Dead forum? Beginning readers advice & a question

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Dead forum? Beginning readers advice & a question

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1RowanTribe
Okt. 24, 2010, 2:32 pm

This is my first message, and I have a feeling this is a 'dead' forum, but I and my husband have been trying to learn Japanese for about 4 years now.

I've read several of the threads here, and it seems that most people are either at the "we just want to speak it" level of interest, and the other large segment is a the college-grad-school level of competency in kanji.

So, my husband and I are right in the middle! We realize that it's a modern universe, we live on the other side of the planet, and trying to learn a language 'just to speak it' when no one in our area actually does, is worse than useless. Anyone we interact with will likely be online, or through reading papers or books in Japanese.

So we're going for the highest level we can get of competency, BUT neither of us has time or money for traditional courses nor anyone available for actual tutoring.

We tried on our own with traditional textbooks and rosetta stone-type 'immersion computer systems' for a while, and they all failed miserably to engage us. Our biggest problem is that we're busy, and we need something that we find challenging and fun, rather than more 'study.' Both of us do enough of that in the rest of our lives. Our other problem is that we're both quite bright, and very verbal/visual, so we found that we were memorizing what the whole kana words looked like rather than knowing the individual characters. We also found that we're lazy, and if there's an english voice-over or english characters on the page for comparison, we read that first, which really isn't helpful.

So, we found something different! It has really helped us get and stay motivated. (Don't laugh!) It's a DS game called My Japanese Tutor.

Once you get through the first 29 lessons in romaji, and have been introduced to all of the kana, the lessons begin to be entirely in kana characters, and your sensei begins to speak only in Japanese for the information sections. Now it's a challenge, instead of just memorization. How well DO you remember all those characters and sounds?

I found out quickly that all the flashcards in the universe don't equal having to KNOW what that character is so I can sound out the damn word fast enough to then translate it in order to match a card or spell out the correct english or romaji translation or place words into a proper grammatical sentence, all just to conquer a particular mini-game and "win" rewards.

The gaming aspect of it really makes it easier to devote time to 'learning,' because it's fun, and my 'instant recognition' of kana has improved more in the last single mostly-in-Japanese lesson I finished than it did in all 12-15 of the earlier lessons which first introduced and drilled the practice of the individual characters.

So it's also managing to get that 'immersion' concept in a limited way - I have no choice but to know what I am supposed to know by now in order to proceed through the game. There's no practical or easy way to 'cheat' or slide by without picking up what you need to have down.

I know there's a whole other millions of kanji I have to learn now that I've learned kana (I'm more than a little bit intimidated), but I have to say, the concept of presenting mastery as a game challenge with time limits and rewards built-in is a great one so far.

The game is fun, if a little silly, and it's paced so that the individual lessons are nice and short, but you can keep blowing through them if it's information you already know. For the first time in the 4 years I've been trying to learn Japanese on my own, I feel like I am truly 'reading' kana now, even though it is a slow and verbal sounding-out character by character level of reading. It's a surprisingly nice feeling to have reached that level of ability.

Please don't mock the lower level - (the game says I'm essentially a beginning first-grader, *blushes*) but I'm ridiculously pleased with myself for learning this much on my own in 6 months, while doing full-time work and full-time graduate school.

So my question now, where do you find 'beginners readers' for Japanese children? I'm thinking about what would be comparable to "Dick and Jane" or the other school primers which are all short simple stories in big fonts and basic characters? I want to read something new while I still feel so proud of myself!

2Fogies
Okt. 25, 2010, 6:15 am

The Japanese script is hideously complicated. High school seniors in Japan are still in the process of learning to read and write their own language. At the rate of progress you report (with perhaps undue self-deprecation) it would take you a century or more to get to where you could read a newspaper or a novel. Why? What’s the point of it? What could you do then that you can’t do now?

3liao
Okt. 25, 2010, 8:41 am

I'm afraid I don't have any suggestions. However, you might like to check the forums at http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com There are many people there at all different levels of Japanese ability who would be happy to help you.

4RowanTribe
Okt. 25, 2010, 10:58 am

>2 Fogies: - Partly because I've always loved Japanese culture and the language itself.

