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So I haven’t written on language learning in a while. That doesn’t mean I’ve been doing nothing. In fact, I’ve been extremely focused. I put a halt on my SRS sentences. I put down the novel I was reading. I took a break from transcribing Fight Club. I stopped studying for the JLPT. I finally decided to buckle down and go through Heisig’s book Remembering the Kanji.

For those who don’t know, Heisig’s book offers a different approach to learning kanji (Chinese characters). The normal way to learn kanji is to learn a few at a time, writing each one over and over, learning the different readings, learning some words that contain those kanjis and drilling those words. This way works for millions of people (I’m including Japanese people since they do it this way in school) but it is slow as hell. And it’s boring. And it’s not terribly efficient, at least not for me, because in my experience I’m just as likely to forget a kanji I learned this way than remember.

So Heisig published a book, in the 70s I think, with a different approach. He says screw the readings and just learn the meanings first. He takes about 2000 kanji and assigns them each a unique English keyword. Then he puts them in the most efficient/brilliant order possible, so that each kanji you learn is built from kanji pieces that you’ve learned in the past. For example:

You won’t learn 張 until you’ve learned 弓 and 長. That way, when you do learn 張 (lengthen), you can use the keywords for 弓 (bow [and arrow]) and 長 (long) to help you construct a story/mnemonic device to help you remember the new kanji. You won’t learn 暫 (temporarily) until after you’ve learned 車 (car), 斤 (axe) and 日(day). But once you do learn car, axe and day, you can make up a little story involving cars, axes and days to relate to the keyword “temporarily”. And so on. It makes so much sense.

When you are done, you can’t read any of the kanji, but you know what they all mean. Kinda like a Chinese person would if they were to start learning Japanese.

Of course, I can read a lot of the kanji. I’ve been studying Japanese for years. That’s actually a reason I was reluctant to start this book in the first place, since it felt like “starting over” when I felt I had so much kanji knowledge under my belt already. That reluctance was completely misplaced, because going through this book was the single best thing I’ve ever done for my Japanese study (except maybe using an SRS).

It took me 3 months to finish the book. Now I can write 2042 kanjis from memory. And I know what they all mean. Couldn’t do that before. And if I had stuck to the old method for those 3 months, there is no way in hell I’d be at the same place I am now. And it’s giving me results. Sentences I used to miss consistently in my SRS I suddenly get right now. Words I’ve never seen before I can suddenly know what they mean by a combination of context plus knowing the Heisig keyword for the kanjis. I can write kanjis now. Before I could recognize many kanjis, but if I had to produce them on the spot, I was SOL. Now I can write them. All of them!

Just as a test, I read for a bit in Lion Boy (the young adult Fantasy novel I’m reading in Japanese) today to see if there was any difference. There was a HUGE difference. Before it would take me half an hour to an hour to trudge through 5 pages. I’d have to look up half the words in the dictionary. Sometimes I’d have to look up the same word twice because by the time I was finished looking up words for a sentence, I had forgotten an earlier word in the sentence. Juggling 5 new words in your head can be tricky if you let your concentration slip. Today, during my test, I read 5 pages in about 5 minutes. There were just as many words I didn’t know as before, but my knowledge of the meaning of the individual kanjis made up the extra distance I needed to know the word in context. Didn’t need the dictionary. That’s results.

Best thing I ever did for Japanese. If you are trying to learn Japanese, drop everything right now and go run through Remembering the Kanji.

When you finish you will have much, much power. You don’t have to do it alone either. There’s an awesome website called Reviewing the Kanji that has a whole community of Heisigers and you can borrow their stories/mnemonic devices. Highly recommended.

So now that I’m done with Heisig, what’s next? Well, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test is this December. I’m aiming for level 2 (the second highest level). I bought a kanji/vocab study book for the JLPT2 (Unicom series if anyone cares) and breezed through it in about a week (thanks Heisig). Now I’m working through the JLPT grammar book (which sadly won’t be as quick). I’m going to put most of my study focus into the JLPT and watch J-Dramas/read Lion Boy part-time.

If you’ve been paying close attention, then you know that I have an infant son. You may also know that I have a Japanese wife. Since my parents speak English, and my wife’s parents speak Japanese, our son will need to know both languages if he is going to be able to communicate with both sides of his family. So, my wife and I are doing our best to bring our son up to speak English and Japanese.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but the other day it suddenly hit me that I can write about it on this blog (a big duh moment for me). So, I’ve added a new “Multilingual Parenting” category to the blog and from time to time I will post about my experiences trying to raise my son to be multilingual.

