Language learning log: August 2021 through March 2022

Since getting back from my first visit to Japan in late October 2019, my aim has been to do a daily focussed study slot of at least thirty minutes on not less than five days a week. 

Like many language learners, I find it really helpful to log my progress: time spent and what I did with it.

In my last report to 31 July 2021, my running total for focussed study (beginning on 1st January 2019) was 486 hours, 20 minutes (see my last update post).

Here’s what I’ve done since (excluding passive listening, discussed later in the post):

August 2021: 9 hours, fifty minutes over 14 days.

September 2021: 6 hours hours, fifteen minutes over 11 days.

October 2021: 7 hours, forty-five minutes, over 13 days.

November 2021: 3 hours, forty minutes over 7 days.

December 2021: 3 hours, ten minutes over 7 days.

January 2022: 16 hours, forty-five mins over 26 days

February 2022: 7 hours, fifty minutes over 14 days.

March 2022: 12 hours, fifteen minutes over 21 days. 

Target hours for eight months: 86 hours, thirty minutes

Actual hours for eight months: 55 hours, thirty minutes 

Total Calendar Days in the seven-month period: 243. Target Total Days (focussed study slots): 173. Actual Total Days (focussed study slots): 113.

Project Running Total (1st January 2019 to 31st July 2021): 541 hours, 50 minutes

My method: no to “speak early, speak often” or Back to the Future (Part One)

With my last new language (Basque), I tried out a “speak early, speak often”. For me, as quite a studious introvert, this felt unnecessary and inefficient.  

With Japanese, I’ve returned to the approach I used to get fluent in French, German and Russian and Welsh: study first (apart from about ten one-to-ones just to “try the language out” in summer 2020).  

By study first approach, I don’t mean learning about the language for its own sake. I’m talking about throwing up the mental scaffold of key grammar patterns in my head first and building up a basic vocab of a couple of thousand words. 

From the start, I’ve supplemented this with a lot of listening practice.  

My learning materials: struggling and juggling since January 2019

Jan 2019 to Oct 2020: Japanese from Zero. The series has its strengths but wasn’t a good fit for me. I should have abandoned it much earlier than I did.  By spring 2020 I had found two alternative courses that suited me better and my focus had shifted, but I did come back to Book Three in September and October of that year, just to finish it off. I’m a bit too much of a completionist at times.

Feb 2019 to Oct 2020: Assimil’s Le Japonais course. I worked on and off thorough the first 44 lessons. It has been (and will be) a very useful supplementary course.  

From mid 2020: Work with Teach Yourself Japanese by C J Dunn and S Yanada (1958) and Colloquial Japanese by H. D.B. Clarke and Motoko Hamamura (1981). They became my exclusive focus once I’d got Japanese from Zero out of my hair in October 2020. One of the drawbacks of Japanese from Zero was the lack of accessible audio. Colloquial Japanese comes with cassettes and I had a teacher record sentences of the first third of Teach Yourself Japanese (there used to be gramophone records to the book, published separately by Linguaphone, but I have been unable to find these).

End Mar 2020 to early Oct 2020: worked thoroughly through Lessons One to Nineteen (of thirty) in Teach Yourself Japanese, including some doubling back for revision of the first seven lessons. 

Late Oct 2020 to March 2021: shifted my attention to Colloquial Japanese for reinforcement. By mid March 2021 I had worked through Lessons 1 to 18 (including doing dictation exercises of the audio) and then re-did the first eight.  

In late March 2021 to mid March 2022 I started engaging seriously with Teach Yourself Japanese again. By the end of July 2021 I had gone through Lessons One to Sixteen a second time (including quite a bit of dictation and redoing all the translation exercises). Since last summer, I’ve continued to work on the course. I re-did lessons Seven to Nineteen and then pressed into new territory. On 9 March 2022 I completed my first work through Lessons Twenty to Twenty-Nine. I have left Thirty for now as it’s focussed mainly on honorific and brusque registers.  

Middle of March 2022 onwards: I’ve switched my focus back to Colloquial Japanese and am working through the whole book again from the beginning.

I’m not just passively reading the Lessons. I’ve been working with the two books in an interactive way:

• doing the self-correct exercises (sometimes in written form, using the kana) and sometimes saying the answers out loud into my phone’s voice recorder;
• two-way translation;
• dictation from the audio. 

Listening practice

Since February last year, I’ve been watching Japanese YouTube on and off over my after lunch coffee.

Each day I visit my local park, where aim to alternate a walk round (50 minutes) with a run (25 minutes). During the time in the park,  I listen to Japanese podcasts for about two thirds of the time (the other third I listen to Basque podcasts).  

My favourite podcast is Japanese with Shun. I devour every new podcast (one or two a week). Otherwise, I tend to relisten to Shun’s podcasts and some of them I’ve listened to many times.  

It’s great to find myself understanding more and more of a podcast episode. 

I haven’t included all this listening practice in my “hourly totals” in the log, above.

Things that have gone well so far

I’ve covered most of the important grammar patterns several times. While I can’t use them all, I have a pretty thorough sense of how the language works and my interactive practice with the course materials has helped with this. 

Sure, knowing about the language isn’t the same as being able to use it but a sense of the “lay of the land” is a firm undergirding for those of us who like to move from the general to the specific. 

Lots of listening from early on. This is really feeding into my interaction with the textbooks and helping me now as I move to more systematic, deliberate vocabulary learning.  

I nailed the kana writing system (syllable-based) early and use it for the written exercises and when doing dictation exercises (even though both Colloquial Japanese and Teach Yourself Japanese only present the language using Romanisation).  

Problems I’ve encountered so far

In the early months, I spent too long on the kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese). I stopped learning new ones in May 2019 after I reached number 206 of the 2200 “official” kanji in my book (Heisig’s brilliant Remembering the Kanji). Still, I continued to work on revising the first 57 until early 2020.  If I were starting again, I’d just learn thirty or so revealing ones to demystify the system and the process. I now see learning the kanji as a separate project (I’d aim to learn them in two years, though it would take a lot longer to get really proficient). It’s a project I fully intend to undertake at a later stage.  

Switching resources has advantages (repetition in different contexts, benefits from the particular strengths of each course) but it has dissipated my focus. I should have ditched Japanese from Zero earlier but, in fairness, it took me time to discover the courses for me.  

I still feel I have weak passive recognition and active recall ability of the most frequent grammar patterns, words and phrases.  

On balance, my overall achievement “feels” less than optimal at 541 hours in. 

An objective yardstick for my achievements so far?

Yep, I “feel” I should be further ahead with my listening and active recall phrases) at 541 hours.

That said, things don’t really look so bad when I remind myself of the estimates as to how much preparation is needed for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. 

JLPLT Level N5 is roughly equivalent to A1/A2 border on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Only reading and listening are tested and you need to know 800 words and 100 kanji.  On average, it takes students who don’t already know Chinese characters 325 to 600 hours of work to pass the N5. 

JLPT Level N4 (A2/B1 border in reading and listening) is expected to take kanji newbies 575 to 1000 hours (a cumulative total, including the time spent on N5). You need a cumulative 1,500 words and 300 kanji.

I think on some counts I could already be into N4: I worked on 206 kanji (though I’ve forgotten many of them again) and I guess I know more than 800 words passively.  I’m probably familiar with a lot of grammar patterns at a higher level even than N4.

On the other hand, as I said, I do feel that my active recall is weak (and of course the exams don’t even begin to test the speaking aspects of active recall). 

I don’t want to start having one-to-one conversations until my active recall has improved and that’s going to be a major new focus in the next stage.  

Plans for April – end of the summer 2022 or Back to the Future (Part Two)

My listening has been going right so I’m planning more of the same. 

I’ll continue with listening to podcasts on my walks and watching YouTube videos in Japanese.  

My active sentence pattern and (especially) vocabulary recall is still weak and I’m now going to focus on that expressly by some deliberate, effortful practice with flashcards.

Since the middle of March, I’ve started making (and using) paper flashcards of the early lessons of Colloquial Japanese (Japanese on one side in kana and English on the other). It really helps that I’ve done some much interactive study with the course (and other courses) already and that I have had so much listening practice. I’m coming “warm” at any of the vocabulary, phrases and sentence patterns.

This is “back to the future” for me.  I’ve only dabbled with flashcards for Japanese (and Basque) so far. Yet they were one of the main tools I used (along with listening a lot) to get me off the ground with French, Welsh, German and Russian.  

My immediate goal now is to “flashcard” the whole of that course thoroughly. 

Then, I think, will be the time to start speaking.  

Are you learning Japanese? How is it going? Is your approach different from mine? Let me know in the comments!

Here’s the video catch-up:

The post Japanese update: August to March appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Language learning log: March through July

Since returning from my trip to Japan in autumn 2019 my target has been to spend at least thirty minutes of focussed Japanese study a day, at least five days a week. By the end of February 2021 I had a total of 418 hours on the clock (see my last update post).

Here’s what I’ve done since:

March 2021: 13 hours, thirty-five minutes over 19 days.

April 2021: 13 hours, fifty minutes over 22 days.

May 2021: 17 hours, twenty minutes, over 23 days.

June 2021: 13 hours, forty minutes over 24 days.

July 2021: 10 hours, fifty-five minutes over 18 days.

Total hours for the five months: 68 hours, twenty minutes.

So, I studied on 106 of the 152 days in this five-month period. On an average months, my target (five study sessions a weeks) would be 21 days. I was a little under that target in March and July. Taking the period as a whole, I just missed the the target of about 108 days. If I’d done 30 minutes a day five sevenths of the time, I’d have come to 54 hours, so I actually overshot on the time put in.

Of course, the target is arbitrary. It’s about motivation not some objectively necessary amount of study. The totals above do not include the additional listening that I discuss below (Pimsleur, podcasts).

Running total (1st January 2019 to 31st July 2021): 486 hours, 20 minutes

My approach to learning Japanese

The last language I started to learn in earnest was Basque. I’m now at an intermediate level. My strategy was to start speaking as early as possible. I took part in a weekly in-person class here in London and I spent a month in the Spanish Basque Country on an intensive residential course in 2016. But the mainstay of my speaking practice, then and now, has been one-to-one lessons with a teach, on Skype, booked through the italki platform.

This time, with Japanese, I decided to delaying serious speaking practice and focus on throwing up the mental scaffold of key grammar patterns in my head first and build up a basic vocab of a couple of thoussad words. The logic is that I don’t spend time and money on repeating the same basic conversations over and over again with a range of teachers until it all sinks in. That said, I did try the language out with a number of one-to-one sessions in summer last year. I prepared set topics for each one, with a vocab and phrase sheet to hand as a crutch during each session.

I learned the kana syllable-based phonetic writing systems, called katakana and hiragana and continue to use them for my written exercises. Since spring 2019, though, I have put off the serious task of learning the 2200 most-important kanji characters (bar a few tweaks, the same as the Chinese characters) for a later stage. I’ll treat that as a separate, two-year project at some future point. Why? Because my time limit for this project is thirty minutes a day I can’t do vocab, grammar and kanji in that time.

