The numbers don't really reflect anything in reality. There wasn't a controlled study etc. When you take JLPT in-country you have to fill in a blank saying how many hours you studied. No one ever keeps track of study hours so test takers just make up a number. That's what I did. As if I have any idea how many hours I've studied.

Just wanted to chime in: My first day was basic self-introduction in Japanese, how to say "-san" and "-sensei", how to bow, etc. Then we learned hiragana for several days. No kanji for more than one semester (which worked fine for me, doing all the basic stuff in hiragana only).

Hiragana gets a little easier if you can form words with it. E.g. す and し were easy to remember because I could write すし. I'm guessing it helps if you introduce some minimal vocabulary to go with some of the hiragana (like です, さん).

Edit: Oh, and I think a good textbook is super-important, both for you and your student. We used "Elementary Functional Japanese", and I liked it.

Since it was mentioned: Aijin, if you use RTKana, remember that the sample words are based on American English pronunciation. Seeing that you'd have an ear for it, perhaps pick English words that you think sound very close to the kana being taught if the book's choice doesn't seem appropriate.

By the way, RTKana is brute force, just in an interesting order. I also liked how he set up the Dagger, and the No Sign and the Puppy Tail which I think helped improve my writing.

As to study hours for JLPT 1, yeah it's probably a made up number. Only morons like me keep some sort of track, and even that's a rough estimate. Something like 800 study hours (250 RTK, 150 Grammar, 350 Vocabulary, 50 s2s) and not even close to JLPT 2.

Someone come up with a British slang version of Remembering the Kana. ;p

nest0r Wrote:Someone come up with a British slang version of Remembering the Kana. ;p

Being British, I had to use the following substitute keywords:
あ = father
た = Tar
さ = Sargent
は = Hard
ほ = Hop
な = Naan-bread.
ぬ = Nu-rave (UK music style, now slightly out of date..)

Can't remember the ones for カタカナ. I still constantly forget that bloody character set..

epsilondelta Wrote:Hiragana gets a little easier if you can form words with it.

I wonder if you can come up with an ordering so that you can always introduce one new kana at a time with a word each time. So you start with か == mosquito, then かさ umbrella, かみ god, みかん orange... The trick would be doing it without having to resort to obscure words, I think.

pm215 Wrote:

epsilondelta Wrote:Hiragana gets a little easier if you can form words with it.

I wonder if you can come up with an ordering so that you can always introduce one new kana at a time with a word each time. So you start with か == mosquito, then かさ umbrella, かみ god, みかん orange... The trick would be doing it without having to resort to obscure words, I think.

GAAH, RtKana already does that..there are 3 words at the end of each page that use the current character + a mixture of the previous ones learnt..

Fair enough; by the time I encountered RtAnything I already knew the kana, so I've never looked at RTKana.

If you use smart.fm she will hear it, over and over......then you can teach her about the nasal ぎ　etc, as you learn words.

aphasiac Wrote:By the way, I do *not* recommend brute forcing the kana. Obviously it works for some, but also I know Japanese learning who are still not comfortable with reading and writing after 6 months study. One guy I met studying Japanese at SOAS (big London language uni) said it took him a year to learn to learn both ひらがな and カタカナ. When I said I learnt them in a week each, he just said it wasn't possible and totally dismissed what I was saying..

Seriously? I thought SOAS was meant to have some semblance of quality, but apparantly I was wrong... I heard at Oxford they did about 250 kanji a week by comparison (though that's only second hand information), equal to standards here I suppose. I know at Cambridge they expect you to have learnt the syllabaries before you arrive, which seems like a perfectly natural requirement to be able to start real study...

Amazing what passes for full time education.

dizmox Wrote:Amazing what passes for full time education.

Sorry, I did mention in a later post that is a part time weekend course he was doing. So I think they used the old method of 3 kana a week, which as pointed out is ridiculous, as you need to know *all* of them before any are actually useful.

dizmox Wrote:

aphasiac Wrote:By the way, I do *not* recommend brute forcing the kana. Obviously it works for some, but also I know Japanese learning who are still not comfortable with reading and writing after 6 months study. One guy I met studying Japanese at SOAS (big London language uni) said it took him a year to learn to learn both ひらがな and カタカナ. When I said I learnt them in a week each, he just said it wasn't possible and totally dismissed what I was saying..

