My target minimum focussed study time is half an hour of Japanese daily, seven days a week or, over nine months.

A “full house” total of 30 mins x 30 April days would be fifteen hours. My actual total was twenty hours and forty-five minutes.

Here’s how my learning Japanese study breaks down for month four:

Week 1 (Monday 1st April to Sunday 7th April): 3 hours, 50 minutes (every day YAY!).
Week 2 (Monday 8th April to Sunday 14th April): 5 hours, 35 minutes (one day missed).
Week 3 (Monday 15th April to Sunday 21st April): 5 hours, 45 minutes (every day YAY!).
Week 4 (Monday 22nd April to 28th April): 7 hours, 5 minutes (every day YAY!).
Week 5 (two day rump) (Monday 29th and Tuesday 30th April): 30 minutes (30th – missed).

Total: 20 hours 45 minutes (days) Running total: 83 hours 25 minutes.

My regularity was good. I only missed two days out of thirty, whereas in March I only managed twenty-one out of thirty one days.

All in all, I was pleased with how my focussed Japanese study habit shaped up in the fourth month of the year.

Main course: Japanese from Zero

At the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of being “on top” of the language taught in the first three volumes of the Japanese from Zero textbook series by the end of September.

I started to fall behind in March. I was supposed to finish JFZ Book One at the end of that month, but I didn’t do so until 9th April.

By a lucky coincidence, that was the day JFZ Book Two arrived in the post. I was so excited, I did my first “live” in the Howtogetfluent Language Learners’ Club Facebook Group.

Well, after all that excitement, it was down to work with JFZ 2.

To get back on target – and stay there – I would have needed to be at the end of lesson (chapter) four by the end of April.

Instead, I just finished the second lesson. So, I didn’t manage to make up any time (as I also hit Pimsleur this month – see below).

The first lesson of book 2 looks at the basic “existence verbs” いる (iru/to be – living things) and ある (aru/to be, inanimates) and revises the two tenses – present and past that we covered in Book 1. There’s some more about verb conjugation. In lesson two the focus was on prepositions; very useful!

JFZ book 1 taught the “hiragana” writing system. The second book gradually introduces the second syllabary, “katakana” (used mainly for loan words and foreign proper names). The two systems together are known as the “kana”. The “Chinese” characters, kanji, don’t appear until book three.

As you’ll know if you’ve been following these updates, I’ve already learned the kana using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kana. That said, I really benefitted from the reinforcement of the hiragana that came from JFZ1 and I’m looking forward to the same thing for the katakana thanks to JFZ2.

I didn’t use online Japanese from Zero (Yes Japan) audio in April. While the Book 1 materials are available free online, it’s USD8.99 a month for access to the other levels. I haven’t upgraded yet. I found the materials fun(ish) but I’m not really a funster when it comes to learning…(or much else ). I’ll maybe give it go in May.

Trying out the Pimsleur Japanese course

In March I joined my local library to get hold of Pimsleur Level One course. Part One A was loaned out so I took out the second part of Level 1 (Part One B, Level 1 Lessons 15 to 30) on some tatty CDs. That gathered dust on my shelf for several weeks as I awaited notification that my turn had come for Part One.

Then I called by the Library and was told that Part One A was missing. Hey ho!

Despite my nonchalance about the JFZ audio materials, I was, by mid April, crawling up the walls for want of some good audio.

I dived into the Pimsleur Part One B CDs.

I found the level ok, thanks to the work I’d already done with JFZ and Assimil.

Several of my polyglot friends are great fans of Pimsleur’s audio only approach. This is the first time I’ve tried a course and I’ve been really enjoying it so far.

Each lesson lasts just under thirty minutes and starts with a short exchange between a man and a women. The conversation is broken down. The narrator will briefly explains a new word or phrase. It’s not listen and repeat so much as listen and then respond to a prompt, including a lot of revision of language from earlier lessons. It thus gets you thinking and using the language you’ve just heard.

I’ll review the course in full at a later date but I just wanted to mention the use of “back chaining“. I’ve long been familiar this pro technique but never seen it in a course before. They get you constructing a word in reverse: ing….ing..ning…ning…aining….aining…chaining…chaining….chaining.

The theory of backchaining is that it’s best to start with the “landing point” at the end of the word. Plus, with each repetition you put the new element in the word first, where it’s harder to forget.

My plan is to continue to the end of Pimsleur Level 1 (i.e. finish the CDs in May and buy Level 2 (in digital format this time).

