So I talked about Anki recently, but it’s worth looking at the whole picture to see exactly where Anki slots in to my process. I don’t have the faintest impression that I’m doing things the best or the most effective way, but they are working, so I still think they’re worth sharing.
Video Games
I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy games on my Vita – specifically, Final Fantasy X and now Final Fantasy X-2. I started with FFX because I’ve played it many times in the past, so I’m familiar enough with the plot and the characters that I can follow it pretty well without understanding what they’re saying.
“But wait,” you might be saying, “Isn’t the point of this to understand what they’re saying? How will you be learning Japanese if you can understand what’s happening without understanding the language?” The answer to that is that it’s because I can understand what’s happening that I can understand the language.
The human brain is designed to acquire language in context. Flash cards and the like are great for rote memorization, but if your brain has to do a full recall for every word in a sentence, you’re never going to be able to understand speech in real-time, and any speech you create will be awkward and halting. By experiencing content that I’m already familiar with, I get to do two things: 1) I can more the vocabulary and the grammar I already know into a more useful place in my brain, and 2) I can encounter new vocabulary and grammar in contexts where I might be able to parse out their meaning without needing to look them up.
So it’s worth noting that this would be much less valuable to me if I wasn’t already familiar with the language. But because I’ve spent a lot of time learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, I’m at a point where this kind of immersion is getting some work done.
How much work? I was down on it a little bit; it felt like I was just having fun playing video games and pretending it was productive time. But then I started noticing situations outside the game that I was only able to understand because of my time playing the game. I’ll give two different examples.
First, Cassie and I were both reading the same katakana, and she was really struggling, while I could breeze right through it.
Um, oops, okay, very very quick overview time. Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji are the Chinese characters, the complex ones. Hiragana and katakana are both simple pronunciation-only characters, like alphabets except they’re mostly consonant-vowel pairs. It’s far from an ironclad rule, but hiragana is mostly used for writing Japanese words, while katakana is used for writing foreign loanwords.
The upshot being that video games – which use a lot of loan words both by necessity and as a stylistic choice – tend to have a lot of katakana, which again, are being used to spell out foreign words phonetically. For a specific example, FFX and FFX-2 both make liberal use of the word スフィヤ, pronounced “sufiya,” meaning “sphere.” Even a lot of places where there exists a Japanese word, games will use katakana – for example, in battle a character might use a 特殊, but in the menu screen, you’ll look for their アビリティ – “abiriti,” AKA “abilities.”
So yeah, all that to say that playing through Final Fantasy X and encountering the vast amount of loan words – some easy, like “faiya” being “fire,” and some crazy, like “maruchi” being “multi” – has given me a much better sense of how to parse katakana and loanwords in Japanese.
The second event that showed how much it was helping came from reading our Japanese church’s text thread. I was thrilled the other day to realize that I could actually parse most of it. I was showing Cassie how much of it we could read, and then realized that she had a much harder time, because seriously every single sentence had at least one kanji, sometimes even whole words, that I’d learned from Final Fantasy.
Some of it was a reasonable enough connection – there’s holy figures in Final Fantasy X called 祈り子, very roughly translated “praying children.” It’s not a big shock that 祈, the kanji for prayer, gets used a lot in church contexts. But funnier (to me) was the connection to 連続魔法, roughly “chain magic” (the game localized it as “Doublecast”), which lets you cast two spells in a row on your turn. Turns out, 連続 just means something like “continuously,” and gets used in lots of contexts, like when our pastor mentioned something happening for the next three days – ３日連続.
Anyway, I’ve beaten FFX and moved on to the sequel, X-2, which I’m less familiar with so it’s a bit more challenging, but I’m still having fun with it.
Anki
Anki is, on many days, the bulk of my Japanese. I’m getting to a point where I need to transition away from Anki as the spine of my learning and start using it as a support, but I’m not quite there yet.
I have three primary Anki decks right now: Final Fantasy, Wanikani, and Refold.
Final Fantasy
This is my bread and butter right now. I took the translation pages from the Final Fantasy wiki (FFX, FFX-2) and turned them into Anki decks. The main Final Fantasy deck has three subdecks – Kanji, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy X-2. You can guess about the latter; the Kanji deck is for when I get a vocabulary word for one of the games that uses kanji I’m not familiar with.
Wanikani
So Wanikani is actually its own thing that probably deserves its own writeup; basically it’s a flashcard collection and webapp in one, that is designed to take you from zero kanji knowledge to knowing like 2,000 kanji. It’s a bit unique in that it prioritize kanji that are simple to write, rather than common or important kanji; you learn words like “one-track mind” months or even years before words like “bathroom.” This really isn’t a big deal, though, because it gives you such a quick leg up on how many kanji you know that it makes it easy to acquire the common words through other means, like books or TV.
