Not being able to pronounce or hear the words is a problem. Associating the words just with the symbols seems very taxing to the visual parts of the brain. Also using the voice/vocal/speaking parts of the brain seems advantageous.
Not to mention, even if you could manage to remember the symbols that way, it would still be next to useless, since you still couldn't SPEAK Japanese at all.
The site creator has stated elsewhere though that the site is intended for people who already know hiragana/katakana (the phonetic parts of the Japanese writing system). If you do know those, it could help as practice for kanji and phrases.
I don't understand anything and I tried a bit, but IMO this is much more effort than normal. A friend of my confirmed you need to know hiragana. She has studied it a bit and could follow the lessons, whereas I couldn't (knowing next to nothing).
I couldn’t even tell if the first example was
showing how to create a conjunction “banana and monkey” or something else like “monkey eats banana”. Yeah, this would need a lot slower of an approach to work for day 0 beginners. Rosetta Stone and Duolingo are great examples of how it can be done.
The site is definitely not supposed to be the main resource used to learn Japanese despite being self contained. It exists to complement the learning from a more traditional app.
I didn't even get this far. I wonder if it's related to my aspie, literal brain wiring.
In my head, it read like, "Symbol for monkey emoji. New symbol. Symbol for banana emoji with new symbol below it, and to the right."
I certainly didn't get anywhere near "eat."
I was comfortably conversant in English before I was 2, and I've learned Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew reasonably well, so it's not my language ability, or even learning with non-Latin alphabets, though I suppose it could be trying to learn without an alphabet at all? My patterns matching skills are strong.
But guessing meaning of unknown symbols from their nearness to each other? Whooshes right by me!
Well the good news is that the kana are really low hanging fruit. You can learn them in a day and as long as you continue learning Japanese you will be constantly exposed to them. There are only just over a hundred of them and, unlike English, they are only ever pronounced one way[0].
Kanji are significantly more effort, with 2k characters to learn and multiple pronunciations for each. Interestingly, while you will probably hate Knaji at first and wonder why they are still used, you will come to appreciate them later as they aid reading by breaking things up[1] and disambiguating between homonyms.
[0] Ok, sorry, that was the lies-to-children version. Katakana are only ever pronounced one way. Hiragana has different pronunciation for は and へ when they are used as particles. Also there's pitch accent.
It took me at least a month to learn all Hiragana + katakana using getkana and they only really stuck after I began learning vocabulary. Learning them in a day is impossible. You can look them up if you want to get started on day one but that is completely different from actually knowing the by heart.
Like I said, if you continue studying Japanese you'll be continually exposed to them which will make them stick.
By "learn them in a day" I meant one day of decently focused effort to memorize the syllable for each kana character. Between flashcards, pronunciation, and writing it is very doable because that's what I did.
More or less that’s right. They’re a good step toward seeing pictographs as phonetic characters.
When I first starting learning Japanese I took an intensive 7 week course. We learned Hiragana and Katakana in one week, though it took longer to really make that knowledge long term available. I forgot a lot of it after completing the course, but my first year living in Japan helped restore it all!
Now my kids are learning kana and my oldest kanji. The state of the art here is still drilling and repetition. FWIW this website is cute, but without learning the characters you have to rely on verbal instruction, so as an experiment it only works after learning the Kana.
Nice idea, but this would be much better as a slightly animated video, especially with sound effects. E.g. to emphasize the monkey eating a banana, have a sound and animation for it.
Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.
You can spend hours trying to guess the meaning of a word through pictures and context (and not getting anywhere far), or you can spend a minute reading the translated meaning and then spend hours understanding it in context (and reinforcing it, and learning its semantics).
I wonder if this idea of "avoiding the mother tongue" stems from all the misguided marketing surrounding products like Rosetta Stone which advertise "learn like children learn." Spoiler: it takes children years and years of near-constant, directed input to acquire their native language to a high degree.
Edit: But I can see the value in doing this as a thought experiment ("what if translation isn't possible?"), and for that it's interesting.
Have you tried more traditional textbooks? I understand there's a desire for an easy-to-use interactive app, but I've never come across anything remotely as good as a textbook like Minna no Nihongo (I used this book 20 years ago when I started learning Japanese - maybe I'm biased?).
It is 100% in Japanese, but it has a companion book with translated grammar notes if needed. The majority of the book is excellent content in the form of dialogs and readings designed for beginners. I suppose the exercises work better in a classroom setting...
> First there is close to no easy to read content when you begin learning Japanese and there is demand for such thing.
If you know the alphabets (that is kana), you can try the easiest graded reader such as [1] and progressing from there. It assumes little to no grammar knowledge and comes with illustrations and narrated audio that you can follow along.
I buy Japanese children's books from amazon.co.jp, but there are also the NHK Easy News. Normal textbooks also have simple texts. Tatoeba has a large number of Japanese sentences with audio and translations to various languages.
It's not like immersive language classes aren't a thing. Even the normal foreign language classes at my university, past the third or fourth semester at least, only had 1 day of English while handling administravia, and then the entire class from then on was in the target language. During summer semester, all of the classes were taught this way, even the introductory ones.
Part of the difference between children learning something and adults learning something is that we have trouble achieving Beginner's Mind.
Finding techniques that work fine to be remedial or even insulting makes you get into your own way. In the extreme case, how do you fill a cup which is already full?
Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together). Translating back and forth is a crutch for most, and a separate skill for others (eg, professionals). That's why when you ask your friend, "what did those guys say in the background?" you get something vague back. Nothing translates directly, idioms doubly or triply so.
What did that guy say? He said he's really mad at that other guy, (using a lot of colorful language), and I can say "he's mad" or we can go into why calling someone a dog/goat/cow/fish in this language is one step down from saying bad things about their mother.
Yes, the 'natural approach' to language learning is definitely popular. But in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook. Class would not get very far once students started learning abstract concepts otherwise. Of course, translation is just the very first step in lexical acquisition - it's still a long journey to acquire a word.
>Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together).
