Re: The Japanese Language
I got myself Pimsleur's Japanese Language. There's something like 60-90 lessons, of 30 minutes each for the oral japanese (spoken/heard)as well as books for the written/read part.
Right now I'm sticking with the oral section and although I'm only at, like, lesson 6 or 7, I can understand about 2-5% of what is said in anime ^^; (Of course, I can guess, based on the context and the words I understand to see what they might be saying but I'm not quite there yet.
However, I personally find it a very good way to learn the language as they apply 2 key principles that are proven to help learn something:
1- Principle of Anticipation: Throughout each lesson, the narrator will constantly ask you to answer to what a character is saying, giving you a blank space of time to come up with it, after which another character will say the answer and you can compare weither you had it correctly or not.
2- Graduated Interval Recall: Basically, when you're told something, you tend to forget it after a specific lapse of time. If you ask the student to remember it just before he forgets it, the said lapse of time will lengthen so that it will take even longer to forget it, and right before you tend to forget it again, he'll bring it back, so you freshen up and so on.
I'm not really that good at explaining this, but if you guys want, I could cite the whole example(s) that are in the pimsleur book, explaining those principles.
In short, if you want to learn japanese, consider trying out Pimsleur's method. I personally think it works well.
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