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.
