The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask

Note: This is the introduction post to the Language Learning: Japanese series; please refer to the link for other related tutorials.

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I intend to make a series of entries, chronicling the way I go about learning languages; in particular, the Japanese language. I will share any and all methods that I’ve come to devise myself over the past few months.

Some of these methods have been of immense help to me. I hope the same will hold for you as well.

(The methods may still be applicable even if you’re learning other languages. If you find that they are, do let me know.)

What I Offer

I’ll teach you how to make this, in 20 minutes or less:

Tempted yet?

What You Will Have In Your Hands

1. A parallel text of a full short-story or novel.

(Nearly-perfectly) aligned in form, sorted English-Japanese, or Japanese-English, as you please. Requiring only minimal editing or fomatting to have it entirely your way.

The good thing is that my method is fairly automated. (In comparison, the effort you would have to spend doing the same thing manually could deprive you of some few nights of sleep. Yes, I know. I speak from experience.)

2. A list of kanji.

Appearing in the exact order you encounter them in the Japanese text. Without duplicates.

Accompanying definitions included.

The Benefits

As I’ve discovered, the benefits of having something like the above are plenty.

1. The aligned texts are great for printing. Better yet, since you can select individual or batch parts (with the accompanying translations), you can easily extract a page or two for practice for whenever the computer’s not around.

2. The data can be easily sorted. We are using spreadsheets, after all.

3. The data can be exported. For use with Anki, or any other SRS apps of your choice. (So long as they support *.csv or *.tsv files.)

4. You can select your own font-type and size. This I find to be a huge incentive, especially if you’re a Meiryo junkie like me.

5. Easily cross-refer to kanji and their meanings. No need to waste time hunting down definitions by poring through Remembering The Kanji (if you’re an RTK user) or kanji dictionaries, especially if you don’t have a ready Internet access nearby.

6. And so on and so forth.

I love regular expressions, and I use them a lot, so be prepared to play with them a bit. (And don’t worry — if you follow the tutorial properly, you won’t even need to know what they are to make parallel texts like the above. I’ll try to make the tutorial as clear as possible.)

The Tools You’ll Need

All that I mention below are either free, open-source software, or (usable) shareware.

Other tools better or more efficient than the ones I suggest probably exist. (And if they do, and you use them, please recommend them to me by way of a comment.) For the moment though, I’ll make the best use of what I already have.

1. Notepad2. The original Notepad bundled with Windows XP is lacking in features, and that’s why we need Notepad2.

2. Editpad Pro. The only reason why I’ve included this here is because I like the regex engine, which I think beats the one in Notepad++. Also, Editpad Pro has the ability to highlight regex searches, which I love and think is absolutely fantastic. (Pardon my enthusiasm.)

3. Open Office Calc. (Alternatively, Microsoft Excel). I will only illustrate my examples using Calc though.

In The Meantime

I’m currently a bit busy with exams, so I’ll get about completing the tutorials as soon as possible.