That's not really true, though, and it also depends on what aspect of language we're talking about (phonology vs. syntax vs. lexical acquisition, for example). In the case of the lexicon, there's good experimental evidence that bilinguals, when hearing one language, activate lexical competitors from both languages (i.e., they are not fully able to inhibit activation of one language in listening). The mind is far more complex than having different "centers" for different things. It's a complex network of signal activation and inhibition.
Of course, that doesn't relate to my original point, which was simply that language learners should not purposefully limit themselves. The incredible amount of time it's going to take to learn abstract concepts without translation far, far outweighs the possible co-activation of translation equivalents.
> in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook
I don't think this is true. At best the student will have their own dictionary. At least in my experience, all the full time foreign language schools I know of teach solely in the language being learned and the textbook is solely in that language as well. The students are a mix from all over the world. The school would not cater to all of them by providing translations in a bunch of different languages.
One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).
In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.
I definitely think it's important that you teach your native language/that you learn from a native speaker. Learning Japanese from a novice is not something that I want to do.
> One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).
> In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.
I absolutely second this as someone who has taken 3/5 semesters of Chinese. Some classmate's pronounciation is so objectively wrong that I have to pay attention for when they're called on just to mute my volume output. Obviously I can't do this in-person.
I've taken one-on-one courses in another language and it's (believable I suppose) how much faster I've progressed.
Another fault is that some classes are structured so that nobody fails or falls behind (whether they're night classes, at a school, or in a corporate environment). The fault with that is that many other subjects simply don't care if 1/3 of the class fails, but language group classes tend to go at the speed of the lowest individuals.
These classes I was referring to were often taught by a native speaker, so there was always at least one person in any class worth emulating. But that was never really my issue so I am not a good judge of how others experience that problem.
Moving backward a few years, my high school teacher (singular) was a bit odd. He sat us in the same alphabetical pattern every year. Behind me sat a girl with impeccable vocabulary but some of the worst pronunciation in the whole class. Meanwhile I had impeccable pronunciation and a respectable vocabulary.
By senior year she had still not improved, and some days it was more than I could take. It was only a few years ago that I realized that while she couldn’t see me make faces, the teacher could. And so he had to stand up front interacting with her while I was in his field of vision, trying and failing not to make pained facial expressions. I don’t know if he found that frustrating, amusing, or something else.
> Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.
Because you're relying on the translator to accurately convey the meaning of words to you, which translators rarely do. Most professional translators and language instructors don't exactly have the best grasp of language themselves. They do some 1 to 1 translation of "monkey" and 猿 as if the connotation, denotation, and etymology are all the same when if you look it up, they're only kinda similar but not exactly.
English Wikipedia:
"Monkey is a common name that may refer to groups or species of mammals, in part, the simians of infraorder Simiiformes."
Former talks about Simians whereas the latter apparently says (correct me if I'm wrong I don't know much japanese) colloquially all non-human primates. Is the translator going to know whether an orangutan or gorilla qualifies as 猿? Probably not, they're not even going to mention it.
Personally I believe people should learn a language well enough to read Wikipedia( or equivalent), and then continue only with media in the language in question from that point onwards.
The Japanese Wikipedia is not a translation of the English Wikpedia. Wikipedia isn’t a good place to learn a language, and especially not by comparison. For example, here’s the Polish Wikipedia page:
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Oh, and here’s the German Wikipedia page:
404 Not Found
…hold on, that’s not right. Both Wikipedias have a disambiguation page, and the first link on them goes to their equivalent of Simian. The point is, every Wikipedia has its own structure, its own rules of what should be a page, and articles might be based on sources in that language, not in English.
I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page.
A quick word on the rationale for not using translation.
All of the classic apps (Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, ...) are to some extent translation based. Translating has three scalability issues.
First, if you want to be inclusive and your product to be used by everyone you have to translate the whole product in a long list of languages. I imagine there is a ton of people who do not speak English and would love to learn Japanese !
I don't really know how to express the second limitation better than by saying 'translation is not additive' or it does not 'scale up'. What I mean by that is that if you translate at the word level (such as with Memrise), you learn words but somehow you do no learn the language (to be fair is the point of the app and that works fairly well). However a language expresses itself through sentences and translating a sentence is not the same as translating each one of its word. So you are sort of stuck at the word level and can't scale up to the sentence level by combining the low level components that words are.
Third, translating sentences does not scale well due to the complexity of natural languages. If like Duolingo you base your app on translating sentences you face all the poblem faced by Duolingo.
How do you translate 猿はバナナを食べる ? There are a lot of potential translations. Here are some I can think of right now :
I think that one problem that eventually happens with this approach, which is a problem I had with Duolingo as well, is that very soon after learning a few words you need to start learning basic grammar. In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing.
For example, in 猿はバナナを食べる, how should I understand what は and を mean? When should I use them? I can more or less easily understand that 猿 means monkey, バナナ means banana, and 食べる is related to eating. But to understand that は indicates the topic and を indicates that the word before is having an action done to them, I would have to see a LOT of examples.
I think a little grammatical explanation goes a very long way in terms of the number of examples you have to show.
> In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing.
To be fair, you learn your first language by inference and don't start learning the rules until you're some 10 years into fluency. Even as late as high school we were taught grammatical rules with "As a native speaker, do what sounds right, then find the correct rule and say you applied it. Immigrants, sorry you'll find this exam question impossibly difficult. Good luck"
We may not teach a codified grammar rule set until later, but we are definitely learning grammer as we learn language for the first time.
My 2 year old will say things like, "I like she". After which we will correct her, "I like her".
She has never heard anyone say "I like she" but she is re-ordering and inventing her own sentences using unspoken rules. (She may have generated that sentence from hearing "where is she?") She will eventually recognize that some things don't sound right, but she is also applying those things that sound right to newly invented sentences using those rules.
So in effect, we do seem to be learning rules when first learning to talk, we just are extracting those rules internally and applying them rather than working from a codified set of rules.
There is a fair amount of evidence that corrections (negative evidence) do not actually improve the grammar of children who are still developing their language skills[1], for two reasons: adults are bad at correcting mistakes consistently, and children do not internalise corrections because language acquisition is not a conscious process.
