Farewell to Flashcards

So a couple of months ago I suddenly took a step I didn't really expect: I deliberately abandoned Anki.

I've been using Anki flashcards for around four years now, and paper flashcards for several years before that. I dutifully spent an hour almost every day going over first individual words and characters, and then (once I got better at knowing how to learn things in a way that suited me) entire phrases. It wasn't usually a solid hour of drilling, mind; I would end up needing to have quick breaks that spaced it out.

I think the flashcards really did help with cementing some key characters, words and phrases into my mind. I don't regret it.

Over time, though, the number of flashcards grew steadily into the many thousands, and I found it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to spend that hour. This was partly psychological, and partly down to practicalities.

At one stage I'd been able to comfortably schedule my Anki into my normal routine. I'd do them in quiet moments in one of my reception-style jobs. I'd practice flashcards over breakfast, or during my post-tea cuppa. When I went to Japan, I ended up waking early a lot of the time, and I could readily do an hour of flashcards at 6am, get breakfast, shower and head to school; or else I'd be unable to get to sleep in the heat, so would sit up late to practice. When I came back, I was unemployed for nine months (bar a bit of freelancing) so it was easy enough to maintain my flashcards, even though I was living with my parents so my mornings and evenings were not solitary.

Eventually though, life built up. I got a new job with less time in the morning, and busy enough to keep me occupied with actual work (which I prefer). I have fewer free evenings, partly for social reasons: as most of my friends now live hundreds of miles away, I have weekly Skype meetups and lots of emails, rather than simply going for a coffee. My new flat was too noisy to comfortably concentrate on drilling languages.

More importantly, a whole bunch of stressful things happened in my personal life that wrecked my focus and made it increasingly difficult to face going through hundreds of flashcards every day trying to memorise language. I wanted to do escapist, light-hearted things that didn't require much brainpower. There were a few periods when I didn't touch Anki for days and eventually came back and slowly toiled my way though the backlog.

I was growing resentful of Anki. I was also getting stressed when I did other things, like Skyping friends, in the knowledge that Anki wasn't getting done and it was getting late and I'd have them all to do tomorrow. I had quite a lot of nights where I stayed up much later than I should purely in order to get through my Anki. And then I noticed something definitely bad. When I was sitting down to go through my Anki, I realised that I was quite explicitly doing that instead of actually using my languages.

We tend to compartmentalise things in various ways. There's work, and housework, and social obligations, and leisure. There are different kinds of leisure too. Naturally, I couldn't spend time and energy on Anki in place of my job, or food shopping, or visiting a friend, so it had to come out of my leisure time. But I still needed some of that leisure time to chill with friends, or go running, or read something undemanding. So when I was picking Anki, I was picking Anki over reading my Japanese novels, or doing translations, or watching Chinese TV shows, or writing to my L2 friends.

I was sacrificing the chance to use my languages to do the things for which I started learning the languages in the first place, improving them in the process, in order to make sure I got my language drill in.

And that's when I stopped.

Genki Japanese vs. Minna no Nihongo

More ancient half-written posts unearthed from my previous trip

As I've made the switch from Minna no Nihongo to Genki Japanese at GenkiJACS, I'm in a position to somewhat compare the two, at least from a student's perspective.

The test that is not a test

Another old post I didn't get round to finishing! This all still appears to be true, so I decided to finish and post it.

One of the things that comes up in class regularly is short tests. I was initially quite perplexed by them, and have eventually, I think, worked out what's going on.

Adapting to classroom learning

Before coming to GenkiJACS, I studied first through audio courses, then in one-to-one lessons with a tutor, mostly once a week. At the school, there are typically four hours of lessons a day (on the standard course) in groups of 5-6. This is a bit of a difference, and takes some getting used to.

The most obvious thing is, you're not the centre of attention. This may be a plus or a minus for you; when I started with my tutor, I was initially stressed by having all the expectation on me, but got used to it. In a classroom, you get proportionally less feedback and monitoring because you only answer about 1/classmates of the questions. It's a little easier for you to fade away and (deliberately or subconsciously) avoid things you find hard, because someone else may pipe up, or the teacher may turn to someone else. This reduces stress, but of course it also means you're not necessarily going to overcome those fears.

It is not unnatural (as Tom Jones didn't sing)

This week I was completely baffled by a textbook reading. As such, I've been spending a lot of time today trying to puzzle out the intricacies of this page. Perhaps too much. I ended up trying to do a full-on analysis, which is hindered by never having really studied syntax, let alone Japanese linguistics. However, I did end up with a complicated table that I thought I'd share. Maybe someone will appreciate it.

The brackets (「 and 」) indicate the start and end of distinct grammatical elements. I've put things in different columns to indicate how deeply nested a particular phrase is.

