The number 8 and other thoughts from this week

I did not do a whole lot of language stuff this week; time got away from me. Today I have been making up for that somewhat.

In Japanese, I started working on the Katakana alphabet (syllabary, if you want to be technical). It seems to have similarities with the Hiragana, but it is different enough that one actually has to learn it, rather than just guess at the characters. Katakana is used to spell out words that are borrowed, i.e. not native Japanese words. Here's what it looks like. 
I'm up to the t's, so I have a ways to go yet. I also started working on Kanji. I'm using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji I: A complete course on how not to forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese characters. The approach of this book is interesting because it focuses only on how the characters are written and what they mean and completely ignores pronunciation. In a way, this makes sense because kanji are only a written convention, not a spoken one. However, a Japanese learner must eventually integrate these skills. Today I learned the first 15 kanji in the book--there are 2,042 total. So, if I do 15 everyday, I'll be through it in about 4 months. Uh...we'll see how that goes.

Here is the entry for 'eight' from Remembering the Kanji (hereafter referred to as RTK).

What I found interesting about this entry is that it says "Just at the Arabic numeral '8' is composed of a small circle for a larger one, so the kanji for eight is composed of a short line followed by a longer line." When someone mentions "Arabic numerals," I do not think of our western numbers, I think of these:

Coincidentally, the Arabic numeral for 8 actually does resemble the Japanese 8. I think the RTK description of 8 would be hard to remember, but it did make me remember this kanji, so job well done, Remembering the Kanji!

I started using the flashcard program Anki. I downloaded a deck that corresponds to RTK, showing the kanji on one side and the meaning on the other. I also set about making a companion deck that shows the kanji on one side and the pronunciation on the other, so hopefully that is going to work well.

I have to admit that I haven't done any Spanish this week, although hopefully I'll get some done this afternoon. I have decided to start on an Akni deck of Spanish words I've alreaday learned where I have the word and its definition in Spanish. One problem I have with Spanish is that I know words in isolation, but I have a hard time going into much detail, I'm hoping this will help with that, as well as get my brain to work in Spanish better.

I'm not going to post any goals for this week, since I'm going on vacation to Mexico! I'm hoping that this will be a sort of practicum for my Spanish skills. I should return with pictures and hopefully some funny stories.

This week in language learning

This week I had some spare time because student teaching is over and I haven't gone back to work yet. So, naturally, I put my time to use for language. This pleased me.

I re-started reading Historia breve de china to work on my Spanish. The goal has been to read for about 20 minutes a day, which has worked out alright. I have the last bit of the run of Camaleones, a Mexican soap opera, on the DVR that I've been watching as well. It's kind of hard to follow because I came in halfway through the show and because the language is fairly colloquial; colloquial language is not my strong suit. I think the plan for the summer is to read a bit more non-fiction, read some narrative fiction--figurative language is always difficult--, build my vocabulary, learn some idioms, watch some TV shows. I need to find another good show to watch. Suggestions are welcome.

In regards to Japanese, I've not done a whole lot of study, but rather, I've been preparing to study. I joined JapanesePod101 with a one month subscription. Since I don't want to keep paying for the subscription, I've been systematically downloading all the podcasts with the lesson notes. I am going to have plenty of Japanese to do for some time. I worked through their "Absolute Beginner" lessons, so I've learned how to say things like "thank you" and "nice to meet you" and "This is a ___." I have the hiragana alphabet pretty down, I need to get started on the katakana now.

I'm trying to decide which materials to use to get going on my reading and writing for Japanese. I have Japanese the Manga Way, which I'm planning to start on this week. I asked the learn Japanese section of Reddit what their suggestions for learning Kanji are. There were a lot of good suggestions and I decided to order Remembering the Kanji, which apparently is quite a good book for learning to read kanji. I've also been looking at Kanji Damage, which is a really amusing way to be introduced to kanji. It has hilarious example sentences and breaks things down really well.

One of my current questions about learning kanji is how does one look them up? It can't possibly be alphabetical look-up because if you don't know the symbol, you won't know what it the phonemes are either. Hopefully, I'll have the answer for this next time!

I'm trying out a flashcard program called Anki. It uses a spaced repetition system of reviewing vocabulary. You can either make your own set of flashcards, or download a set of cards that other people have made. There are a ton of sets for Japanese and for kanji, which look super useful. I also downloaded one that says it has the 10,000 most common Spanish words, so we'll see how that one goes.

