How Can I Grow My Japanese Vocabulary?

仮面の告白

Since I finished reading Yukio Mishima’s novel Confessions of a Mask a few days ago, I’ve started to study the unfamiliar Japanese words I encountered in the book using the Anki flashcard app. Although this is a relatively short story, I came across hundreds of words I didn’t know.

As I can only study around 15 words per day due to my busy schedule, it would take me more than two weeks if I were to cover all the words, but that’s not what I intend to do—I plan to memorize significantly fewer words, as most of them are archaic words of classical Chinese origin and no longer in common use in modern Japanese—I will only select those words that are presently relevant for studying and memorization.

Speaking of Mishima’s language, being curious about how he acquired such a refined and extensive vocabulary, I asked ChatGPT for some insights, along with the experiences of the author Haruki Murakami, who has also impressed me with his rich vocabulary.

Not surprisingly, Mishima was excellent at his schoolwork, particularly in the subjects of classical Japanese and Chinese, benefitting from the pre-war Japanese education with emphasis on memorization of large amounts of classical texts to build the foundation of his vocabulary.

Mishima also recounted his experiences of reading a wide range of books—literary works by Japanese writers and those by Western writers translated into Japanese—from a very young age, being a cosseted kid doted on by his grandmother due to his poor health. It is worth noting that he consciously read books that were considered too difficult for a reader of his age, perpetually attempting to venture outside of his comfort zone and challenging the limits of his intellect.

There was no mention by ChatGPT of Mishima attempting to mechanically memorize words from dictionaries or glossaries to broaden his vocabulary—which is usually my approach—his unparalleled knowledge of literary terms was acquired thanks to his extensive reading of classical works and intensive studying and memorization of selected passages, along with the formidable amount of writing exercise he did to refine his style.

As for Haruki Murakami, he recounted in multiple essays and interviews that someone aspiring to become a novelist must be prepared to read an insane number of books to acquire a robust vocabulary and establish their unique writing style. When he was a student, rather than doing his schoolwork conscientiously, he opted instead for reading countless books, particularly American literature translated into Japanese.

On top of authoring his own books, Murakami has also translated numerous books from English into Japanese. This translating process—where he needs to constantly ask himself what are the Japanese words and phrases that most accurately convey the meaning of the original writing—has sharpened his sensitivity to the nuances of words, enriching his own vocabulary in Japanese and helping to shape his unique writing style.

As I’m not aspiring to become a writer, I certainly don’t need to go to those extremes as experienced by Mishima and Murakami to grow my own vocabulary. Having said that, I do think it’s important for me to possess decent knowledge of Japanese as it’s the primary language I think in on a daily basis. Maybe I can take a page or two out of their playbooks in order to improve my mastery of this beautiful language.

Reading Confessions of a Mask

Confessions of a Mask

(Disclaimer: The following article contains spoilers.)

Over the past week, I’ve been reading the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s early work Confessions of a Mask in its original Japanese version. Mishima is known for his highly articulate and decorative writing style with a rich and extensive vocabulary, using numerous archaic literary words, many of which are of classic Chinese origin.

Although I’m a native speaker of Japanese, I come across a few unknown words literally on every page of this novel, requiring me to look them up in the dictionary to be able to progress through the novel. Not that I’m complaining, though—it’s not often that I read a book that bombards me with highly elegant, nuanced, and sophisticated words, providing me with a rare opportunity to broaden my vocabulary in my mother tongue in a substantive manner.

Mishima authored Confessions of a Mask in 1949—merely four years after the end of WWII—at the young and tender age of 24. The novel was an overnight sensation, launching him on a highly prolific and successful trajectory in the Japanese literary scene.

Confessions of a Mask was shocking to many because of its subject matter—homosexuality—a delicate topic that other novelists had hitherto avoided dealing with in such an open and brazen way. Mishima was widely rumored to be gay, and this novel was considered semi-autobiographical with numerous elements of the story coinciding with his own experiences. 

The novel starts when the protagonist, Kochan, was a young boy, and follows his life journey as he grows into a mature man, going through a historical period that spans across pre- and post-WWII days in Japan. At a very young age he becomes aware that his sexual attraction was toward men rather than women, and experiences an unrequited love for Omi, his male classmate in secondary school.

