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Who Cares About the Joyo Kanji?

Monday, April 14, 2008

A couple of thoughts on Kanji:

From the Reviewing the Kanji Forums:

I’m not quite finished [with Hesig's Remembering the Kanji], I need about a month to finish, but it bugs me when I see kanji like 俺 not in the first book. This kanji is extremely popular and should have been taught a lot earlier. This makes me wonder, is 2042 not enough? Are there tons more out there like 俺? I wanted to quit once I finished but it looks like I may have to continue.

Learning a language is about communication - Not memorizing lists of words and Kanji. You learn to read Kanji to receive what others have written and how to write them to accomplish the opposite.

That Hesig has developed a technique to help memorize kanji writings doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself. It also doesn’t mean he’s an authority on what you need or want to know.

If you want to learn a character now, learn it.

Another from Reviewing the Kanji:

Does anyone have/know of a list of the everyday kanji that the average Japanese person would know which are not included in RTK1 (ie not joyo kanji)?

Do native Japanese speakers keep lists like this? Do Japanese learners who’ve attained fluency keep lists like this?

The only way to really answer the question of what non-Joyo Kanji you need to know is to read and read and read. The non-Joyo Kanji you run into repeatedly are the ones you need to know - Assuming you even bother to look up whether they are Joyo or not.

I realize that I sound cynical here but my underlying point, I think, is quite reasonable: If you listen to and read enough Japanese, most questions about how much and what order become irrelevant.

Reading thousands of pages of Japanese and learning those Kanji as you go, you can’t help but build a feel for which are more common and you’ll inevitably see all the Joyo Kanji and whatever extra ones you need to know.

The real question is not, How much? or What order?, it’s: How can I find enough to read and listen to that captures my interest and furthers my desire to learn Japanese?


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What goes into an SRS?

Monday, April 7, 2008

From Nihongo Notes:

If you read or hear anything in Japanese add it to Anki. Everything! Names, places, sentences, signs.

Keep it up. Try not to miss a day or you will begin to forget the cards. You don’t want to end up with hundreds of cards to review as it will only demotivate you. Try to practice small amounts but often.

Given the dangers of burnout in language learning, what and how much can go into an SRS? - or any review system for that matter?

The idea of putting “Everything!” in there seems reasonable, but only if you don’t read or hear very much. If you consume hours of Japanese every day through watching, listening and reading, collecting everything becomes a daunting task.

Not only because of the effort required to input all that data, but because acts of entertainment, discovery and play are reduced to work.

If an SRS is the core of learning a language, then everything else, including enjoyment, must submit to the time and effort it demands.

The reality is that an SRS is a tool to complement memory, not replace it. So let’s change the question, instead of asking what to put in an SRS, let’s ask, “What do you want to play with?”.

What words, kanji, patterns do you want to explore? What did you hear or read that you didn’t understand and want to spend more time developing an understanding? Not, what do you feel obligated to study; Not, what do you think you have to review - What do you want to play with?

By its nature, an SRS will push away what you understand, what you “know”. If you don’t want to play with what’s left, you’re in for a boring ride.

So how do you “play” with the material you don’t know or understand? This question, to me, represents the weakness of most language learning resources (and a lot of classroom learning in general). What we don’t know, we need to study, study, study.

In Physics, trying to learn what isn’t understood is called experimentation. In Astronomy it’s called exploration. In Marketing, it’s a test. In Finance, it’s called speculation. In life, it’s called living.

A lack of understanding is a reason to go out and explore, not a reason to buckle down and study harder.

And if an SRS helps you to focus your efforts on what you don’t understand, it’s really giving you starting points for further exploration. Topics to read about, blogs to find, short stories to uncover, podcasts, movies and TV shows to enjoy - All these can be found through exploring what you don’t understand.

So, what goes into an SRS? Whatever you want. Just be prepared to adjust if you find the SRS dumps a steaming pile of boredom on your plate every day.


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Which Comes First: Study or Play?

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

A quote from a discussion over at Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum:

What can I do to review Japanese at this advanced level? Reviewing grammar is painfully boring now — heck even have most of the guide and the grammar books that I read memorized –, and the only other option for any real growth is watching dramas and stuff, and recording and analyzing what is said. But this is tedious, as i have to post(sic) every 10~20 seconds to type down whats been said.

On top of that there are no 日本人　around here to practice with.

So what can I do that is fun and stimulating?

Running out of things to study is a very strange statement. You aren’t learning Japanese just so you have something to study. There is something you want to do and you need to know Japanese to do it.