How do I use my thirty minute study sessions? Well, the key for me is keeping it “interactive”. In detail, this involves:

• developing my listening skills through dictation
• using the shadowing method to practice the pronunciation and rhythm of Japanese
• doing self-correct exercises (either writing in kana and, where I can, kanji or orally my phone’s voice recorder)
• flashcarding sentence patterns and vocabulary using a mixture of the electronic flashcard app Anki and good old paper flashcards

Japanese courses I’m using

I have accumulated a range of different courses:

• Japanese from Zero textbook series. I completed as far as the end of book Three (out of five) back in October 2020. Since then, I have not used this course but I do intend to review it later. The course has its strengths but it’s back on the shelf for now because of its weaknesses. A review to follow (at some point).
• Assimil Le japonais. The new edition hasn’t been published in English, so I’m using the French version. Second-hand copies of the earlier edition in English translation can be found. I had previously worked thoroughly through Lessons 1 to 44 (of 98). During the last five months I have dipped in and out to revise one lesson or another. I have not yet done more new lessons (though I intend to).
• Pimsleur audio-only course. There are five levels, each consisting of thirty, thirty-minute lessons. From November through to mid June I re-listened to all of Levels Two to Five inclusive. As I mentioned in my last update (to end February), my sense is that I’ve got a lot more out of the course the second time round. It feels like there’s been reinforcement in both direction between my focussed study and the Pimsleur listening.
• Teach Yourself Japanese. Several completely different books have appeared from the same publisher under this title over the years. I have one of the most ancient: C J Dunn and S Yanada (1958, reprinted 1971). It’s a very old-fashioned text using the grammar-translation method, with a supplement of twelve conversations. I love the book, though I wouldn’t recommend it to you if you’re not an experienced language learning geek and it only makes sense to use it in combination with a lot of listening practice (on which more below) and, ideally, a more modern, user-friendly course. There were Linguaphone gramophone records of the conversations but I do not have them. I found a hilarious review of the book by the blogger Stephen Jones (He pokes fun at the unrealistic example phrases (in which dark themes do seem overrepresented).
• Colloquial Japanese. Again, there have been various entirely different books from the publisher with this title over the years. I have the version by H D B CLarke and Motoko Hamamura (1987 reprint of 1981 edition). It comes with two audio cassettes.
• Two courses that I own, but haven’t spent much time with yet are Beginner’s Japanese by Joanne Redmond (Hippocrene Books, MP3 audio available online) and Olly Richard’s Japanese Uncovered (online twenty lesson course). Both of these look to have a lot going for them and I hope to try them / use them for consolidation and review in the future.

How I’ve been using my materials, March to July Teach Yourself Japanese

From the end of October to the end of February March I worked thoroughly through 18 of the 20 lessons of Colloquial Japanese (including working with the audio). There were some new structures such as the -tara (if) form, the passive and causative tenses but, in the main, working through the book for me was all about repeat exposure from a different angle.

Colloquial is now back on hold and the main focus of my study since late March has been Teach Yourself Japanese. By late summer 2020 I had worked thoroughly through the first 19 of the 30 lessons. In late March 2021 I started engaging seriously with the volume again. By the end of July I had gone through Lessons One to Sixteen a second time (including redoing all the translation exercises).

I’m please to report that a lot in the course makes much more sense the second time round and I generally found the exercises less of a struggle. There’s a lot more retention and even when I don’t get the translations correct, I’m much less often clueless about how to render a phrase than I was first time round.

More listening input

Since February, I’ve been aiming to sit and listen to Japanese for at least fifteen minutes every day. I’ve made time for the daily listening practice by using the fifteen minutes or so I typically spend watching YouTube anyway (in other languages) over my after lunch coffee. As I finished re-listening to the final Pimsleur audio-only course (Level Five) in mid June, I listen to Japanese podcasts for half of my thirty minute jogs or my fifty-minute walks round the local park (I aim to jog and walk on alternate days).

The podcasts I listen to are all Japanese-only and all aimed at lower-level learners:

• Thinking in Japanese podcast
• Nihongo con Tepei podcast
• The Real Japanese podcast
• Japanese with Shun podcast
• Easy Japanese (also a podcast)
• Olly Richard’s Japanese Conversations

I also occasionally try the (native-level) NHK news bulletins (available as a podcast) and some YouTub several native or learner YouTube channels.

I’ve been listening in a semi-active way: attentive but not rewinding, not working with transcripts to use dictation. I don’t try to pull out phrases to learn. All of these things are great to do but my really interactive time goes on the course book work. I do often re-listen to episodes of Japanese with Shun and Thinking in Japanese, my two favourite podcasts.

It’s great to find myself understanding more and more of a podcast episode. Something else that “feels good” is hearing familiar words but not understanding them. These are often common adverbs, fillers, intensifiers. I know that the exposure will help things click when I see them again in my course books, and vice versa.

My pitch for the second half of 2021

It’s going to be more of the same for the second half of the year: keeping up with the same amount of regular, focussed study and doing the same sorts of things in order to internalise the main grammar patterns and core vocab and phrases.

This means:

1. Keep working through Teach Yourself Japanese to the end of at least Lesson 22
2. After that, return to focussed work on Colloquial Japanese and Assimil in the same way
3. Sample Japanese Uncovered and Beginner’s Japanese.

You can’t study yourself fluent. Study can be very powerful in my experience but only when combined with a lot of input practice. In the later stages reading makes increasing sense, but for beginners/lower intermediate, I think listening is much more important. So, I’ll continue to listen to the podcasts.

At the end of my last update in early March, I said that I envisaged getting speaking practice form July and onwards. All I can say is, not yet! Still doesn’t feel efficient. And yes, I’m aware of the dangers of “not speaking until you feel ready”.

That said, I do expect to do the occasional live one-to-one in the coming months. That’s not just impatient curiosity to see whether speaking is easier than when I first had a few sessions in summer last year. It’s do do with an aspect of the language that I haven’t discussed so far at all: pitch accent.

In Japanese if you change the pitch of a syllable, this can completely change the meaning of the word. We do something similar in English but with a change not of pitch but of stress: addict, addict; conflict, conflict and so on.

I’ve read about pitch accent and understand some of the theory. But that’s very different from tuning in your ear to hear it and actually producing the pitch differences. While you can usually be understood if you don’t get pitch accent right, it seems that if you work on the pitch accent, it really helps make your Japanese more convincing to native speakers.

As you can see from this at month thirty, progress is not dramatic but I am certainly feeling more confident in my (basic) listening comprehension and in my grasp of the basic grammar patterns and vocab of the language. Both of these are getting easier to recall and new things are easier to remember. I’m still really enjoying my Japanese journey.

Look out for another update here on the blog. If you’re a Japanese learner or teacher – or otherwise have thoughts or experiences to share – I’d love to read them in the comments below.

Related posts

Next in series:

Update August 2021 to March 2023

(Note end January 2023: I’m still very actively learning Japanese. Look out for a new update soon)

The post Japanese update: March to July appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Language learning log: November through February

Since November 2019, my aim has been to put in at least thirty minutes of focussed study and practice, at least five times a week and by the end of October, I’d clocked up a total of 352 hours, 5 minutes.

November 2020: 20 hours, ten minutes over 25 days.

December 2020: 17 hours, twenty-five minutes over 20 days.

January 2021: 18 hours, five minutes, over 24 days.

February 2021: 10 hours, forty-five minutes over 20 days.

Running total (1st January 2019 to 28th February 2021): 418 hours

My approach to learning Japanese

I am delaying serious speaking practice until I’ve internalised the basic grammar patterns and a core vocabulary of a couple of thousand words….which is taking me rather longer than anticipated!

In summer 2020 I did have a number of one-to-one lessons with several teachers booked over italki.com just to “break the ice” with speaking and to try out what I’d learnt.

In a previous post here on the blog I explored the question “How soon should you speak your new language?”. I think it depends on your personality and how you like to engage with the language. But remember, engage, you must, and actively. And, if you want to speak, you have to practise speaking a lot.

After the first four months I decided to put a full frontal attack on the kanji (Chinese characters used in written Japanese) on hold and since then have just worked further on the 80 of them introduced in one of my course books.

Japanese writing is a combination of kanji characters and two other systems called hiragana and two other systems called hiragana and katakana (together, the kana), which are MUCH less work to master than kanji. I learned them during the first few weeks of my study.

As usual in my language learning, group classes don’t play a large role (no role actually, so far, with Japanese). No, my engagement has mainly come from following a number of self-study courses in parallel.

I don’t just passively read the course materials and listen to the audio. I make my study “interactive” using several methods:

• developing my listening skills through dictation
• using the shadowing method to practice the pronunciation and rhythm of Japanese
• doing self-correct exercises (either writing in kana and, where I can, kanji or orally my phone’s voice recorder – a new development for me, with the Colloquial Japanese exercises)
• flashcarding sentence patterns and vocabulary using a mixture of the electronic flashcard app Anki and good old paper flashcards

Turning to the courses…..

Japanese from Zero : on hold

At the end of October I finished the third in the Japanese from Zero textbook series I decided that I was more than ready for a break from the series, so I haven’t moved on to book four (there are five in all).

Assimil Le japonais

I’ve also been working with Assimil Le japonais from early in my journey.

By the end of October, Id worked pretty thoroughly through 44 of the 98 lessons. Since then I have dipped in and out of the first 44 lessons in an unsystematic way. I’ve redone some of the exercises, read the lessons passively, done some dictations and also learned several of the dialogues by heart.

Pimsleur audio course

Pimsleur Conversational Japanese is a five-level, audio only course.

In June I completed Level Four (of Five), Lessons 23 and 24 (of 30). As I put the course on hold in the summer and early autumn of last year.

Beginning in early November, I started fitting a 30 minute Pimsleur lesson in again on my daily, alternate run or walk in the park. I completed level Four and worked through the whole of Level Five.

Now (early March) I have doubled back to Level Two and have redone to the end of Lesson Fifteen.

I have to say, I feel I’m getting much more out of Pimsleur second time round, when I “know” nearly all of what I’m hearing. It’s working really well for consolidating feeling for the sound of the language, the sentence patterns and vocab.

Teach Yourself Japanese

Between late March and early August 2020 I worked thoroughly through the first 19 of the 30 lessons in the very old version of Teach Yourself Japanese by C J Dunn and S Yanada (1958, reprinted 1971).

Since then, I’ve done some the odd dictation exercise (one of my teachers recorded many of the Japanese example sentences for me). I’ve used the book for reference and plan to use it a lot more in the coming months.

Colloquial Japanese

In my last review (early Nov) I said that my focus would be Colloquial Japanese by H D B Clarke and Motoko Hamamura (1987 reprint of 1981 edition).

That’s what happened and this book (with the audio) became my main resource for this latest learning phase.

From the end of October to the end of February I worked thoroughly through 18 of the 20 lessons in the book (including working with the audio).