When Kochan is in college, he develops a feeling of platonic love of sorts for Sonoko, a younger sister of Kusano, his close friend. However, much as he tries to fall genuinely in love with Sonoko, he can’t feel anything by way of carnal attraction toward her—a kiss with her leaves him with no passionate feeling at all—such that when he is pressed to make a decision about whether to marry her, he has to decline in the end. Disheartened, Sonoko goes on to marry another man.

Subsequently, Kochan continues his life, but as a lonely man with his mind completely shut off. He laments the fact that he is henceforth incapable of opening his heart and falling in love with anyone, and that he will spend the rest of his days wearing a mask, hiding his true self and pretending to be “normal,” hence the title Confessions of a Mask. The story thus comes to its tragic end.

As a gay man, I find this kind of storyline deeply depressing, and yet it makes me grateful that I’m now living in an era and place where I can be open about my sexuality, without being required to wear a mask of any sort. It must have been suffocating for gay men to act in conformity with the rest of society back in the day, and this novel provides me with a glimpse into what it feels like to live with one’s sexuality permanently suppressed.

Despite its prose that is sometimes arcane and riddled with difficult words, Confessions of a Mask is more than fascinating to keep me moving through the pages. I expect to finish reading it in just a few days, making it the first Mishima book for me to read in its entirety. I look forward to reading more masterpieces by this highly talented author and enjoying the depth and richness of his inner world.

Great Language-Learning Tips by Will Hart

When I woke up this morning, I watched a video by the British YouTuber Will Hart summarizing his Mandarin Chinese learning journey from zero to fluency. It was full of useful tips for achieving fluency regardless of which language you study, so I’ve favorited the video and also shared it on social media to be able to refer back to it whenever I need direction in my own studies of foreign languages.

If you’ve never heard of him, Will Hart (known as 何威 in Chinese) is a famous YouTuber in the language-learning community. What’s remarkable about him is that he’s learned to speak Mandarin from complete beginner level to native-like fluency within two years. As a fluent speaker of Chinese, I can vouch for his mastery of correct grammar, extensive vocabulary, and flawless Beijing-accented pronunciation.

For my own future reference, I summarize as follows the major takeaways from this video:

First, the importance of finding a conversation partner of your target language from a very early stage, and clocking up hundreds—if not thousands—of hours of conversation with them. In Will’s case, he made friends with Ryan, a young Chinese man attending the same school as him, merely two weeks into his study of Mandarin.

Ryan talked to him in Chinese for one hour every day for four months; in exchange, he taught Ryan’s sister math. In the beginning, Ryan’s Chinese hardly made any sense to him, but as he toughed it out in these conversation sessions, his level of Mandarin comprehension improved by leaps and bounds.

Come to think of it, I’m also practicing this method—albeit far less intensely—with my English and French teachers on the online language-learning platform italki. Given my busy schedule as a working professional, I can only manage a one-hour session per week for each language. Accordingly, my progress has been very gradual. However, I believe that persistence is key in achieving fluency over the long term, so I’m determined to keep up my weekly lessons for many years.

In the case of my English, more than five years have passed since I started taking lessons with my Canadian teacher. For the first two years, we’ve experimented with various methods, such as practicing accent reduction and having discussions based on magazine articles. In 2023, we settled into the routine of critiquing my own writing by juxtaposing it with its ChatGPT revisions. I can feel that my fluency in the language has improved substantially ever since. 

This method has also enabled me to understand the essential differences between American and British English, which I used to be quite confused about at best. Nowadays, I can tell whether a particular piece of writing sounds more American or British just by looking at a few paragraphs—a testament to my improved ability to perceive written content with native-like sensitivity.

Second, the effectiveness of using a spaced repetition system, as well as practicing active recall. With the latest flashcard apps like Anki, we can now easily structure a vocabulary-building plan in which a word can be reviewed multiple times at increasing intervals. This technology greatly facilitates long-term memorization of words. Even if you create only 10 to 20 flashcards a day, they can add up to thousands after a year.

Also, the active recall method, in which the meaning of the headword appears on the front side of the flashcard with the headword appearing on the reverse side, fortifies your ability to use the word actively, rather than merely knowing its meaning passively.

Lastly, the importance of creating a passive immersive environment in which you can consume native content in your idle time, such as listening to podcasts in your target language while commuting or doing housework, or watching television shows or movies for entertainment—even if you don’t live in a country where your target language is spoken, you can still obtain sufficient exposure if you’re determined.

