Back in October I found a learning Japanese video series called “Let’s Learn Japanese” on Crunchy Roll. Unfortunately I got too addicted to watching the Japanese dramas (and lately Taiwanese as well) on the site to have any time left to go through this series.

Until today … While looking for another drama to watch my eyes caught “Let’s Learn Japanese,” and I was instantly reminded of my intention to check it out. So I did.

The episodes are half an hour each and usually start with a review, then a short skit followed by some explanations on the expressions used. Afterwards, you’ll be presented with the skit again, and hopefully you understand it better this time.

I haven’t watched the series entirely, but I find it to be a nice resource for learning Japanese for the following reasons:

1. Good listening practice. The dialogs seem to be at native speaking speed. It may be quite a bit fast in the beginning, but since the skits are repeated a lot, you start to get the hang of it after a while.
2. It’s got a story, which makes learning not so boring.
3. The skits (outside the main story) used in the explanations are quite amusing a lot of times.
4. Even though romaji is used throughout, it also covers the writing system (the first series covers Hiragana) and how to write them.
5. The vocabulary is quite decent with lots of every day expressions covered. Here is a sampling of the vocabulary up to episode 10 (there are 26 in the first series) :

I was reading the “13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese” the other day. There’s one chapter listing some really silly mnemonics, and it was a lot of fun just reading them.

Here are some of them:

• 武士(ぶし) : samurai, warrior
  • “True samurai were so virile that their battle-toned bodies where absolutely covered in a bushy mat of hair!”
• 肥満(ひまん) : obesity
  • “A He-man may be a muscled Greek god in his youth, but when he gets old he’sjust going to be an obese mass of blubber.”
• ぐるぐる : round and round
  • “The fat round guru levitated and then span around and around.”

I also just recently found a blog on Japanese mnemonics here. It should be quite helpful for constructing my list of Japanese vocabulary to learn.

On another note, I just learned from babelhut of a vocabulary learning method called the “Input Method” where you learn vocabulary from drilling sentences…tons of them. According to this old post, he seems to have pretty good success with this method, so I might give it a shot as well.

Anybody else have tried the “Input Method”?

[ETA: More info on this method can be found at All Japanese All The Time. Here are some related posts:

• 10,000 Sentences: Input before Output
• Does Input Really Work
• Sentence-Picking in Action: Making Lemons into Lemonade
  
• 10,000 Sentences: Why
• 10,000 Sentences: How
• 10,000 Sentences: Where
• 10,000 Sentences: More on What Sentences to Learn
• Sentence Starter Pack 1
• Sentence Starter Pack2
• Sentence Starter Pack 3
• Sentence Starter Pack 4
• Sentence Starter Pack 5

There! Enough research for today. Until next time!]

I’m still figuring out the mechanics for my vocabulary project. Since I’ve seen Anki mentioned quite a few times in Confessions of a Language Addict, I thought I’d give it a try. So far so good. I’ve only put a few words and expressions in it since I only got it installed today. But I think I’ve got the program more or less figured out. So the plan is to put my vocabulary list into Anki, use some mnemonics to memorize the words and test myself using Anki.

Here are some of the words I learned today. The mnemonics ain’t the best, but hey, I’m not quite used to making them up yet.

• un carnet: a book (number of sheets)
  • Imagine opening a book of tickets, and all of a sudden a car is born (né) out of it.
• les cabines: changing rooms
  • Imagine going to the changing room only to find a cab crashing into it.
    
• le casque: helmet
  • Imagine going to a funeral. You look inside the casket to say the last farewell, and you saw the deceased wearing a helmet.

I just started listening to JapanesePod101’s Survival Phrases series. One thing I learned yesterday was that Japanese cabs have automatic doors, so you don’t open or close the doors yourself.

After a little more research, I learned that it’s actually only the left rear door that is automatic. So you still need to open and close the door yourself if you sit anywhere else.

Check out japan-guide, fodor’s and wa-shoi for more about taxis in Japan.

Every other weekend I spend maybe a total of 11 hours on the bus to visit my spouse. Thank goodness for my iPod, I can kill time listening to some language podcasts.Here are some of the words I memorized yesterday:

1. 章魚 (たこ) : octopus
   Picture having an octopus at Taco Bell. With a little stretch of imagination, an octopus head sort of looks like a bell.
2. 鮪(まぐろ) : tuna
   Picture a tuna at MacDonald. When I think of tuna, I think of a big fish; hence, the association with MacDonald (Big Mac)
3. うに : sea urchin
   A sea urchin has a symmetrical (uniform) shape.

Note: I only memorize the sounds, btw, not the Kanji. I’ve decided not to focused too much on written Japanese this year so I can put more study time on the other languages.

Stay tuned for some French vocabulary in the next day or two.

One of my plans for this year is to enrich my vocabulary. My goal is 2000 words in each language (French, German, Japanese, and Italian).

Since I’m most comfortable with French, this is what I’ll tackle first. Here’s the list of the 2000 most used French words: Wiktionary: French Frequency Lists 1-2000. [After taking a closer look, I found this list to be marginally useful. A lot of the words are really the same words in different forms (different conjugations, nominalized verbs, etc.), and some of them, such as abbreviations, I don't find particularly useful right now. So, I'll mix in words/expressions from other sources as well.]

