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.

Watching Squid Game for Learning Korean?

Squid Game

Yesterday, I finished watching Season 3 of Squid Game, a dystopian Korean Netflix drama. I found the latest season thrilling and entertaining, and liked it better than Season 2, although to be fair I felt that all three seasons of the show were amazing and worth watching. As Season 3 is the final one, there will be no more episodes produced for Squid Game per se. However, I hope its producers come up with a prequel or spin-off of the show in the near future.

Speaking of Korean dramas, here in Singapore they are extremely popular, and they constantly appear in the list of 10 most-watched shows on Netflix, often eclipsing American shows featuring major Hollywood actors. Aside from Korean shows, Chinese dramas and Japanese animation series often make it to Netflix’s top-10 list here.

Despite its thriving economy, Singapore hasn’t been particularly successful in getting its entertainment industry off the ground, so Singaporean viewers tend to gravitate toward American, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese productions for their viewing pleasure, rather than Singapore’s own domestic fare.

By the way, until about 20 years ago, Hong Kong used to be an entertainment powerhouse in the Far East, producing countless highly entertaining movies and television shows every year. Singaporean Chinese in their late 40s and above grew up consuming Hong Kong shows on a daily basis, so much so that they can speak or understand Cantonese even if it’s not their mother tongue.

However, with the decline in popularity of Cantonese content in Singapore, younger generations are far less familiar with the dialect as with Mandarin. In my workplace in downtown Singapore, out of a team of around 30 colleagues—a majority of whom are in their 30s and 40s—only one person speaks Cantonese, with English and Mandarin being the two dominant languages in daily communication.

This phenomenon demonstrates the effectiveness of the immersion method in foreign language acquisition, where a learner optimizes their learning outcome by not only learning it as an academic subject, but also using the language to perform daily tasks and enjoy entertainment content, such as books, movies and television shows.

While younger generations of Singaporean Chinese might be less familiar with Cantonese, they might be more familiar with the latest popular terms and expressions in English and Mandarin compared with older generations, thanks to their constant exposure to these languages through streaming services like Netflix and HBO.

By the same token, many people in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland speak English with remarkable fluency, thanks not only to their excellent English teaching programs that begin at a young age for schoolchildren, but also to the wide availability of English content in media—movies and shows—that air with subtitles without dubbing in local languages. They grow up on an overabundance of English influence, practicing the immersion method without even being conscious of it. 

Returning to the topic of the rising popularity of Korean shows in Singapore, will it result in young Singaporeans gaining fluency in Korean through the immersion method, the same way Hong Kong shows did to older Singaporeans in enhancing their Cantonese comprehension? 

Obviously, the answer is no, since most Singaporeans don’t study Korean in school, and as such have no idea how to read the Korean alphabet (Hangul) or how Korean grammar works, not to mention the meanings of tens of thousands of Korean words. For the immersion method to work, your exposure to native content needs to be backed up by your constant studying of the target language, including pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

Incidentally, out of sheer curiosity, I recently bought an elementary Korean textbook. I suppose I can combine the studying of the Korean language with the enjoyment of Korean movies and shows. I don’t know how my Korean study will turn out, but I’m determined to take it easy and have fun in the learning process.

Revisiting Chinese Books

 

原子習慣：細微改變帶來巨大成就的實證法則

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Yesterday, I began reading the Chinese version of James Clear’s best-selling book, Atomic Habits. I listened to the English audiobook version years ago, but have forgotten most of the content except that it was a decent book, so I decided to revisit it. The reason why I chose to read it in Chinese is that I wanted to brush up my Chinese, which has gotten quite rusty over the years.

The Chinese version I’m reading is the traditional Chinese edition published in Taiwan. Although I learned Chinese mostly in Mainland China, where the simplified Chinese script is used, when it comes to reading, I much prefer the traditional script because of its esthetic visual appeal. Moreover, due to Taiwan’s more advanced printing technology including its paper quality, Taiwanese books look far more exquisite and even feel nicer to the touch than their counterparts from Mainland China.

Furthermore, I also prefer the general vocabulary that’s used in Taiwanese Mandarin, which has a bit of a traditional feel to it, reflecting Taiwan’s respectful attitude toward history and traditional culture, as well as their harmonious liberal arts environment; in comparison, the Putonghua from Mainland China has elements of toxicity and aggressiveness that have been copiously injected into the language through decades of propaganda and political upheavals under the Communist rule.

