Saturday, May 05, 2007
Japanese Refresher
Last week, I picked up Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text
by Giles Murray.
It's a very clever idea: take public-domain works written in Japanese from Aozora, run them through Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary server, create an impeccable translation, and hire an actor to perform a reading for digital audio. Package the collection and sell as an easy-to-carry paperback – no need to carry word lists or dictionaries (paper or electronic). Just take along the book and an MP3 player with the spoken word.
At the Cornell FALCON program, we were taught that reading actual texts was by far the best way to learn the written language. Flashcards may be useful for passing tests, but it's hard to sustain interest in a pile of flashcards.
Nevertheless, I recently discovered japanese-kanji.com, and decided to get a sense of how much I know after about 10 years of having the Japanese language as a sporadic hobby, and eight years after FALCON.
The chart at right shows my results, with the characters (in traditional order) along the x-axis, and the comprehension level on the y-axis.
Note that each character has two readings: "on" (from the Chinese root) and "kun" (native Japanese pronounciation).
Despite atrophy from lack of use, I have a solid grasp on the first 400 kanji or so, although there are some for which I don't know the relatively obscure on/kun readings. For the next two hundred kanji, I know most of them well. After that? Not so good. While I know many of the more difficult characters in context from reading actual texts, I wasn't so good at picking them out of a lineup.
I'm not going to radically change approaches at this point, but it's good to have a method to periodically benchmark my progress.
by Giles Murray.It's a very clever idea: take public-domain works written in Japanese from Aozora, run them through Jim Breen's Japanese-English dictionary server, create an impeccable translation, and hire an actor to perform a reading for digital audio. Package the collection and sell as an easy-to-carry paperback – no need to carry word lists or dictionaries (paper or electronic). Just take along the book and an MP3 player with the spoken word.
At the Cornell FALCON program, we were taught that reading actual texts was by far the best way to learn the written language. Flashcards may be useful for passing tests, but it's hard to sustain interest in a pile of flashcards.
Nevertheless, I recently discovered japanese-kanji.com, and decided to get a sense of how much I know after about 10 years of having the Japanese language as a sporadic hobby, and eight years after FALCON.
The chart at right shows my results, with the characters (in traditional order) along the x-axis, and the comprehension level on the y-axis.Note that each character has two readings: "on" (from the Chinese root) and "kun" (native Japanese pronounciation).
Despite atrophy from lack of use, I have a solid grasp on the first 400 kanji or so, although there are some for which I don't know the relatively obscure on/kun readings. For the next two hundred kanji, I know most of them well. After that? Not so good. While I know many of the more difficult characters in context from reading actual texts, I wasn't so good at picking them out of a lineup.
I'm not going to radically change approaches at this point, but it's good to have a method to periodically benchmark my progress.
Labels: Japan, literature
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