You learn things by first wanting to learn it and taking that leap. The next thing is to simply dive into and let your brain recognize patterns and structure. This is how you learn a new language, but this is also how you learn in general.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J34i9lr94pI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9wUEiSHtqU
The Dragonball Z in the background was a little irritating, but this is interesting, this seems to be what he was talking about:
Although, honestly, I wonder how much of this is due to a genuine positive educational effect or the psychological effect. In other words, do you learn more because of a genuinely better educational exposure, or because a person tends to be highly motivated to learn the subject when they are immersed in it? One could argue that this is a moot point since the psychology induces the educational experience, but notice that this leaves the possibility that one could alter the psychology and use a bit more of the traditional educational approach and be left with a much more beneficial result.
I bring this up because I had a long conversation about procrastination with a friend of mine, and we got into talking about the importance of environmental factors that relate to procrastination. Thus, I could see how immersion would be much more of a psychological development.
Normally, I’d leave such thoughts to myself, but I got the feeling that this post would’ve gotten forgotten about had I not posted. And I am interested enough in seeing posts related in any way to general techniques of self-improvment that I didn’t want to see this pushed to the way-side.
This guy’s got it right. He learned Japanese to near native-level in a year and a half, and got a job in at a software company in Japan right afterward. He also learned Cantonese, but this has been a little detrimental to his Japanese writing because he frequently mixes Chinese characters into his Japanese. Still, these are amazing feats according to any linguist. Hats off to him.
However, he’s slightly wrong about two things.
Having stuff play in the background doesn’t do much. Japanese constantly listen to English music at home, on TV, at the store, at the office, on the train…but most people can’t speak or understand English at all. It’s what you actually pay attention to that matters.
Videos will do a lot for you, but without the trial and error process of communicating you can’t become fluent or be a good conversationalist. However, this only takes a few weeks, and will be handled automatically once you arrive in the country, so it’s doesn’t matter much.
I have to say you are correct. As someone who has a degree in linguistics, I have never seen any research that suggests playing dragonball z videos in the background leads to proficiency. In fact, much research suggests we process things semantically before we process them syntactically (which is why we start with broken English or Spanish or whatever and move towards self-correction and input-based correction). So it is exactly working in reverse to what you should do. Maybe learning some words and then hearing later how everything is conjugated, ordered in a sentence, etc. Movies can be helpful a little from the start if you watch a good movie and then have that movie in subtitles in the language you are trying to learn. It is not exact, but you get a good idea about basic vocab, verbs, prepositions, etc. But this may only be helpful if you’ve learned the script and have some abstract understanding of the grammar (but have not processed its use quite yet).
I do not know Japanese. But have some books on kanji that I’ve been meaning to look at. Particularly James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji which provides an excellent memory device remember each character and its meaning.
If you want to see good language learning skills, check out Daniel Tammett learning Icelandic in a week!
Nielsio, you said that Steven Pinker was on your reading list. No?
He is the Hans Hoppe of psycho-linguistics and cognitive science.
Meanwhile, you are wasting too much time with the Paul Krugmans
I don’t think he would disagree with that. But when you surround yourself with it – replace the movies you watch, replace the podcasts you listen to, replace the magazines you read, etc – then you will end up concentrating on it. Basically you give yourself the most potential time that you might end up concentrating on it. Even during the videos I linked, he pointed out two things in the manga that was playing that caught his attention.
Ah, interesting.
Huh? I don’t know who that is.
Previous thread. you don’t remember.
Then if language acquisition and cognition is of interest to you, then you should consider to get to know him.
I’m sorry, I’ll have to disagree.
I tried the immersion approach with Chinese. After spending many hours on it, I still couldn’t manage to compose a proper sentence. I had no clue about grammar or conjugation. The recognition effect that’s supposed to occur if you are confronted with a foreign language long enough just didn’t happen. I suspect that after some time, the sentences you have immersed in will stick and you will be able to repeat those, but I seriously doubt that you will be able to extrapolate the content of a language from this.
I found the more conservative approach to be working better for me: learn the grammar and vocabulary, read and understand texts written in your specific level of complexity, repeat and move on. If you feel ready, start oral and audio exercises. This got me an A in Latin, a B in French and an A+ in English - not too bad for a native German I think.
It would probably at least get you to start assimilating the phonotactics of the language, which is, of course, important.
How is he the “Paul Krugman” of “psycho-linguistics and cognitive science”?
I picked up another language by hearing it spoken regularly, but never studying a single text, word list, grammar, etc. Worked just fine for me.
No surprise that it works for some and not for others, though. Of course it does. That it works for me doesn’t conclude the demonstration, and that it doesn’t work for another doesn’t either. We have to take a larger look I guess!
Since adults can deliberately learn things like sentence structure, and soak up a whole lot of vocab quickly with SRS (Structured Repetition Systems), I think there is an introductory period where it’s more efficient to emphasize study over immersion.
