Chinese Future

December 2nd, 2009

As I wrote about half a year ago, I started studying Chinese. To tell you the truth, that has been going kind of slow. “Slow” is really just an average though; I’ve studied grammar and the characters (hanzi) quite a lot, i.e. the areas that appeal to me the most, but not vocabulary and pronunciation very much.

That doesn’t really work out well for Chinese, though. I think the main reason for that is that – compared to Japanese – pronunciation is very difficult. I don’t know about you but I can’t remember a word that I can’t pronounce. Or rather I can remember it as a (hanzi) character, but I can’t connect that to a sound, which makes it semi useless. Of course it would be possible to learn Chinese completely as a written language without ever learning how to pronounce things, but besides that being sub-optimal (it would certainly be very valuable for a deaf person, for instance, though) I also think it would take even longer than it takes to learn Chinese while learning both reading/writing and listening/speaking at the same time (for a non-deaf person).

So what I’m trying to say is that I finally realized that me going all in on hanzi and all out on pronouncing the damned thing was not going to work (obviously!), which is where Chinese Future comes in.


Chinese Future happens to be the portending name of a Chinese language school conveniently located between my office and my home, slightly cheaper than the competitor across the road, and with a name that I think really captures the essence of why learning Chinese is not only a fun activity but also highly rational for anyone with a remaining life expectancy of over 20 years – in a very non-subtle manner!

So yeah, I signed up as a customer-student there and had my first lesson yesterday. It seems like in Japan everyone’s going to language schools all the time – it’s really the hip thing to do. No one ever seems to learn any language though. In practice that usually means Japanese people going to “learn” English at one of the English conversation “school” chains, which never seems to produce any result. Considering not being able to speak any foreign language being a point of pride for many Japanese individuals, that is hardly surprising.

So color me full of skepticism (as always!) when I went there. But the first lesson is free, after all, so not much to lose anyway. The following 8 lessons are just 3,000 yen a piece – a considerable amount, but not too large to give it a shot. So well, that is my plan at the moment: Try those (in total) nine lessons and see whether or not language conversation school is really the thing for me. I’ve already got some good conclusions from the first lesson, which I’ll summarize in the next blog post. Stay tuned.

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Japanese study methods beyond JLPT 1

April 15th, 2009

There was a time when I considered passing the JLPT’s (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) highest level (level 1) to be the goal. Since passing it, I’ve understood it’s actually more of a beginning than anything else – and it’s a beginning of something good (and it ain’t just a beautiful friendship). There’s still lots more to learn, but with the end of JLPT studies begins the time when mastering the whole Japanese language is the goal, and there are no more silly tests.

Let me tell you three things that I used to think sucked but really enjoy now:

  1. Discovering a kanji I don’t recognize

  2. Reading a word I don’t know
  3. Finding a sentence pattern I don’t understand

Out of which 3 and 1 are fairly uncommon. And I am making an effort!

Every time I find a kanji that I don’t recognize, or a come upon a word I don’t know, or find a sentence pattern (grammar) I don’t understand, I look it up in the dictionary, find words using its different readings, locate sentences using these words, and add them to my Anki card deck.


I am learning 5 new items per day, and I make an effort to catch up by learning more on days after I for some reason didn’t do any new items (such as holidays). Most of these items are words, so that means my Japanese vocabulary is growing by at least 1800 words per year, which seems like a reasonable pace to me – although I’m sure it’s possible to learn much more than that.

Finding 5 new items per days actually takes some effort though. Although some days just seem to bring with them a storm of unseen vocabulary and kanji, in order to keep a decent buffer of them – I aim at always having at least 50 unseen cards in my Anki deck for rainy days – some effort is required. These are my main sources for discovering unknown Japanese:

  1. Japanese Wikipedia

  2. News”papers” – specifically Asahi Shimbun
  3. Books – any book, as long as it’s in Japanese

I find these three to have quite different characteristics; Japanese Wikipedia uses quite formal and long-winded language, decent supply of new words, but not many unknown kanji. The news on the other hand is written in that typically very compact form with lots of kanji compounds, but of course almost no non-joyo kanji, with a decent supply of new words, and also often interesting sentence patterns or vocabulary usage.

Books of course depends on the book… I read essentially anything I find interesting. Quite often that is books about the Japanese language or one of those introspective books about Japaneseness – of which there are plenty in Japan – both ones that go “Japan is the greatest” and those that go “Japan sucks”. The one I’m reading right now is quite basic in its general difficulty level but uses a tremendous amount of obscure kanji – actually I think the author is trying to show off – but that is of course great for my purpose.

Anyway, so, lots of reading, finding new things, and reviewing – every day. I used to listen to the radio a lot but I kind of grew tired of it and it stopped being very effective (although I still think it is for JLPT 1 listening practise), and besides now I’m listening to Chinese while working.

So that’s how I’m studying Japanese now, and I don’t expect it to change much for a while since I’m focusing on Chinese, albeit still mostly on a hobby level. Another thing I’m going to do is write a few more pages like my recently published page on software development-centered technical Japanese. I found writing that more fun than I had thought as well as providing me with a good chance for review, and I have a few more topics in mind!

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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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