Start 'em early

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I passed the JLPT 3 ...

Back in 2007, I sat for and passed the 三級「さんきゅう」(　translation: level 3 ) exam for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. It was a big moment for me. It meant a lot, personally. It stood to show that I could study on my own and make serious headway into Japanese fluency. I had managed to pass the same test my brother passed while living in and immersing himself in Japan! I even managed to almost beat his score. Next stop: being paid to be awesome!

It was pretty much a complete lie. Not that I passed, mind you. I passed with, I think, an 80%. And I achieved that success through a lot of study. Many nights would find me at the kitchen table for 4 to 6 hours of study. So, that part is true. What I thought it connoted was the lie. I had not made any significant headway and here is why: I studied to pass a test and not to communicate.

Short and sweet, isn't it? A lot of work completely invalidated! You know what part of the test that I scored the lowest on was?　 Listening comprehension! I bombed it. Might as well have been deaf. I had some fantastic resources as well. I worked through Japanese for Busy People, Pimsleur Japanese, Master Series for JLPT3 Grammar. I　think the biggest problem with the method I was using was that I was doing my damndest to use English.

The only thing I had to tie my studies to was my understanding of their concepts as translated to English. The first page of the Master's Series goes over how to use 「かた」to conjugate a verb into "how the verb is done." Three years ago, I would read that, go over the samples, and memorize "「かた」 means VERB+how to". Then, onto the next one. No sentence mining, no constant deck reviews and culling. No i+1 input. No materials that were chosen simply because the subject interested me! When it came time to take the exam, I could read the sentences well enough having developed a good vocabulary(　that's right, folks, I　used Anki back when it was an EMACS module! Pedigree! ) and I could tell which was the correct conjugation to put in the blank. Should some harried teacher have rushed up to me with some ungraded grammar quizzes for her class of 2 year olds( okay two year olds with massive head injuries ), I could have been her hero! Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly a hero when it came to the various in-person language exchanges I was part of, though.

I'm a moderately shy person. I　don't like looking like an idiot and like a lot of human beings I don't like being wrong. I had two language exchange partners, both with native Japanese speakers who were living in the DC area. Both spoke fantastic English and both were more than willing to help me with Japanese. However, I almost never spoke in Japanese or asked them to speak in Japanese for a set period of time. I didn't want to be wrong, I didn't want to look like I couldn't communicate and, in the end, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I couldn't communicate. Not taking advantage of the perfect opportunity presented to me in the form of truly enjoyable language exchange partners is probably the biggest regret I have when it comes to Japanese. I spent way too much time asking JLPT grammar questions( in English ), asking the difference between vague JLPT vocabulary( in English ), and wrapping my head around various Japanese idioms( IN ENGLISH! ).

There is fundamental flaw in the idea of setting an exam as your goal. The goal should be, has to be, fluency in communication. Being able to communicate fluently is the mountaintop and exams like the JLPT should be your base-camp. They should be your first step up the mountain - That place where the wizened old mountaineer pours over your gear with a critical eye and decides whether or not you're going to kill yourself going up the mountain. Passing tests like the JLPT 3&4 are valuable intermediate launching points, I think. The test is able to dilute the massive swirling soup of Japanese into some very concise points that you're going to need to know. How you get to the base-camp is just as important as how you're going to climb that mountain. I know that, in my case, I took the exam and having seen it as the mountain-top for so long, all I had to look forward to was the long walk back down. It was so easy to quit. To say, "well, we're having a baby, I don't have time or the mental capacity for this at the moment," because I had reached my goal. There is an urge to make excuses for my behavior: "Well, I'm an American student trying to learn Japanese outside of Japan." "Japanese is hard to learn even IN Japan." "It wasn't the right time to learn." To which there are a couple of rebukes. I did the exact same thing when I trained for my Cisco Certification. My goal was to pass the CCNA exam, I passed with flying colors and I stopped learning. That information has effectively atrophied. So it's not that Japanese is hard because Cisco products aren't difficult to use and I let the same thing happen. As for learning outside of Japan? Go check out Khatzumoto at All Japanese All the Time, he did it as have many others. The material isn't cripplingly difficult, but the same can't be said for the mindset! To be honest, I don't know where the mindset comes from! I don't know if we pick this up in school ( "Will this be on the exam?" ) or if we're hardwired to be lazy learners. Path of least resistance?

Another post coming down the pipes about the changes I've made this time around!

Kids don't want to learn a language...

They just want to communicate. Helena can practically stutter herself into a coughing fit because she gets so excited to tell us something. Her brain is going so fast and her mouth can't keep up. We have to remind her to slow down and "use her words." She's simply so excited to be communicating with people that it's the highlight of her day... okay the highlight of five minutes! It's not the same for adult learners, especially ones who aren't in an immersion based environment. If we happen to be lucky enough to have a friend to try out our new found skills it's no skin off our noses if we don't get it. We take that for granted! I mentally SIGH every single time I see the 「お元気ですか」lesson at the beginning of a textbook. It's so pedestrian and useless, get me to the meat and teach me how to say complex stuff or show me the secrets to being awesome! But I'm honestly unable to imagine just how excited Helena must have been when she realized she could say "How you doooing?" when she wanted to ask us how our day was going.

It must some kind of terrible storm going on inside of a kid's head. When I was in a language exchange we'd meet for dinner and chat. Since my partner was proficient in English we'd spend most of our time on English. Because, that makes sense! I didn't have the temerity or the simple willpower to not slip into English to try to express something. If things got difficult I'd just go back to what was comfortable! Helena can't do that and we can see it when she tries to communicate something she's found important and we're not able to understand her. She squeezes her fists shut, shakes( practically vibrates! ) and starts to cry. It makes me realize that learning to communicate is one of her primary goal in life and she probably doesn't even know it!

