Feed Me Japanese

It’s become popular of late to “collect sentences”.  As though this is a goal unto itself.

There have even been a few discussions on the interwebs. Some have even blossomed into organized efforts with semi-elaborate controls on copyrighted works.

 I did my own experiment with these a while back because I thought this was a good idea as well.  It saves time!  You don’t have to put in all that work finding and typing sentences, you can just pull them all in and start reviewing.

Look at all the sentences in those dictionaries of Japanese grammar!  If I had them all in an electronic format I could have thousands of sentences in my SRS right now!

But what are you actually getting? What are you giving up? And is it worth the tradeoff?

Let’s take a look at this from three perspectives: Context, Time and Focus.

Context

My little experiment with creating a collection really surprised me.  I went through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Grammar and pulled about a third of the sentences and put them in a “collection”.  

But I noticed something interesting as I pulled them together - they lost context.  They lost the context from reading the commentary in Tae Kim’s guide.  They became sterile word strings.

Juxtapose them with key sentences that I pulled from interesting topical articles that brought a richness of context that rushed back into my head every time I read them.  Or compare these harvested sentences to those I grabbed from textbooks where I read the accompanying discussion.

The implication for people who are searching for these sentence collections is that there is an ‘ideal’ set of sentences and if you drill those in your head, you’ll know Japanese.  But the amount you learn from that is a testament, not to the sentence collection, but to the human mind’s learning ability.

Context is important, not simply for learning, but for your interest in learning.  Without it, burnout always lurks.

Time

But we can accept a loss in context because we’re spending less time, right?  By having these collections, we spend less time typing in sentences and more time reviewing. That’s good right?

Well, doing anything with Japanese can be considered “good”.  But which direction does it take you?

You say that you want to learn Japanese and that, presumably, includes learning to write (or at least type) in Japanese.  If that’s the case, why look for more ways to avoid writing in Japanese?  Why seek out yet another English language forum to find help with not typing in Japanese?

And how much time are we talking about?  How much does a pre-made collection of sentences speed the learning process?  You still have to become comfortable listening to Japanese.  You still have to look at pages and pages of Japanese text to get over that ‘wall of kanji’ feeling.

You still have to read and read and read to improve your reading speed.  Whatever technique, philosophy or terminology you use, at the end of the day, you learn to listen by listening. Speak by speaking. Read by reading. Write by writing.

Optimizing your use of time is an admirable goal, but why not reduce the time spent studying, where burnout lurks the most, and spend more time reading to really get the benefits of studying and further your interest in the culture?

Focus

Could it be that what’s valuable about collecting sentences is not being the fustest with the mostest?  Perhaps it’s the fact that you’re out there reading and listening to actual Japanese people?  Or that you’re in a textbook or on a learning site trying to understand more of the structures used in Japanese?

Doesn’t it seem silly that someone would ever say, “I’m having trouble finding Japanese sentences.”?

Or to quoth a forum byline:

provide fuel for AJATT : you like Khatzumoto’s method but you’re desperate to get some good sentences ?

Is the focus on Japanese or on sentences?

Now, to be sure, it can be difficult to find reading material at your ‘level’, whatever that is.  But isn’t that the real question?  Where do I find stuff to read?

Consider this, what would you regard as a more ideal ratio of sentences you’ve read, to sentences you’ve collected for review: 1:1 or 10:1?

1 to 1 is what you drift towards when the focus is all about review, all about studying, all about collecting sentences.  10:1 and higher is when you can consistently find something interesting to read that just happens to be in Japanese.

Do you think that when you were a child, you would have had more fun learning to read if you were given big lists of sentences at your ‘reading level’ for you to put in your KidSRS?  I was quite happy just reading books that set my imagination on fire.  Jules Verne’s Around the World in 180 days? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Bring it on.

Final Thoughts

Note that I’m not denigrating any learning technique or method, just our natural tendency for mental navel gazing.  We find the perfect hammer and spend all day looking for nails to drive.  The hammer is just that good, I gotta nail something!

And we forget that we got the hammer so we could build something.  And sometimes we even forget what we wanted to build in the first place!

Likewise with Japanese.  Sentences are a tool, a hammer.  I think the person who focuses on reading Japanese and the person who focuses on collecting sentences will both acquire thousands of sentences in time.  But I suspect that the former will have more fun, wrestle less with burnout, and find it easier to encourage others to learn Japanese.

P.S. A lot of the interest in sentence collection comes by way of readers of the All Japanese All The Time Blog - a great read.  But, unless I’m missing something, Khatzumoto didn’t have sentence collections, he collected sentences from everything he saw and read in Japanese.  10,000 sentences was a natural product of what he did, not the purpose.