How to Really Learn a Language

Though languages are required subjects, and most Americans study a foreign language for several years in school, relatively few of us can actually speak or read the languages we studied. Over the past several years, I've given a lot of thought of how to really learn a language. I've tried a number of approaches, ranging from regular classroom instruction, online classes such as Mango and DuoLingo, a variety of flashcard systems, and an increasing variety of for-natives-by-natives materials. I've also read a variety of things from a variety of people discussing the best ways to learn languages. There are a number of themes that come out as I've read things and these things seem to be born out in my experience as I've made real and consistent progress toward becoming really conversational in my adopted language.  I've come to the conclusion: Typical classroom instruction is simply not enough. To learn a language is a project that is bigger and deeper and wider than you can possibly cover in your average class. 

If you think about English, it's like an ocean. We are constantly immersed: the conversations around us, the signs, the inserts in the packages we buy, the people we talk to, the books and music and other media we listen to --most of it is all English all the time. The level of exposure, the number of hours we hear in a year, the number of words we meet in a day... it's staggering.

But we think that we can learn a new language with a few minutes from an online lesson.
20 minutes. Check.
Marked that box.
Learned my language for the day.
Next!

Odds are good that, whatever lessons you use, a sizable portion of the lesson itself is English explanations. So not even the whole 20 minutes (or however long) is going to be in the new language.

This is not enough.
To learn a language is to embrace a culture.

A serious effort at learning a language will change you. It will change your home, introduce new music, new books, new sounds, new smells and flavors. It will probably gradually impact the things you hang on your walls, the way that you decorate. It will change the way you think; literally give you new ways to shape the thoughts you think, ways that you cannot think with English alone. It will teach you new ways to understand the world. Offer new relationships.

It's a remarkable thing, learning new ways to think about the world is, and to get this remarkable blessing, you must put forth significant effort, sustained, over a significant period of time.

Learning a language is much easier with a community -even a very small community- of people to speak with, but in the age of the Internet, if you are willing to go the extra mile, you can go very far without any Real Local Humans to speak to, if you must, as long as there is enough media online.

One of the secrets that parents who successfully pass heritage languages to children they are raising far from their family's homeland is this: mass exposure. Multiple hours per day where they are interacting with their children in the heritage language. One of the adult learners that I read about talked about listening to 10,000 hours of his new language. I am currently about 100 pages into a goal to read 10,000 pages in Japanese. (I'm reading comic books, for the most part, with lots of help from my phone's dictionary. But I'll get better and read more "respectable" things after I get further into the project.) It's the mass of exposure that the classes miss. If, in the course of a school year, you have a 30 minute lesson on your language every day, even calculating generously, assuming that the entire time is all in the new language, at the end of the year you've only accumulated about 90 hours of exposure.

But. Don't let that mass of time needed overwhelm you. You do NOT have to eat the elephant in one sitting to be successful! 

Turn on the (internet) radio.
Listen to the scriptures in your new language; it's really easy to switch languages in the app.
Find a food/travel/painting/whatever channel on YouTube.
Learn a folksong or hymn.
Listen to the news.
Try a yoga workout.
Listen to the same stuff over and over: repetition is important.

It doesn't matter if you don't understand at first. Keep up your book work --take that class, the one I said isn't enough. You'll learn the grammar there, and that will help. You'll get a start on some vocabulary there, and that will help. But do other things, too; don't let the class be your only contact with the language.

Babies are born with the capacity to distinguish all the sounds in all the languages. I have no idea how researchers figured that one out! But apparently, as they are exposed to the languages that are usual in their home, they gradually loose the unused sounds, and it's typical for adult learners to struggle to distinguish sounds that do not exist in their language. Japanese isn't that different from English, as far as sounds used, but I can remember distinctly when, after several years of listening to the language regularly, it was like my ear "tuned in" to the "station", and all the sudden I could hear more and distinguish more than I'd previously been able to. That was exciting! I am convinced that it's the mass of listening over time that did it: I try to make sure that I listen for at least a few minutes every single day.

