My Head Is Full and I Am Tired

The mad cramming of Japanese into my skull continues. I'm devoting about 5-7 hours a day to it, dividing my time among working with my educational CD-ROM (which gets the lion's share), practicing writing hiragana characters, and doing exercises in a teach-yourself-Japanese textbook aimed at the business traveler (which, really, isn't the best choice, vocabulary- and situation-wise, but it does aim to teach you the essentials quickly, which is what I need).

I have to say I'm really loving the computer program. I'd used the Spanish version of it before, but that was after I'd had some practice with Spanish already, so it was more like vocabulary review and practice than learning an entire language. Here, I'm doing it all at once -- which, really, is what the program is designed for. It throws text, sound, and pictures at you, rewarding you when you put them together properly, and beeping sourly at you when you make a mistake. As you grasp the basics, it tosses in variations, then adds a few more basics, while adding more variations, and so on, in increasing degrees of complexity. At first, you're just struggling to distinguish words from each other and remember them, then you're grasping concepts and trying to figure out what the smaller distinctions are, then you're wrestling with nuance.

None of this is explained to you; you just proceed by trial and error, being rewarded when your interpretations of what's going on are correct, being discouraged when they are not, with the tasks getting more and more subtle as you go. I've been intensifying this experience by spending a good chunk of the time going through a sub-chapter until I have it completely down, then going through several additional chapters until I am totally confused. Everyday the bits at the start become more familiar and comprehensible, to the point that I can do the earlier exercises perfectly, and simultaneously it's taking longer for me to become confused, and I make fewer mistakes even when I visit a chapter for the first time.

I love it. It's like a great huge puzzle. Plus, the repetition is very helpful in getting things into my head; I find my mind full of earworm-like phrases burrowing deeper into my subconscious. Very, very cool.

It is, however, exhausting, which I admit is also deliberate. Not only am I short on time, but I have this theory that things you learn when you are tired will be things you remember better than those that you learn only when you are fresh and paying attention. I want my understanding to be as instinctual as possible; while the mental puzzles keep me engaged and moving forward, I don't want to have to do them when someone chatters something at me at top speed -- I want it going in, making sense, and triggering the appropriate response without having to put my full attention to it.

Still, I'm feeling impressed with how fast it's apparently going, and how well things are sticking. SO bizarre.

In other news, my hair is now shorter by about four inches. Whoo.

Comments

[KathyR]

So, say something in Japanese!

[Rana]

Otokonoko wa oiyoide imasu!

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

I was going to ask you about the CDs. That sounds like heaven to me, being able to wear yourself out with 7 hours of new confusing language a day! I love what it does to your brain. I think your repetition of the easier stuff at the beginning is smart - it both embeds that in your brain and reminds you that you're really getting somewhere. Most of what frustrates people about language, I think, is that no matter how much you learn you're always painfully aware of how much you don't know, unlike most other fields.

Can't wait to hear about the trip!

[Jane Dark]

Gambatte!

My Japanese is pretty terrible at this point.

[Jun]

gambatte rana san! nihongo wa sugoku omoshiroi desu ne? watashi wa tokyo ga daisuki desu!

[Rana]

Aaaah! Vocabulary I don't know yet! (Your point proven, P/H!)

Greetings? The Japanese language is interesting? Tokyo's something for you?

btw, if anyone is interested, I can whole-heartedly recommend the program I'm using. It's helpful to have a couple of other books around if you're a geek like me and have moments where the frustration gets to be too much and you. just. have. to. know! what's going on, but I think if you can stand the frustration, it would do the job fine on its own (perhaps even better, given that it encourages the development of gut understanding to a greater degree than head understanding -- I found, for this reason, that I'm learning more Japanese and getting more out of the program than I did when I used it to refresh my Spanish and found myself getting bored going over stuff I already knew -- though that may be different at the higher levels -- I ran out of time and patience in that instance before I found out).