Glenski
Aug 22, 2007, 06:12
Dear All
Thanks a lot for the words.
Kirirao and Glenski put a lot of examples.
Mike the Frus~ gave simple but truly good word to remember.
Kirirao, I live in Edogawaku area, so please let me know if you find some activities there.
Glenski, good suggestions as well. I can catch any drama for now. I think pod casts should be good.
I have not even responded to this thread. Why are you mentioning my name?
As for the OP, pick up any English grammar book. Look at it. Do people speak exactly like that? No. What you learn in any grammar book serves only to give you a grammatical foundation for learning the language. IF you want to communicate on the street, you will have to get practice. Talk to people, make mistakes, find answers to your mistakes, learn idioms and slang (the hardest things for any language learner, so be patient), etc.
Get your nose out of your book and point it to living people. Talk.
ArcticFox
Dec 27, 2007, 11:41
Here's what I've got, and please add your advice:
1) Dictation with repetition. What this means is that you take a segment or some audio or audio/visual content, and you listen to it / watch it over and over again with no additional textual assistance (no script, no subtitles, etc). You then write out everything that is being said, word for word as best you can. If you are unsure of something, if possible, find a native speaker to help you, otherwise skip it after 10 or so tries (and fails). Then, this is the critical part, speak audibly (out loud) what you've just transcribed. Whether it's a movie script you just made from watching your favorite movie, or the radio NHK news broadcast, speak it out loud.
First, just get a feeling for how it sounds to speak it, and get a general idea of what it is. Then, try it again, this time speaking along with or shadowing the speaker as best you can . Then, do it without stopping the video / audio at all, trying to keep up as best as possible. This is a HUGELY important point: focus on comprehending what you're saying first. Then, and only then, focus more on pronunciation and more natural intonation.
Now, note patterns. For example, if you notice that 「しばらく」 is often followed with 「すると」, try to memorize that particularly phrase, 「しばらくすると」. Language is not mainly a combination of individual words, but a combination of phrases. Another more grammatical example might be 「だから」and 「＊から」 (＊ symbolizes the absence of だ). When do you say 「だから」and when do you say only 「から」? Note the patterns. For example, if you always hear 「いいから」and never 「いいだから」, ask yourself why, and then look it up in a grammar book or on a website. Learn the rules firsthand this way, and then reinforce them with grammar explanations (try to find explanations in all Japanese for best results).
One more example of a different type. I often read 「〜ようだ」 or 「〜ようです」in textbooks and other written material, but I noticed something: I hardly ever hear anyone say it. In fact, I listened for a week, and after spending over 30-40 hours interacting with native speakers, I never heard it once except in a sermon (and that only once). I concluded that it must not be used in spoken language much, and is mainly used for written language or for formal speeches/events. I looked it up in a Japanese grammar book, and there it said:
[i]「ようだ」は書き言葉や改まった話し言葉で使われる
It sticks so much better in my mind when I discover it in realistic communication versus merely reading about it in a grammar book. At the same time, without the grammar book, I wouldn't have that reassuring professional opinion to refer to.
2) Find good language material and mimic it over and over. Only repeating a dialog once will not solidify it in the mind. And, it's been nearly proven that we now realize that muscle seems to have a "memory" (not inside the muscle, but how the brain categorizes information and uses seems to indicate that muscle develops memory from habitual repetition). People who clench their teeth tend to do so without realizing it, and people who train in martial arts or even a sport like baseball seem to just "know" instantly how to move to achieve the desired result. Likewise, you must train your mouth and tongue to move exactly how they should for different phrases. If we don't do this, we constantly stumble over our words and we become nearly incomprehensible to our listeners.
By "good language material," I have two definitions. The first is obvious: find material that has realistic, natural language that native speakers use in the appropriate situation. That means, don't keep training on self-made dialogs unless you're absolutely sure they are completely natural, otherwise you'll internalize errors or awkward (though grammatically correct) language. Don't train yourself to speak in all です・ます form if you want to speak with your similarly aged friends naturally.
The second meaning is less obvious but will become so when I say it: mimic only the material that makes you who you want to be. If you download a radio podcast designed for young listeners, and you are female and are copying a female speaker, you're pretty good to go. If you're male and copying a female, you should either know the pitfalls extremely well or find a male speaker. Furthermore, do you want to sound like a cutesy female? If so, then you can find cutesy speakers. If not, avoid girls who speak cutesy. Me personally, I have just started the hunt for male speakers who sound pretty intelligent when they speak, use occasionally big words, but yet don't sound too terribly dry. I found one guy I definitely like on the radio, and recorded some of his conversations and will be mimicking them after I transcribe it. I don't want to completely lose who I am to learn to speak Japanese.
