1 is a negative number

Khatzumoto today repeats the dictums that “1 is infinitely larger than 0″ and “just do one”.

These are good and valid points, and frequently helpful, especially for the chronically lazy (yr.hmbl.srvt. raises his hand) who often have issues leaving the parking lot of sloth.

However: it can be a blinkered view in a way because 1 is not really infinitely greater than zero, when you set about to learn a language.  And if you’ve ever forgotten a word, or kanji, or anything else; you will understand this.

1 is, in fact, infinitely and tragically less than zero.  You are on a moving sidewalk going against the flow.  Your brain is only too happy to discard items that haven’t been accessed in too long.  You must make more progress than regress.

Now if you view “0″ as that quantity of exposure (let’s leave out the nasty “w” or “s” words for now) that will keep you stationary with respect to the surroundings, that will move you precisely in the opposite vector to that moving sidewalk, then yes, 1 is all you need for progress.  And 1 and 1 and 1 is more progress.

So what speed is that sidewalk going exactly?  Do you feel lucky enough to know?  And anyway don’t you want to get to that goal faster – understanding that amazing movie in six months is better than a year, right?

Then why not add up 1 on top of 1 on top of 1 until you get a stupendously large number and have spent your day in, well,

one could even say all Japanese, all the time …

in fact

this is English, why are you even reading this

getting text from image-based subtitles

I’ll try to expand on this post later, but just a quick note: today I watched an excellent movie (The Abacus and the Sword) and wanted to take some of the subtitles to use as SRS cards. But the subs were in the image-based .sub format, so Aegisub couldn’t handle it. The solution is to use Subtitle Edit. This doesn’t have a Japanese dictionary built in so you need to get it from the Tesseract project. Unpack that file to the \Tesseract\tessdata folder under Subtitle Edit’s install folder. Then when you open such a .sub file, it will ask you if you want to import it, then ask you what system to use (Tesseract) and what language (Japanese). Then you wait, some magic happens, and you have text. It marks the ones it isn’t sure of in a different colour so you can correct them manually, but it gets most of them pretty much right.

tadoku list january

For someone who advocates extensive reading as much as I do, the last couple contest results have been pretty embarrassing. So I was happy to see that this time goals have been implemented. Should be a good opportunity to embarrass myself further! So I set a goal of 1000 pages – modest by many people’s standards, ridiculous by mine. But ridiculous awesomeness was never achieved without ridiculous goals! They laughed at little Alexander the Not-Yet-Great too. At least I’m assuming they did.

Forthwith, what’s on the shelf this go round:

• Lucky Star (never actually read this yet. shocking.)
• what I didn’t finish of Durarara!!
• Death Note (started this, kind of not sure I actually like it. low priority)
• Yotsuba& 11 (nice warmup snack)(does anyone else constantly type “tu” when attempting romaji?)
• Eve no Jikan manga (loved the anime, looking forward to this)(there’s a light novel too which I also have, but it looks like a bit too high-level zone)
• The Hobbit (this is the main project)
• Kino no Tabi vol. 1 (won’t likely get this far but it’s there if I need it)

読みましょう！

2012の四字熟語

The 四字熟語 can often encompass an entire outlook, mindset, philosophy.  Looking back on the previous year, I see much room for improvement.  These, then, are what I would like to define 2012:

一刻千金（いっこくせんきん）

A single moment is worth a thousand gold. Time is precious. Waste is unthinkable.

日進月歩（にっしんげっぽ）

Moving forward day by day, month by month. Whether you’re tending a garden or a mind, neglect will undo months and years of work. Progress need not be quick, but it must be continuous, as inevitable as a natural force.

切磋琢磨（せっさたくま）

Cultivating the character by diligent study and application. It is no accident that the last three characters of this expression all mean, more or less, “to polish”. The cut and a single polish can give you an adequate, functional, marketable product. But for the mind and character, that can never be accepted as a sufficient standard.

when can i delete this srs deck?

“I don’t really SRS anymore” is something one occasionally hears from advanced learners, usually with a twinge of envy. Compared to reading, watching movies, conversing with natives, SRS feels like (and is) a pretty dry and mechanical thing. Some days it would be a nice relief to drop it entirely. Of course no native speaker uses SRS for their own language.

Then again some will insist that one should never stop SRS, even when the card intervals stretch into the years and no new cards have been added for a long time.

