The Technique

Learning another language is often a daunting task. There is so much to learn. Japanese seems especially difficult because not only do you have to learn a completely different language, but you also have to learn a completely different kind of writing. In fact, there are 3 different kinds of scripts in common use in Japanese.

How can we hope to learn this? As it turns out, there are several characteristics of our brains that we can exploit in order to learn faster. The best thing about learning Japanese is that nothing in it is conceptially difficult. By and large it is just a matter of memorization.

Don't worry. Most people are bad at memorizing stuff. Or at least they think they are. In truth, most people are actually pretty good at remembering things. If I give you an oatmeal cookie and then take it away, you will remember that I gave you an oatmeal cookie. What is lacking is a way to tell the brain that you want to store this information for long term use.

Luckily, in the 1970s a person by the name of Sebastian Leitner invented the Leitner System. It uses a technique call Spaced Repetition to memorize information.

The Wikipedia links provided above give a good description of the system, but I will expand a little with my visualization of what's going on. Keep in mind that I'm not a psychologist (I need a spell checker to even be able to write the word), so this is just how I think about the system. My understanding is probably completely incorrect from a factual standpoint, but I still find it a useful way of thinking.

Basically, the brain has two modes of information storage: short term memory and long term memory. My understanding is that this functionality is located in two physically separate parts of the brain. When you experience something for the first time the information is stored in the short term memory (henceforth known as STM). When you try to recall something in STM, it's available immediately, and in pretty good detail most of the time.

So in otherwords, if I tell you that the Japanese word for fish is "sakana", and then ask you immediately "What is the Japanese word for fish", you will search your STM and probably get the word "sakana". But sometimes you don't. Sometimes you will remember "hakana" or "sakene" or something similar. This is because the memory pathways didn't get laid down strongly enough.

Our memory isn't like a computer's memory which either remembers something or doesn't. It's "fuzzy". In other words, we might remember the association of "fish" to the Japanese sounds "sa", "ka", and "na", but some of the associations might be stronger or weaker than the others. Some might be downright wrong. So in order to make the memory better we need to "reinforce" it.

Luckily, our brains automatically reinforce stuff. There's very little we have to do, consciously, to reinforce the memories in our brains. We just have to re-experience it. So the first time we see "sakana", we might remember "habana". The second time "sabana" and the third time "sakana". By the third time, the connection is quite strong and we are very likely to remember it.

Which leads me to "forgetting" things. The "memory" in the STM area is constantly being reused. There's only a limited amount of it. Some research indicates a limit of 7 concepts that can be stored in STM at one time. To indicate this, try to visualize one jelly bean. Easy, right? Now two. Not bad. Keep adding jelly beans and try to see how many you can visualize at the same time. It will probably be about 7 (actually, it's 5 for me). After that you start to envision 2 or 3 groups of objects (for instance, a group of 4 and a group of 3) rather than individual objects.

The point is that you can only store so many things in your STM. And since your brain is constantly storing stuff there automatically, you are bound to "damage" the stuff there. But luckily our brains are "fuzzy". As we bring new things into the STM, we only weaken the associations of the old things. They don't go away entirely. Of course, eventually they become so weak that they disappear. But if we continually reinforce a concept, its associations will remain strong.

This is a wonderful way of remembering stuff. I recall seeing an animated short on Sesame Street where a kid walks to the store mumbling "Quart of milk, loaf of bread, and a stick of butter" over and over again until he gets to the store. Lo and behold, when he gets to the store, he remembers what he wants to buy. Buy unfortunately we need to remember more than 7 words (or 5 in my case!)

What we need to do is store some of this data for the long haul. Fortunately we have another memory system called "long term memory" (or LTM) for doing this. Without any conscious interaction on our part, items that have strong associations in our STM automatically get stored in our LTM.

Amazing! So all I have to do is continually reinforce a concept over and over until it's "strong" in my STM and then it will automatically get stored in my LTM. Wonderful! Except that there are a few problems (you knew it, I bet!).

First, the storage of the associations from STM to LTM memory isn't perfect. The way the brain works is that it will strengthen or weaken "associations". It doesn't do a verbatim copy. So, having strong associations in STM will strengthen the associations in LTM, but they might not be strong enough to get the correct answer.

Second, you can't access your LTM memory directly. When you try to "remember" something, it takes associations out of your LTM and strengthens those associations in the STM. So the copy out of LTM can be faulty. As a side note, the associations in the STM are altered as normal and stored back in the LTM. This means that everytime you "remember" something, you will be altering it slightly. This fact is used in "brainwashing" techniques where they can use an existing memory in LTM, continually bring it back, alter it, and store it in order to make you believe that you remember something that never happened.

Finally, your LTM is also finite. It is constantly being overwritten by other things. Over time, the associations will degrade and you will eventually forget things (or remember them incorrectly). So don't be too sure about your memory. The fact that remembering something alters that memory and the fact that memory degrades over time means that it is entirely possible that things you remembered are not correct at all.

So now it seems hopeless again. Sure I can memorize a bunch of stuff and put it in my STM, but there's no way that I can reliably shunt it back and forth between LTM. In fact, those of us who are "bad at memorizing" can probably relate to this. I sit down and memorize a whole bunch of things and can remember them. But a week later it's all gone...

