Hello! This is a weird question, but I thought about it today during my flashcards and was wondering if such a product exists, or if this technique exists, or if anyone’s studied it before, etc.
So the idea would be to take a long novel (say Harry Potter, because that seems to almost be a meme in this community) and essentially have the book itself start with English in Japanese grammar. Like (making up a sentence, I don’t have the book):
> Harryはwandがexists。
Or something equally dumb. Dumb, but readable by an English reader without having to look up any words. But the idea would be to essentially make N+1 sentences out of the entire rest of the book, while you’re reading it. Not flash-cards, but make it so every sentence can only introduce at most one new word. Something like:
> ハリーは魔法«magic»をcan-use。
So the idea there would be that as you’re reading you can kinda stay in the flow of the story. You may have to stop and remind yourself of a word at some point, but you can trust that this word you can’t remember _did_ come up at some point before this. You have seen it before, and it was defined to you when it was introduced. Or you could just skip the word you forgot, because again you know it came up at some point, so maybe you can remember it from context, or maybe it’ll come up 2 more sentences from now which will allow you to remember it better in that context.
I assume by the middle of the work there will be entire Japanese sentences that contain only words you’ve seen before. And also by the end there will probably be some words that stay in English the whole time. Like one of those words that comes up once in the whole book, and the sentence it was in had another unfamiliar word, and that one was more important to learn because it comes up later and this one doesn’t. But that’s ok! If it only came up once, then it probably wasn’t a very important word to learn. But seeing it in English meant you could still understand the sentence it was in and keep reading without looking up and trying to memorize a rare word.
Obviously there would be some tricky sentences to parse, even with English words. Japanese grammar isn’t the same as English, so there may need to be some footnotes to highlight a grammar point. And there are some infamous Japanese words that are individually difficult to translate. Like, we may need to have a helper translation on many sentences that involve “かける”. But that difficulty will be present whether you’re reading native Japanese material or this ugly-hybrid thing.
So my real question, then, is whether or not anyone else has done this? Is there an existing series of material that uses this technique or something close to it? Is there any research on a technique like this showing whether or not it would be effective for learning? I imagine it’s less effective at raw “number of words learned” than other methods, but the hope is that it would make up for that in “amount of time you can spend doing it and still be enjoying yourself”. But I don’t know, and it would be neat if someone else already had the answer to this question.
So that’s my long rambling question. Any ideas?
3 comments
I think this is a backwards way of going about it. Theoretically in a textbook this is being laid out and you can see how things are going together.
The Japanese From Zero series of courses offer a progressive method in which as you learn a character like あ its used in words and keeps going like that. For example:
Wあtあshi
It keeps going like this as more characters are introduced and by the end you’ll end up with わたし in hiragana. Same thing with katakana. Eventually the courses build up to kanji.
That’s the only course like that I can think of that uses that method. I used the courses myself and while I’m not promoting them as a be all end all or anything, I did enjoy them and they were pretty fun. Especially back then from the standpoint of knowing absolutely nothing.
I’ve seen many such books in my native language (for both kanji and vocabulary), but I haven’t seen it in English. I’ve also tried it. It was more like a list of words (like 20-30-50) and a chapter where it was gradually rephrased and replaced. But I haven’t done more than several attempts. It’s kinda fun, because you focus on a story, but for me it looks more like a waste of time for learning purpose separately. Basically you don’t learn Japanese as a whole, you only learn vocabulary and for vocabulary there is nothing more time efficient than SRS.
The way we learn is that we need around 5-7 repetitions over prolonged amount of time (like 3-12 months). We gradually lose ability to recall, at most we will be able to recognize in specific context, that’s why we need reviews to keep/bring it back and reinforce. If we repeat one word 20 times in a single day, then it produces a small advantage, but it’s around it and you will need to do like 1 repetition less over time, so 4-6 or maybe 3-5. It’s hard to make such approach inside a single or several books. To begin with, it’s hard to produce reviews consistently while majority of words in a book appear only several times, similarly it won’t take long to read even a whole book.
Thus learning in such way will give you only temporal result. We can learn via content generally, but the idea is that we are doing it for at least 1 or 2 hours everyday for several years, so you always have opportunities to see new words and see known words for reinforcement. And considering that we have a mix of English and Japanese, at the end you need to spend like a hour to learn the same you could in 10-15 minutes with SRS and much higher consistency. That’s why I’ve tried only several times and decided that it’s not my format.