It’s actually very easy to tell approximately when you can permanently delete or suspend any given SRS card. SRS is designed to remind you of a fact just before you forget it; so if you see the fact (be it a grammar point, word, or kanji) in the course of your normal day-to-day use of the language with a greater frequency than the card interval, you don’t need that card anymore. In fact, keeping it around is a waste of time. You can see that this is always going to be approximate, going by intuition not exact statistics.

Thinking of it mathematically like this it’s obvious that an advanced learner will both have his average card interval much longer than a beginner, and will see the facts on those cards far more often, due to faster reading, better listening comprehension, and involvement with more advanced materials. Then the time inevitably comes when new material comes in so infrequently, is so easily remembered due to the massive context already absorbed, and old material is so ingrained that the whole SRS process can be dispensed with. You could graph the whole process if you wanted.

This is partly why I like to keep separate decks that are at least somewhat homogeneous. It is a time saving to suspend an entire deck of easy grammar, for example, rather than continuing to review that deck and suspending cards bit by bit. One also needs to learn to take a somewhat detached view of the individual cards. A dragon might know the details of every treasure in his pile, but it’s a bit much for a human; and anyway there’s so much treasure already there and flowing in all the time that a gem or two or a dozen will never be missed.

how to stay monolingual: making use of recursive lookups

If you advance beyond the beginner stage in your language learning, the question will arise soon enough: “How do I switch over to monolingual study?”  Thinking about Japanese in English is of course how we start, and even at advanced levels an English explanation of some abstruse point can quickly get you unstuck, but there’s no denying the multiplicative power of thinking about Japanese in Japanese.  Usually the suggestion will be made, “Do recursive lookups”; with the idea of looking up every word in a Japanese definition that you don’t understand, again in a Japanese dictionary; looking up any unknown words in those second level definitions; and so on, until you’ve branched out enough that no more unknown words remain.  Depending on the case, you could get five new words, or twenty, or fifty out of this.  But that sounds like a lot of work, and then once you’ve done that, what do you do with them?

In case you’ve somehow been missing it till now, there’s a brilliant Japanese learning resource in a location you might not immediately think of; the IRC channel #ajatt on Rizon.  It’s a sort of blender for ideas and pretty often some excellent stuff comes out.  Today, the subject was nesting definitions and massive context cloze deletion (MCD) SRS cards.

It got a little long, so the rest is behind the jump, posted as written.  There’s examples too.

vocabulary multiplication

This is not something that you are likely to be able to do intentionally, but it’s really nice when it does happen; and with the large number of compound words in Japanese it happens quite a bit.

For example, today I learned 「栽培（さいばい）」,  the word for cultivating crops of any kind.  Looking it up, I found that I had, in effect, learned a bunch of other words automatically, because it’s part of quite a lot of compounds.  For example, 「温室栽培（おんしつさいばい）」, greenhouse gardening;「果樹栽培（かじゅさいばい）」, fruit growing; 「栽培所（さいばいしょ）」, plantation; 「栽培種（さいばいしゅ）」, agricultural variety or species; 「テラス栽培（てらすさいばい）」, terrace growing; and several more.

And the fact that an easily recognizable word forms a part of so many compounds makes it more likely that you’ll be able to infer the meaning of a new word in reading or listening.  You read or hear a word, note that 栽培 is a part of it, and immediately you can tell (even without context) that this new word has something to do with raising crops, which narrows the meaning down a great deal.

haiku friday

落葉松は・直幹落葉・しつくして

からまつは・ちょくかんおちば・しつくして

Vertical tree trunks with all their needles fallen – larches in winter.

山口誓子・1974

—————–

I found the grammar and vocabulary notes for this haiku quite interesting, so I will include them here as well.

• 落葉松 (“larch”) is written with kanji meaning “fall”, “leaf”, and “pine”; so, “pine that drops its needles”, or a deciduous pine.  All trees of the pine family have 松 in their name, and their needles are referred to as 葉, the same kanji/word used for the leaves of broad-leaved trees.
• 直幹 is literally “straight trunk”.  So 落葉松は直幹 is “the larches are straight-trunked”, or “the larches show their straight trunks”.
• おちば is the usual reading for 落葉, “falling/fallen leaves”.
• しつくして is the ーて form of しつくす; し is from する (“do”), and ーつくす is a verb suffix meaning “[do] fully/completely”.  落葉 followed by a form of する makes a verb, “to drop (its/their) leaves”, so 落葉しつくして means “having fully dropped its/their leaves”.