You want to watch Anime in Japanese with no subtitles and get every joke. You want to read Japanese newspapers without a dictionary and see world events from a different perspective. You want to talk to native Japanese people on the phone and speak so well, they assume you’re Japanese as well.

I had a conversation with my younger cousin this past Easter Sunday. He’s learning Spanish in his High School classes. I asked what his teacher recommended that he do outside of his class assignments.

She recommended watching some Spanish TV, reading something, or speaking to a fluent Spanish speaker. Wonderful.

Here is my question: Why doesn’t learning a new language begin with watching, reading and listening?

Why don’t we first cultivate an interest in the culture? Wanting to get more out of the books you read and the shows you watch is a great motivator for study.

It also provides context for everything learned in a textbook or a classroom. There are many words in every language that have no need whatsoever for an SRS or any kind of review. They are spoken and written so often that the only reason you would study them is if your only interaction with the language was studying lists of words.

Why do we look at new vocabulary and then go hunting for examples? Why aren’t we consuming so much of the target language, that plucking out new words for further review is almost effortless?

How do we come to think that watching TV, reading books and newspapers and simply enjoying them without analyzing every-single-phrase is a privilege for those who’ve mastered the language?

How is taking a day off from study to relax and read a book for a couple hours a lack of discipline? Even if your reading pace is slow and you have to skip whole sentences because you don’t know the Kanji or the grammar - Even if you don’t understand 90% of the conversation during the movie, you’re making progress.

You get more of what you reinforce.

If you think, “study, study, study”, that’s what you’ll do and that’s what Japanese will become: something you study.

But if you think, “explore, explore, explore”, you will constantly find things to drive your interest in the Japanese language and culture. The greater your interest, the easier it is to take a break from smelling the roses and do some studying.


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The Problem With SRS

Monday, March 24, 2008

For those who don’t know, an SRS is a Spaced Repetition System. It creates longer and longer intervals between reviews when you get the answer correct. The idea is to review just before you forget, to encourage long-term memory retention.

And in this technical statement from supermemo’s Theoretical aspects of spaced repetition in learning, you’ll find both the value and the problem with Spaced Repetition Systems:

In a long-term process, for the forgetting index equal to 10%, and for a fixed daily working time, the average time spent on memorizing new items is only 5% of the total time spent on repetitions. This value is almost independent of the size of the learning material. [emphasis mine]

It’s saying that in the long term, most of your time is devoted to pushing items further into memory, to making progress - And this is good.

But note that for modeling the memory performance of the human brain as an equation, or modeling anything for that matter, when you find yourself with too many variables, you take most of them and fix them at some value so you can solve a simpler problem.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “All things being equal” or “Ceteris paribus”, what they mean is, “There is too much change for me to understand what’s going on so I’ll just assume that everything is frozen except the one thing I want to measure.”

And this is quite reasonable. We know because the SRS model is proven to be an effective memory tool.

But that’s not the whole story. The reality is those other variables do change. Which begs the question: How much do those changes matter?

Let’s take the assumption of a “fixed daily working time”. Is this true? Of course not. Most people don’t spend exactly the same amount of time studying everyday. And even if we allot and use 1 hour, everyday, our pace, focus, concentration and motivation vary from day to day.

Fixed time has been useful for modeling the SRS methodology and proving its value, but less useful for implementation. Why? You implement in reality, not in the model.

The reality is that users skip days, their motivation wanes, circumstances consume their time, they get bored, they burnout or they forget.

And when they come back, what does an SRS do? For today’s fixed working time, it globs together the work from the previous 3 days you missed. So much for the fun of language learning, you now have real, bonafide work to do.

Which is more important: The discipline to use an SRS everyday, or the discipline to have meaningful interaction with Japanese everyday through reading, watching, listening, speaking and writing?

SRS is a powerful methodology, but it can be completely undone with a simple case of burnout.


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Burnout and Language Learning

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Burnout is the greatest enemy of learning any language. It takes a goal like fluency that motivates you, that drives you, and turns it into something you hate.

I think most of us have had that moment when we’ve worn ourselves down trying to memorize as much as we can in as little time as possible and for just a moment, you hate the language, you hate learning the language and you want to throw the whole project out and find something else to do.

Or worse, the amount of time you spend with the language slowly slips over time and before you know it, you haven’t touched it in a couple months!

Given my experiences with burnout, I’ve been trying to nail down what it is so I can deal with it directly.

