I have a goal of some day being able to teach programming and machine learning in Japanese, so I wanted to immerse myself in the vocabulary and expressions related to those. I thought it might be useful to share the process of how I’ve been working towards that as an example.
As a first step, I set out to develop a “Tiny Habit” of reading at least five minutes a day from an online programming site I found via Google: ゼロからのPython入門講座. Recall the principle behind Tiny Habits: start with the simplest, cannot-posssibly-fail level of effort. The point is to establish the habit. In my case, if I read for as little as five minutes, I count that as a win and log it on my tracker. In practice, once I get started, I tend to go for much longer than five minutes.
Each page is relatively short, so it makes for a nice block of study. When I first visit a new page, I try to read all the way through it without assistance. This “priming” has been shown to make learning more effective (described in “Make It Stick“) and it gives me a sort of benchmark of how well this material fits into my ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of Comprehensible Input — I want material that is neither too easy, nor too difficult, but “just right.”
Once I’ve read through the new page, I go back and read it sentence by sentence and do the following:
- I highlight the sentence and use Google translate and/or deepl.com to show the translation (i.e. creating comprehensible input);
- use their text-to-speech function so I can listen, find out how new words are pronounced and shadow;
- take note of new vocab and consult my dictionaries for selected words to understanding nuances or new uses of words I already know.
I will also often only highlight portions of the sentence, such as clauses modifying other words, so I can focus just on that tiny bit of usage.
I’ll read the same page a few times until I feel like I understand at least 90-95% of it before moving on, but I also make a point to go back periodically and reread pages I’ve already studied, my own way of performing Spaced Repetition practice. For a very few selected colocations (i.e. things I think are important but just aren’t sticking for whatever reason), I add them to an Anki deck (no more than a three or four each week) which I review mornings taking less than five minutes. If it starts taking longer than that, I will delete cards I no longer find as important.
That’s the main process I’ve been following. After a few weeks of building up some basic vocabulary, I’ve added a few extra sources (e.g. a Kindle book and a couple of YouTube channels) to broaden my exposure to different ways of expressing the same concepts. I still focus daily on my original source but will jump to the others occasionally to shake things up a bit or cross-check anything I may not be sure about.
That’s it for input. For output, I sometimes talk to myself in Japanese and try to use some of the terminology I’ve learned recently as if I were teaching or describing the process of writing a program. I also plan to start sharing this with my main iTalki tutor. I haven’t been doing much writing yet, but my plan is to create short posts on HelloTalk and also have some simple written conversations with one of our AI overlords like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot.
Action Steps
Find a topic you are interested in, search for online resources (e.g. courses, blogs, etc.) and give this approach a try. Everyone is different, a method that works for me doesn’t necessarily work for others, but use this as a starting point then fine-tune it. If you discover some effective adaptations, please send an email to: john AT nihongokaizen.com and let me know!