350

I’ve built up a backlog of links and whatnot. So it seems to me a good idea to clear the up in the remainder of this first year. Herewith the first:

For me, manga got me to change my attitude to Japanese. It was my wedge. And so on FluentU I see the potential to tap further in. I have not yet explored it. Today I’ll try and set aside some time.

In addition, the site also seems to promote ‘hacks’ and ‘essential phrases’. I’m not interested in them, though. I’m eclectically selective as that’s the only way to be.

349

Reading comes first. Before listening, in fact. That’s what I’ve concluded. At least, for myself.

I’m a visual learner and person. I need something to latch onto. Something I can look over and ‘visualize’. And so, I need the written text on which to overlay the spoken.

Which brings me back to Schliemann. His ‘Heinrich Maneuver’. He had it right originally. That’s the way to gain a foothold.

So I’m still at the stage of experimenting. The principles are there, for sure, but things are not nailed tightly down by any means yet. There’s still a good ways to go.

348

When I walk to or from work, I should use that opportunity lest too much time is ‘lost’. I ought to listen to a language or two for part of the way at least.

In terms of what I listen to, a good rule of thumb would be to listen to as much at a time, and at a level, that I can manage to do reading.

So with Dutch I can do anything. With German and Japanese, I can do a chapter’s worth of a familiar book. And with other languages, from a page to five minutes is ample.

347

With my English engineering lot, I’ll show how with English our approach needs to be individual. I’ll pick out 10 different factors and have students choose one of two options for each. That’ll give us 2 to the power of 10 combinations. And we can even reduce those combinations to a single number (up to 1024) by converting from binary.

It’s all very technical but interesting too, in a nerdish way. I’m getting a kick out of this, at any rate. And it ought to be the concrete cylinder fiasco of yesterday. Talk about organizing a piss-up in a brewery!

346

My current lot of Japanese short-course people are engineering students of one sort or another. And so, I plan to take that sort of approach to their English.

Today in class I shall demonstrate how I reduce an authentic text down to i+1 sentences. I’ll do that for the Japanese version of Harry Potter. Then I’ll give them an Enid Blyton book, The Adventurous Four, to try for themselves. 

While they’re doing that I’ll be able to assess their speaking one-by-one. Their reading, listening and writing have already been done. Again, I’ll go over their results from an engineer’s perspective.

345

I have recently completed updating my list of ‘acquired’ music albums—over 2000 of them. Because I went through it in alphabetical order, a group called Zelda, a all-Japanese, all-girl group from the 1980s was one of the last that I organized. 

Much of their stuff is on Youtube as individual songs. I have many of them, which I’m matching to the track lists of their 10-odd albums. And ‘odd’ is the operative word. They sound a little like the B52s, and their song titles are a weird mix of Japanese and English. 

Their music could help with my Japanese.

344

After having gone through 6 chapters of HP1, collecting 842 sentences along the way, a better idea of how to do it came to me.

I’d been jumping back and forth between two documents, cutting from one, and pasting to the other. But there’s a better way. I simply stay with a copy of the original and delete the text that I don’t want. I remain with a numbered list of i+1 sentences.

What could be simpler? What else do I need to say—I’m an ideas man through and through, man!

Next, I’ll develop the idea of ‘Language Up!’.

343

Any approach to learning a language must be individual and therefore unique. And that’s why every system falls short. Every method is suboptimal. There is no ‘best practice’. That’s a myth.

About 10 days ago, we set up a conversation session between 2 groups of students. It went well. And then yesterday we repeated the experiment.

One student quietly asked me if he could opt out. Another student had gone to the trouble of preparing Korean rice balls for 20 people to try. One teacher’s class was a little wild. Another teacher held the reins more firmly. We’re all different.

342 Alan Watts

Language comes along before grammar. A child picks up language by ear, and on going to school is amazed and horrified to discover this language has grammar. Lots of people in the world did not know they had grammar until some anthropologist told them, having discovered the rules of their so-called primitive languages.
Even the greatest neurologists don’t know how the brain works and they are the first to admit it. They don’t know how we manage to be conscious, how we make decisions; we just do it, in the same way we move our fingers without knowing any physiology.

341

Today, a couple of things.

At work, we presented our classes’ initial feedback this semester. My class want to improve their reading. They say they’re not good at it. They want to be trained how to do it. So today I reinforce that the only way to improve is to practice.

I’m not happy with Any Language I Like. The concept isn’t likely to grab people. In a moment of inspiration I got the idea to write How NOT to Learn a Foreign Language instead. It feel more snappy, tight and funny. It ought to catch people’s attention more readily.

340

Quite easily and naturally I attended to several languages (Japanese, German and Dutch) in the course of the day. Things simply fell into place. I had my Kindle at hand. I acted out of habit. These are good indications.

