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Japanese Language Study with Anki

I’m not that good about studying Japanese. Studying for school, sure: there are short-term, immediate consequences to not doing my work, not to mention public ridicule from professors and classmates if I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about or what’s going on. But with no (immediate) consequences and no (guaranteed) public ridicule if I don’t learn my five kanji for the day, Japanese always seems to fall to the bottom of my to-do.

Then I try to read a website, or an advertisement, or I have to ask my friend for the umpteenth time what a word means, or I know what I want to say in English but argh how do I say it in Japanese… and motivation returns. Life is hard living in a foreign country and only sort of knowing what’s going on, or what’s written on something, or what someone just said (and what to say back). There’s a lot of being confused and looking dumb.

Still, it needs to be easy for me to study: not easy in the subject matter, but easy in the method. If I have to read worksheet instructions or fumble around trying to find the right flashcards I lose my motivation in about half a second. Not to mention there’s no immediacy to gathering all these physical study materials: I have some already, but if I decide I need to learn something else I have to go to amazon.co.jp or the bookstore and poke around and obsessively read reviews to make sure what I’m looking at is a good product and on and on. Being a poor and mildly OCD is not a good combo.

And lo, in that void of a quick, convenient, well-priced (and isn’t free the best price of all) study tool comes: Anki. Anki is actually a generic flashcard application, but it allows for shared flashcard decks. So after downloading and installing the program, I can search through Anki’s massive database of flashcards and find that many people before me have created Japanese-language flashcards. No need to laboriously input data myself. There are flashcards for all the kanji for JLPT 1, 2, 3, and 4 (these designations are outdated now that the JLPT is organized by N1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, but it’s not as if the kanji I need to be fluent have changed), flashcard packs of 6000+ Japanese sentences, hiragana and katakana for beginners, grammar, and many more. Better still, Anki has an iPhone app. At $25 it’s more than a little pricey, but if you consider that the desktop client and all the flashcards that come with it are free, it more than evens out.

And finally, if you’re a particular studier who wants things just so like I do, you can edit the flash card packs you download. I didn’t like how the kanji flashcards gave me the kanji and the reading then asked for the meaning; I wanted them to give me the kanji and ask for the reading and meaning. With a quick template edit, I changed all 1000+ flashcards so I could have just that.

Studying has been a lot easier – or at least a lot easier to guilt myself into doing – since I started using Anki. With the iPhone app I can do my reviews on the train, syncing my progress so the desktop app knows I did my work when I get home. I can’t say I’m as diligent as I need to be, but I’m headed in the right direction.

So all that said… anyone want a box of White Rabbit kanji flashcards for JLPT 3-4? They’re starting to gather dust.

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No pictures for this one, but let me know if you’d like me to break it up by adding a screenshot or something.

Japanese Study Resources

Here’s a list of the resources I use to study Japanese

  • Lang 8 – It’s an online journal/social networking site where people write journal entries in a language they are studying. Then their journal entries are corrected by native speakers or others who are also studying the same language. This site is excellent for improving grammar and vocabulary.
  • Japanese Pod 101 – This a series of 1-3 minute podcast conversations. After the conversation, the vocabulary is explained and then the main grammar points are discussed. This site is excellent for improving listening and speaking skills.
  • Tumblr – Tumblr is a blogging site that many people use to share their study habits, tips and tricks to learning Japanese. You don’t have to be a member to read someone’s blog, but you have to a member if you want to follow their blog.
  • Anki – Anki is a program that allows you to create flashcards. It uses the spaced repetition method (a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. -according to Wikipedia).
  • Labochi – I meet with a private teacher once a week at my home and she is great! I found her on Labochi.
  • I just discovered Tae Kim’s Guide and Study Stream.
  • I have the textbook Japanese for Busy People.
  • I also use the iPhone application- Kotoba!

There are so many resources on the Internet that are free. With some time and practice, anyone can speak Japanese in no time!

Elementary Newspaper

Lately I haven’t had a lot of time to dedicate to studying Japanese and at my job I speak English all day. Considering I am more of a student at heart than a worker it sort of breaks my heart that I don’t have that time to study. Therefore, I have been trying to come up with creative ways to get some Japanese into my everyday life.

So recently, I subscribed to the local Asahi elementary school newspaper and everyday I have been trying to read at least one article plus the section of a story that runs everyday. Because the audience of the newspaper is young children all the kanji characters have the readings next to them. This isn’t necessarily good for my kanji skills but because there is still a lot of vocabulary I don’t know it is good for me now. After a bit though I may move on to the middle school newspaper.

elementarynewspaper

Sand with my sushi ?

Not far away from Tokyo Midtown, in Roppongi, there’s an old shop that was turned into a shelter for vending machines selling drinks. There it is.

sand for lunch

What is puzzling here is what is written in English. “Sand Sushi Salad Rice“. The majority of speakers of English who don’t understand Japanese will probably think that it was a place where people were selling sushi, salad, rice and… sand !?

Of course, Japanese people don’t eat sand with their sushi or their salads. Neither is there a sandman who brings sand to make children falling asleep. In fact, this “sand” is a contraction of “sandwich”, sandoitchi サンドイッチ in Japanese. It happens often that long words are abbreviated in Japanese. “sando サンド” is therefore often used for sandwich.

I however wonder how many foreigners who don’t know about the subtlety of Japanese language have looked at this shop with perplexity.