Will Hart is one of the very few YouTubers focused on language-learning that I truly admire, and I’m really glad that I found his channel. While I might never be able to study languages as intensely as he does, I can certainly take a page or two out of his playbook to enhance my efficiency. I look forward to witnessing my future improvements after implementing a few of his recommended methods.

Began to Study a New French Dictionary

Larousse Maxi Poche Plus Japonais

On September 11, I finally finished learning French vocabulary from my Larousse French-Chinese dictionary, after about a year and nine months. I’ve been learning French off and on since 2003, but compared to my English and Chinese, my French lags far behind in overall proficiency, both in comprehension and in speaking and writing skills.

Based on my estimate, I have learned about 15,000 words in total from this dictionary. I can feel that my listening comprehension has substantially improved—notably, I can now understand about 80 percent of the newscasts on France 2, the state broadcaster. That’s a big change compared to before, when I could only understand about 50 percent.

Consciously studying vocabulary is definitely an effective method to improve your proficiency in a foreign language, so I’m really glad that I have gone through this painstaking journey of studying an entire dictionary. However, now that I’ve finished this process, I feel that my method hasn’t been particularly efficient—at least for the first four-fifths of this project.

First, I didn’t use a spaced repetition system when reviewing the words I’d learned. I reviewed only those dating back to ten days and not beyond, causing me to forget more than half of the items after a couple of weeks. Second, for most of this learning project, I looked up every single word and phrase that appeared in the pages I studied, making me conflate important items with unimportant ones.

As a result, I wasn’t able to retain most of the words I’d learned in my long-term memory. The loss was so extensive that I’ve decided to study another dictionary to make up for it. This time, I’ve decided to learn French words using my French-Japanese dictionary, also compiled by Larousse.

What makes this new project different from the old one is that I use the Anki flashcarding app from the beginning, enabling me to review the words following its spaced repetition algorithm. I review every item at least seven times—spread out at increasing intervals over 30 days—to help it stick to my memory. This is much longer than my previous limit of 10 days.

Also—perhaps more importantly—this time I’m much more discriminating in deciding which words to learn and which to ignore, so as not to overcrowd my limited memory space. Specifically, I’ve made it a rule to study no more than one word on every page of this dictionary, forcing me to learn only the most essential words appearing with high frequency in spoken and written French.

This highly selective approach will enable me not only to focus on important words, but also to progress much quicker in the dictionary, boosting my motivation to keep studying. Though I’ve only been working on this new dictionary for 17 days, I’ve already covered more than 6 percent of the total, indicating that I can cover the entire volume in a little over nine months—much faster than my previous learning project lasting 21 months.

Besides its spaced repetition system, another beauty of the Anki app is that it allows to embed audio and picture files in each flashcard. Instead of creating a flashcard for a headword in isolation, I create one with a whole sentence containing that word, embedded with a corresponding audio file generated with the ElevenLabs app. With this new method, I can make sure to memorize words with the correct pronunciation.

When I started learning French vocabulary in earnest, my goal was to become a fluent reader in French, not a fluent speaker. However, recently I’ve begun to think that being able to speak the language fluently can definitely facilitate the growth of your vocabulary, so you can’t just focus on one aspect of language learning and overlook the other. Practicing pronunciation while learning words is vital for effectively improving your comprehension skills, and I’m grateful to modern technology for making that possible.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep studying French—perhaps indefinitely, as long as my interest in this language persists. I’m fully aware that becoming good at French will serve no professional purpose for me, unlike English or Chinese. However, understanding this beautiful language and appreciating the culture behind it can enrich my life in ways that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. To achieve this goal, I’ll keep learning French words with diligence, dedication, and determination.

Will I Take the Japanese Judicial Scrivener Exam?

司法書士試験-仕事を辞めずに一発合格する方法

Yesterday, I read at a nearby café a book written by a young Japanese woman named Yayoi Kawashima (河島弥生), documenting her timeline of preparing for and passing the Japanese Judicial Scrivener Exam within a relatively short period of one year and eight months—while working full-time.

This exam, a national accreditation, is reputed to be very memory-intensive and extremely difficult to pass, normally requiring around 3,000 hours of study. If you can dedicate 15 hours of study per week, it’ll take you 200 weeks—almost four years—to pass the exam and be certified as a judicial scrivener in Japan. It is administered once a year and has a pass rate of around 5 percent.

