And on the seventh day, God rested. But not Glowing Face Man! Welcome to the one week mark in the French Revolution, my tireless crusade to learn as much French as I can cram in my brain in a few hours a day for 30 days.
INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD
I just finished changing my keyboard settings so I can type French àççénts. It's not hard, for example to type this è, I just push ` and then e. The instructions for setting up the International Keyboard for Windows XP are here. But, one little catch for me. Step 8 on that list instructs you to set the default starting language to "United States- International". All well and good if your original default starting language was plain old vanilla "United States". But for me, the original language was of course, Japanese. Basically, it seems that unless I'm missing something, you can't have International keyboard support (for French accents) and Japanese keyboard support (for Japanese) at the same time, you have to go into control panel to switch between the two. Not too big a deal, I guess...
By the way, if you're learning any foreign language with exotic characters, even just the Spanish ñ, I encourage you to look into how to efficiently type those characters. When I first started studying Japanese, I didn't know how to type Japanese characters. I'd just copy-and-paste things to make flashcards and/or communicate with people. And if I wanted to type something original, that meant painstakingly finding, then copying-and-pasting each individual character. With my U.S.-bought computer, it was kind of a pain to get Japanese IME support (and it involved borrowing a Windows XP disk from a friend since you need one to install Microsoft's Japanese IME). But it was worth it a million times over. In retrospect, I should have done that as one of my very first steps when I first set out to learn Japanese.
FRENCH CHRONO TRIGGER
So besides the general wisdom I just gave you, the specific reason I set up the French accent support is because I'm gonna do some sentence mining from a source which I can't copy-and-paste. A French fan-translation of the old Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger is a classic RPG, a game where you can walk around and talk to people as well as just fight. It has a very compelling story, in fact when I was in junior high I even adapted the whole story (with modifications) into novel form. There was a misunderstanding and my parents thought it was original... and I didn't want to correct them because they were so happy about it... ugh.
In general, one fantastic source for sentence-mining is old media (video games, movies, songs, books) translated into the target language. You see, there may not be English translations, but that's okay because you already know the story. For the answer side of the flashcard, rather than write "You shall not pass!", you can write "(Gandalf shouting at the Balrog on the bridge in Moria)". It's just as good as the English translation, provided you actually know the storyline... in fact, it's better, because the English translation by itself provides virtually no context!
For Chrono Trigger, I'm particularly familiar with the storyline, because, not only was I in love with the game as a kid and played it many times with my friends, but I've already sentence-mined the original Japanese version of it, so even if I tried to forget it, my Japanese SRS deck wouldn't let me ;)
Incidentally, since the storyline involves time travel, Chrono Trigger is a particularly interesting source for sentence-mining (at least for Japanese, not sure about French yet). You get modern language in modern time, robotic language in the distant future (for Japanese, that means everything's in katakana), archaic language for the past, and even caveman language for the very distant past.
I decided to add French Chrono Trigger as a sentence-source because I noticed my main source, Tex's French Grammar, was lowering my consciousness too much, I was pretty much just copying-and-pasting. A robot could do that, and you should never do work that a robot could do.
Now, I have an excuse to replay an old favorite game, and have some fun, and everyone knows you learn best when you have fun.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
I'm using a flashcard program, called Anki. It's one of many programs called spaced repetition systems (or SRS for short). Basically, I put the flashcards on there, and then when I review them, I rate them. The program uses my ratings to determine what cards I should see, optimizing the whole flashcard process.
I started out by reviewing the new audio pronunciation cards I made yesterday. It took 14 minutes. My pronunciation is pretty bad, but slowly getting better. I proceeded from there to review the main deck, the sentence deck. There were 237 sentences scheduled for review, and the review took 52 minutes. Finally, reviewing the pronunciation fact cards (17 scheduled) took under 2 minutes.
