Formative Assessment

19 days into the challenge of learning kanji and I decided it was about time to measure the success (or failure) of my strategy with some formative assessments. So, yesterday I used Kanji Koohii to test myself on writing the 450 kanji I’d covered thus far in the RTK1 on Anki.  I put my magic slate to good use once again, writing each kanji out according to the keyword presented by Kanjii Koohii’s review testing app (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Using Kanji Koohi for Formative Assessment

 To ensure that I assessed myself well, the criteria of correctly writing the test were:

1.         The radicals must sit in the correct proximity to each other.
2.         There must be no missing strokes.
3.         There can be no extra strokes.

The result of this test can be seen in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Kanji Writing Test Results

In some respects, I was a little disappointed to find that I’d remembered under half of the kanji I’ve covered over the first 18 days of using this strategy. However, I can also look at this way; I can safely say that I was able to write 212 kanji characters completely correctly according to their associated keywords. Yes, the strategy can be improved upon, however, when I’ve read that most people studying Japanese at University manage to learn less than that in a whole year, then I’m not so disheartened at all. I know I can improve my strategy for learning as I assess my learning, analyse where the weaknesses lie and tweak things accordingly. Also, I definitely feel confident with the first one hundred kanji, I hardly forget any of those, and that’s most likely due to the Anki SRS (Spaced Repetition System) ensuring that kanji I forget most frequently appear more frequently in the reviewing process.  The other good thing about using Kanji Koohii is that it has better mnemonic stories for each kanji than I can usually think of myself. Sure, I honestly believe that its always best to write your own personal mnemonic when you can, but when I’m writing 25 each morning, I have to admit that some are a bit rubbish. Occasionally though, I see kanji that really lend themselves to me writing my own mnemonic story … the case of “Canopy” being a prime example (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Canopy

So being someone who flies various canopies I wrote “Canopy : I see myself flying my canopy over Headcorn parachute club. It’s like a towel above my head protecting my head from the sun’s rays.” Now of course, that is a little wordy and wouldn’t fit everyone else’s imaginative memory; a canopy might be thought of as something you sit under to protect yourself from the sun’s rays … but for me, a canopy is something I fly … and so if I tried to use someone else’s mnemonic it wouldn’t work so well for me.

Also earlier this week, @kanjipro DM’d me on twitter and I learned a little about the KanjiPro system for learning Kanji.  Their book will be available on 2^nd August and I will definitely consider buying a copy; their system seems really fun and I like the idea of separating the kanji that are straight pictograms out from the ones that require mnemonics to remember the radicals.  

Today I have assessed my ability to recall the keyword associated with each kanji symbol from the 480 that I’m currently up to now. A work colleague was talking to me about Timothy Ferriss’ book, “The 4-Hour Chef” book shortly after starting this blog and has kindly lent me his copy (thanks Daniel). One thing that Ferriss explains rather well, is the importance of putting a time limit on your goal. He also used a poster of the jōyō kanji … and I can see how that would help. It’s nice to be able to see how you’re progressing towards a goal; but also if you mark up which kanji you can remember and which ones you’ve forgotten, you can precisely focus your reviewing time. Previously, I’d just been making a few notes during my morning Anki session of kanji keywords that were appearing that I couldn’t recall at all. I would then add these to a study list called, “Kanji I keep forgetting” on the RTK app on my iPhone. Then throughout the week, I would run through them and rewrite the mnemonic story if need be. That seemed to mop up a few stray kanji from my “forgotten” list; but it is quite costly in time. The idea of having a big kanji poster sitting in my study that I can immediately focus on seemed a much better idea, so I looked into buying a poster. Low and behold, White Rabbit (of the kanji flash card fame) produce one in RTK order … and it’s laminated … so you can use dry markers to mark up the ones in long-term memory, short-term memory (otherwise known as ‘still sketchy’ in my language) and ones you’ve completely forgotten (or “doh” ones as I call them). The only issue with White Rabbit’s poster as far as I’m concerned is that the poster itself is quite expensive … probably worth every penny if I lived in the USA, but in the UK, the additional postage puts it into “errrr … can I do this another way” territory. So, I found a lovely person’s blog in which they’d posted the jōyō kanji in Heisig’s RTK order.

Armed with that, I thought I would just print it out on A4 paper once a week and use a couple of highlighter pens to mark up the kanji I could remember and couldn’t remember. Now instead of trying to write the kanji from their keywords, I would be reading the kanji and trying to recall the keywords. Interestingly, I did slightly better at this assessment for reading kanji than the one I did the day before which involved writing kanji. The results were that I could recall the keyword to 241 of the 480 kanji covered today (see figure 4 below).

