ad lassitudinem　は言ってみていたの。退屈＝lassitudo

それに、sci-fi の番組イッパイがあの問題があるよ。Stargateだけはない。
いい説明がある番組はDS9なら。かべに訳せる機械があるって。だから誰にも言語一つ以上を分からないでもいい。
　
何故宇宙人全員が英語をしゃべれるか私達には分からない。

Closest thing I’d ever seen to one before I started were those old Goosebumps choose your own story books. I always lost at those…or cheated. These are like the cooler, older, Asian cousins-in-law of those books, and they have naturally gone digital.

Anyway. So it’s like reading you a manga and interacting with it (usually; there are some where you just click through it, apparently), making policy choices in the story. And maybe some rpg elements or mini-games, or whatever other gravy the maker might have put in. But it’s mainly a suped up version of a book. The cooler ones are fully voiced. So you’re reading and listening at the same time.

(Story begins before I have any active drive to learn Japenese, but have picked up some via osmosis). Now I first started one of these because I read a manga and was investigating online to see if there was an anime and found out that it was based on an otome game* (this is girly fantasy for those who don’t know), albeit a very introspective, psychology-based one, full of symbolism and darkish philosophy and humor.

Not to be put off by the fact that it didn’t have an english version (most don’t, as they are sadly off the mainstream even with anime otaku types, and are rather unwieldy for individual/small group trans projects), I got it and armed with a text-grabber and aggregator program that auto-spammed online translators and gave you up to half a dozen different translations in parallel, I started playing the game. I wasn’t particularly paying attention to the japanese in and of itself. Though the uber voice acting definitely had me hooked enough that I would only interrupt it if I were hearing something for the third time in a row (and not even then if it was said by one of my better-liked seiyuus), my main focus was on playing the game and going with the story.

But I still ended up learning me some japanese. (Shocking, right? /sarcasm) Just from seeing and hearing patterns together. It got to the point where amongst my four active translators I would find myself slightly correcting them all based on context. And this is where I wasn’t actually trying to learn anything at all, so naturally I started picking up even more when I actually got above a mild interest. Waaay more than I got from watching subbed anime (though I have consumed far more of that), or other more commonly-known ways to irresponsibly enjoy japanese.

I submit that playing text-heavy video games (ie visual novels) in japanese owns both reading manga/books/etc and watching movies/anime/etc on a mild-to-moderate scale for the following reasons:

1) You don’t play video games you find boring (at least I don’t). Even when you are grinding at some level you are enjoying yourself. The duty bit is already pretty much a non-issue here, yeah? I do not feel loyalty-bias to video games for some reason.

2) VNs are like a dense set of all-in-color manga, each of which have rather different endings and somewhat different middles, existing in parallel in the same general setting. They also speak to you as you read them. You get the listening and visual context of video-based stuffs, but on a self-controlled timescale like book-based media. Plus with the reading. Kinda like the best of both worlds, right? You get everything but speaking practice.

3) These video games are low-energy enough that you can take the time to muse on things without pressing the pause button or worrying that you will die now because you got distracted thinking about kanjis. You don’t need good reflexes either. Everyone can play! More importantly, everyone can play whilst eating a snack. You generally only need one hand, and that not all the time.

4) Chances are that if you are after “completion” whereby you want to achieve all (or much, anyway) possible endings that you will need a guide to consult (or you can muddle through it with lots of repeating trial and error and possibly still miss the subplot that you didn’t realize was an option to shoot for). These will all (or at least the better ones) actually be in japanese. Makes sense that if no one bothers to translate the game itself, no one will bother translating the online guide either.

5) Generally speaking, you cannot ever be satisfied with only one playthrough. The coolest stuff doesn’t get unlocked until after you’ve already achieved something else. So you end up getting repetition with slight variation which personally makes me muse about nuances.

6) You can’t really just passively let it wash over you. You have to make choices, so you kinda have to pay attention. At least a bit. You feel more engaged since the gist (as in most video games) is to make you feel like it’s something you’re living rather than just observing.

7) If you do get bitten by the boredom bug in part (“I’ve already gone through the prologue x number of times; I know the situation, thanks!”) you can skip through selectively (or put it on auto and semi-vegetate whilst listening to the excellent voice talent but not otherwise being engaged) and therefore skip the boredom too. Therefore #1 is still valid.

8) We’ve all had those moments when we were backseat writers and were like “well if it wereme, I would do it this way.” VNs let you indulge yourself there to a nice degree.

