Everyone says that learning Japanese is hard. Even the people in my class go on (to my annoyance) about how hard it is. Well the truth is: it isn't. It's as easy as you make it to be. For a log time I tried to learn from A Guide To Reading And Writing Japanese. I tried to learn straight out of the book and learning faceless strings of definitions.
Despite my obsession over them my Kanji was still pretty poor, I spend more time working over them than learning them in an effort to make a large, comprehensive alphabetical Japanese English dictionary, everybody seems to arrange them according to stroke order. This went on during my Japanese course. It wasn't until recently that I started looking and the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. They don't have any information regarding their syllabus on their website so my teacher directed me to another website that has their former vocabulary lists. My first step towards understanding how to learn Japanese came from transcribing the dialogues in Take Off In Japanese. This was a very useful exercise but gave me unaccountable head pains.
When it really took off was when I started to learn the now out dated, but probably still accurate, vocab lists from JLPTstudy.com. Every day I write out cards with the Japanese word and it's meaning on one side and the Japanese writing of the word on the other. Then I make sentences using the words. Since I know quite a few of them already once I've used a word I put it into one pile, if I didn't know it I put it into another pile. Then I come back to the ones I didn't know until I've remembered them. The key to doing this is to make it fun. That's right learning can actually be fun (unlike writing on a damned computer) When I write sentences I don't write ones that make sense or even pay proper attention to grammar. I even write sentences so they're surreal and absurd. If you make something interesting you'll learn it much better. I don't particularly think much of the classroom environment or conventional ideas of education. One of the major problems is the idea of notes. Notes are the bane of a serious student. The whole purpose of taking lessons is to remember things. Notes are only a secondary educational tool to use as back up to cover what you don't remember. The idea of revision is overrated too. It seems people spend time sitting through boring, pedestrian, often pedantic lessons and them worry over the last few months of the year when revising for their exams. A lot of emphasis is placed on working hard. In my experience learning would be better facilitated by making it easy.
The lack of a pressurised environment where exams are the ultimate goal is far better at letting people learn. I learn from home, casually and do about forty minutes work a day on vocab, including cutting bits of paper for my cue cards. This seems rather childish doing hand crafts but actually helps. Contrary to my earlier methods, an essential part of studying a subject is to work in a learning environment not a testing environment. As soon as you start to think about anything other that the actual subject you start to lose it. When learning a language don't wrack your brain trying to remember a word, just turn over the cue card and look at it. Never try to push yourself when learning. As soon as you do you make it a mental strain and that impedes your ability to learn. I find that by doing less than an hour off casual work I can keep it fresh and happily work on it every day (rather than approaching it in big chunks) and absorb information far better than I would if I was stressing myself.
In context I'm covering twenty-five Kanji a day. I may not learn them all perfectly, but at the end of the week I do a recap. It actually helps to have something going on in my life other than just learning from a 'book.' The fact that teachinng is far more effective when students are enjoying themselves led to a perverse notion that children should work and earn the right to an education. Education would be a privilege, and an enjoyable one, rather than a tedious chore forced on them. The fact is that I have to pay to take Japanese classes and my exams from my own pocket and appreciate the value of work and education a lot more as a result. Crucially I actually want to be in the class room. This is someone talking from a great amount of life experience but nevertheless working this way suits me far better than formal education did.
Here's my bitch. I hate maths. Most of all I hate the way it's taught. It's exemplary of the pedantic approach the academic establishment has. When I was at school doing a design and technology project the teacher seemed to be more concerned with the presentation of our work than with the work itself. This is one of the major issues I have with education. Once I was repremanded by a teacher for not taking notes. Issues at the time aside, the important thing is to let the information sink in. People approach lessons as time to take notes they can come back to later. Even in the library during revision time I see pupils writing out sets of notes from text books. Our history teacher during GCSE's gave us directions on how to write titles in correspondence to their importance. I may have taken such things a bit too seriously being rather literal minded at the time, but making notes is what the writers of text books should be doing. The pupil's job is to learn it and get all the information into their head. Learning should take place during term time, not a few months or weeks before final exams. By the time you get to the exams you should know everything. Having information on paper, no matter how well presented won't do you any good. In an exam all you're going to have is what you already know. Term time should be an intensive learning experience so that exams are easy, they are only a measure of your ability not the ultimate goal of learning. The ultimate goal of learning is to do just that not to get high grades in exams. Of course results are important, and the reason I'm learning the JLPT syllabus is because I want to take exams and get good results, but the real aim of the whole thing is to be proficient at writing and speaking Japanese.
Going back to why I hate maths apart from my personal grudge against the subject, two things stand out. Firstly is the ridiculous way of marking exams that puts method before results. It was the same in my electronics course work. Mark are given primarily for working not for getting the right answer. You could probably get every question wrong and still pass. How ludicrous is that! If someone handling the Apollo 13 mission (or any other space flight for that matter) made a mathematical error that caused the astronauts to be killed no one would give a fuck if they showed their working. Similarly in electronics coursework you're not marked on the basis of whether you managed to get your circuit to work (which is the point of the whole exercise- who's going to hire an electrician who can't construct a circuit properly) but how well you kept notes (there they are again) of what you did during the course of your work. They expect you to make a circuit, things to go wrong and you write about how you corrected them. You could be a prodigy who can make a complex circuit, working out the design completely in your head without making a single mistake and you would probably fail miserably.
Secondly is the way they teach people to solve maths problems. They always seem to work on the basis of a plodding, 'trench warfare' approach of working out the smallest units, then the next smallest ones until they finally get to the end. When doing maths away from the stultifying atmosphere of the classroom I tend to start with the largest part of the number and work towards the smallest. This way I know immediately roughly what the answer will be. Another key thing in maths is to take short cuts. I have to work out prices of numbers with awkward combinations. Say if you want to add £2.75 to a price, the conventional method is to add 5 p, then 70, then two pounds in a way that's very likely to cause numbers to overflow and add to the next figure in the calculation. The obvious way of doing this problem is to add £3, then take away 20 p, then 5p, or just take away 25 at once if it helps. Don't limit yourself by following a boring procedure when you know you can do better. Multiplication works the same way, look for short cuts. If multiplying a figure by 14, normally an awkward calculation, multiply the figure by ten to give you a rough idea of the outcome, add half that number again to effectively multiply by 15 and then take away the original figure to multiply by 14. Once I was thinking about how to work out the volume of a one foot cube of steel in metric measurements. A 1 foot cube is 12 x 12 x 12 inches. 12 x 12 is 144. So multiply that by 10 (to make 1440) then double the original figure and add that to the result. 1440 + 288, add three hundred (1744) subtract 12 (1732)
Then to work out how to convert that size into metric measurements the number of millimetres in an inch is 25.4. This plays into the hands of a clever mathematician. 25 x 25 is 225. To multiply that again by 25, divide it by four and multiply by a hundred. 200 divided by 4 is 50 (25 4's in a hundred, or just halve it and then half it again), 20 divided by 4 is 5, and 5 divided by four is 1 and a quarter. Use the way numbers relate to eachother to do sums faster. Think big and start with the whole of the result them whittle it down till have the right number. Doing maths isn't about being a human calculator, it's about using your imagination to make it easy and also more enjoyable. You can make pupils actually like a subject and they'll be better at it as a result.