This makes the case of Ms Kawashima a remarkable example of highly efficient exam preparation. As I’ve been interested in taking this exam for some time, I read her book with great interest and finished it in one sitting.

By the way, in case you’re wondering what a judicial scrivener does, they are authorized to perform a wide range of legal procedures, such as real estate registrations, company registrations, and inheritance-related asset transfers.

Since you need to be accredited to conduct these tasks, there is limited competition within the industry. Furthermore, the cost of setting up a judicial scrivener office is relatively little—all you need is a laptop, Internet connection and a printer—and you’re not even required to have a dedicated physical office, if you can set aside a room in your home to run the business and meet clients.

Due to the recent economic downturn in China triggered by the burst of the real estate bubble, numerous affluent Chinese entrepreneurs have been scrambling to protect their wealth by transferring their financial assets, setting up businesses, buying real estate, and even sending their children to study in prestigious schools in Japan.

As a result, there has been a growing demand for judicial and administrative scriveners who can speak Mandarin to serve a Chinese clientele. As someone who speaks Japanese, Chinese, and English fluently, becoming a judicial or administrative scrivener in Japan is definitely something I could consider as my second career after I retire from my current job in Singapore.

Returning to this book, Ms Kawashima has some interesting insights to share for exam preparation. Although in terms of the absolute duration, her preparation period of 20 months is much shorter than the average, the intensity of her study is definitely remarkable—she dedicated at least 20 hours per week to studying, meaning she spent pretty much her entire free time, foregoing all sorts of entertainment and relaxation.

Ms Kawashima’s level of dedication was such that she specifically chose an exam venue more than a hundred kilometers away from her home that was inside a hotel rather than a much closer venue on a college campus.

There, she reserved a room for the five days leading up to the exam so she could do her utmost to prepare and make sure to arrive at the exam center on time. Obviously, her efforts paid off, enabling her not only to pass the exam, but also to pass it with flying colors, ranking 13th out of the 13,372 participants.

As for me, I don’t consider myself to be particularly efficient when it comes to exam-taking. However, given my extensive experience of trials and errors in the past 15 years or so, I’ve learned to improve my preparation methods over the years.

The prospect of taking a major test like the Japanese Judicial Scrivener Exam sounds, while daunting, like an exciting challenge to me. I don’t know whether I’ll really end up taking this exam, but I’ll keep an open mind and eagerly face up to the challenge when the opportunity presents itself.

Don't Try to "Swallow" a Dictionary!

 

The Breakthrough on Netflix

A few days ago, I started watching a Swedish series called The Breakthrough on Netflix. It’s a short series based on an actual murder case in Sweden in 2004. It’s made up of four episodes, each of which is around 40 minutes long. Despite its Swedish origin, I decided to watch this show purely for the purpose of learning French, because it happens to have both French audio and subtitles, and its level of French vocabulary is suitable for my current proficiency level.

I love it that Netflix offers countless movies and series from numerous countries and make them available with audio tracks and subtitles in multiple languages. As my current focus is learning French, I plan to mainly watch productions with French audio and subtitles regardless of their countries of origin—as long as the dialog is clearly pronounced and the subtitles match the actual words being spoken.

In fact, I even prefer productions from countries other than France but dubbed into French compared to productions from France itself, because the former’s pronunciation tends to be clearer than the latter, and they use more basic French vocabulary while avoiding excessive use of slang and colloquialisms—they can be Danish, Spanish, or Korean productions for all I care. 

When I play each episode, I normally leave it running all the way through without stopping. While watching, I make notes of the words and phrases I don’t know. When I reach the end of the episode, I look them up using the dictionary and ChatGPT and create their Anki flashcards. After studying those flashcards, I watch the same episode again for review, usually on the next day. Whenever I can, I also try to mimic the French dialogue using the shadowing technique.

Luckily, since I’ve already acquired most of the basic French vocabulary, I don’t come across unknown words and phrases too often, so I don’t feel the need to stop the video to look them up and interrupt the flow. Unlike those exceptionally gifted language learners, I don’t have the patience to pause the video dozens of times to get through each episode, so I’m glad I’ve laid a good foundation in vocabulary beforehand.

Granted, having to watch the same episode twice to study a foreign language still feels like a bit of a grind, but it’s far less excruciating than stopping the video frequently to look up unknown words, so I’m quite happy with my current learning method.