I think there are 3 elements:

  • Demanding Perfection too Soon
  • Lack of Context
  • Excessive Reviewing

I’ll start with context. Without context, all you have are Kanji and word lists. Long Kanji and word lists. We don’t use words out of context, why try to learn them there?

In my earlier kanji experiments, I tried using a list of the most commonly used Japanese words to provide context for learning kanji. Whenever I added kanji, I also computed what common words I could now read that only included kanji from my list.

This way I could build my vocabulary while building a feel for each kanji based on the words it appeared in.

It was horrible. The words added context for the kanji and that helped, but the words were out of context! Drilling the words to practice reading the kanji was absolutely mind numbing.

Wherever context is lacking, burnout is lurking.

Next up is excessive reviewing. This is simply a case of prioritization. What needs to be reviewed and what doesn’t?

Spending hours reviewing material that doesn’t need review is asking for burnout. Spaced Repetition Systems or SRS’s in their various forms are a great tool for dealing with this. Material that is easy for you is reviewed less and challenging material is reviewed more.

But even an SRS can blow up if you put too much in it too quickly. Then it doesn’t matter how well you’ve prioritized what to review, you’re spending way too much time reviewing.

Variety is the key. Reviewing/studying is one of many things to do to learn a language. When time spent studying pushes out reading for pleasure, enjoying a good TV show or conversing with a pen pal, burnout is bound to happen.

Lastly, Demanding perfection too soon. This one’s subtlety is what makes it more insidious. Kanji, words, grammar, pronunciation, listening comprehension, reading speed: All these things take time to learn and are learned at different rates.

Some kanji come easy and some are hard. Some grammar patterns are easy to read but harder to hear. Everything is learned at different rates.

So, to force yourself to study and restudy the words or kanji that challenge you, is fighting your own brain. Your mind wants pictures, sound, patterns to associate information. Subjecting it to more review and study for what your mind hasn’t built a pattern for is busy work.

See the kanji being used. See the word being used. Your mind will create imagery, uncover patterns that will be the basis for your memory.

The implication is that when you get an answer wrong, note the correct answer and move on. Subjecting your self to “extra” review is a recipe for burn out. Then, not only won’t you recall the information, but you might not even want to.

Learning a new language is a fun process. Eliminate sources of burnout and you can keep it that way.


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How long does it take to learn 1 Kanji?

Sunday, February 10, 2008

All the tools I’ve seen out there are about learning Kanji Now! Fast! Locking it in your brain forever! Special mnemonic techniques! Learn hundreds of Kanji in a few days, remember them forever!

While it would be lovely to flip a switch and immediately understand another language. These things take time. So I’ll ask the question - what if it took 2 months to learn 1 Kanji?

Not 2 months for every Kanji, just some of them. Some you pick up immediately. Some take weeks. But suppose one took 2 months. Is that bad?

What if taking 2 months was the best way to learn that Kanji? What would that mean for all the special memory techniques out there?

Consider this. You use a special method and get that Kanji in your head. Great. Now what? What can you do with it? How would you use it? How do the Japanese use it?

When you see that Kanji, what do you want to pop into your head? Its English meaning? An English keyword? An English story? All of its ON and KUN readings? A memorized list of Japanese compounds? A photograph from some learning software?

This is a question that I don’t think we ask as language learners. We want the map, the list, the key. We want the Kanji in our head now.

Meanwhile, we don’t do any of that in our native language. We understand the meaning of the words we use because we’ve seen them used six-ways-from-sunday.

We effortlessly use words like “up” and “set” that have hundreds of definitions without a second thought.

Did you memorize all the uses of “set”? Can you even name 20 of them? 10? And yet you can understand every one of them.

You know what pops in my head when I hear the word “set”? Nothing. Not a thing. There is no context. It doesn’t mean anything until a person gives it meaning by putting it in some context. Without context, it means nothing so I think of nothing.

When I listen to someone speak, when I read, I don’t think in words and characters. There is a thought in that person’s head, he wants to get it into mine. The characters, words and grammar are just the carrier signal, nothing more.

So. Why hang so many “things” on each Kanji? Is recalling all that information at will somehow more special than wasting time memorizing all the definitions of “set” and “up”?

Well, I need to know 2000 Kanji to read a Japanese newspaper. No you don’t.
Well, if I’m reading a book and I see a word with Kanji I don’t know, I have to look it up. No you don’t.
I can’t just read any book if I don’t know every word. Yes you can.
I have to read books that are at my reading level. No you don’t.

