thejsubexperiment

[thejsubexperiment]

Flashcard Mania - Super Sets

The saying goes that you will forget as quickly as you memorize. That is true.

We’re very familiar with the intensive Latin and Greek courses offered during the summer all over the world. Everybody gives the same advice: don’t do it unless you’re going straight into a reading course in the fall. Otherwise, you’ll forget everything before the end of the semester.

We like working with massive sets of flashcards. They tend to have more than 1,000 items. We have one that is close to 3,000 items, in fact. We can learn them because we have the time, and we do it slowly. But how does one optimize the learning process for those short on time?

An optimized learning process consists of two things 1) the learning of the items in a relatively short amount of time, and 2) the ability to test oneself on the entire set in a reasonable amount of time.

If it takes about 5 minutes to properly learn an item, then learning 1000 items will take 83 hours, not including reviews; and you have to review. If you do not review at some point along the way, you risk forgetting the first items you learned. Reviewing adds to the time spent. If it takes about 5 seconds to review a flashcard (reading it, coming up with an answer, and flipping it over to verify it), then it takes a minute to review 12 flashcards. That’s fine; but once you get to the last 50 flashcards -and there are 4 hours for you to forget a couple of items- and you have to turn back to review, you will take you over an hour, about 79 minutes, to review the ones you learned, at best. If you are working with a set of 2136 flashcards, the size of the Jōyō Kanji set, before you study your last set of 100, you have to spend almost 3 hours reviewing. Worse yet, assuming you do at one point have all the flashcards learned and memorized, you have to make the time for the next few months to review them every day (or every other day). Perhaps that is not so bad when you just need one hour, but finding 3 hours a day is very difficult.

That would be one method. Alternatively, perhaps the proper form of working it is to learn the large set in subsets (in fourths or eighths or tenths) and then simply read the learned flashcards after they’re memorized, even if it is slower overall. This means just reading the front and back. That would take about 3 seconds. This doesn’t look like much, but in a set of 1000 Kanji that is at least 33 minutes less than if one had to produce an answer (or worse: type in an answer.) Presumably, if one is very consistent with one’s reviews, once everything has been learned, and one can speed up that reviewing process, and one does so twice a day, by the end of a year everything should be up there in one’s active memory.

In any case, even with this alternative method, one has to test oneself at some point with the entire set, and anything you get wrong you have to mark as needing to be reviewed in a special manner.

We bring up the subject in a general manner, but if we look at it from the perspective of Kanji, two peculiarities come up. Firstly, it is truly superior to learn Kanji by writing them than by merely identifying them. That is to say, it is better to read the side of the flashcard that says “cat” and write “猫” rather than to read the side that says “猫” and say (or write) “cat.” Secondly, unless you are learning Kanji in a vacuum and you aren’t reading any Japanese, you will probably come across two or three “meanings” of Kanji (if you are doing a Kanji-meaning) set. For example, “創” can mean both “wound” or “genesis,” which seem like antonyms.

(On a third note, there are some Kanji in the Jōyō Kanji set that are there largely because they are used in names, such as “野” and “田,” but we often fail to point that out. It is not a bad idea to question whether or not, in this case, the meanings are all that relevant.)

To address the first point, on a psychological level, there is a significant level of relaxation and security that comes from extensive familiarity with Kanji, even if one cannot write them perfectly. It’s much easier on the mind to learn to write Kanji one knows the meaning of or can read than it is to do so with Kanji one has never seen before. On the second point, for the sake of learning meanings, it appears perfectly suitable to just learn one meaning and stick with it. Most people are not so dense so as to not accept multiple meanings once they get to learning vocabulary.

One last matter to bring up is three-sided flashcards. They are highly impractical to make in real life, but they can be made digitally. This is rather simple. In Japanese, where there Kanji serves as an overlay to Kana, there would be a good reason to use three-sided flashcards having Kanji/Okurigana - Kana - First-language translation. But would it be worthwhile to create a Kanji - Chinese Reading - Native Reading - Meaning flashcard, a 4-sided flashcard? We believe not, but maybe we’re wrong.

Food for thought.

#日本語 #言語学 #漢字 #Japanese #Linguistics #Kanji #Flashcards #langblr #study blog

[thejsubexperiment]

We are back in action!

Hello everyone! Happy Holidays to all!

We are glad to announce that we have begun 2018 in full operations.

To give you a quick rundown of everything that happened in the latter half of 2017, Hurricane Irma hit Puerto Rico, and a week later, on September 20th, Hurricane María hit. We did not receive electric power until November 2nd, 52 days later. We received high speed Internet on the 30th of December.