					English	Grammar
「	「	「	「 それが		This	NP
				「 普通だ 」	Is ordinary	VP
			と思っている 」		Are thinking	VP
		「 日本人 」			Japanese people	NP
		の			Of	PRT
	習慣 」				Custom	NP
からすると 」					From the perspective of	PP
「	「	「 その時 」			This time	NP
		「 一回かぎり 」			Once and for all	AVP
		「	「	「 お礼 」	Politeness	NP
			だけ 」		Only	AVP
		で 」			By	PP
	は				(topic)	PRT
	もの足りなさ 」				Insufficiency	NP
	を				(obj.)	PRT
「 感じる 」					To feel	VP
	の				this case	PRT
	も				(Emph.)	PRT
「 無理はない 」				Is not unnatural	VP
」

From the point of view of the cultures of the Japanese people, for whom this* is usual, it is not unnatural to feel the inadequacy of only a single expression of gratitude once-and-for-all on this occasion.**

* that is, repeating your thanks on several occasions

** that is, having done someone a favour

More naturally: From the point of view of the cultures of the Japanese people, for whom this is usual, it's natural to feel that thanking someone only once for a favour is insufficient.

I hope, glancing at the nested clauses and intricacies of this particular sentence, you can have a little insight into what I'm doing, and perhaps feel a smidgen of pity. Right, back to work...

On time and energy

After a busy day at school, I've just wrapped up my homework. It's 11.30pm. I should really be in bed about an hour ago, since light goes from about 6am-6pm in Japan, but it seems increasingly rare that I'm able to do that.

Having started trying to catch up on my vocabulary backlog, I'm finding myself very short on time. Normally, this would be because I'm squandering it frivolously, but I can't particularly find that I'm doing that at the moment. There's certainly a bit of time spent reading the news, writing emails and the odd blogpost, but not much else. Occasional running. I haven't touched a game in the last week. To my irritation, I've barely touched a book this week either, aside from my textbook. Podcasts, certainly, but those are a "while" activity - while commuting, while walking to school, while washing up. I went for a meal with some classmates once.

From what I can work out, I'm just spending a large proportion of my time and energy on, well, studying. There's four hours of lessons, which works out at somewhere around five hours most of the time due to lunch breaks (enough time get and eat food, but not much else). Sometimes I have additional activities, like bilingual conversation or cultural outings. Vocabulary practice and homework takes a little over an hour, according to what Anki (my vocabulary-training software) records, but that's misleading. Lots of mini-breaks are necessary when you're working through a couple of hundred items of vocabulary, so I generally read an article or something, but it's not really usable time. New vocabulary cards need making, which is surprisingly time-consuming, but worthwhile. I'd say I spend maybe two hours a day on the whole vocabulary-learning process.

Today, for example, I spent a fair chunk of the morning studying in a cafe, then came back home to cook before afternoon school. I finished school at 6pm, was back around 7.15, put the tea on, washed up and studied vocabulary. I ate around 8.30. Then I studied a bit more, went for a walk, came back, read an article and wrote a comment on it, finished my homework, and it's 11.30. This happens a lot. Whenever I have a 6pm finish followed by a 9am start, it seems more or less impossible to wrap up my work much before midnight. This probably says something about my efficiency.

All this learning is a full-time job, and I'd forgotten just how tiring for the brain it can be. Also, I suspect the classroom kind of learning is particularly hard work; even with regular five-minute breaks, we're still basically sat down for an hour at a time paying attention to a teacher and trying to parse meaning from a textbook. This is very different from, say, sitting in your own house with a pot of tea and a popular science book.

I have quite a few little projects that I'd like to work on, as well as reading and so on, but my brain's usually too tired to do anything that serious by the time I've finished my work for the day. Here's hoping things will ease up soon...

On vocabulary learning

So today we began a new chapter, and I received another sheet of vocabulary, with the request to review it by tomorrow. And this was quite a depressing prospect, because I realised that I still haven't got round to even looking at the last two sheets of vocabulary I got (last week, and the week before). This isn't because I'm a lazy swine; it's because I was too busy learning vocabulary.

These particular sets of vocabulary come from the new textbook I began on moving to the pre-Intermediate stream. On a quick skim-through, each sheet seems to contain around 50-80 terms. Thankfully, I already understand some of these (maybe a third) and have a broad idea of some more (another third) either from recognising a Chinese character, or because it's a compound. The latter case is much less useful, of course, because generally I can guess the approximate pronunciation or the approximate meaning, but not both, and am sometimes wrong anyway. So I need to study roughly 30-50 terms per sheet.

On top of these 40ish items of vocabulary, there are others that come up in class. I get around 10 new vocabulary items a day, unless I had a particular complicated conversation, which may be 30 or more. Outside class, I may also encounter new important vocabulary relating to business, food, a conversation with a friend, or something I'm reading. Conservatively, let's assume 140 words per week, or 20 per day.

This would entirely viable to keep up with, in theory. But it's not that simple.

One thing is that I front-loaded myself. When you start learning a language seriously, there's an awful lot of vocabulary you need to learn to be able to usefully do very much - like live in that country for six months. So I'm not starting with a blank slate, but with a large reserve of vocabulary that I was already working through slowly. Too slowly, perhaps, but I was working full-time and trying to sort out rather a lot of things at that time.

