Hello all,
I'm an online student of the Japanese 101 class who was thrilled when Tony extended an invitation to a listserv group to which I belong: ITFORUM.
I'm working on a Master's in Education Technology Leadership with George Washington University and the teaching and learning of languages has long held a fascination for me. In college, I was a German Lit major and had to have proficiency in French as well for my degree.
I have always wanted to learn an asian language and I had taken steps to teach myself Japanese. I had an "audiobook" program called Learn Japanese in Your Car. I had also purchased iKana for my iPod touch from the iTunes store. But I had made little progress. Being a part of this class would, I hoped, provide the organization and focus that I have lacked.
So far, as we've concentrated on Heisig, I've still had difficulty memorizing the Hirigana and I started thinking about how I break it down in a way that worked for me and came up with something that works for me. I emailed Tony about it and he asked me to share my thoughts with the group so here's the email I sent him:
"Tony,
Thanks for the blog postings. They are helping me get a "feeling" for class, although I'm afraid I'm falling behind without the showing up part. I thought Heisig's first few descriptions were brilliant and they stuck well with me. "Hay and No."
Going through chapters 3 and 4 I realized that his stories were a stretch and you mentioned as much in one of your class postings. What to do?
Two things. As you know I have the iPod touch app IKana by ThinkMac Software. As I tried to weld the characters into my brain, I discovered that I may be more of a visual learner than auditory for the characters. Heisig's descriptions are noise and interfere for me (although) I liked your new descriptions for the Katakana in yesterday's class posting, but I digress.
As I thought about how I could make the learning more manageable for me, I found an organizing visual principle that works... for me. Here's how I grouped the letters: (apologies for the phonetic) no, a, me, nu, o -- all of these have a component of the "no" in them even though "o" is a stretch. Next is: sa, ki, ri, ra, chi -- these are all the letters that look like a 5 either backwards or front. The simple characters came next for me: u, shi, tsu, hi, he, ku, te, to. Then the letters that are connected to the number 3: ro, ru, fu, ko, so, wa, ne. Those that feel like "n": n, e, ka, re. Those that are compound with a simple vertical: i, ke, ni, ha, ho. Those that are compound and "t" like: ta, na, mi, yo. And finally somewhat of a catchall but not "compound" and "t" based: su, mo, mu, se, ya, yu, wo. So I guess for visual learners what I'm proposing is a different page order than Heisig's. I might even start with my simple cluster -- u, shi, tsu, hi, he, ku, te, to.
Last night I was up to 95% on the speed test with the IKana program, and I'm afraid of the mental clutter until they are really in my head so I haven't started Heisig's Katakana chapters yet. I hope to work hard to really solidify the Hirigana today and start with the Katakana in earnest.
I hope the view inside my head is somehow either helpful or intriguing in some way and not a sign of early onset of Alzheimers.
Kind regards,
David Ferris"
Hi, David! Thanks for re-posting that here!
I'm a mutant, and instead of getting an iPhone got an Android phone instead, so I can't try out the app you're using. Sounds pretty cool, though! Please also consider using Anki. I think that the class has really benefitted from using it, but maybe some of the students will chime in here with their first impressions.
I think that alternate versions of Heisig's kana book would be of huge benefit to many people. In fact, as I mentioned before, we have one student here who is planning on doing just such a re-organization/re-writing of the book as her G-Time project.
If you want to do it here on the site, you might want to play with the "book" and "wiki" features. A "book" is a collection of pages with automatic navigation between them. See the Japanese through music link for an example. A wiki page is a page that allows for automatic linking between pages by using double-brackets between page titles. For example, if I have a wiki page with the title "hamsters", then I can automatically link to it from another wiki page by typing [[hamsters]]. Another difference is that by default book pages are only editable by the author, whereas wiki pages are by default editable by any registered user (at least, I think that's the defaults... (^^; )
You can create either kind of page from the "Create content" menu. Don't be afraid to experiment! You can always delete your experiments later, if you like. You can also "hide" them while you're working on them by de-selecting the "Published" checkbox underneath "Publishing options" on the page creation pages.
If your interested I use an I-pod app that works with anki so you can download your decks that you have on your computer to your Ipod and along with that it has all of Genki's vocab and all of Hiesgs 'Remembering the Kanji" decks for download directly from the app. So just incase your thinking about it, it has a free version you could try and the real version is only $2-$4. O yeah I forgot to say the name of the app its called Study Arcade heres the link to the site http://inzania.com/