One thing that happens is that I'll listen to something for a while, and then I'll find something else that catches my interest, and listen to that. Sometimes, I like to go back to old things that I haven't listened to in a while. Going back again later is fun because I've learned more since the last time, and I'll usually find that my comprehension is higher than it used to be: concrete evidence of improvement is often hard to come by, but if I understand more today than I did 6 months ago, that's clear evidence of progress!

To really learn a language, you'll need to gradually move some of your regular actives into that language.

One of the first ones I've moved into Japanese is my basic scripture reading. "Study projects" I still usually do in English. But my basic scripture reading, the one thing that I'm careful to never miss, but that I don't require to be long, is in Japanese. This was really hard at first! But with time and practice, it got better. Last fall, when President Nelson challenged us to read the whole Book of Mormon by the end of the year, I thought it was too much, too hard. I wasn't going to try, until the Holy Ghost suggested that it was possible. I finished a little late, but I finished. I really can do all things through Christ! So I moved that into Japanese. Now, I've started making little inroads into the New Testament. And scripture study in a second language is pretty amazing.

Sometimes, I do watercolor tutorials in Japanese. Even when my comprehension isn't awesome, because it's so visual, the tutorials are still helpful. And I learn a few words here and a few words there, which is how they accumulate. Some of my reading, I've moved into Japanese. Other than scripture, it's just fluff: even comic books count as self-education, if they're in your foreign language! We'll include a couple of hymns and folksongs in Japanese this year as part of school. One of the things that heritage families talk about is the importance of speaking the language in various different situations, otherwise their kids learn the words used around the house --but end up weak on the words at the grocery store or the park, for instance. So as your vocabulary grows, it's important to continually challenge yourself by seeking out new areas to explore.

Changing habitual ways of doing things takes time and requires intentional effort over a period of time. But building your language into your habits is critical to actually becoming bilingual. Happily, habits are built one decision, one action at a time. By small and simple things, great things -like learning a language- are accomplished. 

What will you do in your second language today?

Making it Safe to Not Know

I no longer remember precisely what it was that got me thinking about it, but:

It's really important that we create an environment where it is safe to not know something.

Not in a neglectful kind of way, where we're complacently not trying, but in a the sort of way where it's ok not to know yet, and it's so ok to ask questions, to try out incomplete ideas, to say the sentence half in your native language, half in the one you're studying, to take a stab at it, and try -even knowing that your effort is going to be half-baked and incomplete.

Because there is so much learning in the trying.

More on Conversion

After what I learned about conversion last time, I wanted to know what kinds of words had been translated as "conversion" when the New Testament came to us from the Greek. I'd found that our one word, conversion, had been translated into Japanese into four different words, which each brought their own interesting layers of meaning to the concept, and I wondered what kinds of Greek words had given rise to these translations.

Not surprisingly, I found four different Greek words.

The first word (and the only one that I'm looking at in this post) is used in a number of different passages, which all draw on a passage from Isaiah 6:9:

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And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.

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This verse is referenced in various ways; there's the four verses that use the most common Greek root of conversion and also reference Isaiah 6:9:

I've Gone to Japan

So, I haven't been posting much, and won't be for a little while yet, but I have a good excuse: I'm in Japan right now. For those who are on Instagram, there's pictures there. Especially trains, because my nephews love trains. I'm just photographing ordinary stuff: I'm here taking some classes. So I haven't done much at all of the typical touristy stuff. I'd hoped to, but things are so busy; some unexpected opportunities are eating up the time I'd planned to spend on going and looking at beautiful things. So I've got pictures of bikes and trains and food and regular life kinds of things that I'm photographing this trip, and very little of the shrines and parks and temples this time.

So, when my trip is done, and I've had a chance to reconnect with my people and recover from the jetlag (it's 14 hours difference), then I'll start thinking about homeschool stuff again. But right now, I'm having an adventure!

It's the Same (but different) in Japanese

President Nelson asked us to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year, and I was a touch sad, thinking, "There is no way that I'm going to be able to do that in Japanese. Not that fast."

I've been studying Japanese for years, and 2 or 3 years ago, I started reading the Book of Mormon in Japanese. It was hard, much harder than reading the Spanish I did ages ago: there are no cognates. And while everyday Japanese is full of English loan words, the Book of Mormon just is not. So progress was slow: in the beginning I often read less than a single verse in a sitting. I'd worked up to where, on a good day, I could read around 10 verses. I think that my personal best, prior to Conference, was somewhere around 12 verses in a day.