9) The more semi-popular ones often have spin-off manga/anime/book series, etc. So you’re back to that stuff anyway. x3

In conclusion book+video game = awesome. Or at least potentially awesome. Also, most VNs aren’t otome games like the one I was describing. They are as varied as in any medium through which stories are told. As a starter I recommend Ever17, which is slightly romance-oriented, but mainly a double-level sci-fi flavored mystery with two protagonists living two disjointed stories in the same-ish place but without apparently relating to one another until the very end when you unlock the true story with all the nifty secrets (and you can’t get that until you do all the other paths first). It’s quite intriguing. It actually does have an english trans (which is like subbing an anime: read english but still hear the japenese) but that’s quite hard to find and I won’t tell you where. You weren’t going to reach for that anyway, were you?

*If anyone is interested, it’s called Heart no Kuni no Alice and is an Alice in Wonderland parody. I highly recommend it and just about anything else that their maker, QuinRose, has come out with. They are more balanced for those who like some meat on their plot to balance the romancing. But get Anniversary edition instead of plain Heart, since it has better graphics and added content and no downside as far as I can tell.

Today I did like 20 or so. I just didn’t feel like doing 50.

And I’m fine with that 🙂

I’m in the UK so the easiest way I’ve found to rent Japanese DVD’s is an online rental place, like netflix in the USA. The UK one is called “lovefilm”, it’s seems very heavy on anime, shogun, yakuza and horror but very light on anything else.

I’m a huge gamer, it’s probably my second favorite hobby. E3 just happened, and they announced a lot of great games, some of which probably won’t come out in Japanese. Should I just not play them until I learn Japanese? Because that’s gonna be a loooooong time.

I should also mention that my main hobby is reading American comic books. I really doubt that I’d be able to read the Blackest Night or Battle For The Cowl in Japanese. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, so please someone tell me if I am.

I’m just really confused on how to proceed in this whole Japanese thing. If anybody has any advice for little ole me, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks again Khatz!

After stumbling upon Gedo senki a week ago and enjoying it a lot, I’ve felt a need to watch some good anime (something I haven’t done in a while – my Japanese exposure has been mostly tons of music and rewatching my favorite shows). I’ve read a few reviews of some really good shows and I started sampling them. The problem is, I’ve approached them with extremely high expectations of the bad kind – “ok, if this show isn’t absolutely awesome in every goddamn frame I’m not watching it”. Ironically, by consciously focusing on fun in this way (“I MUST HAVE FUN ALL THE TIME”), I didn’t really give the shows a chance, because some shows simply aren’t mindblowingly amazing in the first 20 seconds – and when you decide that the beginning isn’t fun, you start skipping scenes, trying to find “the fun part”, which is more likely not to happen with such an approach.

I sort of realized what I was doing (koanishly – “looking for fun isn’t fun” 😀 ), but only after starting to watch Hatake no gotoku: because the show WAS a lot of fun in the first 20 seconds, I gave the rest of it a chance; And then I sort of remembered that even the best shows can’t be consistently amazing, not because the producers aren’t trying, but rather because between the awesome fights and the instances of hilarious humor you simply have to have some plain ol’ dialogue – you know, exposition, character building, people just talking etc. all of which, while not brimming with teh awesome, also has its purpose.

So, the lesson for me was: RELAX! Give whatever you’re watching/listening to a real chance. This doesn’t mean enduring stuff which is bad/boring/Belgium – when you realize that something simply lacks quality, drop it. It also doesn’t mean not having high standards. What I’m sort of trying to say is: relax and find the balance – skim, skip, but also give the materials (and peace 😀 ) a chance. Sort of like how you would enjoy stuff in your native language, no? 🙂

on the topic of SRSing, I pretty much agree with Rob. Apart from my parents translating some words for me in the beginning, when I was a small kid, I learned English without consciously using any sort of method – I simply enjoyed TV shows, comics, computer games etc.

But then again, I see that some people need an SRS. Heck, Kats achieved fluency using it. To quote the no doubt dashing Freakman 🙂 “From my experience, intensive exposure will still lead you to a near native fluency in reasonable time, with or without an SRS. But the absence of an SRS makes it a bit more haphazard.”

To this, I would add: if you have the right knowledge and awareness of the principles of language acquisition (i.e. Khats’ method minus the SRS), and a judo grip on your mind to stick to them consistently, you can learn a language without an SRS. This requires lots of trial and error and unlearning some things and habits as much as learning new ones, but it’s possible.

