Time for another catch up post!

Heeeeeey! So it's been awhile again. Not as long as I thought it had been since I last posted though, so that's awesome! Good thing this time (like last time) is that I've still been studying 日本語 quite a lot lately, even though I haven't been posting about it.　

Since my last post, I've covered a few sections of TextFugu to complete Season 一 in it's entirety! ^_^

Going to summarize what I've done since I was here last. It's a lot so it will make for a long catch up post so try to keep up. :)

Passion List

I created my passion list, which is a list of 二十 vocabulary words that revolve around something that I am extremely passionate about -- Ron Paul and the message of liberty!! Koichi-san wanted us to create this list of vocab words so we can associate something we already like into our 日本語 studies to keep us motivated.

Here is my passion list!

liberty - ふき
government - せいじ
president - だいとりょう
doctor -　いしゃ
economics - けいぜいがく
gold - おごん
debt - ふさい
revolution - かくめい
Constitution - けんぽう
America - アメリカ
republic - きょわこく
representative - ぎいん
war - せんそう
freedom - ふき
money - おかね
bank - ぎんこう
prosperity - はんえい
people - ひとびと
speech - えんぜつ
rights - じんけん

I created my worksheet, looked up the vocab using the radical online dictionary Koichi-san referred to - http://jisho.org/ - and created my Anki deck to study these words. I know most of these pretty well by now. Viva la かくめい!!

Japanese Grammar with Yoda

Next up was a section called Japanese Grammar with Yoda. In this section, there were a few Yoda highlight videos which were entertaining, especially since I'm not particularly familiar with Star Wars. Point being in this section is that when speaking Japanese, the order we are accustomed to in English is flip-flopped. Yoda's way of speaking is sort of parallel with this at least in the simplest and most basic forms of Japanese grammar. For example, in English, we would say 'It is a strawberry' but in Japanese the flip-flopping that occurs makes it actually 'Strawberry it is.' So needless to say, we covered and practiced です in this section and created very basic sentences with various nouns like strawberry, grapes, etc.

In this section, I did end up learning some new vocab words so gonna record those for future reference:

strawberry - いちご
monkey - さる
pumpkin - かぼちゃ
grapes - ぶどう
banana - バナナ

There were others used but I knew them already like でんしゃ, つなみ, とまだち, すし, さけ, さしみ, すもう, みず, せんせい, からて, いぬ and ねこ.

Also this section, we practiced using the words from the passion list with です.

Lastly there was a new Anki deck introduced for download for the various TextFugu sentences we worked on in this section and a practice ひらがな worksheet to make sure we had them down prior to moving on to the next section: Intro to Kanji!!!

Intro to Kanji

This section was just purely information for the soaking about how most Japanese learners learn Kanji according to how Japanese school children learn Kanji and how that method fails most non-Japanese who are attempting to learn the language. This is mainly because Japanese school children learn Kanji in procession based simply on the meaning of the Kanji, not the complexity of the characters themselves. I mean they learn Kanji that are sometimes in excess of 15 strokes before they learn Kanji that have one stroke because the word meanings themselves are less complex. Koichi-san detailed how the TextFugu methodology for Kanji learning was different and thus actually much more effective for learning to read Kanji quickly as we would be focusing on complexity as far as number of strokes and not meaning of the words. Koichi-san also stressed that it isn't really necessary to learn how to write Kanji at this stage and wanted us to focus more on learning to read it.

He also introduced the concept of the 80-20 rule. Developed by Vilfredo Pareto, the 80-20 rule states: “80% of the efforts of something come from roughly 20% of the causes.” We will also utilize this concept in learning Kanji. Koichi-san believes that:

20% of kanji makes up 80% of all that is written, therefore we’re going to learn that 20% first, so you can start using your reading abilities in real-life situations as quickly as possible (which is really the best way to practice, anyways).

The goal TextFugu aims to achieve in respect to Kanji is to get us reading it as soon as possible and to help us learn the most useful things first.

In essence, the TextFugu method for Kanji learning totally turns the traditional method on it's head. Using the TextFugu method we will:

First - learn the radicals - sort of the building blocks of Kanji
Second - once the radicals are learned they can be put together to build Kanji
Third - continuing this progress - as previously mentioned we'll learn Kanji by the complexity of the characters themselves vs. the meanings. This helps us to build on concepts we've already learned through teh first and second steps to create learning more and more complex Kanji with far less brain-strain
Fourth - using practice worksheets, unconventional memory tricks and other tools to study the Kanji and  move them into long-term memory

No time like the present to get started so next up was...

Intro to Radicals!

This section began groundwork for learning actual Kanji. Radicals are very rarely taught in 日本語 but that's not really a good thing. Kanji radicals are basically like the letters of the alphabet so to speak. In 英語, we had to learn the letters that make up words before we could actually learn words and that's how radicals work too. Kanji are typically made up of several pieces so instead of just trying to remember what strokes go where, we can actually learn the different pieces of the kanji that make up the strokes. LOL, not sure if this will make sense to an outsider, but it makes sense in my head. For a final attempt at explaining, the kanji for 'walk' is made up of 8 strokes. Instead of remembering 8 separate strokes, we can actually just learn the three radicals that make up the 八 strokes. The radical method is really supreme for the purpose of long term memory and that's what learning a language is really all about.

We'll start off learning the radicals only made up of one stroke each, then use those radicals to learn the 2 stroke radicals then use those to learn the 3 stroke radicals and so on and so forth. The methodology really is designed to keep building upon things you know so as to reinforce and strengthen the learning you do.

In order to learn the radicals, we'll use mnemonics. Here are the steps:

1. Take advantage of “flashbulb” memory - we remember things that are traumatic or shocking more thoroughly than other memories - think about how you can remember minute details about certain events in life - like where you were when 9/11/01 took place
2. Make things ridiculous - we'll use crazy little stories so as to enhance our memories - you don't remember ordinary things like you do outlandish things
3. Use Multiple Senses
4. Put together memorable stories - flashbulb memories + ridiculous stories
5. Practice - makes perfect!

This summarizes the end of Season 1. Now on to Season 2 and the radicals themselves!

またね!