While I’m convinced that watching native content is an effective way to become fluent in a foreign language, I still believe that intentional study of vocabulary using non audio-visual material—mainly through word lists and dictionaries—is required at some point in one’s learning journey.

The problem with grinding one’s way through a dictionary is that most people cannot complete the whole process due to the sheer number of words and phrases contained inside. If you try to study each and every item, you’ll likely give up before you reach the 10 percent mark—and that is if you’re lucky.

As someone with extensive experience in vocabulary acquisition, if there is one piece of advice I can give to those attempting to study an entire dictionary, I’d tell them flat out that it’s pointless to try to “swallow” a dictionary, because they’ll end up forgetting more than 90 percent of what they learn. Instead, I would suggest that they pick only one or two most essential words out of each page to study and memorize, and work their way forward without hesitation.

That way, when you reach the end of the dictionary, you will have mastered the most essential words in your target language, easily covering more than 80 percent of the vocabulary commonly used by native speakers. As to how to decide which word is the most essential one out of each page, you can largely rely on your gut feeling—if you see a translation that sounds essential in your native language, that word is most likely important in your target language as well.

I’ve been learning French off and on over a span of two decades. Throughout my French learning journey I’ve had my share of successes and setbacks and experienced numerous plateaus, but I’ve been through enough to know that keeping at it consistently is the only sure-fire method to achieve fluency. I will not give up in my quest for mastery of this beautiful language.

Shift in My French Learning Strategy

(Picture from my Japanese blog)

This past Monday, I resumed using the flashcard app Anki to memorize French words and phrases, after years of not using it. The reason why I decided to use it again is that I’ve watched several videos of successful language learners on YouTube, who almost universally recommended the use of Anki because of its automated spaced repetition system.

For a long time, I was of the opinion that creating flashcards was too time-consuming and therefore counterproductive for vocabulary acquisition, but those language-learning influencers still seem convinced that using Anki to memorize words is essential for developing their fluency in a foreign language, chipping away at my previously held conviction regarding flashcarding as I kept watching their videos religiously—until I finally caved and decided to give Anki a go one more time.

As a matter of fact, I used to be a diehard believer of flashcarding. I started using flashcards to memorize English words and phrases back in high school in preparation for the college entrance exam. The method was instantly effective and I was able to pass the exam with flying colors. During the first two years of college, I wanted to deepen my understanding of English and doubled down on flashcarding, learning close to 20,000 entries. This enabled me to understand English novels and movies without feeling the need to look up words in the dictionary.

However, around 10 years ago, I began to doubt the efficacy of the flashcarding method as it’s extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, whether it’s done manually with physical cards or digitally with Anki. I was working full-time and no longer had the luxury of devoting eight hours a day to creating and memorizing flashcards, so something needed to change in my methodology—hence I decided to relinquish flashcarding and switched to simply reading through several pages of dictionary entries multiple times for memorization.

Although the latter strategy has allowed me to progress through the pages in my dictionary much faster, my memory of the words I’ve learned has been precarious at best, making me forget most of the items after a few months. Now that I’ve resumed using Anki, I hope it can help me retain French words more securely in my head, leading to faster development of my vocabulary in the final analysis.

Aside from this revelation about vocabulary learning, another takeaway from those YouTube videos by high-achieving language learners is that they largely focus on spoken language—by watching numerous movies and shows and engaging in tremendous amounts of conversation practice—as compared to written language, i.e., reading and writing.

One aspect of my French that I’m not happy about is my nearly nonexistent ability to speak the language. Throughout my on-again, off-again French-learning journey spanning over two decades, I’ve always told myself that I should never rush myself into speaking until I have acquired sufficient vocabulary to understand native content, including books, movies, and shows.

Looking back, I can’t help but think that I probably might have been too cautious in my approach, because—let’s face it—there will never come a day when I feel truly comfortable with the size of my vocabulary, especially if I only focus on reading books in French. On the other hand, if I develop my speaking ability robustly enough, it can certainly help me grow my vocabulary in a practical way, enabling me to breeze through most contemporary French books.

In this regard, I will probably shift my focus to conversational French rather than written language. I will watch more French shows on Netflix and engage a private tutor online to do conversation practice in earnest. It remains to be seen whether my new strategy works, but I’m fired up anyway about my French study and will keep working in pursuit of my dream of becoming fluent in the Language of Love one day.