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English: 
...but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of His hands...

Japanese:
They do not stop their eyes on the works of the Lord's hand.
-2 Nephi 15:12 (Compare Isaiah 5:12)

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So President Nelson asks us to read, and I figure I'm going to have to take a break and go back to English for a while. This is disappointing: I've worked so hard, and I'm afraid that if I break my streak I'll lose ground.

"There is no way that I'm going to be able to do that in Japanese. Not that fast."
Then, the Little Voice:

"Well, actually...."

That's all he said.
I took the plunge.
That day, I read 1 Nephi 1, the whole chapter.
I was so happy with myself. Personal best!

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English:
[Him] who should come to redeem His people from their sins.

Japanese:
that Honorable One who will certainly come to redeem His own people from
(away from) their sins.
-Alma 5:21

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The next day I looked at a schedule and realized how inadequate a pace 1 chapter a day is. Most days, my list calls for about three chapters. Some days I did it, but I started to fall behind. That's a lot of reading, and the fact is, I'm not that good at Japanese. So many words! A new language just has an unbelievable number of words and phrases that you need to recognize in order to be able to read. I know more than I used to, but...

I kept trying. Slogging along. Losing a little bit of ground every day.
I figured I could catch up with whatever I miss in English in the last week or two of the year.

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English:
For the kingdom of the devil must shake, and they which belong to it must needs be stirred up unto repentance...

Japanese: 
The devil's kingdom will certainly shake. To certainly repent, they must be pressed/urged.
-2 Nephi 28:19

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Eventually, I was about 15 days behind, which means somewhere in the neighborhood of 35-45 chapters behind. Last week, I decided to take a day off of school, to try to catch up. I asked the kids for help, and they were amazing. They did all kinds of things independently and for each other, so that I could read. It was so hard. I was tired. My brain was full. And I would take a break, and then come back to it. I read 5 days' worth. It was amazing! I'd never read so much Japanese in a month, prior to the challenge, as what I read that day! And I was also a little bit disappointed: 5 days wasn't enough to really catch up. The date moved too, so I only gained 4 of those 5 days.

The next morning, I woke up with a sore throat and no voice.

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English: 
Thou shalt go before this people, and I will go with thee and deliver this people out of bondage.

Japanese: 
You shall stand at the front/vanguard of this people. I will be with you [this word is often  how they describe friends being with each other] when you go, and rescue out this people from slavery.
-Mosiah 24:17

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No voice meant no school. This was frustrating, because it's so important to keep school going, but there it was: I can't do much with no voice and no energy. Turns out, it was a blessing.

So I sat on the couch and read. We didn't even pretend to do school that day: the kids had a free day, and I read on the couch. I fell asleep, and they did quiet things so I could rest. I made up another 2 days: I was now less than 10 days behind. It was invigorating!

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English:
...and having peace of conscience...

Japanese:
"conscience" is a compound of "good" and "heart":
...having gained tranquility in their good heart...
-Mosiah 4:3

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The next several days, I made up more.
Not much, just one or two extras each day. But it added up.
I began to hope I would make it all the way, in Japanese.

It's a miracle; there's no way that I could do it on my own.
It's too big. Too hard. Too much.

But I really can do all things, even crazy things like read the whole Book of Mormon in another language, in three months, through Christ: the strength to do it is His.

Every day I find little gems. As many times as I have read the Book of Mormon, this is almost like having a whole new book of scripture. (What a blessing that would be, if He gave us more of His words again!) I'm building up quite a collection of things to put in my scripture journal when the reading is done; I'm not even trying to do that right now, just putting in a little tag, since I'm reading on my phone: this lets me listen and read at the same time, and it turns out that I know some words by sight, and others by sound, but when I follow along as the phone reads, then the Holy Ghost helps me remember things, and I am spending less and less time in the dictionary.

It was crazy to try.
I think it's going to actually happen.

I'm so glad I took the leap.
What a blessing this has turned out to be.

