mezbup Wrote:A year? That's ***** ridiculous.

yep that's what I though! To be fair he was a part time student, so many 1-2 hours of lessons per week, each lesson instroducing 3 characters. Then same time again to get comfortable using them..
His Japanese was decent, but his accent was appalling too; seems SOAS don't bother teaching how to pronounce all the characters. Do not recommend that school..

QuackingShoe Wrote:FYI, I brute-forced, wouldn't have seen the point of mnemonics if I'd known about them, and didn't know about them anyway.

It should be clear I'm talking about recognition only. I learned to write them a little later, but while still fast, I did this leisurely, because I considered it fairly unimportant.

RtKana leaves you able to read AND write all the characters in 3 hours. Mnemonics are just easier; what's the point of needless extra work?

The mnemonics are mental work, and mental space. My learning wasn't extra work, because it wasn't work at all; I just casually used an online flashcard program in-between waiting for my friends to reply while chatting online. If I can choose between mindless work that doesn't feel like work and mindful work that does, I choose the former.

I'm not saying nobody should use mnemonics. I'm just saying I hate them and 46 characters isn't a lot. (and neither is 92)

Well, and that for this topic in particular, it's my opinion that mnemonics scare people away. Because the thing is, mnemonics are weird and an unfamiliar way of doing things for most people. I think it's great that mnemonics can be used to make learning a lot faster - I used them for the kanji. But it doesn't matter if you scare away the person you're trying to teach before they actually get going. In the case of Japanese, it makes something that already seems scary and complicated look even more complicated and scary, at first. For a serious, dedicated, self-motivated learner - for the kind of person who goes through RTK, and is on these boards - that's not an issue. For your little sister or your mom or your friend who's gotten curious about Japanese because of you, it is. So I wouldn't use a mnemonics system with them (though general mnemonics are cool). This is also why I have no intention of introducing RTK to my friend any time soon. We're taking a "Just learn the kana, start listening to Japanese, start reading manga with furigana. See what you think. Try to pick up some kanji from exposure. If you get to the point where you're serious about it, and want to seriously pick up the kanji, I've got something you might want to try" approach.

QuackingShoe, I kind of agree with you that mnemonics can sometimes scare people away, but have you looked at Remembering the Kana? I think it's quite a friendly, low effort approach.

Hey anyone else besides me still has trouble to write the kana?

I recommend the smartfm Hiragana lesson because it is beginner friendly - nice interface, and audio. And you can learn to write them and type them while your there. It hammers them in but it's like a game so, not too painful. You could introduce them to her in your lesson, then she could spend a little time each day for a week doing them on smartfm, and by the next lesson be ready to do some fun stuff with it.

Could you give me the link to the smart.fm hiragana lesson? Thanks!

I think I'll start the first lesson with really basic grammar, and hiragana. Now I just need to figure out some activities and games to make learning it more fun

So, anyone think of ways to make learning hiragana enjoyable?

It's very difficult to make unfun things fun, often impossible. I'd worry more about making it effective than fun. Otherwise you come across as patronizing.

<rant, directed at my less than happy school days>

What is up with people--especially primary school teachers--trying so hard to "make learning fun?"

There are all kinds of fun things to do on the way to Japanese proficiency. Watching さようなら絶望先生 and actually getting some of the jokes? Fun. Crazy game shows? Fun. Reading and writing e-mails in Japanese? Fun. Making up dirty kanji stories? Half fun, half apparently pointless.

Fun is great, and the really cool thing is that fun things are also very likely to be good for learning. But, the world isn't perfect, and sometimes there are things that are very important to know that aren't fun to learn.

Now, research says that fun things are easier to learn. And somewhere teachers and schools got the idea that they could make it fun to learn multiplication tables or the alphabet or the population of Peru's ten largest cities.

So, they figure it's worth the effort. But, it's not. Because while the first point is valid, the second isn't. Fun comes from an alignment of content with the students' interests--there is no magic fun additive that makes boring stuff fun.

Someone needs to come out and say it: playing stupid games to learn pointless crap isn't fun. I really hated primary school and even a fair bit of high-school over this. It felt like either the teachers thought we could be manipulated, or that they didn't have the guts to come out and say "learning this sucks, but here's how to do it most efficiently so you get back to doing fun stuff."

A little honesty would have been greatly appreciated.

That's not to say that you should accept the deferral of fun. If there are fun things your student can do to advance his level, Go For It--and there almost always are. Just remember that fun is discovered, not created.

(And what's even worse, they had an almost uncanny ability to turn fun stuff unfun in an attempt to introduce fun. Foreign language for example. Who cares about the lame-ass word search or the unending fill-in-the-blanks? Never mind the fluff, cut to the content. As little as Latin did for my oral ability, it was great that we'd actually read stuff instead of fixing grammar errors.)

Aijin Wrote:Could you give me the link to the smart.fm hiragana lesson? Thanks!

Master Hiragana

Quote:So, anyone think of ways to make learning hiragana enjoyable?