Figure 4: Kanji Reading Assessment

So albeit a slight improvement on yesterdays writing test, the psychological boost of getting over 50% correct was quite encouraging. I still think that having a poster would be worthwhile, so I think I’ll ask how much it costs to get a laminated black and white print on A3 or preferably A2  printed at a local print shop … I’m sure it will work out less expensive than having one shipped from the USA.

I’m going to make formative assessment part of my strategy and also refine the way I mop up those stray forgotten kanji from now on. You can see that in the way there are a just four kanji that I couldn’t recall the associated keyword in the first hundred. Then they increase towards the end of the kanji I’ve covered in the first 19 days of this challenge. Interestingly, there is a block of yellow remembered kanji at the beginning of the kanji I learned this morning. As far as I’m concerned, this shows how short-term memory has formed a connection with these kanji; that’s why it’s important that I do a reflective exercise tonight before I go to sleep. The brain does all of its indexing whilst you are sleeping – I can even see the result of not reflecting on kanji for the last few nights by the fact that there are whopping great pink blocks covering the last week. I definitely think that reflective activity will increase the number of kanji to cross the chasm between short and long-term memory. Perhaps I should avoid playing video games before going to sleep … or maybe play video games that use kanji!   

The Strategy

Since I began learning jōyō kanji, I've reached kanji #330 in the Heisig order. It's debatable whether the Heisig method works for everyone. I've read some quite angry rants about the Heisig approach, but concluded that a lot of people like to vent on the internet because they learned using a method that worked for them and thus, that becomes the only method they will ever advocate. One of the biggest problems people have with the Heisig method is that it can come across as some kind of panacea. It isn't and the criticism that you only learn to associate keywords with the kanji symbol was something that I questioned before I began. By doing this, you won't learn the readings of the kanji; you have to go through the whole lot again to do that. However, you do learn to recognize the symbols in association with a keyword; which puts you in a strong position to learn the readings later. Or put it this way; trying to learn the symbol, what it means as well as its kun-yomi and on-yomi readings at the same time is a lot to be doing. Essentially, by learning kanji by Heisig's method, you are literally setting yourself up for an easier transition to learning their readings. Also, simply by being able to recognize the kanji symbols and their associated keywords, as long as the keyword is a rough translation of the meaning, you might get the gist of the written kanji ... and that might be useful from time to time.

The strategy I'm using requires me to learn 25 new kanji every day. I usually start at 7am with the Anki flashcard system offering me 25 new and however many I review is based on however many I had difficulty remembering in previous sessions. I'm currently at #330, however the number I have to review is 68; so I can roughly remember around 250ish given that some of the kanji I will be reviewing have subsequently become stronger in my memory. 

To describe the strategy I use, here is screen grab from Anki. It just displays the keyword: "Strange" and I'm supposed to recall the symbol if I've memorized it, or write it down with a story if it's a new kanji that I've not learned before. In the case of "Strange", it's one that I can recall. 

This is the first addition to the strategy that I've made myself. Ordinarily, the learner just visualises the kanji in their minds eye before clicking the button labelled, "Show Answer". Since I knew this kanji, I use a magic pad to write the kanji.

Then I click the button labelled, "Show Answer" to check what I've written is correct.

In this case, I remembered the kanji correctly and have the advantage of seeing whether I've written it correctly rather than just imagining I would have written it correctly. If I don't have a clue what the kanji is, it is either a new kanji that I haven't learned or one that I simply forgotten. If it's a new kanji, then I write my own story in my kanji log book.

If however, it is one that I've already tried to learn but have forgotten, I examine the story to see whether it can be improved to make it more memorable. I also make a note of the Heisig number of the kanji I can't recall because later on, I'll add it to a review list on my RTK (Remembering the Kanji) app on my iPhone. The Anki flashcard session takes me about one hour each morning and then I take a break from doing any kanji study for about ten to fifteen minutes. Then I lauch the RTK app for a quick review of the 25 new kanji that I learned that morning.