Also, take care with dialects. Copy them if you want, but remember that someone who can only speak a non-standard dialect of a language will face unique limitations in terms of employment and social standing (the same is true of native speakers themselves).
3) Take extreme care with textbook dialogs. They are designed just for people like you, studying Japanese as a foreign language. They often contain simplified, unnecessarily polite or formal language. For example, quickly glancing through my intermediate Japanese textbook that is still lying around, I found a variety of stereotypical, less than completely natural conversations in the dialogs. I work in an office, and the average worker who decides to chat will do so in their own natural language as a friend does with a friend, dispensing with most です・ます endings and using the common slang and dialect; that of course instantly changes if the boss comes around.
As the conversations get better (more natural language), they still have a huge, fatal flaw: every single one pretty much centers around college, studying abroad, talking to professors, etc. The only ones that branch out cover stereotypical restaurant / doctor conversations. There are no trips to the game center, no one is chatting in a car on the way to a restaurant, there are no conversations about funny things people did the day before, etc. These kinds of conversations comprise the majority of what is spoken around me outside of work with my friends. I'm being prepped for conversations I already learned how to have and don't want to have anymore. I just don't want to recycle the same old static, boring, stereotypical conversations about sushi, Kanji, how hot it is in the summer, and narrow roads and small apartments.
I haven't found a decent textbook that is more down to earth about the dialogs; they mostly center around stereotypical experiences that foreigners are supposed to have in Japan, even though I've never received a gift from my neighbors who have moved in and out, and I really don't want to talk anymore about my home country compared to Japan. If you know of one, please, by all means, PM me or post it here.
4) Reading out loud. This has been helpful for me, and it taught me many helpful phrases. Find books with lots of dialog, and read the dialog out loud many times.
5) Acting out dialogs that I have in my head is often times helpful. If I know I'm going to have a conversation about something with someone, I have it in my head beforehand. What helps me even more is if I say it out loud. I can't anticipate all the responses, so I just mostly talk from my perspective saying all the things I want to say, and whatever I am asked, I am usually prepared to give at least a basic answer. For example, when I talked to my friends about how I felt when Japanese people constantly feel the need to excessively use phrases like 「サンキュウ」(thank you), 「グッド」(good), and 「ハロウ」(hello), I rehearsed it first out loud by myself. I looked up how to say phrases similar to "it makes me feel" and "their intention is." I could communicate how I felt, sympathize with why they do it, and communicate what I wanted. I did not unnecessarily offend anyone, and clearly got my point across: I know why you do it, but it's unnecessarily because it sometimes makes me feel like an outcast because it singles me out as different.
6) Listening to other people talk, and paying close attention to phrases that I think would be useful for me. I try to internalize them, and as soon as possible write them down and then I can study them.
7) Swapping words in natural conversations. Find a natural conversation on radio, TV, the internet, or from memory of one in person (better have a good memory). Once you know it inside and out, start swapping words. If the person says, 「社会的なルールがあっても、破れるってええんちゃう？」. Try swapping in 「社会的なルールがあったら、破れるってだめじゃない？」. Notice the necessary change in the verb that I had to make to follow up with my statement (two opposing opinions).
An easier way to do is simply to change the verb if possible or to change a noun. 「外食のほうが気楽」can have a lot of stuff in place of 「外食」. You can also change the 「気楽」 to something like 「高い」 or 「好き」or 「楽しい」.
8) Pay special attention to natural conversation styles that non-native speakers rarely use or avoid. For example, conversation softeners like 「と思う」・かなぁ・かもしれない・けど・とか・など ・〜だもの. These types of phrases can sometimes carry little or no meaning; you don't really want to say "probably" or "I wonder," but sometimes it's necessary to soften the phrases you use. Also, eliciting responses from people in a natural way is difficult for non-native speakers, but watch for how people end their sentences (intonation) as well as words they use, such as 「いいんじゃない？」・「な！」(rising intonation)「〜ないの？」・「ねぇぇ」(falling intonation as the voice fades). Also, simple grammatical forms like 「〜てしまう」 are easy to forget but make for a lot more natural conversation. For example, this sentence is a bit dry without the proper ending:
「使わないと、言葉の能力はすぐなくなる」
This is much better:
「 使わないと、言葉の能力はすぐなくなってしまうよね」 or 「使わないと、言葉の能力はすぐなくなっちゃうねぇ」
9) This is perhaps the most difficult to do, not because it's hard, but because it's embarrassing and revealing: record yourself having a real or imagined dialog, and then listen to it / watch it afterwards. See how long you pause, try to notice any errors you make if you can, and listen to your intonation. Do you tend to favor using なぁ at the end of every single sentence? Is that the speaking style you want for yourself? Do you take a long time to think of vocabulary? Should you focus more on studying vocab, and if so, what area of vocabulary especially trips you up?
