Theory
The theory behind this project all stems from Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis. Simply put, the ability to comprehend a foreign language comes from input.
All fine in theory ... but it's a different matter in practice right?
Well, yes. I've been learning Japanese for over five years and I still mostly suck at speaking Japanese!
I know a lot of Japanese words (somewhere around six thousand or so I would guess), I understand a lot of grammatical structures and I can read over a thousand kanji characters. So I'm not entirely useless at speaking the language; but often my Japanese sounds weird, foreign and judging by the confused expressions on the faces of Japanese people ... incomprehensible!
Now, the way I believe I can solve this problem is by exposing myself to a lot of authentic Japanese content. But there's a few barriers preventing us from just doing that:
1. Speed of speech - Japanese sounds like incomprehensible babble.
2. Connected speech - Japanese sounds like incomprehensible babble.
3. Can't read the kanji - The writing is incomprehensible squiggles.
As a result, I've ended up with a very small active vocabulary and active sense of the language. This is really frustrating ... you know you know the word, but can't spit it out in a conversation. There's a huge bank of passive knowledge, passive vocabulary is stored in my brain ... but the problem is, the speed of recalling it in time to use it. So, the problem I'm trying to solve is simple ... how do I activate the language? As Johnny Five, the robot in the movie, "Short Circuit" would say, "Input ... Input .... Need input!!!!"
So we have a problem ... need input ... but incomprehensible input isn't good. So, how can I make incomprehensible input ... comprehensible.
Well, thankfully, Olly Ricahrds created a series of Conversations in Japanese. They're exactly what Krashen would call "i+1" material. That is, they just slightly above my level of comprehension. That is to say, I comprehend most of the content, but there's a new word or phrase from time to time that I notice I don't comprehend.
The conversations aren't spoken at a painfully slow non-native speed ... and they're not spoken at a rat-a-tat-machine-gun pace that I can't follow on authentic materials, such as podcasts, anime or movies. They're spoken very clearly and at a near native speed; so I'm not giving myself a false sense of accomplishment by listening to beginners material ... only to find myself completely bamboozled when I hear Japanese spoken by natives.
I'll be using Olly's Conversations for the next two to three months to get myself to a place where I can start listening to authentic material and start sentence mining.
Sentence mining ... that's how I think I'm going to solve my biggest problem ... knowing grammar, knowing words out of context etc = speaking unnatural sucky Japanese.
Once I'm able to consume authentic content; I'll start watching movies with Japanese subtitles. To test the theory, I watched a Japanese movie with Japanese subtitles recently. Amazingly, I could comprehend a lot more than I'd expected. Largely because I could read enough kanji to clue me in on what they were talking about ... it helped me hear the words ... and even when I didn't know the words, thanks to Heisig's RTK (recognizing the characters and having a rough idea what the character means), I would often know whether that utterance was important. So, I realized; knowing what content is worth pausing on and looking up the reading and learning from a context ... that's teaching me natural Japanese and re-enforcing everything I know already.
In theory, once I'm regularly listening and reading to authentic content, I'll be developing a sense of knowing how to talk naturally. That's something I really suck at right now ... I'll utter something from the perspective of a Englishman who's got the Japanese passing through an interface cobbled together mess of neural connections. It's time to refine the interface - rewire myself.
So that's the theory. Stage one - become able to comprehend authentic material. Stage two - once able to comprehend authentic material, gain massive amounts of language through data mining the content for nuggets of language that is useful to me. That is to say, if the content is about time travel (remembering that I tried reading "Your Name" in Japanese - and knew that being able to poetically about fate through spiraling threads of time wasn't going to help me too much in everyday conversation) - that's not very useful ... but content relating to something I feel is going to empower me ... I'll seize that and put in my "That's worth knowing" box and put my efforts into making that language that stays with me.
All fine in theory ... but it's a different matter in practice right?
Well, yes. I've been learning Japanese for over five years and I still mostly suck at speaking Japanese!
I know a lot of Japanese words (somewhere around six thousand or so I would guess), I understand a lot of grammatical structures and I can read over a thousand kanji characters. So I'm not entirely useless at speaking the language; but often my Japanese sounds weird, foreign and judging by the confused expressions on the faces of Japanese people ... incomprehensible!
Now, the way I believe I can solve this problem is by exposing myself to a lot of authentic Japanese content. But there's a few barriers preventing us from just doing that:
1. Speed of speech - Japanese sounds like incomprehensible babble.
2. Connected speech - Japanese sounds like incomprehensible babble.
3. Can't read the kanji - The writing is incomprehensible squiggles.
As a result, I've ended up with a very small active vocabulary and active sense of the language. This is really frustrating ... you know you know the word, but can't spit it out in a conversation. There's a huge bank of passive knowledge, passive vocabulary is stored in my brain ... but the problem is, the speed of recalling it in time to use it. So, the problem I'm trying to solve is simple ... how do I activate the language? As Johnny Five, the robot in the movie, "Short Circuit" would say, "Input ... Input .... Need input!!!!"
So we have a problem ... need input ... but incomprehensible input isn't good. So, how can I make incomprehensible input ... comprehensible.
Well, thankfully, Olly Ricahrds created a series of Conversations in Japanese. They're exactly what Krashen would call "i+1" material. That is, they just slightly above my level of comprehension. That is to say, I comprehend most of the content, but there's a new word or phrase from time to time that I notice I don't comprehend.
The conversations aren't spoken at a painfully slow non-native speed ... and they're not spoken at a rat-a-tat-machine-gun pace that I can't follow on authentic materials, such as podcasts, anime or movies. They're spoken very clearly and at a near native speed; so I'm not giving myself a false sense of accomplishment by listening to beginners material ... only to find myself completely bamboozled when I hear Japanese spoken by natives.
I'll be using Olly's Conversations for the next two to three months to get myself to a place where I can start listening to authentic material and start sentence mining.
Sentence mining ... that's how I think I'm going to solve my biggest problem ... knowing grammar, knowing words out of context etc = speaking unnatural sucky Japanese.
Once I'm able to consume authentic content; I'll start watching movies with Japanese subtitles. To test the theory, I watched a Japanese movie with Japanese subtitles recently. Amazingly, I could comprehend a lot more than I'd expected. Largely because I could read enough kanji to clue me in on what they were talking about ... it helped me hear the words ... and even when I didn't know the words, thanks to Heisig's RTK (recognizing the characters and having a rough idea what the character means), I would often know whether that utterance was important. So, I realized; knowing what content is worth pausing on and looking up the reading and learning from a context ... that's teaching me natural Japanese and re-enforcing everything I know already.
In theory, once I'm regularly listening and reading to authentic content, I'll be developing a sense of knowing how to talk naturally. That's something I really suck at right now ... I'll utter something from the perspective of a Englishman who's got the Japanese passing through an interface cobbled together mess of neural connections. It's time to refine the interface - rewire myself.
So that's the theory. Stage one - become able to comprehend authentic material. Stage two - once able to comprehend authentic material, gain massive amounts of language through data mining the content for nuggets of language that is useful to me. That is to say, if the content is about time travel (remembering that I tried reading "Your Name" in Japanese - and knew that being able to poetically about fate through spiraling threads of time wasn't going to help me too much in everyday conversation) - that's not very useful ... but content relating to something I feel is going to empower me ... I'll seize that and put in my "That's worth knowing" box and put my efforts into making that language that stays with me.
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