Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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From the submitted blog post:

"I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal.

The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency:

1. Spanish

2. French

3. German

4. Swahili

5. Russian

6. Hindi

7. Farsi

8. Arabic

9. Afrikaans

10. Polish"

That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method.

AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages

and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages

My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.

An argument can be made, too, that both Afrikaans and Swahili approach the simplicity of a creole; they're certainly closer to being truly rule-based grammars than most of their relatives (which tend to have accreted a lot more arbitrary classifications, exceptions and etic peculiarities). Standard Arabic is also relatively simple, being more of a regional lingua franca than a typical everyday language (much like Europeans slipping into Latin for political or scientific discourse).

I agree.

Is Arabic indo-european? I thought it wasn't. Maybe I'm mistaken though.

I don't know that my solution works, but it's a stab at it.

Semitic if I remember my tree's correctly.

I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/

It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).

I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well.

Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.

A fantastic book for learning Kanji is "Remembering the Kanji", by James Heisig.[1] It teaches you the meaning and writing of each character independent of its Japanese readings, which drastically reduces the cognitive load of memorization. It also arranges the characters in a logical order to speed up the process. A few months of study with this book are enough to memorize the reading and meaning of the 2136 jouyou kanji. These are the basic characters you need for proficiency; Japanese students learn them during elementary and middle school.

(A personal anecdote: I used this book one summer to learn and remember about 1500, substantially more than I could use after 6 years of studying Japanese and drilling kanji the usual way.)

If this sounds too good to be true, it's partially because it is. You won't learn much actual Japanese by studying the characters; you'll just learn to associate them with English words. This might be frustrating initially, but if you're committed to becoming proficient in Japanese this will speed up the path substantially. If you've ever seen how quickly native Chinese speakers pick up Japanese, you'll understand why: the Chinese and Japanese languages have about as much relation as Japanese and English. The advantage of the Chinese speakers is that they already know all the Kanji in their native tongue.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...

I believe that a serious study of kanji (such as Heisig) is best left for a more advanced level of Japanese. Beginners often overload themselves trying to learn thousands of kanji when they don't even know the meanings of the compounds that the kanji are used in. I believe that Heisig even mentions in his introduction something to the effect that using his book won't really improve your Japanese, it will just improve your ability to learn Japanese. Rather than spend hours per day studying Heisig for months, I would recommend a more traditional approach to beginners of learning the most common kanji as they learn the vocabulary.

For the advanced student looking to master kanji, then a method like Heisig's seems best. However, for those interested in the Heisig method, I recommend this book: Kanji ABC [1]. It is similar to Heisig's but organizes the kanji so that you learn similar kanji together. Also, while Heisig spends much time trying to get you to memorize convoluted association sentences, Kanji ABC simply gives you the radicals (similar to Heisig's 'primitives') and you build your own association sentences.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-ABC-Systematic-Approach-Characte...

I think you need to be a bit clearer about what you actually learn via Heisig - it's not accurate to say you're learning the meaning of kanji (which have several meanings depending on how they're compounded or not with other kanji), which you're not actually. And my understanding was that you don't learn the readings either. I could be wrong on that but learning all the readings for a kanji is a terrible approach. Much better to learn them by way of learning vocabulary.

Heisig seems to be best as a way just to get all the kanji into your mind as opaque artifacts, just a visual familiarity primarily. Which can be a huge help when you actually start learning Japanese.

You're right in that my site is for people who've already mastered kana and some basic kanji, and there are already so many resources where you can learn those, but there are relatively few for intermediate and advanced students, and that's what I'm addressing.

As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know).

But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how.

It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology. Rather, they have forgotten the stroke order on certain characters, or often confuse two similar characters. It's very debatable as to whether this has been caused by more widespread use of computers, or if such "character amnesia" has always been present. The same can be said for spelling: Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?

> It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology

Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.

Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.

I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.

No, Japanese people do not seem pretty firmly convinced "that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how".

This problem is often reported on the news in Japan, and the problem is that people are forgetting things such as: 1) the correct stroke order for difficult kanji 2) the exact radicals in rarely used complex kanji. For example, 薄 and　簿　look similar, but the top radical is different. Confusing these rarely results in someone being unable to understand the desired meaning, but will elicit eye-rolling and chuckles.

It's absolutely not the case that Japanese people can't write by hand anymore.

A better analogy would be cursive writing. Most young Americans can no longer write in cursive. Their handwriting has become simple, inelegant, and they probably don't follow the "correct" way of writing their letters. But they can still write. Just as Japanese can still write.

Perhaps I could have been more clear. I'm not defending your absolute statement. As I said it's clearly an exaggeration, but it's so absolute that it's at best a strawman—I don't think you'll find many people trying to defend it, so arguing against it is kind of pointless...

However, many Japanese people are indeed firmly convinced that Japanese—and particularly young Japanese—have non-trivial problems writing by hand, and that it's because of computer usage. I know this because I hear them say it constantly...

> Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?

English speakers make more spelling mistakes when typing into a spell-checked document because they know they no longer need to spell correctly.

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