Let's just admit that learning Japanese and its Kanji is not a quick and easy task. Of course, nobody wants to admit that it's going to take 15 years. You've got people trying to learn 2,000 Kanji when they don't even know 1,000 words. It should be the other way around. We need to know lots of words before we learn more and more Kanji. Just knowing Kanji alone doesn't allow you to read and understand everything you see.
There is a way to be able to read everything in a book without knowing a single Kanji. There are books written for people to do this. The whole book is written is Hiragana. Just go down to your local Japanese library and you'll find dozens of these books. They all have pictures and tell nice stories. You'll want to have a dictionary with you to look up all the words you don't know. And there will be a lot. Spend your first year, a whole year doing this. You'll learn lots of words and enjoy reading Japanese books.
With that solid foundation in vocabulary, you'll be ready to start reading books with Kanji in them. Start with the 一年生 books. These are for first graders. They will use only 80 Kanji but they will always have ふりがな above or next to the Kanji so you can read it. Again, spend a whole year reading these books and look up the words you don't know.
You'll be able to follow this method up through the sixth grade books. The important thing is to build up vocabulary. Without the vocabulary, even if you have learned 1,000 Kanji, reading books for 6th graders is still going to be very difficult.
As a modification to this method, you could move on to the next level after every 6 months. I would suggest doing so if after six months you felt the books had become too easy and you weren't learning any new vocabulary.
Another thing you could do differently is to not use a dictionary at all. Don't look up any words. That might make it less of a burden on you.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
What is it like to learn to read Japanese?
I think it is interesting to learn to read a new script. Many people (who are not adult language learners) don't know what it's like. I will describe how it works.
For Japanese, you start with 2 phonetic scripts called Kana. One is Hiragana and the other is Katakana.
Even though they are phonetic, they mean nothing to the newly initiated. When you start, you can't just look at the shape and figure out for yourself what it sounds like. So you have to begin a process of training your brain to give you the sound when you see the character. It's very slow at first. You study and then you test yourself. In the beginning, you wait and wait but the answer never comes to you and you must resort to looking at the answer. Soon, you get to where you can come up with the answer after several seconds of thinking about it. Sometimes you come up with the wrong answer so then you learn that you have to check to see if you are right.
Then there is the point where you get the answer after only a second but you must double-check to make sure you are correct. Some characters come quicker than others. A few seem to really resist.
Finally, you move on to reading several characters that form a thing called a word. If you read the word and understand it, then you know you read it correctly. If you don't understand what you read, you double-check your reading and then look for the meaning of the word. The best thing to do is to continue reading familiar words.
At this point, you tell all the people you know that you can read Japanese kana. But really, you can't. You still read at a snail's pace, looking at each character one-by-one. The best thing to do is to keep reading. The more you read, the faster you get. In fact, suddenly, you'll notice that the reading of the characters will pop into your head before you even start to think about it. When that happens, you may doubt yourself and think for a second to make sure that what came to mind so quickly is, in fact, correct. This is where you start building confidence and trusting yourself.
The next level you need to reach, is the ability to see more than one character at a time. When you can start looking ahead a bit, you will begin to increase your reading speed. Since Japanese doesn't use spaces, it is difficult to see where the word ends and to be able to read the whole word at once. This is where Kanji comes in. Kanji in Japanese helps divide the words up. However, if you have authentic children's books, they will be all in Kana with spaces.
Now, how about Kanji words? Well, let me tell you, it is exactly the same. What I mean is, you have to train your brain to come up with the right reading. You don't just look at the character and sound it out. But since Kanji have meaning, what you do is, look at the word, get the meaning, and then apply the reading. You DON'T get the reading and then derive the meaning. It's meaning first, then reading.
It's slow at first but you get quicker at it. Sometimes you wait for it to come to mind, and sometimes it pops into your head right away. The characters are like a signal to your brain. Once your brain is trained, you don't have to think about it. With Kanji, there is a lot of training to do. Just accept that it's going to take forever.