This doesn’t mean that you MUST or even SHOULD learn a language without an SRS. If acquiring that judo grip in order to use the Khats-minus-SRS method is too costly (in time and effort), and if some people simply enjoy using an SRS (and we know that Khats’ method works, him being the living proof), then by all means use an SRS.

I’ve been learning Japanese on and off (in the AJATT sense) for what now amounts to 6-7 years (from about 18y.o to 24-25)
Of course, I didn’t realize I was learning for the first 2-3 years.
I simply did what lots of bored students do to pass time : watch anime (copious amounts of it – roughly 150 series over 3 years last time i checked). It was fun (for the most part – god knows Japan produces a lot of crappy anime…. I wouldn’t confess to watching 1/10th of it under duress) and I didn’t think about it too much.
My first idea of japanese was like “Man one would have to be a big nerd to go through the hassle of learning this language even aliens would be stumped by”, so I almost vowed not to learn it (just for the purpose of enjoying non-translated content at least)….. boy did my brain betray me on that.

Now as Khatz has established before, there’s no problem with the Japanese presented in Anime. It is perfectly valid input, despite showing some slight bias (I mean, I probably learned 発射せよ・修羅場 before 会社…. but to be honest, everyday words bore me. I remember reading somewhere people usually speak a language using only 3000 words…. what’s the point of having hundreds of thousands of words in the dictionary if you’re only going to use a fraction of that ?! Shakespeare would weep. So I totally understand why Khatz always has the weirdest vocab in his japanese blog posts. (I mean, who uses 拙者 except for visual novels crossing into the 時代劇 territory ? :D)

Anyway back on the topic, after 2-3 years of watching anime, I could actually understand most of the simple dialogue in anime, with only specialized vocabulary being a minor annoyance. (Ghost In the shell is still to this day a bitch to follow)
The rest could be inferred from the context (and anime tends to be context heavy so it definitely helps).
To say this came as a surprise is an understatement. I mean I almost vowed not to learn this language, and the travesty : my brain actually learnt it just by being exposed to it ! I claim to be a victim of language poisoning.
As I was blissfully unaware at the time, I had simply followed Khatz’s method almost to the T, but minus the SRS.
So what did I do ? I indulged in my new found super powers. I started watching shows without subtitles (…. that’s probably just because I didn’t want to wait for subs :o). It did feel slightly overwhelming at first without the safety net that subtitles provide, but I felt confident enough to not even bother checking words except on a few rare occasions (like …. WTF just happened? I think I just missed 80% of the plot). As someone said, not obssessing over things you don’t understand helps a lot.

My next evolutionary step was simple : the moonrunes ! I had pretty much run out of interesting anime, so I turned to the japanophile geek’s second favorite pastime : the visual novel. My problem was simple : I didn’t know the first thing about kanas, much less kanjis.
So I just rolled up my sleeves, whipped out the software du jour (namely Slime Forest), and learnt hiraganas & katakanas in a matter of days, then moved on to kanjis. The shortcoming of that game were soon apparent (you weren’t taught the readings, only individual meanings of the kanjis with mnemotechnic hints ala Heisig’s RTK). So it wasn’t fun for me. Simply because I couldn’t map the kanjis to the words I had learnt. I used a dictionary to try and do that, but the material (i.e the learning game) was not *fun*.
So I did the sensible thing : I took what I reckoned would be fun : a visual novel.
What I did with it was less sensible though : I pretty much brute-forced through the damn thing. I took an electronic dictionary (Jwpce), and proceeded to look up every single kanji I didn’t know. This basically amounted to forced SRS’ing except the text in the game was my only source of sentences. But I found it more enjoyable to do repeats on new sentences than to simply do SRS’ing for the sake of it. Overall, I gauge I forgot a kanji 5 to 6 times before it “stuck”.
It took me around 2 months to go through the game, but when I finished it, I could read hundreds of kanjis without having to look them up.

After that, the rest is history : I just kept practicing by reading with less and less lookup involved.
「There are plenty of anime and manga fans who can play through all of クラナド and ひぐらしのなく頃に without ever havin used an SRS.」
Now that one hit home a lot more accurately than a US bombing and took away the roof : Those 2 games were some of the first I played once I had a solid grasp of kanji 🙂

To sum up this rather bloggish comment, here’s the deal about SRS i.m.o :
Any intensive exposition to a language is going to cause repetition, simply because of the repetitive nature of languages (and I just meta-proved my point) Remember what I mentioned earlier about the 3000 words : well you can be sure those 3000 words you’re going to learn fast if you go through random material). The SRS is only a perfectionist’s tool : it’ll leave no holes and no room for chance.
From my experience, intensive exposure will still lead you to a near native fluency in reasonable time, with or without an SRS. But the absence of an SRS makes it a bit more haphazard. You will forget things, as such is the way of the brain, but the more you practice, the more you will remember.

