The YouTube bandwagon

Merry Christmas! This Christmas, I bought my wife a pair of Ugg boots, which apparently have been all the rage for quite some time now. It seems every female friend or family member I know already has a pair of these. In turn, she bought me a Canon digital camera so that we can take better pictures for umm… her blog. Still, I always love more gadgets and this one also has HD video! So I’ve been toying with the idea of starting up my own YouTube channel.

Yes, I know it’s fairly late to join the bandwagon but I always wait things out until the technology gets better and cheaper. But technology isn’t the only issue as there really needs to be a good reason to spend the additional time for making any kind of video.

First of all, I prefer text because it’s pretty much better in every way in terms of visibility, searching, and non-intrusiveness. I hate having to sit through a video when I could have gotten the same information much quickly by browsing through text.

So what are the advantages of video? In terms of learning Japanese, I can’t really think of any. Still images can convey just as much information as a video can for things that are more easily understood visually. Audio doesn’t require video to convey pronunciation and intonation. You can also do a lot with just slides and a good microphone. It’s still technically a video but doesn’t require a video recorder. I guess if you have an interesting, funny, or attractive face and/or personality, it can make things more interesting. Doesn’t really apply to me, though.

So I doubt you’ll be seeing Tae Kim’s YouTube channel any time soon. Despite the fact that I now have the technology, I doubt I’ll be getting faster, better, or stronger… at least on YouTube.

What do you think? Is there something special video can do for learning Japanese that I’m missing?

Anyways, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday!

What’s your major time sink?

What’s true happiness? Of course, a stable and happy family is essential but for many of us, it’s also about seeking new opportunities, investing in ourselves, and contributing something useful and helpful to the world. All of these things fall under a large category of being “productive”. Even a happy family requires its members to be productive in order for things to run smoothly around the house.

What prevents us from being productive and being a vastly over-simplified definition of the word: “happy”? It’s activities where you don’t produce anything; things like watching TV or youtube, playing games, or browsing sites like failblog.org. It takes a lot less effort then actually producing the TV show, youtube video, or website but the ease of effort in passive consumption is what makes it so tempting.

Lately, one of my major time sinks were playing games. Games are addictive because of basic behavioral psychology of rewarding fake achievements. Hey, I know that. I took Psychology 101 in college. But why did I hardly play any games in college when I was first learning Japanese and began writing the Grammar Guide? It’s because I couldn’t afford it. I had no TV, console, and my laptop could play basically minesweeper and that’s it.

In fact, during college winter and summer breaks, I was dirt poor and bored out of my mind. Necessity really is the mother of invention: the necessity to save myself from going insane from boredom. It didn’t help that the rest of the academic year was spent in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota. Things were different for my good friend, who brought a new computer to college and a copy of the Sims. He would say, “Hold on, my character needs to go to work now,” to which I replied, “But the REAL YOU needs to go to class!”

Anyway, I’ve had a good run playing a whole bunch of games the past few months with my Intel Core 2 Dell and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO. But now, the system is showing it’s age and doesn’t run GTA IV very well (which I just bought for a measly $20). I could probably afford to buy a new computer, or maybe even a TV and game console. But I’ve decided to just save my money and time by not enabling myself to waste it on games. Now, I really can’t waste my time playing games even if I wanted to.

I realized today that my major other distraction was the huge number of random RSS feeds that I picked up in my Google reader. Any time I go online to do something, it sits there, beckoning me to go dig for jewels of interesting content buried in a huge pile of junk. So I’ve cleaned up my list of everything except for 14 feeds including a few web comics like dilbert and xkcd which are quick to read, my wife’s blog, a couple of really cool or funny technical feeds like hacks.mozilla.org and thedailywtf.com, and cinemassacre.com (I can’t give up my Angry Video Game Nerd fix). Currently, my feed has 0 unread items.