For Japanese, you start with 2 phonetic scripts called Kana. One is Hiragana and the other is Katakana.
Even though they are phonetic, they mean nothing to the newly initiated. When you start, you can't just look at the shape and figure out for yourself what it sounds like. So you have to begin a process of training your brain to give you the sound when you see the character. It's very slow at first. You study and then you test yourself. In the beginning, you wait and wait but the answer never comes to you and you must resort to looking at the answer. Soon, you get to where you can come up with the answer after several seconds of thinking about it. Sometimes you come up with the wrong answer so then you learn that you have to check to see if you are right.
Then there is the point where you get the answer after only a second but you must double-check to make sure you are correct. Some characters come quicker than others. A few seem to really resist.
Finally, you move on to reading several characters that form a thing called a word. If you read the word and understand it, then you know you read it correctly. If you don't understand what you read, you double-check your reading and then look for the meaning of the word. The best thing to do is to continue reading familiar words.
At this point, you tell all the people you know that you can read Japanese kana. But really, you can't. You still read at a snail's pace, looking at each character one-by-one. The best thing to do is to keep reading. The more you read, the faster you get. In fact, suddenly, you'll notice that the reading of the characters will pop into your head before you even start to think about it. When that happens, you may doubt yourself and think for a second to make sure that what came to mind so quickly is, in fact, correct. This is where you start building confidence and trusting yourself.
The next level you need to reach, is the ability to see more than one character at a time. When you can start looking ahead a bit, you will begin to increase your reading speed. Since Japanese doesn't use spaces, it is difficult to see where the word ends and to be able to read the whole word at once. This is where Kanji comes in. Kanji in Japanese helps divide the words up. However, if you have authentic children's books, they will be all in Kana with spaces.
Now, how about Kanji words? Well, let me tell you, it is exactly the same. What I mean is, you have to train your brain to come up with the right reading. You don't just look at the character and sound it out. But since Kanji have meaning, what you do is, look at the word, get the meaning, and then apply the reading. You DON'T get the reading and then derive the meaning. It's meaning first, then reading.
It's slow at first but you get quicker at it. Sometimes you wait for it to come to mind, and sometimes it pops into your head right away. The characters are like a signal to your brain. Once your brain is trained, you don't have to think about it. With Kanji, there is a lot of training to do. Just accept that it's going to take forever.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Let me count the ways
The Japanese language has more words than the English language. But how do you count "words" in Japanese? All verbs have multiple forms. If you count each form of the verb as a word then you would have the 31 words below derived from the verb "to speak."
If you count each form of the Japanese verb, there are 31 listed. For English words, there are about 23 distinct words in my list. Then, do this with a second Japanese verb and you add another 31 words to your Japanese vocabulary while the English vocabulary would only add about 4 words (replacing speak, spoke, spoken, speaking).
Now it's Japanese 62, English 27. Already the difference is increasing drastically. If I create a little formula for this it would be J=31xN and E=19+(4xN). That would mean a vocabulary of 500 English verbs is equivalent to 2,019 words while 500 Japanese verbs equates to 15,500 words.
So if you count words by each form, then you have to admit that Japanese has a lot more words than English. But why would you count words this way?! Those 500 Japanese verbs are not going to be any harder to learn than those 500 English verbs. It only makes sense to count the word families. 500 verbs should be counted as 500 words. Even plural forms should not be increasing your count. "Event" and "Events" can be counted as one word only. This way gives us a better way to compare across languages since Japanese does not have these plural forms for every noun.
In order to say which language has more words (and thus more work for the students of that language), we need a manual counting method. Just throwing a few simple rules into a computer program to do the counting for us is not going to yield dependable results. It takes a human to decide on a case-by-case (or word-by-word) basis.
If I were starting a project to accomplish this task, here is the way I would go about doing it. Basically, I would take a concept and see how many words there are for that concept.
