A keychain I received from my Japanese teacher for attending every single class

If you can’t tell by reading most of the content on this blog, I love learning. Anything and everything. I try to teach myself because I firmly believe that it’s up to you to better yourself, and not anyone else’s responsibility.

In the fifth grade, I taught myself how to write two of the three alphabets in Japanese using a Magna-Doodle. During the later part of middle school I taught myself HTML and web design, and in high school I moved on to PHP. I would draw for hours on end to improve my art, often spending weekends never leaving the house. In college I more or less took a break from all this and just went with the flow of school. When I interned in Boston last summer, I weaseled my way into new-hire training programs and passed courses that dealt with money management and businesses–something I have never dealt with in my entire life–and essentially completed an entire semester of a Bentley course in one week.

After two years of studying Japanese, I was accepted to go abroad in Osaka, which is where I am today. When I came to the decision of staying another semester, I had a choice to make. My grades in both Japanese classes were high As, and I never missed a single class, which meant that if I worked hard enough over my winter break, I could skip an entire semester in both my kanji class and my grammar class. This would put me into the second-to-highest level of Japanese that the school offers.

Naturally, I decided to go for it.

Deciding this meant that I would have to learn an entire semester’s worth of Japanese (which is really an entire year’s worth for my college at home) in one month. Before the fall semester ended, I bought the next level textbook, which was to become my companion during the course of winter break. The day I finished exams, I started to break into the book.

At first, I thought that maybe I had bit off more than I could chew. The topics in the book dealt with health issues, the decline in population and the increase in crimes, the environment, and businesses. But I pressed on and memorized page after page of vocabulary, tested myself on the grammar, and read and re-read all the example dialogs in the books.

Here is, more or less, the steps I took to learn the material:
- Started right away: I didn’t think “Oh, I’m on vacation now! I can let my brain forget about school for a while!” Instead, I just started the new book the night exams were done.
- Go through a chapter a day: I didn’t worry about learning the material in the beginning. I simply reviewed each chapter a day, without worrying if it would absorb or not. This also gave me a sense on which chapters I would need to work more on, instead of wasting time pouring over a chapter I already have a good handle on.
- Review nightly: During the day I would learn something new, and then at night before I went to sleep I would review what I just learned.
- Space it out: I didn’t attempt to learn everything in one day. I would go over as much as my brain was willing to, and then stop so I wouldn’t feel burnt out.
- Backtrack: After learning new material, I would back track the previous chapter and try to recite mentally all the vocabulary I learned in that chapter to keep them fresh in my mind.
- Integrate it: I tried to look and listen for any new grammar forms that I learned, including trying to incorporate the material whenever I spoke to somebody in Japanese.
- Writing practice: In order to skip my kanji class, I needed to have learned 100 more characters. I wrote these over and over again in my notebooks everyday.
- Not panic: Even though the material was intensive, I stayed calm and kept going. I figured, even if I couldn’t pass the exam to skip a level, I would need to know this material anyway. I would still be in a respectable level either way.
- Mark problem areas: There were some grammar points that I just couldn’t get–these I marked with little flags so that I can review them more frequently than the rest.
- Go through the book more than once: Once I finished going through the book that first time, I went through it again. And again. And again. I must’ve gone through the textbook at least 4 times, each time trying to pick up any remnants that I haven’t learned.
- Review as a whole: After going through the book a couple times, I was able to review grammar points just by looking at the table of contents. I would flip to the back of the textbook and review all the vocabulary as a whole, instead of by chapter. This helped reinforce things that I knew, and point out things that I didn’t.

In the end, I was able to skip both Japanese classes. This experience only enforces my belief that you are responsible for your own education. Some might think that learning an entire of semester of a language is impossible without a teacher, but in actuality they are just there to guide you. They will go over grammar points or whatever with you, but you should go over it on your own because time spent in a classroom will not be enough.

I hope writing down these experiences motivates some of you to take learning into your own hands. Do you have any comments/tips on self-teaching? Let me know in the comments!

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Foxes | how-to, language, life | Monday, February 18th, 2008 | Trackback