Does anyone have suggestions for a good textbook(in Japanese) for teaching English to a native Japanese speaker? Maybe even a series of books. I'm talking about someone who doesn't even know the English alphabet yet.

Hopefully it would be easy enough for an RTKer to follow.

If possible, please list title, ISBN, or URL link.

Thanks.

I've just finished reading a bunch of articles about Total Physical Response (TPR), it looks like an incredible way of teaching second languages to absolute beginners. Of course you would need to supliment with other material for learning writing etc. but do a search and a read about it!

And.. I thought almost all Japanese people know the English Alphabet? How old is this person?

Force him/her to watch Two and a Half Men without subs!

Yeah, how old is the student? If they don't know the English alphabet, they must be under 10 or over 80, which would make a big difference in textbook recommendations.

I thought about posting a topic like this. My girlfriend is Japanese but speaks practically no English at all. Ordinarily I wouldn't care about that, but she claims to want to learn English. The shocking part is that her methods are some of the worst I could imagine! She goes to eikaiwa for one hour a week, does the assigned homework (usually about one or two pages of producing cookie-cutter sentences), and ignores English the rest of the time. Whenever we watch a movie, it's always in Japanese (and usually with Japanese subtitles for my benefit), and even though I'm a native English speaker, she absolutely refuses to speak any English with me (despite paying hundreds of dollars a month for this very service from an English teacher who is actually Japanese), and insists that I speak Japanese to her as she "can't understand me" when I speak English.

She says that her English isn't good because she forgets stuff too easily. So I installed Anki on her computer, and showed her how she could use it to remember sentences. She said she would use it, but a month later I checked her program and found that the only cards in there were the two examples I typed in.

I wanted to find a method for her to be able to learn English, but I don't know what would be acceptable. Now she's moving to Fiji to study English because she claims that moving to a foreign country "is the best way to study English". She's spending an insane amount of money to do this in the belief that living in a place with English speakers will make her magically good at English.

Oh well. I'm not sure what my point was. Any advice?

Esgrove, with your girlfriend, try the Subs2SRS program with a US TV show she likes. This may be easier to swallow than actual sentence mining where you're typing in sentences. There's also a site that has lots of links to TV and movie scripts (Drew's script-o-rama I think).

Do the audio stripping/splitting that Khatz recommended with her favorite shows (break into 3:30 minute segments, play on random). Download top 20 to 40 songs per year for the last 20 years. Get her to get a daily podcast of CNN or other news.

Get some CBR's of comics (or just buy GN's) for her to read if that's her thing.

These are the simpler things to do. However, this is still the old adage "You can lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink".

If you'd like to discourage her from moving to another country to learn English, try this visual argument: Show her the scene from Titanic when Rose goes in the water, and the guy is grabbing onto her trying not to drown. That's what's going to happen going to another country, you're not going to try to swim (learn English). You're going to grab onto the closest thing that makes you feel safe (another Japanese speaker most likely) and try to latch onto them for dear life.

I'll second Nukemarine's comments. With her mindset, moving to Fiji is not going to do anything. Plus why does she have to move to a foreign country to live with native speakers. She's got you, right?

But this isn't about logic. I think we've all been in this position before. It doesn't matter what you say, she's not going to listen because you're the one who is saying it. It's funny how women are. Anyway, you need to do two things: 1) convince her friends that going to Fiji is a bad idea. She'll listen to them. And 2) see if you can find a translation of antimoon in 日本語. Show that to her.

If she wanted to learn English she would learn English. It sounds like she just wants to go to Fiji.

Is there a translation of antimoon in Japanese? I would love to have that. If there's not, I would fully encourage someone to do it (someone far better than me).

Esgrove, antimoon has posted an article that a major problem with antimoon is that their stuff is in English. Kind of like saying "Instructions on how to open the box are located inside the box". They're looking for volunteers for translations.

I've looked at their forums (ok, briefly so the following may be complete BS). They haven't got near the level of discussion going on that we do about language learning in general. We've got learning methods, links to sites, programs to assist, and discussions on the above that apply to more than just Japanese.

They seem to have the English equivalent of TJP forum going on.

But we don't have any Japanese descriptions of our methods either. Anyone know a good description of Antimoon/AJATT/RevTK's collected knowledge in Japanese?

Yeah, we do!