And it's not even done, yet.

A Bilingual Math Lesson

Today, we had a legitimately bilingual math lesson.

Three years ago, when I first felt the Holy Ghost nudging me, saying that I needed to do bilingual instruction, I was paralyzed by my own inadequacy and perfectionism, and terrified to try. I didn't know the words. I didn't know where to get the words. It was just me and the dictionary on my phone, and I was pretty certain that wasn't enough.

Mrs. C. said it was.

Expanding our Linguistic Web

Last spring, I started reading Gouin's Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, I wrote a series of posts about it for By Study and Faith, and we started using our own madeup series of phrases we've been learning in the kitchen. I didn't finish the book at that time because the ereaders I was using couldn't keep my place, and I eventually got frustrated with trying to find where I'd left off, but I slipped it into our most recent book box, and it came the other day, so I've started reading and I'm thinking about foreign language instruction again.

A post shared by Baby Steps Blog (@ritsumei_babysteps) on Aug 19, 2018 at 8:53pm PDT

The book is a reprint, and it has a number of typos where the scanning process was imperfect, but even with that, I'm enjoying having a real paper copy to hold in my hands; I like those so much better.

So I found my spot again, and started reading.

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In order not to load our text with too many examples, we leave on one side all such exercises as would arise from the possible and ordinary  accidents which are connected with this series and complete it. We will simply point out that, as an aim can be attained, it can also be missed. ... The maid who upsets the water in carrying it to the kitchen would miss her aim. ... The development of the indirect and complementary series of accidents  is hardly less rich in terms and sentences than the development of the direct series itself.
-The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages, (reprinted) p 43

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This is an interesting prospect. We've been working on an "Applesauce Series" and it's gradually generalized into whatever fruit (real or pretend) is handy when we're doing it. And we've "cooked" some crazy things, though I think that the real food we've cut up has had more impact on their skills: it seems that real activity is considerably more effective than pretending for this activity. The kids are doing quite well with this in terms of receptive language: I can tell them to do a number of variants on our Series that we've been working with. Productive language is more unsteady, but that is to be expected, and is exaggerated by the fact that I have not been doing well with integrating this into our regular kitchen talk.

But this idea of adding in accidents is interesting. I think that may be just what we need. Maybe a variant Series would go like this:

Pick up the apple.
Place the apple on the cutting board.
Pick up the knife.
Cut the apple in half.
Be careful not to cut your finger.
Move your finger away from the knife.
You have cut your finger.
Your finger is bleeding.
Don't get blood on the apple slices.
Go to the sink.
Wash the cut.
Put a bandaid on the cut.

It is, perhaps, slightly gruesome to just write them out, but this adds several new sentence options to our conversations, and I'm pretty sure that my kids would have a blast hamming it up, acting this one out, and fun is an important element in these activities!

I think that this will be a good way of keeping our exercises fresh. We're also experimenting with how to deal with different conjugations, though I'm finding that aspect tricky: I have to work really hard to stay in the tense that I select through the whole exercise, and while the kids are recognizing the similar stem and fundamental meaning, they're not really getting the finer details that the conjugations give. That's one area where having someone that's genuinely fluent would be really, really useful. But we're making progress, and it's steady, which is the goal.

It's Working: Foreign Language Learning the Charlotte Mason Way

I've put a lot of time and effort in the past month or two into studying the method that Francois Gouin developed for studying foreign languages, and about 2 or 3 weeks ago, I started putting some of what I learned into practice in our home. Oh wow, guys, this is amazing. I am learning so much! And my kids are learning quite a bit! This is definitely something that we're going to continue to do.

Our first efforts have been in learning what I think of as my "Applesauce Series": we're learning to talk about what happens as you make applesauce. These are our main props (the bowl was handy, and it's pretending to be a pot today)

Experimenting with the Gouin Method of Foreign Language Instruction

As I was writing about the intersection of Charlotte Mason and foreign language instruction, I discovered that the author she looks to for her instruction method, Francois Gouin, has a book -- and that it's online for free. So I've been reading it, and as a result I'm making some tweaks to how we are doing our language instruction. They're not huge tweaks, the biggest changes is the level of intentionality that I'm able to bring to our instruction. I'm pretty excited. Even better, I've got a group of people who are also experimenting with Gouin's methods, so we can all talk it over an see what works and all help each other improve the instruction in our homes.