Partly because several of my friends (all sadly long distance) have married Japanese nationals or diplomats, or become so themselves.

Partly because learning something easy wouldn't be nearly as much of a challenge, and I want my brain to last me until I'm 120 years old. I think crossword puzzles and Sudoku are boring, so language learning, especially a non-roman based character script, is a good enough mental challenge for me!

What better mental task than to try to learn a language that its own people don't know all of?

On another point, that's in my favor as well. I'll never reach "mastery" of this language, but most Japanese people don't either, so I feel like there is a little more understanding for people who may not know a certain character.

I admit that the going goes slowly, but even if I never get to the point of reading a 'real' novel or newspaper, yet I get pleasure from reading grade-school textbook passages, what's to say that's not a valid goal of itself?

5Fogies
Okt. 25, 2010, 12:09 pm

>4 RowanTribe: Our scepticism was prompted in part by what seems, to people with much experience of learning and teaching east Asian languages, to be a very odd choice of vehicle for your self-study. Elementary textbooks are not designed to teach Japanese to foreigners. They are meant to teach elementary school subjects to native Japanese speakers. The script being the intellectual equivalent of a monstrous junk-sculpture, teaching how to use it must always be a subtext of each book, but the pupils already have vocabulary of thousands of words, excellent grasp of syntax, and good knowledge of Japanese idiom. You need teaching materials that will convey to you what can be taken for granted in those children. Your using Japanese schoolbooks for that strikes us as like donning skis to go snorkeling. Perhaps it could be done, but it would be laborious and not enjoyable.

Consider approaching written Japanese through manga. There are so many foreigners who want to appreciate manga in their native language that an industry has sprung up to teach them, with Japanese-English textbooks, videos, periodicals and websites. Try doing it that way and see what you think.

6RowanTribe
Okt. 25, 2010, 4:46 pm

I wasn't so much thinking of textbooks per-se, but of those little "grade-level appropriate" reading books that always seemed to be around in schools. Not the things that TEACH the language, but the things the teachers have the kids read on their own after they've learned it.

I'm trying to think of something similar - the Bob Books is about what level I was thinking of. Not textbooks, but super simple pre-K level books. The excerpt from the amazon description is about what I'm aiming for :

"Your child can proudly spell his or her name. Perhaps he can identify the stop and open signs as you drive in your car. He or she is ready for the next step into reading.

Inside the colorful box, the bright red cover beckons. On the first page, the letters: M a t. Your child says the sounds: mmmmm, aaa, ttt. Then, faster: Mat. Your youngster has read his first word! "Sam", "sat" and "on" complete the vocabulary, and suddenly your child can say, "I read the whole book!" This is the magic of Bob Books.
"

I know - w00t. Super stupid, right? But I don't know where to find ANYTHING to read, and if I'm not using these characters, I'm going to lose them. The game is fun, and it's useful, but once I get into kanji, I'm going to need to encounter them somewhere other than in a DS game, and most places online aren't geared towards people who are still learning. I don't want to have to NOT read anything until I feel I know most of the main characters, and surely there are grade-level appropriate books that use mainly the characters a kid is supposed to know by a certain age/grade level.

I'm a librarian-in-training (that's the grad school) and one of the things we have to help schoolchildren pick out appropriate reading materials is something called a LEXILE score. (http://lexile.com/about-lexile/lexile-overview/) gives a pretty decent explanation. On the whole, the hundreds-place is supposed to roughly represent the grade-level. Therefore, if a kid is in 2nd grade, we can suggest books listed in the 200s to them and be pretty confident they'll be able to hack it.

What I'm asking is if there is any comparable 'level' marker for children's books in Japanese, so I can find appropriate things for me to start reading on my own.

Make a bit more sense now?

7lilisin
Okt. 25, 2010, 4:53 pm

I really want to encourage you in your studies and really hope something comes your way but I can't think of anything that'll help without you having studying grammar.

Let's say you do find one of these books. The problem is that you're expecting to see something like this:

Matt walked by the dog and said "hello".

But what you're really going to get is:

Mattwalkedbythedogandsaid"hello".