Hurricane María changed everything for Puerto Rico. We at The J-Sub Experiment have been very fortunate to have a workload we can manage without high speed Internet. That being said, we have had to modify our plans for 2018, with various business things we wanted to have done in 2017 will carry over into these upcoming months.

We have not yet solidified our general release schedule. We will be doing a live stream during mid-February, showing off something quite different, which we hope you will enjoy. Until then, we would like to touch on various topics.

If there’s a topic you’d like covered, let us know in the ask. We are up for basically anything.

Our patrons in 2017 have already been contacted by e-mail. (If you were a patron and did not receive any message, let us know.) We will be talking about more exclusive materials come March.

[thejsubexperiment]

Patreon Disabled

Hello all,

We just wanted to step in for a moment to announce that we have officially disabled our Patreon account due to increasing complications given Puerto Rico’s situation, change in business models, and general lack of interest.

We will be taking down all posts in the next few days that are links to anything regarding Patreon because they are obsolete.

To all our Patrons to whom we still owe things, we’ve sent you an e-mail regarding how we will handle that. There’s nothing to worry about.

Thank you all for your patience and cooperation.

[thejsubexperiment]

Quick Update: Hurricane María, 2 weeks later

Just to keep you updated on Puerto Rico’s status, things are not going too well. Things are progressing, we’re at about 10.7% on energy, and at 55.5% on running water (although that number is misleading); but other areas of infrastructure are doing much more poorly, such as cellphone antennas, which are at about 12%. 

Diesel and gasoline are arriving to the island as a steady rate. Right after María, 6 hour lines were not uncommon, now they’re about 30-20 minutes.

We’re still working, but we cannot do any heavy Internet-based work because our signal is spotty and we can’t commit to being in one place for too long.

Big Updates

The first update is that, unfortunately, our big video series’ publication has to be postponed for quite a while. We don’t know when we will be able to publish, because we need sponsors and the communications system is so bad and people need to also invest in repairs, but we’re aiming for January of 2018.

The second update is that we will be closing our Patreon account this month. While we still do like the platform, explaining why we use it all the time, and the lack of public interest has led us to this decision. We will still be producing the same content offered on Patreon (video game runthrough, exclusive anime runthrough, and Linguistic Perspective), but they will be available in a very different manner. Once we can comment on how one can access these materials, we’ll let you know.

That’s it for now.

Not that anybody has asked, but we’re fine.

Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.

[thejsubexperiment]

Important News Regarding Puerto Rico

Hello everyone,

As some of you might be aware, Puerto Rico is facing the worst hurricane in its modern history. 

Very important in this story is the lack of electricity on the island. As of now, about 80% of the island is without, and the number will probably go up.

The mayor of San Juan, the municipality we are in, has announced that we will not have electricity for 4 months. During Hurricane Irma, we ran on a generator, but we cannot make that kind of investment for 4 months.

Given these circumstances, it is very possible we will have to cease all Internet-based operations until San Juan has electricity again. 

We have most of what we need for the video series, so that will continue as normal. Everything else will have to be paused, including the publication of the video series.

We will continue to keep you updated once we come to a more definite decision. Thank you for your understanding.

[thejsubexperiment]

Update on Puerto Rico

Right now things are stable. Most households have water and electricity. We ourselves are running on provisions still. Our water is due to return with the electricity - but we don't have a date yet for those repairs.

We thank you all for your patience. Once we have everything running, we'll resume operations.

[thejsubexperiment]

Hurricane Irma Update

Hello, everyone!

As you've probably heard from the news, Puerto Rico and various other islands of the Caribbean were affected by Hurricane Irma.

We are fine. But we are running on provisions. We're running on a generator and have no running water or cable (Internet) service.

What little Internet we do have is from cellphone data, which is spotty, to say the least.

Nevertheless, we are well, and we are managing things as they come up. We're just tired.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

[thejsubexperiment]

Final Fantasy X Japanese Runthrough (Parts 18 and 19)

are finally up!

Part 18

Part 19

We won’t take up much of your time, but if you’d like to keep up with us and everything we’re up to, our Patron Program is the way to do it. You get weekly benefits for monthly pledges. It’s a really great and small investment in one’s Japanese education.

We tried running a campaign a few months ago hoping to get about $1,000 in monthly pledges, which would amount to about 167 patrons of varying levels. We only reached $19 with 4 wonderful patrons. 

We’re still looking for patrons. We’d love to have you all on board, and no matter what you pledge, you get a lot out of it.