In a lot of ways, what Gouin suggests is really pretty close to what we've been doing: he suggests making the ear the primary "organ of learning" rather than the eye: listening, rather than reading or writing, is at the heart of his method. We have long made it a priority to keep Japanese in the atmosphere of our home to train our accent, help establish native patterns in our mind, and remind us to use our language; it's remarkable what a difference it makes to have a playlist going in the background! I have tried to teach my younger kids what I can through speaking to them out of what I know. This has been slow, in part because I'm a non-native speaker, and when we started this several years ago, I was really not fluent. At all. I've come far in the time since then, and the kids have come a fair distance, but we still have a long way to go before we're fluent. What Gouin offers us is a way to be more systematic about our instruction, and that's pretty exciting:

Trying Foreign Language Narration

I got this cute little book a while back at a very cool Japanese mall that I occasionally get to visit. It's a fun little book of "Why do things work like they do" kind of questions, with little 4 page essays (big type) about things like why stoplights are red, yellow, and green (did you know that's standard all over the whole world?), and why train stations and railroad crossings have rocks under them. Big "First Grade" on the front of the cover... I'm slowly growing into first grade, lol. Those kids would talk circles around me, for sure. But I am reading their book, little by little. It's small and simple things that get the job done; baby steps, right? It's gradually working and adding up in an exciting way.

Quite a while before I got the book, I remember hearing about Charlotte Mason recommending that students do narrations of their foreign language readings... in the foreign language. At the time, I thought that was crazy talk. It sounded so far off. But it occurred to me tonight that my little Japanese "Why Book" is perfect for attempting that, now that I'm growing into it. So I took the essay that I've been reading and rereading this week, and I tried it out.

Learning Languages: Moving Beyond the Textbook {part 2}

This post is part of a series.
Part One: Listen, Listen, Listen
Part Two: What To Read {this post}
Part Three (coming soon)

Not only to satisfy the necessities of travelers in far countries has the study of language ever been desirable, but to penetrate the spirit and genius of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Dante, it has become, to the cultured of every country, a necessity for the full gift of a liberal education. Since language became literature, the necessity for mastery over other tongues than his own has forced the attention of student and of professor to the problem of the study of languages…
-Howard Swan, Preface to The Art of Teaching and Studying Languages by M. Francois Gouin

In part one of this series, we looked at considerations for the beginning language learner: in particular, the need for vast quantities of exposure to spoken language as an indispensable aspect of successful language learning. As the student begins to progress, in addition to the aural input and lessons, books begin to take on a much greater importance. Just like learning to read in your native tongue, start with simple books. Miss Mason recognized that parents wishing to teach a language they do not know at a native level face particular challenges, but she reminds us that even in this case we should not lose sight of the importance of Gouin’s concept of imitating the natural acquisition of the first child’s first language:

Learning Languages: Moving Beyond the Textbook {part 1}

Education is the Science of Relations’; that is, a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things.”
-Charlotte Mason, 12th Principle

When we begin to study a foreign language, we are beginning a whole new set of relationships. The serious student of an additional language will eventually open the door to relationships with a whole new culture and the people who inhabit that culture both in the local community and also, through technology, gain the ability to communicate with people in the areas where the “foreign” language is the local community language, even if they cannot travel there in person. The student learns new ways of describing all sorts of things, and (perhaps more importantly) new ways of thinking about the things they describe. No wonder learning a language is a daunting task! Sadly, too often, students of languages learn little, and retain less: even reasonable fluency is a distant goal that few seem to achieve outside of those favored few able to spend several years living in an area where the new language is spoken.

This Week: Garden Planning and More

I'm excited: Once upon a time, I used to participate in the Daring Bakers cooking challenges, but I struggled to keep up and dropped out after a while: it was too hard to be consistent. When I finally felt ready to try again, they had finished. And I haven't found a different baking challenge -- until now. King Arthur Flour is hosting one. And they're doing Gruyère-Stuffed Crusty Loaves. I'll need to find the fancy cheese, but otherwise, it's ingredients that I've got on hand. However, it's a method that I've never tried before, so that ought to be fun to do.