I think that, ideally, one should first learn hiragana without relying on romaji at all. It's best if you start by associating the hiragana to the actual sounds. Then your student could learn romaji once they've already learned the kana. I'm not really sure how you'd go about teaching this way, though. :lol:

Edit: Oh! I have an idea! Consult with your student beforehand and decide on an anime or a Japanese song or something that she's already into and then find or make a transcript of it. You could either write it out with kanji and furigana, or write it out all in kana. Then teach the kana directly from this. So, for example, play the audio of whatever it is that you guys end up choosing, and try to learn the kana for each line, one line at a time. Hehe, don't know how well this will work, but I think it'd be really cool and would be more fun than just trying to first memorize あ行, then か行, then さ行, and so on.

Anyways, good luck Aijin! ^_^

The thing about kana is, they're pretty much useless unless you know them all. But once you know them all, they become immediately useful and should become your default for transcribing/reading japanese at the beginner stage. It's using them in this way, that makes them stick. But to use them you need to know them first. If you take a 3 kana a week approach, it takes along time before they actually become 'usable'. That kind of approach has far too little forward momentum. So I would highly recommend aiming to have both sets of kana done in a short time (2 weeks?).
For kana, you need to remember the writing and sound. When I learned kana back in highschool, my teacher used pictorial flashcards that linked the sound and the characters really well. I can still remember a a lot of those mnemonics now after 10 years. For example う was written over a picture of an old woman bending over with a heavy load on her back. To get the sound, we imagined the old woman saying 'ooh' from the strain of the heavy load. お was a picture of a golf course with the phrase "お for On the green)

I just had a look at the RTkana sample pdf. This book seems pretty bad. His mnemonics are long and complicated and make no connection to the pronounciation of the kana. Also his kana pronounciation seems way off. I'm guessing he must be american but still...
for example:
け　cape kangaroo wtf?
first of all the 'ca' in cape and 'ka' in kangaroo aren't even the same sound and and neither of them sound like け. KEpt would be a better approximation.

another example:
こ comb ??? more like COttage.

Actually I've noticed a lot of bad kana pronounciation guides on the internet on various japanese learning sites. One problem is that english words used to approximate the kana pronounciation will be pronounced differently depending on where someone is from. For example, a pronounciation guide written by an american(most of the internet) will most likely be incorrect for someone from australian or the UK.

Aijin Wrote:Could you give me the link to the smart.fm hiragana lesson? Thanks!

I think I'll start the first lesson with really basic grammar, and hiragana. Now I just need to figure out some activities and games to make learning it more fun

So, anyone think of ways to make learning hiragana enjoyable?

I remember when I learnt Japanese back in year 7 we had simple mnemonics like

Ke for Keg of bear
Ka for Cut off his head

But before I took it up again at university I Just rote learned the whole *lot, no rtKana or any of that stuff. Though I still read katakana like a half-blind nut case - but I couldn't care less

liosama Wrote:I remember when I learnt Japanese back in year 7

Is this 7th grade, or did you study Japanese for 7 years?

Aijin Wrote:So maybe it'd be best to start with romaji, and learn like 10 hiragana a week? I've seen that style used in a lot of Japanese 1 classes. The only problem is, I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate romaji. It's a pet-peeve. I am not sure if I could teach in romaji for two months

The kana can definitely be learned without relying on romaji. One way to do it would be to prepare a hiragana deck with audio on the front, hiragana character (possibly animated to show stroke order) on the back. Then teach the katakana from the hiragana. No romaji needed.

Edit: Of course, being able to read romaji is important, too. This way, though, you could teach your students romaji after they have already learned the kana.

kazelee Wrote:

liosama Wrote:I remember when I learnt Japanese back in year 7

Is this 7th grade, or did you study Japanese for 7 years?

Damn you Americans, year 7 = 7th grade. The beginning of this thing you guys like to call 'middle school'

Yeah using a song or something is a good idea - as long as the sounds of the syllables are clear. As a beginner (well still am - but, when I was a super beginner) I really wanted to mine a japanese song, but translating on my own was just too hard. But I didn't have a native Japanese person to help me..... really you can help iron out things and give her some fun options that otherwise would be impossible if she was only on her own. By using smart.fm it will de facto teach the romaji counterparts.... .but really there will be little or no need to use it other than on the keyboard I think (seems like such an eye sore if you are used to real japanese). She can get it going with lesson 1, and smart.fm, and then through using it in subsequent lessons/exercise become super fluid with it in a jiffy. With that going Katakana will come pretty easy (can also find it on smart.fm if you like), and really she'll have the foundation of the language (and I think it will really show up in her pronunciation). You'll also be there to help her with all the little alterations in pronunciation and such, so she has a great advantage to get it right from the get-go.

From there, sky's the limit!

Oh - I also used this one -

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projec...timer.html

There's a Katakana one too. Kind of fun....you can try and beat your personal record.

Kana was easy. I'm still somewhat hazy on katana because I don't read enough of it, but even then the initial learning of it was no problem. Hiragana was and is a piece of cake.

