+- kanji koohii FORUM (http://forum.koohii.com)
+-- Forum: Learning Japanese (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-4.html)
+--- Forum: The Japanese language (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-10.html)
+--- Thread: How did people learn Japanese ~50 years ago? (/thread-8451.html)
How did people learn Japanese ~50 years ago? - Daichi - 2011-09-24
kainzero Wrote:I think it's not SRS (or vocab lists, grammar rules) by itself, or immersion by itself but rather the combination of the two that makes for a very powerful learning technique. I think the ratios of the two are up for debate and probably best left to the individual learner based on the troubles they are having.I feel like this is a one bit is quite important. I know I've been victim to this. I think a lot of people get stuck on the crusades that focus too narrowly on one thing.
If we separate the two, referring to the SRS as "drills/practice" and immersion as "experience," a combination of the two is necessary for improvement in any skill. It's only with experience can we refine our drills and identify weaknesses, but it's only with drills/practice that we can learn new things to implement in our experience, to which we can refine our drills, etc.
Like just learning kanji/vocab; just watching TV; just learning kanji readings; or just reading books. And while it's fine to do some of this in isolation, is there really a need to do everything in isolation to 100%? Again, the ideal break down might be different for everyone. Doing all of these things is certainly fine, (maybe I have a short attention span these days,) but I think mixing things up a bit goes a long way.
I always used to think that RtK was fine that it ignored learning actual Japanese along with the kanji. But it takes so little extra effort that why shouldn't you at least learn a single word that uses that kanji? You don't even need to focus on learning the word, you could just add it to the card, you can have it display along with the keyword. The keywords already have a lot of synonyms/homonyms and this is a small way to make ease any possible confusion. Sadly, I did this way too late into RtK to make it worthwhile, but if I did this from the beginning, I'd know a lot more vocab words, and I'd even know more readings because of it. This is just one small example where I think doing more then one thing outside of isolation can speed things up.
I am a believer in the sentence method. You certainly get more exposure to common words then you would by reviewing single vocab words in isolation. These days it's easy enough to watch an episode from your favorite show and then break it down sentence by sentence to review later in Anki.
I'm not sure how people did it effectively ~50 years ago, but I assume they didn't have the option to tackle the language in the large isolated chunks like we seem to commonly do today. For all I know is it was decent instruction, lots of immersion and good intelligent questions to the right people.
How did people learn Japanese ~50 years ago? - Omoishinji - 2011-09-24
Nagareboshi Wrote:Now that　dictionary is very interesting. Anything, before 1910's in my opinion is more interesting from a historical perspective.Omoishinji Wrote:Very interesting! Too bad that most of the books that could be found on google have been removed ... The exerpts for some of the books are still there, but considering the age, they should be free of charge already. I am talking about old tomes teaching Japanese, from the 1800's to 1950's, not some new books you could still buy.Bokusenou Wrote:I feel compelled to link to "Yokohama Dialect - a textbook from 1879". XDOh cash she
Here is a dictionary I found while browsing the listing of books that is still available. Maybe someone overlooked it ... *click*