Also, learning vocabulary in isolation is both difficult and mostly worthless. This is especially true in a language very different from your own. While you might be able to do some basic reading just by knowing the terms, you can't use them productively or understand normal speech unless you know how they're used in context. This means studying not individual words, but sentences. These are longer, so things like writing practice takes more time, but they help drill the term and its use into your head far more effectively than an isolated gaggle of new syllables. The problem is, of course, that often finding a useful sentence (never writing one! bad idea!) takes time, and even a good one may well involve one or two other items of vocabulary you don't actually know yet. This will increase the time taken to study the vocabulary.

Plus, in quite a few cases vocabulary can be used in multiple ways. Sometimes these are very important to learn, and so that single piece of vocabulary might lead to three or four different phrases to learn. Maybe a common idiom or two, also.

Personally, I use Anki to study vocabulary, so I don't need stacks of paper, flashcards or to remember when to study what. One of the things Anki does is let you form different cards from the same information. In the case of Japanese, and Chinese, I need four:

• Understand the meaning of this sentence (reading comprehension)
• Remember the pronunciation of this sentence (pronunciation)
• Translate this sentence into Japanese (vocabulary recall)
• Write down this pronunciation in correct Japanese (writing)

Most languages call for only two, but there we go. Both languages kindly make this task even more difficult by having multiple pronunciations for the exact same character, and multiple characters with the exact same pronunciation, but then English has its own problems in that regard.

What this means is that I may technically need to learn 20 new vocabulary items per day; this may translate into 30 new phrases, several of them including multiple new words or expressions. Each phrase generally translates into four cards. This means that keeping on top of 20 new bits of vocab means studying around 120 cards, many of them multiple times. This is very difficult to keep up with. It certainly makes it very difficult to make any kind of dent in my backlog, which stands at a couple of thousand words.

What usually happens is that I learn a bit of the newest vocabulary, and some of the oldest material also makes an appearance (Anki presents the oldest cards I created first), and everything else vanishes into the bowels of Anki to resurface sometime in the distant future. I don't have time to learn all the most recent vocabulary before the next lot arrives. I'm not really sure I can do much about it, to be honest. Most sources suggest you can realistically learn 20 words per day, and much more is hard to sustain in the long run. Since I'm also studying at least 4 hours a day in class, I don't really have the energy to spend more than an hour or two poring over vocabulary - and of course, making up my review materials also takes time.

Right, best get back to my vocabulary...

End-of-book exams

This is mostly for GenkiJACS students, so feel free to pass along if that isn't you. I should also mention that this will not include any specifics of the exam, since I'm pretty sure they will need to reuse some questions. Not like I could remember them now anyway. In case anyone's confused, I wrote most of this on the day of the exam, but didn't finish it up until a week or so later.

---

So having finished the Genki II textbook, I'm due to take an exam (in about an hour) before I can move on to the next class. I thought I was done with exams ten years ago. For what it's worth, I'm writing this in a brief revision break, not purely for procrastination.

I was under the impression the exam would be once my lessons resumed next week, as I'm currently on a 3-week half-term break. However, while I was in Korea I had an email asking me to take the exam today. If I'd arranged another trip or something I'd have politely declined, but since I wasn't actually doing anything I didn't see any particular excuse. It also meant, although I'd have to cram my revision in, I'd have a few days post-exam when I wasn't thinking about it. And in the fairly likely event that I don't pass, it gives me more time to prepare for another go...

The exam covers the whole textbook, covers vocabulary, grammar and listening, and has a pass mark of 80%. I haven't actually studied the whole book in class, due to joining an ongoing class on the basement of my placement, which means that although I'd covered the essential bits, there was quite a lot of vocabulary and a certain amount of grammar that I hadn't covered. So I've been trying to catch up on that in my free time during the past couple of months, while staying on top of my classwork and homework. I just about got there.

Unfortunately there's no past paper for the exam. As someone whose revision style is based almost exclusively on doing past papers, this is a pretty substantial drawback.

I now realise that one thing I should have done ages ago is make use of the accompanying CD. Because we'd been using it in class sometimes, and covered the other sections with the teacher, I didn't particularly see the point. So I only started using it yesterday, and realised I'd been missing a trick.

The advantage here is that the CD is both a resource for listening (which you really can't get too much practice for, especially for the odder verb forms that get less use in conversation) and a way to drill things. So I started working through the textbook exercises based on the CD. I just wish I'd had longer to do this. I heartily recommend any future students to do exactly this. On a weekend or something, just pick a chapter and go through it. It's great revision and pretty quick when you're not doing anything else. Doing it in small doses over time will be way more effective than trying to cram it in like I am.

Right, back to revision.

---

...time passes...

---

Okay, I just finished. Maybe. We'll get back to that in a minute...

The exam was, on the whole, okay, although I'm not hugely confident.