We’ll also let you know that last week we finished the Genki series in Linguistic Perspective. All 23 chapters have commentaries (usually running from 4 to 5 pages). So if you’re using those books, we may be able to help you. Additionally, we have Tobira coming up along the way. This is the level where lots of people jump ship, and we hope to break it down well enough so that you can understand what’s going on and not rip out your hair in the process.

As always, signal boosts are appreciated, and we’re always here to answer questions and talk about things.

#JSubPatron #Japanese #日本語 #Final Fantasy #Final Fantasy X #Let's Play #Walkthrough #video games #Blitzball

[thejsubexperiment]

Let’s Talk Tae Kim

We were on Twitter a while ago, and we mentioned that we had spoken about Tae Kim often, and that we have a great deal of respect for him. Then we realized that we hadn’t properly spoken of his works in a general publication, only in business settings and without Patrons. So we want to do that right now, because it’s importnat.

Tae Kim is the author of the Complete Guide to Japanese Grammar, a free online resource for learning Japanese. (There is also a PDF version of the Grammar Guide we really like.) Here we will be remarking on his work, using his name in reference to those works. We won’t be talking about the man himself, because we don’t know him.

Tae Kim was a pioneer in his way of approaching Japanese for a foreign audience. As he points out at the beginning of his Grammar Guide, conventional Japanese resources have you learning a very polite and artificial version of Japanese, learning equivalencies to Indo-European phrases, and try to keep you away from Kanji. He certainly hasn’t the first one to realize that these problems existed, but he was the first to try to do something about it that turned substantive.

What Tae Kim created, nonetheless, is something that is very much within the confines of traditional Japanese grammar. He explains grammar as a Japanese grammarian would. We have the u-verbs and ru-verbs, the na-adjectives and i-adjectives, and all particles are put under one class. For some, this may be disappointing, because it doesn’t radicalize itself enough. For others, arguably for most others, this is exactly what one needs when learning primarily in the classroom, a second perspective that sheds lights on some peculiarities and offers a bit more of a challenge.

Do we ourselves have any major objections to Tae Kim? (i.e. is there anything we’d like to warn people about if they do use these works?) Beyond our objections to grammar in themselves, we will just add that Tae Kim uses more than once the phrase “think in Japanese,” which we dislike because it is unnecessarily vague. Essentially, if you could think in Japanese, you wouldn’t need to be learning Japanese. What tends to be meant by the phrase is “to be aware that Japanese functions differently than one’s native tongue.” Most people understand that already, but one has to be taught those different functions.

One of the funnier articles in the corpus is on the passive voice, where he points out that there is no “suffering passive,” which is a phrase used to describe the use of the passive to imply that the subject has been inconvenienced by the action (not necessarily suffering,) which he takes literally and then advocates that there is no “suffering passive.” This just serves to remind the reader that people who write about Japanese are constantly in dialogue with one another and that they have disagreements, and that’s okay.

We ourselves at The J-Sub Experiment have found ourselves reading others’ works, some similar to our own in intent, some radically different, and we’re always tempted to enter into dialogue. We wanted to work on Tae Kim for our Linguistic Perspective series, even. But since we’re a linguistic endeavor, we’re not even using the same language a lot of the time, which would make communication difficult and unhelpful (not to mention hostile.) We don’t really believe in u-verbs and ru-verbs, or in i-adjectives, and we all but despise keigo, but we cannot expect everyone to think like us.

So, for all of you with us who are using Japanese resources who may be seeing contradictory information between us, keep this is mind mind: We are all trying to account for the phenomena that occur within the Japanese language. You can have many different models that all account for the data. The question is which ones hold up better in the long run. For some people, the paradigm model (where a language is made a series of expressions with variables one can fill in) works. (We would argue that most accounts of Japanese are paradigm models.) For other people, biting the bullet with the linguistic account works better, where one has to understand some universal language mechanics and see them applied in a particular language. That is what we are doing here. That being said, since we depend on data acquisition, we need those resources that work with paradigms along with the native source materials. And if you need one detailed Japanese grammar when you start out, you really can’t go wrong with Tae Kim.

#Tae Kim #Japanese #Japanese grammar #Linguistics #日本語 #langblr #studyblr

[thejsubexperiment]

Spirited Away’s script has been Romanized.

This week, we’ll be working on getting the vocabulary list done. In truth, that in itself is not time consuming or difficult. The jump links are very time consuming, though. So we’ll have to leave that for another time.

#JSubPatron

[thejsubexperiment]

Same as every week.

We’d just like to thank everybody for the signal boosts when we post these links. It means a lot to us. 

We’ll continue using the tag JSubPatron if you’d like to blacklist everything regarding our Patron Program, which will be quite a lot between now and our video series’ release.