Imagine seeing someone(s) day in and day out and not being able to communicate with them and they're you're only contact to the world. If you want food, you have to scream. If you need some attention, you have to cry. Effectively, for an adult version, you'd have to imagine yourself in a foreign prison. Easier yet, imagine you are the foreigner and you're in an American jail - slim luck of meeting a bilingual sympathetic ear! Every single linguistic achievement must generate a sense of relief and accomplishment. Things like this aren't chapters in a book or project milestones, they're major passages in ones ability to communicate.

I've spent a lot of time trying to learn the Japanese Language when I really need to be spending time learning how to communicate in Japanese.

Learning like a 2 year old

Khatzumoto over at All Japanese All The Time has a couple theories about the idea that it's best to learn a language when you're young. I think it's something that anyone who choses to a study a new language has heard or thought at sometime. "Oh, their brains are like sponges!" "Well they don't have a choice to learn, they need it to survive!" Khatzumoto suggests that they're effectively never not learning, it's just that all their learning is disguised as play and child-like curiosity. A constant environment of immersion is a fantastic way to learn things! Going to a class a couple hours a week is decidedly less effective. It's one of the points that Khatzumoto tries to make, that, no matter what you do, try to do it in your target language.

I see this in my daughter, who at the time of writing this is a couple months shy of three years old. If she is awake she's asking a question... and then asking it again... and again. A good example is the day I had to pick her up from daycare and walked with her to the head office of the company at which I work. It was nice out and once she was up on my shoulders she could see some of the sculpture exhibits that were set up on the streets. "Whats that, Daddy!?!" "That's a sculpture, Helena." This went on for about 5 blocks, the same question and the same answer with some deviation to describe the sculpture. About a week later, while putting her in the car, she asked if we could go see the "sulpturres." It took me a couple beats before I realized that she had simply mispronounced "sculptures" and when I did I was shocked. The previous encounter was the only time she'd been exposed to the word "Sculpture," but the constant linguistic input had cemented the concept for her.

Obviously, I don't have someone to carry me around on their shoulders( blast! ) while I ask questions in Japanese( double blast! ), but I do have Anki! So, I recently started a deck for words and grammar constructs that I see Helena discover or use. My intent has been to observe her language use and ask myself, "can I express the same thing in Japanese?" If not, I create more anki cards and study the grammar required with a focus on finding and studying example sentences. In my mind, being able to express something in Japanese is different than trying to translate into Japanese. As it is, I'm attempting to avoid production in my target language and focusing more on input.

It's been eye opening, in fact, to see the differences between her English and my Japanese. I'm not completely new, but I haven't studied seriously since she was born, and had only passed the JLPT 3 right before she was born. While JLPT 3 isn't a huge accomplishment, it did at least give me a basis with which to work. Vocabulary lists, grammar elements, etc - all things that, if I give it critical thought, gave me something of a technical understanding of Japanese but not an ability to communicate. I could correct basic grammar usage( a pretty big part of the JLPT exam ) but I couldn't communicate well with my language parters at the time and communication is the entire reason I was learning Japanese! I'm hoping that trying to mimic my daughter's learning process, I can help make my reentry back into the language somewhat more organic.

Here's a quick break down of the process, I've been using thus far. I tend to carry around some 3x5 cards and a pen and I've been using them to write down things that I cannot express that Helena can. So, given a typical scene when I pick her up from daycare and we talk while walking back to my office:

H: What is that mans doing? ( she often uses the plural for a single person )
S: He's welding.
H: What are they doing?
S: They're hanging a sign!
H: Oooooh. Can I take my shoes off?
S: Not right now, we're in a hurry.
H: Okay.
H: Where is my harmonica? I can't finds it.
S: Did you forget it?
H: Huh? ( I don't think she understood "to forget" )
S: Did you forget it? Did you not remember?
H: Nooo, I put in my bag!

I would take a moment to write down:
1. grammar: create gerunds from verbs
2. vocab: welding, sign, to hang, to take off, hurry, not right now, to forget, to put, bag/backpack.
3. expressions: Asking permission.

The vocab is easy - look them up in gjiten or an online dictionary and pile them into the deck in Anki. The grammar is a more difficult. Taking, for example, "Can I take my shoes off". I'd forgotten how to ask permission for things but was fairly certain that 「～てもいいですか」was the way to go about it. A quick online search let me know I was right and I went through the process of breaking down the grammar required to use that sentence. Obviously, conjugating to　て-form is required and I'd completely forgotten that. A quick run through Tae Kim's grammar guide followed up with some notes from Makino's A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar helped to refresh my memory. The last thing to do was to add not only some example sentences to Anki but also some summarized grammar points.

Taking these steps was pretty easy and not terribly time consuming. However, I don't particularly have a way to know if I'm right or not. While I'm trying to work with expression instead of translation, I'm sure I'll run into an example where an accomplished Japanese speaker would say, "We don't say it like that. We'd probably understand what you were trying to communicate but we say it like..." A possible extension of this exercise might include posting on Lang8 and attempting to communicate using the new expressions, vocab, and grammar.

The intent of this post isn't to say, "this is the way to learn Japanese." It's more of sounding board for me to look at what I'm doing and if needed alter they way I'm learning to best suit me.