The pronunciation fact cards provide an illustration of one of the virtues of spaced repetition systems like Anki. SRS users can easily miss this, because we're usually adding new cards as we review old ones, but if you stop adding new cards, the time it takes to do a daily review of the old cards quickly goes down toward zero. This makes an SRS good not just for learning new facts, but also for maintaining old facts. I can go months or years, for example, without studying any new Japanese, and spending only a small amount of time per day (smaller and smaller every day) reviewing with the SRS, and I'll basically stay at a fixed level of Japanese knowledge.
SENTENCE MINING
I finished sentence-mining the verbs chapter of Tex's French Grammar, adding 71 new sentence cards to the sentence deck, which took 26 minutes. Then, I did something a little more fun, I sentence-mined a bootleg, emulated French translation of Chrono Trigger. Since you can't copy-and-paste from an emulated SNES game, I had to type these sentences manually, which was excellent practice on the spiffy new Ìnterñatiònal Kéyböard. (I wish I'd known about this international keyboard option back when I was making pinyin flashcards for Chinese 101!) I played and sentence-mined for 34 minutes to get 20 cards. Not so efficient as copying-and-pasting, but much more fun. And the sentences are really high quality since I know the context so well.
WHAT'S HARDER, JAPANESE OR FRENCH?
Of course, the official popular agreement is that Japanese is much harder than French. But let's break it down into more detail.
Vocabulary
With French, the vocabulary is way easier. However, this is deceptive. Certainly when I'm reading French, I can "understand" it pretty easily, by noticing cognates. But when I comprehend French writing through this means, I'm not really comprehending it in a French way. I'm just mentally translating it word-by-word into English and then understanding it in an English way. That's not really knowing French. Furthermore, the cognates are useless for production: while I can instantly recognize a cognate when I see it, I have no idea a priori what English words have French cognates, or how to transform an English word into its French cognate.
Writing System
Obviously French wins hands down here. Even with the most sophisticated technology for learning Japanese characters, there are about 2000 of them to learn. In the French writing system, there's almost nothing new-- mainly just some accents and this weird ç thing. On the other hand, once you learn the kanji, it's tremendously helpful for learning everything else about Japanese. Whereas French words (like English words) are just literally alphabet soup, Japanese words are highly structured and the characters themselves provide meaning.
Grammar
Japanese has the harder grammar by far. Consider this. For Chinese, a learner needs to learn a lot more Chinese characters than a Japanese learner needs to learn Japanese characters. Something like 8,000 or 10,000 Chinese characters. And yet, experts often consider Japanese the harder language. If it's not the characters (where Chinese is harder), where does all that hardness come from? The grammar. Me, I say the difficulty of Japanese grammar is a little overrated. To a space alien with no knowledge of any Earth languages, English and French have much harder grammar than Japanese. Japanese grammar is extremely logical and regular. But of course, to an English speaker, Japanese has the harder grammar since English and French are much closer related.
Conjugations, declensions, etc.
Japanese is definitely easier when it comes to conjugations, declensions, and so on. See my article: Irregular Verbs in Japanese. To sum it up: there aren't many.
Pronunciation
When it comes to pronunciation, French is harder, hands down. If you don't count tiny little differences, the Japanese sound system is almost entirely a subset of the English sound system. Depending how you count, there are only 3 or 4 or 5 really new sounds you have to learn as an English speaker learning Japanese. With French, on the other hand, there are tons. Also, the Japanese alphabet (or, technically, syllabary) is a pretty cut-and-dry one-kana-one-syllable sort of affair. Not like French with all its mute letters and multiple sounds for each letter.
Overall
With French, it's easier in the beginning, because of all the free cognates. With Japanese, it's easier in the end because of the regularity, structure, and logic. Of course, both languages are easy in the sense that a child born in either culture will naturally learn the language with ease.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 6
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 8
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
Foreign Language Sentences With No English Translation
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Real Life Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS)?