How am I going to memorize all these words? Well, since around New Year’s Day or so I learned about Dominic O’Brien, the memory champion. He, and other memory buffs, is using the “Journey Method” to memorize lists and mnemonics to associate words. I’ve been listening to his audio book “Quantum Memory Power,” and so far his memory tips work very well. I’ve also tried it to memorize some French vocabulary a few days ago, and everything still sticks. Of course it takes me a while to figure out the mnemonics to use for each word, but I think it’ll get easier with practice. So, that’s the plan.

I tried just using mnemonics earlier today to memorize some German words, and it didn’t work quite as well as combining it with the Journey Method. The problem is with the Journey Method, I can replay the scenes with ease in my head for practice. Plus the locations used in the journey serve as an additional association that can help trigger the words I’m learning.

Anyway, here are some links about the Journey Method (also called Method of Loci) and memory techniques for your information:

• Wikipedia: Method of Loci
• How to develop a perfect memory (limited preview of the book)
• How to develop a brilliant memory (limited preview of the book)

One of the distractions I encountered towards the end of the year was called “Chicktionary.” It’s a game where you’re given 7 letters that you use to form a number of 3-7 letter words. I think I stumbled upon it while looking up a word on dictionary.com and got rather addicted. It didn’t help that my husband found the cackling chicks funny and got similarly engrossed in the game. Nor did it help that you got points from solving each game, which you could redeem for gifts after you reach a certain number of points. (Don’t do this for the gifts, though, since you’re looking at a very poor hourly “wage” unless you’re very, very good.)

Anyway, I had fun playing the game, trying to get all the words (only managed to do this maybe twice on my own without any help). So, if you like word games, you might enjoy this.

Has it been ages since I last wrote in this blog? Well, here’s a quick update then. In a nutshell, I am still earnestly studying my languages.

• Podcast: I still listen to these. Admittedly, I’ve been favoring JapanesePod101 for my listening routines, but I do listen to the other podcasts every now and then. A while ago I mentioned another Japanese podcast that I thought I’d like more, but I can see now that’s not the case. Here’s why I like this podcast so much:
  • not too much material, making each episode very easy to digest
  • funny! I really enjoy the interaction among the staff.
  • interesting dialogues
• Reading: I’ve been reading French quite a bit, and German a little less. I try to read one or two French and German news articles every week for the past couple of months, but sometimes I still get lazy. But all in all, I think I’m making good progress here, at least in French.
• Grammar: I’ve got this one French book called “Un Peu de Tout,” and it has tons of readings and also quite a bit of intermediate level grammar in the beginning chapters. I’m proud to say that after being on the shelf for so long, I finally got to finish the grammar chapters, and now I’m doing the readings. Of course, I still need to review those grammar points, but at least now I’m somewhat familiar with them. Perfection comes next. For German and Japanese, well, I’ve made some progress (finished Genki I for Japanese and finished a few chapters of one German textbook), but I haven’t been as studious in these other languages when it comes to grammar.
• Vocabulary: I think my vocabulary is still rather poor. So, I’m planning on focusing on this for the next few months.

I wish I could give some assessment as to where I actually stand in these languages right now. Maybe I should take some proficiency tests this year… We’ll see.

This lesson “Was machen Sie?” (What do you do?) illustrates the use of the question word was ‘what’ and introduces a few more verbs. In German, the infinitive form of a verb ends with -en. Coincidentally, that’s also the ending of the conjugation for Sie, which is what’s used throughout this podcast.

Here are some examples:

Was machen Sie? : What do you do?

Warum sagen Sie “du”? : Why do you say “du”? (this is from podcast #5)

Was studieren Sie? : What are you studying?

Sie brauchen doch das Geld : You need the money.

Vocabulary
Guten Morgen : Good morning.
was : what
machen : to do
arbeiten : to work
neu : new
brauchen : to need
keine Manieren : no manners
interessant : interesting
die Journalistik : journalism
Sagen Sie mal : Tell me.
rauchen : to smoke
studieren : to study
recherchieren : to research
Reportagen schreiben : to write reports and articles
Auf Wiedersehen : Good bye.

The 5th podcast in this series is titled “Das ist doch unhöflich” (that is impolite).

It’s a pretty easy to follow podcast, not much in terms of grammar or anything, but you certainly get the sense of the spoken language, which is why I really like this series.

Here’s some vocabulary. There’s not much regarding grammar. It’s mostly just illustrating the verb sein ‘to be’ in the present tense.

Vocabulary
Ja : yes
Nein : no
Danke : Thank you.
erstaunt : astonished
warum : why
junger Mann : young man
der Witzbold : the joker
der Kobold : the elf
wohl : well (discourse particle)
müde : tired
doch : (1) used for emphasis, (2) used to make an assumption about someone.

examples:
(1) Das ist doch unhöflich! : That is impolite!
(2) Sie sind doch der Portier, oder? — You must be the porter.

sagen : to say
Gute Nacht : Good night.
also : well

example
Also–du bist unhöflich : Well, you are impolite.

If you listen to the podcast, you’ll notice that there were quite a few discourse particles used (also, doch, wohl). What do I mean by discourse particles? Here’s Wikipedia’s entry for this term:

In linguistics, a discourse particle is a lexeme or particle which has no direct semantic meaning in the context of a sentence, having rather a pragmatic function: it serves to indicate the speaker’s attitude, or to structure their relationship to other participants in a conversation.

These are something that I really need to get a better hang on since Germans use them a lot. More on this topic some other time…