I think proactively removing areas of distraction is really going to help me become more productive and accomplish the things I really want to get done such as the new Complete Guide to Japanese. What are your major distractions and what can you do to remove them? Oh, and don’t forget to add my feed to your RSS reader!!

Death Note on Hulu

I was recently informed that Death Note is available to watch completely for free on Hulu. And with none of that dubbing crap, which used to be all so common back in the day. I feel like an old fogey when I think back on how difficult it was to get any sort of Japanese content in the United States back in the day. I used to feverishly grab onto whether random stuff I could get my hands on. For crying out loud, at one point, my only source for study was a 単行本 of 「新きまぐれオレンジ★ロード」 that I happened to get a hold of somehow. Seriously, I had that exact book, cover and everything. You guys no longer have any excuse!!

(An an aside, I still remember one of the FIRST words I ever looked up in my Kanji dictionary was in the first couple sentences of that book: 「瞳」. Guess what? Since it’s not in the 常用漢字 list, it wasn’t in my dictionary. So I was pretty screwed to begin with until I luckily managed to find WWWJDIC. Thanks, Jim Breen!)

By the way, my favorite anime of all time is Lain. Who can resist an anime that talks about internet protocols and Memex? Yes, I’m a geek at heart and personally, I can’t wait for IPv7!

Smart.fm looks smart all right

You may (or may not) remember when I lamented about all those stupid index-card websites with just lists of random words.

My argument was that the main drawback of word lists is that they had no context and are boring. You still have to go find source material on your own in order to learn those words in any meaningful context. It would be so much cooler if people can share interesting content and the words associated with it. Well, it looks like smart.fm has delivered exactly that.

There’s still lists of just random words, it won’t stop you from making those. But you can also append other media to provide context. For instance, you can learn the words to the Japanese version of Beauty and the Beast while watching the actual clip. Pretty cool. Here’s another catchy song with the full lyrics and accompanying vocabulary list.

Looks like there’s plenty of bloggy material to read as well.

Here’s a really freaky story called 「なまえのないかいぶつ」. Kind of scary. Would you read such a story to your kids? I wouldn’t unless I wanted to give them nightmares. Maybe it has something to do with why horror movies are so popular in Japanese (and scary too!).

There’s a lot of stuff in that site to play around with. My only complaint is that it can be a bit difficult to find media-based lists. It would be nice to be able to scroll through all the videos or music instead of having to mess around with tag clouds. Ahh, here we go, you have to use the results filter after you do a search. Not very intuitive if you don’t have a particular search term.

I’m having fun but I wish there was more Chinese content. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Definitely check it out. Two thumbs up.

When to use (and not use) grammar

I’m a huge believer in using grammar as a tool for understanding and learning how to speak Japanese. So much so that I built a whole website about it. However, when I ran across a list of Korean irregular verbs while going through Google Reader, I began to wonder whether grammar is always a useful tool.

The list contains only 10 verbs, not nearly as many as I remember from my horrible experiences in High School Spanish. Still, that’s far more than the 2 in Japanese and the author mentions that he will continue to add to the list as time allows.

Speaking of Spanish, I shudder when I think back to memorizing all the various verb tenses in singular/plural and 1st/2nd/3rd person for each irregular verb. When I see a page that lists 200 common (not all!) irregular verbs, I can only think that learning grammar here becomes more of an hindrance than an aid.

Thankfully, Japanese grammar is simple and consistent enough to become a powerful tool for learning how to easily handle any arbitrary verb or adjective. But it’s good to keep in mind that it’s only a tool nonetheless. I think there’s a fuzzy line where too many exceptions, rules, and inconsistencies can render grammar a rather cumbersome and limited tool for the learner.

English and Spanish, I would say easily crosses that line. Personally, I’ve never used Pimsleur but there’s an argument to be made for learning how people say things without really understanding how the grammar works for some languages (not Japanese). After all, native speakers usually don’t know all the grammar rules for their language. They just know what sounds right from experience.

