4 Great Resources for Learning Japanese from My 14-Year-Old

My 14-year-old son spends hours every day meticulously composing Japanese phrases in his notebook for fun.

He scans Twitter's short pithy messages in Japanese for reading practice, views his Facebook profile entirely in Japanese, pesters me to go to oriental food markets to buy junk food, and has appropriated our discount bin DVD of Ramen Girl to capture glimpses of Japan and listen to the dialogue.

In the words of an 80's hit by The Vapors, I fear he is turning Japanese - I really think so. This is on the heels of his successful self-initiated push to learn Spanish, last year, and his assiduous following of language hacker Irish Polyglot (@irishpolyglot) and his fluentin3months.com blog.

So, I asked him about the resources he uses most often. This is what he recommends for beginners like him.

1) jisho.org - Denshi Jisho is an awesome English-Japanese/Kanji dictionary. Kanji characters can be searched by radicals.

2) renshuu.org - Solid site for vocabulary, Kanji and grammar practice. Also has a library of useful grammar tips.

3) alljapaneseallthetime.com - Great blog written by Khatz (or Khatzumoto) an American who learned Japanese with digital flashcards, and by watching Japanese TV shows and listening to conversation.

4) Japanese My Way - An iPad app with flashcards, dictionary and tutorial videos.

Much-hyped Word Lens Fails to Deliver

Ok, there's a lot of breathless hype about a new iPhone app called Word Lens which translates signs and text between Spanish and English on the fly - just by pointing your device's camera at them. If you watch the demo video above your jaw will drop. It's an amazing piece of augmented reality, better than kicking an AR soccer ball around, for sure.

While the concept is brilliant, the execution is disappointing.

I've been speaking Spanish since I was 19 and wanted to test the tech. So, I downloaded the app and sprung for the $5 Spanish to English and $5 English to Spanish modules (other languages are in the works).

Yes it's cool seeing the "translation" appear. But it is not even close to being as smooth as the demo portrays. The words on the screen constantly, constantly, shift until you lock them in. It's a major annoyance.

Clumsy translations
On simple signs you get clumsy translations, which admittedly are still of value because you could make use of them in a place where you didn't know a word of Spanish (or English). But if you try it with anything slightly more complex, sometimes even a book cover, you get a different set of words every time you lock the translation in. The software is simply not robust enough to settle on a translation in one go. So it generates major visual noise as it tries to make sense of the text - words are always jumping around.

Another problem is the translations are word for word. This makes sense in a way. You can't fit five words on a three-word sign. But it's limiting as well.

Among the many pieces of text I tried was this simple phrase, "Sunday will come" in English, which should be "El Domingo Vendrá" or "El Domingo Llegará. Word Lens rendered "Domingo Voluntad Venir." Voluntad refers to a person's free will.

Sleight-of-hand
I have no doubt that this is the beginning of something special in the realm of AR. Kudos to the developers for it. But the demo video sleight-of-hand is really not appreciated. It's the visual equivalent of a disingenuous dot.com news release that overpromises and underdelivers.

So sure, if you want to experience the novelty of holding up your phone to a sign and watch it magically morph into another language, wonderful. It may come in handy if you're vacationing in Cuba or Mexico and need a bit of language help.

But if you want to use it for marginally more serious purposes, there is much more work to be done on Word Lens before it begins to deserve all its good press.

The Book that Opened a World to My Son

This past summer, my 14-year-old son blew me away by learning Spanish in about two months flat. Naturally, I'm not talking about complete fluency. But Ryan is now what I consider functionally bilingual.

Besides having a heck of a lot of determination, he owes a big part of his success to a book. Here's the story.

One day, suffering from a case of floppy summer boredom, Ryan asked me, "Dad, how did you learn Spanish?" I told him about taking Spanish lessons, striking up conversations with the Chileans there during breaks, listening to shortwave radio, frequenting a Latin-American store downtown, buying Condorito comics and other Spanish magazines, and generally hanging with a community that in some measure adopted this intrepid gringo.

Then I mentioned Spanish Made Simple.

It was a book I pored over every night, slogging my way through its 50 chapters, repeating the dialogues out loud, working through the half dozen intense exercises after each chapter. That nightly effort yielded me functionally bilingual status after about a half year.

He asked, "Can we still get a copy?"

"Gee, I don't even know if it's still in print," I said. But we called up McNally Robinson and were able to order it in.

I see that it's been given a graphic facelift for a new generation, but the dialogues and the exercises haven't changed a bit since I picked it up 30 years ago. It's the same book only prettier. And you can order it for your Kindle or Kobo reader, too.

So, Ryan starts to study seriously, often bugging my wife and me to practice with him, listening to Spanish pop songs on YouTube, and increasingly becoming smitten by all things Español.

In the evenings, he's working through the book - doing exactly what I did decades ago.

He starts Facebooking his cousins in Edmonton, then our relatives in Chile. Lo and behold, he understands them, and they him.

The kid is hooked.

My wife and I never taught our two boys Spanish but used it as code for talking to each other without the boys understanding us. Now, there's nothing we can say around Ryan in Spanish that he won't get. This is not convenient. But the upside is we have another Spanish speaker in the house.

My eldest, Mark, is good-natured about being out of the Latin-American loop. He graduated from French immersion and, parallels between romance languages being what they are, he can still sometimes figure out what we're up to.