Here's what needs to happen in the next week or so:

• Learn katakana
• Read something in Spanish 20 minutes a day
• Start learning some new Spanish vocab
• Keep going with the JapanesePod lessons.
• Start on Japanese the Manga Way.
• Find out how kanji is listed in a dictionary!

A love song for linguists

Well, this is pretty awesome.

Diacritics in Hiragana, scheduling

I've continued working on my Japanese a bit this week, despite the business of circus and the end of student teaching (woo!). I got through the main letters of the hiragana syllabary and then started working on the voiced sounds. This is something really interesting. Japanese has a couple of diacritics, one is two lines that look like a quotation mark (colloquially called 'ten ten') and another is a circle (colloquially called 'maru'). The presence of these diacritics indicate that the sounds should be voiced--in most cases. Actually, I should be more specific. Since the Japanese "letters" are mostly syllables in CV (consonant, vowel) form, the consonant is either voiced or unvoiced. Vowels are, obviously, voiced. So here are the unvoiced and voiced sounds. 

With the diacritics the syllables starting with /k/ now start with /g/, /s/ to /z/, /t/ to /d/. These changes make linguistic sense. Unvoiced stops and fricatives are changing to their voiced counterparts. The crazy part is when we want to make syllables starting with /b/ and /p/. For one /p/ is not a voiced sound, and its voiced counterpart would be /b/. In any case, these are bilabial sounds, so we might expect them to be related to the /m/ set of syllables, but they're not! Rather, both come from the /h/ line of syllables. I guess this is just one more example of language being arbitrary.

As I mentioned last week, I started using Japanesepod 101. It seems pretty good. I've been making frequent use of the hiragana symbols quiz thing; it shows you a letter and you have to name it. I've only listened to a couple of podcasts (I can now say, "hello, nice to meet you."), which were pretty accessible. All of the podcasts have "lesson notes" with them that have transcripts and grammar notes. They also have kanji notes available for each lesson. The notes are for paid subscribers, so I decided to subscribe for a month. I noticed that you can download everything when you are a subscriber. So, being cheap, I have been systematically downloading all the content so that I won't have to keep paying for it. Go loopholes.

I've been trying to work out how I want to schedule my language studying time for the next while. It's necessary for me to have some kind of schedule. In the past, I have usually decided what to do by saying "I have to do X things today." However, that slowly drives me mad since I can't always get through everything, things take different amounts of time, I end up focusing on the wrong sorts of activities, etc. I think I need to make a time schedule. Right now, I'm leaning towards doing something like this on weekdays, weekends are kind of a melee for whatever I feel like doing:

• One hour of Japanese. Since it's new, I need to work on it a bit more for now
• At least 30 minutes of Spanish, probably in reading and watching TV (news, telenovelas)
• 30 minutes of Arabic: a bit of everything. Maybe vocab one day, reading, listening and then reading again.
• French? I'm thinking about doing 15 minutes a day or just something small to keep going with it. Probably in the form of listening to podcasts (yay for the internet).

I'm hoping this will work. In reality, I'll probably end up doing more than this, since I'll be working a boring job all summer where there's very little to do. So, we'll see how it goes!

New blog, starting Japanese

So, this is the new blog wherein I discuss all the language acquisition stuff that I do. For now, you can expect to hear about me starting out with Japanese, getting better at Spanish with particular focus on figurative language and conversational skills, improving my Arabic, and maybe starting up again with French (if not that, then just listening to French techno). There will be talk of what I'm doing, what I've learned, and probably lots of other bits and pieces.

I've decided to start learning Japanese with the goal of teaching English in Japan after two or so years. Right now I'm working on learning the alphabets, or more accurately, syllabaries. The Japanese writing system includes Katakana, which is used for words taken from languages other than Chinese, Hiragana is for other phonetic writing. There is also Kanji, which are symbols that are not written phonetically and which represent words/morphemes.

For the moment, I'm mostly just working on learning the Hiragana. I've been using A Guide to Learning  Hiragana & Katakana. It's been useful, but I don't think they really give you enough space to practice.

And for the curious, here is a chart that shows all the Hiragana.

I feel pretty ready to get going on learning some actual words, but I know it's best to wait until I have this down at least. I think while I get the rest of the letters down, I'm going to start on some listening stuff. I heard that Japanesepod 101 is quite useful, so I'm going to try that out.