I have a few questions about this method:

Complete beginners are supposed to attempt to read Japanese material straight off the bat? Even simple children's books in Japanese for little kids with sentences like, "The penguin thought the fish looked very tasty. Yum, yum!" require the basic knowledge of at least two years of university Japanese grammar; causitive and passive verb forms, etc. I don't understand how a complete beginner could possibly comprehend the material.

I don't really understand the use of using the English translation side by side that well either, as translations of sentences can vary vastly between the two languages. It may be a helpful crutch, but it also can prevent true understanding of the original Japanese translation. Not to get too off topic, but translation in itself is in many ways essentially writing when it comes to translation between two vastly different languages. In that I mean that the translator must be skilled with English prose, to make a sentence sound as fine in English as possible, and often that requires liberties with the original Japanese sentences. Tone and gist is reserved of course, but the actual nuance and even information conveyed in the sentence can be drastically altered for the sake of artistry. I think reliance upon a English translation could be very harmful towards true understanding of the Japanese.

I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking the method, because I'm definitely not, I'm just curious about how issues like that are worked through by the student.

Thora Wrote:

digitlhand Wrote:I have to agree with sheetz. When I read Lord of the Rings in German and Swedish I didn't have trouble really following along... It's written in a style that's supposed to sound older....

I think the point others are making is not about ability to follow along, but that an older style (or a dialect) isn't ideal material for absolute beginners. Particularly with an audio immersion method. Sheetz is an advanced reader, so she can discern what's nonstandard and adjust to it.

I don't really understand why a beginner would even attempt something so far out of their reach as most 20th century literature though. The vocabulary used by someone like Mishima would eat a beginner alive!

Quote:I don't mean to sound like I'm attacking the method, because I'm definitely not, I'm just curious about how issues like that are worked through by the student.

First off let me say this: When I began Listening-Reading I had similar questions, so I'm happy to help clarify as much as I can. I know the feeling of wanting to try something new, as this method proposes, but don't want to waste any precious language learning time. I only feel qualified to answer these questions because I have used it for other languages.

Quote:Complete beginners are supposed to attempt to read Japanese material straight off the bat? Even simple children's books in Japanese for little kids with sentences like, "The penguin thought the fish looked very tasty. Yum, yum!" require the basic knowledge of at least two years of university Japanese grammar; causitive and passive verb forms, etc. I don't understand how a complete beginner could possibly comprehend the material.

The best answer I can give as to how one begins to understand the above sentence, is that it isn't so unique as one would think it is. Throughout a novel or several novels, as is required to achieve natural listening through the use of L-R requires, one will find thousands of sentences. Most, if not all sentence models will be heard repeatedly, through use of example and loads of translations that give the reader or listener the "feel" of the sentence, one begins to understand what is going on.

edit - I think AJATT.com attests something similar to the loads of input to understand grammar.

Quote:I don't really understand the use of using the English translation side by side that well either, as translations of sentences can vary vastly between the two languages. It may be a helpful crutch...

That's exactly what the translation is there for. It helps you limp along until it's not necessary anymore. When is it not necessary? When one achieves "natural listening". I wish I was better at describing it. Once natural listening is achieved the translation is unnecessary as one can hear where the translation is different from the original sentence in the target language. I'm already hearing these differences myself in my infant Japanese comprehension stage.

The usefulness of the method remains to be seen, hence why I started my blog ryanslrblog.com

All I can say is that I had huge doubts before starting L-R with Japanese and I'm seeing signs of "natural listening" much earlier than I did with German.

Oh one last note... I love grammar. I prefer opening a grammar book after I have achieved natural listening.

The L-R system has been discussed ad nauseam at the how-to-learn-any-language forum it's probably better to point you over there.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...21098&PN=1

I'm not a beginner, but I intend to give the method an honest go, even if it kills me. My listening comprehension level is currently crap, so we'll see what happens after 100 hours.

Curious to try this method. I have a Japanese and English version of 火車 by Miyuki Miyabe. Anyone know where I can find an audio version (or if it exists)? Checked eBay, iTunes Japan doesn't have it (although they don't have Harry Potter in Japanese, either, so their selection is dubious), etc.

