Category Archives: Personal

About my personal language learning and writing goals.

Personal Experiments in Extensive Reading

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As mentioned in my previous post about learning Japanese, I’ve been applying extensive reading principles to improving my Japanese language skills. At best, in Japanese, I can be described as a “false beginner”, as I don’t have the skills yet to pass the lowest level Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I have dabbled in learning the language whenever I have found a fun resource (Let’s Learn Japanese TV series, Kimono text books); completed a half-semester beginner course, which taught Hiragana and some introductory phrases; and visited Japan briefly three times, each trip providing immersive language learning experiences.

I don’t recall exactly when I started, but it was either from December or early January, I attempted to read something in Japanese for ten minutes per day. I keep a database of my language books, and used data in that to produce an approximate order of difficulty for attempting the books, and probably read through about 80 booklets, plus the chapters of Kimono level 1, and the starting chapters of Kimono level 2. I stopped about a week ago, as it was frustratingly difficult, and I had other things occupying my mind. For the moment I am filling the gap by playing Kana Quest, which is keeping my kana recognition alive.

So in a way, this has been an experiment in seeing how well extensive reading goes in a language where you are still at the beginning stages. In a couple of readability studies I’ve led, I’ve used a 5-point scale to indicate how easy something is to read:

  1. Very easy, understood everything
  2. Easy, a few words were not known, but it didn’t impact reading comprehension
  3. Not easy, but it was possible to follow the story
  4. Difficult, a dictionary is needed to make sense of it
  5. Very difficult, a dictionary won’t help

Number 5 is rarely chosen by anyone, and it has been argued that maybe it doesn’t happen. However, if I were to attempt to read something in Chinese, a dictionary won’t help me, as I don’t know how to look up hanzu characters based on stroke count. Sure I might get there if I persist, but life is too short for that. So I guess Number 5 is more about lacking willpower when encountering very difficult text.

In terms of optimal language learning, ratings of 2-3 are ideal, since new language is being encountered, but the reading is not at the frustration level.

I “extensively read” in a few languages. In Dutch, my mother tongue (but not my best language, which is English), I can comfortably read novels written for children.  I would need a dictionary for anything technical if it was important for me to understand the nuances of meaning, but I would still be able to “follow the story” for most texts I come across.

In French, a language I have studied both in courses and on my own, I am also at the stage where most texts would not be classed as difficult. For German, I read graded readers up to B1 level, giving me texts in the target zone. Thanks to my Dutch background and some study of the language, it would not take too much for me to be able to read texts for native German speakers and be able to “follow the story”.

Now we come to Japanese. The booklets I read went from rating 1 to rating 4. Naturally, the rating 4 ones led to frustration and reduced willpower to continue. My approach to reading them was to read straight through, and then afterward, allow myself to look up a word or two that seemed to be important for understanding, or that had occurred a few times in my reading. I will make the following observations of my experience.

  • My vocabulary definitely improved, but I think that stopping will lead to much of it being forgotten again
  • My ability to recognize kanji improved, and I think that this may actually last a bit longer in my memory than the pronunciation, particularly where there is some obvious logical connection between the ideogram and the meaning, eg. the words for “above” and “below”.
  • Illustrated books that are basically an illustrated vocabulary are very easy to read, even if you don’t know any of the words beforehand and forget most of them afterwards. However, it can be challenging to make them interesting.
  • Booklets with illustrations and repeated sentences can be easy. For example, where the concrete noun, such as a type of animal, is substituted into a template sentence, and the sentence has an illustration of the concrete noun on the page. Even if the sentence isn’t fully understood, the substituted noun will be.
  • Where it is clear from the illustrations what is being said, the meaning of the text can be deduced.
  • In languages that I can read reasonably well I don’t like to read stories that I already know, but I was grateful for the known stories presented in Japanese, to allow me to deduce what the text meant. While the text may have been just as difficult as other stories, the fact that the story was already known meant that the text was better understood and learnt from.
  • What also fascinated me was how focused and absorbed I was in the reading and sense-making task – much as I have observed young children when they are following a story in a book that is being read to them. It was as though my entire brain was switched on – until I got to that frustration point recently.
  • Attractive illustrations make the experience much more enjoyable.

A take home lesson for me is: once an alphabet is known, it is possible to read something, such as illustrated vocabulary books. My Japanese collection includes colour+object combinations, transport, trains, illustrated loanwords in katakana, cities and countries. The difficulty is perhaps learning the alphabet in an absence of known vocabulary. In our first languages we have clues from words we know, such as B for banana. For languages we haven’t learnt yet, authors would need to resort to other tricks such as loanwords, cognates, international words and names and place names.This is one of the tricks I use in my comic book series for French.

The Kimono series simplifies the reading a little by rendering all words that would be in katakana in romaji (our regular western latin alphabet), but spelt as it would be when rendered in katakana. I like this idea for slowly ramping up the difficulty. Books for Japanese native speakers also slowly ramp things up. Children’s books might be in hiragana, hiragana plus katakana with hiragana support, or kana and kanji with support, depending on the target age group.