My exam (they presumably differ) came in more that one paper. As nobody else was taking it at the time, I was set in a room to get on with it. GenkiJACS clearly trusted me not to do something as self-sabotaging as cheating on a progression test, so I just dumped my bag in the room and started - none of the regulatory stuff you have to worry about in school most exams, no teacher sat impatiently waiting for me to finish à la GCSEs. This was an unexpected and very welcome feature. I began with a grammar paper, which covered everything from verb inflections to particle use, including some contextual use. Opening the paper, I look at a table of verb forms and promptly transformed into a shaking, sweating mass of nerves.

This was pretty unexpected, because historically I haven't really been that worried about exams that didn't involve oral tests (those are always deeply traumatic). However, in the last few years I've had some stress/anxiety issues, and they decided to manifest here. This may be partly because I didn't get as much preparation done as I'd have liked, as I mentioned, so I wasn't feeling entirely ready for it. The immediate reason was that this was actually one of the trickiest parts of the whole test for me. You know where I mentioned earlier that I'd missed some of the textbook by joining an ongoing class? Well, that included a couple of verb forms in their entirety - the potential (can do) and volitional (let's do) forms.

I did say I wouldn't mention specifics, but I feel like "you need to know all the inflections of common verbs" is obvious enough that it doesn't really undermine the test in any way.

Naturally I'd looked over these forms in my revision, and we did use them a very small amount in class. However, they aren't used that often in a classroom context. When they are used, we tend to be use the -masu polite form of the verb, whereas the test covered the plain forms used between friends. I use the volitional occasionally in conversation with friends, but of course in that context it's much easier to get away with mistakes, particularly small ones like slight mistakes in vowel use. The test was written, of course, and so accuracy was crucial. My revision had been hasty, with a lot of vocabulary to focus on, and I was filled with agonising doubt about the details of these forms.

I spent around fifteen minutes of the fifty available filling in the first question on the test, and then moved on. Most of the rest seemed okay, with a few uncertain points. I left a couple of blanks, because in a test like this I saw no point in guessing when I didn't have a preferred answer. If my Japanese wasn't strong enough and I needed to redo some material, then I'd be better off failing than passing by chance. What with my worries about the first question and having wasted a lot of time, I was fairly stressed throughout this paper, which naturally slowed me down further, so I just scraped a finish before the time was up. Quite worried about this paper, I had no time to review answers or anything. As a person who normally spends the last third of all exams rereading the paper twice and then doodling in the margins, this is a pretty big deal.

Thankfully, the rest of the paper was nothing like as anxiety-inducing as the first part, and between that and a brief break while I got a fresh cuppa (yes, I could drink and eat during the exam! marvellous!) and the next paper, and my brief conversation with the lovely Nabe-sensei, I'd calmed down a fair bit.

The second paper was vocabulary. This included kanji recognition, marking pronunciation, and knowledge of how to use words in a sentence. It was tricky in places, not least because some kanji are annoyingly similar to others. This is a particular problem for me because I know a ton of kanji that haven't yet appeared in the books, including loads that I only know in Chinese and may have a wildly different meaning or pronunciation in Japanese. While it's usually a big advantage for me, in some types of questions this can trip you up. On the whole though, I found this paper fairly straightforward, although again there were a few spots I wasn't that sure of. Not entirely sure how well I did, as I was a bit doubtful of some points (especially pronunciation) but probably better than the grammar.

When I finished paper two, I came out and there was some brief confusion. It wasn't quite clear whether I needed to do a third paper, and as it was getting late, nobody left in the office knew the answer. There was a paper lying around, but it wasn't clear whether it was intended for me - from a quick look at it I rather thought not. So I agreed to come in the next morning and check.

---

...the night passes uneventfully...

---

So I went into the school again and discovered I had in fact finished the exam. In fact, Nabe-sensei had already marked it and congratulated me on passing! I was so happy. Exact marks and transcript aren't ready yet but knowing I can progress (and don't have to resit!) is good enough for me right now. This afternoon is my conversation date, so I can also enjoy that without having exam worries in the back of my mind.

---

...the next day...

---

So I came into school for no particular reason. It's technically still holiday for me, but I had nothing particular to do and I get bored sitting around my apartment or just walking on my own. I've done plenty of that. So just like on my free afternoons, I decided to spend a few hours in the lounge reading and studying. Being at school generally makes it easier to motivate myself to work, plus I like having people around even if I'm not chatting to them.

Anyway, Nabe-sensei tracked me down and provided me with my transcript. The boy done good!

Okay, this will be a bit bewildering to the non-Japanese-readers amongst you. The broken part on the far left is just my name. From left to right, we go Vocabulary, Grammar, Listening Comprehension, Interview, Total. Each lists a number of marks (点) available. Each section has two boxes, for mark and percentage respectively. The Listening and Interview sections are blank because they're for higher-level students, I think. As you can see, I actually did better on the gramamr than on the vocabulary! I'm not quite sure how that happened, but then it was a much bigger paper.

I appreciate reading the picture may be difficult. The crucial point to note is that with a pass mark of 80%, I scored a respectable 91% overall (89% vocabulary, 93% grammar). I'm fairly happy with that.

