It is hard to be any busier or any badder when it comes to learning Japanese. If I'm going to learn anything in the next few months, it is going to have to be super-convenient, unfortunately. So it is with much luck that, while reading an industry journal, of all places, I came across JapanesePod101.com, a daily podcast with Japanese lessons. Will give it a try...
Ten days since I last posted, longer since I last studied. If ever there is a time for a brutally honest self-test, this is it. Getting the Kana cards, shuffling 'em twice, going to find out who's naughty and nice...
Hiragana - 32 known, 13 unknown or unsure. I probably could have got more if I stopped and really thought about it, but I wanted to figure out which characters I could count on, if time was of the essence. Of the unlucky 13, nine of them had me kicking myself for being so stoopid, and only four of them fell into the "saywhaaa?" category -- ra, re, ri, so. The plan of action, for now, is to re-review each of the missed characters in both the Kanji Pict-o-Graphix book and the Remembering the Hiragana book. From there, I hope to move on from the character drills, for the most part, and find more natural ways to reinforce the Kana.
Katakana - this is where we put the "brutally" in the brutally honest. 20 known, 26 unknown or unsure. With so little reinforcement, relative to the Hiragana, I knew this would be bad, the only question would be how bad. As such, this was kind of a "which characters are so obvious that even a trained monkey could remember them" kind of test. This monkey needs more training. I need to set aside time each night this week for the Katakana, before I can think about anything else. As the soup Nazi on Seinfeld would say, "no soup for you!"
Not much time to study this week. Not good at this early stage in the learning process. I am going to try and work my Kana Cards into the mix, so I do not lose my fragile understanding of the Hiragana and Katakana.
I have since found some blogs by people who are studying Japanese, but they seem to be at an intermediate level or above. I have not found anyone else who is this early in the process. Probably for good reason, heh.
I thought I was supposed to feel like an idiot before buying this audiobook, not after listening to it. In my defense, this must have been a use-it-or-lose-it situation, where I had to use a download credit on something -- anything -- before the end of the month.
Still, crikey, where to begin? These things are in very short supply:
* relevance - many of the words were of questionable importance.
* grouping - they used groups, but within these groups was chaos.
* progression - did not take advantage of any word relationships.
* repetition - two repetitions, not a lot of time inbetween words.
It felt like an assault on everything that was logical. Very frustrating.
No sense trying to finish this time-trap, I'm off to the next audiobook.
Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I don't want to get caught without an electronic dictionary before my next trip to Japan. And who knows how much time it will take to get comfortable with the software, so maybe it is not to early to have thoughts in this direction. Thus far, the main site for this kind of shopping appears to be SmartImports.net. Mainly saving that link here for future reference, analyzing the reviews of the various products will have to wait until later.
Last year, I signed up for a promotion with Audible.com, whereby I saved a hundred bucks on an Apple iPod, in exchange for downloading 2 audiobooks per month, over a contract period of 12 months. Being an aggressive multi-tasker, I figured it was high time to make better use of my time while at the gym, hiking, flying, and so on.
During the life of my membership, there were some months when I could not find anything particularly interesting. In those cases, I initially plugged the gaps by downloading all of the Japanese language-learning audiobooks.
The Inventory List:
In-Flight Japanese (1:04:58)
Learn in Your Car: Japanese, Level 1 (3:00:32)
Learn in Your Car: Japanese, Level 2 (3:00:32)
Learn in Your Car: Japanese, Level 3 (3:00:32)
Pimsleur Japanese for English Speakers (3:50:09)
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Japanese, Vocubulary (3:23:58)
These actually predated my purchase of Rosetta Stone, and I had almost forgetten about them. Now I'm curious. Are there any gems in here that will be useful? If not now, perhaps at some point in the intermediate-level future?
I'll look into each of these in the coming weeks, and will return here to post my findings.
Sweet!
While browsing a related product, I discovered that Amazon.com is offering a rebate on my beloved Power Japanese CD-ROM. For any fellow fumblers who do not have this yet, it looks like you have a few weeks to snatch it at the low price.
List Price: $49.99
Amazon: $39.99
Rebate: -$20.00 *
Final: = $19.99
Purchase by: 01/07/2006
Postmarked by: 01/15/2006
Maybe it is on sale because the graphics are not sexy enough for 2006? Dunno, but that is one helluva deal...
vs.
subtitle: oops! I lost my copy of Kanji Pict-o-Graphix during the move!
So I've got Power Japanese back on track and I'm firing up the section on the Katakana. But first, I must find my copy of Kanji Pict-o-Graphix to lay the mnemonic groundwork. Now, I moved recently, and I packed that book apart from the other books, because of its frequent usefulness. And you just know what happens when you try not to lose something by putting it somewhere special... yep, I lost misplaced it, of course. :-)
Anyway, I did not want to start the lessons without first establishing the visual cues, kind of an order-of-operations superstition. In desperation, I turned to my other book on the Kana, Remembering the Kana by James W. Heisig.
I have to say, overall, I did not prefer this book, at least in terms of mnemonics. There were instances where the descriptions were geniunely helpful, and I guess any insights are worth the book's modest price. But there were other instances where the explanation felt like a hindrance, so much so that I tried not to remember them, so my mind would not be warped before I found the lost copy of Kanji Pict-o-Graphix.
