4. Gradual Immersion
If you've read the AJATT website as I've suggested, you should have seen something about comfort zones. If you haven't, here's the short version. Do something under your current level, and you won't learn anything. Do something too hard, and it will just be frustrating. So the perfect target has to be slightly above your current level. You may have already experienced that in the past, and I sure had many times.
This is what we're aiming for in this step. The theory is simple: You start with a native media aimed at children, and everytime you finish something, you start a new media aimed for a slightly older audience. That will eventually lead you to be good enough to no longer need a dictionary to understand Japanese, without any frustrating obstacle in the way. Simple, and fun!
Before starting, we need to prepare our tools. Just reading won't get you anywhere, you need to make sure you understand and memorize what you see. So here's what you will need:
-The same Flashcard deck used for Kanji. Do continue the practice everyday, you don't want your Kanji recognition skills to rust too fast. There is no more need to add new Kanji from the books, but do add the new ones you encounter while reading. The length of this practice will gradually slow down with the lack of new Kanji, and you'll be able to drop it for good once it reaches less than 10 reviews per day.
-A Flashcard app/software that allows custom decks. This time, the focus will be placed on vocabulary. And do remember that unlike normal languages, you will need at least 3 fields: Kanji form, reading, and meaning. Some may want to add more to it, like the sentence you found it in, the role it has (noun, adjective, etc.), or anything you feel useful, but I personally went with the bare minimum, as I don't want to be spending too much time throwing in words. My personal choice was Anki, popular as a very customizeable Flashcard software, but there's a lot of choices out there.
-Dictionaries and translators. For vocabulary and Kanji, Jisho works wonders, as you can search Kanji by meaning or by radicals, making it very quick to search words you encounter. This is no good for grammar however. There aren't many grammar dictionaries out there, but I did found an excellent one that answered 90% of my grammar searches: Renshuu. If you end up having trouble with a sentence as a whole, you can try throwing it in entirely in a translator. For your own sake, don't use Google Translate, it's horrible. The best I have found is this one: Excite Translator.
Second part, you need to prepare your native medias. The best place to start is a media that you have already seen before and that is aimed for children. If you have seen it before, not only you'll save yourself the frustration of not understanding the story, but you'll also be able to work out more parts by already knowing the context. Then you want it to have Kanji here and there, but not too many. The amount of Kanji in a sentence determines the rhythm between adding up words and actually enjoying the media.
So think up of good ol' nostalgic media, search a preview of it, and determine if it's perfect for now. If it looks too hard, you can keep it in a to-do list for later. Once you found a perfect media that hypes you up, go for it!
Everytime you are about to finish a media, prepare the next one. Think of your next short-term goal.
-Do you want to expand your vocabulary? Pick a media for a slightly older target audience.
-Do you want to focus on understanding the readings of Kanji? Pick a media that supports furigana or that accompanies both text and voice.
-Do you want to increase your reading speed? Pick a media for a slightly younger audience and have a try without the use of any dictionary.
And so on. Of course, you want to focus on vocabulary first, as this is what truly expands the level of material you can access. And then it will all be freedom once you can understand novels without the use of a dictionary.
Last part. Because just reading won't get you anywhere fast, you still need to practice. The idea is simple: anything you don't understand, search it in your dictionaries, understand its meaning, and add it into your Flashcard deck.
If said thing seems too hard to understand, don't worry about skipping it. You might actually never see it again as it turns out to be an uncommon or made up word. Or if it's actually a common word, you will certainly have more chances to learn it.
On the opposite, don't spend too much time on a single word or grammar point. A quick dictionary lookup is more than enough. The more you encounter it, the more details you'll understand from said word using the contexts you find it in. If you encounter multiple times a word that you should have learned yet still have trouble understanding it, that's a clue that this is a word actually worth investing time in fully learning it. That way, we keep a good pace between learning and actually enjoying the media.
