So, you’ve been using LWT, and it’s great, but you want an easy way to take the brand new words you are learning in LWT and put them into Anki so you can retain them, right? I have made a video that shows you exactly how to do that!

These are the websites and other software I mention in the video:

• Learning With Texts
• Anki
• LibreOffice
• FluentIn3Months.com
• AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com

For quick reference, these are roughly the steps to export terms from LWT to Anki:

1. In LWT, go to Terms in the menu
2. Set Text to the name of the text you are getting words from
3. Set Status to Learning/-ed [1..5]
4. Set Tag #1 to UNTAGGED
5. Set All x Terms to Export ALL Terms (Anki)
6. Open LibreOffice Calc (or OpenOffice or MS Excel)
7. File -> Open
8. Set filter to Text CSV
9. Select the file you downloaded from LWT and click Open
10. Select Tab Separated and Unicode
11. Look at opened document
12. Note which columns you want for the front and back (in the video I choose columns E and B)
13. Open Anki, and open the deck you want to import into
14. File -> Import
15. Select the file you downloaded from LWT
16. Set the fields (which correspond to columns in the spreadsheet) to map to the Front and Back
17. Click Import. Your LWT terms are now in your Anki deck! Rejoice!
18. Go back to your browser window with LWT open
19. Set All x Terms to Add Tag
20. Type in “anki” so that these terms won’t appear in future exports. All done!

Where to find me if you have questions:

You may of course leave a comment here on the blog, but you can also find me on these social networks and contact me anytime:

• RhinoSpike
• Twitter
• Google+
• YouTube

Related posts:

1. Barra de Español 1.2 is now available!
2. Language Learning Tip #2: Read Children’s Books
3. Language Learning Tip #1: Start A Translation Project

1. Recipes are short – most recipes fit on one piece of paper, and that’s including a big picture of the end result.
2. Recipes are easy – recipes all follow pretty much the same format: picture, ingredient list, instructions.

   The ingredient list itself will provide you with half of the information you need to read the instructions.

   And the instructions are short, logical and sequential:  Cut this into this size pieces.  Cut that into that size pieces.  Put them in a pot.  Add this ingredient.  Cook it over a flame of this strength for this many minutes.  Add this seasoning.  Garnish with this.  Voila!

3. Cooking is hands-on – when you cook you will be using all five senses: touch, sight, taste, smell, sound.   This enhances the experience and you will remember it better.

   The more senses you use the better it is for recall.  Imagine sitting at a desk and looking over a vocabulary list of fruits in Swahili for 5 minutes.  Then imagine someone throwing fruits at you for 5 minutes, calling out their names in Turkish while you try to dodge.  Which set do you think you’ll remember better at the end of the day?   Assuming you don’t get hit in the head with a canteloupe.

   Senses matter.   Instead of studying words in a language you are creating an experience in the language.  That experience will imprint itself in your mind in ways that a chair and a sore back can’t.

4. Double reward – when you cook you get to eat the food at the end.  When you cook in a foreign language you get to eat the food and feel good about yourself for doing something in your target language. 

   That’s double the return.

   And if you mess up and the food tastes horrible at least you have a funny story to tell.  “Check this out.  I was trying to make some cake but the recipe was in Arabic…”

5. Foreign food – part of learning a language is experiencing another culture.  You can’t separate the two.  And food is a big part of any culture.  You need to learn the tastes, smells and names of native foods.

   How many Spanish people in Spain can talk about Spanish food in Spanish?  All of them.  (Replace the underlined words to match your language situation).

   Learning food will make your language experience more complete.  And it will help you read menus when you visit the country.

Execution

Ok, I hope I convinced you that it’s worth a try.  It’s very easy to get started.  Here’s how you do it:

Paper Method

1. Figure out the word for “recipe” in your target language.
2. Put that word into Google.  That should bring up a ton of recipe websites.
3. Find a recipe that looks good.
4. Print the recipe out.
5. Cook it.
6. Eat.

YouTube Method

Same as the paper method, but replace Google with Youtube, and of course you watch the video instead of printing out the recipe.

