You sayin' "bolt"?

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Rob MacPherson talking about language sprints. Essentially, with the invitation of doing a week long sprint starting on August 20th, I decided that one thing I really needed to kickstart was listening to native Japanese media.

At the time I decided to do this "sprint", I'd completed Olly Richard's Conversations in Japanese and was quite happily re-listening to all 20 episodes with a pretty high (90%+) level of comprehension.

I'd noticed that my listening skills had improved to the point where I was no longer hearing noise, but now at the very least, I was hearing the words clearly. So the idea of listening to native materials was beckoning me ... I wanted to know how much I would understand ... but to be honest, I'd been avoiding diving into native materials for fear of drowning in the noise of incomprehensible babble.

So, Monday 20th August arrived and, in addition to my usual kanji studies, I did my first hour of listening to a Japanese talk radio show.

Day 1
The proverbial starting gun fired and off I went to listen to FM Nabari, broadcasting out of Mie Prefecture. My first impressions were, "Oh, good heaven's, this is still pretty incomprehensible ... how utterly depressing ... I've been working on Japanese for over five years ... and I can't follow a lot of what they're talking about!" I remember the 90's ... I remember peer pressure leading me to Napalm Death concerts when I was younger and in love with a dreadlocked siren luring me to a life of Special Brew, moshing and snogging of the aforementioned dreadlocked siren.

I expected there would be a comprehension gap ... but i+5 (relating the gap to Krashen's input hypothesis) ... that's depressing isn't it. But, I'm a proper grown up now ... I even bought antiseptic solution from the convenience store ... so let's not burst into tears and get hysterical about this thing ... let's actually sit back and draw up the pros and cons here.

The Pros

• I could hear words I knew. It wasn't just noise. It wasn't Napalm Death.
• I was noticing how real Japanese is different to textbook Japanese. They say 中々(nakanaka - quite / fairly) and 是非 (zehi : certainly / by all means / pros and cons) a LOT. I get the feeling that even without a high level of comprehension, noticing how real Japanese is spoken will at least shape my Japanese into a more Japanese shape.
• I hear a lot of grammar constructs that I can understand ... albeit without understanding vital vocabulary that gives full comprehension, but I could often get the gist of the conversation, the mood being expressed etc.

The Cons

• I don't know enough words to understand the details of what they're saying.
• It's hard to find Japanese talk radio stations that are just talking ... they love to play music too!

The Result

It was clear to me that, where I'm at right now, I need to go nuclear with my vocabulary. I'd say my vocabulary is somewhere between five and ten thousand words. You'd think that would be enough wouldn't you? ... but nope ... not for listening to what I imagine would be a pretty standard native talk show. Come to think of it, if I listen to some talk shows in English, there's a fairly good chance there will be words that aren't at the forefront of my lexicon ... maybe when people go on talkshows, they just want to sound like clever-clogs, so they splurge out their most intellectual utterances in the hope of coming across as intellectuals. 

I could either try finding the Japanese equivalent of Donald Trump (please no ... no ... scrap that thought) ... or find a show talking about a context that I'm more familiar with. So what contexts am I more familiar with in Japanese ... Star Wars and Photography.

And just like that ... I struck a vein of pure gold ... for I found a Japanese podcast series on Photography with over 100 episodes ... no music ... just talking about photography. 

Day 2 to Day 6

My daily ingest of Japanese (on top of the kanji study and reading comprehension I was already doing) was now as follows:

1. An hour of listening to Photo Sho no such.
2. Encountering 300 new or at the very least "sketchy" words on LinQ
3. I joined a 90-day Japanese challenge of LinQ.

I don't work on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I was able to get off to a flying start on day two and three. The more articles I read on LinQ, the more I started feeling that, unlike before, where I'd go at tortoise speed, dutifully encountering a new word and writing out a flashcard or trying to construct a sentence using my newfound word, I went totally hare-on-fire with it.  It occurred to me that, if I'm encounter 300 unknown or "sketchy" words that I kind of know passively but don't easily come out of my mouth in a conversation on a daily basis; then every month I'd be pushing 9,000 words between my ears. Who cares if 8,000 of them immediately go in one ear and out the other ... every time I re-encounter a word, there's a slightly better chance that great neural guardian of sticky-words will grant that word entry to my memory ... if at first it doesn't stick ... keep pestering the brain with it until it sticks!

This is massive exposure to the language ... it can't hurt ... and I have a feeling that by Christmas, if I keep bombarding my brain with words, out of 36,000 words that will have theoretically struck the grey matter, a lot more will have stuck than if had just continued at my comfortable tortoise-esq pace.  How many ... I don't know ... probably a few thousand ... and probably the one's that my neural guardian determines are most useful for me.  Also, with massive amounts of reading and listening on my language learning power-diet; all the grammar that I already know should be heavily reenforced ... possibly to the point where I'm no longer trying thinking in English and reverse engineering my thoughts into Japanese constructs in an attempt to construct new utterances ... I have a feeling that already, this week long sprint has hinted that the language is being absorbed in a more natural, more native way than before.

Day 7

I'm excited about day 8!

This week long sprint has been incredibly useful. Its true to say, that one of the great benefits is that you don't have time to dilly-dally and dither about ... you just do what you said you'd do. At the very least, I'd have done seven hours of listening that I wouldn't have done before.

But, what happened on my sprint was more like gatecrashing a party, waking up the next day with a grin on your face and a whole load of new phone numbers to call.

The notches on my bedpost this week:

• 7 hours of listening to native Japanese content
• Moments of delight when comprehending occasional snippets of chatter about photography.
• Over 30,000 words read. 
• Starting a 90 day challenge 3 weeks late and ending the week in 8th place out of 32 people.
• Still being able to encounter 300 new words a day on my busiest days (Saturday and Sunday)
• Still being able to maintain my kanji studies and working on my reading comprehension book.

Weekly Statistics from LinQ (* note : the primary focus on LinQ was on reading)

8th place out of 32 people in the challenge ... and I gave them a 21 day head start.

So, tomorrow I'm making a plan to include kanji writing practice into my schedule. I've been working four hours a week longer than usual in August as there was a summer bonus ... that's four hours of kanji writing that I can do without losing momentum on my listening and reading.

Final thoughts on "sprints" ... I usually think of language learning as a marathon not a race. That's still true of course, but occasionally, give it a jolt, give it a bolt ... you sayin bolt ... emphatically yes!