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.

This is the first post in what may become a semi-regular series from me, called Frases en Español. In this series I will give you several sentences or phrases in Spanish from a particular source. These phrases will ideally introduce you and me to new vocabulary, and are ideal for adding to your SRS study.

By their nature, mobile phones have small screens, so the phrases found here are pretty short. Future posts in this series will contain longer phrases so that new grammar can be shown with the new vocabulary.

Here are the phrases I found:

El dispositivo de bolsillo está bloqueado.
The handheld device is locked.

Bloqueo del teclado
Lock the keypad

Hacer una llamada
Make a call

Números de marcación rápida
Speed dial numbers

Libreta de direcciones
Address Book

Mis tonos de llamada
My ringtones

If you have other mobile phone related phrases, or wish to correct my phrases (I’m a beginner after all), please comment below!

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!

There are many things I’d like to blame. A stressful personal life. A busy work schedule. Lack of sleep. I’m sure these were all contributing factors, but I think I know the source of the problem: me.

More specifically, it was my decision not to spend at least a few minutes a day on my SRS or any of my learning materials. Even when I was the most busy and the most tired I could have done at least that much. Another problem was that I decided that it was absolutely important that I learn all the verb endings for the preterite and imperfect tenses quickly, so I input all the possible conjugations of hablar, comer, and vivir in those tenses into my SRS. This was a big mistake! My SRS study became pure drudgery. It’s supposed to be fun! If it isn’t, why bother?

I am happy to say that I’m on the path to recovery. I’ve taken Khatzumoto’s advice and have begun to delete all those boring conjugations, choosing instead to rely on adding sentences to my SRS. I now understand why Ramses says I should read about the rules, but not learn them. I’ve burned a CD full of various Spanish podcast episodes so that I can listen to them at time when I listen to audio the most: in my car. As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to grab my DS and play My Spanish Coach.

Once I realized I was avoiding my studies because it had become work, I took steps to correct that, and now I’m excited about learning Spanish once again!

Once I logged backed in, I was a bit overwhelmed with new vocabulary. One good source of vocabulary was the clock in the lower right-hand corner. When I hovered the mouse over the clock, it shows the current day of the week, day of the month, the current month and year. I had been having trouble with remembering the days of the week before this. Now everyday I hover the mouse over that clock to see the name for today. I probably should have added the days of the week to my SRS a long time ago, but I had never thought to before.

I’ve also been learning other words through my daily computer use. Many of the words I’ve had to look up to know what they are. Lingro.com has been invaluable for this. Some of the words I already knew like abrir (open) and salir (close), but there were many that I had not seen before. These include carpeta (folder), archivo (file), tipo (type), marcadores (bookmarks), herramientes (tools), guardar (save),  and enviar (send).

While most of this new vocabulary is not useful to me in daily conversation just yet, it will be useful when discussing use of a computer or even discussion concerning an office environment in Spanish. It also another way to motivate myself with Spanish and keep myself interested in learning more.

Unfortunately this change isn’t totally complete. While all of my KDE applications are now in Spanish, applications written with GTK or other toolkits are still in English. This includes applications like Firefox, the GIMP, and OpenOffice. I’m not quite sure what’s required to make those display in Spanish, though I intend to research that at a later date.

To say “turn on the (sink) faucet”, you use the verb ひねる (hineru), which means to twist.  蛇口をひねる。 Turn on the faucet.  But for God’s sake be careful!

My weak point was the listening section (50%).  I also missed a few on the reading section because I ran out of time and had to circle answers randomly.  Stil, the fact that I passed on my first try gives me some confidence.

To celebrate our inclusion in their Top 21, eduFire will give away 1 hour of free tutoring on their site to the first ten people who send an email to freetutoring@edufire.com and mention the giveaway here on Babelhut. So send that email and check out what eduFire has to offer!

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.

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!