Using YouTube to find recipes is great because you get some listening practice in too.  Plus you get to watch somebody else cook the recipe before you do.  It has repetition built into it too because you’ll find yourself running back and forth between the kitchen and your computer to watch the video again.

I’ve been learning a little Spanish and I cooked dinner one night (actually two nights now) using this:

I’m a complete newbie at Spanish but I was able to follow this more or less after watching it a few times.  The end result didn’t quite look the same, but it tasted great.  And when I was finished I was better at Spanish than I was when I started.

Bonus Tip

If you already live in the country where your target language is spoken, here’s a bonus tip for you:

You’ve probably walked into a grocery store before and seen food that you had no idea what it was, how to eat it or what to do with it.  Instead of passing it up, buy it.  Take it home.  Here’s why:

Most recipe sites have a search box.  Enter the name of your mystery food into the search box.  Bam!  Now you have a bunch of recipes that tell you how to use it.

You may have to take another trip to the store to get more ingredients, but its worth it because you will get to try something you’ve never tasted before.

Here in Japan I often come across food I’ve never eaten before, like the day I saw a shelf full of tougan (冬瓜 – とうがん). I searched for とうがん on cookpad and found a recipe for some delicious Chicken and Tougan soup.

Try it!

Do you have any language learning tips? If so, please share them!

Other language learning tips:

• Start A Translation Project
• Read Children’s Books

Related posts:

1. Language Learning Tip #2: Read Children’s Books
2. Language Learning Tip #1: Start A Translation Project
3. Learning a language is like having a pet

BORING STATS

In the 33 days I’ve been watching Thai television, I’ve racked up about 41 hours of Thai, which is about 1.3 hours a day.  I want to try to get this number closer to 2.0.  I’ve only missed 3 days, and I’ve made up for all three days by watching double the next day.  I like my consistency so far.

NEW UNDERSTANDING

I haven’t learned many new words since the last update, but I’m getting really good at recognizing names now.  I’m also doing well at identifying relationships: brothers, sisters, parents, children, friends, employees, etc and determining who is older than who.  I don’t know the details, but in Thai I’ve observed that people add a prefix to a person’s name if that person is older than them.

Some words that have jumped out at me are numbers.  I’ve seen people count to three.  I’ve seen them count to ten.  I’ve seen them talking about dates and phone numbers.  I don’t know all the Thai numbers yet, but if I hear a string of them I know them for what they are.  For example, check out this clip from a cool animated movie about some elephants.  At about the 6:00 mark, an elephant is playing hide-and-seek with some frogs.  Can you hear the frog counting to ten?

(P.S. check out part 8 of the same movie to see a badass war scene with elephant battles.)

Whenever I watch a drama, I have no problem at all following the general story.  Body language says so much and it’s easy to guess what’s going on just by watching the actors and the flow of the scenes.  What I don’t get is the details.

I don’t know what people are saying when they talk, but I am starting to recognize that some sounds are said over and over again.  Sometimes I find myself making a mental note of it: “oh, there’s that ‘eng’ word again”.  I suspect that after a few hundred more hours of hearing these words I will eventually sense some sort of pattern and more understanding will come.

RUNNING MY MOUTH

I’m not there yet though! For now, I just try to copy the sounds with my mouth.  I look at the Thai peoples’ faces when they talk and try to copy the shape of their mouths and produce the same sounds.  I got the idea to do this from watching my son learn how to speak.  He was copying the sounds I made long before he understood what I was saying to him.  When he was very little, we would sit in the tub together pa-pa-pa’ing and da-da-da’ing at each other.

I’m hoping that practicing Thai sounds in this way will help my accent in the future.  When I took Japanese classes in college way back when, we had to read and speak right away and I think it ruined my pronunciation for life.  We learned how to introduce ourselves.  The teacher modeled it a few times and then we had to produce it:  “Hajimemashite.  Watashi ha Tomasu desu.  Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.”  I didn’t sound anything like a Japanese person!  A few times hearing it is not enough!