I was allowed to see my papers and check the mistakes I made, but not to keep them. Seems fair enough, presumably it will help avoid answers getting passed around - with the best will in the world, for many people it would be hard to say no if someone asked for a look at your paper, and people won't necessarily realise that answers may be the same.

Unfortunately I didn't think to actually write down the points I need to review. I might ask in the office if they can let me have another look so I can do that.

Yomikata musings

We had a semi-interesting discussion in class about 読み方 (yomikata) – which is to say, readings of kanji. When you see a character, there are often multiple ways it can be pronounced: 人 might be hito, jin or nin, and in some compounds hito becomes bito, in the same way that handbag isn’t pronounced like a combination of hand and bag, but as hambag.

We ran into confusion with 日, “day” or “sun”. This has yomikata of hi, bi, ka, jitsu and nichi. Except that this is clearly not the end of the matter, because in the very common word 明日, “tomorrow” none of those sounds appear. The word’s pronunciation is, in fact, either ashita or asu (myounichi exists, but is very formal).

This caused a minor argument-slash-misunderstanding, because I suggested that one yomikata for 日 is ta. The teacher disagreed, on the basis that the whole word is pronounced as ashita, but that doesn’t mean anything for the individual kanji. I don’t pretend to have any authority to argue with the teacher about whether this is officially true, but I do think it’s confusing.

I suppose this comes down to ways of thinking. I don’t know what the ‘point’ of yomikata is, or whether anyone has actually defined it. I assumed they were a system for classifying the possible pronunciations of kanji, and under such a model omitting ta* would be a failing: a person encountering the word 明日 for the first time would be totally unable to come up with the correct pronunciation, despite having a perfect knowledge of all yomikata. This is presumably not the only word which has a pronunciation not reflected in any yomikata, either.

* shita is probably better on reflection because 明 does have an official yomikata of a

So basically, I think if you think of yomikata as the set of official kun-yomi (Japanese-devised) and on-yomi (Chinese-derived) readings for kanji, then indeed shita does not exist, not being on the list. However, if you think of yomikata as the real-life set of possible ways to read a character (as its name would suggest) then one of the ways you pronounce日is, indeed, shita, in the word 明日 if nowhere else. It’s all a bit confusing! The omission seems arbitrary (I don’t know whether it is arbitrary, and it doesn’t especially matter).

English has a related problem, in that pronunciation is really only defined at the level of the word, though there are of course many patterns that exist between similar words and are reflected in spelling, so a lot of extrapolation is possible. I suppose the difference is that a) I’m a native speaker, b) our alphabetic writing system works quite differently from syllable-based kanji, and c) as far as I know, there isn’t an official list of possible pronunciations for English letter combinations claiming to be complete and authoritative.

I would tend to argue that, for a person learning how to pronounce kanji (so, anyone who ever learns Japanese, including Japanese people), it's more useful to include all possible pronunciations of a character rather than just a subset. You can of course learn idiosyncratic words like 明日 entirely separately, but I generally think having a comprehensive mental model is more useful than a partial model and a string of special cases. However, I am not World Yomikata Authority so it doesn't really matter what I think.

The short version is, I suppose, that what yomikata exist for a word depends very much on what you think yomikata are, and the official answer is, official yomikata. Be aware.

On grammar videos

It often happens - typically when I'm doing homework, but not always - that there's some bit of information I want to look up. It's usually a nuance of language in a particular situation, such as a complicated sentence with subclauses. Or it might be to do with phrasing things appropriately for a particular audience, such as polite or informal language. Today, it's about a specific verb form for making or allowing someone to do things: the causative.

For reference, this is a verb inflection where you basically add "aseru" as the new ending of most verbs, which can then be inflected again to add new meanings. As far as I can tell, Japanese grammar is about 75% inflecting verbs, 15% using particles (little words that tell you things like subject, object and direction) and 10% anything else.

Anyway, the homework, as they are wont to do, includes a section about using the causative with another auxiliary verb in a way that we have not yet in fact covered in class. I'm making a brave attempt at it, but wanted to look up the actual rules for doing so. The easiest way to do this is generally to just google, as someone somewhere has usually talked about most aspects of grammar, particularly in a language as popular as Japanese.

It's not the first time I've noticed them, but today is the first time that most of the results I can find are in the form of videos. I'm writing this because it struck me what a bizarre decision this is.

Video definitely has its uses, but as a medium for getting across explanations about the use of language, video is about the worst possible option (barring cave painting). Okay, there are a few cases where audio is useful, like explaining pronunciation. There are a handful of cases where visuals are useful, if you need to convey appropriate gestures, body language, or discuss some bit of language that is very heavily tied up in a particular situation that's hard to put across in words alone. But for 99.9% of cases it's really inefficient.

The main problems here are that video is, with current mainstream technology, a kind of anonymous lump. There's no way to search the content of a video to find out whether it actually contains what you're looking for. There's no way to skip around to the part you care about, because you don't know where it might be. The useful information a video about language contains is usually just some words describing how to do a particular thing, but those words are wrapped up so you can't actually access them directly; you have to sit through the video to see what's in it. While you can skip around to some extent, you don't know what might be mentioned in the parts you skipped. You have, generally, zero control over the speed of the video, and speech is a slow medium. Audio has similar problems, but it's typically easier to speed up audio playback, and you can do other things while you listen to it.