In addition, even in early development children actually do appear to have pretty strong understanding of their native language's syntax[2] even if they cannot produce adult-level English. There are certain classes of mistakes they do not make (indicating they have internalised many more rules than may be apparent), and they can understand sentences which have grammar that they do not produce themselves (meaning that the level of output is not a good indication of their language development).
Interesting video. But it seems that the definition of negative evidence is telling the child "no" and then correcting them.
When I say we "correct her", I simply mean that we repeat back the sentence correctly. It seems to work well as she will often repeat it back again how we say it or sometimes just continue on. We never withhold understanding because the grammar is wrong. I can definitely see how the example given of correcting with "no, that's not proper grammar" would not be effective with young ones.
By repeating it back correctly, she is given another example of correct grammar and I know of no other way for a young child to learn than to hear it spoken more.
> But it seems that the definition of negative evidence is telling the child "no" and then correcting them.
The video goes through several examples from peer-reviewed studies, and several of them involve "repeating back the correct sentence". In fact while the video did mention the fact that saying "no" just makes communication harder, the majority of the video is explaining why giving corrected examples of grammar doesn't necessarily help.
The video talks about your approach specifically here[1].
> I know of no other way for a young child to learn than to hear it spoken more.
That is true, but repeating back a specific sentence is not necessarily the most effective manner of helping them acquire an aspect of grammar. Language acquisition isn't a conscious process, so focusing on a mistake doesn't help -- and repeating a sentence with correct grammar is only a single example of that particular grammar concept, which the child still needs to hear many more times before they actually acquire.
It should also be noted that one of the studies (looking at what sentences parents would correct) found that "there is not even a shred of evidence that approval and disapproval are contingent on syntactic correctness". So it's quite likely that you aren't actually correcting grammatical mistakes -- most of the time you're probably correcting sentences with incorrect meaning and pronunciation.
I mean, it probably doesn't hurt or anything, it's just probably not as helpful as you might think it is.
> To be fair, you learn your first language by inference and don't start learning the rules until you're some 10 years into fluency.
This isn't really a good way to think about it; if you're fluent, you have already learned all the rules.
A "rule" like "no one will take you seriously as a lawyer if you write 号, you must always write 日 instead" is a fact about the culture, not the language.
As I said elsewhere, the main difference is that children get 7-10 years of constant immersion, 24h a day, to learn their first language. I don't have that kind of time :)
Also, I agree that past a certain point grammar becomes extremely convoluted. But I'm not speaking about complex grammar subtleties here, just basic things such as the role of prepositions, word order, basic conjugations etc. Stuff like "most verbs from their past by adding -ed at the end" or "when you ask a question, you typically change the word order and add "do" " etc.
Just one more anecdote, but this is what turned me off from duolingo completely. You can't just learn words or sentences alone, you have to have at least some grammar in there. You need lists of prepositions and pronouns, and you need a little bit of at least simple rules for verbs and nouns. Yes, it's boring but otherwise you'll really struggle.
Not that I disagree necessarily, but to play devil's advocate: kids don't learn any formal grammar rules before they speak their first language fluently.
Well kind of depends what you mean. Kids do years of formal grammar in school here in Germany, the language is hard. Kids take a long time to pick up a language via immersion and they typically don’t need to express any complicated constructs. They also have all their needs met by a caregiver, I know what you’re getting at but it’s impractical for most adults to learn this way.
To be fair, people were speaking German for hundreds of years without any formal education in grammar.
But the key point is that, while it is POSSIBLE to learn a language this way, it is definitely more efficient with some formal training as well, until you can develop the "ear" for it.
> But the key point is that, while it is POSSIBLE to learn a language this way, it is definitely more efficient with some formal training as well, until you can develop the "ear" for it.
1. Kids take about 7-10 years of constant immersion to become fluent in a language
2. Child brains are different from adult brains, and it is likely that the ability to pick up a language in this way degrades significantly after a certain age
I'm not saying it is impossible to pick up a language without being told the grammar rules, just that it's much faster if you do learn them.
> 2. Child brains are different from adult brains, and it is likely that the ability to pick up a language in this way degrades significantly after a certain age.
There is plenty of evidence which counters the latter part of this claim (see Stephen Krashen and the input hypothesis).
It took me a while to find the "tips" lessons on duolingo but now I always review them before the translation drills and usually find them to be relevant.
Even worse, it is (or at least was) not available in all methods used to access the content. I think it is available on the web, where I started using Duolingo during a downtime at work, and when I later wanted to continue, I just did not find the button for it on the iOS app (or the other way around). That is pretty terrible for such a basic part of the learning experience.
This is basically the Uplan method, no? The Israelis pioneered this long ago, or so I have been told, by relatives who were taught Hebrew in the 70s when studying there. Hebrew as spoken today (aka Modern Hebrew) was a new language that won by vote (to IIRC Russian, Yiddish, German and others) when the country had to decide on a national language, and they needed a way to teach people uniformly.
That being said, as they learned via Ulpan as adults in their 20's and spent only 1-2 years there, none of them speak beyond a few words of Hebrew once I was in their lives decades later up until now. Twas quickly forgotten. I went through conventional language education in Arabic from early teens (it was my desired hobby because of my obviously vibrant social life, hehe) to college and speak it so-so until this day, but I have many friends and family of my own who speak Arabic.
So more than anything: increased exposure is key and few people will correct humor you with your method if it takes longer as an adult, and it definitely will! haha
I think you're hitting on something real here, that translation doesn't "scale up". You can't rely entirely on learning translations to learn a language, and in some ways it can really hold you back if you think of things as having a 1-1 mapping with English. Especially when dealing with languages without a common ancestor with English, like Japanese, where a lot of concepts just don't line up.
For example, in Japanese there's not a direct equivalent to the word "to give". There are different words depending on the relationship between the people, and at a basic level, you always have to "give upwards" or "give downwards", with different words for each.
I could see this kind of method of teaching being really useful for learning those kinds of concepts. I think learning the Japanese words directly, without getting hung up on what their English translations are, could avoid some pitfalls.
I'm less sure about how useful it is for the real basic basics. But it's a cool concept none the less.