One study I read about extensive reading and vocabulary acquisition examined what happened if you re-read stories. Each time you re-read you pick up more of the vocabulary. I think I will explore this next, and see how many re-readings of the easier books will make it easier for me to advance to the more difficult ones. Stay tuned for the answer!

 

 

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Function word frustrations

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I recently re-watched Dilili in Paris, which is a fabulous animation movie for children, with French dialogue that is slow enough for French language learners to follow. I originally watched the movie during the Melbourne French Film Festival and considered buying the movie later so I could try watching it without English subtitles.

Frustration 1: Memory

There is a frequently repeated phrase when Dilili meets new people: “Je suis heureuse de vous rencontrer”. It was semi-humorous, and certainly designed to be remembered, to teach how to be polite when meeting someone new. However, what I actually remembered after a week or two was: “Je suis heureuse __ vous rencontrer.” Despite being exposed to many occurrences, the function word was lost. Function words don’t provide semantic content and therefore appear to be harder to retain. There is certainly research evidence that concrete nouns are easier to remember than various other types of words. This movie brought that home to me in a big way.

Frustration 2: Resources

(Not really about function words…)

I bought the DVD of the movie, and then when viewing it, discovered that the subtitles could not be switch off, and that the only subtitles were in English. I don’t know who makes these decisions when preparing DVDs for sale, but perhaps they don’t really consider their audience carefully enough. A French movie sold in Australia would have various audience segments: French ex-pats – possibly including some French people who are hard of hearing, Australian francophiles, Australians learning French. To me, movies and TV episodes are highly useful for practising comprehension of the spoken language. Ideally it can be done at three levels of difficulty (with the example given for L2 referring to the language being learnt and L1 referring to the native language):

  1. L2 audio with L1 subtitles,
  2. L2 audio with L2 subtitles,
  3. L2 audio without subtitles

I even do this with DVDs that were originally in English. I’ve watched two entire series of Perry Mason with French audio, which was quite illuminating. If you are short of practice material, check your DVD collection for audio in your target language. You may be pleasantly surprised to find a good selection amongst your favourite shows.

Frustration 3: Vocabulary Size

(Function words are frequent words…)

One of the excellent things about some graded readers was that they were designed for a specific vocabulary size. For me, vocabulary makes all the difference between a readable text and an unreadable one.  CLE International used to publish books targeting a specific vocabulary size. For example, Niveau 1 had vocabularies of 400-700 words. Through extensive reading, I have successfully moved from 300-word vocabulary books to 700-1000 word ones, and I hope to continue to progress through further reading. However, as with other publishers, the publications have now been converted to CEFR levels: A1, A2 etc. and as far as I can tell, the subtleties of vocabulary size have been removed from the book information.

I have completed a CEFR B1 in French, yet I’m most comfortable reading A1 texts (and texts with less than 1000 word vocabularies) and with few exceptions they are not easy apart from the grammar, which is too easy for me, but the books are still sometimes challenging vocabulary-wise. What frustrates me is that A2 covers such a wide range of vocabularies, depending on the source material, from readable to incomprehensible. Published vocabulary sizes for A2, where they occur at all, vary from 400 to >1200 words. The level of frustration with some of these graded readers is the same as for texts written for native speakers. I oscillate between A1, A2, native texts and back again. The original memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan are as easy and more exciting than many A2 texts.

CEFR is designed, as far as I can tell, to describe a person’s practical skill in a language, and for that it is useful. However, the jumps between levels are quite large, so that the defined levels are not very useful for the learner themselves. Some publishers solve this by dividing up levels. ELI uses A0, A1, A1.1. The Danish Teen Readers/Easy Readers also divide up the levels, and still appear to quote target vocabulary sizes. Indie publishers tend to ignore vocabulary size in their writing. However, writers and publishers should remember that:

  1. Extensive reading is at its best if learners are reading at a comfortable level while not being familiar with all vocabulary. Ideally learners should know 98% of the words in text they are reading.
  2. Readability of text largely consists of grammar and vocabulary components.
  3. The more readable AND interesting reading material is, the more learners will read, the better their vocabularies will become, and the better their skill in a language will be.
  4. Publishing vocabulary levels required for 95-98% coverage of the text will assist learners in finding materials of the right level for them at any point. Vocabulary levels should be (loosely) based on general word frequency.

This is why I write my comic books for language learners. This is why I research extensive reading, readability and language acquisition.

Extensive Reading in Japanese

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I’ve been reading my collection of very easy Japanese graded readers in recent weeks, and was very pleased to successfully order all the level 0 books from ask-books.com.  This gives me a collection of 18 books in addition to the 3 level 0 books I had from NPO.  I’m currently making my way through them.

My knowledge of Japanese is quite limited really: I learnt a bit from the Let’s Learn Japanese TV series, then from the first book of the Kimono Japanese language school text book, a short course based on the Japanese for Busy People textbook prior to a one-week visit to Japan, and then pretty much just doing extensive reading and occasionally revising my hiragana and katakana (and another short trip to Japan).  So some of the level 0 books (and some level 1 which is the same vocabulary base) are roughly the right level for me.  The others are perhaps a little difficult, however, the design of the books is such that you can follow the story via the pictures and pick up vocabulary by deduction a lot of the time.

