A New Word!

I have a Japanese friend that I skype with twice a week. One day is devoted to English conversation practice and questions and the other day to Japanese conversation practice and questions. 

Digression alert! If you don’t have a language partner, you should get one. It’s free and a great way to practice. Just search for “language exchange” and you’ll come across several websites to help you out. Now, some language partners will be great at explaining grammar and answering difficult usage questions and other not so much, but you get conversation practice either way, so go for it!

And now, back to our post.

I love finding out the quirks of languages. My favorite Japanese word is 朝飯前 (あさめしまえ or asameshimae in case you haven’t learned hiragana yet). It literally means “before breakfast” but is the Japanese equivalent of “a piece of cake” or “easy as pie”. Basically, 朝飯前 means that something is so easy that you can do it before breakfast.

New Digression alert! What’s up with all the food comparisons to mean that something is easy. Proper baking isn’t easy. It requires careful measurement and some precision, doesn’t it?

Today I learned a new word that I really like. What do you call this?

Well, that’s a shoe, obviously! Duh!

No, not the shoe, but the way the lace is tied. No secret there, especially since it’s named in the picture, right? Well, my Japanese friend says it is a 蝶々結び (ちょうちょうむすび or chouchoumusubi) which literally translates as “butterfly knot”. I love that!

Have you seen 君たちはどう生きるか (the most recent Ghibli film yet? They called this “The Boy and the Heron” in English. I guess they didn’t like “How Do You Live?” as a title. Anyway, here’s a song from it: 

Also, Godzilla Minus One was excellent, and it was fun to see the choices made in the English subtitles. (For example, they translated ダメです different ways at different points in the film.)

Is Japanese hard? Yes. That’s okay. You know what you have to do：

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Looking Up 漢字

Do you know the Kanji radicals?

You know. These guys:

Looking up Kanji can be difficult if you don’t know the radicals, and, to be honest, sometimes the radicals that go to make up a particular character aren’t always obvious (at least to me). One thing that can really be annoying to to scan the list while trying to figure out the radicals that are in a particular character, only to discover (after a long search) that the character itself is a radical!

If you’ve experienced this, you know what I mean. If you haven’t experienced this, I’m glad for you.

When you don’t know that many kanji and you have to look them up a lot, you get to know the radicals. Then, as you learn more and more kanji, you spend less time looking them up and you forget the radicals, and then, when you have to look one up again, a process that was once relatively smooth can be quite rough.

Any guesses as to what I’m having to do today?

Yeah.

And, in the end, it will probably turn out to be a word that I should have remembered!

That’s okay, though. It’s still good practice!

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself!

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The Dreaded Plateau

Or, as my Japanese friend puts it: 平ら which means flat.

As you are learning any language, there will be times when you are soaking up vocabulary or grammar or getting experience speaking and you are progressing by leaps and bounds.

And then…

Suddenly…

You realize that you don’t feel like you’re progressing at all.

Been there, done that. In fact, I’m there right now. What to do? What to do?

The first and most important thing is

It isn’t really a big deal. What you need is just a new plan. Shake things up, that’s all.

Typically, a plateau means that you’re in a bit of a rut and you need to do something different.

What could be? Just about anything.

Watch something new or more difficult

Find a new language partner

Look for an online radio station in Japanese

Set a new goal to work towards

I’m a big fan of achievable goals. For example, decide that you will learn 3 new vocabulary words or kanji every day for the next month. Decide that you will learn (and use!) a new grammar point every day for the next two weeks.

How about choosing for one day (or one hour) to use only Japanese. (This could require a very accommodating roommate or spouse. Only watch Japanese TV or videos or listen to music in Japanese for that time frame.

Decide that for one whole day you will get all of your news from NHK (or news web easy).

Take something at an appropriate level and length and translate it from English to Japanese.

Buy a new workbook in Japanese.

Do you have a hobby (other than learning Japanese)? How about learning specific terms associated with that hobby?

There are all kinds of options, but a plateau often means “too much the same” so don’t do “the same” for awhile. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go back to what you’ve been doing later.

Or, if you’ve hit a plateau, trying writing a blog post about how to break out of it, because I can already guarantee that it will help. Trust me on this one! I’m already feeling better about the plateau that has been bugging me.

I use Bunpro for grammar study, and I just went in and reset all of my progress to make myself restudy some grammar. I have also found some new movies to watch. I struggled through a skype conversation because I found myself wanting to use some words that I didn’t know. That’s a good clue about what to study.

The trick is to not let the plateau frustrate you or get you down. Think about this – you have to climb quite a distance to get to that plateau in the first place! You can’t plateau unless you’ve made some progress in the first place. Congratulations!

Now go climb off of that plateau!

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Studio Ghibli Event in the US

Fathom events Ghibli Fest if you want to see some Studio Ghibli movies on the big screen!

