Beginner's mind

Last September, I started learning Japanese through Duolingo.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grantuking from Cerrione, Italy, Flag of Japan (1), CC BY 2.0]

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I'm at least a little better than the average bear when it comes to languages, but still -- my graduate research focused entirely on Indo-European languages.  (More specifically, the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and the Celtic languages.)  Besides the Scandinavian languages and the ones found in the British Isles, I have a decent, if rudimentary, grounding in Greek and Latin, but still -- until last September, anything off of the Indo-European family tree was pretty well outside my wheelhouse.

The result is that there are features of Japanese that I'm struggling with, because they're so different from any other language I've studied.  Languages like Old English, Old Norse, Gaelic, Greek, and Latin are all inflected languages -- nouns change form depending on how they're being used in a sentence.  A simple example from Latin: in the two sentences "Canis felem momordit" ("The dog bit the cat") and "Felis canem momordit" ("The cat bit the dog"), you know who bit whom not by the order of the words, but by the endings.  The biter ends in -s, the bitee ends in -m.  The sentence would still be intelligible (albeit a little strange-sounding) if you rearranged the words.

Not so in Japanese.  In Japanese, not only does everything have to be in exactly the right order, just about every noun has to be followed by the correct particle, a short, more-or-less untranslatable word that tells you what the function of the previous word is.  They act a little like case endings do in inflected languages, and a little like prepositions in English, but with some subtleties that are different from either.  For example, here's a sentence in Japanese:

Tanaka san wa, sono sushiya de hirugohan o tabemashou ka?

Mr. Tanaka [particle indicating respect, always used when addressing another person] [particle indicating who you're talking to or the subject of the sentence], that sushi shop [particle indicating going to a place] lunch [particle indicating the object of the sentence] should we eat [particle indicating that what you just said was a question]? = "Mr. Tanaka, would you like to eat lunch at that sushi shop?"

Woe betide if you forget the particle or use the wrong one, or put things out of order.  Damn near every time I miss something on Duolingo and get that awful "clunk" noise that tells you that you screwed up, it's because I made a particle-related mistake.

And don't even get me started about the three different writing systems you have to learn.

This is the first time in a while I've been in the position of starting from absolute ground zero with something.  I guess I do have a bit of a leg up from having a background in other languages, but it's not really that much.  Being a rank beginner is humbling -- if you're going to get anywhere, you have to be willing to let yourself make stupid mistakes (sometimes over and over and over), laugh about it, and keep going.  I'm not really so good at that -- not only do I take myself way too damn seriously most of the time, I have that unpleasant combination of being (1) ridiculously self-critical and (2) highly competitive.  If you're familiar with Duolingo, you undoubtedly know about the whole XP (experience points) and "leagues" thing -- when you complete a lesson you earn XP (as long as you don't lose points in the lesson because you fucked up the particles again), and at the end of the week, you are ranked in XP against other learners, and depending on your score, you can move up into a new "league."

Or get "demoted."  Heaven forbid.  Given my personality, my attitude is "death before demotion."  As my wife pointed out, nothing happens if I get demoted -- it's not like the app reaches into my cerebrum and deletes what I've learned, or anything.  

She's right of course, but still.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna let myself get demoted.

So last week I reached "Diamond League," which is the top-tier.  Yay me, right?  Only now, there's nowhere left to go.  But I have to keep hammering at it, because if I don't I'll get dropped back into Obsidian League, and screw that sideways.

On the other hand, I keep at it because I also want to learn Japanese, right?  Of course right.

In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called shoshin (初心), usually translated as "beginner's mind."  It means approaching every endeavor as if you were just seeing it for the first time, with excitement, anticipation -- and no preconceived notions of how it should go.  This is a hard lesson for me, harder even than remembering kanji.  I've had to get used to taking it slowly, realizing that I'm not going to learn a difficult and unfamiliar language overnight, and to come at it from a standpoint of curiosity and enjoyment.

It's not a competition, however determined I am to stay in the "Diamond League."  The process and the knowledge and the achievement should be the point, not a focus on some arbitrary standard of where I think I should be.

And some day, I'd like to visit the lovely country of Japan, and (maybe?) be able to converse a little in their language.  

[Image licensed under the Creative CommonsKeihin Nike, Bunkyou Koishikawa Botanical Japanese Garden 1 (1), CC BY-SA 3.0]

When that day comes, I suspect if I can approach the whole thing with beginner's mind, I'll get a lot more out of the experience.  Until that time -- I could probably think of a few other aspects of my life that this principle could be applied to, as well.