For example, the concept of "mother." I would start with the word and find how many other words there are which are used for the concept.
mother
In Japanese we might have this list for the same concept:
母
There may be some missing, but as an example we will use the above lists. In this example, Japanese has 6 words for mother and English has 5 words.Notice, I would only count a word once in Japanese no matter how many conventional ways there are of writing it, such as using Kanji or Hiragana or Katakana. But computer programs would require a lot of effort to incorporate my simple rule.
By using my method of concepts and finding out how many words there are for each concept, we can create a nice method of comparison. We would have covered the same number of concepts in each language and then we could compare the total number of words. That would give us a nice idea of which language is richer in vocabulary.
Some concepts, of course, will not have an equivalent in every language. I would not throw out those concepts. I would just give a zero to the language which is missing the concept. That would also be an interesting comparison in the end; to see which language has more concepts.
Once the project was completed, the database could then be used to count a learner's vocabulary. Although, one more level in the details of the database would be required. All of those word forms that we exclude from counting would need to be mapped to their original word. If in the learner's reading, something is not found, it would not be counted in the learner's vocabulary. Such as names. It does not matter how many names you know. They do not contribute to your vocabulary.
So there you have it. That is the way I would count vocabulary and be able to make comparisons between languages. This method would give you an accurate count to then determine how many words you need to know in a particular language. Once it is done for all languages we could figure out if there are differences in the requirements for becoming fluent in a language. And until such a method as I have described is employed, you can take with a grain of salt any figures you hear about how many words are needed to learn a language.
| JAPANESE | ENGLISH |
|---|---|
| 話す | speak |
| 話します | speak |
| 話さない | not speak |
| 話しません | not speak |
| 話せ | speak! |
| 話しなさい | speak! |
| 話しなさるな | don't speak! |
| 話そう | going to speak or: let's speak |
| 話しましょう | going to speak or: let's speak |
| 話すまい | not going to speak |
| 話しますまい | not going to speak |
| 話せば | if (I) speak |
| 話さなければ | if (I) don't speak |
| 話しませんなら | if (I) don't speak |
| 話して | speaking |
| 話しまして | speaking |
| 話さないで | not speaking |
| 話さなくて | not speaking |
| 話した | spoke or: had spoken or: have spoken |
| 話しました | spoke or: had spoken or: have spoken |
| 話さなかった | did not speak |
| 話したら | if (I) should speak or: if (I) were to speak or: when (I) speak or: when (I) spoke |
| 話しましたら | if (I) should speak or: if (I) were to speak or: when (I) speak or: when (I) spoke |
| 話さなかったら | if (I) should not speak or: if (I) were to not speak or: when (I) didn't speak or: when (I) hadn't spoken |
| 話したり | speaking and |
| 話しましたり | speaking and |
| 話さなかったり | not speaking and |
| 話せる | can speak or: able to speak |
| 話される | is spoken or: will be spoken |
| 話させる | make (someone) speak or: will make (someone) speak or: allow (someone) to speak or: will allow (someone) to speak |
| 話させられる | is made to speak or: will be made to speak |
If you count each form of the Japanese verb, there are 31 listed. For English words, there are about 23 distinct words in my list. Then, do this with a second Japanese verb and you add another 31 words to your Japanese vocabulary while the English vocabulary would only add about 4 words (replacing speak, spoke, spoken, speaking).
Now it's Japanese 62, English 27. Already the difference is increasing drastically. If I create a little formula for this it would be J=31xN and E=19+(4xN). That would mean a vocabulary of 500 English verbs is equivalent to 2,019 words while 500 Japanese verbs equates to 15,500 words.
So if you count words by each form, then you have to admit that Japanese has a lot more words than English. But why would you count words this way?! Those 500 Japanese verbs are not going to be any harder to learn than those 500 English verbs. It only makes sense to count the word families. 500 verbs should be counted as 500 words. Even plural forms should not be increasing your count. "Event" and "Events" can be counted as one word only. This way gives us a better way to compare across languages since Japanese does not have these plural forms for every noun.