You're still translating the mouse image into "mouse" in your mother tongue, then staring at the Japanese word.
But I do agree translation does about as much harm as good. It's a shortcut that helps you shorten the learning curve by importing what you already know about language and the things you often say generically from another language. Learning a language is really really hard, so for many, without this shortcut, you'd barely get anywhere. That's the only good it does though, because it will set you back from becoming fluent and will continue to prevent you from thinking in that new langauge.
The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.
> The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.
Those people must also be willing to correct you when you make a mistake, which is socially much harder as an adult.
I learned Japanese without translation, but I learned it in a classroom in Japan.
From that experience, I don't know how you expect to start with reading and not listening first. You really need to hear something over and over and watch people pronounce the words to learn it properly yourself.
I also learned Japanese in a classroom in Japan. At the elementary level, some of the teachers used English to explain grammar and vocabulary, but from the intermediate level the classes were conducted entirely in Japanese. While some teachers and learners believe strongly in monolingual immersion as a matter of principle, at the school I attended in Tokyo there was a more practical reason for choosing that approach: most of the students were from other East Asian countries and did not understand English.
Outside of class, though, I memorized vocabulary mostly using English translations from dictionaries rather than definitions in Japanese until I reached quite an advanced level. That was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was easier for me to remember Japanese words when I associated them with a particular English word; on the other, the translation I memorized sometimes actually referred to something different from the Japanese word. It took a lot of exposure to real-life Japanese to unlearn some of those mistranslations.
Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the use of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries by people learning the language:
My sister learned early reading through the Peabody Rebus Reader method. She was given short books with titles like "Red and Blue Are On Me". A small symbol stood for each word in the early chapters, which were slowly replaced with written words until the end of the book (an example of "whole word" reading).
I got strong "Red and Blue Are On Me" vibes from this page.
I worked briefly on a similar idea last year. The problem was to collect parallel data for translation without requiring the annotators to be bilingual. We achieved it by selecting a set of universal pictures (e.g., dog running on grass) and asking the native speakers of Hindi and English to caption it. Since the concepts in the pictures we selected were common across the languages, we were able to collect high quality data.
This is a very interesting experiment. A couple of observations from my side.
1. First goal is mentioned as, "prove that you can learn japanese without using your mother tongue". But when I click on start you show a Monkey with some Japanese text. In my mind I see the picture of a monkey and think of the word in my mother tongue, Telugu(Kothi), then I check the Japanese script. So I am not strictly learning Japanese without using my mother tongue.
2. Since Japanese script is also new to me it becomes harder. As I have to learn the alphabet first and then words and then sentences.
3. To really try this experiment out instead of the Japanese text the picture should be associated with the Japanese word and Japanese sentences. If you realize, thats how we learn language as a kid. We are shown images and told to repeat words and then sentences.
4. Deep learning tries to do something similar. Here what you are trying to do is encode the word in an image as a translation layer and then we jump across languages. Deep learning also learns embeddings and then uses those embeddings to translate. In this case, the embedding is an image, but computers can use lesser info than all the pixels to embed.
5. This embedding approach has limitations in deep learning as we can see from the current translation engines. But by using sound and image maybe our brain embeds information better and hence we learn languages better.
I've seen a plenty of "learn Japanese" sites, and always scratched my head wondering what their end goal are. The learning process should accomodate the end goals.
Is that to watch Japanese anime without subtitles? To have a deep conversation with ordinary people? Or simply the language is too linguistically intriguing? (BTW, so many languages are just as intriguing as Japanese)
To me, a Japanese native majoring in CompSci, learning English has obvious benefits: there are 100x more learning materials, youtube videos, source code comments, and discussions, etc. And they're better. Eventually, speaking English opens up the world. (Maybe that's also true for Mandarin today.)
But Japanese? It's a niche market for a smaller number of people. I think learning Japanese is much less practical than learning English/Mandarin, so I guess you'd have to be more committed at it to actually gain something.
> Is that to watch Japanese anime without subtitles?
20-30 years ago, Japan was an ascendant technological nation in which Americans were very interested. Japan had several dominant consumer brands and was considered an AI pioneer.
But Japan lost its way when transitioning from pre-Internet hardware products to "software with hardware."
So today the interest is probably about reading anime subtitles, or having a Japanese gf.
I studied Japanese in SV at the Jetro-related classes, and worked in Japan briefly.
What's interesting is that although Japanese non-work culture is roughly opposite that of the West in many ways, it seems we share a "Protestant-like" or at least secular work ethic that is results-driven.
You can see that in WW2 - the Japanese Navy was able to build itself into a world power that was briefly equal to the US Navy, and the Battle of the Coral Sea was roughly a draw.
Where the cultural values differed was at the very top of leadership, and ultimately the US had aggressive, independent naval commanders, and Japan had Yamamoto (a rebel who couldn't communicate his plans effectively to traditionalists) and Admiral Nagumo (a traditional, hesitant commander who was both inflexible and unlucky - he refused to do a third wave at Pearl Harbor, and he thought the Battle of Midway was primarily intended to capture Midway!)
It's an interesting question. I'm a native English speaker (American). I began learning French in school at age 11, and did so for 7 years, before taking a few years off, then minoring in it in college. Even now, another 15 years on, with little practice, I consider myself fluent; I haven't forgotten much and it's fairly easy to hold a conversation. That said, television and radio have always felt slightly out of my grasp; movies less so. It's the speed, and the context, and the slang.
Learning a language is so much easier when you're younger.
I also took a year of German in college, and know just enough to ask questions, the answers to which I will not understand.
I've used Duolingo to learn bits of languages before I travel. I would put this more in the "personal enrichment" category. A couple months of brief daily Norwegian lessons before a trip to Norway. It's interesting to be able to piece together bits of information from signs, advertisements, menus, etc. Certainly not something I could call useful, particularly in such an English-speaking country.
I've always heard Japanese is much harder for an American to learn than, say, French or Spanish. Given how little time American schools spend on languages, and how many years it takes to be truly "good" at even an "easy" foreign language, why bother at all? Especially as an adult, where the learning curve is so much steeper than it is for a child.