Why “multilingual” and not “bilingual”? That’s the fun part. In addition to English and Japanese, I’m going to expose my son to as much Swedish as I possibly can. You may remember that I’ve been learning Swedish children’s songs. There was a reason for that beyond my own personal love for “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. I wanted to be able to sing to my son in Swedish!

But Thomas, how can you raise your son to speak Swedish if you don’t speak Swedish yourself? That’s the fun part. It’s a no-pressure experiment and I get to learn Swedish along the way! If you think about it, when we communicate with a 9 month old child, we don’t need to say very complex things. Conversations are one-way and consist of sentences like this:

Look at the flower.
This is a monkey.
Let’s eat some carrots. Open your mouth.
What a big boy you are!

With a little preparation, I think I can pull this off in Swedish. :)

And so it begins! I look forward to seeing how little Noah will progress. I know I’ll have some fun stories to share and hopefully I can hit some language topics that are a little out of the ordinary. Do you know how to play “peek-a-boo” in Japanese or Swedish? I had fun learning how and I’ll teach it to you in a future post.

Will keep you up to date!

Can’t figure out how to type “¿Dónde está el baño?” on your keyboard? If you use Windows Vista, this article will tell you how to setup a Spanish keyboard so that you can type all those characters that aren’t standard on your keyboard. Users of older versions of Windows (XP, 2000, etc) won’t be able to use the directions exactly, but you should be able to get a general idea of how to setup a Spanish keyboard.

First open up your Control Panel. The Control Panel can be found in your Start menu. Depending on your setup, the Control Panel should display in one of two views: Classic View or Home View.

In the Classic View, you will want to open “Regional and Language Options.” In Home View, you need to click on the “Change keyboards or other input methods” link underneath “Clock, Language, and Region.” A window titled “Regional and Language Options” should have appeared no matter which view you were using. Click on the “Keyboards and Languages” tab.

Click on the “Change Keyboards” button. A window titled “Text Services and Input Languages” should appear.

Click on the “Add” button. You should see the “Add Input Language” window.

Dig through the list of keyboards and check the box for the Spanish keyboard variant you’re looking for. I’m personally most familiar with the Latin American keyboard, so I chose “Spanish (Mexico)” and “Latin American,” though I could have found this same layout under “Spanish (United States)” or any of the Spanish-speaking South American countries. If you’re not sure what keyboard to use, you can select one and click the “Preview” button to see what the keyboard looks like. This is also useful even if you know which layout to use because you will need to learn where some of the keys are. When you’re done looking at the preview, click the “Close” button.

In the end, if you can’t decide what keyboard to use and you plan on visiting a Spanish-speaking country, learn and use the keyboard layout of that country. Click “Ok” to close the “Add Keyboard Dialog.” You should be back to the “Text Services and Input Languages” window. Click on the “Advanced Key Settings” tab.

Make note of the default key combination to switch keyboard layouts. The default is Left Alt + Shift, but you may change this to whatever you like. Click “Ok” to close the window. Note that you should now have a little “EN” in your taskbar, assuming you have a US English keyboard. If you have a different keyboard you may see some other two letter abbreviation.

Now hit the key combination you chose to switch keyboards, or Left Alt and Shift if you kept the default. Your taskbar should now display “ES” to show that you are now using a Spanish keyboard.

Your keyboard is now setup! Looking at the keyboard preview from earlier, it’s obvious how to type “Ñ” and “¿”, but how do you type “áéíóú”? All you have to do is type the key for the accent mark, which is the key to the right of “P” on the Latin American keyboard, followed by the key for the letter you wish to put the accent above.

The process is similar if you wish to setup a keyboard for other languages. I have followed the same process to setup the Greek keyboard in Windows. Wikipedia also has a good article on keyboard layouts, which displays the keyboard layout for many different languages.

I’m also a Linux user, and I dual-boot Windows Vista and Linux, working primarily in Linux using KDE. If there is interest I may also cover this subject in KDE.