But let's look at this from the perspective of understanding what's going on (or at least understanding my fantasy of what's going on...). As you memorize stuff the associations get rather strong in the STM. And as the associations get strong in the STM, the associations are strengthened in the LTM. And as you study, you recall the information from the LTM, strengthening the STM. And so we can "remember" everything and think we must "know" it.

But over a weeks time period, you don't move the information from LTM into STM. And so the associations get weaker (you're storing other information during that week). And after some period of time, they are so week that you can't "remember" it any more. So how do we combat this?

Well, we could do the old Sesame Street technique of constantly reviewing material. But the problem is that there's a limit to how much material we can review at once. For me, it takes about 30 minutes to review 100 words of vocabulary. So if I wanted to have a vocabulary of around 1500 words (about the number of distinct words used in the average manga) I would have to study for about 8 hours a day. This is clearly impossible. But it's also unnecessary.

Because we have a lot more LTM than STM, the associations degrade much slower. What we need to do is merely strengthen the associations to the point that they will stay active between the periods that we are likely to run into the word on a normal basis. Studies have shown that you can stengthen an association to the point that it takes several months to forget it, even if you aren't exposed to it again.

So we can just continually refresh our memories with a concept until it's that stong. But how do we know how many refreshes that is? And ideally, we want to optimize for having the largest possible "working set" of information at all times. That is, I'd rather be able to just barely remember 1000 words than have 100 words really well memorized, as long as eventually those 1000 words are well memorized.

That's where "Spaced Repetition" comes in. What we do is "learn" a concept (piece of vocabulary, or grammar point), by getting it to the point that it is strong in our STM. Automatically, this will reinforce the concept in our LTM. The next day we recall the information from LTM. This will automatically strengthen the associations. 2 days after than, we do it again. Then 4 days, 8 days, etc, etc...

Usually after about 8 correct repetitions, the concept will be firmly implanted in the LTM. You can verify this because the 8th repetion actually occurs nearly 4 months after the 7th repetition. If you remember it then, you're going to remember it forever.

However, if at any point we recall the information incorrectly or can't remember it, we need to start all over again. That's because the associations have degraded to the point that we might be strengthening them improperly. So, if after recalling it correctly 4 times in a row, I get it wrong after the 5th time, I'll start back to day one.

The idea is to schedule your reviews so that you wait as long as possible (in order not to waste your time), but that you still remember the item (so that you will be reinforcing it correctly). This can be done (awkwardly) with flash cards (as described in the Wikipedia article on flash cards above). But it's so much simpler to get a computer to keep track of the scheduling for you. Later I will introduce you to some free software that does this.

The important thing to remember here is that using "spaced repetition", we can vastly increase the speed at which we are "memorizing" material. In fact, it's not so much that we are increasing the speed, but since we don't spend time reinforcing material that we already "know" we can increase our "working set" of knowledge.

The other really important thing to realize is that tests have shown that humans by and large require the same number of repetitions in order to reinforce the associations in the brain. The ability to memorize is independent of the concept we know as "intelligence". Average people are able to memorize at about the same speed as "brilliant" people. It's my opinion that some people are better or worse at memorizing than others, but the average person is well capable of memorizing an astonishing amount of material quickly.

I've talked a lot about memory and memorization here. But aren't we going to learn to read manga? Of course. But you need to realize that you are going to be spending some time reviewing material. In fact, you will spend far more time reviewing material than you will spend reading manga. But that's so that we will eventually be able to read manga at a reasonable speed.

As it turns out, reading manga is relatively easy. You just need to have 3 things: a Japanese to English dictionary, a dictionary of Japanese grammar, and a table of Japanese characters. You look at a sentence in the manga and transliterate the characters into characters you can type into your computer. Then you type the words into your computer and have the dictionary look up the meanings. Then you look up the grammar of the sentence in the grammar dictionary to figure out what the sentence means. Easy as pie.

Only it will take you about 30 minutes per sentence to do it that way (strangely I know this from experience...) And it will be extremely difficult to determine what words you are using if you don't understand the grammar first (since the grammar modifies the words and the dictionary only lists unmodified words). But it's hard to figure out the grammar without knowing the words.

So what we need to do is memorize a few things. The most important is the Japanese characters (don't worry, there's only about 150 that you actually need to memorize to read this book). This speeds things up tremendously. Then we need to memorize the vocabulary and grammar.

I will be guiding you through the Japanese language using the manga. As we experience new characters and new vocabulary and new grammar, I will explain them (heavily using outside materials) and then get you to memorize them. At first there will be a lot of memorization, but by the time we get to the end of the book, you will be able to go through large sections without having to memorize anything.

Mahoraba volume 1 is 178 pages long. On average we will probably be doing about 1 page per day. Which means that it will take roughly half a year to read the whole manga. As I said, there are about 150 characters to learn, 1500 words to learn, and roughly 300 grammar points. So in total 2000 items to memorize.

In a typical day I will discuss the content of the material we are reading for that day. I will then assign 10-15 new items to memorize for that day. You will do the initial memorization for those items and then review the items that the software has scheduled for review. Finally you will read ahead for the next days material to see how much you can understand.

We will only read enough material to get 10-15 new things to memorize for that day. At the beginning that will be a pathetically small amount of the manga. But as we learn more, the amount that we can read each day will become larger and larger. By the time we get to the end of the manga, you will be able to read other mangas fairly comfortably with the aid of a dictionary.