Still learning Japanese, yay.

I love it when I learn something worthwhile. Like I learned 喜怒哀楽(きどあいらく）not too long ago and now it’s showing up in just about every article I read. Like this one, about 6 lines down. When you first learn something sometimes it seems so rare and exotic, like “When am I ever going to see this word again?” so it’s always fun to realize it’s actually a common phrase, yay.

As for the rest of my Japanese studies, it’s going…well, I guess? I’m almost done with that interfering little Fire Emblem and this time I promise my next game will be in Japanese (sorry Grandia Extreme!). What I’m suffering from right now is a lack of things to read. I’ve grown tired of many of the things I used to like about Japanese culture like anime and manga so all I have left to read are videogame and music articles, and the occasional news item. I need to diversify, but nothing else interests me about Japan or the Japanese. Well, videogames and music will keep me occupied for the time being and then we’ll see where to go from there.

Video games

If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.

Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.

So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.

A further word on SRS

I just read one of the newer AJATT posts about sentence-entering in the SRS. I have to say, I don’t agree at all with his suggestion. And it’s fine not to agree. It’s the AJATT “approach” not a school of martial arts or anything, so I feel free to take what works and disregard the rest. The point made in the article is that excessively long sentences are not good for SRS entry and should thus be edited into shorter, more consumable forms. Come on, that’s just ridiculous. Is he trolling or something?

Long sentences are part and parcel of Japanese writing anywhere. If you choose to run away from them in your SRS you will only meet them again elsewhere, in real writing where they don’t pull any punches. Furthermore, if you come across a sentence you feel is too unwieldy for your current stage of learning, just don’t include it in your collection. Why emasculate it, thereby destroying its authenticity and power? If the writer meant to write「現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」then that’s exactly what he would have written, not「中村によると、我々の現代社会は『準備社会』だ。」, right? In short, this is one piece of advice I will be merrily ignoring as I go on my way towards Japanese fluency. Perhaps for easily-intimidated beginners it might be a good way to get started, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Nothing to update

Yaahhh, I was going to write a lot here today but all of a sudden I don’t really feel like it. I have a lot of material to go through that I have downloaded and need to watch. Basically I’m satisfied with my progress in reading Japanese and while I’m going to continue with my daily readings, I want to concentrate more on the listening comprehension and speaking ability. To that end I downloaded a lot of videos and radio programs that I was going to watch and review over the weekend, only my laptop decided to come down with a terminal case of Bad RAM over the weekend, freezing and stuttering pretty much every 5 minutes. So I’m going to have to delay things a little bit while I spring for new RAM (so not in my budget) or otherwise figure out how to watch my stuff.

And that’s all for today.

A word about SRS

SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System. I know what it is and why it’s useful for learning languages, so I don’t see the need
to go on about it. This blog is all about me, remember? But for anyone who wants to know more, I’ll link the AllJapaneseAlltheTime (AJATT) website post on the subject: What is an SRS?

I started the SRS thing around 1st May, planning to enter about 50 sentences a day so that I could hit the magical 10,000 mark (or close to it) by the end of 2008. Some days have been rough (i.e. I have been lazy) and some days have been awesome, hitting the goal and more. Yesterday I had my personal best of 77 sentences in 8 hours, made up almost entirely of sentences ripped from Dragonball wikis. To paraphrase Khatzumoto of AJATT, just because it’s fun doesn’t mean you’re not learning. When it’s something you want to read badly enough, no Great Wall of Kanji can keep you away.

The SRS system I’m currently using is Khatzumemo. I like it’s because it’s simple, it’s online and the interface isn’t cluttered. I hate cluttered stuff, and these buttons and functions and whizzbangs and doodads. All I want is a place to keep my sentences and the chance to review them at the right time. Having said that, it has a major drawback in that you can’t input audio sentences…(or can you, I haven’t tried) or pictures into it. For that purpose I’ve installed Anki on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten round to testing it yet. Also Khatzumemo seems to limit reps to 100 a day, regardless of how many you have left undone in your backlog. It’s also a bit annoying when you have a delay between clicking on your mark and moving on the next sentence. I’d rather have the statistical information be optional so I can access it when/if I want to, instead of forcing me to look at it every single time.

A picture speaks a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot of the current state of my sentence collection. 907 sentences in 7 weeks isn’t half bad, eh? Click to enlarge.

How do I pick which sentences to add to my SRS? Anything goes, really. With over 9000 words left to go before I hit my goal, I’m not particularly picky about getting “just the right” sort of sentence. I don’t even think there’s any such thing as “just the right” sentence. My criteria is simple: it should be grammatical Japanese. It should be natural Japanese, or as natural-feeling as I can tell. The kanji should be correct. For preference it shouldn’t be too long, but super-long sentences are also part of Japanese writing so I include them on occasion. It helps if I find the subject matter interesting (witness all the DB sentences) so that I can stand to read them over and over again as I learn.

When I come across a word/phrase/expression I don’t know, I look it up in two dictionaries simultaneously. First the Sanseido Web Dictionary, which has definitions in fairly simple Japanese, and then in Jim Breen’s WWWDJIC, which is English-Japanese. I check with the English meanings just to make sure I’m not getting confused by the J-definition, and also because Sanseido occasionally has unhelpful entries like this:
げきど 1 ［激怒］= 激しく怒ること.
It’s fine for me when I already know the meanings of the two separate kanji, but when I don’t it can get pretty annoying.

So that’s it for my SRS doings. In the mornings I do all my reps, and then I spend the rest of the day surfing the net for new entries to add while listening to music on the internet. My retention rate is 98.13%, 1927 reps done. I’m a bit Dragonballed-out today after yesterday’s marathon session, so I’m going to cut back on that today and spend the time going through Mainichi Daily’s game article archive. And that’s all for today!