So what I plan to do is to utilize these strategies in another area of my life that needs them—sorely so. I’m talking about that, for the want of a better word, I’ll refer to as my tendency to procrastinate.

That has been my major issue for as long as I can remember. Let’s teach this old dog new tricks. 

339

I’ve just finished my first home run book in German! Well, actually it’s more of a short story—about 20 pages long. It’s Dorothy Johnson’s tale: A Man Called Horse. In German, Ein Mann namens Pferd.

(Enough to base a movie on.)

Anyway, I’m chuffed! I feel great.

I did it the ‘Heinrich Maneuver’ style—that is, I read it sentence by sentence. First in English, then in German. That worked very well.

Next, I’ll read another story—there are 8 stories in the book—the shortest one: Dog Eater (Hundefresser). And I may copy out some i+1 sentences too.

338

German featured on the radar today. At mum’s, after e-cycling there for the first time, I browsed Omas Tips Apfelessig. Then, detouring home via the Tip Shop, I picked up 5 books for a dollar. And three of those were in German too. 

There’s an SF trilogy by Marrion Zimmer Bradley, Alice by EV Cunningham, and Marga Berck’s Sommer in Lesmona.

The other books—Pippi Goes Abroad, and The Secret Garden are handy to have too as they are often translated.

It’s been a good haul. Now all I must to do is to get stuck in and read them.

337

I’ve more of less completed Any Language I Like. I’ll turn it into a PDF file. I’ll set up a landing page. And then, I’ll put more of my time into language acquisition of my own.

It’s like life, you see.

Seeing the whole before you, you can get overwhelmed. That feeling can be paralyzing. But between all or nothing there’s a better way. One by one you can attend to the various things that you wish to get done.

So that’s the mantra. That’s how I’ll proceed from here on out. Starting with a trip on my new Ebike.

336

Regarding the ‘how-to’ section of my booklet, Any Language I Like, I’ll begin by describing Schliemann’s original ‘Heinrich Maneuver’. I’ll take that concept and develop it. I’ll expand its basic principle—that you ‘shoehorn in’ another language with your own language’s grammar. I’ll introduce the need for listening so as to powerfully combine skills. I’ll explain that listening maintains the speed that you need so as to elicit meaning from text. And I’ll demonstrate that you need to be a little disoriented so as not to over-analyze. When you balance the left and right brains, you promote acquisition over learning.

335

In class yesterday we hit on a winning formula.

We had the Level 2 class join in with a group of 13 to 17-year-old Japanese girls. They are here on a 2-week short course and have, up to now, been reluctant to use English. But by placing them in groups of between 3 and 5, and then rotating partners every 10 minutes or so, everyone spoke animatedly for a full hour. And everyone reported back that they had both enjoyed the experience and found it useful.

That’s very interesting. Personally, I don’t think I’d be as keen. And then again—

334

I’m about to write up the ‘how-to’ section of Any Language I Like.

I see that I’ve done that before—when I attempted to squeeze everything I knew in a one-hour lecture. So of course, I thought about copy-and-pasting. No good.

There was too much there. There were too many steps. It was all too involved.

The thing to remember is that people are shell-shocked. They are damaged goods. They are crippled with myths and misconceptions. Really, they need to be taken in hand wearing veritable kid-gloves.

In short, I’ll just give them the gist. I’ll offer them an invitation.

333

My day has zones—time zones. And the question is: In which zone do my languages fit?

First thing in the morning I like to create. Then, I limit myself to an hour or two to do what I must. After that, I’m a free man! I potter as I please.

I guess that languages belong in the afternoon. They aren’t a duty nor a drudge, yet neither, not realistically, are they pure entertainment. They don’t exactly involve effort. And yet there’s concentration and brainwork going in in the picture.

Actually, that ‘hour or two’ is of greater concern. Shhhh!

332

I love a good project. It’s my aim to create one for each language. How do I do that?

Well, having identified the most important principles, and having unearthed the best resources, I’ll devise the most addictive activities.

I’ve been there and done that with Japanese. With that language, my ‘in’ is the written word—specifically kanji. I have devised my own method for identification. And I’ve been known to spend hours getting the computer to find sentences with particular kanji (or combinations thereof). 

So I’ll start from there. I’ll set up the best thing that I can think of.

331

More than most (because I switched languages several times) I remember being read to. I know what it’s like to get to grips with the written language, and with a second language. It’s all connected with both parents and story books. And that feeling, that experience, is very different to that of the adult foreign-language learner.

I had that initial bond. I was totally at ease, on top of which comprehension could form—the icing on the cake. I was secure from the start.

But others usually start out cold—cold turkey. Their ears and eyes strain in the dark.

330

For me, being organized is active. It’s not just planning, but attending. I want to get things done—things that I want to, and things that I ought to, in balance.

So let me first set up my booklet: Any Language I Like. Once that’s done, I’ll concentrate on a language or two of my own.