While I try to avoid looking up words (well, actually I’m pretty lazy anyway), I allow myself to look up one or two words after I’ve read through a book to either confirm my guess at its meaning, or to make the meaning clearer where there were too many words I didn’t know to follow the story.  I will sometimes reread the story after having done so – I’m only reading very short stories so this doesn’t take long.

Via the Japanese Level Up site I discovered another blog with information about extensive reading, together with reviews of Japanese graded readers, and also how to access an on-line library of Japanese picture books.  Given that the tadoku competition favours new books over rereading, I’ll probably hit the picture books once I run out of my readers.

 

 

Children’s Books

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In my French reading, partly to continue using extensive reading, and also partly research for my writing of comic books in French, I’ve started reading more children’s books.  The J’Aime Lire series from Bayard was an excellent place to start.  They publish for specific ages: 6, 7, 8, 9, etc.  While the difficulty for a foreign language learner varies sometimes, the books for 6-8 year-olds mostly work for me, and seem to match a ~1000 word vocabulary or A2/B1 level.

One thing I found with reading children’s fantasy novels is that they are very vivid, and it is easy to become engrossed in this fantasy world, with a feeling of wonder.  I had the same experience when reading the first volume of Harry Potter (and as a child when reading Enid Blyton).  My comic book also has this vividness about it – partly because it is a brightly-coloured comic book.  I’m not sure if it is the fantasy element, the illustrations or a property of the writing that makes it so.  In the case of Harry Potter it can only have been created via the text, as I read it before seeing any movies of it.

Easy Reader Genres

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I’ve been taking part in the Tadoku competition again this month, in French, Japanese and German.

My Japanese is pretty basic, so I’m reading beginner readers that have only a couple of sentences on each page at most, with the majority of them being repetitious in order to give practice at certain phrases.  Only a few of these are particularly enjoyable in terms of text content: The Shinkansen series previously published by Heinemann are good.  The DEE Publications readers are good practice and have nice illustrations, but can’t be classed as particularly entertaining.  The interesting part of those books are actually the cultural notes at the end in English.  Some Japanese little books for very young children that I acquired in Japan are amusing, partly for their innovative layout (Inai inai baa!).

In French I’ve been reading books at the 700-1000 word vocabulary level, plus a few other books of a similar level of difficulty.  After reading quite a few books for adolescents about adventures and mysteries etc, I seem to have hit saturation point with the genre.  I’m still enjoying crime mysteries and some classic stories (though not all), but my new interest is stories from Africa.  There is a series of African stories published by Heinemann in 5 levels of difficulty.  I stumbled across these when visiting a Dutch shopping site, and ordered a couple at Niveau 3 to try.  They are a refreshing change from the fodder I’ve been reading recently.  They don’t pull any punches though.  I’ve read La Valise Ensorcelée, which has an element of magic to it, as well as a moral.  I’ve also read “L’usine de la Mort”. This book shocked me a little, but I’m glad I read it.  I don’t think it’s great literature by any stretch, but certainly interesting, moving, and sufficiently different for the jaded easy reader reader.  As a result I’ve bought more books from the series.

Recent language learning experiences.

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Recently I sat my French B1 exam. In preparation I had conversations with colleagues and friends in French over a few drinks, switched my various gadgets and accounts to French, read books in French, did a few exercises from textbooks, revised a few points of grammar, tried duolingo, and did some practice exams. Looking at my results, my main weakness is speaking. My French colleague says that my main problem is being hesitant. Add a few drinks and I’m more fluent.
Currently my obsession is Japanese, while I’m in Japan for a conference. I’m getting a bit better at katakana and kanji thanks to repeated efforts at reading signs.

Pronunciation songs

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While preparing my choir for a concert of French music I have been inspired to write some rounds and short songs in French to help choristers to produce the correct vowel sounds, and to have a bit of an idea about how to pronounce French.  I’ve written one round for each vowel so far, and am now writing songs for various consonants.  Today I finished a song for the letter G.  I’ll probably publish these as a booklet for choirs and classes.

Language Qualifications

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As I write a comic book in French for language learners I thought it would be a good idea to update my qualifications.  A long time ago I did senior high school French and the corresponding Alliance Française exams.  A few years ago I did a few courses at the Alliance Française.  This year I sat the (CEFR) A2 exam – a fairly low level exam just so I could see how it all works, and because I haven’t done an exam for a few years. 

Europe has a set of standards for language skill, known in English as the “Common European Framework of Reference” (CEFR).  The 6 levels go from A1 to C2, and reflect practical skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing, rather than just grammatical skills.  I hope to do the B1 exam soon, which is still a lower level than expected by international students entering TAFE in Australia, so I have a bit of a way to go.  B2/C1 is needed for tertiary study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages