Putting out more videos at a regular interval was beneficial to get noticed by the YouTube algorithm at some point, if I’m not mistaken.
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phonetic dictionary
Above anything in this life I wish there was such a dictionary for all the languages that I know. There are some bits here and there, usually in book form, and most of the time they don’t use IPA because it’s a fairly recent development.
They instead use “domestic” ways of representing phonology which ends up only making sense to the natives of the language. For example this bit by google:
Something along these lines you’d find in books for english phonology.
Wiktionary might be the only place where you can consistently find correct IPA transcriptions. There are also websites that let you convert a word in a language to its IPA transcription, but about 90% of the time they would produce an inaccuracy, and about 30% of the time output an incorrect transcription.
Though I think that the phonetic dictionaries intended for humans will not be of use to the engines anyway. For example in IPA there’d be a marker indicating that the sound is palatalised, but to a computer that generates soundwaves this would make no sense, because different sounds sound different when palatalised. I don’t think there’d be a reliable way of creating functions that modify sounds in the same way phonetic dictionaries would imply.
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That really annoys me. You’d think a dictionary would have phonetic transcriptions of words in IPA, but mine just has this weird system with capitals and digraphs and stuff.
But there are systems that make sense for ANY language, like IPA. If you know the language’s prosody and the general rhythm, and you are comfortable in reading pretty much any IPA out loud, you can read text in a language that you don’t anything about in a close to accentless manner.
Also these kinds of systems don’t let you in on the particularities of a sound. In the word above it says “-row-”, but “row” in the general american accent is [ɹ̠oʊ], in received pronunciation, southern british accents, and the general australian accent [ɹ̠əʊ], in a posh english accent it’s [ɹ̠aʊ], and in scottish english (southern accent) it’s [rɜʉ]. So when you see “-row-”, how do you even pronounce that? Also note that you can’t just go “just pronounce it the same way you would in your own accent”, because, as per the list above, in a posh and a scottish accents those two will not be the same as the standalone word “row”.
How about just recording all those sounds and treat them as a simply separate sounds. How hard can that be.
There are many caveats with this. For example, the prosody of a language will change that language’s sounds significantly. The tempo and the rhythm will also change them. For a simple example, “I am going to work” - you can read this with the emphasis on “am”, which will change its pronunciation to [æm] in most english accents, but then if you pronounce it with the emphasis on “work”, then the vowel in “am” will turn into schwa and become [əm]. Another difference in prosody between these two will be the length of the vowel, but the change is too insufficient to mark [æm] as [æ:m] in IPA to show the difference. This is the part that even IPA doesn’t cover, but is fundamental to the pronunciation.
If you’re an english native, and especially if you’re from america or canada, you probably have noticed before how you can tell if you’re talking to a person of a different race even if their speech is flawlessly accentless. This is because of the physical differences in our bodies that make our “default” prosodies that we’re most comfortable with different, producing this tiny, at times barely noticeable difference, while being completely unrelated to the actual sounds of the language.
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If you find any good ones, could you share them? As a fan of Cure Dolly’s organic Japanese, I was looking for something like that a few months back, but I don’t think I was using the right search terms.
I found mikle.jp to be quite good, but the topics there are very “reddit”. If you like things like “explain me like I’m 5”, /r/dating, /r/casualconversation on reddit you’ll probably be fine with 90% of the top daily posts on there.
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What Cure Dolly’s organic Japanese is like?
If I recall correctly it was just learning the basics of grammar followed by immersion with a mining deck. That said it’s still up in the air whether it was a scam artist or not because no evidence was ever provided as to how proficient she was at japanese, and the bits of sentences that she did pronounce herself had a very questionable accent. That said her content was basically paraphrasing japanese grammar books, which are miles better than the bilingual ones, as well as whatever the natives themselves think their language’s grammar looks like and the way they try to put it into words.
She wasn’t a scam artist, of that I am sure. She kept her Patreon posts available for all Patrons, often making them public as well, and while I do not know how long her Patreon will be able to be kept up, it will no longer bill for however long it may remain. She continually pushed for prospective learners to start using the language (especially but not exclusively input), trying for years to get the KawaJapa Forums to reach a critical mass despite never being able to succeed in doing so. If you believe what she advocated for doing is ineffective, fair enough, but a scam artist? no.
Yep. In many ways similar to the more recent Refold, but more (if you’ll excuse me the pun) organic, with more emphasis on the core philosophy of making Japanese “Language”: a necessary means of communication; instead of just a language: a game you play.
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I’ll check these out.
Maybe scam artist was a stretch, but still, the first thing to do when freelance teaching is to prove it in any way that you’re good at what you’re trying to teach. Otherwise how does one know that you’re not just peaking the dunning kruger chart thinking that you finally solved everything, but in reality you’re still an intermediate learner?
Confidence fuelled by such a belief can lead one SDK to teach other SDKs of the same strength from a position as if they were a high dan teacher. And keeping those SDKs oblivious to the real strength of their teacher will in turn give them the confidence to learn something. They will undoubtedly improve, but this is quite a circlejerk innit? All of this could be solved by a simple introductory video in japanese.
It should be said, that it’s never really to early to teach. If you understand something in a slightly better way than someone else, and it helps them get better, then the teaching is successful. Similar with Go: an 5k could be an excellent teacher to a 20k.
Actually, teaching can be great to help the teacher learn more about the subject too. I once had to teach a uni course where I was basically one week ahead of the students, and there was no better motivation to understand the stuff I had to tell them in class.
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This is acceptable only if you know that everyone that you’re teaching are weaker than you. Actually this reminds me of the old(ish?) KGS teaching community where you would have a “teacher” who’s a low dan player and then you’d have some high dan players listening to what he’s saying and constantly correcting him, so as to keep him from teaching the wrong things, because he himself can’t tell if they’re wrong or not since these things are too high level for him. But how does one ensure such control when it comes to the one-way teachers on youtube?
Speaking of the youtube teachers, it reminds me how there are many of those who had reached fluency in one language and immediately started pushing their way of learning languages as being the best. It always amuses me to watch them from the position of somebody who’s reached fluency in several languages all by myself, english being one of them, and see how they keep overthinking everything post-factum. And then you watch a video where they tell you about their journey and you notice how they’ve never applied anything that they themselves now teach/preach. Quite an amusing “do what I say, not what I do” situation.
Ultimately I think I’m just biased to think that any language learning advice online is de facto bad, because I’ve been exposed to so much of it that it became the norm for me. So it’s the “guilty until proven innocent” for me than the other way around, unfortunately.
If by “anki” you mean a predefined deck in anki, then you’re spending your time very inefficiently. Those decks are almost pointless and are only advised by people who either never followed them themselves (most “influencers” in the english world) or that are fluent in just one other language (and they obviously won’t share their plans on using predefined decks for learning consequent languages if it will at all happen).
If you had spent upwards of a thousand hours on just reading you’d have been close to an upper intermediate at this point. Reading has you covered in everything because it works best with how our brains naturally learn new things. Do you see go professionals doing spaced repetition for shapes? Not really, just the context and the natural recurrence rate is sufficient for their memorisation. Reading a foreign language as a learner is no different.
Anki is a great tool misused in great ways. The most efficient and effective way to use it is to have your own decks, the so-called “mining decks” on it, and fill them up with the words that you would want to remember, but that you feel may not come up naturally frequently enough. This liberty of choice frightens new learners and it’s what pushes them towards precompiled decks, I assume. However this is a very natural process and the people who had already learned several other languages in the past have it “solved” in some way or another. From what I could gather, most people would just write those words down in a notepad for later reference/repetition, but it’s actually a missed opportunity to use anki in the right way.
1 year doesn’t sound like a lot, but since you could dedicate what seems to be over a thousand hours to learning japanese, I would say that the rate of your progress speaks volumes about the efficiency of your most used resource for learning. It’s up to you of course to follow my or anyone else’s advice. However I wouldn’t go so far as to call japanese convoluted.
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I use precompiled decks when preparing for exams and my own lists (compiled from reading texts in apps) for words I need to know. Sometimes they coincide but not often. To me, this means that if I go to an exam center with a functional vocabulary of what I usually read/watch, I will probably fail the exam requirements!
What kind of examination is that, then? What skills are they trying to evaluate?
I was talking about the HSK, chinese. They have predefined lists. I took the lower level exams a few years ago and I had to do a lot of work on vocabulary I didn’t see outside textbooks. The predefined decks helped me monitor progress towards a specific goal (exams). Learning the actual language is another story and, unfortunately, it doesn’t reflect in exams.
I see. I agree that for cramming the exams it would be more effective.
Maybe I missed the update when they disabled this for japanese, because currently I identify myself as an upper intermediate (I can watch some generic blog videos on youtube with no assistance, can converse on general topics) and I have spent less than 50 hours total on predefined decks, and less than 100h total on anki in general. I was just reading and listening, like you said, just like I did with english.
It does have many more synonyms, and phrases that are very close by their function and meaning. And this is exactly why I think you should read instead of trying to memorise them orderly. For example when you put たった今 and ちょうど今 next to each other you’d say “they’re the same”, but when you read a lot you begin to notice that one is used more often in one type of contexts and the other is used in another type of contexts, which can greatly aid you in understanding their difference. This works very well with a synonym-heavy langauge like japanese.
Another disadvantage to using predefined decks that I forgot to mention is that you’re still using a bilingual resource. How and when are you planning to use monolingual resources? Switching to monolingual dictionaries and resources increases your immersion and therefore acquisition rate exponentially. What use is it to keep building a bilingual “database” of words in your mind?
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If you want to speak naturally, absolutely yes. Not the same, just an adjacent example, but do you feel like you need to understand the difference between “just now” and “right now” in english? Both can be used interchangeably in some contexts, but they’re not equal in all contexts. The two japanese words above share this quality.
It may not look like much, but the subtleties of synonyms is what makes the speech flow naturally. I work for an american company and naturally we have many indian people in our teams as well, and every day I hear them say “let’s begin this (project, discussion, etc) with …” instead of “let’s start”. Accent aside it immediately gives away a non-fluent speaker. The fine details is what ends up mattering the most.
This is half true. The majority of the training for translation jobs is more about building the mental map of phrasal structures. I think only live interpreters would need such a solid database in their minds. Even then it should come close to 50/50 between this and phrasal structures, if not exceeding that the closer the interpreter gets to the speech (the closest is usually 2-3 seconds iirc).
It is more binary because english has lost all of its complexity in its current iteration. All languages have a “language of prestige” the loanwords from which usually sound more sophisticated and elegant. Such language is generally reserved for formal speech and poetry. To japanese such a language is chinese, with all the chinese loanwords being distinctly more formal and poetic. To english the language of prestige used to be french, and even in the 20th century it still held true to a degree, but not anymore. Latin-based words (including the derived vulgar latin languages) comprise over a half of a regular vocabulary in modern english. It has lost its elegancy and became the norm, thus indirectly removing the past complexity the english language used to have.
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This assumes an imaginary way of learning a language in some sort of “waves” of understanding, which is unrealistic. Your skill in a language isn’t a single bar that goes up, it’s a plethora of different bars and you’re increasing them unevenly. Once again a parallel can be drawn to go, but I won’t go that route. You can be fluent-level in some things concerning a language and at the same time be beginner-level in other things. There’s not a reason to strive for an evened-out progression because it’s not how humans learn things. And even if you try to force it you won’t be able to achieve it anyway.
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On the topic of synonyms, I was having a discussion recently about three closely related Latin nouns: deserta, (h)arena, and solitudines.
harena means “sand”. Like many Latin words, it has a written form both with and without an h, since h-dropping was common. So eg. there is harenatus, the adjective “sandy”. Because the amphitheatres were floored with sand, we get the name arena. An arena could also be a sandy beach, although a shore in general is lit(t)us, giving us the technical English term lit(t)oral. The relevant sense for this conversation, though, is that of a sandy desert. It’s a metonymic usage, like the sands of the Sahara.
Next we have deserta, which gives us English desert (not dessert!). As I understand it, it only appears in the plural, so not the neuter singular desertum (desert) but deserta (deserts). This word is related to our English verb to desert, ie. to abandon, and the adjective deserted, as on a desert island, and the noun deserter. So deserta has more the sense of an uninhabited or abandoned place, that is not necessarily sandy; a wasteland. You could call the Central Asian steppes deserta, but not an harena.
Then there’s solitudines, another noun that only seems to appear in this sense in the plural. The singular is solitudo, which produces English solitude. Thus solitudines can be read as “solitudes”, and has a meaning like deserta.
Just because somewhere is a sandy desert doesn’t mean that it can only be called an harena – it can be called deserta or solitudines as well. The latter are sometimes translated as “wastes”.
There’s a passage, though, in which an author describes the Sahara as deserta, yet goes on to mention how it’s inhabited by monstrous people. So it seems that in his view, deserta didn’t have to mean completely uninhabited, just scarcely populated.