Tag Archives: sentences

I’ve heard about Lang-8 for a while, but never actually looked it up until recently. As it turns out, this was a fantastic move. More on that in a moment. So, what is Lang-8? On the surface, it’s a journal that you post to with a community. However, it’s so much more than that. Lang-8 is a community with native speakers of over 190 languages for you to interact with.  An Overview of How it Works Basically, as mentioned before, it is a journal that you post to, with a twist. When you sign up, it asks you for two things (aside from the standard information all sites ask for upon registration, like email): your native language and your target language(s). The twist is that all of your posts will be in the target language, not your native one. So for me, this means […]

This is the second article in the Method Change-Up series. If you haven’t yet read the first, please do so first. The biggest changes in my method for learning Japanese have been detailed in the first article in this series. However, I have made another change (more like a decision, actually) that I’ll detail here. A while back, made a post about trying something called MCDs (Massive-Context Cloze-Deletion Card), a concept first introduced to me by this post at AJATT. I decided to give it a go in tandem with my sentences to see how I liked it. In fact, it was so different than how I was used to learning that I actually tried it for over a year. In that article I hinted at possibly switching over to MCDs. However, after trying it for a long time, I have […]

Part of immersion is listening to audio, such as podcasts. However, most Japanese podcasts do not come with written transcripts. This represents an issue when studying because it can be difficult to correctly understand what you hear. This is where Podcastle comes in. Podcastle is a project funded by the Japanese government for foreign Japanese language learners. It provides a speech recognition system to automagically convert the audio into text. While you play the audio, it tries to keep up but can sometimes become “desynchronized”. It helps if you know enough Japanese to be able to tell when it’s messed up, as it can sometimes be off by a few words. Knowing kana at a minimum may be enough to be able to tell this. While its speech recognition is not all that accurate (let’s face it, though – none […]

Alright, so I’ve had some time to look into these MCDs posts on AJATT to see what they are all about. It seems each MCD is meant to focus on a single kanji, rather than a whole word. This makes a lot of sense, but also can (and likely will) mean that you can have multiple cards for the same sentence. However, it also seems that this might be better once you have more kanji/readings under your belt, since they are so context dependent. To that end, I’m going to use a combination of both going forward. I’m going to continue adding sentences to my original deck primarily, until I can go monolingual. From there, I think it would be best to ease into MCDs a little at a time until I’ve got a solid enough grasp on things to […]

Almost daily, I run into people asking me “How do you say [insert random phrase] in Japanese?”. Anyone that knows I’m studying Japanese seems to think I can immediately speak it, and seem disappointed when I cannot (yet). This is because of the way I’m learning sentences. You see, right now, I am focused on input vs. output. Before I get into my reasons why, let me first define each. Input is taking anything Japanese in. It’s listening, reading, seeing. Output is speaking and writing.   Why Input Should Come First The reasons behind this are simple. Let’s get an example situation to work from. Say you’re lost, and need directions. You find a local, and ask something along the lines of “渋谷はどこですか。” (Where is Shibuya?). Great! He understood your question, and is now giving a response. Problem is, you […]

Sentences are the largest part of learning Japanese, for several reasons. But before we jump into that, let’s take a step back and look at this phase from afar to get an idea of what it’s all about. The idea here borrows heavily on AJATTs method, specifically the sentences portion (credit where credit is due and whatnot). The idea is that by the time you learn 10,000 sentences, you’ll be fluent. Why sentences instead of words? What good is a bunch of vocabulary if you don’t know how to string it together? This method kills two birds with one stone. You learn sentence structure and vocabulary at the same time. That being said, it’s important not to memorize the sentence, but to understand it instead. 10,000 sentences! Holy crap! Yeah, holy crap indeed. It’s a large goal, and not one […]