@Aijin. I agree with you. I have no idea how/why this method is beneficial to beginners. I also have some issues with parallel texts. I'm an around high-intermediate level, so I think I'm at the optimal level for LR method. After using it for 8 days, I feel like my listening-comprehension is growing by leaps.

After 'this' discussion thread started to pick up, I went over to http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...21098&PN=1 and the other posts on that site, and read up on it. Apparently many people have seen great results, many of whom were beginners.

My best guess, based on my limited experience is that it works on a less than active level. Somewhere, above passive and subconscious. It may sound like a bunch pseudo-science, but that pretty much the logic behind the input method. Get lots of comprehensible input and let you brain to the word-crunching. According to this theory and Krashen, the brain it optimized for language, and it's best to stay out of its way. (paraphrasing with a bit of liberty)

Right now I'm beginning to understand the meaning of a lot of things without knowing exactly what each word means. It's a big strange, because when I'm listening, I think "this" means "this", and I've been right more and more often. Of coarse, it could just as easily be because I'm reading each chapter in L1, before doing anything in Japanese. Plus like I said, I'm on day 8, so what do I know.

DAY 1 (chapter 1):
Read L1, ListenL2/ReadL2, ListenL2/ReadL1
DAY 2 (chapter 1):
ListenL2/ReadL2, ListenL2/ReadL1

DAY 3&4 (chapter 2)
DAY 5&6 (chapter x+1)

@oregum and Aijin it's perfect for beginners. Think of it like the Rosetta stone (the real stone tablet, not the software) but with multi-sensory input. You are using a large text in your native language as a decryption key to work out the syntax and semantics of another language.

Essentially you employ the extremely well developed pattern-matching and problem-solving skills of your brain to do the following:
1. Through exposure and synchronising with the written text, recognise the junctions between spoken words and sentences. (read L1, listen L2 and just listen L2)
2. To correspond the meaning of those words by associating them with their analogues in your L1. (all stages)
3. To use context and the vocabulary and partial grammar you have built up using 2 to learn new words in L2 as they occur in the book. (read L2, listen L2)

It's similar to how a child learns, except that you have a reference language to help you with the deciphering.

@oregum and Aijin, I'm at a loss of words at how to describe why the method is effective. It seems so obvious to me now. But I remember I felt the same as you did when I first started, and just took comfort in the fact that too many people reported success for it to have been a hoax. Maybe a summary of my own story would help:

I was exposed to L-R and the 1-million-words method (which I'm convinced is the same as L-R, just without the audio component) on HTLAL and was dubious but decided to give it a try. I picked up a copy of Der Vorleser (The Reader) as I has seen the movie and wanted to read the book. It was a miserable failure--I couldn't understand all but the most simple cognates, was unable to follow the story, quickly lost my place and lost interest.

A month later (after hearing of more positive results) I decided to try it again, this time with Der Kleine Hobbit (The Hobbit) by J.R.R. Tolkien as I had read that many times as a kid, and still know the story like the back of my hand. This time I had no trouble following along, despite knowing next to nothing of the language. The cognates plus proper names, and how these aligned with paragraphs and quotations made it not too difficult to match up the text with my memory of the story. From there I quickly identified while reading the first chapter the obvious, common words that show up in most sentences (he, it, is, are, this, there, of, from, etc.). I didn't bother to look these up in the dictionary--I just assumed they meant what I thought they meant, and moved on. Sometimes I was wrong but usually I was right, and if I was wrong I would find that out quickly enough. After those few dozen words it pieters out to a process of picking out just one or two new words every other page or so. I remember seeing the word sich ('himself', 'oneself', 'themselves', etc.) over and over again and thinking What does that mean?! I allowed myself to lookup words in a dictionary when they caught my attention and started to annoy me because I hadn't figured them out yet. Words that were staring me in the face, so to speak. But that really didn't happen more than once or twice per session, and when it did I had already accumulated enough context that I would never forget that word. For the most part I just kept reading, without stopping.

I would say I learn maybe one word for every thousand words read. In the beginning, that means more than ~95% of what I read I simply did not understand. But that ~5% of common words, cognates, proper nouns, etc. was enough to keep my place in the story that I remembered because I knew it so well. And my memory of the story was good enough to help me figure out the meaning of new words here and there.

The trick, and I feel like I'm channeling Khatz here, is to accept failure. Especially when first starting out, you will at times have no idea what you are reading. But you try to figure it out anyway, knowing you will probably fail, but do your best. You resist the temptation to skim and make an honest attempt to read for meaning. And although at first you fail, you do pick up a word or two, now and then. Eventually the process snowballs, resulting in near-total comprehension.

@Blahah. Seems nothing like how a child learns, as a child is not using a key(L1) to decipher a puzzle(L2). I pretty much agree with everything else you said.

I also think this method is effective. However, I think its effectiveness is in direct relation to the similarity between L1 & L2, and the learner's current knowledge of L2. I am not saying that a beginner can not achieve listening fluency using the method, as many have proven that it is possible. I'm more concerned with efficiency.

Talking specifically about Japanese. A beginner, with absolutely no knowledge of grammar, kanji (RtK keywords), vocab will have to spend dozens of hours before picking up the basics of the basics.

digitlhand had some exposure to Japanese prior to beginning LR. He said it was very limited, so lets use him as an example of a beginner. I would not be surprised if has already reached 100 hours of LR. Nor, would I be surprised if his comprehension is still very low.

I may be wrong. Please let me know if you've had success with LR & Japanese.

I'm currently testing the method on myself. I created a spreadsheet that I'm using to track exactly how much time I'm spending each day. Currently at 427 minutes. Not counting initial testing phase.

@oregum, could you explain what you think basic of basics is. I'd like to continue this discussion. What do you think one should be able to understand at 100 hours?

oregum Wrote:@Blahah. Seems nothing like how a child learns, as a child is not using a key(L1) to decipher a puzzle(L2). I pretty much agree with everything else you said.

It's similar to the way a child learns because children are forced to find patterns and discern meaning using their innate problem-solving ability when learning their first language.

oregum Wrote:Talking specifically about Japanese. A beginner, with absolutely no knowledge of grammar, kanji (RtK keywords), vocab will have to spend dozens of hours before picking up the basics of the basics.

I think you're probably right that in the case of Japanese for speakers of Indo-European languages, or with any completely unrelated language with a completely different writing system, it would be more efficient to familiarise yourself with some basics.

In the case of Japanese RTKlite or similar would be a short route to the ideal level of kanji learning prior to starting L-R. I really don't think you'd need to know grammar - I've learned a LOT of grammar in the last few days just from L-R. It's just so easy to figure it out. From no Japanese exposure you would very soon be able to distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

I would say that by 100 hours you should be recognising a lot of repeating patterns and know the translation of quite a few. It's difficult to pinpoint an exact list, but whatever words had caught your eye/ear, there should be a fair few of them whose meaning you suspect. You might be able to recognise the most common verbs (to be, to do, to have, to say), and you would probably have started noticing verb tenses (if the story involves a variety of tenses).

Quote:I think you're probably right that in the case of Japanese for speakers of Indo-European languages, or with any completely unrelated language with a completely different writing system, it would be more efficient to familiarise yourself with some basics.

Totally right... I am super close to natural listening with French, I can feel it... around 40 hours only. I am around 80 hours in Japanese and not close yet.

Quote:I really don't think you'd need to know grammar - I've learned a LOT of grammar in the last few days just from L-R.

Although I agree that one can learn a lot of grammar from pure input, I think learning grammar doesn't hurt. Heck, I would say most people would benefit from opening a grammar book on their native language every few years...

It's really an interesting method and just out of curiosity, I translated some excerpts from newspapers in German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese with google translation and compared them to the original English text.

German seems to have a very similar grammar structure (to my Japanese eyes) as English, the translation had close to 100% word to word relations and the word order was pretty much exactly the same. I can see why reading English while listening to German would be beneficial, as you are almost like just using 2 different sounds for a word. I know there ARE differences in the grammar, but they are close enough I can easily guess what is going on with the translation in hand.

Spanish was a bit different, but each Spanish words still had almost 100% correlation to the English words, like "gran cantidad de documentación incautada" being "large number of documents seized", and the word order was still almost the same. I could understand the short translated excerpt 100% too.