As you can see, in the Flashcard mode, the RTK app asks the user to write the kanji on their touchscreen. As you can see in the above example of the keyword "Capital", I haven't got it quite right. I've used the "House" primative rather than the kettle lid radical ... and also the bottom part, I've made the strokes a little short. This was a new kanji to me this morning, however, when I tested myself this evening, I've recalled the first primative from visual memory rather than imaginative memory - I know this because my story says, "Put the KETTLE LID down firmly and stand waiting with an open MOUTH. HO HO HO, CAPITAL radio is just soooo lame".  I remembered the MOUTH (the rectangle in the middle) and I remembered what I call "HO HO HO" (because it's the bottom half of the katakana character "ho"). However, for some reason the part about the kettle lid didn't make a very strong connection in my mind, so I'll try and make it more memorable by making the kettle lid do something weird ... "The KETTLE LID shot across the room into my open MOUTH just as the annoying presenter laughed "HO HO HO" on CAPITAL Radio".

I then log this story in my RTK app on my iPhone, which I review later in the day. I still forget quite a few kanji, but slowly I'm refining this strategy so that I forget less - the less I forget, the less I have to review over the next days, which then makes my initial Anki session take less than an hour in the morning.

The Challenges of the Japanese Writings Systems

Before I write anything, let me first say that in regards learning Japanese, I've been learning for just over a year ... and I am just that ... a person who's been learning through all kinds of different methods using a load of different technologies and finding the whole experience to be one of the most fascinating and rewarding adventures I've had in my life. I cannot profess to be an expert at anything, but I can say that these days, with so many free resources available on the web ... learning Japanese is achievable by anyone who wants to learn it ... and I was utterly rubbish at learning French (a supposed easy language in which 60% of it is apparently English anyway!). Saying that, I did get somewhat bored of reading about Grandpa Laffeyette's regular bicycle rides to the Supermarche ... note I can't even write French properly ... so what chance have I got of learning a supposed hard language like Japanese you might ask.

One simple answer ... a pretty good one ... you see the first thing I learned when I began learning Japanese was this: "You don't have to be a clever cloggs to learn a language; you just have to be persistent". I had also read a fantastic book by Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld titled "Above All Else". In the book Dan tells us the secret to achieving your goals in life - he asks us to ask ourselves two questions.

1. Is it possible that I can do this?

2. Am I prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve it?


When we are absolutely honest with ourselves and we can say yes to both of these questions; there is very good chance that we will be successful in our quest to achieve them. Sure, aspirations change, life throws us curve-balls etc etc ... but when I asked myself these questions, I was able to answer yes. I also must admit that having an interest that borders on an obsession for all things Japanese ... it really helped me answer those questions honestly. But I still reflected on previous failed attempts to learn French and thought, "who am I kidding right?" ... but then I thought, "I'm never going to learn any language with that attitude - so I suppose I could begin learning Japanese and just not tell anyone ... and then they won't know if I've failed or not". Yeah, I managed that for about 3 hours ... until I found what I was learning to be so utterly cool that I just had to go blabbering on about what I'd learned. Anyway, this post is supposed to be about the Japanese writing systems ... so I'd better get back on topic hadn't I!?

So ... from the outset, the Japanese language can seem incredibly daunting because of it's three writing systems (four including romaji). There is katakana, a syllabary for non-native words and names, hiragana for native words and kanji - the pictograph characters imported from the Chinese. Then there is romaji, which is Japanese words written in roman characters. So to give an example of each type of writing:

The word "Lion" would be written in katakana because Japan simply doesn't have any lions roaming around and thus, the word was imported from foreign Johnny's telling the Japanese people about the existence of lions and tigers and coca cola (oh my). Now, one thing to note, is that the "L" sound spoken by English speakers never existed in the set of spoken sounds (syllabary) that the Japanese use ... so consequently, the nearest sound the Japanese have is the sound "Ra" (which is about 70% "L" anyway). So the word "Lion" is spelled "Raion" in Japanese ... and represented by katakana characters, looks like this:

ライオン

ラ = Ra , イ = i , オ = o and ン = n

Looking at a native Japanese word that most people know, "sushi", that would be written in hiragana like this:

