with your focus on time efficiency nadiatms I have to say I find it very curious how strongly you position yourself against anki. whatever works for you, great... but the whole point of anki is to help you remember information in the most efficient way possible with the minimum amount of time/work.

i'm not sure how going over word lists or a paper SRS is more efficient than anki. reading with a dictionary is a great way to enjoy yourself but an inefficient way to memorize new vocabulary.

and the criticisms of anki seem odd... if you want audio and pictures there is Subs2SRS to create decks. If you want cloze-cards there are plug-ins to mass generate them. One can copy/paste everything one enters into anki, both original content and definitions. These things take seconds.

On a side note I think the reason the above-mentioned 15,000-card deck is unwieldy is that it shouldn't have gotten that big in the first place. You need to keep deleting the super-easy ones on a regular basis or else an increasing part of your rep-time will be taken up dealing with bs cards. 5-7k might be a hyphothetical upper limit.

ta12121 Wrote:

prink Wrote:I'm guessing they didn't use Anki.

without anki it would have honestly taken a decade to learn japanese back then, even more. We are really fortunate to have anki+powerful pcs/laptops

10 years? I really don't think without Anki we'd be that incapable. People did learn languages in the past quickly too.

Pen and paper is fine for learning, just less convenient. I memorised about 700 kanji over a few weeks with just a notebook before finding Anki. Kanji are just a small part of learning the language anyway.

dizmox Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:

prink Wrote:I'm guessing they didn't use Anki.

without anki it would have honestly taken a decade to learn japanese back then, even more. We are really fortunate to have anki+powerful pcs/laptops

10 years? I really don't think without Anki we'd be that incapable. People did learn languages in the past quickly too.

Pen and paper is fine for learning, just less convenient. I memorised about 700 kanji over a few weeks with just a notebook before finding Anki.

True, people have been learning languges to fluency well before anki was born but it really helps and makes ones learning goes faster than the traditional route. I still write down kanji via paper/using a pen. It's common sense to write kanji, to be able to write better and so forth (Plus helps you ingrain writing kanji easily)

dizmox Wrote:10 years? I really don't think without Anki we'd be that incapable.

Ten years isn't actually outrageous for learning Japanese. In this particular forum 10 years seems like a lot, since people are devoted here, but I'd say on average it takes about seven to ten years for people to learn Japanese even today. I've been studying for six years and only now am I kind of toying wth the term fluent, but I know I'll be more comfortable with that word after about 8 years of study.

(I think it's in the intro to Read Real Japanese Fiction that the editor talks about how he is relieved when he hears from a professor that you can become fluent in Japanese in about 7 years, since he was expecting it to take longer.)

I'd say it's possible to be fluent after only 3 or 4 years of study, but only if you are a really intense learner.

Tzadeck Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:10 years? I really don't think without Anki we'd be that incapable.

Ten years isn't actually outrageous for learning Japanese. In this particular forum 10 years seems like a lot, since people are devoted here, but I'd say on average it takes about seven to ten years for people to learn Japanese even today. I've been studying for six years and only now am I kind of toying wth the term fluent, but I know I'll be more comfortable with that word after about 8 years of study.

(I think it's in the intro to Read Real Japanese Fiction that the editor talks about how he is relieved when he hears from a professor that you can become fluent in Japanese in about 7 years, since he was expecting it to take longer.)

I'd say it's possible to be fluent after only 3 or 4 years of study, but only if you are a really intense learner.

Definitely hit the mark with that one, it really varies between learners but if the learner is dedicated then 3-4 years is what is needed. I expect by next year, I'll be able to call myself fluent(reading,listening,speaking). Writing is still something I want, but I'm planning on gradually learning over the next 2 years for that skill, so by that time I'll be set to go)

If you're thinking flashcards, word lists, SRS like Anki or whatever are significantly better than others to increase your vocabulary, I do believe you're all wrong. I hear people talk about moving newly learned words to long term memory and such. And I think it's complete nonsense. Language doesn't work that way.