However, Korean grammar is kind of between Japanese and English in terms of complexity. There’s an excellent website called Luke Park’s Guide to Korean Grammar, which has slowly grown into a very nice resource. However, when I see 5 rules just to get the present informal tense when Japanese has none, I think, “Japanese is awesome!” and “Wow, Korean looks hard!”

From http://parksguide.blogspot.com/2006/11/very-useful-verbs.html

II. Plain Form → Present Tense (Spoken)

● Rules

1. For verbs with ㅏ/ㅓ and no final consonant, just take 다 off.
Exceptions: A verb with 하 as a final letter, 하 changes to 해.

2. For verbs with ㅗ/ㅜ and no final consonant, add ㅏ for ㅗ verbs and ㅓ for ㅜ verbs.

3. For a verb with 르 as a final letter, add ㄹ to a letter before 르 and 르 changes to 라 for ㅏ/ㅗ verbs and 러 for ㅓ/ㅜ/ㅣ verbs.

4. For a verb with l and no final consonant, change ㅣto 여.

5. For a verb with a final consonant, first take 다 off then add 아 for ㅏ/ㅗ verbs, and 어 for ㅓ/ㅜ verbs.

Since the rules are based on phonetic vowel sounds, maybe it’s better to just wing it and let your ears and listening practice do the work instead of your brain. I’d be interested in hearing people’s experiences in learning Korean.

My thoughts on eduFire as a (biased) tutor

Note: This post was written before I knew there was a 1 on 1 option. Turns out the button to request tutoring only shows up when you’re logged in as a student instead of a tutor. I’m quite confused as to why that matters since you can join classes fine as a tutor but that’s a fault in the UI not the site itself. Be sure to check out the comments for more info. Also, why can’t I find a list of certain types of classes? You can mess with the url and add “/classes/language” such as http://edufire.com/classes/mandarin to find all classes of that language but I can’t see a link to do this anywhere!

The title says it all. This viewpoint is completely biased and objectivity is impossible from my position as a Japanese tutor. Let me make that clear before I even start.

I decided to try an eduFire Japanese class as a student for mainly three reasons.

1. It was free.
2. I’m interested in seeing other styles of tutoring and keen on improving my own.
3. I’m always happy for any opportunity to keep up my Japanese.

Thoughts about the service

So I picked what looked to be the most advanced class out there, which as it turns out was an intermediate class. That brings me to the first thing that has me puzzled about eduFire. Are the classes free or no?

Currently, every Japanese class is listed as “Free” yet the tutors themselves list prices on their lessons. I’m assuming some tutors are offering free classes as a way to promote their class but every tutor? I guess it’s a good thing that all the tutors are so generous (more generous than me for sure).

That leaves me with the next question which is kind of made moot by the previous one but if you teach let’s say a $25 class and you somehow manage to attract 100 students, do you get paid $2500 x 0.85=$2125? Or even just 20 students, do you make 25 x 20 x 0.85= $425 for just one class? That’s quite a racket!

Even with a modest 5 students, you make $106.25 dollar for an hour, that’s like a high paid consultant. Why is it such a awesome deal for tutors (and incidentally the site who gets a 15% cut)? Because in most cases, the students are getting hoodwinked, that’s why. There are two aspects of language teaching which are often mixed together: presenting new information and practicing the new information.

The first aspect is non-interactive and is more of a lecture style presentation. This means I can create a YouTube video with the static information and charge every student to watch it. Maybe I can respond to questions via email. This is essentially what you are getting with if you join an “interactive” class with let’s say 50 other students. You can have a 100 or even 1,000 students, it scales well but it’s not something you’d want to pay for each time.