I built my intuitive unthinking feel for “set” and “up” by reading and hearing those words used. How can I build the same feel for Kanji, for Japanese vocabulary, for Japanese grammar, by avoiding reading until I’ve “learned” all this stuff?

Intuitive unthinking feel. That is what we have in English. That is what we want in Japanese.


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Learning Kanji From Context

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Tae Kim has a great final post up on the “Remembering the Kanji” books. The best part isn’t when he discusses the merits of RTK but when he describes the process he went through in learning Kanji.

I may have mentioned this before but I never studied kanji; I studied the words that are made from kanji. For instance, I learned 「力」 as 「ちから」 but never as 「リョク」 or 「リキ」. I only learned the other on-yomi when I learned words like 「努力」 and 「怪力」. The key to learning these words is, of course, reading. Therefore, it’s very important to find reading material that is interesting and appropriate for your level, something that is a lot harder than it should be.

When learning a language we talk about context, context, context. Words must be seen in context to understand their full meaning. Expressions, idioms, clichés, slang - they all need context for you to grasp their full meaning.

But not Kanji. Get your flashcards out. Start memorizing readings and meanings. Yes, it’s soul-crushingly boring. Yes, you’re memorizing information in a format that you won’t use. But if you want to learn Japanese - you need to suck it up and start memorizing.

Why not learn Kanji in the context of words while at the same time learning words in the context of sentences?

Our brains think in patterns and stories, not lists and maps. By seeing the same Kanji in multiple words again and again, our brain will make the connection - It’s not studying, It’s inevitable.

Similarly, when we see the same word in multiple sentences we build a feel for its meaning. When we see the same grammatical pattern again and again, we build a feel for the language’s structure.

Context, Context, Context - except for Kanji. No context for Kanji.

Part of this comes from our strange desire to “know” things…right now. I want to know this Kanji right now. I want to look at it and “know” what it means.

Reciting the on and kun readings and the English meanings for any Kanji doesn’t mean you “know” it. You know about it.

If I give you a list of private information about any person on this planet - will you know them? Of course not. You must spend time with them. Interact with them and in time you’ll come to know them.

So it is with Kanji. See it used again and again and you will discover meaning over time. There won’t be a specific day or time when you can say you “learned” that Kanji, you’ll simply know it when you know it.

But which is faster? I want to know the Kanji now! Learning about a Kanji character will never lead you to knowing it. Eventually you’ll start reading in Japanese and inevitably you’ll run across it again and again on the road to truly knowing it.

When do you want to start knowing, Now or Later?


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Stop Studying Japanese!

Thursday, January 3, 2008

How do you study? Simple. You are given the answers to a set of questions and you review those questions until you know the answers. The key is that you are given the answers.

And that’s the problem. True learning doesn’t come from being given the answers, it comes from discovering solutions, connections, principles and ideas on your own.

So why do we give answers? Because it’s easy to measure. Checking whether or not you remember the answer is easy. Checking whether or not you truly understand is very hard.

If all you need are answers, then study. But if you want understanding, you must discover.

Said another way, study is work and discovery is play. What is your path to excellence, to fluency? Work or Play? Study or Discovery?

Two examples outside language learning to illustrate the difference:

Do as Avogadro did

An article from Oct. 2006 by Lisa VanDamme on teaching Physics by Induction.

You know how learning physics goes. You are given the principles, the equations, the relationships, the “laws”, i.e. the answers. Regurgitate them on your exam and you can go to MIT.

In Lisa’s words:

Scientific knowledge is presented as a series of commandments rather than as conclusions that have been reached by a laborious process of observation, experiment, and induction. If taught physics this way, a student’s grasp of the principles is necessarily detached from reality.

And what happens when you stop giving answers and encourage students to play with these concepts as the original great minds did?

As a result of Mr. Harriman’s approach to teaching physics, my students have not just memorized the principles of physics, they understand them clearly and concretely. Let me tell you a story that conclusively makes the case for this method of instruction. One day, Mr. Harriman was teaching the kids about the first evidence for the existence of atoms. He had spent several hours explaining many of the discoveries made by chemists, and he reached the Law of Combining Volumes, which states that the volumes of gases involved in a chemical reaction can always be expressed as a ratio of small integers. (For example, 2 L of H will combine with 1 L of O to make 2 L of steam.) Francisco, as focused and intent as always, thought about this for a minute, and then raised his hand and asked, “Does that mean that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules?” If you don’t see the connection, don’t worry–I didn’t either at the time, and I had the benefit of Mr. Harriman’s class behind me. As it turns out, Francisco was anticipating the next development in science. Avogadro’s Hypothesis states exactly what Francisco said–that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules.

