Laurie in Japan

What the Fukuoka Part 1 Answer

The long thin plastic bags are for umbrellas when it has been raining.  You put your umbrella in one to catch any drips.  These umbrella bags are quite common in Japan, they have them in shopping malls too and most large buildings.

Input! Need More Input!

This post is the first in a series which in which I will put forward how I intend to go about learning Japanese.  For me the target is Japanese, but the tips can easily be applied to learning other languages.

If you want to learn a language, you need to know the rules that make the language work.  Where do you find these rules? In a textbook? In a dictionary? In fact the rules that govern a language are only known to linguists and grammar geeks, everyone else just uses them without knowing.  Take these two fragments:

The red big car.

The big red car.

Most English speakers will instantly prefer the second one, but if you ask them to tell you which rule you use to choose the order of adjectives they will come up blank.

The rules you need are hidden in every sentence of the language you seek to learn.  Input is the sentences, phrases, novels, movies, TV shows, signs and anything else you see in the language.  After a certain amount of input your brain will cotton on to and infer the rules. 

What does this mean for me?  Simple: I will be trying to read and listen to as much Japanese as possible, even if I don’t understand everything.  

Japanese Challenge for September

To keep me motivated in my Japanese studies I’m going to set myself a goal every month.  For maximum public celebration/humiliation I will publish these challenges at the start of every month and report my glorious victory/crushing defeat at the end.

In September I will learn how to write and recognize all 2,136 joyo kanji.

“But Laurie” I hear you cry “that’s just too many, there’s no way it can be done in a year, let alone a month!”.  Well, I already have a slight advantage of being able to write around 600 of them, I did so by following James Heisig’s book “Remembering the Kanji”.  The book puts forward all the characters in a helpful order (from least to most complicated), combined with a mnemonic system.

To ensure I do not forget the characters that I put so much effort into learning I will use Anki, a spaced repetition system.  Essentially there is a flashcard for every character and the software chooses to quiz you on a given character when it predicts you have forgotten it.