It's not how often you review a word that makes it stick in your head as your active or passive vocabulary word. It may help a bit. But I don't think it's essential. What matters is, I think, how strongly it is connected to other things in your subconscious mind. Those other things can be synonyms, antonyms, collocated words, homonyms, similar-sounding words, homonyms, idioms that have it in them, and most important, your memories (such as situations and contexts) that particular word is mentally connected to. I don't think your brain throws any information away. It's there but you can't retrieve it if the piece of information isn't hooked together with other pieces strongly enough.

If you've been doing the immersion thing to learn a language, you should already be aware that you somehow know tons of rarely used words which you never reviewed or tried to memorize. You might have heard them used in real life only a couple times. But still they sound familiar to you. If you haven't immerse yourself into your target language, think how many obscure words and phrases you know in your native language.

There are so-called "frequent" words. But aside from the most common ones like "the" in English, they aren't that frequent in the sense that they only appear like once in every million words in real life. But we can naturally pick up even much more obscure words without Anki, word lists or whatever they recommend to you.

Think of knowing a word well as something similar to knowing a person well. You know good friends of yours very well because you've spent a lot of time with them. Sure, it might help you know people better quicker if you make a good list of their names, favorite foods and movies, personalities, etc. and do reviews. But does it really matter if you see them regularly? Do you honestly think knowing a person from such a list would count as knowing them well?

What's really important is that you get to know various aspects of a word from all kinds of angles and connect it to many words, phrases, situations, contexts, and connotations. The only way to accomplish this is to use the language, whether the particular word appears or not. If it doesn't, still you can make connections. You hear a synonym, and you subconsciously make one connection. You talk about things which are related to the word in some way, and you get a contextual connection. There are many other possible ways to strengthen connections between words, which are mostly coincidental.

If you don't hear or read a word for too long or it doesn't pop up in your subconscious at all, it'll eventually be in the functionally no connection state, which means "you forgot." And this means either that you don't need them or that you simply don't use the language enough to achieve your goal.

I think moving words and grammar rules to your long term memory has little to do with your proficiency because while your conscious mind can benefit from it, I don't think your subconscious, which probably is the part of yourself that handles language, cares if you can remember it when forced to do so consciously. Of course, it gives a tiny extra edge, especially when reading or writing very slowly using dictionaries and such. But that's not what you want, is it?

By the same token, I don't think internalizing grammar and vocabulary is all about reviewing or using the exact things you want to be familiar with. It's about using the language so that your mind frequently experiences the exact things or things related to what you want to know better.

From my experience, as far as consciously memorizing stuff goes, I also agree that SRS does a much better job than traditional methods. Memorizing the shapes of kanji might be a good example where SRS shines. But if you're talking about language learning in general, the extra edge you get from conscious memorization is so tiny that it doesn't make a huge difference; I don't think reviewing is essential. The most important thing is to get in touch with them in real life, I think.

Which do you think is akin to knowing a word/grammar rule very well: a person who knows another person through reviewing a list of personal traits many times or a person who is a real friend of his. How about a person who reviewed the section about a war in his history textbook v.s. a person who actually experienced the war? SRS and such does work wonders if what you want to do is the former kind. Thanks to optimized reviewing, you may be able to consciously remember even the most obscure thing about a person or war which his best friend or a war veteran can't do easily. So what? That alone doesn't make you more familiar with the person or war in a meaningful way. It's not absolutely necessary to do the review thing either.

Use the language you want to learn. If a word you want to learn doesn't appear, still you're getting more and more familiar with it.

@magamo
nice post, got a lot of nice info from there. I agree with everything you said on that one, I noticed through immersing, I am able to say so much things that I wouldn't even find in a textbook at all (things from animes like bleach,naruto,rurouni kenshin,etc). Plus even dramas, I easily pick up stuff I wouldn't find in a word list/grammar book. I definitely know I never used anki to memorize any of this and yet I know it so well/naturally. It's really effective combining them both for effective language learning but immersion is suppose to take the larger portion of your studying. (something like 3:7 ratio of srs to immersion or 2:8)

I agree with you magamo, but for people who are not immersed in a Japanese environment, a spaced reptition system can be extremely helpful for bringing back old things that you learned in the past that you aren't always able to 'connect' to things in real life constantly. It really helps bridge the immersion gap.

I feel that the amount of words we learn from immersion is small compared to what we can learn through vocab lists, etc.

