Read The Kanji - Tracking 3

Made a lot of progress over the last 4-5 days. At this point, it's not only worth nothing JLPT4 progress but that of the more advanced kanji since the vocab I'm learning is composed of kanji from all 4 difficulties:

Kanji Tested:
JLPT4: 97
JLPT3: 62
JLPT2: 27
JLPT1: 6
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Total: 192

Vocabulary Tested:
JLPT4: 258
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Total: 258

Read The Kanji - Tracking 2

My kanji reading progress is climbing at a nice steady pace now with JLPT4.

JLPT4 Kanji Tested: 80
JLPT4 Words Tested: 192

Anime: Phantom - Requiem For The Phantom (Finished)

I just finished the last and final 26th episode of "Phantom - Requiem For The Phantom". Overall I'd say this was a fairly decent anime. The last 10 seconds really ruined it for me, but up until that point I'd say the characters had depth and the story was unique enough to keep me interested.

I'd recommend giving it a watch if you're thinking about starting a new anime series.

Rating: 8/10

Read the Kanji - Tracking 1

I've been spending a lot of time working with the "read the kanji" site and have made quite a bit of progress since my last post. Felt it was worth taking a new snapshot as of today.

The one complaint I have with the site is it really seems to have slow periods where you can sit there and wait for upwards of a minute or two just for the website to finish "checking..." your answer. My guess is there's too much load on the server at times and the owners need to figure out where the bottlenecks are (database load, web server load, bandwidth). Either way, I certainly hope this is corrected, as I find the site very useful but get turned off when it starts lagging to death.

JLPT4 Kanji Tested: 57
JLPT4 Words Tested: 134

Reading the Kanji with "Read the Kanji"

One of the aspects I felt that was lacking with my Anki studies was context. You might recall that I mentioned I was putting example sentences into play to help with retention. Well, I came across a comment somewhere referencing readthekanji.com. I've spent the last week or so with the site and have basically replaced most of my Anki studies with it.

There's a number of configuration modes you can run in, but ultimately, this is the way I've set it up visually:



You'll notice there's not only a compound kanji but also a full Japanese sentence below. I've toggled all things in English to never appear (unless I absolutely need it, then I can toggle the English sentence or kanji meaning on as needed). One thing I've noticed a handful of times is that if I can't recall the way to read the kanji, I have actually figured it out by reading the entire Japanese sentence. As you type in Romanized form it gets auto-converted to hiragana. The idea here is to solidify the readings for various kanji. This is a critically important skill. As you answer the question correctly, the text color shifts from a dark red to a light green signifying your strength with that particular kanji.

You can control which of the JLPT level kanji to focus on. The statistics that are generated are worth their weight in gold since it really gives you a visual reference to not only how well you know the kanji you've been exposed to (color) but also how far you are through the complete set of kanji for that JLPT level. For example, here's my current progress after spending a number of hours with the site:

JLPT4 Kanji Tested: 34
JLPT4 Words Tested: 78



You'll notice the top section reflects your progress through "kanji words" associated with the JLPT level, while the bottom section reflects your progress through the kanji making up the words. There are also a few other views, but this is the primary one I typically look back on.

Overall I'd say this is an excellent tool and should not be overlooked for those serious about studying kanji readings.

The Japanese Verb: Naru (なる)

I'm nearing the end of Japanese in Mangaland 1 (Lesson 28), and finally reached the verb なる. There's actually quite a handful of juicy tidbits in this lesson, but なる is the focus of this post. To my surprise, before reaching this chapter, I had already subconsciously obtained a basic understanding of なる as "to become" from other studies. In the roughest sense, this is vaguely what it means in English. なる appears to be quite flexible and can be paired with nouns, adjectives and する-verbs. So basically here's how it breaks down:

1. Noun + になる
2. -i Adjective + くなる
3. -na Adjective + になる
4. する Verb + になる

Formula 1 might yield 彼は犬になっている (He is becoming a dog!). Notice I've taken the noun for dog 犬, stacked on になる, and continued to make the sentence more complex by using the gerund form (~て+いる) of なる.