Intensive Language Learning Day

I was listening to some of the materials produced by the Say Something in Welsh people, about how to break a language plateau. One of the suggestions they made was to have an intensive Welsh learning day, modeled after the things they do in their 5 day intensive courses. Which got me thinking: I wonder what that would do if we did it in school with Japanese?

Really, truly, I would love to spend 7 to 9 hours just studying Japanese and doing nothing else with my day. Oh my goodness, the progress I could make! But this is not a season where I can do that kind of thing, not really. But I can do something smaller: an intensive Japanese day with the kids. So I made up a plan and I put it on my whiteboard. I gathered up all our Japanese activities, and figured we'd do them all, all day long.

This Week: Miss Kitty Turns Five

All year, we've been telling Miss Kitty how long it is to her birthday. She asks frequently:

"How long till my birthday?"
"It's a long time; about 9 months. Which means that it's about 36 Sundays."

I don't think she counts to 36 yet, but that seems more meaningful to her than the number of months.

"Is my birthday almost here?"
"No, it's still a long time. It's summer, and then fall will come, and we'll have Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and the New Year will come, and THEN it will be your birthday. It's around 24 Sundays."

"My birthday is far away, isn't it? How many Sundays to my birthday?"
"Still a whole bunch. First Daddy has his birthday, then Hero, then Jesus, then you. That's about 20 Sundays."

Sometime after Halloween, the number of Sundays got low enough that it started to be close enough to be numbers that are meaningful to her. This was pretty exciting. And then something even more exciting happened just this last Sunday night at bedtime:

"I only have ONE SUNDAY LEFT until my birthday comes!"
"Well.... actually, today was that last Sunday. There are no more Sundays before your birthday: your birthday is on Friday. That's only five Sleeps away!"
"No more Sundays? Only five Sleeps??"

Oh yes, this was an excited girl. And that's the biggest news of the week: Miss Kitty is turning five at the end of the week. And she's making Big Plans: she's having friends over to make crowns (made out of paper, with stickers) and play in a fort (a really big fort), and eat a cake (because we usually eat cake on birthdays) with ice cream.

Switching Languages in the Gospel Library {Tutorial}

One of the best ways to integrate your adopted language into your daily life is to do some of your scripture study in it. Additionally, reading the scriptures in another language is a great way to see familiar passages in a new light. Using the Church's Gospel Library app for this is actually really easy. I'm using an iPhone, but I would imagine that it would be similar on Android devices.

Study Tools for Mama

One of the big challenges in trying to learn Japanese in this area is that there are no native speakers in my circle of acquaintance, and not very many speakers at all. So finding ways to learn, basically in the absence of live humans who know  more than me, is challenging. But I feel like this is the language that both my interests run to, and the direction of the Spirit points this way, and things happen.

Every year, the Daddy heads to Japan, and he always asks, "What do you want me to bring you?" And, always, this is a hard question. Several years, I've had him bring me books. A couple years he brought me some brush pens. This year, I asked for notebooks. Because they have these cool notebooks that are designed for learning kanji.

I think they're for little kids, like the American notebooks that have the dotted line down the middle to help new learners know how tall to make the lower case letters. Only, kanji all fit in a square, and so these are set up to help you learn how to draw them well-proportioned in a square space. I love them. I had bought some graph paper, trying to have something that would work well for this, but it's too tiny: like a kindergartner, I need to make my first forays into literacy with enough room to write with large letters.

So, the Daddy brought me these, and I was excited and wanted to use them... but I'm really not very literate, and I didn't want to waste them. So I tucked them away, figuring that something would show up that would work. And this morning it did. I looked in my Tofugu email, and they were talking about this cool set of graded readers. The first one is free. It also covers kanji that I know well already, for the most part, but the very first phrase is one that I wasn't familiar with, so I'm planning to work through the set anyway. And I'm pretty excited about it. This is some of my favorite mother culture: after the kids go to bed, get out the chocolate and the fancy Japanese paper, and relax into studying. That's a great way to wind down after bedtime.