I’ll pick the best books, the best activities. I want to have to limit myself to an hour per day on them. It should be addicting.

That’s that area of my life. The rest of it ought to follow as a matter of course.

329

Just like in the movie, I see language ‘ghosts’ everywhere.

In A Man Called Horse, after 4 months of nothing meaning anything, the white man felt that his ears had become unstopped. His understanding was so sudden.

In Circle of Friends, a group returns from a summer in Spain Italy and France. The only thing they have in common is how little of the language they had learned. 

And in Alan Watts’s autobiography, In My Own Way, he claims that anything in English takes twice the time to express in German and Japanese, but only half the time in Chinese.

328

There’ve been a couple of pleasing outcomes from yesterday’s bonanza of books. Pleasing, from the points of view of me, Sachi and my class.

Sachi is back into Japanese. The manga that I got are aimed at children. They consists of 4-panel comic strips. Sachi had almost finished the first, so she took both the first and the second to school so that she wouldn’t have to wait.

Another book consists of cowboy and indian stories. I recognized ‘A Man Called Horse’. Odd pages have English; even pages have German. I’ll survey my class how best to use this book.

327

I don’t need more books. So yesterday I got some. Twice.

I’d visited mum in Mosgiel. I’d resisted calling in at the tip shop, but then was passing by Bargain Barn anyway. I got $8 worth of Danish (I think), Swedish and German. Two of the books are for mum, anyway.

And then later, Mami told me about the new op shop in North East Valley. I had a look. Mami had heard from Rie that they had a few manga for sale.

This time, I got $7 worth. Including some stationery for Sachi. She got into the manga too.

326

I had a go at the 100 most-common words in Spanish. I started listed them, with their English equivalents. But that was a mistake, as it quickly bored me.

Out of context, I couldn’t recognize them. And yet in context I do. Some of them repeated. Some of them had no English word that corresponded—just stuff like ‘the 3rd person singular indirect object pronoun’ sort of thing. Stuff that. It just got annoying, so by the time I got down to number 30 or 40 I quit.

But ‘no problemo’. I just need to potter about in another style.

325

When The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck mentioned Alan Watts, I took notice.

In Watts’s autobiography, In My Own Way, there are at least two references to foreign languages.

Watts translates quotations “because most of my American readers, especially the younger, do not understand French, or any language other than their own”.

At school, he “noticed that the muscular, athletic boys had an extreme and uncomfortable resistance to the correct pronunciation of French. They would grunt and mumble over their textbooks, absolutely refuse to articulate the French r, and seemed to feel that speaking French properly was effeminate.”

324

I had a dream about doing language. With Spanish I was working out the frequency of its letters. In English, it’s etaonish... etc. How might that differ from Spanish?

Another thing that I want to do is check is the frequency of each of the 100-most-common words.

I have a list of them. I don’t know them all yet. What I’ll do is to use HP1 and do a search through it.

All nice nerdy behavior that suits a Sunday. 

It’s fun to follow your whims and inclinations—see where they lead you. That’s the story of my life, really.

323

I’m a muesli man. I’ve the classic muesli-mix problem. The ingredients of my life are many. Therefore, while I wish to spend significant fractions of time on them all, that’s impossible. You can’t spend 20% of your time on over 5 elements.

I’ve numerous books on the go. I dabble in a dozen languages (or want to). I have a number of unfinished projects and multiple interests. It a good life, a full life—crammed and jammed.

I look back over every period of my life with affection. I’d like to be able to do that for these days too.

322

Some unknown glitch causes our kitchen clock to stop for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. It says 5 a.m. whereas it’s actually past 7. I couldn’t get my 100-word post done. But luckily I already had the content ready.

By the time Sachi reaches 8 next September, I’ll have spent 5 years on language acquisition. That’ll be a good time to move on. And that means that I will want to have everything written up. 

Am I going to pack up all my foreign books into boxes? Which languages will I continue to read in?

321

Reading through John Michael Greer’s new blog, I find mention of Joseph Jacotot. 

“He was assigned to teach a class in the Alsace; half the pupils spoke only French, half only German. In desperation, he had them memorize the same passages of prose in both languages, and found that they very quickly became bilingual. He proceeded to create a method on that basis. In my experience, it works very well — your brain very quickly picks up the tricks of grammar and syntax by memorizing complete passages, and since you know what’s being said, it’s easy to absorb the whole pattern.” 

320

My next project will be my book: Any Language I Like. To write it, I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

Yesterday I demonstrated to a group from Hiroshima how to 1) brainstorm 2) do a first draft, and 3) attend to grammar. So I’ll knuckle down and do that too.

I must write, the way I read, using every free moment. I can’t afford to wait for times that everything is right.

I must live and work to conserve energy. I need enough left over.

It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be great. I’ll start today!