Seriously? I thought SOAS was meant to have some semblance of quality, but apparantly I was wrong... I heard at Oxford they did about 250 kanji a week by comparison (though that's only second hand information), equal to standards here I suppose. I know at Cambridge they expect you to have learnt the syllabaries before you arrive, which seems like a perfectly natural requirement to be able to start real study...

Amazing what passes for full time education.

250 kanji a week? :\

I've never heard of any program that would do something like that. There really isn't that much of a difference between the Japanese classes at Harvard versus the Japanese classes at a generic community college, for example. The Japanese teachers here at Stanford are all wonderful, and their students are great, but there is certainly nothing like "learn 100+ kanji a week" or "learn all the kana before the first day of class". That is a bit...overkill. It doesn't mean that the education is inferior, that's ridiculous.

I've noticed a trend on this forum towards obsession with doing ridiculous amounts of things in a tiny time frame. I am not sure that I really understand it. Why feel the need to memorize all the kana in a single day, or 2,000 kanji in a month? If you have the time, discipline, and capacity for that, then that's great, but I don't feel the necessity for it, nor really think a program like that can be applied to widespread teaching.

Different things work for different people, of course, and whatever works for you guys, that's wonderful

Back to the original question...a few thoughts which might run contrary....

2 1/2 hours is a long time!

My first day was one month before going to Japan. I knew nothing. My tutor was an old Japanese lady (Nagasaki survivor!). She told me to bring the BBC book, Japanese Language and Culture. So it was crash-course-use-romaji-cuz-speed-is-necessary-but-make-sure-he-doesn't-embarrass-himself-and-can-say-the-sounds-properly Japanese class.

Based on that experience, which was really useful...I'd say...

Do basic speaking/biodata the first day: how to say hello, my name is, I'm from..., nice to meet you. Combine it with bowing, so your student will associate bowing with the words. (total physical response)

Go over the sounds of Japanese, but don't necessarily teach the kana first day. I found it a lot of squiggles, and intimidating. Give the student a book and a task to learn Katakana for homework: yes, Katakana first, so that you can use it to practise ordering food from an Italian restaurant or coffeeshop or pizza menu. It's hard enough learning how to order, without having to learn all these new foods in hiragana.

Do a needs assessment first day. Figure out what the student needs. Go over the big picture of how Japanese works, word order, etc.. Pick a text. use pics to introduce some vocab, say 20 items...

good luck

Katakana before hiragana is a really interesting idea. I've never seen that done before, but it definitely makes sense, and gives immediate practice since they can figure out words merely by the pronunciation. Also would set up a foundation for hiragana. I like it

Anyone have experiences with that?

Aijin Wrote:Katakana before hiragana is a really interesting idea. I've never seen that done before, but it definitely makes sense, and gives immediate practice since they can figure out words merely by the pronunciation. Also would set up a foundation for hiragana. I like it

Anyone have experiences with that?

Actually, that's how I learned kana, myself. I was big into import games 10 years ago or so, and taught myself katakana while playing RPGs (as most people/place names and spells are in katakana, allowing me to get a very rudimentary understanding)... and hiragana came later, when I decided I actually wanted to learn Japanese, rather than stumble through games awkwardly.

I often hear students of Japanese complain that katakana is difficult, but I found the opposite to be true; hiragana was much trickier for me to learn. I think learning katakana beforehand made the process a lot easier, but the same can probably be said vice versa, as well. This worked pretty well for me, but I think learning hiragana first is probably more practical for 99% of students - at least, the ones who don't care much about playing soandso RPG 9 months earlier

Aijin Wrote:I've noticed a trend on this forum towards obsession with doing ridiculous amounts of things in a tiny time frame. I am not sure that I really understand it. Why feel the need to memorize all the kana in a single day, or 2,000 kanji in a month? If you have the time, discipline, and capacity for that, then that's great, but I don't feel the necessity for it, nor really think a program like that can be applied to widespread teaching.

That's where the skill of "skimming" and "skipping" comes handy in languages - Use it wisely here =D.