#JSubPatron

[thejsubexperiment]

This week we’ve provided a Romanization of the first 45 minutes of the film, so almost half of it. This is is everything from the beginning up to when Chihiro signs her contract with Yubaba. 

Please remember that until we’re done with our big video series project, there will be no more general publications. The big series is a general publication, and we thank you all for your patience as we finish that up.

If you’d like to support The J-Sub Experiment, and you’d like to make a smart investment in your Japanese education, please consider joining our Patron Program.

The J-Sub Experiment’s Patron Program, unlike so many others, is not donation and gratitude-based, but service-based. For monthly pledges, you get weekly benefits. Our weekly offerings include a newsletter, a patron-exclusive Final Fantasy X video, and a patron-exclusive anime runthrough. None of our patron-exclusive series will receive a general release, so the only way to access them is in fact through joining our program.

For more information, please click the link above.

If you’d like to join our Patron Program through Paypal, send us a message and we’ll make that happen.

Thank you all for your time. As always, signal boosts are appreciated.

#JSubPatron #Japanese #Spirited Away #Studio Ghibli #日本語 #言語学 #Linguistics #Langblr #Studyblr

[thejsubexperiment]

Special News Updates

Hey guys,

We just wanted to come in to give you some updates, compiling little things we’ve mentioned here and there into one page:

As a quick reminder, we’re currently working on a very long video series requires a great deal of time. We originally wanted to do it in 3 months, and then unforeseen circumstances got in our way, and we made a few grave mistakes, and we’re still working on it now. Just last week we had to discard various hours of footage and transition to using After Effects to ensure the quality of our series. It’d be wrong to say we’re “almost done,” but the end is in sight.

Way back in January, we said that Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood would be our last general release project before we focused almost entirely on the video series. Since then, we’ve done a few live streams, a video runthrough of the first chapter of Final Fantasy XV, and a text runthrough of Sailor Moon. While we’re very happy we’ve gotten to do all that, we will be ceasing general release content until we finish with our video series.

Our next big runthrough will be My Neighbor Totoro, and you should expect that in November. We will be doing several songs and other things between the publication of the video series and My Neighbor Totoro.

Our Patron Program continues to run as usual. 

We’ve just finished Linguistic Perspective — Genki Lesson 19. After Genki, we will be tackling Tobira, which is an intermediate-advanced book. Not the best book in existence, honestly, but it is extremely popular. We finished Fairy Tail a few weeks before Sailor Moon, and right now we’re working on Spirited Away. Our Final Fantasy X runthrough is doing just fine. We just reached Luca, which means we’re about 20% done with the game.

We’ll try our best to drop by and write some things every now and again. Hopefully they’ll be constructive and useful to you all. If you have any suggestions, please send them our way.

[thejsubexperiment]

Spirited Away is up!

This is a work in progress, and we’re revealing that on a weekly basis. We have the raw script with the character labelling done. That was quite the endeavor.

If you have a Rikai extension (and if you like them), you can get cracking with the information as is.

Next week, we hope to have the vocabulary list and the Romaji done.

#Spirited Away #Japanese #Studio Ghibli #日本語 #千と千尋の神隠し #Langblr #Studyblr #Linguistics

[thejsubexperiment]

I’ll Be At K-Con LA 2017

(Don’t ask why...)

Anyway, if you’ll be attending, too, and you see me, please say hi.

[thejsubexperiment]

We have finally reached Luca, and Tidus has made a fool out of himself once again.

As always, please remember that The J-Sub Experiment depends on the support of its Patrons and benefactors to keep moving forward. By joining our Patron Program, you are making an investment in your Japanese education. You receive a huge amount of resources for only small monthly pledges. We’ve gone through Genki I, we’re halfway through Genki II, we’ve completed Episode 1 of Fairy Tail, and we’re currently working on Spirited Away. 

Our Patron-exclusive material will not receive general release- and most of our material is Patron-exclusive.

(If you’d like to join our Patron Program through Paypal, send us a message and we’ll send you the link to that.)

Thank you all for your support

#JSubPatron #Japanese #Linguistics #Langblr #Studyblr #日本語 #Final Fantasy #Final Fantasy X

[thejsubexperiment]

Final Fantasy XV Japanese Runthrough Commentary

Yesterday’s archived video is up.

This is just a simple commentary of where we try to close some gaps by talking about Japanese verbs and ending particles.

If you enjoyed our last video, but felt like you wanted to learn a bit more, this is a good supplement to that.

#Final Fantasy XV #Japanese #Linguistics #Runthrough #Let's Play #日本語 #langblr #studyblr #video games #Japanese grammar #Japanese vocabulary #Kanji #文法 #単語 #漢字