—————–

Taken, as always, from The Essence of Modern Haiku.

give yourself a project

If you’ve been learning a language for any length of time you’ve surely come to realize how amorphous and hard to measure your progress actually is.  Sometimes you get a bunch of notable insights in a row but just as often, probably more often, you can go weeks without noticing all that much difference in your skills.

This is where it might be time to take focus off your creeping language XP bar and focus on some quest chains – er I mean projects!

I have found this to be notably useful.  For me, a good project is something with a very clear end point, and a time span of around three months.  That’s short enough that you can see measurable progress every day and feel that your goal is inexorably drawing near, while being long enough to give a big shot of satisfaction at finishing it.

Going through Remembering the Kanji volume 1 is maybe the first such project that many people start with, and it’s a great example.  Averaging a very doable 30 or so a day, this will take a little over three months, and once you’re at the end you have laid a tremendously useful foundation for reading and writing.

Another project I benefited from was taking Naoko Chino’s All About Particles, mining all the sentences, and SRSing them until I knew those particles cold.  You can do this with a lot of different grammar books, or even phrase books, shadowing example books, etc.

Right now I’m about a month away from “finishing” (that is, having no more unseen words) the JLPT 1 list on readthekanji.com.  Again, an easily measurable, highly defined and structured activity that will take a few months but well under a year.  I think a year is too long for this sort of thing to be really motivating.  If you want, you can define a long term goal – “I want to read Heian poetry” – and break that down into several sub-projects, each of which will take you a large part of the way through.  Think of it as timeboxing on a very long scale.

The next project on my list is an incremental reading deck with audio, made from Miki’s audio blog on japanesepod101.com.  I think this will bring a lot of things together and greatly aid listening comprehension. (I do have this Anki deck available for download as I mentioned before.)  There are about a hundred cards, so if I add two a day I can get through in a bit less than two months.  Perfect.

In a way language learning is like the easiest MMORPG ever.  As long as you stay logged in and doing something, anything, you’ll level up and get rewards.  The time put in is the single biggest factor in your language skill, so as long as your method(s) makes even remotely some kind of sense, if you just keep at it you’ll win, no need to worry about your eventual success.  However, the process can easily start to feel endlessly long, and that way lies burnout.  Giving yourself concrete objectives that you can finish gives you that sense of progress, and gives you things you can point to and say “I did that, so I can do more”.

scattered thoughts

Which is kind of what it’s been like lately.  Sorting out what works and what doesn’t is half the challenge of this game, of which more anon.

I’ve finally given up completely on the long-form incremental reading; while effective, it’s just too easy to make excuses for.  The most common are “don’t feel like reading this story again” and “don’t have thirty consecutive minutes right now” which is of course kind of lame because everyone does have that amount of time if the desire is there to use it.  But if the desire isn’t there sometimes it isn’t even worth questioning why not.  Just move on to something you do want to do.

The shorter variety though, is going superbly.  I’m mixing it with audio now to improve listening comprehension, with very good results.  Right now I’m just working through Miki’s blog from japanesepod101.com, reading the blog first and then listening (have the audio on the cards).  If anyone wants this Anki deck let me know and I’ll give you an address to download it.

After a very rocky upgrade, readthekanji.com is working pretty well again, and I’m well into the JLPT1 list.  It’s odd how much you get good at what you just focus on doing regularly.  Kanji readings are going from a weak point to a strong point (well, relatively!), so much so that I quite often can easily read a word without having any clue what it means.  That’s OK though; that’s for tadoku to sort out.

And speaking of which that starts in a couple of days, doesn’t it.  This round I’m going to worry about my score even less than last time, and especially am not going to drop everything else the way I did.  I’m basically done digging out from under my vocabulary deck after adding all 800+ words at once that I collected the last tadoku month, and I have no intentions of going through that again.  So new words will be added immediately, readthekanji will continue, incremental reading and listening, etc.  I want to reread quite a bit of what I read last round, expecting the 50% score to be roughly balanced out by faster reading, and more importantly solidifying what I learned.  Also, I want to finally finish Alice in Wonderland, probably read through Death Note and Durarara!!, and, well, play it by ear pretty much.

You know, if you’re exploring an unknown sea, it hardly even matters which way you’re going.  There’s so much unknown territory, you can hoist sails and go whichever way the wind blows and you’ll discover things everywhere.  And at some point, the parts you’ve seen before often enough become familiar, and once enough of the sea is familiar, then maybe it’s more worth your trouble to seek out specific areas, but until then 風任せ