A page of text describing a grammatical rule is easily searchable, and of course it's accessible to screen readers and other technology for folks with disabilities. You can skim-read extremely fast to pick out the bits you need. When you search Google or wherever, the results display the words you want in context, which can often tell you immediately whether it's a relevant page. You can generally tell within a few seconds whether a page is relevant to your interests. You can copy and paste the relevant text into a file of notes. You can copy words into a dictionary to look up, if it's not clear enough. None of these are viable with a video.

It just seems like language videos explaining grammar are about the least helpful way you could possibly present the information, so why do people do it? In some cases it seems like they are presenting a whole series of videos on the language, presumably expecting that audience is learners interested in watching the whole series, rather than people looking for specific information - I suspect the latter pool is probably larger, though. It may also be they find making videos easier than putting things down clearly in writing. Maybe they just want to make videos.

I never did find that information.

Pushmi-pullyu exercises

A favourite language-teaching exercise is to make sentences using a construction you're studying. Unfortunately, I really struggle with sentence-making exercises. It's not because of the grammar particularly, it's just something I find very difficult in general, like when people ask you to "say something" - my mind goes blank.

The reason I'm bringing this up is, as you might have guessed, that they make frequent appearances in the textbook I'm currently using.

Basically I think the trouble with these exercises is they test two things at once:

• Your understanding of the grammar point
• Your ability to conceive a sentence that:
  1. Uses the grammar point in question
  2. You know the vocabulary for
  3. You know any other necessary grammar for
  4. Makes sense
  5. Isn't completely banal and self-evident (not strictly necessary, but generally it seems people's minds revolt at saying things that are tautologies, or really really boring)

Part of the problem is that they're not realistic reflections of language. In real conversation, or writing, or reading, you do not spend any of your time thinking of ways to use specific sentence structures. You think of something you want to say, and say it. Language training should guide you towards being able to do that in a different language.

Good language training will encourage you to produce increasingly complex bits of language, assembling blocks together into useful communications. You begin with scattered bits of vocab and grammar that can pass on only simple things, but built up. You learn to convey positive and negative forms; to discuss the past and future; to express hypothetical events; to disparage or praise; to add nuances like amusement, surprise, regret and disapproval; to be polite, or indeed impolite. You go from "The cat is black" to "To be honest, I think I'd prefer that the Tories hadn't implemented a benefits regime that disproportionately penalises the worst-off members of society, but who am I to question the wisdom of a bunch of Old Etonians who've never seen a day's hardship in their lives?".

Pushmi-pullyus do not reliably exercise your sentence-building muscles. This is because completing a pushmi-pullyu exercise requires you to adhere to a number of criteria that, crucially, are often contradictory to a learner. You must create a sentence out of whole cloth, which is difficult at the best of times; but the scope of that creativity is crippled by the need to include a specific grammar point. Many of the examples you might think of require vocabulary you don't have, and which may be actually pretty unusual, and not really worth looking up: "I beseeched the octagenarian cosmonaut to fricasee only the rind of the cantaloupe", for example.

In other cases, a sentence may be perfectly grammatical but not really mean anything, or seem silly, which is a different kind of error and unrelated to the point of the exercise - nevertheless, most teachers will spring on this like leopards upon a hungry gazelle, unwilling to accept the argument that it doesn't affect the validity of the grammar. "If you eat this cake, the giraffe will implode" is a perfectly good sentence; requiring the student to give a detailed explanation of the exact circumstances in which it makes sense to utter those words will not provide any substantial benefit, assuming that they do actually understand what they wrote.

As a result, these exercises can become a frustrating time-sink. It's like the classic scene in films where a fireplace or bin gradually fills with rejected drafts. The student is pulled between different objectives, struggling to make any decision like the ass between two mangers. Ideas are conceived, and rejected. By the time a sentence finally passes the series of disconnected tickboxes, it's taken far longer than most other kinds of question of equivalent length, without any substantial benefit that I can see.

There are at least two obvious ways around this:

1. Offer a set of components to build the sentence around, rather than expecting the student to invent them. Say you're practicing conditionals: offer up "cat", "flap", "open", "come in" and a student can reasonably build "If the flap is open, the cat will come in" or one of several variations, practicing expressing that kind of thought without wasting brainpower trying to come up with the situation themselves.
2. Separate out exercises. Have completion exercises to practice grammatical forms, and free-writing exercises to use creativity (these still need structure - "write something" is deeply unhelpful).

I think many authors and teachers see "write your own sentence" as fun for the learner, because it offers a chance at creativity. But that appearance is deceptive; there are too many constraints for these to be creative. They also seem challenging, but most of the time what they are is difficult.

