Wee Kev's Blog

Well, in an attempt to get away from insects I’ll talk about something else.  Today marks the day were I finally conquered one third of the 2000 general use Kanji 漢字。　I thought that mastering them would be an impossibly arduous task that would take years and years of intensive study to accomplish. Let’s be honest, students who study Japanese as a second language for 4 years in college, don’t generally know them all, and it takes Japanese students 10-12 years of school before they have them all. However, this German guy Heisig came up with this brilliant way to learn them.  His theory goes…. students of Japanese (foreign and native) mostly learn the kanji in order of common usage.  The government has given the order best learned and the public schools follow this as well as just about every text for Kanji aquisition available.  Though this makes sense at first, thinking a step further, it seems like we really should be learning them in whatever order is easiest for memorization.  So he created an order that simply builds them based on ones you’ve already learned.  Which makes them way easier to remember and also accompanies each one with a story to help remember.  Though after the first 300 your on your own to make the stories up.  At first it seemed like alot of work remembering all these ridiculous mnemonic stories, but they work so well, and quickly the stories fall away like a scaffolding and what remains is simply the kanji.  It’s like magic, and it’s amazing just how fast they make the make journey into wherever that place is that language is stored. (I’m at 677 with mostly part-timeish studying in < 6 weeks) Which brings me to another point about the importance of sleep and memory ... (the going theory is that, during REM sleep the brain does most of it's processing and during this time it constructs new proteins, transmitters, receptors, and new synapse pathways that reinforce the communicative strength between neurons which in effect permafies memory.) These chemical changes occur as a result of spaced repetition, which is where the SRS comes in way handy. I've been using 'anki' ->

http://ichi2.net/anki/index.html which is just a flash card program that uses a specific memorization algorithm (these do change as the reasearch changes) that decides based on length of response and difficulty of the question when best to show you the flash card again.  You just put whatever facts you want to remember into the SRS and you can forget about forgetting.  Seriously it’s way easy, and you’d be shocked at just how much you can remember.  You can use these for anything, and it’ll make it stick and stick for good.

Anyway, so this other guy Khazumoto, who I believe was an African born dude that was adopted by some white folks living in Kenya.  Has these brilliant ideas on language, which make a lot sense even though it’s contradictory to everything taught in schools. His website http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com, I found a couple years back, but blew it off as it didn’t look all the professional and somehow I equated that to it not having worthwhile content… Dead wrong.  This guy is brilliant, and his ideas, though simple, are spot on and a reflection of what current research is teaching us.  He basically has the premise that you should emerse yourself in the language 24/7 (obviously, right?) and study sentences, not grammar and you’ll obtain natural fluency in the same way that a native learner obtains the language.  So he just makes flash cards of sentences from materials that he’s interested in, and after so many (he says around 10,000), he speaks the language in the same way that the native speakers do, and you don’t struggle to make that transition where you think in your target language, it just happens as a matter of course.  He speaks English, Swahili, Douhlo (sp?), Japanese, Mandarin and is now working on Cantonese.  He speaks them all fluently and learned them all with this simple approach.  Not only are his ideas top notch, but his methods and materials are way motivating.  If you have any interest in learning any other language, check his site out you’ll get that spark that drives people to do things when the world has told them a million times that it can’t be done.  Good Stuff…

-kev