Formula 2 is slightly different because of the way -i Adjectives conjugate, but otherwise the same concept. Take for example, おいしくなる (to become delicious). Rather than using になる, we use くなる (notice the final い of おいしい is conjugated into く).

Formula 3 is more standard. Take for example, 彼女は安全になります (she is going to become safe). In this instance, we've taken the base 安全な adjective (safe) and converted the final な to に, then simply added the polite form of なる, namely なります.

Formula 4 is also quite interesting. する-based verbs (which can also stem from nouns, adjectives, adverbs) take on the same pattern. Take for example, 彼らは明日結婚になる (They are getting married tomorrow).

Overall, this is a pretty powerful verb and I hope to get more practice using it so that the above types of patterns start to become part of my more permanent memory. If any of my readers notice any typos or inaccuracies, please let me know, as I made up my own examples for practice.

The Grammatical Gerund Form

I've been reading more of my Japanese in Mangaland book, and stumbled upon something I've known for a little while but didn't know the name of. In Japanese when you want to say you're "verbing" something, such as "eating", you take the base verb for "to eat", convert it into its "te" form, then apply "iru".

So in this example, say I wanted to express "I am eating food", it would look like this: 私はたべものを食べている。 Notice the "食べている" portion. In "spoken form" however, the internal "い" is usually dropped and it would simply be stated as "食べてる".

This leads us toward much more interesting ways of expression. Let's take the same sentence, but instead state "I wasn't eating food"-> "私はたべものを食べていなかった。" Notice the "食べていなかった". Again in spoken form, we drop the "い" and this would become "たべてなかった". The trend to see here is that we're simply conjugating the "iru" into the form we'd like to express. So let's say we wanted to say the exact same sentence "I wasn't eating food" but in a more polite way, it would then become "私はたべものをたべていませんでした。" Again, all we've done is conjugate "iru" into it's past-tense negated polite form this time.

It's really interesting how all of this knowledge about the language begins to apply to everything. Whether I take an ichidan or godan verb, so long as I know the rules for how to convert it into "te" form (refer to previous post), I can now express many variations of the gerund form.

Conjugating Verbs into their Te-Form Through Music

Work has been eating up too much of my time lately, but I've still managed to keep up with my existing Anki decks that I've been gradually building up. My vocab deck has 46 cards and verb deck has 49 cards.

I've also reached a bit further in Genki 1 with regard to grammar sections. I'm now in the middle of Chapter 6 grammar, having covered some items I was familiar with, such as the conjugation patterns for Te-Form for both ichidan and godan verbs, and other items I wasn't so familiar with such as the 〜てもいいです／〜てはいけません forms.

Regarding conjugating the Te-Form, the way I originally learned all of these patterns was through the "Oh My Darling, Clementine" song. I took a look at my list of Japanese links and still have a link to a recording of it for you guys to hear if interested. I've always remembered it ever since and highly recommend learning it. What's equally cool is once you've learned this song for conjugating into Te-Form, it is equally helpful in conjugating into past tense form, simply change the final "e" to "a", such as: 食べる　ー＞　食べて　ー＞　食べた (to eat -> eat -> ate).

Building Verb Vocabulary With Genki 1

Over the past couple days I started yet another parallel approach to studying. I decided I needed to beef up my verb vocabulary with a focus primarily on the phonetics for now with a passive recognition of the kanji for the verbs. I've keyed in all of the verbs for the first 6 chapters so far of Genki 1 into Anki. This resulted in a total of 49 verbs.

Off the start, I think I comfortably could recognize about 40-50% of them, so that was a good indication that these fairly beginner verbs were still a major weak point. I would like to be able to visualize a verb when I perform an action throughout the day, but in order to do that, I need to have some focus, as learning the occasional verb mixed in with vocabulary takes forever to actually build up an artillery to draw from.