I've been forced to see myself on video several times using Japanese for college courses, and they were very eye-opening moments; I realized just how much I look for others to reassure me of my language ability. This makes some Japanese feel awkward or shy, because I keep indicating by my eyes and posture (as well as by excessive sentence ending particles) that I'm not sure about what I said and need reassurance. Many people can't give me that reassurance, so as I lose more confidence, they lose more confidence and become more shy/awkward, makes me feel like I'm really saying something totally screwy and I get more awkward, and the cycle moves forward.
10) This is important: learn how to buy yourself time naturally. This is essential for conversations, especially in a foreign language. For example, if you are not groping for words but are generally searching your brain for some fact or memory (such as a time, or a name, or a place), be natural and say something like this:
「何だっけ」「どこだったっけ」「何と言ったっけ」
Say it clearly to yourself, looking away from the listener for a moment to emphasize this inner search. If you look straight at the person, you might imply that they should know this fact, and if it has nothing to do with them, they may think, "How should I know?" Also, the following are helpful and simple:
「あのぅ」「ええっと」「で、．．．」「じゃ．．．」
Just be careful that the ones like 「で、」 are not completely nonsensical in the sense that you use them. For example, 「で、．．．」is generally not used before you start speaking, because it insinuates a direct connection to what was just said; essentially, it's the 〜て form of です. I used it once to start something I said, and the people around me laughed, because I had connected what I was about to do (the welcome game for our church cell group) so closely with what was just said, and thus had a slightly comical quality to it (helped by the fact that I'm an international, not a native speaker).
Plus, if you use the 「っけ」form to indicate your search for information, it helps the listener know what the heck you're doing when you start guessing at it. Check this out:
自分：昨日、たこ焼き屋さんで会った人．．．
話し相手：うん。
自分：ハシ．．．ハシヤマ？ ハツヤマ？
話し相手：？？ 箸？
Compared with:
自分：昨日、たこ焼き屋さんで会った人．．．
話し相手：うん。
自分：名前、何だっけ？ハシ、ハシヤマ？
話し相手：あ、ハシモトさんでしょう？
This was a very long post, but I figured you want too much information versus too little.
I'm quite serious about what I'm going to say: if you seriously follow this advice, you WILL become proficient in the particular dialect you are studying. Only pitfalls to watch out for are these:
1) Don't study all standard dialect (標準語) if you live in Kansai and want to speak natural 関西弁 (Kansai-ben, Kansai dialect). Same applies to other dialects.
2) Please don't speak like the NHK broadcaster! We'll all get a good laugh, but you won't, so be careful about studying too much of the NHK news (though it is useful for important political and social topics and vocabulary).
3) Don't spend too long on the same material. It may be easy to continue to watch that same episode of Bistro Smap, because you know it so well now, but there's only so far you can advance using the same stuff over and over.
4) Definitely supplement this study with some old-fashioned book learning. Don't just read novels and such, but also get a good grammar book and read it and study it, and practice the sentences in it out loud until it feels natural (no on-the-fly translation in your head, cause it won't cut it in the real world). For example, repeat this sentence without thinking of English until it just seems to "have" a meaning in your head:
あの田舎の人が、英語を分かるわけがない。
Then, start substituting different words in for 英語. You can start with simpler things like changing to a similar noun (ドイツ語), and then get a little more advanced with 化学. Then, start replacing the whole phrase 英語を分かる with something else, like ギターを弾く. Then, as much as you feel at least 95% confident of the language, start changing the structure a little more. Best method is to follow closely with the sample sentences in the grammar book, and then start searching for the phrase in Google or on アルク's search engine. Always listen carefully and particularly stop at points in your audio practice where they use your newly learned grammar.