It’s really a solid system and I do recommend it to new learners, as long as they understand that finishing the program won’t let them read Japanese – it’s not teaching any grammar, for example – and so it’s only one column of their instruction. It’s particularly good for teaching kanji – most of the other resources I’ve found prioritize vocabulary, but learning words is way easier when you know the kanji making them up.
That said, I like to have more control over the scheduling, so I used the API to download all their cards and turn them into an Anki deck. (I’ve paid them several hundred dollars over the course of my subscription by now, so I don’t feel bad about it.) (I don’t regret paying that much; again, it’s a great system.)
Refold
This is just a paid Anki deck that we found online. I changed it around a bit, but mostly just the formatting, I’m pretty much using the deck as-is. It’s a solid Japanese vocab deck focusing on the most common Japanese words. Each word has a sample sentence read by a native speaker, which I extracted and turned into a separate “sentences” subdeck, because that’s more useful than lone words for learning grammar and actual use. I also added a “kanji” subdeck, just like the kanji subdeck in my Final Fantasy deck, where I add in the kanji of any vocabulary that I’m struggling with.
All Together
I think these three prongs together give me a really solid approach to the language. Refold gives me a good foundation of important Japanese, Wanikani fills in some odd gaps and gives me great kanji support, and Final Fantasy gives me the specific vocabulary that I’m reinforcing on a daily basis through actual use.
Soon – maybe after FFX-2, probably a bit before – I intend to start reading through some of our manga again, adding a new deck for the manga with each word as I come across it, and a kanji subdeck for any kanji I’m struggling with. When that happens, I’ll probably rename the “Final Fantasy” deck to something like “Organic Vocab” and keep it all under that umbrella.
Cure Dolly
Cure Dolly was (she has, sadly, passed) a vtuber Japanese teacher. Her style is… unusual, and I was aware of her videos for months before I actually started watching them, mostly because of how put-off I was by the presentation.
But oh man, do not sleep on this channel.
Cure Dolly, by my understanding, was a bit of a Japanophile who learned a smidgen of Japanese, then went to Japan, bought of a bunch of Japanese language textbooks – as in, ones written in Japanese for Japanese schoolkids – and used those to teach herself Japanese. This gave her a uniquely Japanese approach to the language, which let her make sense of things that a lot of the English textbooks mishandle.
Her big thing is on approaching Japanese as Japanese, not as a European language. For example, rather than thinking about verbs as having conjugations, she views them as having a few simple stems that you attach different helpers to. Most English language Japanese instruction would say, for example, that 話せる is the potential form of 話す – “To be able to speak” instead of “to speak.” But Cure Dolly says no, we’re attaching the potential helper verb, here just る, to the e-stem of 話す, 話せ. It’s a subtle distinction with massive ramifications for ease of parsing. Whereas the standard English approache requires you to memorize dozens of different forms of verbs, Cure Dolly turns the whole language into Lego blocks that you can easily rearrange.
She’s a little too “my way is the best way” for some people – despite paying lip service to the idea of her approach as just one of many, she sure talks about her way as correct and other models as incorrect, even crazy – but dang, man, I think her way really is the best way, so it’s hard to hold it against her. I’d tried Tae Kim for a while, but was having a hard time remembering his lists of rules; Cure Dolly turns all those lists into one simple system and single-handedly turned Japanese from a complicated mess to simpler than any other language I’ve studied. It’s like magic.
You gotta do it all
No one of these systems alone will get you to the point of understanding Japanese; honestly, not even just these three will do it. Sooner than later, I’ll need to start reading Japanese books and comics and watching Japanese shows and movies, and then not long after that I need to start practicing generation – easy if I’m in Japan and can have regular conversations in Japanese, but if I’m still in the USA I’ll need to start writing short stories or something.
I think a lot of the people who start Japanese, get discouraged, and fail do so because they’re leaning too heavily on only one column. Wanikani is awesome and will make it possible for you to learn to read, but even finishing Wanikani will not teach you to read. Honestly, it won’t even get you close, because Japanese is a very grammar-heavy language. Cure Dolly makes that grammar easy to learn, but there’s still a lot of it to learn, and if you’re just focusing on the vocabulary you’re not going to understand what any of the words in a sentence are doing.
For example, take the sentence 「彼女が言ったことがウソであることと分かった。」 If you know all the vocabulary but none of the grammar, you’re reading something like “Girl say thing lie is have thing understand.” Maybe, maybe you can get from there to “The thing she said turned out to be a lie,” but even if you do it’s only going to be with a lot of mental exertion that makes reading anything a serious chore. And that’s not even using very complex grammar – there are much more complicated sentences. It’s all easy to parse if you’ve learned it, and very difficult to intuit if you haven’t.
But the payoff of all this work is so worth it. Man, even if I didn’t want to live there, learning Japanese is so fun. You feel like some sort of wizard, looking at all these crazy runes and sigils that you know are meaningless to most of your friends, but to you they’re a complete sentence. It’s awesome.