+1 Challenge Weekly Updates #10/11

The goal of challenge I set myself was to speak Japanese comfortably. Now that I'm reaching the final hurdle, the stake (dancing to neko mimi switch) enters my mind ... in parallel with thoughts that it all depends on the criteria I use to measure success.

You see, when I set my goal, the criteria of "comfortable" related to how comfortably I speak my native language ... and when I use that to measure my success, sure, I'm still at some considerable distance from my ultimate aim ... fluency.

Myself and Kirsten at London Educational Games Meetup

Yet, this week, my friend and magical girl, Kirsten wrote an amazing blog post How not to learn a language) in which she compares how I've approached learning a language and the way languages are taught in school. I have had quite a few friends and acquaintances telling me that what I've managed to achieve is quite remarkable, in their opinion ... to which, I have to give a very Japanese response of waving my hand in denial to the compliment and saying,「いいえ、いいえ、けんきょなだ」( "No, no, I'm humble."). However, when I think about going to Japan next year, I'm at least confident that I will be equipped with the conversational skills to have a descent conversation. So, perhaps that's a more realistic measure of "comfortable" ... rather than the criteria being relative to how comfortable I am when speaking English, my success criteria should have been how comfortable I am speaking Japanese relative to how well I could hold a conversation in Japanese when the challenge began. Suddenly, I think, wow ... I really have come a long a way in a relatively short period of time.

My profession is an 'Innovation Technologist", I work in education and advise a University on how technologies can be used to enhance the students learning experience. I often feel like Tom Hank's character in the film, "Big" ... they give me technologies to play with or spend time observing how students are using them ... and then I reflect on my observations and report back to the University with my recommendations.

Last I went to Norway and observed both how children and adults learn a language.

In the video I made, you can see how much fun we all had PLAYING with language ... PLAY is massively important ... but as Jesse Schell (The Art of Game Design, 2008) would put it, "When play is enforced, it ceases to be play and becomes work".  Think of language learning as a game ... it is a game ... a wonderful game that affords the player the richest reward imaginable ... being able to unlock the cultural levels for you to play in.

Now, when you buy a computer game ... hands up who reads the instruction manuals from cover to cover? I speculate, that actually, if you're like me ... maybe you read just enough information to get started ... and then you dive into the game and usually, you don't last very long before you lose the game. What do you do? For me, my approach will usually be to have the manual sitting there at arms length, so I can read it whilst the game restarts ... or I might pause the game so I can figure out how I can avoid being killed the same way again and again. That doesn't mean I won't be killed the same way ... often I have to practice before I get the knack ... and once I've got the knack .... I've got the knack forever!

Here is a case study ... sitting at Club Ganbatte (the Japanese Meetup group I attend regularly in London) ... I was talking with a couple of people, one Japanese speaker, another English speaker ... the English speaker was telling us about his experiences of shopping around Christmas time ... and he used the phrase, "Window Shopping".  Now, I thought, "hmmm ... I wonder if that's lost in translation ... or I wonder if the Japanese person is thinking he's going shopping for windows ... maybe it's some a Christmas tradition us quirky Londoners uphold!?) ... so I tried out saying 「まどのかいものをわかりますか」(shopping of window do you undersand?) ... and the Japanese person said they knew what I was trying to say, but it didn't translate properly. Asking what a Japanese person would say if they were "window shopping", they said, 「みてだけ」 (only look) .... ah, excellent ... and how すばらしい (wonderful) is that going to be when I'm Japan ... I'm sure I will often be asked if I want to buy something and can't afford it ... or I'll be out and about with friends and they'll want to know if I want to go into the shop to buy something ... and shall now know I can perform my special move ...「いいえ、みてだけ」(no, just looking!).

When I reflect on the way I didn't learn French at school, I can certainly appreciate the way my French teacher strove to make the lessons engaging as much as she could. Ultimately though, I was more interested in drawing pictures of tie-fighters on the back of my exercise book. The elephant in the room was that I simply wasn't interested in learning French. We only had the option of learning French or German; not that I had a desire to learn any other language, however, when given the options of chicken or fish, I would ask if there was a vegetarian option? Back in the 1980's, the argument would have been that our school was fortunate to employ teachers capable of teaching French and German; it was logistically impossible to teach a range of languages. Recently, a friend was telling me that her daughter is learning Japanese at school ... I wonder if Japanese had been an option for me whether I would have taken it? I'm sure it would have appealed to me, but whether I would have made the effort to study is another matter.

What has changed the most for me is that I am learning Japanese through my own free will. I don't need to study at the same pace as anyone else, I don't need to follow the well thought of structure laid out in text books. Yes, there are virtues to studying to a curriculum, being part of a language learning herd etc ... but the internet affords us the freedom to personalize our learning experience. To begin with, my approach to learning Japanese wasn't efficient, wasn't consistent, wasn't even effective ... but it certainly was enchanting and magical. It was the equivalent of not reading the manual and diving into the game ... I wasn't speaking Japanese to anyone ... I was in "safe mode" where I could wander around and take delight at the scenery without the danger of having a conversation. I began to converse with Japanese people via Twitter ... short little hiragana tweets to Harajuku fashion designers, Vocaloid artists, musicians etc ... and the thrill of conversing with people who would have previously been less accessible to converse with ... that kept my motivation up for the first six months or so.  Then a friend introduced me to a retired Japanese teacher and I had my first proper experience at speaking Japanese ... apart from the most basic of introductions, I seem to remember being able to say,「ねこがすきです」(I like cats).

