Recently we spoke about a sneaky, devilish way to improve your listening.
However, that technique requires either being in country or having access to native speakers in some way.
What happens if there’s no Chinatown/Osaka in tourist season (read: every season) or equivalent in your area?
Perhaps you’re planning on coming to Japan to teach and fancy a much recommended head start on the language, or maybe you’re studying and can’t help but notice that native speakers you see online don’t seem to speak like the language is presented in your textbook.
Today we’re going to talk about extracting language from content made by native speakers in on the internet. You can also do this if you live in the country and are shit at making friends like I, who did not write that article, am, but it’s a simple and effective way to increase your vocabulary that anyone can do from home, regardless of where you live.
Acquisition
Getting Words is of utmost importance in anyone’s learning of a language, and debate rages about the most efficient ways to do so. There are endless supplies of curated word lists available online, but say you want to know something very specific and you just can’t find it searching in English. What if you wanted, for instance, to know how to ask to get the neck of your guitar set up for a new tuning (don’t worry, non-guitar heads, it’s just an example)? You could, perish the thought, be willing to saunter into the music shop with Google Translate and a smile, but here at Language Crab we want to learn more natural interactions.
Why?
Because speaking to real poeple, you are never going to simply ask a question and be done with it. You’ll want to get used to the range of replies you’re likely to get, related vocabulary, and so on.
The Journey
What we’re about to do can be adopted as part of your immersion, or as an immersion component of your general study, and you’re going to learn that, wait for it, waaaait for it:
It’s not about the destination, it’s about the THINGS WE LEARN ALONG THE WAY 😀
– A Crab, 2024
Leveraging New Technologies
We are in the year of our Common Era 2024, so I’m not going to pretend this blog was written in 2022 and not recommend asking ChatGPT as a jumping off point, but it’s important to then use the answer it gives to search for videos of native speakers.
We’re going to to see how this works out… and for the sake of this post I really, really hope it does.
Case Study
We’re going to use the above example about getting one’s guitar neck set up for a new tuning. If you don’t know what this means in English, it doesn’t matter. You’ll hopefully learn via Japanese if you follow along with me in this process.
To start off with, ChatGPT has given me the delightful, barely Japanese sentence:
ギターのネックのセットアップを調整してください。オープンG チューニングのために。
(Try saying that without sounding foreign as a side challenge.)
Next, let’s pop that into Youtube for a good ol’ search.
Immediately we’re presented with certified Mint Content For Me with this channel, and I shall be returning to it for fun and study, but it hasn’t answered our question.
…But what’s this, lurking just below it?! This could be what we’re looking for.
Fabulous wipe transitions aside, what you pick up (pun absolutely intended, guitar nerds) from here will depend on your level, but quite quickly we’ve found an entire set of vocabulary and phrases adjacent to our target. If you were to end up in a conversation about guitar maintenance with the shop clerk, a likely event, studying this video would do you very well.
It’s still not quite giving us the target, though. So should we just pack up our crab belongings and sidle back into the surf? No, we change the search and continue, onwards and sidewards!
Grab what you can and keep going!
I think you should already see the value in this approach, given how quickly we’ve found a resource that fills in so many potential gaps in our language around the topic at hand, so let’s see what happens digging a little deeper.
What ChatGPT gave us was good, and comparing it to the search results I can see that 調整する seems to be an appropriate verb to use. However, I think we need to change our search phrase. I really want to know what to ask for in a shop, so this time I’ve massively simplified it and searched for 店で、ギターをセットアップ, and found this video.
Now I am confident that I should use セットアップ as a する verb, and could ask something like オープンGチューニングにセットアップしてもらえますか？ were I to go to a shop with this request.
To be honest, in my search for a natural way to ask that question, I’ve pretty much learned how to do it myself now! That’s beside the point though and merely a bonus! The main thing is this approach is perfect for those not living abroad. All this new tech means we can find natural language used in whatever situation you can think of.
The benefit is that you’ll learn about the things around your target. You’ll be learning from true context.
It’s a bit like fishing, except until you get that fish you’re constantly being fed grapes and other delights. In fact, you may be satisfied before you even get that elusive fish. How satiating! I’m full already!
Isn’t this just sentence mining?
You may have seen the concept of sentence mining being bandied about online, especially by younger folk (shudder). It’s when you extract a sentence from content you are consuming in order to learn a particular language item, and put it in your digital flashcards. A lot of successful people have used the method, but I’ve found it isn’t the best use of my time.
Why spend all that time making a flashcard, with some making the flashcard and not even reading the full sentence, when you could just make a quick not of the word in your notebook and continue consuming media?
If you simply continue with this, you’ll see the word enough times to get used to it and how it’s used in a variety of circumstances, which repeatedly looking at the same sentence in a flashcard app isn’t going to give you.
The people who have successfully used sentence mining are highly motivated with enough time (I did say they’re generally younger (shudder)) to make the cards and consume a lot of content. Busier people should prioritize the consumption.
Conclusions
What we’ve done today is mining, but not sentence mining.
The main takeaways from this process are:
- Search in your target language
- Use smart new tech as a jumping off point, but don’t trust it!
- Trust and copy natives!
- You don’t need a bullseye to be improving! Learn around your target.
Let us know your experiences with this below!
Happy fishing!