すし

す = su and し = shi

Learning hiragana and katakana doesn't take too long (from my experience, I'd say it takes around a week to get the hang of the basics and around a month to get reasonably fluent at reading them ... although still to this day I sometimes still forget some of the ones I don't use very often) - and there are lots of resources out there on the interweb that make learning them relatively painless. I used a game called "Katakana Quiz Game" to learn the katakana in an afternoon. I then forgot quite a few of them by the next day because, well, memory is all about neural connections ... and when those connections are strong you remember stuff, and when those connections are weak, its really hard or even impossible to recall the information you wanted to. So the trick is, how do we make our memories really strong ... hmmm ... traditionally, this would be a thing we call "drilling" ... and most of us find this to be dreadfully dull ... essentially repeating things time after time ... its the brute force brain hack approach to strengthening neural connections. Now, even though playing the katakana quiz game was more enjoyable than simply writing out the symbols again and again, I only learned to read them rather than writing them. Around this time, I was talking to a friend who had learned the Aramaic alphabet - he gave me a top tip ... use whatever non-roman script you are learning to write reminder notes, shopping lists etc in English. Also, for speeding up your ability to read kana character, I used games on my iPhone called hiragana and katakana bubbles respectively and also the Sega dance game "Miku Flick".

It's debatable whether to learn hiragana and then learn katakana or vice-versa ... but having learned katakana first, I then read many articles saying why it was better to learn hiragana and then katakana. What I will say though, is that learning them gives you a lot of instant satisfaction. When I learned katakana, I could look at a images of downtown Tokyo streets and read quite a lot of signs on shops ... quite often I'd be able to pick out English words or names glowing out in neon katakana. Also, I had a new party trick, I could write my friends names in katakana ... it's fun to show off your new skill isn't it! Also, I would see some katakana on things around me in; for example, on Asahi beer bottle tops, it says, スーパードライ ... the dashes hold the sound a little longer so that says "Su-pa- Dori" in katakana ... "Super Dry". Again, with the knowledge of what sounds exist and what sounds don't exist in the Japanese syllabary, it's easier to work out what they mean when they are using English words ... herro kitti ... and dorama are good examples of where you have to do a little bit of converting the sounds to get ... hello kitty and drama respectively.

So having learned hiragana and katakana, you are adequately equipped to write anything in Japanese. Unfortunately though, when you attempt to read most Japanese writing, you will still have another obstacle in your way.... the kanji. So, kanji are those logographic symbols that originated from China. A long time ago, the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system, hanzi ... but because the Japanese had been speaking Japanese for a long time, they read the symbols to mean Japanese words rather than Chinese words. So you will quickly discover that kanji have two kinds of readings, the On-Yomi reading is the Japanese reading and the Kun-Yomi reading is the Chinese reading. Oh boy, this sounds really complicated doesn't it? Well, yes, I suppose there isn't much wiggle-room here for saying it doesn't make things more difficult. One of pointers I've discovered that helps us figure out which reading we need to use when translating Japanese text is that when you see a kanji followed by hiragana, its most likely you'll use the On-Yomi reading, whereas when the kanji isn't followed by hiragana, it's likely you'll use the Kun-Yomi reading. But, so I have heard, these rules are not without their exceptions. There are some useful tools that you can use to help you understand the reading of kanji. One of the most insightful vloggers on everything Japan, Victor (Gimmeaflakeman) made a brilliant video that sheds light on what tools there are that can really help you make sense of the kanji in his video: How to study Kanji.

I will admit that knowing all of this ahead of diving in and learning kanji really put me off. My inner narrator (my Jiminy-cricket with a massive dose of sardonic wit thrown in for good measure) was saying, "there are thousands of these kanji ... and you're feeble brain can't even remember what you had for breakfast today ... ha ha ... good luck!". Dan BC's book came to the rescue once more - can I possible learn all these kanji? Sure ... you are alive and you hopefully have enough time left on this pretty blue space marble ... and you want to be totally literate in Japanese ... well, you've got to learn the kanji then haven't you! So with that, I bought some flash cards.

Now learning kanji from flash cards can be exactly what works for some people. Myself ... um ... not entirely the most effective way of learning maybe ... either that or I don't know how to use them properly! What I found, was that I learned kanji really quickly with flash cards ... and then I forgot them equally quickly. I was the equivalent of a yo-yo dieter on a staple diet of ten new kanji a day. I thought I was doing everything right, I was learning ten new kanji and then testing my memory with the kanji I'd already learned. But then one day, my schedule didn't allow time for kanji ... and then another day went by ... and so on and so on ... and before I knew it, my kanji retention had gotten all fluffy.