Anyone who speaks a second language knows the world opens up so much wider. Not only do you learn the language itself, but you're enriched by another culture and - more importantly - other ways of thinking; including the realization that the North American way of viewing the world isn't the only way.

You get a foot in both worlds and that's a healthy thing.

Yesterday, my son hooked up with a Chilean relative he's never talked to before on Facebook. Today, he asked us to speak nothing but Spanish to him for an hour. Tonight, he was asking my wife what English sounded like to her when she came to Canada from Chile as a 12-year-old.

Ryan now has a language skill that can play a big role in his life. Of course, it was his own curiousity and drive that propelled him forward, and he still has lots to learn. But the book was a huge help in giving him a basic grounding in grammar and speech.

As much as I like admire change and keeping things fresh, I'm thrilled that the same words and exercises that inspired me when I was 19, have done the same for him much earlier.

Who knows, maybe one summer his son will ask, "Hey dad, how did you learn your Spanish?"

Also read, Who Really Taught Me Spanish - Was It My PLN?

Who Really Taught Me Spanish - Was It My PLN?

I've been blessed with being able to speak Spanish for a long time now. It's a real kick being a gringo and knowing my way around this wonderfully exotic language. And it may not have happened if it weren't for The Midnight Special.

Back in 1975, there were two Friday night concert shows on TV--The Midnight Special, first hosted by Wolfman Jack, and Don Kirshner's Rock Concert.

One night, two extraordinary acts hit the screen. One was David Bowie back in his glam rock days--the other was a British-American, flamenco-rock group called Carmen.

These days, you'd probably call Carmen's style world music or worldbeat. All I knew at the time was that they sang in English and Spanish and their sound really rocked.

So, I enrolled in Spanish lesssons at the International Centre and met Soñia Amaya, my Spanish teacher. Sonya taught us hapless Canucks how to trill our Rs and do various other pronunciation gymnastics which anglos have such difficulty with.

During the coffee breaks, I would sit myself down at a table full of Chileans--this was three years after the coup in Chile, so there were lots of them around--and test my halting Spanish. I'd ask if they had the time or invent any other excuse to start practising my rudimentary Spanish skills.

Well, I had a ball.

I got such a warm reception and made so many good friends that things snowballed from there. Setting foot into the Chilean world made mine so much bigger. They fed me and helped me learn their language. I heard their stories and grew to love them pretty quickly.

There were other Canadians who were just as adventurous and who were rewarded in the same way. And right about that time, I discovered that there was a small Spanish-speaking branch in my church.

I had hit the jackpot.

I was so excited. In fact, the first talk I gave in church was in Spanish, after I had spent eight months reading Condorito magazines, buying Chilean newspapers, listening to Radio Havana Cuba on the short-wave and working through a book called Spanish Made Simple.

Because of my association with Chileans, I learned all about the coup in '73, saw the movie Missing many times and tried to understand what my friends were telling me when they said they were in Canada as refugees--that they were forced to leave their country.

What an eye-opener.

The benefits of speaking Spanish have been extraordinary. But first, let's be clear. The language itself is not hard to learn. People talk about having a universal language and sometimes point to Esperanto. Well, Spanish has Esperanto beat hands down.

It's easy to learn, the grammar makes sense--I don't even have to know the meaning of a word to pronounce it properly--and it's already spoken in 21 countries. I love keeping a foot in each world--the Canadian and the Chilean. They really do complement each other.

I know my wife, who was born in Concepción, Chile, wouldn't have married a gringo who couldn't speak a word of Spanish, so I was lucky there. And that's the biggest blessing.

But it has enriched my life in other ways, as well.

I've learned that there are other ways of looking at things, other ways of thinking, other points of view. That the North American way of doing things is not the be-all and end-all. That has been a major benefit to me.

I like to think I'm more tolerant, more sensitive to racial issues, less patient with racial slurs, and more understanding of other people and cultures because of it.

I love this quote from anthropologist Wade Davis:

"The world in which you were born is just one model of reality.

Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you;

they are unique manifestations of the human spirit."

I owe a lot to this ability to speak such a warm and inviting language, to rub shoulders with such wonderful people, to have my world view broadened and my life enriched.

But my question is, who taught me Spanish? Am I really self-taught?

I could say I spent countless hours listening to La Voz de Los Estados Unidos on short-wave and many more dedicated to working through Spanish lessons on LPs, cassettes, and in manuals. I could give a nod to the excellent PBS sit-com Que Pasa USA--and to the many newspapers and magazines I pored over. Surely my own hard work combined with media and technology (such as they were) played a big part.

But even more important was the friendship of wonderful people in the early years. Recent immigrants who had little but shared their hospitality, friendship and their homes with me. Instructors who really cared about my success and the way I sounded. Church members who reached out to the Chilean wannabe in their midst. The Columbian woman at the Cosas Lindas Boutique who ran the local Hispanic radio show. My good friends Ivan and Victor. Later, my wife and my in-laws. All were huge influences.

In short, I had a large social network that adopted me just because I showed an interest in them, in their culture and language.

So, did I really "teach myself" Spanish?

Far from it.

I had a lot of people who mentored me, guided me and cared about me. People I enjoyed being with and who enjoyed being with me.

And even though we didn't have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Livemocha--or any other social media tools to study languages with--we all shared and learned so much from each other.

To me, that wonderful network of friends sure sounds a lot like a pre-web PLN.

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