Then we learned the syllabaries: “this character is ‘hi’”.  Too bad my reality of ‘hi’ was completely different from the ‘hi’ of every Japanese kid who ever lived.  I was learning the character for ‘hi’ but I couldn’t even say it right (though I thought I could!).  And once I learned all of the characters it was too late.  Now that I could read, the floodgates were opened.  Now I had access to a whole world of Japanese written language, a world that you take in through your eyes instead of your ears.  And it reinforced my bad speaking habits over and over again, thousands and thousands of times over.

Tens of thousands.  Hundreds even!

I didn’t learn until years later that Japanese “ki” and “hi” and “zu” don’t sound like English “ki”, “hi” and “zu”.  Boy was I surprised when I realized even later that NONE of the Japanese sounds have an English match.  Mouth shape is so important it’s not funny.  It seems so obvious now, but I never thought about it back then.  I learned how to speak Japanese primarily with my eyes, looking at black squiggles and turning them into incorrect American English mouth shapes.  That’s ridiculous.  Even audio input (ie, talking) passes through my (verbally-flawed) hiragana/kanji filter before the meaning is processed by my brain.  Unless I’m concentrating hard, my mind will ignore the subtle differences (which make a BIG DIFFERENCE in terms of pronunciation) between the real native Japanese sounds and my internalized off-Japanese sounds.

I never thought about it before now, but learning to read Japanese before I got the sounds down crippled my pronunciation.  Stay away from books people!  Until you can really talk!  Early literacy is foreign language polio.  (Disagree?  Write a blog post and link back to me ;) )

I’ve worked on fixing some of my Japanese sounds, but I’m so used to talking in a bad accent now that I doubt I can recover completely.

Back on track: I’m trying to get the Thai sounds down before I can understand Thai and definetly before I can read Thai.  So I use my ears and eyes (for looking at mouths, not squiggles) and copy Thai people on TV.  This will allow me to internalize the Thai sounds so that when I start speaking (around 1000 hours TV time? in theory) I will have the right tools in the toolbox.  Moreoever, when I do eventually learn to read I’ll be able to map the correct Thai sounds to the corresponding Thai squiggles (and boy are they squiggles! ;) ).

That’s my hypothesis for this little experiment anyway.

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 40.9

Related posts:

1. TV Method Thai Progress Report 1 (12 hours)
2. TV Method Thai
3. Project Mayhem – Learning a Foreign Language Through Movies

Greetings

Keith tipped me off that the first thing that would jump out at me would be greetings.  He was right.  When two or more people meet it’s natural for them to greet each other.  Dramas on TV tend to have several scenes where people run into one another, so there are a lot of greetings.  I already knew the basic Thai greeting, so it wasn’t exactly new, but I heard it a lot.  Good to know my ears could pick it up.  One new thing that I did pick up with regard to Thai greetings was that talking on the phone and talking in person are not the same thing.  Different greeting.

Names of People

I thought that I would pick up peoples’ names pretty quickly, but this turned out not to be the case. I didn’t figure out the two main characters’ names until episode 7.  And I was lucky.  I might not have figured it out if they hadn’t stuck the perfect scene in there.  This is what happenened:

The two characters (a guy and a girl) have been on the run trying to escape some bad guys with guns. This time they escape the bad guys by hopping on bicycles and heading into the forest. In the forest, they are surprised by a sharp decline in the terrain and they head downhill at a very high speed. They lose control of their bikes and tumble over a waterfall (what else?) into a small lake or pond.

The guy surfaces and can’t find the girl anywhere. He searches and searches, but no luck. He makes camp and at night goes to bed. Then he sees her in a dream and wakes up and begins calling her name over and over again. Meanwhile the girl, asleep in another part of the forest, has a similar dream and wakes up calling the guy’s name over and over. Either that or she heard him and starting calling back. Whatever. Anyway, they hear each other and continue calling each others’ names over and over until the guy finally finds the girl’s camp.

Until then, I had no idea what to call them. If that scene hadn’t been there, I probably still wouldn’t know. And I still don’t know that names of any of the other supporting characters.  Names are hard.

Names of Things

I have a 1.5 year old son, and he is just learning how to speak. Most of the words he can say are the names of objects: “star”, “moon”, “nose”, “feet”, “toe”, etc. It makes sense. It is easier to connect a sound to a physical object that you can see like the moon than it is to connect a sound to something abstract like … “abstract”. I thought it would be the same for me and I’d pick up on object names first.

The jury is still out on that one, but it seems to be coming true. The few times where I was able to jump up and say “Aha, that word probably means _______” were when a character (usually the female lead) would point to some object and say a word. This happened to me for banana, for snake/cobra, for telephone, for sunflower and for waterfall (I already knew the Thai word for waterfall though, so it doesn’t count).

I don’t remember the word for banana, as I only caught it once back in episode 1, but I was pretty sure at the time that she was naming the object, like “oh look, bananas!” I don’t remember sunflower or snake either. But telephone. I got telephone down.

The first time I heard it, the girl lead was walking down the street lost when she suddenly stopped and pointed and said the word. The camera pans over and there is a public telephone, which she uses to call someone (who I think may have been her mother). At this point, I had a feeling the word she said was the Thai word for telephone, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been “oh look” or “what’s that” or “finally!” for all I knew.

Then a few episodes later, the male lead does the universal phone symbol (hold your hand to the side of your head, thumb in your ear, pinky in front of your mouth) and says the same word. The evidence is building. Finally in Episode 8, the episode I watched today, there was a whole scene revolving around the two main characters borrowing a phone from some strange people and I heard that same word about eight times. I’m pretty sure I’m right and that word means “telephone”.

There is a little ambiguity though. In all cases, the phone was a big clunky one. I don’t know if this same word is used for cell phones or not. I’ll have to keep my ears open during cellphone scenes to make sure.

Conclusion

Two small victories in my first 12 hours.

1. I figured out the main characters’ names.
2. I figured out a word that means “phone”.

Beyond that I can generally follow the story of the drama, not with my ears, but with my eyes. There is a lot of action so it’s easy to understand. My ears are still getting used to the sounds of the Thai language. I feel like it’s not spoken as fast as Japanese is. I don’t understand what they are saying, but I feel like my ears catch everything, ie I don’t miss any syllables.

I’m at the halfway point in the drama now. I’ll write my next progress report when I finish the drama.

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 12

Related posts:

1. Foreign Language Polio: TV Method Thai Progress Report 2
2. TV Method Thai
3. How Many Days In Each Month: The Thai Way

1. They are talked to by everyone around them (nurses, parents, family, neighbors, etc).  They listen but there is no comprehension, no understanding.  Lots and lots of listening and watching.
2. Eventually, after they encounter the same words in the same contexts over and over again, they start to understand and connect the words to objects or ideas.  “Mama” refers to this person.  “Milk” is this tasty stuff that I like to drink.  “Bath” is this.  “Blanket” is this.  Over time, they are exposed to more and more ideas and words, and through repeated exposure, they start to understand more and more of what is said to them.
3. They babble, experimenting with different sounds in their mouths.
4. They start to say the words they know, mimicking the people around them.  (around 1 year old)
5. They start to say simple sentences. (around 2 years old)
6. They become pretty much fluent in their language.  They can express their feelings and understand most of what is told to them, at least for topics that are relevant to them at their age. (4-5 years)
7. They learn how to read.  (school)
8. They learn how to write. (school)
9. They learn about grammar. (school)

So the basic order is:

1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Reading
4. Writing

The TV method tries to copy this order, but instead of finding yourself some new (say) Chinese parents, you watch Chinese TV shows instead for Baby Step 1 (Listening).

Keith has been experimenting with this method and documenting it as he goes.  At the time of this writing he has logged 437 hours of Chinese TV.  Reading his posts about the TV Method made me want to try it out, so that’s what I’ve done, starting a couple days ago.

If you’ve ever read the “About page” here on babelhut, you may have encountered this line under my profile section:

Someday, if lifetime permits, he [that's me] would like to learn Thai …

So I thought I’d use the TV method to learn me some Thai. My knowledge of Thai language is very close to zero. Here’s what I know, pre-TV Method:

1. I know how to say “hello”, “excuse me” and “thank you”.
2. I know how to say the number “5″.
3. I know how to say “I can’t speak Thai.”
4. I know how to say “This is for you.” (Taught to me for fun by a Thai coworker when I worked at the cafeteria back in the dorms. I delivered dirty dishes to him and said this when handing them over.)
5. I know a few other random words (waterfall, why, fish sauce, shrimp, stupid, very).

So I have about a 20-word head start over a Thai newborn (plus I can walk, eat solids and use a toilet).

The Thai drama I’ve started with is called “RAK NEE HUA JAI ROW JONG“. I have no idea what that means (please don’t tell me. For controlled-environment-experiment-purity reasons.) I’ve watched 5 episodes so far, and it was actually kinda funny because in episode 2 the girl lead found a waterfall and said “waterfall”, which out of the 20 Thai words I know is the one I least expected to encounter first (well, second. I heard “you” a lot before that scene). If you want to watch too, the whole season is up on Youtube here: RAK NEE HUA JAI ROW JONG

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 7.5

Related posts:

1. TV Method Thai Progress Report 1 (12 hours)
2. Foreign Language Polio: TV Method Thai Progress Report 2
3. L2 Holy Grail Books

1. They are easy - This is as easy as reading material comes. Even if you are a complete beginner, if you have a dictionary around you will probably be able to grind your way through a ten-page board book for babies.
2. They are fast – You can breeze through these books. It’s a very little investment in time, especially once you’ve read it a few times and “learn” the book. I’m talking 2 minutes or less.
3. They are meant for native speakers – Parents that are real native speakers of your target language really read these books to their children. The language will be completely natural, native Spanish (or whatever).
4. They are meant to be read aloud – Nobody sits hunched over a library desk late at night in the dark with a reading light and a six-pack of Red Bull taking detailed notes on “Where’s Spot?”. They read them out loud in funny voices to their kids. You will read them out loud too. Your mouth will get used to forming the words in the books. Many children’s books are very repetitive:
   

   Who’s hiding behind the door? It’s a mouse!
   Who’s hiding under the bed? It’s a lion!
   Who’s hiding inside the box? It’s a giraffe!
   etc.

   Reading books like this out loud will get you really used to saying simple sentences in your target language, fluently and without effort. It just rolls off your tongue.

5. They have lots of pictures – this ties in with #2: being fast, but pictures also give you hints about what a word might mean. This can save you dictionary time on your first read through.
6. They often contain slang/shortened language – No textbook sentences here. Native speakers often omit words, run words together or otherwise take shortcuts in their language. The only way to learn these rules and tricks is to be exposed to them. Children’s books do this alot.
7. You can catch up on culture that you missed by not being raised in the target language – Do you know how to say “Ready, Set, Go!” to start a footrace in your target language? Do you know how to play Hide-and-seek? Peek-a-boo? Do you know the cutesy names for animals (kitty, fishy, birdie)? Do you know how to say “whoopsie-daisy” and “uh-oh”? Guess what. Every native speaker DOES! Children’s books are easy and fast (see points #1 and #2). It won’t take long to catch up.
8. You learn sound words – Do you know how to say “splat”, “splash”, “zoom”, “bonk”, “crash”, “whoosh”, “squish” in your target language? How about “woof woof”, “meow”, “moo”, “oink”, “cluck”, “quack” and “roar”? How do you describe the sound a watermelon makes when you smash it open? Many of these are words that people use on a daily basis even as adults. This is a great way to learn them.
9. They usually have a specific theme or topic – animals, body parts, relative directions (under, over, in, on, behind, in front of), vehicles, fruit, vegetables, family members. Learn all your animals at once, in repetitive setences (see point #4). You will learn them without even trying.

That’s just the tip of the ice berg too. You can learn a lot with very little time or effort. Here’s how to do it:

1. Find a children’s book in your target language. Good places to check are the library, the used bookstore, and google (for foreign bookstores).
2. Read it out loud. Try to guess the meaning based on the pictures. Use a dictionary for stuff you have no clue about.
3. Read it again.
4. You’re finished. That took about 5 minutes. Now do it again tomorrow. In a couple days, you’ll be able to recite the book without opening it (but do open it! Seeing the pictures will help reinforce everything for you).
5. Back to step 1. Find another children’s books. Get a little collection going.

If you have a baby or a kid that you can read it too, even better (that’s how I stumbled upon this tip).

Try it. It works.

Do you have any language learning tips? Post them in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Children’s Books in Spanish
2. Language Learning Tip #1: Start A Translation Project
3. Learning Language With Comics

Here are the steps:

1. Find something in your target language that hasn’t been translated into English before. It could be a novel, a comic book, a children’s book, a movie, a TV show, a cereal box, a magazine, a blog, advertisements for a specific product, whatever. Any material will work, but the most important thing is that it should be something you are interested in. You should feel pumped about translating whatever it is you are doing.
2. Find an audience. Someone who will read/follow your work. Preferably an online audience. Forums devoted to a specific topic are good. Starting a blog is a good idea too. Having an audience is important because it will make you accountable. Knowing that people are waiting to read your next installment will help motivate you to work on your project in a timely manner. Also, if people are commenting on your translations, telling you “good job” and “thank you for doing this for us”, you will get a warm fuzzy feeling inside and want to translate more and more.
3. Translate in small chunks. For example, I’m doing a novel and I translate a couple pages at a time (usually 2-5 pages). This is workable and allows me to post/publish my translation at least once a week (often more). I also translate advertisements and previews for a Japanese video game that will be released next year. These tend to be short (1-4 pages) with lots of pictures, so I can usually pop them out as they come.
4. Add words that you want to remember to your SRS. I usually don’t have to enter whole sentences for my translation projects. This is because I’ve gone over the material so many times during the translation process that seeing the word will instantly bring up the context. Often I don’t even need the SRS, because the words will come up again and again. Writers tend to reuse language, so you’ll run into the same words over and over again. My video game previews also repeat a lot of words.
5. Go back and reread the original. After you translate something into English, wait a week or two and then go back and read it in the native language. Surprise, you don’t need a dictionary anymore and you have full comprehension! What the hell?  It worked!

Do you have any language learning tips? If so, please share them!

Related posts:

1. Project Mayhem – Learning a Foreign Language Through Movies
2. Language Learning Tip #3: Learn To Cook
3. Multibabel – Computer Translation Fun

• It guesses kanji (Chinese character) readings automatically. This saves me from having to manually type in readings.
• It has a lot of cool graphs and stats you can use to analyse your progress.
• You can customize the font size and color for all entries.

One of the downsides of Anki (and the main reason I switched to Mnemosyne for Pali) is that it doesn’t handle missed days well. If you miss two days of studying and come back on the third day, you will have three days’ worth of cards to study. Not a big deal. If you miss five days and come back on the sixth, you will have six days’ worth of cards to study. That’s annoying, but doable. If you miss 2-3 weeks due to the birth of a child, you will come back to 3 weeks’ worth of cards due! Ahhhhh!

In my case, I had 1,100+ cards backlogged. Just seeing that number on the screen made me not even want to try. I chipped away at it, very slowly, over the past two and a half months. Finally, last Friday I got that number down to zero. Some things I noticed on the journey:

• I didn’t add any new entries to my SRS for two and a half months. There was just no chance I’d get to study them with 1,100 old cards in the way. The Japanese Fight Club project saved the day here. I could still learn new Japanese by repeating movie quotes out loud.
• When the number of cards due was high, I wouldn’t answer very many in a day. Usually I’d quit after 30. There was no sense of progress and it killed my motivation to do more. Once the number got down to around 500 (early December), I was pounding them out. 100 in a day. 150 in a day. With the finish line in sight, it was easy for me to run through the cards. The first 500 took me 2 months and the last 500 took me a week. What the hell? Looks like it was all in my head.
• I had some ridiculous sentences in my SRS. I ended up purging about 230 entries. I would likely have purged more if I had thought of it earlier. I will be more selective in the future.
• I remembered most of the cards! My retention rate was 85%, even for cards that were 80 days late. Sweet!