Much of the grammar and vocab was repetition and consolidation for me but in the latter units there were also new things such as the verb form -tara (if), the passive and the causative tenses and a lot of “modal” structures (must, should…).

The final two lessons of the book focus on honorific speech and brusque speech, both of which are much less needed for foreign learners so I will leave those for now.

Two new courses

I’ve picked up two new courses (the way one does….) They are Beginner’s Japanese by Joanne Redmond (Hippocrene Books, MP3 audio available online) and Olly Richard’s Japanese Uncovered (online twenty lesson course).

Four courses is already more that I’d recommend any “normal” student to use. But I’ve written myself a free pass in my capacity as a course builder, reviewer, language teacher and blogger It goes with the territory to try things out and compere methods and approaches….

Increased emphasis on listening practice

I said in November that in early 2021 I hoped to start getting more listening practice with wider range of audio.

Now I feel ready. I can already pick out many individual words (including ones I recognise but can’t remember what they mean) and snippets of familiar phrases (again, whether or not I can remember what they mean).

Since the beginning of February, I’ve been aiming to sit and listen to Japanese for at least fifteen minutes more or less every day. I’ve made time for the daily listening practice by using the fifteen minutes or so I typically spend watching YouTube anyway (in other languages) over my after lunch coffee.

My listening material falls into two groups:

First, material aimed at learners:

• Thinking in Japanese podcast
• Nihongo con Tepei podcast
• The Real Japanese podcast
• Japanese with Shun podcast
• Easy Japanese (also a podcast)
• Olly Richard’s Japanese Conversations

Second “authentic” (i.e. native level) material:

• NHK news (bulletins available as podcasts)
• YouTube channels aimed at natives

I’ve found several travel/daily slice of life vlog channels and also a channel about photography and videography.

I’ve been listening in a semi-active way: attentive but not rewinding, not working with transcripts to use dictation and certainly not trying to pull out words and phrases to learn.

The idea at this stage has been simply to get some general exposure to the sound of the language at natural. Colloquial audio and Pimsleur feel more or less natural speed as well; At lesson 44 of 98, Assimil has speeded up from the earliest lessons but is still slower than natural). Understanding something is almost a bonus at this stage.

Goals for the first half of 2021

During the first half of this year, I want to keep continue the core of my Japanese learning will continue to happen during my thirty minutes focussed study slots, at least five days a week.

The aim will be to continue to work on the main grammar patterns and build core vocab, either consolidating those I already feel I can use or internalising those I’m still not sure of.

There are three things I want to do:

Consolidate the basic grammar and vocab

By the end of June main aim is to feel I have an active command of the material in the first eighteen lessons (of twenty) of Colloquial Japanese and at least the first twenty lessons (of thirty) of Teach Yourself Japanese and the first half of the Assimil book (50 lessons of 98).

So I’ll be going back and forth through that material as interactively as possible.

I’ll reinforce further by dipping in and out of the Assimil Course and Japanese from Zero.

Get further listening practice

I’ll continue my second run through Pimsleur on my jog and the after lunch listening that I started in February (podcasts and YouTube).

Third, I want to try to fit in some work with Beginner’s Japanese and Japanese Uncovered….Not sure whether I’ll make the time for that yet.

At the moment, I envisage getting speaking practice in July and onwards (regular one-to-ones booked over italki.com).

Are you a beginning Japanese learner? Have you started speaking yet? If you’re an older hand, how soon did you start speaking? What were the challenges, what were the rewards? Let me know in the comments below!

Related posts

Next posts in this series:

Update March to July 2021

Update August 2021 to March 2022

(Note end January 2023: I’m still very actively learning Japanese. New update soon!)

The post Japanese update: November to February appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Since then, I’ve continued with this fascinating language.

My aim has been to put in at least thirty minutes of focussed study and practice, at least five times a week.

Japanese learning language log

By the end of July this year, I’d clocked up 299 hours, 30 minutes.

Here’s an update of the numbers on the clock:

August 2020: 18 hours, ten minutes (including 3.5 hours conversation) over 23 days.

September 2020: 21 hours, twenty-five minutes (including 4 hours conversation) over 23 days.

October 2020: 13 hours (including 30 mins conversation) over 20 days.

Running total (1 January 2019 to 31 October 2020): 352 hours, 5 minutes

My approach

Whether or not you should start speaking your target language early depends on your personality and how you motivate yourself to learn.

The last language I started learning seriously was Basque.

I put a lot of emphasis on speaking early and often. From the early stages I had regular, live one-to-one lessons via Skype, booked through the excellent italki platform.

With Japanese, I’ve returned to my “traditional method” of internalising the key grammar patterns, a core bank of key phrases and the most frequent vocab before starting to speak.

I’ve done this by working through several courses in as interactive as possible a way (using audio for listening practice, developing my listening skills through dictation, using the shadowing method to practise the pronunciation and rhythm of Japanese; doing self-correct exercises).

Speaking practice

I did some basic spoken Japanese on the ground in Japan after nine months of preparation, of course.

I only started with some one-to-one speaking sessions in summer 2020, though.

The push that got me trying to speak was participation in my friend John Fotheringham’s Language Accelerator programme, which ran through July.

In July I took had ten live one-to-ones with a Japanese native-speaker teacher as part of the Accelerator. Then I continued with John’s follow-on programme in August and September, which involved taking another four sessions in August and four in September. Now that programme has finished too and in October I deliberately switched back to my previous mode of operation and only did one live session.

My summer 2020 foray into speaking confirmed that my Japanese is still very basic but it was fun to see that, yes, it does work, after a fashion.

Shouldn’t I be better by now?

In my last update vid, I shared the clip of me practising my basic Japanese “self-introduction” phrases (for John’s Accelerator programme). I wasn’t reading the phrases out but I did need to rehearse them a lot.

Commenting on my very elementary performance, one regular viewer over on the YouTube channel suggested that by holding back on speaking, speaking for me had become “almost as a review activity”.

She added: “You are here going through the very basic sentence structures of early A1 and practising those. I would think that you will advance through the rest of A1 and A2 now with a reasonable pace, as you have already accumulated so much more vocabulary and grammar, and have trained your eyes and ears to take in more advanced material in the language.”

I think there’s a lot in this. In the vid, I’m a bit like a foal trying to stand up for the first time on fully formed, but very, very shaky legs.

The experience got me thinking “Am I ‘on target’ with my Japanese?”. What’s reasonable to expect at this stage?

It’s estimated that to get to a “upper beginner” (A2) level in Western European language on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, you need to put in 180 to 200 hours. To get to the top of “B1” (lower intermediate), you need another 400 hours.

When I shot my “self-intro” vid in early July, I had 286 hours on the clock. So, could I expect to be well into B1 with a bit more speaking “activation practice”?

Just how well formed can I expect my “legs” to be at this stage?

First, I need to recalibrate that 286 hour total.

Some of that time has gone on thoroughly learning the two phonetic alphabets (more accurately “syllabaries”) that are used in Japanese’s eclectic writing system.

A lot of time has gone on learning the third ingredient in the mix that is written Japanese: the kanji (that’s to say, the Chinese characters). In the first months of my project I studied the first 200 in James Heisig’s classic Remembering the Kanji book. The 80 characters taught in my core textbook, Japanese from Zero 3, were nearly all from within those 200, but it still quite a lot of time to go through the six or seven that the authors presented in each lesson (and to do the reading and writing exercises in the book that use the characters).

Most European languages are, of course written in Latin script and both the Cyrillic and Greek scripts are quite simple to learn. So, I think it’s fair to deduct “kana time” and “kanji time” were to be deduced from my running total. If I did that, I’d guess my total in early July would still be at, say, 240 hours.

On the other hand, I have also done about 50 hours listening to the Pimsleur audio only course (not included in my time log), so that might push my total back to around 300 hours.

A running total of 300 hour suggest I “should” be able to activate my language even to mid B1 if I keep speaking.

This is especially so given that, compared with French or German, Japanese has some very easy aspects: no word “gender”, no cases, a simple and regular system of verb tenses), a great many loan words from English.

On the other hand, the way that Japanese works (and most of the core vocabulary) is very different from the European languages and it often seems to take Europeans longer to learn (even if you factor out the writing system).

On balance, then, I’d say I should be able to advance “at a reasonable pace” to A2 with more activation practice. But with these time totals on the clock, I shouldn’t be beating myself up for not being further on than that yet.

Main course: Japanese from Zero

My main course book is Japanese from Zero. by George Trombley Jr and Yukari Takenaka. It’s a five volume course and at the end of June I’d finished Lesson 11 (of 13) of Book Three. I didn’t use the book at all in July. The time went on the “Accelerator” instead.

I got back to Book 3 towards the end of September and finished the course on 27 October.

Lesson 12 was very light on new grammar. For some reason, the series really rations out the verbs as if they’re a special treat. Lesson 12 introduced two very useful new verbs できる (to be able, can do) and かわる (to change, turn into). Lesson 12 also covers how to turn adjectives into adverbs (final -い changes to -く).

In the Lesson’s “Culture Clip” introduced the traditional way of counting years. The reign of each Emperor is an “era”. The Heisei Emperor reigned 1989-2019, Western style. So, if you were born in 1995, you’d say “Heisei 6” and so on. This system is still very much in use, though the Christian date system is also widely used.

I knew all this before from my other courses, so Lesson 12 was consolidation for me (none the less important for that).

Lesson 13 introduced something new: the potential form of the verb (can/could)(the “eru” form). Like all the Japanese verb forms I’ve met so far, it is very regular and not difficult to form. Using it correctly will no doubt be a different matter.

There were also some more useful verbs. I’d met three of these before elsewhere:なくす (to lose),　めつける (to find),　めつかる (to be found) and おやぐ (to swim). The fourth was new to me: がきんする (to have patience, endure, bear with). This verb, says the course, has a lot of cultural significance. The Japanese are known for their ability to hold back their emotions in public and to endure.

When I started this project, my aim was to complete the first three books of Japanese from Zero before I left for Japan (so, by the end of September 2019). Erm, I was just over a year out. I have lots of thoughts about the series, but I’ll come back to those another time.

For now, I have not ordered Japanese from Zero Book 4. Instead, I’ll be spending some time between now and the end of the year to review the first three books (as a secondary activity, rather than my main focus).

Assimil’s Le japonais

My complementary course is Assimil’s Le japonais

At the end of July I’d worked thoroughly through the first 37 lessons (of 98). I’d also doubled back and reviewed many of the lessons. By the end of October I had completed to the end of Lesson 44. I’m still enjoying the course. One of the main ways I interact with it is by using the excellent audio for dictation exercises.

Pimsleur

Pimsleur is a five-level, audio only course.

In June I completed Level Four (of Five), Lessons 23 and 24 (of 30). As I reported in July, I hadn’t used the at all since June and didn’t use it during August to October either.

This isn’t a negative comment on the course.