At the end of the day, I think it has to be about enjoying the process, enjoying learning, enjoying what you get out of even synthesizing small bits of information when you travel or encounter foreign media. Otherwise, with today's technology, there's simply no way that the average English- or Mandarin- speaking adult learning a foreign language (other than Mandarin or English!) makes a whole lot of sense, unless that person is planning to live in another country.
Personally, I want to be able to read Japanese media (mostly games) that have no English release or at best have a slightly questionable fan translation. The games I'd already playing provide _a degree_ of passive immersion, as they often only have Japanese audio and leave background elements untranslated, which is useful and motivating. It'd also be nice to some that do have an English release in their native language. Were I not a native English speaker, I suspect I'd feel the same way about English. Mandarin may be more useful/practical in some sense, but I don't come across non-English or Japanese texts often, so it's not as immediately useful to me.
I'm not sure why the language is so seemingly popular, but I suspect the popularity of Japanese games and anime in the West is one of the factors.
This reminds me of when I was trying to learn Latin. I used a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. It was entirely in Latin but it started off with simple words which you'd understand due to it being in the Latin alphabet (obviously) which Western language speakers use, and it had illustrations to show you what was happening. People could eventually read larger Latin texts from going through the Lingua Latina series of books.
i would imagine most private language learning schools use a program where they have the first couple of classes - e.g. the basics of reading and writing the script, introductory phrases - in the student's native language before moving directly into teaching with nothing but the target language. my foreign language teacher used a lot of pictures, drawings and charades to get an idea across, if simplification into more basic words failed to do the job.
In my experience, adult learners strongly dislike learning without translation.
If you show an adult a picture of something and say this is a “flug”, only in the very simplest cases (where they are most likely just imagining their native word for the object) will they be satisfied. If it’s a class of objects or a more abstract idea they tend to feel very unsure until they have accessed some kind of translation, even if it is a bad or misleading one. In some ways the native word is more important than the actual meaning for these learners. No native word == no feeling of understanding.
A student who enjoys avoiding using translation tends to progress very well, but it’s difficult to tell if they are simply good at the target language already and don’t need translation, or their avoidance of translation is the key to their success. Teasing out the direction of causality isn’t easy.
I’d love to see a language textbook produced with not language. Just pictures of situations, common items and other prompts. The idea would be to take use this textbook a long with a native speaker to listen to and learn examples of all different useful parts of the language. Even then, I feel the imagine choice would probably bias certain language features more than others.
So, I'd like to try this and I think it's a viable approach... But a language, especially one with a different script that I can't read, really needs some audio clues too, because that's a big thing that'll help to be able to internalise a word.
I mean I can guess banana from the picture and the repeated na sound, but I have absolutely no way of internalising the other characters.
I know of the existence of katakana and hiragana, but I don't actually know any characters, and if you intend this to be teaching the language, you need some way of teaching the basic building block you're relying on.
Also, as I'm learning Chinese, the kanji aren't really a problem and actually I can guess the meaning, but even then I can't internalise the kanji in Japanese with no idea what it's supposed to sound like. At best, it'll just be Chinese plus squiggles. To me it'd just be "yuan mmm banana mmm shi mmm mmm".
If the goal is only to read, then I guess eventually you might start to recognise some of the grammar characters. But if the goal is to learn the language, and presumably to speak it to, then I don't see how this can succeed. Unless of course, I'm missing something obvious and there is supposed to be audio...
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadThe site creator has stated elsewhere though that the site is intended for people who already know hiragana/katakana (the phonetic parts of the Japanese writing system). If you do know those, it could help as practice for kanji and phrases.
In my head, it read like, "Symbol for monkey emoji. New symbol. Symbol for banana emoji with new symbol below it, and to the right."
I certainly didn't get anywhere near "eat."
I was comfortably conversant in English before I was 2, and I've learned Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew reasonably well, so it's not my language ability, or even learning with non-Latin alphabets, though I suppose it could be trying to learn without an alphabet at all? My patterns matching skills are strong.
But guessing meaning of unknown symbols from their nearness to each other? Whooshes right by me!
Kanji are significantly more effort, with 2k characters to learn and multiple pronunciations for each. Interestingly, while you will probably hate Knaji at first and wonder why they are still used, you will come to appreciate them later as they aid reading by breaking things up[1] and disambiguating between homonyms.
[0] Ok, sorry, that was the lies-to-children version. Katakana are only ever pronounced one way. Hiragana has different pronunciation for は and へ when they are used as particles. Also there's pitch accent.
[1] Japanese generally doesn't use spaces.
By "learn them in a day" I meant one day of decently focused effort to memorize the syllable for each kana character. Between flashcards, pronunciation, and writing it is very doable because that's what I did.
https://drdru.github.io/stories/1_01_food.html
I found the examples are literally an image abstraction and how to read them.
They're what you'd find in a similar Genki Vol 1 book, the emojis are cute.
The furigana is invaluable and it helps get the structure in place, I do it similar with song lyrics from utanet.
When I first starting learning Japanese I took an intensive 7 week course. We learned Hiragana and Katakana in one week, though it took longer to really make that knowledge long term available. I forgot a lot of it after completing the course, but my first year living in Japan helped restore it all!
Now my kids are learning kana and my oldest kanji. The state of the art here is still drilling and repetition. FWIW this website is cute, but without learning the characters you have to rely on verbal instruction, so as an experiment it only works after learning the Kana.
You definitely need to learn Kana beforehand. It used to be specified but I decided to remove it a while ago.
Learning Kanji is also really painful. I'm still only 75% done even though it has been a year already.
Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.
You can spend hours trying to guess the meaning of a word through pictures and context (and not getting anywhere far), or you can spend a minute reading the translated meaning and then spend hours understanding it in context (and reinforcing it, and learning its semantics).
I wonder if this idea of "avoiding the mother tongue" stems from all the misguided marketing surrounding products like Rosetta Stone which advertise "learn like children learn." Spoiler: it takes children years and years of near-constant, directed input to acquire their native language to a high degree.
Edit: But I can see the value in doing this as a thought experiment ("what if translation isn't possible?"), and for that it's interesting.