In order to say which language has more words (and thus more work for the students of that language), we need a manual counting method. Just throwing a few simple rules into a computer program to do the counting for us is not going to yield dependable results. It takes a human to decide on a case-by-case (or word-by-word) basis.
If I were starting a project to accomplish this task, here is the way I would go about doing it. Basically, I would take a concept and see how many words there are for that concept.
For example, the concept of "mother." I would start with the word and find how many other words there are which are used for the concept.
mother
- mother
- mom
- mum
- mommy
- momma
In Japanese we might have this list for the same concept:
母
- 母
- 母親
- お母さん
- ママ
- 母上
- おふくろ
There may be some missing, but as an example we will use the above lists. In this example, Japanese has 6 words for mother and English has 5 words.Notice, I would only count a word once in Japanese no matter how many conventional ways there are of writing it, such as using Kanji or Hiragana or Katakana. But computer programs would require a lot of effort to incorporate my simple rule.
By using my method of concepts and finding out how many words there are for each concept, we can create a nice method of comparison. We would have covered the same number of concepts in each language and then we could compare the total number of words. That would give us a nice idea of which language is richer in vocabulary.
Some concepts, of course, will not have an equivalent in every language. I would not throw out those concepts. I would just give a zero to the language which is missing the concept. That would also be an interesting comparison in the end; to see which language has more concepts.
Once the project was completed, the database could then be used to count a learner's vocabulary. Although, one more level in the details of the database would be required. All of those word forms that we exclude from counting would need to be mapped to their original word. If in the learner's reading, something is not found, it would not be counted in the learner's vocabulary. Such as names. It does not matter how many names you know. They do not contribute to your vocabulary.
So there you have it. That is the way I would count vocabulary and be able to make comparisons between languages. This method would give you an accurate count to then determine how many words you need to know in a particular language. Once it is done for all languages we could figure out if there are differences in the requirements for becoming fluent in a language. And until such a method as I have described is employed, you can take with a grain of salt any figures you hear about how many words are needed to learn a language.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Should I change the title of my blog?
Now that I've moved my blog to this new site, I'm thinking about changing the title. Right now it is called "Keith's Voice on Language Learning." I named it that because I started out recording every one of my posts. In fact, there are 30 posts that I have recorded with my own voice. I wanted to do this as a service to learners of English. But sometimes my posts are about Japanese, and I mention Japanese words. These words would not be good for learners of English who don't know Japanese, so I don't like to record those.
Before, my posts were more about language learning in general. But now, I'd like to focus more on my Japanese and Chinese language studies. That means more examples from Japanese using Japanese words. Of course, if I have a lot of readers who are learners of English that are Japanese then it would not be confusing to them at all.
At the old blog site, I didn't get many comments. One major reason being that a reader would have to be registered at that site. Maybe I will get more comments on my posts now, and if people request, I will start recording my posts again. But for now I think I won't record the posts.
So should I change the title of my blog? I'm just thinking about dropping the word "voice" from the title. Then it would become, "Keith on Language Learning." What do you think? Or do you have any suggestions for a new title?
Before, my posts were more about language learning in general. But now, I'd like to focus more on my Japanese and Chinese language studies. That means more examples from Japanese using Japanese words. Of course, if I have a lot of readers who are learners of English that are Japanese then it would not be confusing to them at all.
At the old blog site, I didn't get many comments. One major reason being that a reader would have to be registered at that site. Maybe I will get more comments on my posts now, and if people request, I will start recording my posts again. But for now I think I won't record the posts.
So should I change the title of my blog? I'm just thinking about dropping the word "voice" from the title. Then it would become, "Keith on Language Learning." What do you think? Or do you have any suggestions for a new title?
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