Without having studied any grammar you won't know how to separate the words yet. So, really it's going to look more like this even:

M a t t w a l k e d b y t h e d o g a n d s a i d " H e l l o " .

Where you'll be picking out individual characters you will recognize but you'll make no sense out of what you're reading.

So I think the key now is to find you a great little reader that introduces grammar alongside easy reading passages.

8lilisin
Okt. 25, 2010, 4:58 pm

And I also don't really agree with Fogies' recommendation of the popular manga readers for the following reason. Manga is actually a lot more complicated that one might think for a comic book. The stories are very fantasy based which introduces words that you wouldn't encounter in daily life. Also, the grammar is in what is called plain-form Japanese instead of the more formal Japanese (I don't mean keigo). When you learn plain-form before formal, you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage of looking silly.

For example, you'd be learning how to stay stuff like:
"Yeaaah! Whatcha' gonna' do about that Captain Pidgeon-toe?"

Which is all fun and whatnot but how relevant is that? You can still learn those words but it'll be better for you to learn it as:
"Yes! I did it! What are you going to do about that Captain Kamakura?"

Just my thoughts.

9Larxol
Bearbeitet: Okt. 25, 2010, 5:47 pm

See if you can find a copy of Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics -- it includes translations and help with colloquial wording.

10Fogies
Okt. 26, 2010, 7:16 am

>8 lilisin: That brings us back to the question in our original reply: what do you mean to accomplish by this? Given that years of full-time study with good teachers would be needed to acquire a general competence in Japanese, and given that all they want is to have the intellectual pleasure of reading a difficult language, the support system already in place for foreigners to read manga will provide them with that at a pace they can set for themselves. And IWRR manga are by no means all fantasy or SF. There are also samurai stories, detective stories, sports…. Granted, they may genuinely prefer to read a third-grader’s geography book, but that’s far from their only option.

11soniaandree
Bearbeitet: Okt. 26, 2010, 7:40 am

I second Larxol's comment 9 - I have Maria Ferrer's little books (4 of them, translated in French) on Japanese learning through manga, and it opened up the language to me (more than a more 'traditional/theoretical' approach would have done).

12lilisin
Okt. 26, 2010, 8:52 am

Perhaps I just haven't seen one of those readers in a while and am just not familiar enough with how they're set up.

13RowanTribe
Bearbeitet: Okt. 26, 2010, 12:07 pm

> 7

We are at basic sentence structure - I know verbs are at the end of the sentence, I know a decent number of general-use verbs (a little shaky on tenses and forms) and I know pronouns and some nouns, basic colors, numbers and a few of their "counter" forms, all the months and days, times of day (still shaky, but I've got the idea, it's just drilling), etc.

If it helps, I'm at the level that given sufficient time, I can "read" an article from the hiraganatimes blog and only have to look up the words that I haven't encountered yet (granted, that's still a whole lot of words).

I want the easier stuff because the main frustration now is feeling like I have to stop to look up every other word that I don't know yet. It's a hard herky-jerky way to try to read, and that's what I'm facing when I try to read adult-audience material. I simply don't have a large enough vocabulary to read even furigana subtitles as an adult yet.

I need more controlled/limited vocabulary materials to build up on my reading speed and skill, while I continue to learn new vocabulary (and now kanji as well).

Are there manga aimed specifically at younger children? If so, how does one determine if they are?

14amysisson
Okt. 26, 2010, 12:43 pm

Well, I just want to compliment you, RowanTribe. Knowledge is never wasted, and exercising your brain in this very effective way is terrific. I also think that learning another language, no matter how far you do or don't get with it, helps you understand another culture, and that's something Americans can use a little more of! (Of course, I don't actually know if you're American.)

My husband travels to Japan for work several times a year and always brings me back (at my request) a picture book or two. I can't read any of them yet, in part because my work schedule changed and I had to give up my once-a-week conversational Japanese class, but that doesn't mean I want to stop trying. And if all this means is that in 20 years I can read a simple children's book in Japanese, then hooray for me!

What I do for German, in which I'm MUCH further along due to a year as an exchange student MANY years ago, is get chapter books and young adult books in German and read those.

Anyway, just wanted to lend my support!

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