Moral of the story: Don’t miss days. Keep up with your SRS.

Related posts:

1. ¡Mnemosyne Al Rescate!
2. Remembering Kanji
3. Going Monolingual

Some of you may have noticed my lack of posts in the past couple of weeks. My work life and my home life conspired to consume any free time I had so that I could not even study new Spanish or Greek material, let alone write about it. I did manage, with the help of Mnemosyne, to maintain what I had already learned so that I was able to pick up where I left off. That little bit of maintenance did the job fantastically!

Earlier tonight I was able to continue in my Spanish book right where I left off. I did not need to go back and review what I had learned previously. In fact, I think I was better off than I would have been had I studied two nights in a row because no matter how crazy things were for me, most days I could still find 20 minutes to study with Mnemosyne.

I recommend that anyone who is learning a new language use a Spaced Repitition System like Mnemosyne, Anki, SuperMemo, or similar.

Do you use a different SRS program? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

Related posts:

1. Εν αρχη: Starting with New Testament Greek (again)
2. Step 2: Survive the flood
3. Spanish Update: Shorter study time

• 2 years in a Texas university
• 1 year in a Japanese university
• 1 more semester in a Texas university
• 3 or 4 years of not studying Japanese at all
• 1 year living in Japan, surrounded by Japanese but only studying with serious dedication in infrequent month-long bursts.

Input Method

My most successful month-long burst was last August/September, and my success was due to a new method that is currently making the rounds in the language learning community. I don’t know if it has a name, but I’ll call it the “Input Method”. Much of the credit for the spread of this method goes to Khatzumoto, the author of the wonderful blog All Japanese All The Time. In his words:

… the hypothesis [is] that input (reading, listening) matters more than output (writing, speaking), and that input of high quality and quantity naturally leads to high quality output, without much effort. In English, that means stop talking before you hurt yourself.

Basically, the principles of the method are this:

• Focus on input, forget output
• Learn sentences, not words
• Learn high quality sentences – authentic sentences gathered directly from target language sources
• Enter your sentences into an SRS (Spaced Repitition System), such as Mnemosyne, Anki, or KhatzuMemo
• Drill the sentences daily with your SRS
• Aim for 10,000 sentences

Using a Kanji test prep book, a bilingual dictionary and this method, I basically doubled my Japanese vocabulary in 40 days time. I reached 1000 sentences in my SRS, one tenth of the way to the goal! As my vocabulary grew, I became much more adept at finding new sentences to enter into the SRS. I didn’t have to spend time looking up words because I knew them now. Like magic I started to pick out the new words on TV, in the store, everywhere.

Then my son was born and everything changed. In the first weeks I just didn’t have time to do my SRS daily and I lost my momentum.

During my 3 weeks of off time, I’ve had time to reevaluate my strategy. While I had great success looking up example sentences in the dictionary, I neglected listening input. My vocabulary skyrocketed, but I still wasn’t good at comprehending spoken Japanese. I have an exciting plan to remedy that, but first…

What About Pali?

I am sold on the Input Method, completely. In all my years of studying Japanese, I have never learned so efficiently. I am going to reapply this method to my study of Pali when I begin in a few days.

The Input Method is perfectly suited for Pali. Pali is a dead language. Nobody speaks it anymore. Since I won’t ever run into a native Pali speaker, there is no reason to ever worry about output. If I start trying to speak Pali to people on the street, they’ll think I’m a fool. I’m restricted to input by default, which is perfect!

And Japanese?

Now that I’ve settled into the routine of caring for an infant, I can resume my SRS duties. The focus now is listening. The dictionary work is getting cut. I’m going to pull my input from audio. What audio sources will I use? That’s my exciting plan. I’m going to watch one of my favorite movies over and over and over again. Dubbed in Japanese. One DVD chapter at a time. What movie is that? See if you can guess. Here is the first line:

「タイラー・ダーデンを知ってるか」　何度も人に聞かれた。

For a hint, try to decode タイラー・ダーデン using this Katakana chart.

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3. Project Mayhem – Learning a Foreign Language Through Movies