I was on the phone with my friend Patrick, who has been my friend for about 12 years, and one of the things we discussed was our study of Spanish. Patrick has gone a little further than I have and I found his description of his study habits interesting. He doesn’t use an SRS program like myself or Thomas, but through his use of Rosetta Stone he has had some similar results to what users of SRS programs have seen. I asked him to write a brief description of his study methods so that I can post them here:

The method I’ve been using to learn Spanish so far consists of a grammar book called “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Spanish Phrases“, and the Rosetta Stone program. I also have a bilingual Spanish dictionary for words i come across that are new.

Rosetta Stone: So far this has had a positive effect for teaching me new words, masculine or feminine gender of words, and sentence structure. It sticks mostly in only one verb tense so far. (The present progressive or gerunds.) I think the subjunctive is more used than any other verb tense, but not sure. The only issue i have with this is that it doesn’t cover much ground being mainly in one tense. It does however make the words stick in your head and its not so repetitive that you get bored with it.

The grammar book: Shows all the verb tenses and when they are used. With example sentences in each tense, you could listen to Rosetta Stone and after a bit start to pick up the slight differences of a word in each tense you just read it in. The best thing about the book is that it is straightforward and simple. If you were to go over the charts for each verb tense and write down a couple of sentences you will start to catch the patterns in it.

Patrick also pointed me to a couple of new resources that he plans to try out soon:

• Livemocha.com - Patrick just signed up for this so he doesn’t have any real feedback about it yet, but it looks like a good language learning social network site.
• Learning Spanish Like Crazy - Patrick had heard that was a good companion to learning with Rosetta Stone and intends to purchase this soon.

In case you haven’t noticed already, I added some new ad spaces in the right sidebar. Both are 125×125 spots and can be had for pennies. You don’t have to purchase them for a whole month either - you can grab the ad space for one day if you want to. If you are interested in advertising for cheap on BabelHut, click on the link below the ads (or right here) for more information.

Related to the above paragraph, I received a bid for the ad space today from a webcomic called Buttersafe. They didn’t win the bid, but today’s comic just happened to include a little bit of Japanese so I’m going to link to them. Here’s an excerpt:

The Japanese reads 「私について話してる」 (watashi ni tsuite hanashiteru?) which translates to “Are you guys talking about me?”

The rest of the comic is in English. Check it out. Read the archives too. They’re hilarious.

Warning: This post may not be suitable for adults.

Today’s Word Of The Day is うんち (unchi). That’s Japanese for poop.

Last weekend, my wife and I went to the Confectionary Exposition in Himeji, and on the way back to the car we saw this sign:

Here is what the sign says:

Everybody come and play! Come and look! We have poop books!

Rabbit: It’s shit time!

Gorilla: Come and see my shit too!

Elephant: Animal shit is here yo!

See it. Touch it! Smell it! Explore!

Can you guess what animals made this shit? (3 pictures)

Himeji Museum Of Literature, Special Exhibit. April 1st-May 18th

Naturally we couldn’t resist.

We paid our way into the little exhibit. On the walls around the room were little pictures of animals doing the deed:

Then you get to see the real stuff up close, displayed in cute little boxes as if they were Easter treats. You are free to look, handle and sniff to your heart’s content. Can you guess which animals this shit belongs to? (Answers below):

Answers: Zebra shit, Addax shit, Hippo Shit, Giraffe Shit, Elephant Shit.

Excretory Literature

But that’s not even the main attraction! This is the Himeji Museum of Literature. What would this exhibit be without books about poop?

Book Made Out Of Shit

The paper of this book was made from elephant dung:

Unchi Restaurant

This book, titled “Unchi Restaurant” is about a bug that eats dung (warning: plot spoilers ahead):

Trans: Eww.. What’s that smell?

Trans: It’s shit!

Trans: Munch, munch.

Excretory System

Trans: When you eat breakfast your belly starts to move, and your poop starts to move too.

Poop1: I’m getting pushed out!
Poop2: Here I come!

Shit Professor

Trans: I am the Shit Professor. I know everything there is to know about shit!

Nasty Fish

Trans: Fish: Delicious!

Eh? Shit is delicious?

Yes. Shit is delicious food.

The hippo takes a dump and then these little fish eat it, chasing after the hippo’s butt.

End Of The Japanese Poop Exhibit

Finally, after enjoying the literature, you can take a picture at this special cut-out to take home as a souvenir:

If you want to see it first-hand, the exhibit is open until May 18th, 2008 at the Himeji City Museum of Literature. It is well worth it.