But it's not the only thing that turned up. Yesterday, I was over to my friend's house, and she was running late, but before she could call and tell us to come a little later... we knocked on the door. But she had this game, GardenScape, going on her computer, so while she played catch-up, I checked it out (she doesn't like people to help, so I didn't). It's pretty fun. You've inherited this estate, and the house is ok, but the gardens are in sad shape. So you go around them and clean them up. In English this isn't really my kind of game -- in fact, I let Hero play one of the levels for me tonight, and I just did the reading. But I like it anyway, because I get to learn a bunch of new words. There is so much vocabulary in a new language! This is a pleasant way to get some.

It's fun to find new ways to integrate my adopted language. And, if the kanji thing goes as well as I think it's going to, then when the kids get to the point that they're ready for it, I'll have them start on the same book. I like the way that it puts things in context, rather than learning words in isolation. And they've apparently gone to some significant trouble to make sure that old words pop up at good intervals so that you get practice at using real words in real for-native-by-native sentences (paragraphs, at the higher levels), and do it in a sane beginner-friendly kind of way.

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Mother must have time to herself. And we must not say 'I cannot.' Can any of us say till we have tried, not for one week, but for one whole year, day after day, that we 'cannot' get one half-hour out of the twenty-four for 'Mother Culture?'--one half-hour in which we can read, think, or 'remember.'
-Charlotte Mason 

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It really is true: when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I think it's one of the cool ways that our Father blesses us. When we are ready to learn, He is always ready to provide someone or something to teach.

Japanese Storytime

Miss Kitty(4) grabbed this book off the bookshelf for storytime tonight. These books are much more difficult - I have to have my phone handy for frequent dictionary checks, and once I know the words, I get to explain them to the kids. BUT. More and more I can put part of those explanations in Japanese (yay me!) and usually, with a little bit of pointing and pantomime, the kids can figure out what I'm telling them (yay them!). And the parts I can do in Japanese are growing. It's exciting.

There's so much good in that: my vocabulary is growing and my comfort level with speaking (at least to my kids) is growing. And, which they answer in English still probably 95% of the time when we do this, their receptive language, the Japanese they understand if they hear it, is also clearly growing. This is wonderful: receptive skills precede expressive skills in learning your native language, and I see no reason to expect that it would work any differently in an adopted language. Some exciting milestones happening here!

We didn't read the whole thing; dictionary checks and explanations were still too frequent to get very far in a single sitting. But we read about snow (on the other side of the window), snow that both fell and piled up over night. And we read about putting clothing on: socks and boots, scarves and mittens, and Miss Piglet's favorite coat. And we read about stepping into snow where your foot sinks right down and leaves behind footprints. Japanese has such a beautiful way of describing things. And -and this might be the best part of all- the kids protested when I stopped. Even with needing to pause to look things up, they were still really into it. And so I promised that I'd put it on the schedule for Monday during school.

Pretty darn awesome.

Bilingual Calendering Update

I realized tonight that it's been almost exactly three years since we started to do a calendar "circle time" in Japanese. I was pretty frightened to even try, but my friend Mrs. C. was right: it's been much more do-able than I thought, back then. And all of us have grown as a result. We started pretty straight forward: just a calendar for "Today is the 11th of July." Actually, we often just count our way through the calendar, since there is some specific jargon for counting days of the month in Japanese. I need to work on helping the kids learn to say, "Yesterday was the 10th. Today is the 11th. Tomorrow is the 12th."

We've learned several songs in the process of doing this calendar stuff. Our toothbrushing song is in Japanese, and the kids know the Wise Man and the Foolish Man, among a few others. We're reinforcing place value -- and Japanese doesn't have the irregular and confusing "teen" numbers: numbers to 100 are completely regular in every way and make place value simple, which is nice. We can count to 1000, and sort of tell time. It's tough teaching and learning time on an analog clock in a new language, but they're getting there!

After starting to work with Latin Christiana, I decided to adopt some of their methods in our Japanese -- specifically, we're practicing some of our verb conjugations by chanting them. It's working so well for the Latin, that I thought I'd try it here, and it seems to be working here as well. It's a nice easy introduction to grammar, which I've been feeling the need to do. I plan to continue to introduce new grammar and vocabulary in this way, starting with the most common and most regular verbs.