The retired Japanese teacher agreed to give me some Japanese lessons and I gladly accepted. I was a difficult student ... I wouldn't take the direct route from A to B ... it was frustrating for both of us, but I certainly learned some very useful grammatical structures that afforded me to go off and play with the Japanese language. I definitely needed a human tutor ... but at that time, I hadn't seriously considered using the Internet ... in hindsight, I was stupidly thinking, "I will use Skype when I'm ready to make conversation". Of course, nobody will ever be ready ... and waiting until you are ready is the barrier that prevents the majority of people from making progress in language learning.

Over the past eight months or so, I've been using Skype (both with a language partner ... now friend I made via Mixxr and tutors I've found on italki) and I've been using the applications Memrise and Anki. Just as importantly though, I've learned a lot from listening to many language hackers, polyglots and other language learners. I shall start a blog at some point just to focus on the compressing what I've learned from this marvelous group of people. Certainly, learning from Tim Ferriss accelerated my learning and then doing Benny Lewis', "Speak from Day 1" course afforded me a structure. Then, by participating in the +1 Challenge, I learned probably the most important lesson in language learning ... to keep at it even when life throws you a few curve balls along the way. I've also learned a lot from other participants on the +1 Challenge ... and they've been enormously encouraging. The friends I've made through meetup groups have also been fantastic.

People seem to have been impressed by my progress in learning Japanese. Whilst I know that I've steadily progressed and become more efficient in how I'm learning a language ... I haven't got it all figured out just yet. The first thing I'm going to do post +1 Challenge is reflect on what I've learned, what I want to tweak, what didn't work as well as I'd hoped. We are all different ... what works for one person may not necessarily work for another.

I would definitely recommend participating in the +1 Challenge to anyone ... it's not just an opportunity to progress in your target language ... it's an opportunity to tweak your language learning configuration ... become a better player in any game.  Best of all though, you can't sit there clinging on to the rock, planning your strategy, tooling yourself up etc. You have to let go of the rock. There is no other way. You have to play.

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #9

Over the last three weeks, in addition to learning Japanese, I've been completing my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates and preparing to demonstrate my skills. Recently, I've been working on an introduction speech and an 'ice-breaker' activity. For the introduction, I initially wrote a script which I ran through with a friend called Ian. I then revised the script when I had a lesson with Satoko-san, and finally practiced with my language partner, Mikie-san. What was really awesome was Satoko-san recorded herself saying my speech, so I could listen to it over and over again. It's been a few days since I actually gave my introduction speech for real ... and for this update, I thought I'd try and re-create it ... I was better last week, but, I'm glad to say I hadn't forgotten any of it!




In addition to completing my TEFL course, I took a specialist certificate on "Teaching in Japan". This has been very beneficial as it's given me a greater understanding of Japanese culture. Saying that, I thought I'd learned a lot about Japanese culture through watching dramas; and for sure, I'd still say that I learned a lot of interesting stuff that way (even just simple things, like Japanese table manners), but what I learned on the course was the sort of stuff that is useful to know to spare me from putting my foot in it without knowing what I've done wrong. As with everything, I'm sure to make mistakes, but at least now I feel confident that I at least know I've made a mistake and continue to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones.

Anyway, I had better crack on. I'm going to Norway for the weekend. In fact, I've just had a Japanese lesson on Skype and had great fun learning a couple of Norwegian phrases in Japanese ... as in, I pretended I was a Japanese student learning Norwegian.  In the same way that I've started learning to play guitar by watching tutorials in Japanese ... I have to admit that I struggle to stick at one particular thing at a time ... but in the first five or six weeks of this challenge, I made such good progress by keeping a regular routine going. Whilst I've recently been a bit all over the place, I've maintained my Japanese learning by doing stuff in Japanese rather than in English wherever I can.

+1 Challenge Weekly Update #8

It's Sunday and I have a stomach swarming with flutterbyes. I can't really talk about why or what this is about on any public timeline at the moment. What I can say that I'm preparing to give a speech in Japanese in front of an audience and it will be recorded on video. Amusingly, I would be nervous enough doing this presentation in English and in some respects, opting to do it in Japanese feels almost less worrying than doing it in English.

Anyway, my Japanese language learning is progressing. I've missed about three days of my scheduled language learning over the last week (things have been a bit frantic!) but then, I've increased the amount of Skype sessions I'm doing via italki.com. These are going really well and I'm trying out different tutors again. It's nice to have regular tutor's who have gained a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses, but I also like having a session once in a while with a tutor I've never tried out before. For some reason, a private joke referring to a John Cage (a.k.a. 'the biscuit') from Ally McBeal quote just sprang to mind.

OK, I had better sign off. I just thought I'd make a small written update as I'm wanting to let everyone know I'm still maintaining progress ... few bumps and unexpected turns from time to time, but it keeps everything interesting.