Himeji City Museum of Literature Info (Japanese)

I recently purchased a book called Spanish Verbs And Essentials of Grammar to strengthen my understanding of Spanish grammar and conjugation. I didn’t feel I was getting enough of this from my existing study materials. It’s funny how some themes seem to occur at the same time. On Friday, Ramses at Spanish Only posted Studying Grammar CAN Help. He discusses how much grammar has improved his study progress, which is what I am hoping for with my recent purchase.

The book itself is only a little over a hundred pages, but it was perfect for what I was looking for. I did not yet have a book that explained the familiar forms of you (tú, vosotros, etc) and how verbs are conjugated with those pronouns. I haven’t gone very far into this book yet, but I did look ahead at the object pronouns (me, te, le, lo, etc.), which have been stumping me when I run across them.

I also purchased The Big Red Book of Spanish Verbs which has some explanation of conjugation but mostly it is a big list of Spanish verbs and all the different ways in which they can be conjugated, which is exactly why I bought it. I kept finding words like eran which I couldn’t find in my Spanish dictionary. I did guess from context that it was a form of ser (to be) but now I know it’s the third person plural form in the imperfect tense. This led me to learn that the imperfect tense is one of two past tenses in Spanish, though I don’t yet understand the differences between them.

I’ve yet to take a look at the CD-ROM that came with the Big Red Book but at some point I intend to.

BTW, I know I’m a day late, but Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Today (May 5th) is Children’s Day in Japan, and that means today’s Word of the Day is 鯉幟 (koinobori). 鯉 (koi) means “carp” and 幟 (nobori) means something like “flag”, so 鯉幟 (koinobori) translates into English as “carp streamer“.

Japanese families (who have boys) put these carp streamers up to celebrate boys. 　My wife and I had a son last year, so we got some.

At the top of the pole are 矢車 (yaguruma). 矢 means “arrow” and 車 means “car” or “wheel”. If you look closely, you will see that the wheels are spoked with arrows, hence 矢車. The fletching of the arrow-spokes catches the wind and makes the wheels turn.

The koinobori are sold in sets of four. At the top is a plain old wind sock and beneath it are three carp windsocks. The black carp is the father, the red is the mother and the blue one is the boy. A koinobori set can cost anything from 10,000 yen (US$100) to 60,000 yen (US$600). Ours was 40,000 yen and some change. Not cheap by any means, but you only have to buy them once, you use them year after year, and up close they are actually pretty freaking cool.

You hang your koinobori at the beginning of May, and then take them down on June 5th, one month after Children’s Day. Our koinobori are hung off of our balcony, and as you can see, the boy likes it!

In the summer of last year, my wife told me (in Japanese) “We need to buy a magic bottle.”

“A what?”

“A magic bottle.”

“What on earth is a magic bottle? and why do we need to buy one?”

Magic Bottle

The word in question here is 魔法瓶 (mahou-bin). The first part 魔法 (mahou) means “magic”, as in Harry Potter magic. The second part 瓶 (bin) means “bottle”. What is a magic bottle? Simple, a thermos.

A Thermos?

Yup, the good old vacuum flask invented by James Dewer in 1892 - the one that keeps hot liquids hot all day long - is known as a “magic bottle” in Japanese.

Why is it called “magic bottle”? Are the Japanese superstitious? Turns out it’s just a bit of marketing. The thermos was introduced to Japan in 1909. Two years later, an Osaka company produced a domestic version and called it “magic bottle”, but they forgot (or just didn’t want to) to register the trademark. The name stuck and now any old thermos is known as a 魔法瓶 (mahou-bin). (Source: wikipedia japan).

Pretty cool huh? Btw, the reason my wife wanted one is that we had a baby on the way. A thermos is a good way to carry around hot water for making baby formula on the go. Ours has a picture of Miffy on it, and is Thermos brand :)

My wife and I went to see cherry blossoms at Himeji castle today. On the way back we ran across this awesome sign:

What a welcoming sign! The Japanese reads お急ぎの方ご利用下さい (o-isogi no kata go-riyou kudasai), which is hilarious in Japanese but translates a little awkwardly to something like “People in a hurry, please use”. A more loose translation, which gets the meaning across a bit better would be “If you need to piss really bad, please come into our store,” but in the most polite and formal language possible. It’s sooo not Japanese and yet so Japanese at the same time.

I didn’t need to use the restroom, but the sign lured me into the store anyway. What a great idea!