As I've hit about the last 15-18 verbs in this pack of 49, I've realized they seem to be a bit tricky to stick into my brain, so I may look up example sentences for them and attach them to my Anki questions so that I can read an example sentence to help stick the verb into my brain (and potentially learn more from the example sentence of course). We'll see if that works - it will certainly take some extra effort!

Cell Phones to Practice Texting in Japanese?

Ugh. So my wife and I recently bought brand new cell phones so that we could enter the era of text-friendly cell phones. We both picked up an LG Xenon because of it's full qwerty keyboard and the slide out features mixed with the nifty touch screen. We had considered the iPhone but the service plans were simply too expensive to justify the dive in.

Unfortunately after poking around on the phone and searching the net, running this phone in Japanese or at least texting in Japanese doesn't appear to be possible. The only reason I temporarily got excited was because I saw that the phone supported Korean. If memory serves me correctly, LG is a Korean company so that sounded logical. What surprised me was that Japanese wasn't in the list :(.

Anyone out there, who lives in the US, have a nice texting setup with their phone for Japanese? I'm guessing the iPhone natively supports this since it is basically running Mac OS X. I guess my wife and I will have to stick to sending romaji-fied texts back and forth - oh the pain! Oh how I long for some of the Japanese phones I saw while in Tokyo to be supported by telecom carriers out here in the states...

Kanji Compounds Rule the World

My compounds list has now grown to 46 words, covering the first 2 lessons of Kanji in Mangaland 1. I'm still going through them in Anki, but the scheduling system built into Anki is definitely helping force me to learn the ones that I just can't seem to retain. More often than not, the readings seem to be the hardest thing to remember since they can change from one compound to the next (in fact they always do based on my selected vocabulary).

The meanings of the individual kanji (for the time being) still mainly relate to the meaning of the compound as a whole, but this property apparently subsides once you get past the basics.

Also been slowly chugging away at more Genki 1 grammar. Signing off!

The Balance Between Vocabulary and Grammar

So I had a chance to focus on "Kanji in Mangaland 1" this weekend. What I find interesting about this book is that you can approach the book in a variety of different ways. The first lesson of the book introduces just 8 kanji. My guess is that most people would fall for the temptation to simply memorize the 8 kanji and their short meanings and quickly rush onto the next lesson. These 8 kanji are accompanied by 53 example compounds using them. At first I tried to memorize all 53 compounds - massive waste of effort since many of the words are fairly uncommon (i.e. rooftop).

After a bit of strategic thinking, I decided it was more important to pull at least 1 example for each reading of a kanji and to make sure the example was a useful word. This effort resulted in 22 compounds instead of the original 53. Obviously 22 compounds is certainly less intimidating and easier to memorize, don't you think?

This realization also led me down the path to considering how many actual kanji I was learning. In these 22 compounds, I believe there were a total of 21 unique kanjis, only 8 of which were actually introduced in the lesson itself.

Additionally, before I keyed these 22 compounds into Anki for review (which I am still in the process of reviewing), I first spent a great deal of effort making sure I could fully write each compound out with ease in the correct stroke order. This took the most effort, as it took some time to look up the stroke orders for the 13 additional (21 - 8) kanjis that weren't officially introduced with the lesson.

At the end of the day, in just the first lesson of the book, I've managed to extract a massive amount of knowledge that will be critical moving forward and I feel this is a very solid approach for vocabulary and kanji building since I am learning multiple readings per kanji, how to write them, as well as compound vocabulary that uses them.

On the subject of grammar (yes, that was also included in the title of this blog entry), I decided out of curiosity to revisit my old "Genki I" book, as it has been quite a long time. I remembered enjoying the grammar sections of each chapter so I am starting from ground zero and moving forward through each chapter, carrying my particle dictionary and basic grammar dictionary in hand for any questions that pop up.