On nice thing about Remember the Kana, each character was shown in a half-dozen fonts. Just the other day, I was thinking about the hundreds of fonts on my computer, and cringed at the possiblity of these barely-familiar characters having so many unfamiliar variations. It was nice to get some sense of how much variation there was for each character, and where the variation was most/least likely to occur. Better to get exposed to it in the beginning, instead of getting caught off-guard in real-world situations.
The other interesting aspect of this book was the order in which he introduced the characters, NOT standard. The next time I review, I want to try using the order of this book, but in conjunction with the descriptive pictures in Kanji Pict-o-Graphix. As inexpensive as these books are compared to my initial purchase of Rosetta Stone, there is no reason to think of these resources as mutually exclusive. After what felt like hitting a home run with the combination of Kanji Pict-o-Graphix and Power Japanese, part of my goal here is to find out which resources are the most complementary.
Oh yeah, after unpacking nearly everthing in my house, I finally found the missing copy of Kanji Pict-o-Graphix. Phew! Many of the visuals where instantly memorable. I'm not sure where this book will fit into the mix when it comes time to learn Kanji, but for Hiragana and Katakana, it really hits the spot.
So here I am, all excited about tackling the Katakana, and things get all wacky with Power Japanese.
On their virtual keyboard, instead of Kana characters, they had funky Roman characters. At some point, I saw the following error message:
font registration error with font named PJHIRA.TTF
font registration error with font named PJKATA.TTF
I uninstalled and reinstalled the software and everything went back to normal. I'll update this post when/if I find more information on this...
Part 1 of Power Japanese (The Hiragana) went well. Next up, basic grammar. The only problem is that the "basic" sentences are about a gazillion syllables long. What ever happened to "see Spot run" and other short sentences?
Time out.
I need to get more comfortable with the tail end of the Hiragana if I'm ever going to be able to keep up with such an onslaught of syllables.
Re-enter the Rosetta Stone.
The first time I attempted to use Rosetta, I had no choice but to use Ramaji text option. This time, I'm re-visiting the early lessons, but with the Kana text option. So far, so good. More opportunities to interact with the Kana without repeating the already-familiar Power Japanese drills over and over.
I'll get $299 worth of value from Rosetta Stone yet. :-)
Hey, people at Power Japanese, you have an incredibly enjoyable piece of software, but you might want to adjust the speed settings on any time-sensitive games, computers are a whole lot faster these days. Granted, my computer is faster than average, but the characters on the screen move faster than I can move my mouse, even on the slowest speed.
update: it turns out, if you click and hold your mouse outside the virtual keyboard area, you can freeze the movement of the character. Kind of defeats the point of a real-time game, but it is better than nothing, I guess. And these real-time games are a very small part of the total package, which has already paid for itself many times over.
Heh. Just yesterday, I was thinking that my visual character recognition might be too reliant on a limited number of distinguishing characteristics, at the expense of remembering the characters in their entirety. So today, Power Japanese, almost as if they were reading my mind, introduced an excercise called Creative Obfuscation. It was a fairly standard pick-a-character-out-of-a-lineup extercise, except they covered up important parts of each character. And if you incorrectly select a character, the cover grows a bit bigger each time. Got me to focus on the less-glamorous parts of each character. Nice.
I know, I know, actually writing the characters would be ideal. I'll get to that soon enough. Just let me have my fun for a little while longer...
+
What is better than the Power Japanese software for learning the Kana?
The Power Japanese software, plus the Kanji Picto-O-Graphics book.
These two training tools feel like they were meant to go together. I love Power Japanese's drills, but they seem even more powerful after getting a mnemonic kick-start from Kanji Picto-O-Graphics. Kanji Picto-O-Graphics uses clever memory aids to make sense of 1,000 of the most-used Kanji characters, plus the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. I'm not sure how efficient or effective the book would be by itself, but this one-two punch of book-introduction/software-reinforcement feels ideal.
vs.
When I first thought about learning Japanese, before I was fully committed to studying Japanese, the first software I bought was Rosetta Stone. I was flush with cash, the software sounded like it was top-of-the-line, what's not to like? So I used it for awhile, "learned" some words, over and over, and promptly got left in the dust when things got more complex. Simple objects were replaced by compound phrases, and it was NOT AT ALL clear what was what. Either this was not for a true beginner, or I was a complete idiot.
Fast forward several months. My trip to Japan has left me feeling motivated and focused. On the recommendation of a friend, I order the Power Japanese CD. It is almost 1/10 the price of the Rosetta Stone bundle, and oh man it ROCKS. Sure, the graphics bring back memories of the mid-1980's, but I've rarely used a more logically-designed piece of software.
After purchasing Power Japanese, I planned to do a little studying each night before going to sleep. Now, I'm drawn into studying earlier each day, and for longer periods of time. So far, so good.
This is not to say I'm ready to write off my investment in Rosetta Stone. I'm still hopeful it will come in handy in the not-too-distant future.
There are a lot of great resources for learning Japanese on the Interweb.
This is not one of them.
Instead, this is one person's journey (struggle?) to learn Japanese, as it happens. It might prove useful to me, it might even prove useful to others, no way of knowing at this time.