However, I do agree that using a vocab list, etc. is simply a starting point for the word. We won't know the nuances until we hear it used, understand why it's not using in certain places but in others, etc. But I also think that having that starting point is not an insignificant or minor advantage but a major one.

Let's use the example of knowing a person.

If I read a person's blog/facebook/etc. before meeting them, I get a lot more basis to remember and know them than if I met him/her without knowing anything in advance. I can make the connections more easily; compare their features to what I read, whether it's right or wrong. Make similar connections to similar friends, etc.

It's really not so much that "Oh, I put in 3000 words in Anki and now I reached maturity, I'm a vocabulary/language master." Instead, it's meant to act as a starting point so that when you do what you want to do so that you have some familiarity when you actually need to use it and you can pay attention to the details.

.

ta12121 Wrote:@magamo
etceetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetctcetcetc)

Not to be the guy with 2 posts flaming but let's all keep in mind that this "subconscious" "conscious" mumbo jumbo has zero value. I don't think you emphasized enough that this is a theory that you have.

SRS is a tool to get repeated exposure to large quantities of information. The learning should always take place outside the SRS, in media, books, talking and listening to people, and using the language as often as possible. Currently I am using Anki to get exposure to large quantities of words. With the sentences I get an idea in which situation the words are most likely used in a real life context. I don't use it for "learning" sentences, grammar patterns, or memorizing translations of sentences. This happens outside the SRS. I would lie if I said that I never was of the conviction that Anki was a tool to memorize things. The insight, that by using Anki to get exposed to sentences and words to get a feeling for both, dawned on me just recently. I understand it now.

I am working with Kanji Odyssey 2001 and Anki. I don't pay much attention to the translations, but Japanese. More and more I become familiar with Japanese through Japanese. Because I typed in so many sentences and words, I also became able to read about more and more topics. And when I read, it is like playing a game of Super Mario when he jumps on a button, and coins appear out of thin air. The real important thing to notice here is, that I believe that once I am done with all 2001, I can start learning the language in the language. I don't talk about "going monolingual" here, which is another misconception I was carrying around with me for way too long.

By using Anki alone I will not be able to produce anything. This is the next big step, which will not happen inside Anki. This can only be done by actively writing and speaking. And by the time I will have enough vocabulary to express myself. Without Anki, this would not be possible in such a short amount of time. But it is very well possible to learn everything without ever using an SRS.

It all depends on the way we are using the SRS to gain the most out of it. We still have to use or own faculties, and no SRS can do this for us.

@zachandhobbes and kainzero

Yeah, I agree that SRS does have merits, especially in an early stage of your learning. And if you can't go hardcore in language learning because of your job, school and whatnot or your goal is to be good enough for what you need or want to do in the language, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a godsend to you. Also, if you use it wisely, it can even help improve your native language too, which means advanced learners can benefit from it if you do it right.

One of the points I wanted to make (which I failed miserably...) was that it shouldn't be that important to people who committed themselves to language learning like missionaries in the past and the translators 50 years ago, which are the topic of this thread in the first place. If SRS had been available to them, would they have been able to learn Japanese more efficiently? Most likely, yes. Does it matter much to people like them who probably learned Japanese hardcore? I don't think so. They must've been learning language so seriously through actually living in the language that it wouldn't have made much difference if SRS had already been invented back then. There are many other things that would have helped them more such as electronic dictionaries and the internet though.

Also, kainzero, don't you think knowing many other people before you make new friends is important when you do the pre-facebook checking? You know the culture you're in, and you know a lot of people's behavior, personal traits, patters, etc. So when you check a stranger's blog and such, you can make an educated guess about the person.

That's one of the reasons why immersion gets more and more efficient as you get better. When you encounter a new word, if you already know tons of words deeply, you can make a fairly accurate guess about how it should be used, what it should mean, what is the range of its meanings, and so on. And it's so much easier to memorize new words thanks to the knowledge you already have about other words; when a new word comes into your head, a huge net of related concepts in the target language is waiting to be connected. I think many people agree that vocabulary building gets easier and easier as your vocabulary improves. Maybe what you can learn from immersion is much more than you might think.