Until mid March I’d been listening to the course on my walks to and from the underground station on my commute to work and on my daily run or walk round the local park. Since then, I’ve been working from home, so the commute has vanished. Also, I’ve been using my time in the park to listen to native-level Basque talk radio (either live or podcasted).

As I write this (early November), I’ve started fitting a little Pimsleur in again on my walks. I do intend to get back more fully to Pimsleur Level Four before too long. I also bought Level Five, so won’t want to let that go to waste.

Teach Yourself Japanese

Since April, I’ve also been working a very old version of Teach Yourself Japanese (C J Dunn and S Yanada) (1958, reprinted 1971). Some of the vocab is dated and some of the phrases stilted but it’s still a great reference work and a source of extra grammar explanations and exercises.

I finished Lesson 18 in mid August. Since then, I haven’t moved forward with any of the remaining Lessons (19 to 30). Instead, I’ve doubled back on some of the exercises. I used some of my live lesson time to have my teacher record sentences from the book for me and I’ve been doing dictation with the aid of those recordings.

Colloquial Japanese

In September, I acquired another older course, Colloquial Japanese by H D B Clarke and Motoko Hamamura. (1987 reprint of 1981 edition). This has is much more conversational in focus than Dunn and Yamada. It also comes with an audio cassette (which I’ve copied onto .mp3). There’s lots that I really like about this book and so I’m planning to use it a lot for the rest of this year.

Like Teach Yourself, this edition of Colloquial Japanese uses romanisation rather than the kanji and kana.

Kana and kanji writing practice?

I’m continuing to get reading exposure to the kana phonetic syllabaries (and some of the kanji characters) as I read Japanese from Zero and Assimil. I do quite a bit of kana writing as I use them for the written exercises from all the courses and my own dictation practice with the Assimil, Teach Yourself and Colloquial audio.

I also try and incorporate the 80 kanji I’ve consolidated in Japanese from Zero 3 Aside from the eight kanji taught in Japanese from Zero 3, even though “Project kanji” is very much on hold. It’s a question of what to prioritise in the time I have available for Japanese.

Goals for November and December

The plan is to continue with my thirty-minute focussed study slots through November and December.

Part of the time will go on review as I dip in and out of all three of the Japanese from Zero books that I’ve completed.

I’m also aiming to work through the whole of Colloquial Japanese, in a very active way (flashcarding and/or speaking the answers to the written exercises into my phone’s voice recorder and self-correcting them). I anticipate moving very fast through at least the first three quarters of the book, as it will be mainly consolidation.

I’ll also use Teach Yourself Japanese whenever I can fit it in.

I’ll continue to work with Assimil, and I’d like to have completed as far as least to Lesson 50 (that’s half way through the course).

In January, maybe I’ll be ready for a new phase: a lot more listening to authentic (non course-book) audio and maybe booking regular speaking practice sessions again…. Watch this space

If you’re a Japanese learner (or a teacher), let me know what you think of my approach so far. How is what you’re doing (or what you’d recommend to your students) different? What are your favourite materials? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

By the way, although John Fotheringham has now paused his Japanese Accelerator programme but if you’re beginning Japanese or are a more experienced learner wanting to get back into it, you should definitely check out his Master Japanese guide. I’ve partnered with him as an affiliate, so if you buy it with my link, it will benefit my work here at the site, at no extra cost to you. You can check out the offer here:

=> John Fotheringham’s Master Japanese

Here’s my August to October “Project Basic Japanese” update vid:

Related posts

For the most recent post on the project, check Update August 2021 to March 2022 (another one coming soon! Dr P, January 2023).

The post Japanese update: August to October appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

I started learning the language eighteen months ago in advance of my first visit to Japan (last October). In Japan, I certainly had a lot of “orientation” in the language, but didn’t say very much beyond the absolute basics.

The way I’ve been learning Japanese is in many ways typical of the approach I took to get fluent in Welsh, French, Russian and German: slow but steady conscious study, deliberate vocab building and a lot of listening practice.

As usual, I like have a focussed study slot, daily where possible. For Japanese in recent months it’s been thirty minutes a day at least five days a week.

Month 19: week-by-week log

I managed at least thirty minutes on twenty-six days of July.

Here’s the month’s breakdown:

Week 1 (Wednesday 1st July to Sunday 5th July): 1 hour, thirty minutes (missed two days).
Week 2 (Monday 6th July to Sunday 12 July): 4 hours, thirty minutes (studied every day).
Week 3 (Monday 13th July to Sunday 19th July):
3 hours, thirty minutes (missed three days).
Week 4 (Monday 20th July to Sunday 26th July): 7 hours, forty minutes (studied every day).
Week 5 (Monday 27th July to Friday 31st June): 2 hours (studied every day)

July 2020 Total: 19 hours, ten minutes over 26 days (so averaging about forty-four minutes a day, on those 26 days).

Running total (1st January 2019 to 31st July 2020): 299 hours, 30 minutes

When to start speaking Japanese?

I’ve just mentioned key components of my approach to language learning but I experiment with different approaches and methods as well.

One “moving part” has been how early I start speaking.

With Basque, I put a lot of emphasis on speaking from day one.

With Japanese, I’ve once again delayed speaking, which is a return to my previous approach. The reasoning was that I was spending a lot of time (and money) in the early years of my Basque journey, saying very basic things over and over again because I didn’t have enough vocab or patterns to do much more.

Why I started speaking Japanese in July

Towards the end of June I heard that my friend John Fotheringham of Language Mastery was running a new “Japanese Accelerator” programme for the month of July. The aim of the “Accelerator” was to get beginner to lower intermediate students of Japanese actually speaking the language.

I got to know John personally a couple of years ago (and then had him as a guest on the Howtogetfluent YouTube channel).

But before that I already know how big an expert he is on learning Japanese and how good his material is, as I’d been a regular reader of his blog and a podcast listener and I’d already bought his Japanese Mastery book.

So, I thought “why not now”? Let’s see how John runs this and spice things up a little in my Japanese journey.

The four “Japanese Accelerator” conversation challenges

In Week One our task was to work up a brief “self introduction” script and have a one-to-one session with a teacher. We were to use the session to have our self introduction corrected and to get the teacher to record it for us. Then we used the recording for practise before posting a recording in the Accelerator Facebook Group of us saying our spiel.

Here’s my attempt from my corrected script (full disclosure: it took about 40 takes for me to memorise it off to this level).

In Week Two we had to book another session with a different teacher.

Our task was to stay in Japanese for at least five minutes and to have a conversation based on our week one self introduction and using some high-frequency phrases to keep the conversation moving.

For this, John provided us with a list of high frequency “getting to know you” questions (e.g. What’s your name? おなめはなんですか; What is your hometown?　どちらのしょっしんですか; Where do you work?　どこではたらいていますか and so on), fillers　and connectors (e.g. that’s correct/right　そうそう ; of course もちろん; well　さあ)(I covered strategies like using fillers and connectors a few months ago in a post here on the site on how to sound more fluent).

In Week Three we had to book a further two sessions and have two 10 minute conversations. The challenge was to practising the same material and questions but using additional questions and phrases to talk to the tutors about their family and hobbies as well.

In Week Four we had to find three more tutors and have three ten minute+ conversations.

As well as repeating the basic self-introduction and questions about them, we had to prepare sentences on three topics in advance. One for each session. I chose two of my hobbies (gardening and, erm language learning) and the COVID-19 crisis (keep things cheerful, eh?).

In sessions two to six I stayed in Japanese for thirty minutes (some of the lessons were one-hour slots and I did switch to English for the last ten minutes or so sometimes).

I was at a very basic me-Tarzan, you-Jane sort of level but it was really exciting to get speaking for the first time.

It was useful to work up a number of mini “islands of fluency” (bespoke topics in which you feel confident to say something). It was great to “test drive” six different teachers. The idea of that was to find people you “clicked” with for the future. John encouraged us to find teachers of the same gender (because Japanese language is very gendered and you probably don’t want to end up sounding like a boy/girl if you’re not).

I was lucky with my teacher choices. They were all native speakers (not actually that important at this level), patient and encouraging and I could see myself working with any of them on an ongoing basis.

Without the Accelerator, I’d probably have continued building up my word and grammar pattern power for several more months.

From an efficiency perspective, that may also have made sense for somebody who’s highly motivated, good at efficient focussed study and who isn’t going to fall into the trap of postponing speaking just because of a reluctance to have a go.

I’m very glad I got started. The Accelerator injected some variety into my efforts. The weekly group Zoom calls with John and the other participants gave me a bit of “community” in my language learning. It was great, too to be really “doing Japanese”.

From now, I plan to continue include one-to-one practice sessions in my routine. More about that in a minute.

First, a quick look at what else went on on this project in July.

Focussed Japanese study with my usual course materials

My main course book is Japanese from Zero. It’s a five volume course and at the end of June I’d finished Lesson 11 (of 13) of Book Three. In July, due to work in the “Accelerator”, I put Japanese from Zero on hold and didn’t work with it at all.

My complementary course is Assimil’s Le japonais

In June I’d worked thoroughly through the first 37 lessons (of 98). I didn’t break any new ground in July but I did quite a bit of review of earlier lessons (and re-doing the exercises in my head). This action took place in bed (either on waking in a morning or last thing at night).

Pimsleur’s Conversational Japanese is a five-level, audio only course. In June I completed Level Four (of Five), Lessons 23 and 24 (of 30). I didn’t use the course at all in July. All my listening time on my thirty- to forty-minute daily runs and walks went on Basque. That’s great for my Basque but not at all ideal for Japanese.

I do intend to get back to Pimsleur Level Four, when I can fit it in. I’ve got Level Five lined up ready, too.

Since April, I’ve also been working with the original version of Teach Yourself Japanese (C J Dunn and S Yanada) (1958, reprinted 1971). It’s a dated course but useful if you like detailed explanations and lots of two-way translation exercises.

In July I worked through the whole of Lesson 17 (out of 30) and started Lesson 18.

Goals for August

In August, John invited Accelerator participants to enrol in his new ongoing Japanese Academy School which is an expansion of the “Accelerator” concept (and also replaces it).

I’ve joined with the intention of giving it a further go for a few months and that will mean more sessions speaking Japanese with a teacher coming right down the track.

I certainly felt that I got more out of the Accelerator thanks to my previous focussed study and I’ll be trying to juggle building out my word and pattern power in my usual focussed study slots with a new weekly “Japanese Academy” speaking challenge.

The Academy speaking challenges similar to those in the Accelerator but on different themes. The first, for August, is Japanese cuisine.

Watch this space to see how things go from here.

By the way, you can check out John’s Master Japanese guide. I’ve partnered with him as an affiliate, so if you buy it with my link, it will benefit my work here at the site, at no extra cost to you. You can check out the offer here:

=> John Fotheringham’s Master Japanese

Are you a beginning Japanese learner? Have you started speaking yet? If you’re an older hand, how soon did you start speaking? What were the challenges, what were the rewards? Let me know in the comments below!