Okay, that sounds like nonsense. Here's I'm distinguishing two things that both mean "hard" in a way that I'm mostly drawing from computer gaming. Challenging, as I'm using it here, means that something calls for skill to do well, and helps to foster that skill by exercising it. Difficult simply means that something is hard to do.

In a game, a challenging section may require that you execute a large number of moves you have practiced earlier in the game, with good timing, in response to the actions of the robot postmen trying to stop you reaching the dentist. A difficult section often means you must execute a series of jumps from pixel-wide platform to pixel-wide platform, with any mistake resulting in your immediate death, and that some of the platforms are secretly illusions. Difficult parts of games often require luck, memorisation of what is and is not safe to do, or tactics that seem inappropriate to complete them, regardless of the player's competence at the game.

Similarly, I think pushmi-pullyu exercises like "write your own sentence" tend to be difficult because they require simultaneous completion of a number of unrelated and arbitrary goals. It does not matter very much how skilled the student is at forming the past perfective, or pluralising nouns, or using the vocative; the sentence will be difficult to write regardless. In many cases, a native speaker will also have a certain amount of trouble producing a sentence that works within the given bounds.

I'm not saying nobody should ever be asked to write a sentence in the target language, or even that nobody should be asked to write sentences using particular learning points; I'm just suggesting that they deserve a long, hard look and consideration of just how useful they are in building the skills intended at any given point.

End of week one

I've now got through my first full week at the school and have settled in a bit more. It's taking me a while to adjust to being in a classroom again, having daily homework, and deciding how to spend the free morning/afternoon when I'm not in lessons.

The first few days I brought in sandwiches for simplicity's sake, although saying that obtaining bread was by no means simple. Japanese "bread" sometimes superficially resembles bread, but as far as I can tell it's more like brioche than anything. Many kinds are sweet, the others are flavoured with things I haven't yet learned to identify, some contain cream or custard, and all are squidgy. Yes, even the crusty-looking ones!

Eventually I unearthed a pain du campagne in a dusty corner of a supermarket and used that, although the lack of a breadknife made for some uneven sandwiches. I've bought so much essential stuff for this apartment already that I refuse to buy a breadknife unless I really, really need to.

Anyway, having eaten said bread I've followed the general practice and bought bento lunches the last couple of days.

Mine were a lot simpler than these, although sizeable and filling. Basically the rice and one heap of mixed veg. They come in at around, oh, £3, which isn't bad.

I'll probably try to make my own (I have a lunchbox) some of the time, not least because I really resent the wastefulness of throwing away boxes every day. They don't seem to be recyclable. Also, once you're making rice and frying vegetables it doesn't really matter how many portions you make. Anything I make will be much simpler and less Japanese, of course - no sauces, fewer ingredients in general - so I'd like to keep getting lunches some of the time. Next week I'll also look into cafes.

Classes seem to be going reasonably well, although I have to fend off certain feelings of inadequacy. Having switched to a new textbook here and jumped in at chapter 17 (corresponding roughly to the grammar I've already studied) there is inevitably a ton of specific vocabulary that the textbook uses but I'm not familiar with. This makes for poor performance on the tests we have every couple of days. I'm also just not used to writing quickly in Japanese, since my previous classes were entirely based on conversation with writing left for homework, so I find tests and some other exercises tricky in that respect. I'll get better.

I deliberately didn't do any extras this week as I was trying to get over my jetlag, get used to my routines and generally settle in without getting overwhelmed. Also, while there are a fair number of interesting extra activities to do, I'll be here for ages; almost certainly I'll be able to try any of them multiple times if I want over that period, and I certainly don't want to burn through everything too early, nor to spend all my hard-earned cash up front and then run short later on. I feel like this was a good plan, because for example the amount of homework seems to vary quite a bit. Next week I'll look at signing up for one of the conversation exchange schemes; I thought I did that when I registered, since there was a little box to tick, but nothing seems to have resulted from it.

Despite the climate I have managed a couple of runs to different parks - largely because the first one turns out to be (as far as I can tell) a botanic gardens that shuts about 5pm. I'm definitely feeling the pain of being in a proper city (and downtown at that) because there just aren't the large public spaces I've got used to. I can trot around confusing backstreets with no pavements, or run in marked laps in designated places in a park during its opening hours (largely outside the times when it's cool enough for weedy foreigners to run), but stepping out of my door at 11pm and running for miles down peaceful towpaths or round farms is no longer an option.

Day One in the Genki House

So I've just finished my first day of study at GenkiJACS. I have to say that, while this is probably inevitable, it was a little frustrating.

We came in on Sunday avvy for a placement test and orientation, which seemed pretty useful in a general sense. It was also nice to have a chance to see the place and meet some folks before turning up for a first lesson, although only one of the new arrivals ended up in the same class as me. This morning we were told to turn up at 9am - lessons typically start at 9.30 so I assumed this was to allow time for the brief individual "interviews" that had been mentioned on Sunday. In practice, while I didn't check my watch, I don't think much actually happened until around 10am, by which time the existing students had turned up and the common room was a seething, uncomfortable mass, where moving from your table was like those little slizing block puzzles. On the plus side, there's free tea and coffee, but actually getting to either one, or back to your seat, was a serious feat. Another bunch of new students had arrived, which is presumably why those of us who arrived early were bumped up to Sunday.