Almost Wrote:Not to be the guy with 2 posts flaming but let's all keep in mind that this "subconscious" "conscious" mumbo jumbo has zero value. I don't think you emphasized enough that this is a theory that you have.

That's a legitimate point. But I'm sorry. I don't put "in my opinion," "from my experience" or "This is just my armchair theory but" in every assertion because I wouldn't sound awesome that way! Joking aside, you know, you should always take ramblings by a random guy on the internet cum grano salis by default, and everyone knows that. Sorry if I sounded like I was preaching the truth of language learning proven by both God and science. If you forgot it, here's your daily dose of salt for websurfing ∴.

@merlin.codex

あー、確かにみんなもっと日本語使ってくれたらすんごい楽になる。まあ有り得ないけど。
そもそもそれがみんなのためになるかって言うとどうだかわかんないしね。

たとえばさ、サイレントピリオドとかなんとかいうのの効果信じてる人もいるし
日本人の日本語じゃなきゃ読まないって人もいるわけで。まあ気持ちわかるしね。
ブルガリア語って日本人の間じゃマイナーだろうし、日本語練習する場所ネットで見つけるの
結構難しいのかな、やっぱり。英語のネイティブだったら楽だろうけどなぁ。
んまぁ語学学習系の掲示板でみんな日本語メインに使ってるとこって
もとからあんま無い気がする。そういう意味じゃあ英語勉強してる人はいいよね。
英語母語話者ってネットで英語教えるのに外国語使わないもん。
あー、スペイン語とかならある、かな？
いずれにしても日本語使って英語教えてくれるネイティブはまずいない……

Yeah, I also think it'd be great if more people use Japanese here; it'd make my life much easier here! That said, I don't think that will happen any time soon. I don't know if it's a good idea for everyone either.

Some people discourage early output. I don't know if it helps or hurts your learning. But you don't want to force others to use Japanese. Also, some people don't like to read nonnative writing, which is understandable. I kind of understand you're having harder time finding good places to practice your Japanese than native English speakers because there aren't many Japanese who are learning Bulgarian. Plus, it doesn't seem like there are many language learning forums where learners use Japanese. English learners are blessed in this regard; native speakers don't come to language learning forums and teach us English in our native language. Well, maybe they do in Spanish, I guess. But they certainly don't in Japanese...

I can't wait to 'learn Japanese' to unveil the secret.

.

magamo Wrote:Also, kainzero, don't you think knowing many other people before you make new friends is important when you do the pre-facebook checking? You know the culture you're in, and you know a lot of people's behavior, personal traits, patters, etc. So when you check a stranger's blog and such, you can make an educated guess about the person.

That's one of the reasons why immersion gets more and more efficient as you get better. When you encounter a new word, if you already know tons of words deeply, you can make a fairly accurate guess about how it should be used, what it should mean, what is the range of its meanings, and so on. And it's so much easier to memorize new words thanks to the knowledge you already have about other words; when a new word comes into your head, a huge net of related concepts in the target language is waiting to be connected. I think many people agree that vocabulary building gets easier and easier as your vocabulary improves. Maybe what you can learn from immersion is much more than you might think.

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.

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.

(I also want to add that languages acquired during childhood are stored differently in the brain than languages acquired post-childhood, so the techniques of learning are different as well. I forgot where I read that from, either the book Brain Rules or from one of nest0r's random linked papers.)

I've seen far too many cases of people tilting too far on one side, resulting in uneven development and frustration. My favorite example is with video games. For Street Fighter there are people that play massive amounts of games and don't practice new techniques at all; and there are people that practice all day but don't play enough real games. Neither advance very far and become frustrated and vent on the Internet, especially when newer players manage to blow past them.

If we go back to the topic, I do feel like SRS is the current pinnacle of the practice side, and with the internet we have easy ways to get real experience which makes it both easier and faster to gain proficiency. So, I would be curious to know in the past...

-What kind of practice methods did they use, if any? What textbooks, vocab lists, etc. were available? How long did it take for them to become proficient, and what levels of proficiency did they attain? How many misunderstandings did they make?
-Was it possible for people back then to learn in their home countries, or was it a necessity to learn Japanese in Japan? Immersion-wise, were they forced to seek Japanese communities and were there enough Japanese materials like newspapers and books available?

