So recently I’ve noticed several people in my life with problems stemming from the way they study, which has really inspired me to take a look at my own methods. With the way we’ve been taught to learn, whenever we don’t get something, instead of taking a step back from it for a minute and reevaluating the methods we use, we only ever focus on the content itself. If we don’t get something the first time, our habit is to cram it until we do, whether that’s by rereading chapter after chapter, drilling hundreds of flashcards, or recopying notes for the billionth time. And I’ve known this for a while. The way we learn in the common classroom is by no means the most convenient way to learn. And yet despite my knowledge of that, that’s exactly what I’ve been spending my time doing these past few months: cramming.
Being an exchange student living in Japan, naturally, I have a seemingly undefeatable conviction that I absolutely must become fluent in Japanese as soon as possible. There’s been so many conversations I wish I could have understood, so many people who I wish I could be friends with, and just so many things I wish I could do. Hell, earlier this week I went to a concert where they discussed their inspirations for making music, and the process of making the songs they’re working on right now. I understood maybe half of what they said, and the rest is just lost. Yeah, I understood a good amount of it given that I’ve only been here for less than three months, but I could have understood even more if I had studied harder. Having this kind of unending stress on my shoulders makes it really easy to get careless at times. I’ll put words into my SRS that I know will be difficult for me to retain, or sentences with grammar that I don’t understand at all. Often, I’ll even increase the amount of things I learn per day, to a point where on the next day, I basically just have to relearn everything all over again.
Sure, doing things like this is good in nature, but in the end, all it does is hinder a process that’s already difficult enough as it is. So this week I reevaluated my study routine.
The first step of my new process is to translate some material. If you’re studying for the JLPTs, you could use sample texts, or if you like Japanese music, use song lyrics. Basically, just find something that is either extremely relevant, or extremely interesting to you. While translating most things at my level can be incredibly overwhelming, the reason I do this is to build up an inventory of kanji through the vocab that I learn, while also mixing a good amount of grammar into the mix. Keep in mind that doing is by no means easy, so be sure to pick out material that won’t lead to too terrible of a headache later on.
As you look up each word in the passage, make sure that you input it into an SRS application (I recommend Anki!!) and if you find any grammar you’re not sure of, be sure to look that up too and even add it to your flashcards if you feel the need to do so. After you’re done with all of that, the next steps are relatively simple.
So once you build up a strong inventory, you can do two things: either learn new words with kanji you already know, or study full sentences with words and grammar you already know. I recommend doing both- which is super easy if you use my best friend in the whole wide world: Jisho. To find words with Kanji you already know, type a character between two asterisks like this: *字*. Do that, and Jisho will give you a whole list of words that contain that specific kanji. All you have to do is pick out the words that work best for you, enter them into your SRS app, and study them. To find sentences, type in a specific word you would like to practice, and add #sentences at the end. That’s it.
The reason why this is such a huge upgrade from my old process of simply just translating material and adding whatever I want to my Anki decks is that it incorporates principles from Stephen Krashen’s Theory of Comprehensible Input.
In summary, Stephen Krashen’s Theory of Comprehensible Input distinguishes between two types of information: what we’ve ‘learned’, and what we’ve ‘acquired’. Learning is what we do in classrooms, where if someone asks you a question about a word, perhaps you can answer it, but when you go out into the real world, you’ll probably have a difficult time actually putting it into use. (If you’re an exchange student, you should be able to relate to this!) This is because you haven’t ‘acquired’ it yet. So in order to get this information from a state of learning to a state of acquisition, Krashen hypothesized that the way to do that is, if the learner is currently at stage ‘i’, to expose them to information at level ‘i+1’ of which they can understand, but can’t actually put it into use.
By adding words and sentences to your study list that are +1 and not +5 or +10, you’re doing exactly that. Which not only makes studying so much easier to handle, but also makes the time you spend doing it a lot more worthwhile.