My interview seemed okay despite being in Japanese, which was a relief. I hadn't done brilliantly on the test, which makes sense as I'm still not very good at Japanese (I wouldn't be here otherwise, right?), though the sleep deprivation probably didn't help matters. Sorting out everyone's schedules took quite a while, so that in fact I didn't have mine by the time those of us who'd had inductions on Sunday were taken out for a quick tour of the area. Thankfully a lot of this was indoors, since the rain was hammering down at regular intervals and my brolly snapped in the wind. I'd actually seen about two-thirds of the places over the weekend during various shopping expeditions, but still enjoyed the chance to wander about and get to know people a bit. I also learned that underground passes were available, which would make my life a lot easier and eke out my precious cash supplies for longer. Yuuki-sensei handled the tour very well, although my fingers twitched when she drew a route in pen on my nice shiny new map I'd kindly got out for everyone! Why, why do people do this?!? We were pointed towards various useful shops, as well as an international centre that I might pay a visit to sometime.

I still didn't have a schedule by the time I got back, so kicked my heels for a bit and was told to have my lunch. I was getting a bit frustrated by this point and would have liked to know a bit more about what was happening, but eventually a timetable turned up with classes from 2-6pm today. To be honest I would have gladly gone home at this point, especially on the four hours' sleep I managed last night, and I struggle to stay awake for the afternoon's classes, despite the very pleasant and lively teachers. There's a good atmosphere in the class and everyone seems nice. This is good news, because about half the class consists of talking in pairs, so the last thing you want is sullen uncommunicative types. I'm hoping the trend will continue when these folks leave in a couple of weeks.

Class finally finishes at 5.45, in a bit of a rush because that teacher thought we had a bit longer to finish an exercise. There are two homework sheets to finish. Class tomorrow is in the morning, for some reason - we seem to switch on a semi-random basis - which means only a few hours to actually do the work. When I get home and find time to look at them, I'm a little underwhelmed. One from the textbook seems straightforward enough, but the other is rather under-explained, so while I'm reasonably clear on the grammar point, I don't understand what we're supposed to be writing down as answers. After a certain amount of sulking I get something written down and move on with my life.

Moving day

So another milestone passed today as I moved out of my place in Oxford, dumping a vast pile of stuff onto my long-suffering parents. This move bore uncanny similarities to my work on the university's REF submission last year.

I'm horrified by the sheer amount of stuff I've managed to accumulate here. It's partly due to having hobbies that call for stuff (games), and substantially due to my reading habits. A lot of what I read is hard to come by in libraries, and so I tend to buy it or get it for birthdays, and then am reluctant to get rid of what was hard to acquire. I also have a lot of household stuff on account of living in two unfurnished flats. It's inconvenient to not have suitable kitchen stuff, for example, and while individual bits aren't that expensive, re-equipping a whole kitchen is not a cheap prospect.

This stage isn't quite over, as I have lots of unwelcome arranging-of-stuff to get done over the weekend. Just hoping for a good night's sleep to set me up for it.

Yesterday I had my final lesson with the amazing Naoko-sensei, which was a little melancholy. Seeing as it inspired me to move continent for six months, you can probably guess how much I've enjoyed our lessons this past year.

Book 2

A little milestone along the way - I just started the second textbook in my private Japanese lesson with Naoko-sensei. It's a very nice feeling to have made some progress. Especially when, having arrived a bit early, I tried to read the introduction to the book (all in Japanese, of course) and was able to puzzle out a good bit of it.

Sadly I won't be able to finish the book in the next, um, six weeks. We go pretty fast, but not that fast. Still, let's see what we can manage. Gambatte!

Things to do tomorrow morning: get travel insurance, discuss getting yen with the bank, get parking permits ready for moving out. Busy, busy, busy...

And so it begins

This is the first really tangible evidence that this thing is happening, and I felt quite shaken after the booking was done - I had to go and lurk in a caff for a bit to get over it. The travel agency lady was very nice and chatty; if you happen to be in Oxford Flight Centre, I can recommend talking to Caroline.

The KitKat is a random bonus gift thrown in for anyone making a booking that day. I didn't do that on purpose - I've boycotted Nestle for the last twenty-five-odd years and see no reason to change tack so far. But hey, free chocolate!

And this is where that bit of paper points to. Fukuoka (福岡市), Kyuushuu, Japan. More specifically...

Genki Japanese and Culture School. Slightly cheesy name, admittedly, but they seem professional, are heavily accredited and approved by my existing Japanese teacher after a fair bit of scrutiny. As there are a lot of English schools of uncertain quality around - and I've been a summer school teacher in one organisation that I wasn't impressed with - I wanted to do my best to steer clear of those. Here's hoping! And it's right over a bookshop, so that has to count for something.

I don't yet know where I'll be staying. So many things still to do...