If I can go further into the Street Fighter analogy; because of home gaming consoles and the internet (allowing us to view high-level matches and see advanced techniques and combos, play others in the comfort of our own home at our own time, etc.), many people nowadays can reach what would be considered "high level" ten years ago. However, that level is considered a low level nowadays and you have to really push yourself to learn all the techniques and implement them into your game to be able to start placing in tournaments. I wonder if it is the same with language, if it took them longer to understand what would be considered basic nowadays.

Almost Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:@magamo
etceetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetctcetcetc)

Not to be the guy with 2 posts flaming but let's all keep in mind that this "subconscious" "conscious" mumbo jumbo has zero value. I don't think you emphasized enough that this is a theory that you have.

Fair enough.

Well, based on my personal experience, new kanji readings and vocab only tend to stick when you encounter them at a high frequency in what you read/listen to. Though it seems to be easier for me to remember on readings for some reason, kun readings I really have to SrS unless I'm really familiar with the word beforehand. Then again I also think immersion can do a great deal for your vocab, given that I've never once in my life had to formally study English vocab, the words were always just there because of years of exposure. I think the optimum way to go is probably to focus on SrSing mostly when you're a beginner/intermediate but once you get to a level where you can start to immerse yourself in native media without it being a frustrating experience I would choose that option and reduce the SrS time.

kainzero Wrote:If I can go further into the Street Fighter analogy; because of home gaming consoles and the internet (allowing us to view high-level matches and see advanced techniques and combos, play others in the comfort of our own home at our own time, etc.), many people nowadays can reach what would be considered "high level" ten years ago. However, that level is considered a low level nowadays and you have to really push yourself to learn all the techniques and implement them into your game to be able to start placing in tournaments. I wonder if it is the same with language, if it took them longer to understand what would be considered basic nowadays.

There have been novelists who wrote in foreign languages they learned as adults, some of them are considered among the best authors ever. There are multilingual actors too. If you look further, I think you can find many more examples of nonnative speakers who achieved way better proficiency in their foreign languages than your average educate native speaker's. So maybe the highest level one can achieve hasn't been changed much. But if you're talking about lower levels of proficiency such as passing for a native speaker, language learning geeks might start thinking it's not that difficult in the near future.

kainzero Wrote:(I also want to add that languages acquired during childhood are stored differently in the brain than languages acquired post-childhood, so the techniques of learning are different as well. I forgot where I read that from, either the book Brain Rules or from one of nest0r's random linked papers.)

I'm not sure how this is related to the current discussion, but yeah, scientists say adults learn language differently, and most likely it's true. I don't know exactly how kids learn language either. But the fact that our brain handles language differently doesn't imply many things. As far as I am aware, all we know is that adults' brains learn language differently. And since second language acquisition hasn't been investigated enough, we really don't know what this fact implies. At least that's my take. If there is one thing I am sure of, it'd be that there have been many people who acquired awesome skills in foreign languages they learned as adults without SRS.

I know this woman who came to Japan when she was 25-ish, worked hard, and now speak Japanese so fluently that it's nearly impossible to tell she's a nonnative speaker. She is actually a trilingual and says she's better at English, which she started learning before Japanese. I can't tell if that's true or not because all I can say is her English is much better than mine. And when she was learning English and Japanese diligently, there wasn't such a thing as an affordable personal computer for a poor Chinese girl.

So SRS isn't necessarily a must item for achieving proficiency, and the fact that new languages are stored differently doesn't seem to affect how well some hardworking nonnative speakers can function in foreign languages.

My impression that SRS isn't that important after you achieve a certain level, which is quite low compared to near-native fluency, comes from my observation into near-native speakers.

I often use this small E-E dictionary which has about 50,000 or so headwords. Most of the headwords have multiple meanings, sometimes 30+, sometimes only a few. I also use dictionaries for idioms and phrasal verbs. Near-native speakers know pretty much all of them really well plus a huge amount of slangy vocabulary and technical terms the average dictionary doesn't contain. And there are those things such as the names of places, plants, animals, and the like which you don't expect a dictionary has as headwords. They know many of them. And that dictionary is sometimes a little too small for my needs, so we still need more obscure words, which are not slangy, technical or proper nouns.