I believe that people’s psyche is largely shaped by the kind of language they use in everyday life—if you keep using gentle language, you’ll become a gentle person; if you use abusive language, you’re more prone to exhibit aggressive behavior. Therefore, wherever possible, I try to avoid being exposed to abusive language. When it comes to reading Chinese books, I naturally gravitate toward Taiwanese books rather than Mainland Chinese books.

The only thing I like about the Mainland Chinese Putonghua is their accent, especially the standard variation adopted by China Central Television’s news anchors, which doesn’t use too much rhotic sound commonly heard in Beijing vernacular speech. It sounds purified and sophisticated, and can be easily understood by Chinese speakers from all regions, including Mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. I think it’s the equivalent of the broadcast American accent (General American) in English, which is by far my favorite English accent.

Although I spent six years in Shanghai where I attended local secondary school, I didn’t get very fluent in Chinese. If anything, my favorite subject in school was English, because that was the only academic subject in which I could compete with my Chinese classmates on an equal footing.

As a result, I ended up studying English far more conscientiously than Chinese, which eventually enabled me to lay a much more solid foundation in the former than the latter, especially in vocabulary and grammar. That sounds like a wasted opportunity to learn Chinese, but I don’t regret that my language learning journey has turned out the way it did.

That said, I do find the Chinese language beautiful, and every once in a while I get the urge to delve into the study of Mandarin or Cantonese. Here in Singapore, I speak with my colleagues, clients, and friends every day by alternating between English and Chinese, although in written communications English is almost exclusively used.

My professional needs dictate that I spend more time and energy on learning English compared to Chinese, Japanese, and French, but I consider my Chinese skills, if less-than-perfect, a valuable asset I should never let go of. As long as I live, I will keep coming back to learning the language of Confucius and appreciating its beauty.

"Never Let Me Go" and Taking Baby Steps

Never Let Me Go

On Friday night, I watched Never Let Me Go, the movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s eponymous novel. I bought the book a few weeks ago and had been reading it for a few days, but for the first 90 pages or so, I found the story moving too slowly. On top of that, it was written in narrative form by the protagonist—a schoolgirl named Kathy living in a boarding school in the south of England—in highly colloquial British English, adding to the difficulty I experienced reading through those pages. Quite frankly, I found the novel rather boring in the beginning few chapters.

However, as this novel was highly acclaimed—to the point of being named the best novel of 2005 by Time magazine—I didn’t want to just throw it away before getting to the interesting part. So, to facilitate my understanding of the story, I decided to cheat a little and asked ChatGPT to summarize the plot for me. Sure enough, it generated a short summary in a matter of a few seconds, telling me that it’s a dystopian novel surrounding human cloning technology. Despite the obvious spoilers, the summary definitely got me more interested in the story, so much so that I decided to watch the movie adaptation also.

So, I viewed the movie first before finishing the book. It turned out to be a very well-made film with exquisite acting by the three actors playing the central characters. It saddened me profoundly that some people who were born into an unfortunate existence cannot change their predestination no matter what they do or how hard they try—their fate was sealed at the beginning of their lives, as tragic as it may be.

Instead of taking away the joy of reading the original novel, the movie only increased my interest in it tremendously. Yesterday, I sat at a nearby café and read a sizable chunk of the novel with keen anticipation—the plot has indeed thickened—that I’m nearly halfway through now. I expect to finish it within a week.

If you start to read a highly acclaimed novel and yet find it too challenging to read, I believe it’s a good idea to read an abridged version in simple language or watch its movie adaptation before tackling the book itself. That’s how I approached the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, often cited as the greatest work of fiction ever written.

As I was aware of its reputation as a long, difficult book, I first read two abridged versions written for young children, followed by two Japanese comic books, to grasp the general flow of the story. Then I watched the movie adaptation starring Yul Brynner to learn about its highlights. I even bought the CliffsNotes dedicated to the novel so as not to be confused by the convoluted storylines and numerous characters, adding up to around 75 people.

The strategy was a great success—I was able to follow the plot with little confusion and enjoy the various sub-plots without wearing myself out. Had I not made those thorough preparations, I’m sure I would have given up reading The Brothers Karamazov only a short way into the book. 

As I have argued multiple times in these blog posts, your knowledge needs to be built from the ground up, little by little, and new things can only be learned based on what you already know. There’s nothing shameful about not understanding something you’re not familiar with. Starting with baby steps and gradually progressing to more advanced content is the only way you can expand your knowledge in a meaningful manner.