Everyone recommends that book, it is very cool as a book about the kanji, and the mnemonics are nice, but the big secret is that memorizing all 2000~ of the daily use kanji doesn’t really do much. Kanji constitute an entire system of organizing meaning; they aren’t just vocab words. You could memorize every kanji used in newspapers, be able to perfectly recite every single reading and meaning of every last character by heart, but still be completely unable to read a single sentence or headline in a newspaper, book or magazine (neither read aloud nor comprehend!).
For learning to use the kanji, the standard is the Kanji Kentei test prep “Step” books. These are what most native speakers use, and what I used to go from the kanji level of a 2nd-grader to that of a Japanese-native college graduate in six months of hard study. It’s basically a paper-based SRS, and SRS are simply amazing for how much info they can get you to retain. If I ever have to learn another language, I’ll spend the first three months just configuring a perfect SRS for it.
Yes, that is true. It basically forces all your attention time onto one language artifact or another.
As for Pinker, I think he would largely approve of the method in the videos. It seems right in line with what his ideas.
However, as for how to learn in general, language is a very specific kind of learning. As the guy in the video says, it’s not a creative process, it’s an imitative process, and it’s largely automatic once you get the ball rolling. Other types of learning require careful study and reflection, and even more importantly, careful avoidance of random memes and popular delusions (collectivist habits, etc.). For language, you actually want all those memes (or most of them), because that’s exactly what language is.
It does, but again only if you pay attention to it.
It is not the point of the “Heiseg method” to teach you to be able to read aloud or to comprehend text. So just that it fails to do that is not a fair criticism.
In employing the method, you associate a word or phrase from your language with each kanji. But what most people fail to understand is that what word or phrase you associate with what kanji is quite irrelevant, it is at most just an adjunct.
The point of the method is quite simple, it is just that it provides a good structure of mnemonics allowing you quickly to memorize the structure of the appearance of each kanji allowing you quickly to get to the level at which you are able to readily distinguish between that of each kanji from that of each other.
If, instead, when you start trying to learn to be able to read aloud or to comprehend text, the kanji were entirely unfamiliar, the writing would appear to you as senseless chaos, as an indecipherable mess of random lines and for example, it would, in the course of “reading” a phrase or sentence, be very difficult to keep each character composing it steady enough in your mind so if you reach a repeated character, you are able to recognize that you saw it earlier.
It is pretty difficult not to. Even if you just hear the sounds and get none of the content, your mind gathers associations of sounds to other sounds and, in other words, you begin to start assimilating the phonotactics of the language.
It would be pretty difficult to make the case that, if you listen just passively, you retain no memories of the event at all.
I agree that the mnemonics are useful. The myth I’m trying to dispel is that that book is the one to recommend for “learning the kanji.” I might recommend it for learning to differentiate the elements, which is indeed a revelation for the learner at the time, but it’s only the first 0.5% of the job of learning the complete package necessary for actually using the characters as language elements.
I’m not saying you have to grok the content, I’m just saying you have to pay attention to it.
I would say the average Japanese young person is immersed in Western vocal music several hours a day, not to mention movies, TV shows, even mandatory English classes four times a week for six years. Yet the average Japanese person cannot speak or understand a lick of English unless it is spoken with a perfectly Japanese accent. And usually they can’t even repeat back English sounds they hear (young children can, but teens and adults generally can’t without special instruction). Now I’m sure a lot of that is due to mental blocks and the horrific government education system, but even from my own learning experience I can tell you that Chinese (which I spent a while learning by listening to vocal CDs without study) was all a blur to me until I started actually paying attention to the sounds.
So all I’m saying is purely background is not enough. You don’t retain (or at least can’t recall) memories of that which you don’t actually observe. Is the number six on your watch dial, the Arabic #6 or is it the Roman #VI? Most people couldn’t tell you without looking, though they’ve already glanced at it thousands of times.
Yeah, I think that it would be misguided to try to get to the point at which you are able to go through the entirety of each of the 2000 or 3000 words or phrases and be able to write each of the kanji corresponding to each. But it probably makes sense to go through it quickly to familiarize yourself with the elements and whatever.
Well, your argument might be unfair. For it assumes that the person who listens to audio passively does not also read and listen to other writing and audio actively.
What if I were to study Japanese two or three hours per day actively but also listen to Japanese one to two hours per day passively? Do you think that I would learn more quickly than if I just did the former?
I’m sure you would get some benefit, but only in proportion to how often it caught your attention. So if you’re the type who focuses very intently on whatever you’re doing it would probably be more distracting than helpful, but if you’re doing something that doesn’t require 100% concentration and you’re more of a multitasker the extra input will probably have some effect as you’ll be able to expend a bit of attention on it so as to catch brief expressions like “Ouch!” and some typical sound patterns. If you’re just sitting there doing nothing and listening without really focusing on it, it will almost definitely have an effect, but I contend that that’s because it will catch your attention fairly often if not constantly (and will be helpful to the extent it does catch your attention).
This is what you’ll sound like to Japanese people. But I guess if that is what you’re going for…
What is this in response to?