I started it for two reasons. First there is close to no easy to read content when you begin learning Japanese and there is demand for such thing.
The second reason is to see how far I can go like this. It is a sort of thought experiment like you say in your comment.
I discovered after I started that Hans Ørberg something similar for Latin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg ). His Lingua Latina has been quite influential.
You can see sample pages here: https://omgjapan.com/products/minna-no-nihongo-shokyu-1-hons...
It is 100% in Japanese, but it has a companion book with translated grammar notes if needed. The majority of the book is excellent content in the form of dialogs and readings designed for beginners. I suppose the exercises work better in a classroom setting...
If you know the alphabets (that is kana), you can try the easiest graded reader such as [1] and progressing from there. It assumes little to no grammar knowledge and comes with illustrations and narrated audio that you can follow along.
[1] https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/4155/
Part of the difference between children learning something and adults learning something is that we have trouble achieving Beginner's Mind.
Finding techniques that work fine to be remedial or even insulting makes you get into your own way. In the extreme case, how do you fill a cup which is already full?
Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together). Translating back and forth is a crutch for most, and a separate skill for others (eg, professionals). That's why when you ask your friend, "what did those guys say in the background?" you get something vague back. Nothing translates directly, idioms doubly or triply so.
What did that guy say? He said he's really mad at that other guy, (using a lot of colorful language), and I can say "he's mad" or we can go into why calling someone a dog/goat/cow/fish in this language is one step down from saying bad things about their mother.
>Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together).
That's not really true, though, and it also depends on what aspect of language we're talking about (phonology vs. syntax vs. lexical acquisition, for example). In the case of the lexicon, there's good experimental evidence that bilinguals, when hearing one language, activate lexical competitors from both languages (i.e., they are not fully able to inhibit activation of one language in listening). The mind is far more complex than having different "centers" for different things. It's a complex network of signal activation and inhibition.
Of course, that doesn't relate to my original point, which was simply that language learners should not purposefully limit themselves. The incredible amount of time it's going to take to learn abstract concepts without translation far, far outweighs the possible co-activation of translation equivalents.
I don't think this is true. At best the student will have their own dictionary. At least in my experience, all the full time foreign language schools I know of teach solely in the language being learned and the textbook is solely in that language as well. The students are a mix from all over the world. The school would not cater to all of them by providing translations in a bunch of different languages.
In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.
I definitely think it's important that you teach your native language/that you learn from a native speaker. Learning Japanese from a novice is not something that I want to do.
> In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.
I absolutely second this as someone who has taken 3/5 semesters of Chinese. Some classmate's pronounciation is so objectively wrong that I have to pay attention for when they're called on just to mute my volume output. Obviously I can't do this in-person.
I've taken one-on-one courses in another language and it's (believable I suppose) how much faster I've progressed.
Another fault is that some classes are structured so that nobody fails or falls behind (whether they're night classes, at a school, or in a corporate environment). The fault with that is that many other subjects simply don't care if 1/3 of the class fails, but language group classes tend to go at the speed of the lowest individuals.
Moving backward a few years, my high school teacher (singular) was a bit odd. He sat us in the same alphabetical pattern every year. Behind me sat a girl with impeccable vocabulary but some of the worst pronunciation in the whole class. Meanwhile I had impeccable pronunciation and a respectable vocabulary.
By senior year she had still not improved, and some days it was more than I could take. It was only a few years ago that I realized that while she couldn’t see me make faces, the teacher could. And so he had to stand up front interacting with her while I was in his field of vision, trying and failing not to make pained facial expressions. I don’t know if he found that frustrating, amusing, or something else.
You seem to be contrasting this with the implication that it doesn't take adults years of near consta
Because you're relying on the translator to accurately convey the meaning of words to you, which translators rarely do. Most professional translators and language instructors don't exactly have the best grasp of language themselves. They do some 1 to 1 translation of "monkey" and 猿 as if the connotation, denotation, and etymology are all the same when if you look it up, they're only kinda similar but not exactly.
English Wikipedia:
"Monkey is a common name that may refer to groups or species of mammals, in part, the simians of infraorder Simiiformes."
Japanese Wikipedia:
"日本語におけるサル（猿）とは、通俗的な意味ではサル目（霊長目）のうち、ヒト（古人類を含む）を除いたもののことである。"
Former talks about Simians whereas the latter apparently says (correct me if I'm wrong I don't know much japanese) colloquially all non-human primates. Is the translator going to know whether an orangutan or gorilla qualifies as 猿? Probably not, they're not even going to mention it.
Personally I believe people should learn a language well enough to read Wikipedia( or equivalent), and then continue only with media in the language in question from that point onwards.
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Oh, and here’s the German Wikipedia page:
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…hold on, that’s not right. Both Wikipedias have a disambiguation page, and the first link on them goes to their equivalent of Simian. The point is, every Wikipedia has its own structure, its own rules of what should be a page, and articles might be based on sources in that language, not in English.
Yeah that's the point. "猿" and "monkey" are unrelated terms that only have a little bit of overlap. Translators ignore this.
I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page.
A quick word on the rationale for not using translation.
All of the classic apps (Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, ...) are to some extent translation based. Translating has three scalability issues.
First, if you want to be inclusive and your product to be used by everyone you have to translate the whole product in a long list of languages. I imagine there is a ton of people who do not speak English and would love to learn Japanese !
I don't really know how to express the second limitation better than by saying 'translation is not additive' or it does not 'scale up'. What I mean by that is that if you translate at the word level (such as with Memrise), you learn words but somehow you do no learn the language (to be fair is the point of the app and that works fairly well). However a language expresses itself through sentences and translating a sentence is not the same as translating each one of its word. So you are sort of stuck at the word level and can't scale up to the sentence level by combining the low level components that words are.
Third, translating sentences does not scale well due to the complexity of natural languages. If like Duolingo you base your app on translating sentences you face all the poblem faced by Duolingo.
How do you translate 猿はバナナを食べる ? There are a lot of potential translations. Here are some I can think of right now :
The monkey eats the banana.
The monkeys eat the banana
The monkey will eat the bananas.
The monkeys are going to eat the bananas.