For three years of work, it doesn't sound like much. But then I realize that we've done that much in spite of the fact that calendar time is one of the things that we miss as much as we hit. And my own ability to deal with these parts of the language has been greatly enhanced by working on them these past three years. And that's all to the good, because where I improve, I can help my kids more effectively.

We still don't have anybody but each other to speak to, and I'm still not fluent. But I do see marked improvement in all of our skills. Showing the kids what I have learned, in spite of not being fluent, doesn't freak me out anymore. We know more words, we use them more frequently in our daily lives. We just started watching the Netflix cartoon "Troll Hunters" -- in Japanese. And we have several regular channels for watching Minecraft videos in Japanese. It's amazing how much my kids have learned -- and use naturally and fluently -- from watching Minecraft videos on YouTube. I wish that I was able to sit down and watch it with them more often; we all learn more when I can come and do some dictionary work to help expand our vocabulary.



I really can't say enough good about the HiNative app. It lets me ask natives how to say the various things we want to say, so that we're learning real Japanese, checked over by real native speakers, and not a pseudo-Japanese imposter that we make up thinking that we're speaking Japanese. That's a real lifesaver, because I have yet to locate a book that will teach us household Japanese. But we keep asking for the sentences that we want to learn, and it's slowly adding up.

Progress, including slow progress, is success.

I'm glad that I didn't let not knowing scare me off. This is fun.

Japanese Grammar Memory Work

In reading from our new Latin books, I found this in the preface to the teacher's manual:

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The modern approach to language study is the reading method, in which students are required to read text prior to instruction in the necessary grammar and vocabulary. Although this approach can be successful in certain limited circumstances, it is often very similar to teaching reading without phonics.

---

This really resonates with me regarding our Japanese study for a couple of reasons. One is that, although my kids have been picking up a fair amount of Japanese from what we're doing, I've been feeling like the grammar that I studied while I was in college laid a really useful foundation for me, and that when I reached a point recently where both the grammar and my vocabulary hit a critical point, and my ability to understand both written and spoken Japanese has been really expanding the past few months -- but I'm also aware that my kids are not getting very little explicit grammar instruction right now, and I think that needs to change. We already have a number of grammar resources I've purchased, but nothing that's really kid-oriented, so I need to break down the information we've got into bite-sized pieces for them. Hopefully, this will be a pretty straight-forward process!

Looking at the way that the Latin course is organized has inspired me to take some of the grammar materials that we've got and try organizing it into something that is somewhat similar, so that my kids can have a better grasp on the grammar of our new language. We're going to use some vocabulary that they're already somewhat familiar with, but expand the ways that they can do conjugations and declensions. The Latin book has the kids doing small, discrete units: a collection of forms for a single verb makes a set. I'm going to follow that example with these present tense verbs and adjectives:


To be - inanimate objects:
ある、　ない、　あります、　ありません、　あって

To be - animate objects:
いる、　いない、　います、　いません、　いて

To eat:
たべる、　たべない、　たべます、　たべません、　たべて

To sleep:
ねる、ねない、　ねます、　ねません、　ねて

To drink:
のむ、　のまない、　のみます、　のみません、　のんで

To read:
よむ、　よまない、　よみます、　よみません、　よんで



Big:
おおきい、　おおきくない、　おおきいです、　おおきないです、おおきくて

Small:
 ちいさい、　ちさくない、　ちさいです、　ちさくないです、　ちさくて

Delicious:
おいしい、　おいしくない、　おいしいです、　おいしくないです、　おいしくて

Cute:
かわいい、　かわいくない、　かわいいです、　かわいくないです、　かわいくて

Scary:
こわい、　こわくない、　こわいです、　こわくないです、　こわくて


I'm really excited about this -- grammar sometimes gets a bad rap, but I think that, particularly for foreign languages, it helps to speed up the process, and knowing the patterns that are used, it's a lot easier to both understand what's being said, and also to be able to start to swap parts out of phrases and begin to be able to express yourself. I'm looking forward to continuing our Japanese journey, and also to this new Latin adventure!