Anyway back to the topic - Just make sure you reinforce the kana teaching with words.
Give him/her real words made up of those and only those kana which you teach in each respective lesson.

Aijin, although 2000 kanji looks like a lot to learn in a month (and it is), when you step back and look at the guys that did it, they put just as much time as everyone else.

If something is going to take 200 hours, you can either do it 8 hours a day for 25 days or 2 hours a day for 100 days in row, or even 2 hours a day for 50 days, do something else for 2 months, then come back for the next 50 days and finish it.

Yeah, there are those like me on the forums that like to "chunk" their learning. We learn blocks of kanji, blocks of grammar, blocks of vocabulary, then blocks of random mining. The detriment of this is mitigated by the SRS. So, if I spend 3 months learning 2000 kanji, then take a 3 to 6 months getting vocabulary and grammar, but the SRS allows me to keep knowledge of the kanji I spent a lot of time on.

Yeah, I now think it's better to have small chunks (ok, somebody give me a better word to use) of each area such as 1000 kanji, 2000 vocabulary, 100 grammar points to get to real Japanese. Even these can be broken into smaller blocks.

Still, I do 2 hours a day. If somebody does 8 hours a day of study, they're going to do more in less days. That's math. I'm a working adult with other obligations, they're students. I stopped getting fascinated with people doing XX in a month and just attributed it to more time per day.

If anyone's interested in how it went:

Unfortunately my student didn't take to the language very well. Learning a few vocab words and a few hiragana was all she really managed, so I'll have to slow down my lesson plan's pace a lot. I understand that Japanese can be very difficult at first for a lot of people, so I am not too discouraged.

I really do love teaching the language though, and the 2 and a half hours went by in the blink of an eye for me. I really love the interest and passion people tend to show when learning Japanese and about the culture! It seems that East Asian languages really draw polar reactions for most English natives I think. With something like French or Italian, you don't really see the same level of passion and fascination in the average student as you do in a Chinese or Japanese class in America.

But, it does kinda' bum me that most of the students are only interested in anime/manga/Japanese pop music. I really have no interest nor knowledge any of those things, so when students start talking on and on about Dragonball Z or new video games I just have a blank stare on my face I try to learn a little about those things though.

I am not sure if I'd be cut out to teach basic language classes for long either. It's fun and enjoyable in short amounts, but teaching です loses its joy after a while, whereas literature never gets boring Maybe it'd be better if I looked into a career as a graduate teacher rather undergrad. Or a combination of both. Hmm.

Aijin Wrote:Unfortunately my student didn't take to the language very well. Learning a few vocab words and a few hiragana was all she really managed, so I'll have to slow down my lesson plan's pace a lot. I understand that Japanese can be very difficult at first for a lot of people, so I am not too discouraged.

Sounds exactly like my first lesson (see page 1). Remember, Japanese is not particularly different, it's just really different and will take a while to adapt to, especially if she is not a gifted language learner.

To put yourself in her place; have you ever heard morse code? Think you could repeat back 5 morse code words after hearing them 3 times each, and then recall them a week later??
To someone who knows it, it's intelligible sound but to a beginner it'll sound like a random set of beebs. That's basically what your student is hearing..

Aijin Wrote:I really love the interest and passion people tend to show when learning Japanese and about the culture! It seems that East Asian languages really draw polar reactions for most English natives I think. With something like French or Italian, you don't really see the same level of passion and fascination in the average student as you do in a Chinese or Japanese class in America.

That's mainly because they've found some facet of the the culture that they really love (music/tv/comics/anime etc).

Aijin Wrote:But, it does kinda' bum me that most of the students are only interested in anime/manga/Japanese pop music.

uh-oh..

But I'm sure for some people anime/manga etc is just a start off point. Once they learn more about the language and culture of Japan they will find more things they are interested in. At least, that was the way it was for me. It was only a slight interest in Manga that got me interested in Japanese and now I am living here in Japan....

Aijin Wrote:Unfortunately my student didn't take to the language very well. Learning a few vocab words and a few hiragana was all she really managed, so I'll have to slow down my lesson plan's pace a lot. I understand that Japanese can be very difficult at first for a lot of people, so I am not too discouraged.