Not surprisingly, Russian is a different story. I could only make a wild guess on what the gist of the text is with the translated excerpt, which seems to be something close to a word for word conversion. But I could at least understand what the news is about, and the word order seemed to be still matching 90% of the time. There may be a benefit to reading English while listening to Russian as at least you are hearing the words in the order you are reading, but the idea is not crystal clear to me unlike the case with German. I also don't know if I can make out the grammar structure from just reading the text. I would want a grammar book, or/and hands on exercises at this point.

And Japanese is, as everybody knows, a complete mess. I don't even understand what the news is about (from the translation), and the word order is completely arbitrary. Even the idea of a "word" is warped here and 1 Japanese word can be 3 English words, or vice versa. I personally wouldn't count on learning much Japanese grammar from this method. It is probably hard to listen to Japanese while reading English as it requires a good, what simultaneous interpreters call "retention" ability, which is a buffer where you store one language while processing another. In german's case, you read a word and hear it right a way. In Japanese, you sometimes have to store the whole sentence as it takes that long to hear the word you have read. It is actually hard for simultaneous interpreters and they go through special trainings just to improve their retention capacity. Not something I would recommend to a beginner. It may be OK if the sentences are short and easy though. I don't know. Just thought German and Japanese may be completely different especially with this method.

I decided to start today. I am still waiting to get the first two HP books in Japanese. Right now all I'm doing is reading L1 listening to L2. I have to say that I hope this method works for me because I am having a lot of fun with it. At first I had to listen to the first couple of paragraphs a few times to get a good flow. Once I got to the part with Dumbledore and professor McGonagall it was much easier to follow along. My only problem is that I can get ahead/behind of the audio book every 30 sec or so. This is my plan:

Read L1 Listen to L2(About 4 hours every day). The audio book I have is about 10 hours long so I should be done in a couple of days. While I am doing this I will go through Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide. After I complete the first HP book I will Read L1 with L2 text parallel to each other listen to L2. I will report back when I am done.

Well, how much longer does it take an English speaker to learn Japanese than to learn French? 3-4 times longer? That number will apply to all language learning methods, not just LR.

My gut tells me an absolute beginner would have to go through a pretty good chunk of the audiobooks list to reach natural listening in Japanese, in which case perhaps it might be more efficient to go through a very basic course like Assimil just to get your bearings first.

sheetz Wrote:Well, how much longer does it take an English speaker to learn Japanese than to learn French? 3-4 times longer? That number will apply to all language learning methods, not just LR.

My gut tells me an absolute beginner would have to go through a pretty good chunk of the audiobooks list to reach natural listening, in which case perhaps it might be more efficient to go through a very basic course like Assimil just to get your bearings.

Yeah, according to FSI, it's 4 times longer. But Japanese pronunciation, at least the phonemes, are pretty simple, so making out each word may not be that hard, though it's my totally wild guess.

I don't know about this whole Japanese takes longer than Indo-European languages thing, at least not for grammar. Sure Japanese grammar is completely different than English but it certainly isn't more difficult. I assume children all over the world tend to take about the same time to acquire their L1. The reason French or German is easier for English speakers is because of all the similar sounding words. I think the mechanism by which the L-R method ideally works is not so much about precise translation/matching between the L2 audio and L1 text but rather using the L1 text as a context for understanding the L2. This is kind of hard to explain but what I mean is ideally L-R method should be like learning one's L1 by tapping into the natural pattern recognizing ability of the brain. Japanese grammar is totally different but this shouldn't matter as the grammar is simple enough that children can get a rough skeleton grammar quite quickly. Another way to think of it is, L-R method should be like learning L2 by watching un-subbed L-2 TV, but instead of imagery providing the context, you have the L1 text. If you hear the word neko and read the word cat, ideally we're hearing the word neko while thinking of a cat, it's shape/color/smell/behavior not just by storing it like a dictionary entry in our brain.

Quote:Well, how much longer does it take an English speaker to learn Japanese than to learn French? 3-4 times longer? That number will apply to all language learning methods, not just LR.

I'm interested in finding out the question myself. I will keep everyone up to date on my progress.

@Lyulf, how fluent are you in Japanese already? How many times are you planning on going through Harry Potter? Are you planning on passively listening as well?

Quote:And Japanese is, as everybody knows, a complete mess.

I don't think so... at least from my experience so far... It seems like Japanese is actually much more rigid. Languages like German and French may appear to be in the same order when a machine translation is done; however, one will find in native texts, different sentence structure and word order in order to add style to the text.