Connections Between Japanese And Buddhism
INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD
I just finished changing my keyboard settings so I can type French àççénts. It's not hard, for example to type this è, I just push ` and then e. The instructions for setting up the International Keyboard for Windows XP are here. But, one little catch for me. Step 8 on that list instructs you to set the default starting language to "United States- International". All well and good if your original default starting language was plain old vanilla "United States". But for me, the original language was of course, Japanese. Basically, it seems that unless I'm missing something, you can't have International keyboard support (for French accents) and Japanese keyboard support (for Japanese) at the same time, you have to go into control panel to switch between the two. Not too big a deal, I guess...
By the way, if you're learning any foreign language with exotic characters, even just the Spanish ñ, I encourage you to look into how to efficiently type those characters. When I first started studying Japanese, I didn't know how to type Japanese characters. I'd just copy-and-paste things to make flashcards and/or communicate with people. And if I wanted to type something original, that meant painstakingly finding, then copying-and-pasting each individual character. With my U.S.-bought computer, it was kind of a pain to get Japanese IME support (and it involved borrowing a Windows XP disk from a friend since you need one to install Microsoft's Japanese IME). But it was worth it a million times over. In retrospect, I should have done that as one of my very first steps when I first set out to learn Japanese.
FRENCH CHRONO TRIGGER
So besides the general wisdom I just gave you, the specific reason I set up the French accent support is because I'm gonna do some sentence mining from a source which I can't copy-and-paste. A French fan-translation of the old Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger is a classic RPG, a game where you can walk around and talk to people as well as just fight. It has a very compelling story, in fact when I was in junior high I even adapted the whole story (with modifications) into novel form. There was a misunderstanding and my parents thought it was original... and I didn't want to correct them because they were so happy about it... ugh.
In general, one fantastic source for sentence-mining is old media (video games, movies, songs, books) translated into the target language. You see, there may not be English translations, but that's okay because you already know the story. For the answer side of the flashcard, rather than write "You shall not pass!", you can write "(Gandalf shouting at the Balrog on the bridge in Moria)". It's just as good as the English translation, provided you actually know the storyline... in fact, it's better, because the English translation by itself provides virtually no context!
For Chrono Trigger, I'm particularly familiar with the storyline, because, not only was I in love with the game as a kid and played it many times with my friends, but I've already sentence-mined the original Japanese version of it, so even if I tried to forget it, my Japanese SRS deck wouldn't let me ;)
Incidentally, since the storyline involves time travel, Chrono Trigger is a particularly interesting source for sentence-mining (at least for Japanese, not sure about French yet). You get modern language in modern time, robotic language in the distant future (for Japanese, that means everything's in katakana), archaic language for the past, and even caveman language for the very distant past.
I decided to add French Chrono Trigger as a sentence-source because I noticed my main source, Tex's French Grammar, was lowering my consciousness too much, I was pretty much just copying-and-pasting. A robot could do that, and you should never do work that a robot could do.
Now, I have an excuse to replay an old favorite game, and have some fun, and everyone knows you learn best when you have fun.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
I'm using a flashcard program, called Anki. It's one of many programs called spaced repetition systems (or SRS for short). Basically, I put the flashcards on there, and then when I review them, I rate them. The program uses my ratings to determine what cards I should see, optimizing the whole flashcard process.
I started out by reviewing the new audio pronunciation cards I made yesterday. It took 14 minutes. My pronunciation is pretty bad, but slowly getting better. I proceeded from there to review the main deck, the sentence deck. There were 237 sentences scheduled for review, and the review took 52 minutes. Finally, reviewing the pronunciation fact cards (17 scheduled) took under 2 minutes.
The pronunciation fact cards provide an illustration of one of the virtues of spaced repetition systems like Anki. SRS users can easily miss this, because we're usually adding new cards as we review old ones, but if you stop adding new cards, the time it takes to do a daily review of the old cards quickly goes down toward zero. This makes an SRS good not just for learning new facts, but also for maintaining old facts. I can go months or years, for example, without studying any new Japanese, and spending only a small amount of time per day (smaller and smaller every day) reviewing with the SRS, and I'll basically stay at a fixed level of Japanese knowledge.
