More Dravidian language identification

June 16th, 2009

Lately, What Language Is This?, the web-based language identification tool I’m running, has been getting many hits from Tamil-language sources, probably as a result of being covered in two seemingly popular blogs, techintamil.blogspot.com, and tamilnenjam.com. As another blogger pointed out,

Also this service is very good at identifying indic languages (where as many other services fail to understand).

Well, thanks. And yes, I have been making sure that the languages of the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding areas are thoroughly supported for identification.

But two notable languages have been missing, and I finally got around to adding them. Namely the two Dravidian languages Malayalam (not to be confused with Malay, to which it is unrelated) and Kannada (not to be confused with Canada, to which it is unrelated).

Together with the already supported Tamil and Telugu, this means that all four literary Dravidian languages are supported now! I hope this will be of use to many, and I’d like to thank the Dravidian-speaking bloggers for their support in the form of writing about the site.

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Learning Chinese through Japanese

April 2nd, 2009

It has been said, perhaps by Mark Twain, that confusing sinology and Zionism would be a little bit like confusing astrology and astronomy. Anyway, about three weeks ago I finally gave in to the craving and starting studying Chinese.


As I’ve written before, Chinese was among the alternatives when I decided to start studying Japanese. But Japanese seemed even more weird and hard, and the selection of courses at my university was better, so I chose Japanese instead. But I promised myself years ago that once I passed JLPT 1, I could start studying Chinese. And I did pass JLPT 1.

So I went to the huge Kinokuniya book store in south Shinjuku – you know the one located next to the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building, the tallest clock tower in the world. The supply of language-learning books in Japan is just overwhelming! Especially, of course, for English, but the supply of books on other popular languages is tremendous as well. I can only surmise that this is because foreign things are superficially fashionable in Japan, combined with a school system that teaches kids that foreign language acquisition is impossible. So everyone buys the same kind of miracle cure beginner-level language books every year, and every year the miracle breakthrough doesn’t happen, so the cycle repeats itself.


Anyhow, my philosophy on language learning is the antithesis of that kind of books so I bought the most boring-sounding ones I could find: one called 文法から学べる中国語 (“Chinese that can be learnt from grammar”) and one called 中国語の教科書 (“Chinese textbook”). Still quite fancy books, but the content seemed serious, and they follow different approaches: the grammar one obviously focuses on grammar, and the textbook one is more focused on listening, pronounciation, and conversation, so they should complement each other, I think.

As you notice, the Chinese language study books I bought are in Japanese. This is an important point, since that allows me to keep learning Japanese while enjoying studying Chinese (it is rather enjoyable as a change from years of Japanese studies). In fact, out of the first approximatly 100 words I harvested from the “textbook” book, 5 were new to me in Japanese as well. Double-win! Once you pass JLPT 1, there aren’t really any language study books available for your level, so this I think is a good method to ensure there aren’t any holes in my basic Japanese vocabulary.

I believe in setting goals, just as I did both when I decided to pass JLPT 1 in 2008 and JLPT 2 in 2006. So I have set my overall goal of my Chinese language studies: to be able to read a book in Chinese by the time I turn 30 (i.e. in about 2.5 years from now).

That seems challenging, yet doable. I don’t have any specific type of book in mind, but I imagine it would be some normal top-selling book. Actually come to think of it, the only book I’ve read in both English and Japanese is Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (神の子どもたちはみな踊る) so maybe that would be a good one to use as a reference standard.

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Speed Learning Japanese

January 3rd, 2009

Yesterday on the bus home from Narita Airport (after spending New Year in Shanghai/Hangzhou) I read the (Japanese) half advertisement, half general interest easy reading magazine provided in the seat pocket by the bus company, and there was this one article that I found quite interesting. It was an interview with the company president of a “speed learning” (スピードラーニング) English enterprise, as well as a student of said company, a 50-ish business/research person who was said to have learned English up to the level of being able to hold a presentation at an international conference in just one year.