When you learned physics did you ever anticipate the next discovery? No? Join the club.

Never Saw It Coming

For round two, we’ll go to Carnegie Mellon University and Building Virtual Worlds, a multidisciplinary course founded by Randy Pausch - You may know this name from his recent “Last Lecture”.

This is a class where small teams of engineers and artists collaborate to create virtual worlds. Your grade then is no doubt based on your programming skill, your artistic prowess, your creativity, your boldness is trying new things…not so much.

Your grade in this course is based on your ability to work with a team. Why, oh, Why would you do that?!? Simple. If you work well as a team, and you aren’t complete muppets, you’ll be surprised at what you can create. And every so often, you’ll create something really great.

Pausch calls this a head fake. You learn without knowing you’re learning. The Alice Educational Software that came out of his Stage 3 Research lab teaches computer programming in a 3D environment. Students think they’re playing and telling stories, their actually learning the logical basis for computer software. Head Fake.

Inevitable

While playing with 3D software you learn programming.
By building virtual worlds, you learn teamwork.
By learning physics by induction, in historical order, you can make the same discoveries the original scientists did.

What is most powerful about these examples is not what was learned or even how it was learned. What’s important is that you cannot help but learn.

You cannot play with the Alice program and not learn programming.
You cannot take BVW and not learn teamwork.
You cannot learn physics by induction and not build a fundamental understanding of the world around you.

I call these inevitable processes. Simple processes that are easily followed and cannot help but produce some benefit. Put apple seeds in the ground and provide light, water and air and you can’t help but produce Apples. It’s inevitable.

And this is what’s missing from the resources for learning Japanese out there. It’s all about studying, answers and work. It’s rarely about play, discovery, induction, and head fakes.

So, what is the inevitable process for learning Japanese? One where you cannot help but attain fluency? One where you cannot burnout? One where you discover Japanese?

2008 seems like a good year to find answers to these questions.


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What does it mean to “know” a word?

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

What do you get when you review a word with flashcards or a spaced repetition system?

When you can go through a list and give all the correct answers, what have you accomplished? Do you know the words or are you simply adept at reciting answers?

What does it mean to “know” a word? At a minimum, you should be able to understand it when it’s spoken and when you read it. Beyond that you must be able to use the word when speaking and writing.

And if all of that is true, what have you accomplished when you review a word? You’ve read it, but out of context. You haven’t heard it. You haven’t seen it written in context so you don’t know what context to write it in. Ditto for speaking it.

So once again, what have you accomplished?

And when you take a word in Japanese and look it up its english translation so that you can review it, what do you have? Can you use this new japanese word in Japanese as you would its english translations in English?

If not, what is the value of learning this direct translation?

I’m not suggesting that there is no value to translated meanings or to reviewing. I’m asking how much are they really worth? And given how easy it is to burn out reviewing vocabulary, I think it’s a very important question.


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Flashcards: The Bane of Human Existence

Saturday, December 8, 2007

How do you take something that’s fun to learn and make it soul crushingly boring? Make flashcards.

I’ve made flashcards by hand with my hideous handwriting (the technical term is “chicken scratch”). I’ve bought thousands of Kanji flashcards. Good cardstock, cheap cardstock. Curved corners and decks of paper cuts waiting to happen. All of them filled with all sorts of fantastic information about the kanji character - and even a few compounds it appears in!

All these cards did one thing and one thing only: They made me want to learn Japanese less.

Every card took something fun, learning about the Japanese language and culture, and reduced it to painful, boring, mind numbing repetition.

I still can’t believe that I ever thought that you had to memorize every On and Kun reading for a Kanji to be able to say you “know” it. You realize how many readings 上 has, right?

But you know what’s worse? Knowing every reading and every translated english meaning doesn’t mean you know that character. It means you’ve memorized a list of bits. It means you successfully forced the data into your head despite your brain’s best efforts to prevent it.

The average child falls about a 1000 times when learning to walk. If you want to stunt that learning process, sit the child down and attempt to explain the mechanics of walking.

But here’s the kicker: The child wasn’t learning to walk. He was just trying to go faster. If he can go faster, he can explore more, discover more, play more. The learning, the walking, came for free.

Flashcards are for learning. But true learning comes from exploration, discovery and play.

Japanese became fun for me when I stopped studying and started playing - The learning comes for free.


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