If you want to go at a faster pace, try finding some Asian-American students to teach. They usually have a keen interest in Japan too, due to it being an (ex) economic powerhouse. They are usually bilingual or trilingual too, with a strong command of kanji so can learn other languages easily. They also have that diehard Asian discipline when required to learn something. You'll be able to go at a faster pace.

Aijin Wrote:But, it does kinda' bum me that most of the students are only interested in anime/manga/Japanese pop music. I really have no interest nor knowledge any of those things, so when students start talking on and on about Dragonball Z or new video games I just have a blank stare on my face I try to learn a little about those things though.

It would be terribly crass for me to dictate to anyone how to feel about their own language and culture, but I'd like to share how I feel about people learning my native language without doing that. I don't intend this as criticism and I hope it doesn't come across that way.

My native language is English, quite likely the most popular second language in the world. There are a lot of people learning it for all kinds of reasons.

If people approach American culture from a very narrow perspective, it does kind of bother me. We're not a nation of Hollywood stereotypes, nor (all) geographically illiterate, nor intolerant know-it-alls. (Though there is some truth behind those generations, they are just that: generalizations.)

But, if people approach "American language" with a narrow interest, that doesn't bother me as much. Want to watch Desperate Housewives? I don't care for that show myself--let me be honest: I hate it--but it sounds like a good goal! You might like Subs2SRS. (Just please don't think our women are all like that. Yuck.)

Maybe it's different for Japanese. American's can't really say "English is our language:" we share it with the British, the Canadians, the Indians, and, as a second language, more of the world than not. I can understand it being harder to separate the idea of "cultural identity" and "linguistic identity" when speakership and citizenship are more likely to go hand-in-hand than not.

Now, to be honest, I don't really like when people say they're learning "for business." I can't fault them (English is a smart investment), but I do feel a little insulted--we have great literature: Dickens, Poe, Eliot, Shakespeare, and Hollywood if you're more interested in popular literature than classic. Monty Python. Stephen King. Etc, etc. Aren't they enough reason to learn English?

But, I do know from my own experience that interests change with time: I started out in love with cartoons--mostly because American cartoons fall into two narrow categories: family-friendly little-kids' shows (Arthur) and vulgar adult humor(South Park). It was a real eye-opener to see animation (and later, comics) written for other audiences--and even (dare I say it?) be literate and philosophically deep*. Eventually, I added other media and am starting to dabble in non-fiction (though newspapers still remain difficult and Wikipedia unpalatable).

(* Not that depth=value. I've been a Digimon fan (in translation) for most of my life, but I can't say it's particularly deep. It is Japanese at native level that will hold my attention until I master it--something that draws gradually closer.)

Most people will move on when they exhaust a subject. The trick is to give them a sense that there are other options. That's why you don't have to pretend to like DBZ. Talk about the authors you do like.

(Yes, first-year students can enjoy text with neither pictures nor 振り仮名--perhaps not fully understand it, but enjoy and learn from it--with sufficient motivation.)

A word of warning: American kids grow up in a culture that emphasizes "talent" meaning "innate ability." If you give them the impression that "anime is easy," they might devalue their success there and think "well I can learn the easy stuff, but I'm not smart enough for newspapers or novels or technical documents*." Encourage them to follow their interests: enjoyment is the most powerful motivator, and language is won with motivation.

(* Objectively, I wouldn't be surprised if technical documents are actually easier than understanding some crazy, made-for-TV dialect. But, don't tell them anime is hard either, students may very well be frightened by that, too.

Yes, I feel sorry for them, too. I was like that through high school. It took a year of slacking and the beginning stages of two languages to fix my sense of "difficult," "easy," and "diligence breeds results.")

Nii87 Wrote:

Aijin Wrote:Unfortunately my student didn't take to the language very well. Learning a few vocab words and a few hiragana was all she really managed, so I'll have to slow down my lesson plan's pace a lot. I understand that Japanese can be very difficult at first for a lot of people, so I am not too discouraged.