0) You start listening to Japanese here
1) RTK
2) Mine 10.000 sentences
3) Run for glory.

About the best you are going to get is http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...n-japanese BTW you can buy them for 1 yen second hand.

I am reading the first book now, 120 or so pages through. The book describes very well why the grammar and language school approach is crap and explains how babies and how people in general learn language. The approach is similar to AJATT in theory.

However, it differs in that it is far beyond AJATT in the amaount of detail. AJATT could be summed up as listen and read setnences in your target language all day. Review sentences that contain words or grammar you want to understand or use with an SRS. This book however has a much more specific process with 5 steps and each step quite detailed. As it is different from AJATT we can't say if it is good or not without trying. Certainly it boasts some impressive results (6 months to 1 year to get to attain a native like fluency). I plan to try it out once I finish the book.

Otherwise, I went to school for 6 months at a Japanese school in Japan (YAMASA). I had heard before going that is was one of if not the best school in Japan, but was sorely dissapointed with it. I have been writing a large report to send to my teachers at the school to help them understand how people learn languages and to improve their teaching. It explains AJATT and how people get good at languages in quite a lot of detail as well as what is generally considered best teaching practice in the English teaching world (which is much more evolved than Japanese teaching standards). I think basically someone could take this and start using it to learn English AJATT style.

However, English is something of a different beast. The hard part for us to deal with is the Kanji which we have RTK for, but for Japanese learners the hard part is pronunciation and listening. Thus I don't think you can simply plug English into AJATT and expect it to work quite as well. Anyway, I have been planning to post this report here when it is finished, which should be within a week. It is currently at 33 A4 pages.

Actually AJATT is based on antimoon, that was made for English.
The antimoon method is also well described.

0) Start listening to English non-stop
1) Mine 10.000 sentences
2) Run for glory

thermal, thanks, that's what I was looking for.

thermal Wrote:However, English is something of a different beast. The hard part for us to deal with is the Kanji which we have RTK for, but for Japanese learners the hard part is pronunciation and listening. Thus I don't think you can simply plug English into AJATT and expect it to work quite as well. Anyway, I have been planning to post this report here when it is finished, which should be within a week. It is currently at 33 A4 pages.

I don't think that's true at all. We have huge problems with pronunciation and listening too. Not as much as they do, but it doesn't matter. If you know enough of a language and listens enough, your ability to listen is greatly enhanced. If your pronunciation is bad, you can actively learn how to pronounce the sounds properly then do it enough so it sticks. This is true for all languages and English should work just as well in AJATT as any other language.

I'm learning Chinese by AJATTlike methods right now. My main problems are definitely pronunciation and listening since I already know tons of hanzi. I can't properly identify tones and consonants yet but I'm confident listening and mimicking will get me there.

At the basics, it's all about exposure anyway.

True mentat_kgs, although I do find the method to have been advanced a little bit by Katzumoto, such as drilling production rather than recognition.

Tobberoth, I think you are right that you can get there with the method as is, but I don't think it is optimal. Japanese sounds are more or less a subset of English sounds. In some cases that does make native level English speakers to speak Englishy Japanese, but transitioning from this to the real deal is not a huge hurdle. It's not like we need to make hugely different positions with our mouth (baring らりるえろ). Plus even though we can struggle with らりるれろ there aren't any similiar sounds to confuse us when listening, unlike R and L.

Certainly I whole-heartedly recommend immersion, but I think the fastest way to get good prononciation is to record your own voice many times and compare it against native pronunciation, after your listening is good through immersion that is. Also watching natives mouths closely as they say words like "really" and consiously copying is useful. I think in Japanese we can get away without doing this. I have met numerous gaijin with more or less perfect Japanese pron but have only ever met 2 Japanese people that can boast the same. This is despite having chatted in English to over a 1000 Japanese English students in the course of teaching in Japan. Some of whom are much better than me in terms of grammar and vocab.

Back on topic, I thought Headway was a good English textbook. However I wouldn't recommend using one at all, since no matter how good you are better off geting native level input.

I've found it very helpful for not-absolute-beginners in English to work on pronunciation, since the written and spoken languages don't have a lot in common. Also, there's a lot that native speakers don't even notice that we do when we produce English sounds (e.g., CNN is pronounced not see-en-en but see-yih-nin). A book I successfully used a few years ago when teaching ESL was American Accent Training, and there were tapes available. It was amazing seeing not only how much more naturally students sounded, but how their listening comprehension increased dramatically once the rules for putting words together were finally presented to them.