Time To Put Some Language Skills to the Test

So, I bought a new book. This is not a “language learning” book, but it is definitely a book that will give my language skills, such as they are, because this is just a normal book written in Japanese.

Okay, well, it isn’t a normal book exactly. That would be too much to expect, after all. It’s this:

None of my friends were surprised by the fact that I was buying this book. They all just shook their heads knowingly and possible rolled their eyes a little but.

Of course the musical portion of the book is understandable to anyone who can read tablature, but the rest of it will be in Japanese, which will be fun.

A word of warning, though, which might apply to anyone looking to buy books in Japanese: do some comparison shopping.

Not surprisingly, this particular book isn’t freely available in the U.S. where I live, but I did find it on ebay for 60 dollars’, which is definitely too steep for me. Pricey. I checked some stores in Japan and found it there. With shipping, it was only 40 dollars and would only take two weeks to arrive.

I have known people who wouldn’t order from Japan because they thought that shipping would be too expensive, so they went for a U.S. retailer and paid a considerably higher price. (Mind you, some people think that the higher price is worth it if they will get the product faster. I am not one of those people, but, if that’s they way you feel, go for it.)

Why, I can hear someone thinking, am I buying a Ukulele Jazz book that happens to be written in Japanese? Well, because I like playing that style on that instrument and these arrangements happen to be good. The fact that the book happens to be written in Japanese is just a bonus as far as I’m concerned! Here’s one of the videos that made me interested in getting the book in case you’re interested.

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ただ、無料、FREE!

We like free things, and here are some free things I just came across this morning: free books in Japanese

You can pick the level of book that you want to read

and that will lead you to a list of books that you can click on (of which this is a very small sample):

And then you can read the book online:

Did you notice the frequency with which the word FREE appears in these images? I haven’t fully explored the site yet, since I just came across it this morning, but it looks like there are links which will allow you to purchase hard copy graded readers as well as E-books.

Once you pass the beginner level but aren’t quite ready to read full blown normal Japanese novels, it can be ridiculously difficult to find things to read that are at a level high enough to be useful but not so high as to be drive you to distraction with frustration, so this site looks like a treasure trove to me.

Have fun.

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続ける

When I first started studying Japanese, I began with a plan from NIhongo Shark which did set me off on the right foot. The basic idea was that, before you started learning Japanese grammar, you learn the daily use Kanji, all 2200 or so of them, and a basic English meaning for each one. I did this with some help from Learn the Kanji by Hesig and websites like Wankikani.

I don’t make any money off of this blog (though, if you’d like to check out my novels at amazon I would be fine with that!) so when I give a plug to something it is strictly because I found it helpful and maybe you will, too. We’re all in this together, right?

The reason I mentioned NIhongo Shark right now, though, is because a slogan that I saw on his website that resonated with me was: “Keep swimming. You are crossing an ocean.”

This slogan is extra good because, if a shark stops swimming, it will die, and, if a language learner stops learning, their knowledge of the language will likely die, too.

Here is what you need to know if you want to learn Japanese:

Learning Japanese is hard, particularly if you native language is something like English.

Hey! I thought you were meant to be encouraging me!

I am, but telling someone that learning Japanese is a piece of cake when it isn’t is not encouraging. In order to succeed, you need to know what you’re getting yourself in for. Learning Japanese is not easy, and anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Learning Japanese is NOT impossible.

But you can do it, and that’s the real point. Learning Japanese will take real sustained effort. Ideally, you will try to learn something new every day, even if it is only the meaning of a single kanji or a couple of new vocabulary words. Just keep doing it.

What’s the secret to learning Japanese?

There isn’t one. Just keep on working at it and, little by little, you’ll succeed. There are good tools and good teacher out there who can help you, but nothing will suddenly make it effortless, and that’s okay. Nothing worth doing is effortless.

So-and-so has been studying for less time than I have and is better than I am!

So what? Is your goal to learn Japanese or to be better than so-and-so? If it is to learn the language then don’t worry about how fast or slow someone else is than you are. If it is to beat so-and-so who is better than you at learning Japanese, then find something else that you are better at than so-and-so is. Don’t make a competition out of it, unless you are simply competing with yourself.

No, really, what’s the secret?

Sigh. Okay, you wore me down. I’ll tell you the secret.

Are you ready?

Here it is:

Study ever day.

That’s it?!

Yeah, pretty much.

Anything else?

Now that you mention it, yes. If you look at “mastery of the language” or “fluency” it can seem unattainable. Don’t look at huge distant goals. Set small obtainable goals for yourself. “I am gong to learn three new words today.” Then you do it and you pat yourself on the back because you set a goal and you reached it. And, if you keep doing that, eventually you reach those huge distant goals. It’s just a motivational idea.

Isn’t that kind of like a trick?

Maybe kind of, but who cares? You need to keep yourself motivated, and if reaching these small goals will do that, then it’s good.

Any last thoughts?

Just one:

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