SENTENCE MINING
I finished sentence-mining the verbs chapter of Tex's French Grammar, adding 71 new sentence cards to the sentence deck, which took 26 minutes. Then, I did something a little more fun, I sentence-mined a bootleg, emulated French translation of Chrono Trigger. Since you can't copy-and-paste from an emulated SNES game, I had to type these sentences manually, which was excellent practice on the spiffy new Ìnterñatiònal Kéyböard. (I wish I'd known about this international keyboard option back when I was making pinyin flashcards for Chinese 101!) I played and sentence-mined for 34 minutes to get 20 cards. Not so efficient as copying-and-pasting, but much more fun. And the sentences are really high quality since I know the context so well.
WHAT'S HARDER, JAPANESE OR FRENCH?
Of course, the official popular agreement is that Japanese is much harder than French. But let's break it down into more detail.
Vocabulary
With French, the vocabulary is way easier. However, this is deceptive. Certainly when I'm reading French, I can "understand" it pretty easily, by noticing cognates. But when I comprehend French writing through this means, I'm not really comprehending it in a French way. I'm just mentally translating it word-by-word into English and then understanding it in an English way. That's not really knowing French. Furthermore, the cognates are useless for production: while I can instantly recognize a cognate when I see it, I have no idea a priori what English words have French cognates, or how to transform an English word into its French cognate.
Writing System
Obviously French wins hands down here. Even with the most sophisticated technology for learning Japanese characters, there are about 2000 of them to learn. In the French writing system, there's almost nothing new-- mainly just some accents and this weird ç thing. On the other hand, once you learn the kanji, it's tremendously helpful for learning everything else about Japanese. Whereas French words (like English words) are just literally alphabet soup, Japanese words are highly structured and the characters themselves provide meaning.
Grammar
Japanese has the harder grammar by far. Consider this. For Chinese, a learner needs to learn a lot more Chinese characters than a Japanese learner needs to learn Japanese characters. Something like 8,000 or 10,000 Chinese characters. And yet, experts often consider Japanese the harder language. If it's not the characters (where Chinese is harder), where does all that hardness come from? The grammar. Me, I say the difficulty of Japanese grammar is a little overrated. To a space alien with no knowledge of any Earth languages, English and French have much harder grammar than Japanese. Japanese grammar is extremely logical and regular. But of course, to an English speaker, Japanese has the harder grammar since English and French are much closer related.
Conjugations, declensions, etc.
Japanese is definitely easier when it comes to conjugations, declensions, and so on. See my article: Irregular Verbs in Japanese. To sum it up: there aren't many.
Pronunciation
When it comes to pronunciation, French is harder, hands down. If you don't count tiny little differences, the Japanese sound system is almost entirely a subset of the English sound system. Depending how you count, there are only 3 or 4 or 5 really new sounds you have to learn as an English speaker learning Japanese. With French, on the other hand, there are tons. Also, the Japanese alphabet (or, technically, syllabary) is a pretty cut-and-dry one-kana-one-syllable sort of affair. Not like French with all its mute letters and multiple sounds for each letter.
Overall
With French, it's easier in the beginning, because of all the free cognates. With Japanese, it's easier in the end because of the regularity, structure, and logic. Of course, both languages are easy in the sense that a child born in either culture will naturally learn the language with ease.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 6
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 8
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
Foreign Language Sentences With No English Translation
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
Real Life Tool-Assisted Speedrun (TAS)?
Connections Between Japanese And Buddhism
Posts
2 comments:
Hee! I also sentence-mined Chrono Trigger! ;) I used the German translation. I've also gotten some sentences from Terranigma.
Unfortunately, now a bulk of my flashcard sentences are along the lines of "Your Highness!" and "Oh, no! What have you done?!" and "Some weapons have hidden powers."
C'est la vie!
In Windows you can quickly switch keyboards with ALT+SHIFT combination.
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