All I did was this drill, while having a kana chart handy if I needed it. A thousand or two reps for a couple of days and I was good to go.

It doesn't get much more brute force than this, but in this case it's less effort than mnemonics.

It's vague, but I guess it was when I used to work at a コンビニ. I memorized hiragana one day and katakana the next by writing the 五十音 as far as I could by memory on the back of lottery slips. If I couldn't remember or messed up I'd start over from the beginning. Inspiration came from a (somewhat insane) coworker who spoke Japanese and had a JP wife.

Kana learning software is unnecessary and crap. Just get some scrap paper.

Ha, Kana, I still remember (mostly because it wasn't that long ago) naïvely brute-forcing the little things on paper and on flash programs like that as I saw them on Wikiversity. That was one repetitive weekend. Finding another method probably would've taken longer, though.

There is no better method for kana than rote. Mnemonics etc are worthless for such a small dataset with no repetitive elements. The important thing is to rote it by writing, not by recognition. Get that muscle-memory going.

I really doubt any sort of sophisticated method can beat rote for kana. It took me only about 3 hours each, which is a pretty typical number. If you avoid romaji like the plague you don't have to worry about forgetting them either.

Some students aren't interested in spending the amount of time it takes to show good results, they just want to have a bit of fun which is fine. I would determine what kind of student you have and then teach accordingly.

If you have a more eager student. Get them studying in there own time and just use your lessons as speaking practice and to review how their self study is going. It would be excellent to give them Anki decks for Hiragana and Katakana, then get them to add words they learn each week to Anki (and eventually sentences.. and then eveeeentually only Japanese). If they are keen and you show them fast improvement, you can get them putting in lots of effort and improving rapidly.

Have getting all the lesson in Japanese as a long term goal.

Also, relax and have fun yourself. In all likelihood your student won't improve much at all through a lack of talent (if you don't use the immersion technique the mental agility plays a big role in 2nd language ability) or effort. Don't take it as a reflection on yourself.

EDIT. Oh and you must correct their pronunciation. Not just when they make a mistake on the mora, but when they are off. Assume you are preparing them to go and live in Japan and make it so that a Japanese person with no exposure to foreigners will understand them.

I dunno, reading a short paragraph with a mnemonic didn't take long for me and while many didn't stick, the ones that did made up for it... I think.

On another note, did anyone else believe the hideously optimistic JLPT "hours of study" estimates?

Reviewed Wrote:On another note, did anyone else believe the hideously optimistic JLPT "hours of study" estimates?

little off topic but I believe those are based on the assumption it's a Chinese or Korean learning Japanese as those are the biggest learners of the language (aside from little 赤ちゃん of course).

Reviewed Wrote:I dunno, reading a short paragraph with a mnemonic didn't take long for me and while many didn't stick, the ones that did made up for it... I think.

Indeed. I had to make up my own stories and keywords for many of the Kana, as Heisig's book assumes you have an american accent (the keyword for each kana tells you how to pronounce it). But even despite this, it took me approximately 5 minutes per character.

The after you learn the character, at the bottom of the page is a list if words that use the current character + all the ones you have learnt previously (i+1), so I was constantly reviewing/recalling throughtout the process. Those word lists mean you don't need to SRS flashcards.

Once I then started using the kana, the keywords dropped away within a week or two. However, funnily enough even after all this time I sometimes still recall the story if I've forgotten how to write a character.

mezbup Wrote:

Reviewed Wrote:On another note, did anyone else believe the hideously optimistic JLPT "hours of study" estimates?

little off topic but I believe those are based on the assumption it's a Chinese or Korean learning Japanese as those are the biggest learners of the language (aside from little 赤ちゃん of course).

The numbers aren't assuming anything.. They are a result of the poll all JLPT test takers fill out. The vast majority of JLPT takers are Asian, but still. They aren't optimistic, it's a measure of class hours.. The average language class is 3 hour per week, so make the appropriate calculation.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:

Reviewed Wrote:On another note, did anyone else believe the hideously optimistic JLPT "hours of study" estimates?

little off topic but I believe those are based on the assumption it's a Chinese or Korean learning Japanese as those are the biggest learners of the language (aside from little 赤ちゃん of course).

The numbers aren't assuming anything.. They are a result of the poll all JLPT test takers fill out. The vast majority of JLPT takers are Asian, but still. They aren't optimistic, it's a measure of class hours.. The average language class is 3 hour per week, so make the appropriate calculation.

So assuming we study for 37.5 days straight we can pass JLPT1? woot.

冗談はさておき、when I sat the JLPT there were a handful of white people and rooms full of Asians so it's fair to say that the numbers represent the time it takes from a largely Asian standpoint IMO. Makes sense though given that Koreans have the advantage of lots of shared vocab plus the same "backwards" order and Chinese have the ability of Kanji (koreans do too but not nearly as much?) where as non-asians have nothing with the exception of knowing the word "tsunami".