Apparently this speed learning method has been around in Japan for 19 years. Upon googling it, there seem to be some enterprises offering speed learning sets in Japan, for not only English but also Chinese, Korean, French, etc, although I’ll focus on English as a target language, but the major player – or only player, in case all the rest are just search engine spamming – is this company called Espiritline.


So what is this speed learning? It seems to be based on the following ideas:

  1. Just listening without understanding much, even for only 5 minutes a day, is enough. After a while you will start wanting to hear more, because it becomes a part of your lifestyle, just like listening to music, and the topics are interesting.

  2. Get used to the sound of the language. The rhythm and sound frequencies used in English are different from Japanese. If you are not used to the sound of English, it’ll sound like noise to you, and you won’t be able to understand it.
  3. The natural order of learning a language is listen→ speak→ read→ write. That’s why speed learning focuses on listening comprehension first.
  4. After each English sentence, the corresponding Japanese follows. The stories are made up of 4-5 second English sentences, after which the corresponding Japanese sentence is read out. This means you don’t have to stop and look things up in a dictionary, and you’ll understand the meaning of the English sentences just by listening, with no need for a textbook. It also means that you will develop an understanding of English as a whole instead of word-for-word, and develop an understanding of English in English instead of in Japanese, and once you have that you will be able to speak English without intermediary Japanese.
  5. Classical music to keep you relaxed. The best study results are achieved when relaxed, so classical music flows in the background, which keeps you relaxed. There are also no great intonations in the narration, so that you can listen repeatedly to the same story in a relaxed state.

On top of this, there’s also a bunch of new age voodoo behind it, it seems. The article I was reading talked a lot about how speed learning stimulates the right brain (I guess it assumes the reader believes in some over-simplified view of the workings of the brain), and on this site selling some speed learning English package, there’s talk about how the background music stimulates the brain’s alpha waves, in addition to talk about left and right brain stuff.

So what to make of this? Does it make sense, and can it be applied to learning Japanese as well?

At first it looked mostly like a scam to me, with the “this guy learned perfect English in one year by studying 5 minutes per day” and the above-mentioned new age stuff, and not to mention the classical background music (I like almost all kinds of music except classical music – I can hardly stand it – so for me personally there would have to be some package without the music).


But a lot of it is sensible as well. I too believe that passive understanding is incredibly much more important than active when learning a language, which means speed learning makes more sense than for instance eikaiwa-style English conversation classes. Listening to real, spoken English rather than using a traditional textbook also seems very sensible.

As I’ve mentioned before, I listen to Japanese radio while working, in addition to the usual influx of Japanese, of course. This is basically the same idea; get a lot of input in a natural, spoken form of the target language, then the meaning comes naturally to you. Having the meaning of the sentences read out in your primary language afterward might be a good idea in the beginning, but once you achieve a decent listening comprehension level and vocabulary, I think it’s probably more of an obstacle to learning. Or maybe not; I still like having example sentences in Japanese/English for comparison when studying vocabulary, for instance…

In conclusion I’d say that if they just dropped the just 5 minutes per day and brain waves stuff, it makes a lot of sense. More sense than going to eikaiwa or school, at least, judging from most Japanese people’s poor English abilities despite actively studying it for years.

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Japanese studies – JLPT – passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 1

February 24th, 2008

Update a year later: I passed with an 84% score. :-)
Also, please see my recommended books for studying Japanese and the JLPT, and thanks for the comments!

After having spent last year mostly away from language studies, doing web technology stuff and other programming projects, this year I find myself spending much of my spare time on improving my Japanese. My goal is to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level 1 – the highest level – this year. And not only pass it, but pass it with a good margin, or I’m not satisfied.

Two years ago, in 2006, I decided early during the year to take JLPT level 2. I didn’t think I’d pass and neither did my Japanese teacher, but study I did and pass it I did with a score of 81% (60% is necessary to pass). This year I am aiming for over 80% again, preferably closer to 90% (for level 1, 70% is necessary to pass).