And finally, for those of you who like your blogs as videos, here goes :

The post Learning Japanese: Month 19 update appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

I’m a firm believer in the power of habit in language learning and the core of my Japanese learning has been a thirty-minute focussed study slot (usually first thing in the morning).

Since I returned from my first trip to Japan last October, my goal has been at least one such slot, at least five days a week.

This is my third monthly update since London went into semi-lockdown due to COVID-19. For seven weeks, we were only allowed outside for limited reasons, such as to buy food and medicines. Mercifully, we were also allowed out for exercise once a day. Since mid-May, things have slackened somewhat and you are allowed out for exercise when you want, provided that you maintain social distancing. By the way, if you’re interested in some low-key slices of “lockdown life”, check out my “Coronavlog” series over on the YouTube channel

Month 17: week-by-week log

In May, as in April, I’ve not had to commute to the office (I usually work in another part of London three days a week).

Altogether, I managed at least a thirty minute focussed study slot on all but three days of May. That’s an average of just over forty-five minutes on each of the 28 days when I studied.

Not as impressive as my unbroken run in April, but still very satisfying.

I only really fell short of a full house because of the Polyglot Gathering. So, on 14th May, I’d managed 30 mins Basque but then got sucked into editing my interview with Gathering head honcho Peter Baláš. On 30th and 31st May it was the online event itself (post and vlog coming later) .

Here’s the month’s breakdown:

Week 1 (Friday 1st May to Sunday 3rd May): thirty, minutes (studied every day).
Week 2 (Monday 4th May to Sunday 10th May): 5 hours (studied every day except one).
Week 3 (Monday 11th May to Sunday 17th May):
5 hours, forty minutes (studied every day).
Week 4 (Monday 18th May to Sunday 24th May): 5 hours, 55 minutes (studied every day).
Week 5 (Monday 25th May to Sunday 31st May): 4 hours (studied every day except two).

May 2020 Total: 21 hours, five minutes over 28 days (so averaging about forty-five minutes a day, on those 28 days).

Running total (1st January 2019 to 31st May 2020): 263 hours.

My approach to Japanese

An early decision on this project was to postpone speaking and listening much longer than I’d done with Basque, my last serious new language (and one I’m still very much learning).

In the first weeks I learned Japanese’s phonetic katakana and hiragana writing systems. However, given the limited time I’m putting into Project Japanese, I’m no longer attempting a simultaneous head on assault at the Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese. These are essential to reading all real Japanese (except books aimed at younger children). They’re fascinating but they do take a lot of time to learn. All I’ll be doing for now are the eighty characters in my current main textbook.

Work with my core course: Japanese from Zero

I like to have one core resource to provide a roadmap and basic structure to my language self-study. This could be a printed textbook or an equivalent online course.

On this project, it’s the multi-volume Japanese from Zero book series. There are five volumes and I’m on Book Three, which is the first one to introduce some kanji. It has just eighty. There are 2,200 you need to know to graduate high school in Japan but, hey, I’ve got to start somewhere!

As reported in the previous Japanese learning update, by the end of April I had just started Lesson Ten of Japanese from Zero Book 3. All I did in May was to complete the lesson.

There wasn’t much new grammar in Lesson Ten. The focus was on how to use とき (when). There were some useful structural words: たくさん (a lot, many) and だけ (only), both of which I’d already met in the Pimsleur audio course (more on that below).

Back-up course: Assimil’s Le japonais

In May I kept using my “back-up course”, Assimil’s Le japonais, as well.

At the end of by the end of April I was in lesson 34.

In May’s focussed study sessions I revised lessons 15, 16 and 17, including making a dictation exercises on the dialogues from lesson 17 and 34. I moved on to cover lesson 35 for the first time (including doing another dictation).

Every seventh lesson in the book is a review lesson. It summarises the structures introduced in the previous six units and has some additional revision exercises. Lesson 36 was the latest of these and I covered it in May as well.

In April’s Japanese learning update I said that I wanted to get a “satellite slot” set up (a second, shorter focussed study period later on on the day). I failed to do that again but what I have been doing is carefully reading through an Assimil unit or two in bed, just after waking up and sometimes also just before putting my light out in the evening.

Audio only course: Pimsleur Japanese

I’m listening to the five-level Pimsleur audio-only course on my jogs round the local park.

Each level consists of thirty, thrity-minute lessons.

In April I’d started on Level Four.

By the end of May, I had played the first twenty-two lessons. I also did quite a bit of re-listening to earlier lessons in this level.

I can’t imagine myself learning Japanese from this course alone. I’m not saying it’d be impossible, but I prefer some direct instruction and to take my sound with dollops of written word.

Still, I’m a fan of the Pimsleur system: it’s great for preparing the ground and reinforcing what I’m learning in the courses where there’s much more explicit explanation and instruction and, of course, it’s great for pronunciation and the sound of the language.

Blast from the past: Teach Yourself Japanese (old edition)

In March, I acquired and made a start with a further course: a 1970s reprint of the 1958 version of Teach Yourself Japanese (C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada).

I made April I worked through the explanations and back and forth translation exercises in Lessons 3 to 10.

In May I continued devoting significant time to the course and covered lessons 11 to 14.

Lesson 11 was an extensive overview of the system of the Japanese counting system. As usual, the book gives it to you both barrels, stating that the topic is “of considerable complication and requires much sheer memory work.” There are then six pages of dense explanation.

This includes the traditional system of numbering years (according to the number of years since the Emperor came to the throne, when each “era” begins)).

There are extensive exercises to practise all the common “counter categories” used for counting different types of object (e.g. long and thin, round, ships, books, people…).

This would be totally overwhelming if I hadn’t already learned quite a lot about the basics of the system from Japanese from Zero.

I’d reiterate what I said about this course in the April Japanese learning update : if you’re an experienced language learner who likes explicit instruction and exercises, it’s great as a supplement to a more modern, user-friendly course (with audio).

Goals for June

It’ll be more of the same for me and Japanese in June. I’m still fired with energy and finding the language fascinating. I appreciate the reinforcement of running several courses in parallel, even though it means I’m moving through each relatively slowly.

The speaking will come…but there’s no rush. I don’t want to repeat what I did with Basque: tens of lessons one-to-one online when I was still only able to say the most basic things. With Japanese, I’d prefer to keep building the mental scaffolding of the language inside my head, learn more words and phrases and listen to them with my Assimil and Pimsleur course audio.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback on this Japanese learning update and the project overall. If you’re learning Japanese too, or you’ve already got fluent, I’d love to hear how you did it and what it means to you.

The post Learning Japanese: Month 17 update appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Before my first trip to Japan (last October), I aimed to dedicate thirty-minutes to focussed Japanese study. That reflects the importance I attach to consistency and habit in my language learning and how I use shortish “slots” to anchor it in my busy life.

Since I returned from the trip, I’ve dropped the goal to thirty minutes, five days a week.

In my last monthly Japanese update post, I brought things up-to-date till the end of March.

By that stage, the UK was already two weeks into the COVID-19 semi-lockdown (and I’d already been working from home for a week).

As a result of the “lockdown”, I’ve gained about two hours a day on the three days a week when I normally commute from my part of London into the office.

Month 16: week-by-week log

In April, maybe energised by the gain of time (not to say energy) of my commute-free life, I powered ahead with the regular study. I managed to study every day and actually averaged at 48 minutes a day.

Here’s the April breakdown:

Week 1 (Wednesday 1st April to Sunday 5th April): 2 hours, 40 minutes (studied every day).
Week 2 (Monday 6th April to Sunday 12th April): 2 hours, 50 minutes (studied every day).
Week 3 (Monday 13th April to Sunday 19th April):
6 hours (studied every day).
Week 4 (Monday 20th April to Sunday 26th April): 8 hour, 50 minutes (studied every day).
Week 5 (Monday 27h April to Thursday 30th May): 5 hours (studied every day)

April 2020 Total: 24 hours, twenty minutes over 30 days (so averaging about 48 minutes a day).

Running total (1st January 2019 to 30th April 2020): 243 hours, 10 mins.

My approach to Japanese

It took several months last year for my approach to “settle down”. An early decision was to postpone speaking and listening much longer than I’d done with Basque, my last serious new language (which I’m still working on very actively, as an intermediate learner).

I quickly learned the phonetic katakana and hiragana writing systems using Heisig’s Remembering the Kana. These two alphabets are combined in written Japanese with the kanji (Chinese characters). A typical sentence might contain all three: kanji for the core noun or verb, hiragana for Japanese grammatical endings (of which there are none in Chinese) and other Japanese aspects such as particles. Katakana for loan words from languages other than Chinese (mainly a huge number of English loans).

There are 2,200 characters that you’d need to know as a native Japanese kid graduating high school. Learning them is doable but still a tall order. In the early months, I was trying to combine covering the basic Japanese structures and core vocab from a textbook with learning the kanji characters.

However, given the limited time I’m putting into the project, I paused learning the characters, except the limited number (eighty) that are introduced in my current core textbook, Japanese from Zero 3.

Using Japanese from Zero

If you’re starting a new language through self-stduy, I really recommend having one core resource, be it a printed textbook or an equivalent online course.

For me, that’s Japanese from Zero, which is a five-volume series that teaches the three writing systems progressively.

I’m on Book Three, which introduces those first eighty kanji (as well as serving up more vocab and grammar patterns).

The series has its weaknesses (not least fiddly on-line audio) but a major plus is that it’s very conversationally based, with loads of simple, everyday examples and a good range of self-correct exercises.

At the end of March I had just started Japanese from Zero 3, Lesson Nine.

I finished that Lesson on 28th April and in the last few days of the month, started the kanji section of Lesson Ten.

The main new structure in Lesson Nine was the -ていform of the verbs (the “want to” form). This ending turns, say, to eat たべます　into　to want to eat たべたい.

Something else introduced for the first time いじよう – or above (as in “one hundred people or more”; “1000 dollars or above”) and いが – or below (as in one hundred people or fewer).

Dictation exercises: Assimil’s Le japonais

In April, as in February and March, I’ve been spending a lot more time using my “back-up course”, Assimil’s Le japonais.

As reported in my previous monthly Japanese update, by the end of March, I’d reached Unit Thirty. By the end of April, I was in Unit Thirty-Four. I also doubled back and did dictation exercises with the MP3 audio from some of the earlier lessons. I always check my results against the transcript and use the parallel translation (in French) to unlock what I don’t understand.

The course offers a “natural” French version and a word-for-word one. It’s the word-for-word translation that I’m finding of most help as the way the same “idea” is expressed in Japanese differs so much from French (or English).

Pimsleur Japanese on in the park

I originally started to use the Pimsleur audio course because I didn’t like the very “clicky” audio interface on the Japanese from Zero (Yes Japan) website.

During April I reviewed many of the lessons in Pimsleur Level Three and started on Level Four. All levels consist of thirty, thrity-minute lessons. The idea is that you should study one a day.

I don’t sit down in the proverbial darkened room to give Pimsleur my full attention, though. I just have in on through the earbuds when jogging (thirty minutes or so three times a week).