So what are you waiting for ? Stop reading blogs, have fun, and learn Japanese like the best.

Note : this comment lacked remarks about the awesomeness of Khatz. So here are some : your blog is awesome ! You’re an inspiration to all the L2/3-challenged people in this world.

I can see where you’re coming from because for the better part of my first year with Japanese, I dumped my SRS and hated anything to do with sentence mining. I tried starting over dozens of times, but all in vain. I had two major burnouts during this period for the selfsame reason.

Nearly a year later, I’m back to SRSing and have managed to get my count up to 2250 (the number of course, doesn’t matter). I do it almost everyday and when I take vacations, I look at the huge pile and simply do them in small, managebale parts (and don’t add new items for a week or so).

Before doing this, I ran a short two-week experiment on acquiring vocabulary through simply reading/listening (mostly reading). The results were pretty disappointing if you want to look at it from the perspective of vocabulary acquisition. When you have more than 5 unknown words in a given document, it becomes impossible to remember them all. And that’s only one document.

There are certain things the SRS will do for you and there are certain things it won’t. I simply see the SRS as a means to keeping a lot of words at the back of my mind. I know that the only way I’m really going to master those words is if I see them repeatedly in different contexts. The SRS is just to keep all those words which I HAVEN’T mastered at the back of my memory.

The problem with SRS as I see it is that people often add a ton of irrelevant, unimportant and BORING words which you probably will never encounter in real life. You waste hours reviewing all this crap which drains you of both your concentration and energy. Also, adding more than one sentence for a single vocabulary word can prove tedious in the long run.

In short, as long as you’re spending less time SRSing and more time reading, foruming and listening – you’re good to go I think. An SRS is a great tool for keeping a truckload of vocabulary in your active memory until you repeatedly meet such vocabulary in different contexts and finally master them.

As to whether one can get fluent without an SRS, I believe they can. There are plenty of anime and manga fans who can play through all of クラナド and ひぐらしのなく頃に without ever havin used an SRS. And we all know how visual novels are choc-a-bloc full of text. I don’t ever recall having looked up every word in a dictionary when I was reading Eragon.

So I believe SRS in moderation + intensive input (news, political mishmash and other boring stuff are out!) = fast fluency with a large vocabulary

Intensive input – any kind of SRSing = slow fluency with a small vocabulary

So I believe the only problem is the time constraint. I don’t see why everybody is in such a hurry to “master” Japanese to “native-level fluency” anyway. You don’t even need such a large vocabulary if all you do in Japanese is read manga, participate in forum discussions and watch TV dramas. I don’t see WHY it is mandatory for people (who are presumably never going to Japan) to watch news and read about politics in Japan (unless of course you’re a news junkie or really like pol science or….I don’t know). As long as you spend all your free time doing things in Japanese instead of in English, methinks you’re well on your way to fluency.

What actually started my thinking was awhile ago when I came across this old thread on How to learn any language’s forum regarding Julien Gaudfroy, who is French but taught himself to be fluent in Mandarin.

how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7171&PN=0&TPN=4

The one thing he said that jumped out at me was, “Sometimes the more you think, the less you learn. Which also means that at the end you are less able to think.
Think of that: the main reason why we study a language faster in its country is because we don’t understand anything. You keep hearing words and wondering what they mean, and will remember them before knowing their meaning. Which means when you start using them you’ll do it naturally!”

Here is a video of him on a Chinese TV show.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYlnJpvRwX8&feature=related

Anyway what he was saying stuck in the back of my mind. I also later found this paper which summarizes some of the natural acquisition methods.

homepage3.nifty.com/park/silent.htm

I think the ALG people have it right too, but the problem I’m trying to figure out is how to replicate “comprehensible input” without a native person and also finding some way I can actively respond to the input which a TV or podcast can’t provide. My initial thinking for a beginning to this type of process would be to start with a lot of kids videos where the basics of the language are reinforced with a lot of simple speaking and pictures. Then perhaps finding the right exchange partner on skype would be the answer to being able to have an active response to the input. We’ll see.