The second aspect is truly interactive and doesn’t scale at all. Conversation practice means you are either speaking or listening. Typically, beginner students will speaker less since the teacher has to correct and explain more. Ideally, you want to approach an even split as the student becomes more advanced. Let’s say for example, at an intermediate level, you speak for 30% of the time. For a private lesson, 70% of it is spent in listening to a Japanese speaker or getting corrections, all of which are to your benefit adding up to 100% goodness. For a two person lesson, the 30% listening time is split in two and you only get 15%. And the listening is of lesser value since half of it doesn’t apply to you. Let’s say you still get half of good general listening practice but waste a quarter of corrections and pointers that apply specifically to the other person. Now your goodness is down to 67.5%. You should be entitled to a 32.5% discount. In a standard regular 20 person class, you get a mere 6.25% speaking, 25% pure listening, and 3.125% specific pointers and corrections. That’s a mere 34.375% and that’s with a generous pure listening calculation! Personally, I think if you take a $20 class with 19 other people, you should be charged $1. After all, the teacher still makes the same $20 regardless, right?

But in the end, since all the classes seem to be free at the moment, I’m complaining about a completely hypothetical situation. I’m still confused as to why all the classes are free though and wonder how long that will last.

Thoughts on the lesson

I won’t say which but the class I took was absolutely horrible. I actually felt stupid and was almost convinced that I couldn’t speak Japanese at the end! The worst part of all this is that the class itself was actually quite normal. I had just forgotten how horrible regular Japanese classes were.

Basically, you’re like a talking robot that must spit out the correct answer when your button is pressed. The lesson was so formally structured that all you had to do was spit back the question with the answer filled in. There was no freedom or any form of conversation whatsoever. My hopes of getting some conversation practice were promptly crushed. The 自己紹介 was the only free portion of the whole thing and the tutor didn’t even ask any follow up questions or anything for that matter! It essentially became a monologue that I could type up and just read out loud. Also, for any corrections, there were no explanations on why it was wrong or expansion on similar examples.

When it’s your turn to talk and you’re thinking about what the teacher wants you to say, it means you’re a robot. It was Japanese class déjà vu. Seriously, I’m at the point where I’ve started thinking that the more formal teaching experience you get, the worse teacher you become. The lesson was free but it still cost me an hour of my increasingly dwindling free time. I’d like to try another class from another tutor but I’m afraid to waste any more time.

Maybe it’s just not my style or I’m biased and misinformed because the comments on the tutor were all stellar and full of praise. If any students of mine are reading this, please feel free to rip on my lessons and tell me where I’m going wrong here.

Thoughts on improvements

Now, the site obviously has nothing to do with how well an individual tutor or the classes are but I think there are certain things that can be done to improve the situation. After all, the site is only as good as its tutors. I think they’re missing out on the whole web 2.0 social network thing with their philosophy of classes. Classes just don’t work very well for learning languages but private tutoring is expensive and good teachers are hard to find. They should work on lowering the barrier of entry for tutors so that students can get more and more personal attention. The first most brain-dead barrier to entry is that the site itself is not localized. If you want more native Japanese tutors, maybe it might help to be able to use the site in Japanese? Duh. The second barrier to entry is that every tutor has to start from scratch with their own teaching material. There’s no way to put up teaching material on the site much less sharing and rating it amongst other tutors. That seems to me like a huge waste of effort. And how about some basic training or starter guides for potential tutors? Finally, the whole class philosophy makes tracking individual students very difficult. Personally, I keep notes of every private lesson not just for the students to review but for myself to help me remember what we’ve done so far and what remains to be done. After a few lessons, I have a pretty good idea of each student’s strong points and more importantly the stuff that needs to be worked on. Now obviously, I don’t scale very well but imagine what you can do with an whole army of qualified tutors with good teaching materials.

Right now, all the site does is help you find students, arrange a time, process payment, and perhaps pay a license fee for the flash application from Adobe, which has free alternatives anyway. I think it’s time to get a bit more ambitious and start thinking about how to become a game-changer for traditional language education.

Update: It looks like they might already be on the case.