Assimil Le Japonais

Besides the Japanese from Zero books, I’m learning Japanese with the latest, French edition of Assimil’s Le japonais (earlier editions were called “Le japonais sans peine” (with ease, ohne Mühe). I did some physical flashcarding or the first three units in March.

I binged on Assimil when I was up at my dad’s place over Easter. I pushed through, rapid fire, to the end of Chapter 20, just reading and saying the answers to the exercises out loud. Just basic familiarisation with the material, really.

I really like the course and the only reason I haven’t done a lot more is my limited daily time allocation for Japanese.

I’ve noticed some things come up in Pimsleur that I’ve seen briefly in Assimil but not yet met and focussed on in JFZ. I think the cross-fertilisation across the three courses is helping me to notice and remember as I go.

Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji

James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji is my go-to book for the “kana” characters.

I only worked on the kanji twice in April and covered characters 185 to 200 in the book (there are 2,200 in total). As I said in the March update, learning the characters is a completely different form of activity than anything I’ve done before in language learning and I enjoy working on the characters when I get to it.

In April, though, any additional time I have for the project went on Pimsleur audio rather than Assimil or Heisig.

As I said in the March review, I’m holding off on attempts to speak until I’ve got more of a foundation and plan to start some live conversational practice only after I’ve completed book 2.

Goals for Month Five

First, I want to keep defending my daily thirty minute “learning Japanese” JFZ slot as other priorities jostle (writing my talk for the Polyglot Gathering, blogging and vlogging, keeping at my intermediate Basque and completing work on my upcoming B1 German mentored self-study course….Oh and my day job at the law firm, too).

I still expect to do occasional dips into Heisig and Assimil. I’ll complete Level 1 Pimsleur, return the tatty CDs to Brixton Library and equip myself with a shiny digital download of Level 2. That’ll be my audio input sorted for May.

Let’s see how it goes!

If you’re a beginning learning Japanese, what course or method are you using and why? If you’ve already got further with the language, do you have tips for me and other beginners? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Here’s this month’s video update:

Other posts in this series:

New Project: Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese: month 1 update

Learning Japanese: month 2 update

Learning Japanese: month 3 update

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

My target minimum focussed study time is half an hour a Japanese daily, seven days a week or, over nine months.

The month in figures: my Japanese study log

Thirty minutes a day for March would amount to fifteen and a half hours. My actual total was nineteen hours and forty minutes. I’m glad that I came in over quota. However, this was thanks to a strong first half of month.

Here’s how my study breaks down:

Week 1 (Friday 1st March to Sunday 10th March): 6 hours, 45 minutes (missed three days).
Week 2 (Monday 11th March to Sunday 17th March): 7 hours, 55 minutes (every day YAY!).
Week 3 (Monday 18th March to Sunday 24th March): 3 hours, 45 minutes (missed three days).
Week 4 (Monday 25th March to Sunday 31st March): 1 hour 45 minutes (missed four days).

Total: 19 hours 40 minutes (days) . Running total (3 months): 62 hours 40 minutes.

Before we get any further, in comparing my hours with February, I’ve noticed a really freaky thing. The days of the week of each date in March are the same as in February. Does this happen often? Anyone out there with the maths to tell me?

My regularity record for March was not so good. I studied on twenty-one days of the month’s thirty-one .

That’s my worst so far.

My excuses? The third week was a heavy one in the office. For the fourth week I travelled to Berlin where I was busy working on my upcoming German mentored course and attending a conference.

Time trade offs and technical woe time wasters

One morning in the beginnig of the month I spent a whole two hours trying to work out how to use make flashcards on the Anki spaced repetition app including not only kana (the two native Japanese writing systems) but also the kanji (Chinese characters) with the pronunciation written above in tiny kana (when the kana appear this way, they are called “furigana”.

I couldn’t solve the problem. I found various YouTube explanations but none helped me crack it for English on the front, Japanese with furigana on the back. I’ll have to go back to this. I am enjoying using Anki on my commute but it really isn’t a user-friendly app if you’re not a computer geek experienced in coding and are trying to do something none standard.

To spin that a positive way: it’s an app with a lot of custom functionality if you’re prepared to invest the time to understand it.

Invest the time, invest the time…. So much of learning in all spheres boils down to this. It’s always a trade-off, though, isn’t it?