For example, in 猿はバナナを食べる, how should I understand what は and を mean? When should I use them? I can more or less easily understand that 猿 means monkey, バナナ means banana, and 食べる is related to eating. But to understand that は indicates the topic and を indicates that the word before is having an action done to them, I would have to see a LOT of examples.
I think a little grammatical explanation goes a very long way in terms of the number of examples you have to show.
To be fair, you learn your first language by inference and don't start learning the rules until you're some 10 years into fluency. Even as late as high school we were taught grammatical rules with "As a native speaker, do what sounds right, then find the correct rule and say you applied it. Immigrants, sorry you'll find this exam question impossibly difficult. Good luck"
My 2 year old will say things like, "I like she". After which we will correct her, "I like her".
She has never heard anyone say "I like she" but she is re-ordering and inventing her own sentences using unspoken rules. (She may have generated that sentence from hearing "where is she?") She will eventually recognize that some things don't sound right, but she is also applying those things that sound right to newly invented sentences using those rules.
So in effect, we do seem to be learning rules when first learning to talk, we just are extracting those rules internally and applying them rather than working from a codified set of rules.
In addition, even in early development children actually do appear to have pretty strong understanding of their native language's syntax[2] even if they cannot produce adult-level English. There are certain classes of mistakes they do not make (indicating they have internalised many more rules than may be apparent), and they can understand sentences which have grammar that they do not produce themselves (meaning that the level of output is not a good indication of their language development).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Un06tDOn0 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmghbKNiI1k
When I say we "correct her", I simply mean that we repeat back the sentence correctly. It seems to work well as she will often repeat it back again how we say it or sometimes just continue on. We never withhold understanding because the grammar is wrong. I can definitely see how the example given of correcting with "no, that's not proper grammar" would not be effective with young ones.
By repeating it back correctly, she is given another example of correct grammar and I know of no other way for a young child to learn than to hear it spoken more.
The video goes through several examples from peer-reviewed studies, and several of them involve "repeating back the correct sentence". In fact while the video did mention the fact that saying "no" just makes communication harder, the majority of the video is explaining why giving corrected examples of grammar doesn't necessarily help.
The video talks about your approach specifically here[1].
> I know of no other way for a young child to learn than to hear it spoken more.
That is true, but repeating back a specific sentence is not necessarily the most effective manner of helping them acquire an aspect of grammar. Language acquisition isn't a conscious process, so focusing on a mistake doesn't help -- and repeating a sentence with correct grammar is only a single example of that particular grammar concept, which the child still needs to hear many more times before they actually acquire.
It should also be noted that one of the studies (looking at what sentences parents would correct) found that "there is not even a shred of evidence that approval and disapproval are contingent on syntactic correctness". So it's quite likely that you aren't actually correcting grammatical mistakes -- most of the time you're probably correcting sentences with incorrect meaning and pronunciation.
I mean, it probably doesn't hurt or anything, it's just probably not as helpful as you might think it is.
[1]: https://youtu.be/a7Un06tDOn0?t=272
This isn't really a good way to think about it; if you're fluent, you have already learned all the rules.
A "rule" like "no one will take you seriously as a lawyer if you write 号, you must always write 日 instead" is a fact about the culture, not the language.
Also, I agree that past a certain point grammar becomes extremely convoluted. But I'm not speaking about complex grammar subtleties here, just basic things such as the role of prepositions, word order, basic conjugations etc. Stuff like "most verbs from their past by adding -ed at the end" or "when you ask a question, you typically change the word order and add "do" " etc.
But the key point is that, while it is POSSIBLE to learn a language this way, it is definitely more efficient with some formal training as well, until you can develop the "ear" for it.
Agreed. This is the main point I was getting at.
1. Kids take about 7-10 years of constant immersion to become fluent in a language
2. Child brains are different from adult brains, and it is likely that the ability to pick up a language in this way degrades significantly after a certain age
I'm not saying it is impossible to pick up a language without being told the grammar rules, just that it's much faster if you do learn them.
There is plenty of evidence which counters the latter part of this claim (see Stephen Krashen and the input hypothesis).
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/zs/Existence/tips
However, this feature is not really discoverable and often the main content that follows is only loosely if at all related.
But I've found ~15 minutes per day to be fairly helpful in conjunction with other activities.
https://www.ulpanor.com/
That being said, as they learned via Ulpan as adults in their 20's and spent only 1-2 years there, none of them speak beyond a few words of Hebrew once I was in their lives decades later up until now. Twas quickly forgotten. I went through conventional language education in Arabic from early teens (it was my desired hobby because of my obviously vibrant social life, hehe) to college and speak it so-so until this day, but I have many friends and family of my own who speak Arabic.
So more than anything: increased exposure is key and few people will correct humor you with your method if it takes longer as an adult, and it definitely will! haha
For example, in Japanese there's not a direct equivalent to the word "to give". There are different words depending on the relationship between the people, and at a basic level, you always have to "give upwards" or "give downwards", with different words for each.
I could see this kind of method of teaching being really useful for learning those kinds of concepts. I think learning the Japanese words directly, without getting hung up on what their English translations are, could avoid some pitfalls.
I'm less sure about how useful it is for the real basic basics. But it's a cool concept none the less.
But I do agree translation does about as much harm as good. It's a shortcut that helps you shorten the learning curve by importing what you already know about language and the things you often say generically from another language. Learning a language is really really hard, so for many, without this shortcut, you'd barely get anywhere. That's the only good it does though, because it will set you back from becoming fluent and will continue to prevent you from thinking in that new langauge.
The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.
Those people must also be willing to correct you when you make a mistake, which is socially much harder as an adult.
From that experience, I don't know how you expect to start with reading and not listening first. You really need to hear something over and over and watch people pronounce the words to learn it properly yourself.
Outside of class, though, I memorized vocabulary mostly using English translations from dictionaries rather than definitions in Japanese until I reached quite an advanced level. That was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was easier for me to remember Japanese words when I associated them with a particular English word; on the other, the translation I memorized sometimes actually referred to something different from the Japanese word. It took a lot of exposure to real-life Japanese to unlearn some of those mistranslations.
Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the use of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries by people learning the language:
https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents...
I got strong "Red and Blue Are On Me" vibes from this page.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.11954
Slides: https://madaan.github.io/res/artifacts/pml4dc-practical-data...
This indicates that the Google fonts on my phone do not support those Unicode characters. Perhaps the author should consider this.
1. First goal is mentioned as, "prove that you can learn japanese without using your mother tongue". But when I click on start you show a Monkey with some Japanese text. In my mind I see the picture of a monkey and think of the word in my mother tongue, Telugu(Kothi), then I check the Japanese script. So I am not strictly learning Japanese without using my mother tongue.
2. Since Japanese script is also new to me it becomes harder. As I have to learn the alphabet first and then words and then sentences.
3. To really try this experiment out instead of the Japanese text the picture should be associated with the Japanese word and Japanese sentences. If you realize, thats how we learn language as a kid. We are shown images and told to repeat words and then sentences.
4. Deep learning tries to do something similar. Here what you are trying to do is encode the word in an image as a translation layer and then we jump across languages. Deep learning also learns embeddings and then uses those embeddings to translate. In this case, the embedding is an image, but computers can use lesser info than all the pixels to embed.
5. This embedding approach has limitations in deep learning as we can see from the current translation engines. But by using sound and image maybe our brain embeds information better and hence we learn languages better.
Is that to watch Japanese anime without subtitles? To have a deep conversation with ordinary people? Or simply the language is too linguistically intriguing? (BTW, so many languages are just as intriguing as Japanese)
To me, a Japanese native majoring in CompSci, learning English has obvious benefits: there are 100x more learning materials, youtube videos, source code comments, and discussions, etc. And they're better. Eventually, speaking English opens up the world. (Maybe that's also true for Mandarin today.)
But Japanese? It's a niche market for a smaller number of people. I think learning Japanese is much less practical than learning English/Mandarin, so I guess you'd have to be more committed at it to actually gain something.
20-30 years ago, Japan was an ascendant technological nation in which Americans were very interested. Japan had several dominant consumer brands and was considered an AI pioneer.
But Japan lost its way when transitioning from pre-Internet hardware products to "software with hardware."
So today the interest is probably about reading anime subtitles, or having a Japanese gf.
I studied Japanese in SV at the Jetro-related classes, and worked in Japan briefly.
https://www.jetro.go.jp/usa/topics/jetro-connects-japanese-s...
What's interesting is that although Japanese non-work culture is roughly opposite that of the West in many ways, it seems we share a "Protestant-like" or at least secular work ethic that is results-driven.
You can see that in WW2 - the Japanese Navy was able to build itself into a world power that was briefly equal to the US Navy, and the Battle of the Coral Sea was roughly a draw.
Where the cultural values differed was at the very top of leadership, and ultimately the US had aggressive, independent naval commanders, and Japan had Yamamoto (a rebel who couldn't communicate his plans effectively to traditionalists) and Admiral Nagumo (a traditional, hesitant commander who was both inflexible and unlucky - he refused to do a third wave at Pearl Harbor, and he thought the Battle of Midway was primarily intended to capture Midway!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%ABichi_Nagumo
Learning a language is so much easier when you're younger.
I also took a year of German in college, and know just enough to ask questions, the answers to which I will not understand.
I've used Duolingo to learn bits of languages before I travel. I would put this more in the "personal enrichment" category. A couple months of brief daily Norwegian lessons before a trip to Norway. It's interesting to be able to piece together bits of information from signs, advertisements, menus, etc. Certainly not something I could call useful, particularly in such an English-speaking country.
I've always heard Japanese is much harder for an American to learn than, say, French or Spanish. Given how little time American schools spend on languages, and how many years it takes to be truly "good" at even an "easy" foreign language, why bother at all? Especially as an adult, where the learning curve is so much steeper than it is for a child.
At the end of the day, I think it has to be about enjoying the process, enjoying learning, enjoying what you get out of even synthesizing small bits of information when you travel or encounter foreign media. Otherwise, with today's technology, there's simply no way that the average English- or Mandarin- speaking adult learning a foreign language (other than Mandarin or English!) makes a whole lot of sense, unless that person is planning to live in another country.
Sorry for the nitpick, however that sounds contradictory
I'm not sure why the language is so seemingly popular, but I suspect the popularity of Japanese games and anime in the West is one of the factors.
If you show an adult a picture of something and say this is a “flug”, only in the very simplest cases (where they are most likely just imagining their native word for the object) will they be satisfied. If it’s a class of objects or a more abstract idea they tend to feel very unsure until they have accessed some kind of translation, even if it is a bad or misleading one. In some ways the native word is more important than the actual meaning for these learners. No native word == no feeling of understanding.
A student who enjoys avoiding using translation tends to progress very well, but it’s difficult to tell if they are simply good at the target language already and don’t need translation, or their avoidance of translation is the key to their success. Teasing out the direction of causality isn’t easy.
I’d love to see a language textbook produced with not language. Just pictures of situations, common items and other prompts. The idea would be to take use this textbook a long with a native speaker to listen to and learn examples of all different useful parts of the language. Even then, I feel the imagine choice would probably bias certain language features more than others.
I mean I can guess banana from the picture and the repeated na sound, but I have absolutely no way of internalising the other characters.
I know of the existence of katakana and hiragana, but I don't actually know any characters, and if you intend this to be teaching the language, you need some way of teaching the basic building block you're relying on.
Also, as I'm learning Chinese, the kanji aren't really a problem and actually I can guess the meaning, but even then I can't internalise the kanji in Japanese with no idea what it's supposed to sound like. At best, it'll just be Chinese plus squiggles. To me it'd just be "yuan mmm banana mmm shi mmm mmm".
If the goal is only to read, then I guess eventually you might start to recognise some of the grammar characters. But if the goal is to learn the language, and presumably to speak it to, then I don't see how this can succeed. Unless of course, I'm missing something obvious and there is supposed to be audio...
Learning Hiragana and Katakana as well as their pronunciation is a pre-requisite. That was mentioned before but for some reason I removed it.