話題の重要さ

レッスンを始めてから、最近より効率よく日本語を教えることについてよく考えている。生徒のレベルと習い方がバラバラで、やはり個別のレッスンにしてよかったと再確認した。レベルによって教え方は当然変わるが、最終目的は変わらない。それは、もっと色んなことについて話してもらうことだ。

「こういうことは、日本語でどう表現しますか?」日本語を勉強するには、それが一番重要な質問だと思う。自分の思いを表現しようとして、どのように言えばいいかわからない時、日本語が出来る人からすぐに教えてもらう。これこそが、日本語能力が上達している時だ。しかし、一般的な日本語の授業では、そういう質問をする機会がほとんどない。(まったくないと言ってもいいぐらい。)なぜなら、授業では習っている表現や単語があらかじめ決まっているからだ。「こんなことを教えるから、それを練習する」というやり方だ。

「ケーキは好きです?」と生徒に聞いたら、答えはほぼ決まっている。「はい、好きです」と「いいえ、好きじゃありません」と答えるしかない。クラスでは複数の人がいるから、もっと自由な答えをする時間もない。そうやって練習してきた生徒は始めて本当の会話で自分の思いを浮かべようとしたら、何も出てこない。適切な表現と単語と文法を知っていても、どれを使えばいいかわからない。授業では、そういう練習を全くしないからだ。

だから、私のレッスンではもっと自由に話をしてもらうようにしている。「ケーキは小さいころ好きだったけど、大人になってからは甘すぎてあんまり好きじゃない。でも、日本に行った時、そんなに甘くないケーキがあると知って、また好きになったよ。また日本に行って、ショートケーキを食べたいな。私が住んでいるところの駅の近くにすごいおいしいケーキ屋さんがあった。そういえば、その隣のパン屋さんのメロンパンもおいしかったな!」と、そのような話を聞きだせるようにレッスンを構成している。

そのためには、常に会話が盛り上がれるような話題を考えている。それは、もちろん生徒によって違うから、やっぱり個別レッスンにしてよかったと思う。

What obstacles in online colloboration?

I had a couple online lessons during the weekend as well as one face-to-face.

The online lessons went amazingly well except for when my stupid, stupid Comcast connection died and didn’t come back for 10 minutes. I would even venture to say it worked out better than the real-life meeting because the place we had arranged to meet had already closed. (What kind of large coffee chain closes at 7pm??)

We have the technology

Here’s the technology I used to set this up, in case anybody is curious.

Skype with webcam: Of course you need some kind of chat program. One person suggested MSN Live Messenger, which I will try out but Skype with video works amazingly well. It’s almost as good as talking face-to-face!

Drupal: I use Drupal to manage my lessons, conversation notes, and any other content related to the lessons. If you’re not familiar with Content Management Systems (CMS), it’s a generic platform to manage content in different formats whether it’s a blog, online book, forum, etc. This was used to setup the main lesson site.

Google Calendar: I added a new calendar on my Gmail account to manage my lesson calendar. You can embed the calendar for others to share and sync as I have done in this page.

Yuuguu: I researched around for screen sharing apps and this was the first one I tried. It was very simple to use and works great so I’ve stuck with it. At least, it seems to work great for me since I’m the one sharing the screen. I don’t know how slow it is on the other end but so far, there seems to be little trouble following along. I can run Google searches and show how to find interesting information pertaining to your interests in Japanese.

I have screen sharing on my laptop and I converse on Skype through my desktop. I have the laptop on the side for demonstration mostly because my desktop monitor resolution is far too large for sharing.

Lang-8: I setup a separate account on Lang-8 exclusively to correct my student’s writing. I ask them to setup their own account and add me as a friend. This way, I can easily correct their writing and also allows them to find additional friends and input from the awesome Lang-8 community.

Google Checkout: I haven’t tried this out yet but it allows sending out email invoices so you don’t even need a website with a shopping cart. You can however easily embed one in your website if you so choose. I plan to send emails out at the end of every month for lessons already done to save myself the trouble of tracking amount purchased, amount remaining, and all that junk. The transaction fee is 2% and $0.20. Not bad at all!