Assume that you initially learn them all through SRS casually and then do whatever effective to you to know them better. Then you create, what, hundreds of thousands of cards for simple vocab learning as an initial step? What if you want to add grammar cards? It'd be a heck of a lot of work if you want at least one sentence for each meaning of a word or phrase. And what do you do about word usage? Do you make tens of cards for one word for this purpose? What if you want to do the sentence mining thing through native materials later on too? I can't even imagine how many reviews you're going to power through.

Maybe it's not impossible to go through a million plus cards you made for initial learning in your Anki. But something tells me you'd probably be better off reducing the use of SRS at some very early point and switch to something more efficient for your level. Considering the unbelievably wide range of knowledge native and near-native speakers have, what you can cover through SRS even for just initial steps before polishing your knowledge would be quite small if you want to be even remotely comparable with them. It seems to me that the number of cards you need gets huge too quickly as you set your standards higher.

I said "at very early point" because I'm talking about a really good language skill which is comparable with native or near-native speakers'. Depending on your goal, you might have achieved what you wanted way way waaay before the SRS becomes less efficient. But if you're looking at native speakers' level, I kind of feel like it's awesome only at a relatively early stage. It'll remain a valuable tool at later learning stages if you use it wisely, of course. It may not be surprising that many people say it's a wonderful, indispensable tool. But I kind of think that at the end of the day it only contributes to your proficiency so much if your goal is high enough.

Then again, it might be the case that the guys who wrote the first dictionaries and textbooks weren't that great. We don't know. If they kind of sucked, I guess you can say good dictionaries and textbooks are very important and indispensable (Kudos to the first generation of learners!). But I'm not sure about SRS. It's a great tool I recommend to everyone though.

With that all said, I could be totally wrong. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. And because I need the word "maybe" there, it's highly likely that that's the case.

If someone has a good enough learning situation, there is little need for SRS imo. For example if you were in a situation where you were surrounded by Japanese all day everyday, and needed to learn it to go about your day.

I met a high school student from the Philippines in a Japanese high school who said she was fluent quickly after moving to Japan when she was about 13 (can't remember the time, but certainly less than 3 years).

I think you only really need SRS if you're not using the language enough, which includes most Japanese learners of course (including me). I guess 50 years ago there would have been far less English in Japan so it would have been a better Japanese learning environment for foreigners.

merlin.codex Wrote:日本人の日本語じゃなきゃ読まないという人もいるし、気持ちが解らないこともない。けど、間違えるたび人が一つ利口になるとよく言われている。そもそも「いつか間違えてしまう」という覚悟しないと、言葉の理解を深めるチャンスを自らつぶしちゃうんじゃないかと思う。もしあるプロボクサーが非常に頑丈で、世界チャンピオン並みの破壊力を持っても、拳使えないと話にはならないだろう。同じ風に、日本語の記事の意味をつかめれば得することがいっぱいあるだろうけど、それだけで中途半端な気がする。不自然でも、間違いだらけでも話してみないと気が済まない。勿論人はそれぞれだし、飽くまで自分の考えてることなので、参考にしなくてもいいだろう。

merlin.codexさんの日本語レス見落としてました。ごめんなさい。

言いたいことはわかるんだけどね。習うより慣れよって言うし、そもそも実際に使う以外に
上達する方法なんてないし。とは言ったものの、やっぱり外国人特有の間違いを毛嫌いする人は
意外と多いんじゃないかな。その手の間違いを見ない、聞かないっても一応理にかなってる
と言えばそんな気もするし。外国人同士だと結局効果無いって言う人がいてもおかしくないと思う。
まぁ、普通の日本人が作った日本語の掲示板でも外国のIPアドレスをはじいてない限り
普通に書き込めるのでそういうのも考えたほうがいいかも。その方が日本人の日本語に
たくさん触れながら練習できるしね。

と、つらつらと書き連ねてみたものの、そういう自分はネットでも実社会でも非母語話者の英語に
囲まれてきたけど、特にそれが学習に悪影響を及ぼしたかって聞かれたらそうでもない気がする。
個人的な意見だけど、外国人特有の間違いに触れたくないってのもわかるけど、
実際に使うのってやっぱり大事なんだと思う。ここの掲示板でもみんな日本語を
もっと使うようになるといいよね。

そういえばちょっと前の話だけど、ここで日本語で書き込む用のサブフォーラムを作ろうって
動きがあったと思う。あのときは結局うまくいかなかったけど、pudding catさんが
似たようなスレッドはじめたので、もし見落としてたら覗いてみたらいいかも。
賛成する人がたくさん集まれば今回はうまくいくかもしれない。

Ah, I missed this one when I posted the last comment.