Pimsleur introduced the -てい form of the verbs back in Level Two, so I’ve heard it a lot since then. That really helped to “prepare the ground” for the latest unit in Japanese from Zero.

This works the other way, two. For example, one new Pimsleur lesson taught “いじよう” (- or above) a few days after I’d covered it in Japanese from Zero. The flash of recognition – and the repetition – is great for getting this vocab into my long term memory.

Working with Teach Yourself Japanese

As mentioned in my last monthly Japanese update, I bought a 1970s reprint of the 1958 version of “Teach Yourself Japanese”.

It’s a classic grammar-translation textbook split into thirty lessons, each with lots of translation exercises (a set into English and a different set into Japanese).

I think this book would be very difficult for most people to work at from scratch. It throws a lot at you in each unit and the explanations are sometimes pretty complicated. That said, it’s good for someone like me who has an interest in the “nuts and bolts” of language and who has already covered the material (at least at the point in the course I’ve reached to date).

I’ve been advised to treat this old Teach Yourself book with care, as the language presented is quite “stilted”. While that’s a point I need to be very aware of, to be honest, I’d be thrilled to speak even stilted, unnatural Japanese at this stage That said, my main courses, and all my audio, is modern, conversational Japanese, so I don’t think I’ll end up speaking like a 1950s gramophone record.

The main value for the course for me is in forcing me to review the main structures and core vocab and as a work offering a further set of explanations and covering “the whole” language in a condensed, portable form.

Goals for May

For May, it’ll be more of the same. I’ll stick with the goal of thirty minutes a day, five days a week.

At the beginning of April, I said I wanted to have a second, thirty minute “satellite slot”. That only happened on a handful of days. On the many days when I did more than thirty minutes, it was usually in one sitting. I often switched courses half way, though. In my defence, most days I was also doing thirty minutes Basque…but I’ll report back on that in a (long overdue) separate post.

I hope this update on my undramatic, plodding moves with Japanese will have inspired others of you in your language learning journey. If you’re studying Japanese, how is it going? Does your approach differ? As always, I love to get comments and suggestions from Japanese enthusiasts (students and teachers). Don’t be shy!

A new format for the next monthly update

Between February 2018 and March 2020, I posted an article once a week here on the site, without fail. If you’re a regular here you may have noticed that I’ve slackened the pace since mid March. After two years’ disciplined writing and sharing, it’s time free things up a bit. That will give me some time to polish some of the content that’s already on the site and to continue to develop my own course offer.

As part of the new pattern on the blog, I’ll be starting each month with a “Language Learner’s Update” when I’ll be looking forward and back at what’s going on with all my languages. As I’m only actively learning Japanese and Basque at the moment, they will be centre stage. I’ll continue to post the monthly Japanese update on YouTube and embed it in the blog post. Thanks as always for your interest and support and I hope you find (at least some) of my output as helpful as I find it stimulating to share.

The post Learning Japanese: Month 16 update appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

My learning Japanese study routine and approach

Since I began Japanese, the routine has been thirty minutes focussed study daily,. I’ve aimed to do this at least five days a week.

As to approach, I have been holding off speaking and listening as I seek to get a grasp of the sounds of the language, the basic structures and a core vocabulary first.

This is a rather different from my way into the last language I began in earnest: Basque. When I started with that, I went more for “speak from Day One”. I’m still actively engaged with Basque too: mainly weekly conversation practice and native-level talk radio, but more on that another time.

If you’ve been following the Japanese project, you’ll know that I’m using the Japanese from Zero textbook to provide structure and pace to my efforts and I that I also have a secondary course book: the Assimil book Le Japonais.

Study breakdown: Months 10 to 15

Before I hit the road for Asia in the middle of month nine (September 2020), I had clocked 166 hours and thirty five minutes working with these two books (overwhelmingly Japanese from Zero).

Here’s an update of the amount of focussed study I’ve done since then:

October 2019: on the road. No study.
November 2019: studied on 11 days. Total: 5 hours fifty-five minutes.
December 2019: studied on 16 days. Total: 8 hours, fifteen minutes.
January 2020: studied on 22 days. Total: 15 hours and five minutes.
February 2020: studied on 19 days. Total: 10 hours, fifty-five minutes.
March 2020: studied on 23 days. 13 hours 45 minutes.

Running total (1st January 2019 to 27th March 2020): 220 hours, 40 mins

Working with Japanese from Zero

My original project goal was an active command of language in the first three volumes of the Japanese from Zero textbook. Before I went away in September, I’d nearly finished Lesson 3 of Book 3 (which contains thirteen lessons).

I didn’t get as far as hoped for two reasons.

First, when I got about halfway through the first Japanese from Zero book, I did some doubling-back to underpin my work.

Second, Book Three begins to teach the kanji, the “Chinese” characters, which are by far the most complex part of writing in Japanese. That really slows things down.

At the end of month fifteen (March 2020) I have just finished Japanese from Zero 3, Lesson Eight.

Since my distant last report, I’ve covered various new structures: reported speech using と (to say what somebody is thinking or sayiing), the ています form of the verbs (to express actions that are currently taking place or ongoing), some more new “counter” words and how various useful verbs are used. There are six new kanji in every lesson, so 48 so far (most of which I’d already met in Heisig (see below)).

A few months into the project, despite repeating some JFZ units, I felt that I simply wasn’t retaining enough of the material covered needed to spend more time actively doing spaced recall training using home-made flash cards of words and phrases from Japanese from Zero. I found flashcarding hugely helpful to get me “into orbit” with Welsh, French, Russian and German. I hadn’t used the method for Basque at all though.

I’m using cardboard cards (rather than an electronic equivalent such as Anki or Quizlet).

So far, I’ve only flashcarded the whole of Japanese from Zero One. Making flashcards takes time (not included in any of my Japanese hour totals, above).

Just like before my trip to Japan, I’ve been reviewing the flashcards on the underground train when I commute to the office. I haven’t included any of that time in the totals above.

It’s the second week of coronavirus semi lockdown in London as I write this. No more commute time for now!

Spending more time with Assimil’s Le japonais

In February and March, I’ve been spending a lot more time using Assimil’s Le japonais. That’s another thing that’s slowed down my progress with Japanese from Zero.

By the end of Month 8, I’d already done a light work through the first twenty or so of the one hundred Assimil lessons and done some flashcarding of phrases from the earlier units.

Now I am on lesson thirty.

As to how I’m using the course, I’ve recently been focussing mainly doing dictation exercises with the MP3 audio from each new lesson and then checking against the transcript. Plus, I use the parallel translation into French to unlock the Japanese that I don’t understand.

Assimil obviously mainly introduces more of less the high-frequency words and structures covered in Japanese from Zero. It does so, of course, in a different order and from a different angle. That helps prepare the ground for JFZ (when I hit the material in Assimil first) or reinforce the material (if I come across it in JFZ first).

On the run with the Pimsleur Japanese audio course

I originally started to use the Pimsleur audio course because the Japanese from Zero books don’t come with audio. There’s some for free on the series website (YesJapan) but I didn’t like the interface.

Each Pimsleur lesson is thirty minutes. Following a short conversation, it’s prompt and respond. For maximum effect, you’re supposed to do one lesson a day. Each “level” has thirty lessons and there are five levels. I started with the second half of Level One. Since then I’ve completed Level Two and Level Three. I’ve listened to many of the lessons several times.

I haven’t been sitting down for thirty focussed minutes listening, though.

Instead, I have the course on through the earbuds when jogging. That’s thirty minutes or so, two or three times a week. I also listen on the walk to and from the underground station when I’m commuting to the office. That’s maybe an hour’s listening time in total in a week). I haven’t included this exposure in the study totals above.

I’ve bought Pimsleur Level Four, but I haven’t started it yet.

Another “new” Japanese course

There’s a real risk that having too many materials can dilute focus. In Japan I did buy some more language books mainly “out of interest” and for future use. None of these books are complete courses, though. Rather, they focus variously on vocab building, common phrases and patterns or innovative grammar presentations and several seem to me to be pretty cutting edge.

I’ve just bought another complete course though. It’s a British one and it’s far from cutting edge.

It’s a 1970s unrevised reprint of the first ever version of Teach Yourself Japanese, from 1958. It’s almost a pure grammar-translation textbook. It doesn’t teach Japanese writing at all, with everything transliterated. There are thirty chapters of grammar explanations and two-way translation exercises with answers. In a concession to conversation, though, there are twelve conversation transcripts (including parallel translations) at the back. There’s no audio (though Linguaphone did publish records for the course back in the day).

Unlike my other two course books, this one has an index (wow!) so it’s great for reference when I need a little more explanation and that’s how I’ve mainly been using it so far.

I’d like to do more with it, though….

The writing question

If you’ve been following the project, you may recall that I was initially learning the kanji characters from James Heisig’s classic book Remembering the Kanji. All of the 2,200 that Japanese children need to know to graduate from high school are included in the book. I put that project on hold at the end of month five. By that stage, I’d done a “quick and dirty” on 200 of the characters.

The reason for the pause was making a priority of learning core words, phrases and patterns in the thirty minutes a day that I was setting aside.

My plan for 2020 was to hit the kanji big time. That only lasted a couple of weeks in January, simply because I’ve keep the thirty minutes a day study slot so the previous time/ambition tension remained unresolved (doh!).

Given my current short slots, I’ve decided to stay with my priorities of focussing on the core vocab and getting a map of the patterns of the language into my head.

The only kanji I’ll be learning for the rest of this year are the ones from JFZ3 (eighty characters) and JFZ4 (if I move onto that book).

Goals for April

I’m now resuming monthly updates here on the site, so I need to get you guys keeping me accountable.

For April, my goal is simply to continue on my current track. I want to maintain my thirty minutes a day, five days a week focussed study slot as a minimum.

I’ll continue to work with Japanese from Zero. That’s to say, I’ll be moving slowly forward through Book 3 but also keep reviewing the flashcards for Book 1. I also want to create and begin reviewing flashcards for as much of Book 2 as I can.

There’ll be more dictation exercises with Assimil and some flashcarding of the content there as well.

I’m going to try and set aside a second half hour “satellite slot” to replace my lost commute (when I used to review flashcards).

I’ve listened a second (and even third) time to a lot of Pimsleur Level 3 a lot, so it’s time to move into Level 4 on my runs (so long as we are permitted to leave the house). T

Finally, I’d like to work through some of the early lessons of the old Teach Yourself Japanese for some old school explicit instruction and some two-way translation practice.

That then is that plan. Now: over to you! If you’re a self study Japanese learner, how’s it going? Are you doing things differently? If you’ve already learned how did YOU get fluent? Did you use different books, no books at all, did you take classes? We’d all love to hear in the comments below!