French and German share many words with English and that makes them easier to learn... that's fair, but I've also noticed that many words in Japanese, including verbs that are not connected really in any way phonetically in English, are in Japanese. This simple fact allows one to pickup vocabulary much quicker than knowing a few cognates, here and there.

I will update my blog on Friday night or Saturday but for those interested, I am starting to understand sentences here and there... Completely. Though they're small I can understand their tense when a subject is missing from the sentence, etc... It's been 17 days since my first blog post and I don't think I could have made such progress any other way.

If I may make a request to those posting in this thread about whether or not a beginner can or can't learn Japanese to high level, please refrain from making assumptions that it is impossible. I started the blog and thread to encourage others to try the method and see for themselves if it works or not. Some of the replies in here are real bummers and even make me question myself as to why I am bothering with this.

Whether or not the method works has been discussed to death on How-to-learn-any-language.com

Don't knock it 'till you've tried it.

Quote:I think the mechanism by which the L-R method ideally works is not so much about precise translation/matching between the L2 audio and L1 text but rather using the L1 text as a context for understanding the L2. This is kind of hard to explain but what I mean is ideally L-R method should be like learning one's L1 by tapping into the natural pattern recognizing ability of the brain.

Perfect description of how I feel when doing L-R.

digitlhand Wrote:

Quote:Well, how much longer does it take an English speaker to learn Japanese than to learn French? 3-4 times longer? That number will apply to all language learning methods, not just LR.

I'm interested in finding out the question myself. I will keep everyone up to date on my progress.

@Lyulf, how fluent are you in Japanese already? How many times are you planning on going through Harry Potter? Are you planning on passively listening as well?

I'm only a beginner so I don't know much. A long time ago I did the first 1100 or so kanji in RTK, but I have since forgotten most of them. I also took a Japanese class, but have forgotten most of the things I learned. As of right now I know a few words, and I am only half way through Tae Kim's basic grammar. So I am a beginner. By passive listening do you mean just listening to L2? Not sure how many times I will go through the HP books. It's just a wait and see approach for me right now.

digitlhand Wrote:If I may make a request to those posting in this thread about whether or not a beginner can or can't learn Japanese to high level, please refrain from making assumptions that it is impossible. I started the blog and thread to encourage others to try the method and see for themselves if it works or not. Some of the replies in here are real bummers and even make me question myself as to why I am bothering with this.

Whether or not the method works has been discussed to death on How-to-learn-any-language.com

Don't knock it 'till you've tried it.

I really like this method and I hope it works for me. The audio book I have for HP1 is just great. The guy who is reading the story is pretty awesome. It's interesting listening to a male orator try to do female voices. Every time he does misses Dudley's voice I start to laugh. This method seemed interesting so I thought I would give it a try.

Since I am just a beginner I have been looking for different methods to try and learn Japanese. If this method doesn't work I will just go to plan B. My plan B is RTKKO2001-->ko2001

How many hours have you done so far digitlhand?

Quote:How many hours have you done so far digitlhand?

I've done about 60 hours of passive listening and about 25 hours of L1 reading L2 listening.

Recommending any sort of language learning because "it's how children do it" is questionable because in many important ways we still don't know how children learn language.

Using fiction books for this can be dangerous because fiction doesn't always mirror real life patterns. I also don't see how it would be possible to learn things like politeness and style that don't have any equivalent translation in English. There's absolutely no way you will learn everyday conversational Japanese from reading Harry Potter, even if you understand everything.

Just browsing through the thread, I think that part of the problem is the common mistake people make where they think "speaking" means reading something out loud, and "listening" means listening to a monologue. Neither of these prepare you for actual spoken discourse.

(And of course, Japanese has the additional problem of the writing system.)

yudantaiteki Wrote:Using fiction books for this can be dangerous because fiction doesn't always mirror real life patterns. I also don't see how it would be possible to learn things like politeness and style that don't have any equivalent translation in English. There's absolutely no way you will learn everyday conversational Japanese from reading Harry Potter, even if you understand everything.

Partially agree, however my Kanji Odyssey deck wasn't doing that either. I believe that one technique is not the silver bullet, but I feel that L-R is a great approach to listening and bringing context where an Anki deck falls short on.