For your first few medias, you might actually want to limit the number of words you search and add in your Flashcard deck. If you add every unknown word when every single word is unknown, you'll make no progress in that media and that will just be frustating. That's why we start with a media that has a low count of Kanji. In my case, it was Super Mario RPG: aimed for children and uses a low amount of Kanji. So I only added words that used a Kanji, and after I had finished the game, I ended up with 250 words in my Flashcard deck. It was a good pace, considering my Kanji Flashcard deck was still going strong and I was also mixing a grammar book at the same time.
Keep up the Flashcard deck as long as you feel it is necessary. When I had reached over 5000 words, I could learn words simply from context and which Kanji it was using. And the daily Flashcard was starting to take a toll on my motivation. So I had the skills necessary to focus on a full immersion rather than mixing up native media and practice.
That's right, full immersion. If you arrive at this point, you can enjoy whatever you want to at its fullest! Go wild! Change the interface of your stuff in Japanese! Read and listen to whatever you want to in Japanese! Because reading native medias is likely no longer tiring, you can do it all day long! You are in a large plain with no obstacle, and you get better no matter which direction you go!
For reference, this is what I played/read up until that point and a bit further:
0. Pokemon FireRed. Making mention of this one because I actually played it as a way to practice Hiragana + Katakana and to get acquainted with grammar.
1. Super Mario RPG. The low resolution makes Kanji sometimes hard to understand, so Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi games are probably better alternatives.
2. Lufia II. There is still low resolution, but certainly more readable than Super Mario RPG was.
3. Chrono Trigger. The amount of Kanji was rough in the beginning, but it got more manageable after a week. I played the NDS remake, so the Kanji were far more readable.
4. Megaman Battle Network (Rockman.exe). The vocabulary there is more persistent for everyday life compared to other RPGs.
5. Golden Sun (whole serie). The two on GBA have a healthy amount of Kanji, it was perfect for training reading speed. The one on NDS has a lot more Kanji, but is accompanied with Furigana.
6. Final Fantasy. I played them in numerical number, slipping a game or two inbetween each. The first few ones have a very complex, ye olde style vocabulary, while the vocabulary gets more slang-ish later on. Particularly, the 9th is very full of slang and broken japanese.
7. Groove Adventure Rave. The first Manga I've ever read, and I want it to also be the first in Japanese, but you can go with whatever fits your taste. Most Manga are excellent practice material as it's non-stop reading with advanced vocabulary, yet with a huge lot of context provided from drawings and even furigana on top of all the words. Do try the real thing rather than a digital read, the experience is quite special!
7. Tales of serie. Same as Final Fantasy, I played them in release order, slipping a game or two inbetween each. This serie also have quite the advanced vocabulary, and there's a lot of text going on, especially in later ones that use the Skit systems.
7,5. Let's Play (実況プレイ) videos. At this point, in order to start training my listening comprehension, I started listening to native japanese LPers. For those who don't know what LP is, it's basically just people playing games and uploading their footage on Youtube. On the english side, GameGrumps is a popular example. For japanese LPers, my personal recommendations are Abu (アブ) and Retoruto (レトルト), as they speak a lot and quite clearly. And they play some hilarious games too (like QWOP. And yes, that game itself is also in their playlist).
8. Phoenix Wright (逆転裁判). This is actually a very strong media for learners of the language. Because this game actually needs you to understand the detail of everything that is going on, it makes for a perfect test to challenge your japanese skills. Try to win trials without any restart and with minimal dictionary usage!
9. Rewrite. This is actually a Visual Novel that I had my eyes on for a long while. This means that the level of vocabulary is actually extremely high and there is nothing but text. I struggled a lot at the beginning, and had to equip myself with a software that allowed me to quickly copy-paste words into a dictionnary. But at the end, I came out with a much stronger Japanese... and in tears from the beautiful story!
Now I play any game I want to. Games that I want to replay in their original language. Games that were never released in English. Indie games and fangames. Online games in their Japanese server. Although that last one is quite a pain with the lag from distance, the large amount of games blocked by region, and the relatively low popularity of MMOs in Japan that causes a lot of them to be empty or having to close. I've also switched the interface of almost all my stuff to Japanese. I look up tutorials and informations in Japanese, and so on.
No comments:
Post a Comment