Here’s my video update:

Latest update

I’m still learning Japanese – February ’21 was month 26. Here’s a link to the latest update”

March 2021 – update November to March

The post Learning Japanese: Month 15 update appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

My Japanese study routine took place in a daily study slot of a modest thirty minutes, seven days a week. Over nine months, January to September, that would have meant a total of about 130 hours. My actual total to the end of month nine was 166 hours. While I missed some days, I managed broadly to maintain the routine. I hit the monthly time target through to the end of August. I did less in September as the demands of the day job cranked up. That culminated in the third week of the month, when I was delivering training to colleagues in Singapore. The following week I was doing the same in Hong Kong.

Then, whoooooosh, I was in Fukuoka.

Here’s how it went with the language.

Initial overwhelm and first attempts to speak

Even on boarding the aeroplane in Hong Kong heading out for my first visit to Japan there were snippets of spoken Japanese coming over the loudspeaker that I could catch. Nothing amounting to fully comprehended sentences, but things like loan words and the familiar particles (used very frequently in the language) and some of the verb endings.

I landed at Fukuoka airport from Japan and my first task was to get from the airport to the centre of town and find the hotel. This involved taking the transit bus to the other terminal and then the underground to Tenjin and then a walk to the hotel.

It was a good thing at this initial stage that instructions were available in English as my initial reaction was a feeling of total linguistic overwhelm.

When I arrived in Tenjin station in the centre of Fukuoka, I found a team of volunteer helpers out to assist the flood of foreign visitors who were in Japan for the Rugby World Cup. They gave me a map and pointed out where my hotel (probably) was. At this stage I didn’t have any phone as my UK provider only had a very expensive roaming option. As a result, it took me about 40 minutes to locate the hotel, even though it was only about a five minute walk from the station.

I couldn’t muster the linguistic wherewithal to ask for directions, though as the hotel was on the upper floors of a building set back from a side street and part of a co-working space with no signs indicating its presence, asking probably wouldn’t have helped.

At check in, I used my first small amounts of Japanese with the young woman on reception, which felt good, and she used some broken and limited English, too.

In Japan, you won’t be short of opportunities to speak Japanese (!)

My linguistic experience checking in on day one turned to be quite typical. Even in hotel receptions and other “touristy” locations most of the staff, even young ones, either spoke no English or spoke very limited amounts of the language.

That’s great if you’re keen to use your Japanese. Even if you have only a small amount of the language, you won’t feel pushed back into English, as can happen often when, for example, you’re trying to speak Dutch in the Netherlands or German in Germany.

Gradual lifting of the linguistic fog

For the first few days, it was as if I’d forgotten all but a few words and phrases that I’d worked hard on as a Japanese learner.

It took several days for the “linguistic fog” to lift a little for me and for a few more to bubble up.

I was then able to use my minimal Japanese to maximum effect for simple transactions such as shopping for groceries or, buying museum tickets.

There were lots of opportunities to practise the numbers.

I took a cab once (in Hiroshima) and also managed to explain to the driver that I wanted to go to the station.

At a Japanese/English language exchange

The one opportunity I got to have lengthier exchanges was at an English-Japanese meet-up in Fukuoka the night before the Conference opening.

This was a regular meet on Meetup.com that Dave, a fellow Conference attendee and Japanese learner, had found out about and publicised in the Conference Facebook Group.

It was quite noisy but I sitting with two Japanese regulars at the meet-up who were very patient listening to me explaining my name, where I was from, that I was in Japan for the first time….and answering my similar questions to them.

Tourism v language learning

I could have created more such “artificial” opportunities to speak. I could, for example, have arranged one-to-one exchanges or lessons in local cafés or online.

This would have been at the expense of the limited amount of time I already had for sightseeing, though and that just didn’t feel like a good trade off, given that my level is so low that the conversations would have been very basis and repetitive.

The thing is, I can create these opportunities at home later on, while it may be a long time before I get a second twenty-three hours in Kyoto or a repeat four days in Tokyo.

You can’t use what you haven’t got

Overall, although I had enough Japanese to lubricate basic transactions like buying groceries or taking a taxi, I couldn’t actively deploy a lot of what I’d supposedly covered in the Japanese from Zero course books.

In the launch post in January I wrote: “It would be wonderful – and not mean achievement – to have a firm, active command of the language presented in the first three books of Japanese from Zero.”

In practice, I only got to chapter four of book three and don’t yet have that “firm, active command” of the material up to there.

I couldn’t remember words and phrases, even some of the stock “toolkit phrases” that I like to use to help me learn through the language (“could you repeat that please”, “please speak more slowly” etc).

I couldn’t remember some of the basic grammatical patterns either (such as how to construct negative adjectives in the past or present or the past forms of the informal verb conjugations).

This really was just confirmation of what I’d started to realise towards the end of the project: that I’d become too fixated on trying to keep up the pace working through the textbooks and not spent enough time focussed on vocabulary building and on spaced recall of material that I’d already covered.

That was something that I’d started to correct in the last few weeks before I hit the road as I reported at the end of August. I pivoted to more work on flashcarding vocab from the Japanese from Zero and my toolkit phrases but it was late in the day for this.

I don’t regret not having done speaking practice earlier. For early speaking practice to have made a real difference, I think I would have needed a lot of it.

For me, from January to August, it made sense to stay in the “silent period”.

Expectations, managed

I wasn’t discouraged in the slightest by my very limited linguistic achievements on the trip because I had realistically low expectations.

I was under no illusions in January about the scale of the task ahead.

First, Japanese is a very different from English or any other language that I’ve learned before. It has no close relatives but you do have some advantages if you’ve already learned Chinese (writing system, loan words) or another Asian language influenced by Chinese).

“My goal for my first visit to Japan is to be able to function at a pretty basic level in the language. I mean getting around on public transport or in taxis, ordering food at restaurants, shopping, visiting sights.”

Learning any new language takes time. In January, I pointed out that my plan was for about 130 hours study. I actually managed 1st January to 30th September): 166 hours 35 minutes (1st January to 30th October) but this is still well under half the 450 to 750 hours usually required to pass the easiest the JLPT N5 exam Japanese Language Proficiency Test (450 to 750 hours).

To start to understand a new language, you need to be on top of a lot of high frequency words and phrases and to have had a lot of listening practice.

As neither was true in my case, I not at all surprised that I couldn’t understand very much of the flood of language that I heard around me when out and about in Japanese cities.

I wasn’t disappointed at the absence of miracles, because I wasn’t expecting any. At the same time, I know I’ll be able to get fluent in Japanese in good time, because I’ve done it for other languages.

Learning Japanese “wins” from the trip

Although I regret not having done more flashcarding, I don’t feel that the 166 pre-Japan hours were wasted.

I gave focussed, interactive attention to Japanese from Zero, a course which is rich in simple, realistic dialogues and related exercises.

I am expecting to find as I review with the aim of internalising and activating the material better, my previous thorough first-time coverage will stand me in good stead.

The work I’d done meant that I could used basic Japanese. This really helped lubricate encounters in shops, cabs and at the language exchange. It showed me that the language “is real” and “works”.

I was really glad of the thorough work I did learning the kana (Japanese phonetic letters each of which represents a syllable). That was thanks to James Heisig’s brilliant little book “Remembering the Kana” and then to way Japanese from Zero, introduces the kana gradually in the first two volumes.

Once on the ground I immediately found myself trying to decipher as many kana signs. While it will take more practice to be able to read off the kana as if they were Latin or Russian letters, I was certainly up and running.

Although I put my work on the kanji (the “Chinese” characters in which a lot of Japanese is written) on hold about half way through the project I was able to recognise some of those that I’d learned.

I now understand the system, so even though I can’t understand very much, the kanji didn’t feel to me like a set of random squiggles any more more like an enticing system to be explored and a challenge to master.

Next steps: Japanese from Zero – “I’ve stated, so I’ll finish”

My first visit to Japan really brought the language and culture to life for me and I certainly want to carry on learning Japanese and that’s what I’ll be doing, beginning this week (second week of November).

The core of my efforts will remain the “thirty minute focussed study slot”. I’ll be dropping from seven to five days a week, though, as other priorities jostle in the pre Christmas period.

I’ll be sticking with Japanese from Zero Book 3, resuming work in lesson three at the point I left off in September.

The course is a mixed bag. For me, it’s a case of I started….so I’ll finish…. at least until the end of book three (there are four in all). After all, every textbook has its strong and weak points. I think it’s a mistake jump from one resource to the next in search of the perfect course. Far better to make more effective use of what you’ve already begun with.

That said, When touring the bookshops of Fukuoka and Tokyo I found a large range of enticing learning Japanese materials. Yes, I did succumb to the temptation to buy some new learning Japanese books but they’ll be “supplementary”, for next year, rather than replacements for JFZ. Look out for a “book haul” vid on the YouTube channel before too long….

As I keep moving through Japanese from Zero, I will also continue flashcarding the earlier lessons (and the first two books) to learn items of vocab, phrases and the grammar patterns.

Continuing with Pimsleur Japanese and the Assimil book

Before I went to Japan, I completed the Pimsleur Level 2 audio course. I have now acquired Level 3, so I will begin to work on that as well. I’ll mainly be listening when jogging or on my three-times-a-week commute to the office.

I will also continue to work slowly through Assimil’s Le Japonais. I’ve already looked at the first twenty-four lessons (of ninety-eight) and want to revise them and maybe do a few more.

Limbering up with the kanji again

I’m going to start working on the kanji again, using Remembering the Kanji. The focus between now and the end of the year will be reviewing the 206 that I have covered so far (to the end of Heisig, Lesson Nine) plus any new kanji introduced in JFZ Book Three that are not included in that 206. This will put get me back in the swing for a bigger push with the kanji next year.

Look out for the next update

Enough writing….Back to some Japanese learning…and video editing. In addition to my on-going “Asia Diaries” vlogs of the trip (in Russian, German and Basque), I’ve got vlogs from the Polyglot Conference in the pipelines, including some tips from experienced teachers and learners on aspects of learning Japanese.

My next Japanese update will be at the end of November/early December (a review of “month eleven”). Look out for that and, in the meantime, if you have questions or suggestions or are a fellow Japanese learner and have recent experiences to share, don’t be shy; the comments section is down below

The post Learning Japanese: back from Japan appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

Boxy taxis

In Japan, they drive on the right side of the road (that’s “right” as opposed to “wrong” ) and it was reassuring for me as a Brit to be able to climb into a right-hand drive taxi. It was great too to see that most of the taxis are angular Toyotas. I’m a 1980s throw-back too, after all, and they remind me of my car-mad teenage years.

Cab-wise not everything was familiar, though. The taxi drivers often wear uniforms, including white gloves. For some reason, it is derigueur for cab seats to be covered in a lace-style cotton covers.

Multi-storey, but not as I know it 

As you’ll discover the minute you try to book a hotel room or AirBnB, space is at a premium in Japan. This seems to extend to parking.

Here’s what appears to be a multi-story garage in Fukuoka. 

What, though, is this?  

Beware of the bikes

At the bottom end of the transport food chain, Japan’s culture reminds me of Germany’s. Pedestrians like to stand at the “red man”, even if there is no traffic in sight. 

Both Japan and Germany set store by convention and safety on the roads, except when it comes to cycling. 