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Memory boost

About two months ago I signed up with Duolingo to study Japanese.

I've been fascinated with Japan and the Japanese culture pretty much all my life, but I'm a total novice with the language, so I started out from "complete beginner" status.  I'm doing okay so far, although the fact that it's got three writing systems is a challenge, to put it mildly.  Like most Japanese programs, it's beginning with the hiragana system -- a syllabic script that allows you to work out the pronunciation of words -- but I've already seen a bit of katakana (used primarily for words borrowed from other languages) and even a couple of kanji (the ideographic script, where a character represents an entire word or concept).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 663highland, 140405 Tsu Castle Tsu MIe pref Japan01s, CC BY-SA 3.0]

While Duolingo focuses on getting you listening to spoken Japanese right away, my linguistics training has me already looking for patterns -- such as the fact that wa after a noun seems to act as a subject marker, and ka at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.  I'm still perplexed by some of the pronunciation patterns -- why, for example, vowel sounds sometimes don't get pronounced.  The first case of this I noticed is that the family name of the brilliant author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is pronounced /ak'tagawa/ -- the /u/ in the second syllable virtually disappears.  I hear it happening fairly commonly in spoken Japanese, but I haven't been able to deduce what the pattern is.  (If there is one.  If there's one thing my linguistics studies have taught me, it's that all languages have quirks.  Try explaining to someone new to English why, for instance, the -ough combination in cough, rough, through, bough, and thorough are all pronounced differently.) 

Still and all, I'm coming along.  I've learned some useful phrases like "Sushi and water, please" (Sushi to mizu, kudasai) and "Excuse me, where is the train station?" (Sumimasen, eki wa doko desu ka?), as well as less useful ones like "Naomi Yamaguchi is cute" (Yamaguchi Naomi-san wa kawaii desu), which is only critical to know if you have a cute friend who happens to be named Naomi Yamaguchi.

The memorization, however, is often taxing to my 63-year-old brain.  Good for it, I have no doubt -- a recent study found that being bi- or multi-lingual can delay the onset of dementia by four years or more -- but it definitely is a challenge.  I go through my hiragana flash cards at least once a day, and have copious notes for what words mean and for any grammatical oddness I happen to notice.  Just the sheer amount of memorization, though, is kind of daunting.

Maybe what I should do is find a way to change the context in which I have to remember particular words, phrases, or characters.  That seems to be the upshot of a study I ran into a couple of days ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about a study by a group from Temple University and the University of Pittsburgh about how to improve retention.

I'm sure all of us have experienced the effects of cramming for a test -- studying like hell the night before, and then you do okay on the test but a week later barely remember any of it.  This practice does two things wrong; not only stuffing all the studying into a single session, but doing it all the same way.

What this study showed was two factors that significantly improved long-term memory.  One was spacing out study sessions -- doing shorter sessions more often definitely helped.  I'm already approaching Duolingo this way, usually doing a lesson or two over my morning coffee, then hitting it again for a few more after dinner.  But the other interesting variable they looked at was that test subjects' memories improved substantially when the context was changed -- when, for example, you're trying to remember as much as you can of what a specific person is wearing, but instead of being shown the same photograph over and over, you're given photographs of the person wearing the same clothes but in a different setting each time.

"We were able to ask how memory is impacted both by what is being learned -- whether that is an exact repetition or instead, contains variations or changes -- as well as when it is learned over repeated study opportunities," said Emily Cowan, lead author of the study.  "In other words... we could examine how having material that more closely resembles our experiences of repetition in the real world -- where some aspects stay the same but others differ -- impacts memory if you are exposed to that information in quick succession versus over longer intervals, from seconds to minutes, or hours to days."

I can say that this is one of the things Duolingo does right.  Words are repeated, but in different combinations and in different ways -- spoken, spelled out using the English transliteration, or in hiragana only.  Rather than always seeing the same word in the same context, there's a balance between the repetition we all need when learning a new language and pushing your brain to generalize to slightly different usages or contexts.

So all things considered, Duolingo had it figured out even before the latest research came out.  I'm hoping it pays off, because my son and I would like to take a trip to Japan at some point and be able to get along, even if we don't meet anyone cute named Naomi Yamaguchi.  But I should wind this up, so for now I'll say ja ane, mata ashita (goodbye, see you tomorrow).

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