I know where you're coming from. Practice makes perfect, and ultimately it's the only way to get good at output. The thing is that some people don't like to be exposed to nonnative errors. I don't know how much it could hurt your learning, but it kind of makes sense to avoid nonnative speakers. Some may think it cancels out the benefits you get from practice. Besides, you can always join any Japanese forums unless they block your IP address. That way, you're always surrounded by native speakers and can get lots of output practice while getting tons of native input.

But then again, I've been exposed to a plethora of nonnnative English on the internet and in real life alike, and it doesn't seem to be doing a huge disservice. If anything, I'd encourage members of this forum to post in Japanese. This is just my opinion, but probably the benefits of output practice outweighs the negative effect nonnative input might have.

I remember someone on RevTK once tried to start a new Japanese only forum here some time ago. Apparently it didn't work out very well. But pudding cat just proposed the same thing again here. Maybe it catches on this time. If you missed the thread, you might want to post a +1 comment there.

[Edit] fixed typos and grammatical errors in the Japanese part lol

magamo Wrote:There have been novelists who wrote in foreign languages they learned as adults, some of them are considered among the best authors ever. There are multilingual actors too. If you look further, I think you can find many more examples of nonnative speakers who achieved way better proficiency in their foreign languages than your average educate native speaker's. So maybe the highest level one can achieve hasn't been changed much. But if you're talking about lower levels of proficiency such as passing for a native speaker, language learning geeks might start thinking it's not that difficult in the near future.

I think the same is true in Street Fighter as well. The old greats are still great now.
But I'm wondering if, say, what used to take 1000 hours of study only takes 800 or whatever. I guess that's something we can't solve in internet discussion.

magamo Wrote:So SRS isn't necessarily a must item for achieving proficiency, and the fact that new languages are stored differently doesn't seem to affect how well some hardworking nonnative speakers can function in foreign languages.

I feel that drills and focused acquisition on new vocabulary is necessary. I would view SRS as the peak of that, but I'm sure old-school methods are just as good, and some guy working hard with old-school methods would beat the pants off of a lazy SRS user.

However, I generally agree with you, and that somehow picking up vocabulary and grammar through usage gets easier and easier. I can't really explain it either. I've had sentences in Anki for grammar structures that I just didn't understand, so I paused them. A month later, I look at it and I understand it perfectly, and I really don't know what I did to do it.

There will be times in the post-beginner phase when we have to pick up special vocabulary for inane reasons at which point SRS/drills becomes helpful (SAT English, anyone?) and I think it's also useful for times when we have to learn a mass of vocabulary aside from the beginner phase, such as going through a textbook that introduces a lot of new terms. (Having flashbacks to when I had to define various terms in Social Studies class and write out the definition to 10 or 20 words by hand. Blahhh.)

Also, for me, there are still words that really don't stick out and that I feel like I have to drill them or I'll lose them. It's tougher in Japanese because with English you can still read the word and sound it out; if there's no furigana for a word in Kanji, you can't sound it out and it's more difficult to remember if there's no audible component.

But I really feel like we're pretty much saying the same thing to each other.

I feel compelled to link to "Yokohama Dialect - a textbook from 1879". XD

Bokusenou Wrote:I feel compelled to link to "Yokohama Dialect - a textbook from 1879". XD

Oh cash she

Omoishinji Wrote:

Bokusenou Wrote:I feel compelled to link to "Yokohama Dialect - a textbook from 1879". XD

Oh cash she

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.

Here is a dictionary I found while browsing the listing of books that is still available. Maybe someone overlooked it ... *click*