It kind of added to the frisson of my trip to know that I could be dispatched to the next life at any moment by a cyclist moving at top speed on the pavement, without lights.  

Oh, and, talking of the risk of death, like Germany, the Japanese have a blank spot when it comes to the dangers of power points in the bathroom.  

How come Germans and Japanese aren’t regularly electrocuted as they dry their hair while standing in a half-filled bath tub? 

To that, another electifying question: how come I wasn’t singed at the nether extremeties during three weeks of plugging in unearthed, two-pin electric plugs and pulling them out again?

Great to be back in Singapore with it’s solid “British style” three pin plugs. Who could ever doubt the legacy of the British Empire’s civilising mission?  

Top notch public transport

After the usual panic the first time you have to work out a new system, the underground train networks in Fukuoka, Kyoto and Tokyo turned out to be very easy to use. 

The ticket machines offered a choice of English and several Asian languages. The stations on each line are all numbered and colour-coded as well, which helped.  

The machines take most coins and notes and give change. 

The trains were frequent and (even in Tokyo) not as crowded as London’s.

One potential source of confusion in Tokyo was the difference between the underground, the JR national rail services and other, local private rail networks. 

When you arrive by bullet train, you’re still on the rail station and need to go through the gate and enter the metro. 

It’s always that way at home, too, but, with such labyrinthine transport hubs, thronging with people at all hours, I got confused several times. 

For me, entering and leaving the JR station part of each complex (once I’d found it) was a matter of flashing the one-week Japan Rail Pass that I’d bought in the UK in advance of the trip. 

Once this was “activated” it entitled me to unlimited use of most bullet trains, the JR lines in Tokyo (including the most useful Yamanote “circle” line that runs around the centre of town) and the monorail out to the airport at the end of my stay. 

Taking the bullet

I took three of Japan’s famous high-speed trains: Fukuoka to Hiroshima, Hiroshima to Kyoto and Kyoto to Tokyo. 

Even if you have a Japan Rail Pass, it’s recommended that you reserve a seat in advance for the “shinkanshen” as the bullet trains are known (it means, rather prosaically “trunk line”). 

I went to activate my pass and make the reservations at Hakata Station (Fukuoka) three days before I was due to travel. It was already too late to get a guaranteed seat in for the first of my three trips. So, for that one, I had to slum it in a second class “unreserved” carriage, even though I had a “green” (first class) Japan Rail Pass. 

The first two legs by bullet were overrun with rugby fans. I got a seat in the unreserved carraige at Fukuoka, but people who got on at the next stop had to stand to Hiroshima.  The two England fans standing next to my seat never stopped talking (rugby-) “footbollocks” for the whole two hours. 

The best leg was Kyoto to Fukuoka. There were no rugby fans and it very quiet. One of my favourite things is an outbound inter-city rail journey after dark in almost deserted carriage.

I was surprised that none of the trains I travelled on had power points, earthed or not. That’s a serious matter if you want to do some sneaky vlog editing en route and your laptop is threating to give up the ghost. 

There wasn’t a buffet car in any of the trains either, only a refreshments trolly (so quick espressos for me en route).

Hi-tech toilets….low tech paper.

I’d heard about Japan’s toilet tech before I arrived but I was still pretty amazed when I first clapped eyes on these examples of “extreme civilisation”. 

First, they come with a control panel, though you don’t have to press anything before you sit down. 

When you do sit, it’s warm.  

There are various types of bidet-style spray systems which usually seem to involve a probe emerging in a slightly disconcerting way from under the rim at the back. You can often set the strength of the spray, and “full power” may explain why there were showers of water drops around some loos I visited.  

While Japanese toilets may be top notch, the toilet paper is, erm, shite.  

I only ever found one-ply. In the UK a robust two-ply paper is normal. In German, natürlich, you can buy three- and even (if my memory is not playing tricks on me) four-ply tissue.  

Plastic is king

Like many people in recent years, I have been very concerned about the amount of plastic waste we’re generating and how so much of it ends up in the sea, wrapped round turtles’ necks or inside fish. 

Japan is into plastic in an even bigger way than western Europe. The stuff is thrust at you on all occasions and from all directions.

At a convenience store you buy some buns in an outer plastic wrapper. They put the goods  in a plastic bag and slip in a little hand towel wrapped in plastic for you to wipe your fingers. 

You get the thing home and open it. The three buns are in a plastic tray and then also each wrapped in plastic.  

At least the plastic wrapping the manufactured snacks that I bought was easier to get into than the tough stuff covering my banana. 

After two weeks in Japan, I’ve given up all hopes of any conservation breakthroughs. We will, indeed, die in a sea of plastic and take most forms of marine life with us.  

There’s nothing to be done about it. So we might as well wrap, unwrap, disgard casually and be merry. 

I do luuuuuuurve plastic in any case.  It’s so amazingly useful.  

Eating on the hoof?

One a more serious note, I have heard that Japan has a very developed domestic recycling system and I was struck by the scarcity of public rubblish bins. 

Maybe this is partly because there are so many places to eat quite well, quickly and cheaply. At the kiosks and convenience store, there often a narrow counter (or glorified shelf) where you are supposed to stand and eat what you’ve bought. There’ll usually be a bin there too. 

Otherwise, I presume people take things home to eat or drink and dispose of the packaging there.  The Japanese don’t seem to snack on the move as we do in Britain. 

In the food market in Kyoto there were even signs saying “Don’t walk and eat”. 

On my last night in Tokyo, I bought a small plastic-wrapped rice thingy and a can of beer in the up-market Ginza district and after wondering for twenty minutes trying to find a park bench, I had to sneak down a side to for some surrupticious snacking. 

The only way I could get rid of the evidence afterwards was to stuff it into the bin for the paper towels in a gents’ loo.  

Public toilets are ubiquitous and clean in Japan, by the way.   

Yes, the convenience stores had a range of useful snacks that kept me going when I was out seeing the sights.  

I particularly liked the triangular rice numbers, though I never worked out how to unwrap them properly. 

The multi-layered packing, in lovely transparent plastic, has three places to pull to remove additional folds of plastic in stages from between the seaweed and the rice. I’ll have to check for instructions on YouTube. Somebody’s sure to have shot something about it.

The convenience stores were weak, to say the least, in the fruit and veg departments. After two weeks in Japan I’m now gagging for a salad. Yet given Japan’s record-breaking life-expectancy, is all this “eat your greens” stuff actually overdone in the west?  

You know from news footage that Japanese people like to wear masks to ward of the germs. 

I read somewhere that it’s better to sniff away than to sneeze (into a handkerchief). Tosh. I witnessed a lot of public sneezing.  All the more reason to wear a mask, I suppose. Have you ever tried that in glasses, though?  They’ll soon steam up.  I suppose in Japan you can buy spectacles that heat up to beat the condensation (just like the mirror in my Tokyo hotel room).  

I do wonder why convenience stores stock not only a wide range of masks but also a selection of his and hers underware.  Is this because your typical salaryman or woman works such long hours that there’s no time to do the laundry?  

Talking of corporate types, I often returned to my hotel about ten or eleven at night and there were always groups of (mainly men) in business attire on the streats heading for the stations. I presume they had spent the evening in enforced corporate socialising together.  

There were also a lot of teens in school uniform on the weekend which leads me to wonder: do they have weekends in Japan? 

Umbrella etiquette

My third day in Tokyo was a wash-out. I got soaked making my way over to the National Museum, my little telescopic umbrella not up to the job.  

The standard issue Japanese umbrella is a sturdier, see-through affair (plastic, of course).  

When you get to the threshold of a shop or public building, you are offered a one-use plastic bag into which to slide your brolly. 

One other fun thing I saw in one office block was something I’ve never seen before and don’t know the name of in any language. Let’s call it an “umbrella shaking screen”.  1) Enter building. 2) Fold down your umbrella without fastening shut.  3) Slide between walls of screen. 4) Shake vigorously.

Culinary delights

I wasn’t previously a great fan of Japan’s famous cuisine. I’d never choose to go for sushi or noodles back home. I had some fabulous food out here, though. One one of the first nights in Fukuoka I had this tofu which tasted divine.

It sometimes feels a little awkward when you enter a restaurant and request a table for one.  I know this because I do most of my travelling and exploring on my own. 

No loner embarrassment problem in Japan. The society seems set up for solos. Most places seem to have a “bar” style counter where you can sit in splendid isolation facing the wall, lost in your thoughts, your phone and your meal.  Just how I like it  

Don’t bother learning “menu Japanese”.

I don’t read much Japanese yet but I found that in the three large cities that I visited places very often either had a menu in English or there was in iPad on which you could order (with a language choice). Failing that, the plastic-laminated menus almost always have pictures of the dishes and to-scale models of the food are on display in the window.  These are made of…..plastic.

In Tokyo, I found a shop specialising in model food. The stuff is, it turns out, is much more expensive than the real thing.  

At a lot of popular fast food joints you choose and pay at a machine at the entrance. You then go to the counter with your ticket and wait for your order to be delivered.  

I had some great, quick meals this way. It wasn’t expensive, either. Maybe Y400 for a dish and the same (or less) for a beer (under £3/USD4).  

Finland, cubed.

While the emphasis on convention, order and quality gives Japan a “German” feel. Yet is Japan really the “eastern Finland”? 

Finns and Japanese share a reserved nature, not inclined to tell you what you should be doing or – even more alarmingly – what they are actually thinking, as the Germans are so disconcertingly inclided to do  

More than one I thought I heard people speaking Finnish but it was, of course, Japanese. I think it’s because of the “long” consonants vowels that are features of both languages. 

Then there’s the huge emphasis on simple, modern design that you find in the architecture, furniture and packaging. This time I mean paper packaging. Like the Finns, the Japs are very big on paper.    

Yep, it’s Finland. Finland on speed.  

Shop, till you drop

As a London resident I had no problem with Tokyo’s crowds and endless bustle. It was similar to what I’m used to in London but made less stressful by Japanese quietness, manners and superior publilc transport. This desipte the scale in Tokyo being even greater than in London.  The pinnacle was the  the amazing Shibuya “scamble junction” I visited on my last night in Tokyo. 

For the whole trip, I was surrounded by hyper-consumerism aimed at all pockets.  

This isn’t just a Japanese thing, of course, but it did seem to be particularly intense here. 

There’s another side, I know; a powerful counter narrative of simplicity, minimalism and conservation.

Like in the UK, there are also people sleeping rough in Japan, although I didn’t notice them begging on the streets.

Back to shopping: I generally buy very little beyond food and books. I was quite restrained this time and limited myself to a number of books for learners fo Japanese. 

These were beautifully wrapped for my by the store assistants.  Pity I didn’t realise till it was too late that you can claim a 10% sales tax back (you have to do it in store, you can’t at the airport).  

Have you been to Japan? What first impressions struck you? Were they similar to mine or quite different? I’d love to hear in the comments below. 

More on my trip to Japan here on the site before long and some thoughts on how I coped with the language.  

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