If you want to go at a faster pace, try finding some Asian-American students to teach. They usually have a keen interest in Japan too, due to it being an (ex) economic powerhouse. They are usually bilingual or trilingual too, with a strong command of kanji so can learn other languages easily. They also have that diehard Asian discipline when required to learn something. You'll be able to go at a faster pace.

Great so let her pick and choose her students based on a presupposed idea that Asian students somehow study harder than non-Asian students, have a *love-hate relationship with Japan if anything, may or may not have a strong command of characters. Cmon dude

I don't know guys you are all going overkill with all this advice business. This is her student, and her lesson, let her experience everything for herself. She asked for our advice as to how we went about studying Japanese for the first time and wanted an idea of how it would be like in order to better teach her student. It takes time to get accustomed to a student and their learning patterns.

Back on topic:

I mentioned in another thread that I'd listened to Michel Thomas' Japanese -- and how I wish I'd had this when I started. Maybe you could try this approach?

If you've already heard one of his courses then you'll know how they work, if not and you're interested I could find you an mp3 or two to sample (the first track on the disk explains the basic setup, after a couple of tracks you'll have it figured out).

It's at its best in a teacher-student situation and the student makes constant progress which gives them confidence and keeps them keen for more.

To sum it up it basically combines i+1 with SRS to great effect.

(It begins with a few loan words too so could tie in with the katakana idea suggested above).

@Aijin

A lot of anime series have been dubbed in English, and some are super popular around the world. Manga is also very popular. How many Japanese media commercially succeeded better than, say, Pokemon and Dragon Ball? Did your favorite Japanese novel/non-anime movie/whatever sell better than them? I bet your favorite Japanese high culture is 100 times more obscure than Japanese pop culture; it's called "popular culture" for a reason. You can't expect obscure Japanese things introduced a lot of Westerners to Japan when nothing is more commercially successful and widespread among younger generations.

If one is already familiar with the Japanese culture, it's not surprising that he wants to read famous Japanese novels in their original languages. Other less popular cultural things might also interest him. But it's absurd to expect many Japanese learners started learning Japanese because of obscure Japanese stuff. Obscure things are obscure because people don't know them.

I think it's a language tutor's job to give advice about how to expand students' interests when they're ignorant of the culture because you can't master a language without understanding the culture where the target language is spoken as a native tongue.

I guess it's a good thing to learn, to some extent, about things your students are into. But you want to be a language teacher, right? Your next student might be interested in a totally different thing. When you teach a class, there might be many students who have different interests sitting in front of you. I don't think you can be a polymath who knows every Japanese cultural aspect. I don't think you should pretend you also like things they do either. I believe students are eager to know fascinating Japanese stuff they've never heard of.

Also, you might be underestimating the amount of effort/time/whatever required to master a language. If you're a teacher who thinks students would fall by the wayside regardless or only teaches students who don't want near-native fluency, then I think it's ok. But if you want your students to achieve high fluency, I don't think it's good to avoid particular media students like just because it has its own grammar, technical terms, dialects, accents, etc. that are different from the more "proper and prestigious" dialect.

They should learn pretty much every kind of register. They should learn a non-standard speech/writing style if they often come across it in real life; if they avoid it like the plague and don't learn it, they wouldn't be able to tell if it's an error-ridden speech or just a different register. Besides, you can't fully understand what's standard if you don't know what's not standard.

I do believe it's a double standard to say one needs to learn another culture to understand his own culture when the same person says, "You shouldn't learn Japanese from anime because real people don't speak like that." It's hypocritical to discourage students from learning a language using a certain kind of material just because it's not "normal" when they say learning a foreign language is good to appreciate your own mother tongue.

I understand some people need to learn polite forms and whatnot first because, say, they need to be able to speak Japanese in business meetings and such as soon as possible. But you yourself already said many Japanese learners are not in that kind of situation (How many people are only interested in Japanese pop culture again?). They can afford the what-I-want-first approach.

Also, I think pretty much every textbook teaches advanced stuff first while sidestepping the basics. I can go on and on and on, but I think I've already wrote too much... Anyway, here's why I think your average learner finds easy stuff super difficult:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid83122

Seriously though, if a student hears her language teacher say her kind of person bums the teacher, she wouldn't be very happy, I think.