But this time I’m using different methods than I did in 2006 to pass JLPT level 2. Back then, I spent time studying kanji, memorizing grammatical patterns, and doing reading exercises from a course book featuring the same kind of texts and questions that appear on the actual test, and also a similar course book for listening. I used the UNICOM books targeting JLPT2, and found the reading and listening books very good, albeit short. I also bought the grammar and vocabulary books, but they were not good. For grammar and vocabulary, I found two books called 日本語総まとめ問題集 grammar (文法編) and vocabulary (語彙編) that were very good. Pictures and fun all over.

For reference, my strong point then was writing/vocabulary, and the weak point was listening. People say if you live in Japan, listening is easy because you hear Japanese all day, but it wasn’t for me. After the test I bought a TV, mostly to improve my listening.


This year I’ve also got the Unicom books, and the Kanzen master grammar and kanji/vocabulary books. As before, I think the Unicom reading book is great, but still short. I haven’t tried the listening book yet. As I wrote I was using different methods. Except for the reading comprehension, but that doesn’t take you very far since the book is so short. The theme for learning Japanese this year is having fun doing it.

I’m not studying kanji this year. One reason is that kanji is no longer a problem (relatively, of course). The other is that I think I will pick up enough kanji from increased reading. Also if you get dwelling on all the peculiarities of kanji, you risk spending too much time on that. At least I do, since I find the peculiarities interesting.

Grammar: I’m no longer memorizing patterns and functions, I’m copying all the example sentences from the Kanzen master book to flash cards and drilling them. Writing the flash cards is tedious, but drilling them is not (particularly). I’m writing on average about 4 example sentences for around 200 grammatical patterns. I plan to finish next month… I go through some of these flash cards on average a few times every day.

My thinking is that instead of, like I did on the JLPT 2 test, analyzing the grammatical structure of the sentence and remembering how the four alternative answers fit into that structure, this year my brain will do all pattern matching work for me. Like “this reminds me of that sentence, so that answer it is”. On top of that, it’s great for learnign vocabulary and expressions as well!

But that’s all old school – the core of this poodle consists of something entirely different! The first one is reading books. Real books, in Japanese. When you get to JLPT1 level that is very much possible. I was planning to start reading books this summer, hoping to have picked up enough grammar and vocabulary by then. But then my workmate told me he’s been reading the Harry Potter series in Japanese and recommended them for simple reading. So I borrowed the first book from him and started reading it – and now I’m hooked. Not hooked on Harry Potter, but on reading books in Japanese.

Harry Potter is really good, since it includes furigana for pretty much all kanji. One could argue this is not good for learning kanji, but I think it is. I don’t want to learn incorrect readings – I might think I know the reading when in fact I have just made it up myself, and anyway as I mentioned before I’m not focusing on kanji – I think that will come by itself. Harry Potter is also good because it’s a Western book. That makes it easier to read when even when you don’t have 100% comprehension – at least you don’t have to struggle with cultural understanding. The story isn’t very complicated either.


So that’s one thing: reading books in Japanese. Grammar, vocabulary, expressions, and reading speed all at once, and it’s fun. The other revolutionary idea came from the same coworker. He had an old, analog radio on his desk at work for a while. I work in a high tech software company targeting the next, successor of the next, successor of the successor of the next, and successor of the successor of the successor of the next series Japanese mobile phones. Having an analog radio on your desk is weird. Initially I just thought it eccentric. But then it hit me: how much time I’ve spent looking for good Japanese podcasts, online radio, and just about any piece of spoken Japanese on the web. A cheap-ass analog radio is actually all that you need! Free (if you avoid paying the NHK fee), simple access to spoken Japanese blurted out like there’s no tomorrow, any time of the day, on any subject you can think of.

So I got myself a small portable radio for 2,000 yen at the local electronics store in the alley. It’s great! I can get on average around 2 hours of listening every work day. At work! It makes both learning Japanese and working fun. I think the radio is what will make the difference between a good score and a great score on the JLPT in December. For anyone in Japan who’s above JLPT2 level I’d really recommend it. This year the listening section will be a breeze.

If only one could get some licensing agreement set up to broadcast all Japanese radio on the web for all the people struggling to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test who are not in Japan, that would be great. But probably unfeasible.

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