Finally going to start the "Kanji in Mangaland" series

About a week or so back I placed an order with Amazon for the "Kanji in Mangaland 1" and "Kanji in Mangaland 2" books. They finally arrived last night and they look excellent. For those of you who haven't heard of them, they're basically focused on teaching you Kanji through manga, whereby volume 1 teaches you the kanji that 1st and 2nd graders learn in Japan, and volume 2 teaches you the kanji that 3rd and 4th graders learn. When volume 3 is published, they will round it off with 5th and 6th grader kanji.

When all is said and done, you should know 1,006 kanji (and lots of compound vocabulary if you take your time). This first 1,006 kanji are known as the Kyōiku kanji. If you'd like to read more on the subject, wikipedia has a great entry on it here. Basically all Japanese kids know this list by the end of 6th grade and as they move on to secondary school (i.e. high school) they learn an additional 939 more kanji bringing their total kanji knowledge up to 1,945, otherwise known as the Jōyō kanji

So the "Kanji in Mangaland" books not only appear to have some fairly nice manga panels to read through for each lesson, but the authors appear to have gone through a lot of trouble to provide very helpful compound vocabulary and mnemonics for memorization, as well as complete stroke order diagrams.

As indicated in past posts, I will be making sure I physically write out each of the kanji as I trod my way through volume 1, and if possible, will attempt to write out some of the compounds as well in hopes that it makes them stick better. If any of my readers have gone through this series already, I'd love to hear how effective it was for you, so feel free to leave a comment.

Rosetta Stone Japanese v3 Level 1 Unit 1 Complete

As I'm always jumping between learning media / methods / books, I have finally completed all of Unit 1 of Rosetta Stone Japanese v3 Level 1. I'm guessing this took roughly 10 hours worth of time to finish. For those who don't know how the structure of lessons work within RS, each level of their software basically has 4 units of material. In my case, I purchased all 3 levels of their software, so in total, that's 12 units worth of material to get through.

Based on my rough math, assuming the time needed to pass each unit progresses at a linear rate, it should take me roughly 120 hours to complete the entire series. I believe at my current rate, I spend roughly 3 weeks per unit (when considering my other learning methods being practiced in parallel), so that plots out to roughly 33 more weeks, so roughly 8 months from now, or more precisely, June 2010.

This does of course assume that the material doesn't get any more easy or difficult as I move onward. This also assumes I don't get bored to tears and want to rip my hair out trying to complete it. I obviously could decide to drop all other methods and fly through this software, but I honestly think that there's more to be gained by taking a slow but steady pace while learning via other means at the same time.

This philosophy does lend itself to a conflict once I reach the end of RS. How do I possibly quantify how much Japanese was taught by the software if I am assimilating from so many sources at the same time? The answer? There isn't one. This is why I love it when I see reviews for products like RS and they outright claim they reached fluency in only 1 year - well...entirely possible, but were they ONLY using that one product? Usually this isn't the case.

Japanese in Mangaland 1 Workbook

I made a trip out to the local Kinokunya bookstore this past weekend and stumbled across the workbook to my "Japanese in Mangaland" series. Since I've been currently hovering around Lesson 22 of the book, I figured I'd probably benefit from picking up the corresponding workbook in an attempt to catch up. Obviously I'm not terribly far through the workbook right now, but I do have some positive remarks on the experience thus far.

The workbook appears to have a more complete Manga story, split up throughout the lesson blocks and the questions really do force you to "write" a lot of Japanese in order to answer them. I am still working on finishing up the first set up questions (they cover lessons 1-5 I believe), but just answering the first 8 questions took roughly a complete page of kana/basic kanji to answer since I bothered to answer them completely and not get lazy.

Another strong point is that the questions cause you to have to turn back to the Manga and examine it closely in order to hunt down the answers. This is great exercise, even though at times it feels tedious, as it's acting as a reinforcement mechanism with context (context of course being a critical factor in my assimilation).

I will say that by the end of question 8, my brain was fatigued, but I hope to slowly chip away at this workbook in parallel with the numerous other activities I'm pursuing.