It always amazes me how many English "teachers" refuse to acknowledge (and therefore refuse to inform their students about) the International Phonetic Alphabet. Learn those 44 sounds and you can correctly pronounce any word in the English language.

Harhol, do you think something like that could be put into Anki or another program so create pronunciation sentences similar to what's done with pinyin and kana? I know Antimoon sells a program to does a variant, and it would be a boon for Japanese that may feel relegated to ***shudder*** kana only.

Nukemarine Wrote:Harhol, do you think something like that could be put into Anki or another program so create pronunciation sentences similar to what's done with pinyin and kana? I know Antimoon sells a program to does a variant, and it would be a boon for Japanese that may feel relegated to ***shudder*** kana only.

It would likely be impossible because pronunciation & spelling are so messed up. Unless code can distinguish between sentences like "I tied the bow" and "He asked me to bow" then it could do more harm than good. Even bizarre word combinations like -ough can have four or more pronunciations:

cough
rough
bough
borough

There are some companies that market programs which are capable of doing just that. We've got one at my work from Adobe that is able to automatically generate closed captioning for webcasts. As far as I know it just relies up on a huge database of IPA<->english conversions.

esgrove Wrote:I wanted to find a method for her to be able to learn English, but I don't know what would be acceptable. Now she's moving to Fiji to study English because she claims that moving to a foreign country "is the best way to study English". She's spending an insane amount of money to do this in the belief that living in a place with English speakers will make her magically good at English.

I just wanted to update about how this whole "moving to Fiji" thing worked out for my ex-girlfriend (yes, she's my ex now because she moved to Fiji). She said that her English has actually gotten worse. Even though she lived with an English speaking host family, she says that she still never spoke English. The only people she knew were also Japanese, or spoke Japanese. She got a pilot's license and got certified in scuba diving. I also think she may have gotten cosmetic surgery. But after over 9 months of living in Fiji, she knows not one word more of English.

She's also lost all motivation. What little English she used to study has been completely abandoned. I am truly disappointed.

esgrove Wrote:

esgrove Wrote:I wanted to find a method for her to be able to learn English, but I don't know what would be acceptable. Now she's moving to Fiji to study English because she claims that moving to a foreign country "is the best way to study English". She's spending an insane amount of money to do this in the belief that living in a place with English speakers will make her magically good at English.

I just wanted to update about how this whole "moving to Fiji" thing worked out for my ex-girlfriend (yes, she's my ex now because she moved to Fiji). She said that her English has actually gotten worse. Even though she lived with an English speaking host family, she says that she still never spoke English. The only people she knew were also Japanese, or spoke Japanese. She got a pilot's license and got certified in scuba diving. I also think she may have gotten cosmetic surgery. But after over 9 months of living in Fiji, she knows not one word more of English.

She's also lost all motivation. What little English she used to study has been completely abandoned. I am truly disappointed.

Sad to hear. To be honest, I don't mean to be an ass or anything like this, but if people truly want to learn a language. They will want to spend every bit of time in the language if possible. I had a similar situation to this, a japanese friend of mine and I gave her anki/anti-moon site cuz she could read it about it. She is a busy person, full-time working. So I understand that, but she didn't do much.

Not everyone wants to learn a language just because they say they want to. I know this for sure, I had a friend of mine who was going to learn japanese just like me, he's chinese, so I thought he would have the heads up on me on kanji/familiarities. But he said I'll do it later, basically kept postponing it.

Not everyone will put the amount of time/effort into the language to learn it. 1 hour per week won't cut it at all. When I think of how long it takes to learn a language. It varies between 1-7 years. 1 hour per week=7 years=not happening even.
(Although big factor is time, not everyone can spend 24/7 hours a week. But people would still invest there time into learning it, outside of class, outside of school. Basically incorporating it into there daily lives. )

Quote:To be honest, I don't mean to be an ass or anything like this, but if people truly want to learn a language. They will want to spend every bit of time in the language if possible.

This isn't true for everyone; of course you have to put in a certain level of effort, but I never wanted (nor do I want now) to spend every bit of time in Japanese. I like speaking and reading my native language as well; I would not want to be in a situation where I had no access to English.