Long time no blog - apologies - I was tied up with a series of seminars at work for 3 weeks and then I had a week's holiday in Vietnam. And yes, I should have had a bunch of articles written and set to be automatically published but I am weak and let Nihongojouzu sit on the backburner - apologies.
The good news - I had a few bright ideas about language learning whilst travelling in Vietnam and I will focus on those ideas this week (yes - back to regular programming).
So first a simple hint about utilising human resources when studying. In Vietnam I was travelling with my girlfriend and because we squeezed a lot of travel into the week we had a fair amount of plane, train and bus time. Both of us are book worms so she had her nose in a Banana Yoshimoto 短編集 (collection of short stories) called デッドエンドの思い出and I had Harry Potter （賢者の石）. The often violent movement associated with riding Vietnamese trains and buses doesn't lend itself to taking copious notes so I changed my Harry Potter reading strategy. I kept making marks in the novel itself but instead of stopping every page and looking up words on my trusty Wordtank and then transcribing them to my notebook I took stock of the resources at hand and went with a more pragmatic approach:
I just asked my girlfriend what the words meant.
OK, "asking a Japanese person" is not exactly a breakthrough strategy of earthshattering proportions but in the context of reading for vocabulary I found it very effective because:
-I had immediate feedback
-I learnt the word in context
-I kept the flow of the story
-I got an explanation of how the word is used generally, not just in the instance at hand.
-For some explanations I had the added benefit of body-language aided demonstrations of certain verbs (in Harry Potter there are loads of actions associated with creeping, hiding, skulking etc)
-I got to hear the word, and more importantly, use it, for example "So could I say........."
-It was a lot more fun breaking up my reading by asking questions than it was simply looking words up, so I was able to maintain my motivation far more easily
Now there are limitations to this method - you do not need to be in Vietnam, nor on a bus - a quiet cafe in any country would suffice - but you do need a real, live native-speaker of Japanese (although in a pinch a highly proficient non-native speaker would do).
And you don't need them all the time - only when you come across a word you don't know - so your reading buddy needs a book too.