Synopsis

Drupal is great if you already pay for a domain name and have a provider with PHP and database support. But you could probably do most of what you need with a free blog from blogger. So really, there is no overhead cost at all except for your internet connection which I assume you already have since you’re reading this.

My setup probably isn’t going to work for most people. If you need help finding students or don’t want to bother with managing billing and payment, you’ll probably just want to pay the 15% and go with eduFire. But I doubt their flash app can beat having screen sharing where you can show the student whatever you want, whether it’s the lesson, searching for their favorite author’s works in Japanese on Amazon.co.jp or showing them show to use wwwjdic to find example sentences of something they just learned during the course of the conversation. You can even give them control briefly so they can have their hand at it.

Update: I’ve been checking out some videos and it does look like eduFire has screen sharing as well so it’s actually a really impressive little app they’ve developed.

Update 2: Actually, the app I think is from Adobe so it’s a nice big app that they’ve licensed or bought.

Next time, I’ll talk about the most important part which are the actual lessons themselves.

Here ya go, another resource for y’all

Oops! This was published by accident before I was even halfway done!

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll already know that I’m a major advocate of primary materials. This includes reading actual novels and other reading material that regular people read. I learned a whole bunch of stuff as a boy reading the Hardy Boys, Hercule Poirot, Chronicles of Narnia, and even (I’m ashamed to admit) Piers Anthony novels. Unfortunately, as an adult learning the a foreign language, a lot of the easier literature are geared for an audience of which you’re no longer a member of. While Agatha Christie is always good, I would hardly be able to stand the Hardy Boys now. And personally, reading children’s books in Japanese doesn’t really entertain me. Unfortunately, the adult books which are interesting are way too difficult to read for most people who are new to the language. So it’s nearly impossible to find reading materials with the right mix of difficulty and interest level. Don’t even get me started on the fake dialogues and boring readings in Japanese textbooks.

So I figured I’d try to write more stuff in Japanese to maybe fill in some of the gap. I can’t promise it’ll be interesting but I don’t think it’ll be any less interesting than the stuff in textbooks. I always feel some trepidation when I write in Japanese but I haven’t heard any crazy complaints and have received even some comments that it reads like a native wrote it. So I think it’s in pretty good shape. Even so, I can still use a lot more writing practice so it’s like killing two birds with one stone. Corrections are always welcome as always. Enjoy!

このブログをよく読んでいただいている方は、もうご存知だと思いますが、私は、外国語を勉強する時は、原文を読むことを強くお勧めしています。私自身も、「Hardy Boys」、「Hercule Poirot」、「Chronicles of Narnia」、 「Piers Anthony」など、色んな本を読んで非常にいい英語の勉強になりました。ただし、もう既に大人になってから外国語を勉強することになると、子供向けの作品は面白くなくなってしまいます。「Agatha Christie」の作品は大人向けなので、まだいいんですが、「Hardy Boys」は大人として読むのはちょっと辛いでしょう。それと同じように日本語で書かれている童話などは、個人的に興味ありません。しかし、大人向けの小説は、外国語を勉強している方には、たいてい難しすぎるのです。度々単語を調べないといけないのに、単語の漢字すら知らないし、熟語の読み方も当てなければいけない。単語ひとつだけを調べるのに何分かかってもおかしくないというのに、知らない単語だらけの文章を見ると、さすがに諦めたくなります。日本語学習者向けに適切な難易度で、かつ面白い読み物が少ないのが大きな問題だと思います。日本語学習者向けの読み物といえば、たいてい教科書に載っているわざとらしい会話やつまらない読み物ばかりです。

だから、その穴を少しだけ埋めるためにこのブログに日本語でもっと書こうと思います。面白さは保証できませんが、少なくても教科書に載っている物よりましかと思います。私ももっと書く練習をする必要があるので、一石二鳥です。訂正することろがあったら、ご遠慮なく教えてください。