So because my problem was "Forgetting the Kanji", when I read about the existence of a book called, "Remembering the Kanji", I was already sold! Thank you James W. Heisig! I'd heard about this Heisig method before, or at least I thought I had ... I wasn't too sure whether I was confusing the Heisig method with that thing where you whack someone on their back when they're chocking on their food. Anyway, I ordered the book. I liked what I read, it seemed pretty simple to be honest. Essentially, with the Heisig method, you don't learn the kanji by repeatedly writing out the kanji over and over again (paying particular attention to the stroke order etc) ... I liked that part of it ... and you associate nice little stories with each Kanji ... a technique employed by folks who enter competitions for who can remember loads of stuff! It's all about using your imaginative memory rather than relying purely on your visual memory. You see, when you remember pictures in your mind, your brain tries its best to be efficient. For anyone familiar with computer graphics and images, you can easily imagine how your brain would fill up with stuff if every snapshot made in your minds-eye was stored as a high resolution RAW image file. The brain has an amazingly efficient system for dealing with patterns and so you can imagine how visual images get optimised for storage a little bit like when you a computer codec optimises a digital image. When you think about how drilling works, what you are doing is similar to slowly optimising the visual data as a vector graphic as opposed to a bitmap image. On the one hand you are really helping the brain by reducing the amount of data it needs to store but on the other hand, you are doing something that is completely and utterly boring ... you know it, the brain knows it ... so lets just be honest shall we ... in your lifetime ... if I asked you what happened at precisely 3.02 pm on Sunday nine weeks ago ... unless something really significant occured, you probably wouldn't remember would you? The brain tosses out all the boring stuff ... it's how the brain operates. Memories are built by stimulation ... we naturally remember the details of significant things ... but we don't remember every single fart we ever trumped ... unless it was a particularly significant fart at a particularly inappropriate time which caused a significant embarrassment.

So back to the problem ... how to remember a couple of thousand kanji ... you could drill the stokes over and over again, thus forcing each kanji to be painfully significant enough to reside in visual memory. Heisig wasn't convinced that was going to work for him, so he developed a beautiful way of remembering them by using your imaginative memory rather than your visual memory. I've subsequently read a couple of blog posts about using the Heisig method in tandem with using the Anki flash card system. 

People have successfully managed to learn the jōyō kanji (2136 kanji that the Japanese school system installs into all its students so that they can tick a box on a Government form to say that a person is 'literate' to the required level of Japanese citizens). Now we could say that this doesn't sound very much fun, but to their credit, the level of literacy in Japan is very high. It must work, but for a western gaijin (foreigner) to try and learn the jōyō kanji the very same way ... the success rate doesn't seem very high. People simply give up learning because it's such a painfully slow process. So how long can one expect to take to learn the jōyō kanji ... well, from what I've been reading, it does seem feasible that a person can learn the jōyō kanji in approximately three months!!!! Really? Well, reading the small print, within three months a foreigner can recognize all the jōyō kanji characters and recall a keyword that gives meaning to the character. Is that any good? Well, put it this way, Chinese people visiting Japan can actually make sense of a lot of what is written in kanji. So, given that one knows hiragana and katakana, a person who can recognize the jōyō kanji and understand the rough meaning of them is in a far better place than a Chinese person. Then think about this, you have stored the jōyō kanji in your brain in a really tidy way ... when it comes to associating the readings with the kanji, you're also going to be well positioned. 

So here is the challenge that lies before me. First, I will learn the jōyō kanji using the Heisig method ... it's July now, so I'm hoping that by October I shall have achieved this. Then starting from October I'm going to begin learning the readings for jōyō kanji ... there are two more books by Heisig which will apparently help me achieve this, but also teach me even more kanji ... so I'm hoping by the time I move to Japan, I will be able to read newspapers, magazines, subtitles on television etc ... and by having acquired that skill, immersing myself into Japanese life ... I'm hoping that I will quickly gain a large vocabulary to have interesting conversations in Japanese.

Now, this blog is going to be a bit of a diary about what I'm learning. It would really help me if people keep in touch and occasionally ask me how its going. I read a couple of blog posts about how other people have employed the strategy of using RTK (Remembering the Kanji) with Anki ... and the advice seems to be, "if your friends can keep you on track, that's really helpful). So, I might make a bet at some point ... I mean, it worked for me getting a BSc Hons. Computing degree ... I made a bet with a friend one night when we were talking about whether qualifications had value ... he proclaimed that I might attribute more value to a degree qualification if I had one ... so I bet him that I would acquire one and still be of the opinion that all a degree qualification says about you is that you were boring enough to persist through the years it took to gain one. I got a degree ... but I lost the bet ... he was right ... I did actually learn a lot of useful things that went above merely thinking of the certificate as a declaration of comformity ... but hey ... who's the real winner?