Argh!  You and your addictive-fascinating, but English-language articles.

Grit:  Oh please, oh please, oh please don't try to teach it in school.  My brief school-directed experiences with flashcards were almost enough to keep me from trying SRS.  I can't imagine they'll get it right. 

In particular the idea that hard work sucks; no pain, no gain; life is a trade-off between fun and success; forceing yourself to do things is indispensable, (ideas schools already try to program) are just plain wrong, completely discounting the human need for fun with the assumption that the fun is necessarily short-sighted. 

Culture: no comment.  Don't want to read it.

Sleep:  I call BS.  If sleep is purely an energy saving measure, why REM sleep with its intense levels of activation--even more intense than waking?  Why do rats kept awake die?  Why does sleep rebound occur, or predators sleep hungry?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#Preservation

Multi-sense speech perception:  Well, duh.  Language is always gestural: gestures of the vocal organs, pen, hands, fingers on a keyboard, etc.  Sound is not required for language.  It doesn't surprise me the least that the brain uses non-aural information.

Music and audio processing:  Again, duh.  And learning to sketch improves your vision.  Neuroplasticity, man.  Neuroplasticity.

Summary: I've only spent half an hour on this, rather than the hours it could have.  Interesting stuff that probably demands more than I've given it, but I only have about 15 hours a day to do stuff.  Sorry.

Tobberoth wrote:

The multiple-sense article seems kind of unneeded. Sure we look at someones lips when they are speaking... but it makes almost no difference. If it did, how could we possibly have radio, music, podcasts? One can understand spoken language just fine without any visual sense at all.

I have to respectfully disagree here. My own experiences with visual cues, being hard of hearing, have given me a different insight on this. If I were to talk to someone, under normal day-to-day circumstances, I can understand them without looking for visual cues(lip movement, hand gestures, facial expressions, etc). However, if they are talking in a noisy environment or about something completely new to me, then I tend to unconsciously shift to include these visual cues.

I can see what you're saying, but I feel that visual senses can, and do, play into enhancing both our understanding and expression in a language for everyone. While some people may be more aware of its subtleties than others, it remains a basic, universal component of human language and interactions. It cannot be dismissed. My 2 cents.

Surely we can all agree that visual cues enhance the message. So while we can understand radio, we know that we'd get more information from a video of the same speaker. Consider courtroom testimony. In the present system we need to see the witness in order to assess credibility, etc. A tape recording isn't good enough. A written transcript even worse.

So to improve your conversation abilities supplement your studies with video and real life people. It obviously doesn't mean use only video. Video isn't going to improve your reading skills. (But I think T is making the point that some folks tend to take simplified learning advice to silly extremes)

I get the impression Japanese relies on indirect communication even more so than many other languages. So much left unsaid is interpreted through body language, facial expression and shared expectations (as well as tone and word choice.)  It's worth getting a feel for.

One thought on the application that cuts video into single phrases (subsc..s??). While that might fit the ideal of shorter SRS bits, I think it reduces the true benefit of studying dialogue. The (direct and indirect) meaning is often found in the exchange - not in isolated phrases. Memory of the setting isn't a perfect substitute for observing the dialogue as a chunk. Perhaps having a dialogue deck would be a useful alternative?

Last edited by Thora (2009 August 24, 1:50 pm)

thorstenu wrote:

IceCream wrote:

Thora, i really agree with that. It's definately the most interesting thing in dramas, to see how people interact.

I don't know if Thora had dramas in mind when she talked about videos of speakers but dramas are apparently not real. Actors are there to make it look real but as everything is scripted there is no need for the conversational functions and the underlying social behavior which make conversational dialog so complex, e.g. processes about turn taking, interactive and grounding.

And for the visual clues (gaze, mimic, gesture, lip movement, body movement) , there are more important for fulfilling those conversational functions than for understanding the utterances... perhaps lipreading and gestures as an helpful, but not needed exception. Besides that, they have their own meaning to communicate various things (without spoken language).

As for noisy environments, don't forget that we have to ears and hear in stereo so speaker localization (and filtering the rest out) plays an important role too.

In a fun ironic twist, the point of the above post makes me think radio is actually a much better study tool for dialogs than drama. Drama might have a visual cue, but the conversations aren't real. On radio, conversations are.

The process of being in the media still constrains the dialogue, even when it's 'unscripted', but I guess it's the best we can get, for now. Short of RevTKers in Japan walking around and recording Japanese for us.

There's also videotaped interviews that have similar styles to the radio broadcasts, except you get the added benefit of visuals. Some people have better deliveries than others. Ikuta Toma feels like he's improvising even when he's presumably reading from scripts in ドラマ. Such a nice boy, Ikuta Toma.

Last edited by ruiner (2009 August 26, 8:18 am)

You can see if you experience this McGurk effect in this video: http://www.physorg.com/news153579230.html  (The guy in the white coat seems like a bit McGurkish to me.) McGurkism wasn't at the heart of my comments on the value of using conversation to learn conversation, but it's kind of interesting.

Wikipedia wrote:

It has also been examined in relation to witness testimony; Wareham & Wright's 2005 study showed that inconsistent visual information can change the perception of spoken utterances, suggesting that the McGurk effect may have many influences in everyday perception.

As for authenticity - the dramas I've seen are very exaggerated, but perhaps different types of dramas are available. If you're not around Japanese people, I find film, interviews, talk shows to be better sources.  I listen more to radios talk shows b/c it's convenient. I don't think conversation needs to be 100% authentic for it to have some value to language learners (in terms of interpreting real meanings, absorbing how meaning can be communicated non-verbally, and social/cultural stuff). Yes, this is separate from knowing what the utterance means if you were to read it.

We have this intuition in our native languages. While I'm sure we can apply much of it to conversations in Japanese, there are some differences. Most of my many goofups in Japan arose from the read-between-the-lines stuff, not the words. I was usually blissfully unaware until...

So, variety... moderation...simple....no opposing categories...kay?

Last edited by Thora (2009 August 27, 8:37 pm)

hehe You quoted me before I edited out that last paragraph. (I thought I might offend someone)

above wrote:

When touch is combined with visual  information,  recognition  learning  leaps  forward by almost 30 percent, compared with touch alone.

uh oh.  SRS that.

Last edited by Thora (2009 August 27, 9:40 pm)

IceCream wrote:

smell seems hugely powerful as a memory trigger. i'm surprised really it hasn't been used somehow yet... maybe it's the wrong type of memory trigger, i dunno. That stuff was really interesting, ty!

I was joking about the specific cooking words/smells, but he does make some interesting arguments about how to use smell.

There's probably more information on this sort of thing in Lehrer's 'Proust was a Neuroscientist', but in Brain Rules he talks about smell being used in some ambient, passive ways to enhance recall states. He mentions one test where students exposed to a smell (associated with initial learning process) during sleep did better on tests the next morning--and similarly with spraying perfume in a class then during tests improved test scores versus those who didn't have it sprayed during learning. I'll need to do more looking into this sort of thing, but if I were studying before a trip to Japan, perhaps I'd target all my (output?) sessions around cooking sessions of Japanese foods, whilist the fragrances still waft about the domicile.

Wouldn't be hard for me, since I'm constantly cooking that stuff purely for aesthetic immersion purposes. I have consciously replaced all of my 'comfort foods' (this being #1 - ah, that smell floods me with many 日本語-related memories... same with the effusions of my Zojirushi neuro-fuzzy).

Last edited by ruiner (2009 August 28, 10:20 am)