How Manga Can Help You Learn a Language

I am a huge language learning fanatic. I’ve dabbled in Linguistics, and I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and Japanese. Perhaps the most important tool I’ve used in learning them has been the Spaced Repetition System, using Anki. Those of you who follow my blog may know that I’ve written about Anki before, but I’ve used it for learning a wide variety of skills, one of the most notable being foreign language.

I was introduced to Anki through All Japanese All The Time, which anyone interested in foreign language should check out. In his blog, Kazhumoto uses a number of ideas circulating in the language community. A key concept he details is the reaching of 10,000 sentences in spaced repetition. This, coupled with the spending of 10,000 hours of “doing stuff” in the target language should provide a reasonable depth in the language.

This is where manga comes in.

Manga, for those who do not know, is the Japanese form of comic books, which has a reasonably large following around the world. It goes hand in hand with anime, light novels, and visual novel games, and there is a sizable part of the world who consume translated forms of these.

It is not uncommon for fans of these mediums to take it upon themselves to translate manga, often scanning and replacing the Japanese text with their own, ergo “scanlations.”

While usually in English, there exists a sizable community for translations into other languages, for example Spanish. One of my favorite places to find manga in Spanish is animextremist (which, as a warning, is completely in Spanish.)

In addition to be a lot of fun to read, these translated comic books are an absolute gold mine for sentences to place in an SRS. If you know enough of a language to read basic phrases, its an incredibly great way to learn. Its like having a textbook that teaches you common speech and phrases, is fun to read, and learns at a pace optimal for you.

My personal strategy for using manga to learn languages is to simply read until I come across a phrase I am unfamiliar with. When I find one, I write it in a notebook, along with a translation (I like doing this in Cornell format so that I can use them as quick flashcards in case my laptop battery dies or my hard drive corrupts.) When I reach the end of a chapter (usually around 16 or so pages), I enter the phrases into Anki and learn from there.

If you can find a group that translates manga into another language, it can be an easy and amusing way to inch closer to fluency, and aside that a fun way to spend a few minutes.

 

How Manga Can Help You Learn a Language

I am a huge language learning fanatic. I’ve dabbled in Linguistics, and I’ve learned a bit of Spanish and Japanese. Perhaps the most important tool I’ve used in learning them has been the Spaced Repetition System, using Anki. Those of you who follow my blog may know that I’ve written about Anki before, but I’ve used it for learning a wide variety of skills, one of the most notable being foreign language.

I was introduced to Anki through All Japanese All The Time, which anyone interested in foreign language should check out. In his blog, Kazhumoto uses a number of ideas circulating in the language community. A key concept he details is the reaching of 10,000 sentences in spaced repetition. This, coupled with the spending of 10,000 hours of “doing stuff” in the target language should provide a reasonable depth in the language.

This is where manga comes in.

Manga, for those who do not know, is the Japanese form of comic books, which has a reasonably large following around the world. It goes hand in hand with anime, light novels, and visual novel games, and there is a sizable part of the world who consume translated forms of these.

It is not uncommon for fans of these mediums to take it upon themselves to translate manga, often scanning and replacing the Japanese text with their own, ergo “scanlations.”

While usually in English, there exists a sizable community for translations into other languages, for example Spanish. One of my favorite places to find manga in Spanish is animextremist (which, as a warning, is completely in Spanish.)

In addition to be a lot of fun to read, these translated comic books are an absolute gold mine for sentences to place in an SRS. If you know enough of a language to read basic phrases, its an incredibly great way to learn. Its like having a textbook that teaches you common speech and phrases, is fun to read, and learns at a pace optimal for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My personal strategy for using manga to learn languages is to simply read until I come across a phrase I am unfamiliar with. When I find one, I write it in a notebook, along with a translation (I like doing this in Cornell format so that I can use them as quick flashcards in case my laptop battery dies or my hard drive corrupts.) When I reach the end of a chapter (usually around 16 or so pages), I enter the phrases into Anki and learn from there.

If you can find a group that translates manga into another language, it can be an easy and amusing way to inch closer to fluency, and aside that a fun way to spend a few minutes.

The M-Net Study Plan

I developed this academic study plan over the course of three months in 2010, intending it to be used for myself and a friend. I developed this program by combining what I knew about learning foreign languages, productivity, and time management. Using this system, I raised my grade-point average from 4.1 to 4.3 in just a few months.

The way that this system works is by having multiple units which co-exist optimally, acting like a sort of butterfly net or mosquito net for information. If there is a small hole in the net, the net does not unravel due to the connections between the units. Hence, M-net.

The main ideas behind this system is as follows.

• Balancing understanding with memorization
• Using updated and more efficient tools and methods than is the current standard
• Using an efficient system that “auto-optimizes” for each individual
• Retaining academic knowledge in the long-term for exams, instead of re-learning it
• Organization and forward planning
• Using a system that naturally progress to a tool to review for midterms or finals
• Using a system that allows much more free time than one based on learning by rote

Ideally, this system takes around 25 minutes per day, although oftentimes the system takes up even less time than that.

The first and most effective unit in this system is a spaced repetition flashcard system. I can’t say I have much experience on which is best, but I’ve used anki for quite a long time.

Anki is a flashcard program which puts paper flashcards to shame. Instead of using a traditional learn-by-rote flashcard system to commit to short term memory for tests, it spaces each card out in order to commit the majority of the information to long term memory. This is incredibly invaluable.

The best part about this is that it spaces out the information in the most optimal way for you, the user, to learn. It doesn’t simply space everything until the end of time, assuming you will remember in a perfect manner. It lets you rank your success on each card, reviewing more difficult material before the easier material. This ensures that you will not waste any time learning.

Using this for school is relatively simple. You’ll want to enter your notes in as questions (which I will elaborate on further), enter your homework questions and enter your test questions into the subject deck. It can get a bit tedious to enter in everything, but even just a few a week becomes an incredible amount upon midterms and finals. Try thinking of 1000 questions on a given topic in a few days before the test, and then try thinking of 10 questions a day.

Most students should be familiar with the feeling of the day before a big test. Most students spend the days before a test essentially re-learning everything they need. This is an enormous waste of time. Using this system removes that phase altogether, thus turning your time spent studying actually studying instead of relearning.

Anki, however, requires a few minutes each day. Many people simply don’t have the drive to do something every single day. This is the single greatest roadblock in terms of studying. It is important to form a habit of reviewing these cards each day. Once a habit is formed, it greatly reduces the stress of pre-test cramming and makes studying almost eerily addicting.

The next object in this system is the use of mindmaps. Mindmaps are an extremely valuable tool for presenting a large amount of information in a visual format. These are excellent for summing up a chapter to study for a test, or taking general notes during “review days”. They are also very useful for taking notes using a teacher who doesn’t teach in a linear order (i.e. the teacher everyone had in high-school that nobody could understand.)



Its important that these not be taken formally. The purpose of mindmaps is that they create visual connections, causing the one who takes them to see the general shape of the object. Doodling is not only allowed, but beneficial, so long as you can create visual connections between pictures and ideas.

In addition to mindmaps and flashcards, another important unit in this system is Cornell note-taking. Generally, you divide the page into four sections – The header, the cue column, the notes and the summary. The idea is that you create a sort of flashcards in your notes, which make them easy to place into Anki. At the end of each class, you write about a paragraph summarizing the notes. This system is more difficult to explain than to use, and to learn how it is simply best to look at an example or two.

Finally, the last step is to create a summary sheet. In order to do this, you take the summaries from all of the Cornell notes and place them into one document, shrinking the font size and abbreviating until everything can fit on one page. Its is helpful to keep explanations to the maximum and examples to the minimum. This helps to read the entire course at a quick glance, as well as review the course quickly before finals or midterms.

So in summary, the system is entirely connected in order to commit as much as possible to memory and to simplify the study process. Spaced Repetition is an effective way to memorize the necessary information, Cornell Notes simplify the process of turning notes into flashcards, The summary sheet is made easier by the summary section of the Cornell system, and mindmaps present everything in a unit in a powerful and visually impacting way. The system is better at keeping your mind focused than that last cup of coffee.