5) Systematically work through a vocabulary book, such as the 完全マスター日本語能力試験 語彙 series. Fortunately, 1 and 2 are combined into a single book, so you can get a lot of awesome vocabulary from it. It's separated by type of word (noun, verb, adjective, adverb), so vary it up a bit. What I do is study one chapter for two weeks and do the practice exercises, then I change the type of word and study another chapter for two weeks. Recommend the same series for the grammar book.
6) Be on the lookout for two things especially: pitfalls that learners of your native language frequently fall into, and "avoided words." What I mean by the former is this: what words or grammar constructions are frequently used incorrectly by speakers of your native language? Also, what phrases or words are overused by speakers of your native language? Many English speakers far too frequently say 「行っています」 to mean "I'm going/coming." They may also say 「来ています」. What they don't realize is that these are states of what happened after the movement occurred, not mid-movement or ongoing movement. Additionally, many Americans rely too much on English word order style for their sentences, preferring to say A over B:
A: 私の三人の友達も来ました。
B: 友達も三人来ました。
A: 十人の同僚が食事をしました。
B:同僚が十人食事をしました。
As for "avoided words," these are things we prefer not to say because they aren't so sensible to us in our native language, or because we can't wrap our minds around them easily. They include things like the 気 idiomatic expressions: 気のせい、気の毒、気が早い. They also include phrases like the use of 大変 for good things (彼女は大変勢力家), since we often learn 大変 in a purely negative sense. Find the phrases that you hear and see a lot that you realize you (and your international friends) are not using, and focus on them for a while; learn to use natural phrases even if they don't make much sense to you as they are.
I hope this helps!
ArcticFox
Dec 31, 2007, 14:49
Thank you!
Actually, part of it is recycled from another website where I posted the same info (though all of it is my own words).
I'm trying to put together what I consider to be the "generally ideal" path to fluency for Japanese learners who have attained what I like to call "fractional fluency." Fractional fluency is familiar to anyone who studies a non-English language (for native English speakers). It's the stage where you can say some things nearly flawlessly, some things you stumble on, and some things are just "out of reach." In fact, in the same conversation, 30% might be completely reasonable and near flawless output, but 40% is shaky and the remaining stuff is not comprehensible to the untrained Japanese listener.
This is where I'm at. I can discuss some advanced topics, but some even simpler things stump me and leave me making little sense. So, I want to set up a content-independent system that, when followed diligently, practically guarantees results. I think the problem with Japanese is that translation is sometimes doable, but often times impossible; translating sentences with simple English words can often be difficult or even impossible without some resorting to "dynamic" translation, which is simply saying about the same general idea in natural Japanese.
So, the solution needs to be to get TONS of solid input that we master in order to make valid output. With the system I'm developing (for myself right now), it's a series of steps and techniques that combined together should both pave the road to fluency and lead me down it. I also have a clear definition of fluency:
Fluency in Japanese: This is the level of linguistic ability in the Japanese language, covering all four areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, which allows the individual to converse on a wide variety of general topics using common vocabulary with little to no struggling or grasping for words. This speaker rarely needs something repeated in daily conversation, though he may occasionally ask for clarification or more obscure idioms or phrases. This speaker can converse as a laymen on a variety of societal and academic topics, but may struggle with the more technical jargon and academic vocabulary. Although he can generally be sufficiently polite and appropriate, he may occasionally use forms or words that are not the most appropriate for the situation, especially in writing, where his words may sound "conversational."
This is my goal. Sometimes I feel like I'm there, but I know I'm not when I chat with someone who talks fast and frequently; they are hard for me to follow often times.
The main feature of my system won't be actual content; what this mean is that it'll never became dated, and that people don't have to buy specific materials from a particular company. It also means that people will be able to use what is most interesting and accessible to them. The main element of my system is nothing groundbreaking, but a collaboration of what we know about language learning and how to best tailor it to adults who have passed the "ideal age" for learning. It centers around using authentic material (texts, audio, and video) and copying that material (internalizing it). The idea is to have a "feeling" for what things mean without translating or thinking of the equivalent word in your native language. These authentic materials can be whatever we have or enjoy: books, magazines, TV shows, movies, podcasts, radio, newspapers, etc. However, the focus should be on learning to hear and speak the language since that is what is most closely related to fluency, so we ought to focus on spoken, natural language (and far less on contrived material designed for learners). This means that CDs accompanying textbooks will have only a limited role; they can only take us so far with an often unnecessary polite and stilted version of the language. In the real world, conversation is rarely so organized, standardized, and one-track.
When I get the time I'll put it all together and start using it and reporting my progress.
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