Now I’m using anki to review Japanese vocab on the commute, I’m no longer doing twenty minutes or so of native-level German reading per day. Cue a “Quick Tip Tuesday” video:

Main textbook: Japanese from Zero 1

At the end of February I correctly surmised that I’d I have my work cut out to reach my target and finish book one in the four-book Japanese from Zero series. My goal by the end of September is to be in active command of the contents of the first three volumes.

In the end, I only got to the end of Lesson 11 of 12 with hardly any reviewing of previous chapters.

Lessons 8 and 9 were quite challenging covered dates and related festival and time expressions, days of the week and months of the year. Here and in Lesson 11, more counting systems were introduced. You have to learn the words for “one to ten” several times over in Japanese, for use depending on the object counted).

Lesson 10 was focussed on how to ask for things at a shop or in a restaurant, Lesson 12 introduced the (relatively simple, it seems) Japanese verb system with just four common verbs.

I’m doing a lot of the exercises on paper and finding that I sometimes need to check the stroke order of the hiragana. I do feel on top of the syllable assigned to each symbol, though. In Unit 10 the last step with the hiragana was introduced: compound hiragana.

These are all combinations of other hiragana ending in -i (consonant + i), followed by a shrunken hiragana for ya, yu, or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively). This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalisation) to a, u or o. So, き (ki) plus ゃ (small ya) gives us きゃ (kya).

Compound hiragana are, bizarrely, not covered in Heisig’s Remembering the Kana.

I’ve noticed that reading the hiragana is getting easier with practice, though don’t just hear the sound in my head without thinking yet when I see a symbol like I would with Latin or Cyrillic script.

The katakana forms are not taught actively in JFZ but they are included in the vocab lists next to the word in Latin letters (rōmanji). As I’ve worked through them already in Remembering the Kana, I am paying attention to words written in them and also writing them when they come up in the exercises. I’m still shaky on quite a few, though. I’m glad they are covered in detail in Japanese from Zero 2.

So, the month finished with one more Unit to cover and I am a long way from having properly internalised all the structures and vocabulary from all the units. I keep pressing on, though. My reviewing is inadequate at the moment but some of this is taken care of by the design of the book, as things covered earlier crop up in texts and exercises in subsequent chapters (though not nearly enough – that’s too much to ask from any textbook writer… The onus has to be on us, the learners to interact actively with the material.

Library woes…..Still no Pimsleur

A goal for March was to get hold of the first part of Pimsleur course at last (and maybe start listening to that when I’m out jogging, for example). I joined my local library expressly for this purpose and took out the second part of the course (part 1B) on some tatty CDs. Four weeks on, I’m still waiting for notification that the first CDs have become available, so I might either crack and just buy the MP2 downloads or dive straight into part 1B).

What about Assimil Le japonais?

At the end of February I said that I wanted to start working more systematically through Assimil’s Le japonais (“sans peine” as the earlier editions of the book were called). I have done some work from the early units and some physical flashcarding, but still not much.

Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji

At the end of last month I also said that I wanted to keep it more regular with Remembering the Kanji. In the end, though, I only worked on the kanji on three days this month. I do enjoy it when I get to it. It’s a completely different form of activity than anything I’ve done before in language learning.

Still no speaking

When I started Basque and Icelandic it was “speak from Day 1”. This time, I’m holding off having italki conversation practice sessions until much later, to compare approaches. My current plan is to splutter into life after I’ve completed JFZ book 2. That should be at the beginning of July.

Goals for Month Four: Sticking to the approach?

In an ideal world, I think I’d be doing ninety minutes a day with a 30/30/30 JFZ/Assimil/RTK focussed study routine, plus listening to Pimsleur on my jog or around the house (again, at the expense of the extensive Basque listening I’m doing at the moment).

In reality, given the other things I’ve got on, it’s still only thirty minutes a day. I see real advantages in a “second” or “third” take from Assimil and Pimsleur, though and I’ll be working with them in snatches, at least. The reality is though, with this time commitment, it’s mainly just Japanese from Zero. That’s ok because it gives system and direction to my momentum. At the time of writing, JFZ Book 2 is on order. In April I want to finish Book One and do the first four chapters of Book Two.

Any other beginner Japanese Students using JFZ out there? What do you think of the course? Are you using other materials that you prefer? Are you speaking from “day one” and are you learning the writing system as you go? Let me know in the comments below. (PS: I’ll add a video update on Tuesday).

Other posts in this series:

New Project: Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese: month 1 update

Learning Japanese: month 2 update

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