Talk:Japanese/Archive 3

Archived
I've archived some of the old discussions (mostly pre-July 2008) and the discussion on page deletions. Hopefully I didn't mess anything up on my selective move. --Retropunk (talk) 14:42, 7 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I've long thought of doing this, but wasn't sure where to cut. I was hoping that at the end of this stage we could do away with most of this page and start fresh on the next stage; actually adding content. But we're hardly there yet.
 * Thanks for takning the initiative. Are you able to devote a bit more time to the project again, or are you still "busy as a bee"? --Swift (talk) 16:24, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not able to devote a lot of time, but I'll be looking around and helping as I can. I plan on making the red-images for the kanji vocabulary sometime in the near future.  I've requested help on lang-8.com, so maybe we'll get a few people from there.  --Retropunk (talk) 05:45, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi, a little question...
When the book will be complete, include the table of contents? I entered to /Content and this was a mess, I don't know where to start from there.

And I'm correctly in a holiday, so I want to use the time to learn some japanese. =] I like animes, so I want to learn japanese. I'll provably use a special method I heard to learn languges quickly. The man who invented it know 25 languges, including japanese. Worth a try. 77.127.216.174 (talk) 10:17, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Not quite sure what exactly you are asking. If you read the discussion above you will learn how the contributors of this book propose to present the contents of this book. Take care. --Swift (talk) 16:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I understand your eagerness, but you'll need to be patient. Currently, there's only two people developing this book.  We're working on this book in our spare time to develop a better path for readers and developers.  If you want a starting point, I would look at learning the Kana first and then the vocabulary on the very first page.   However, if you're learning Japanese to understand anime, you may want to find another source.  There's a few podcasts that teach Japanese, and you'll probably find this useful for listening comprehension.  --Retropunk (talk) 05:52, 17 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Greetings one and all, konnichiha or whatever! I was around years months ago, and then was unable to have enough free time to commit to being around here. But I'm back and want to help you guys sort this book out. Also, I've been working on a sort of "phrase book" that is less somber. Is that beyond the scope of Wikibooks? I'm curious what people think about having more than one book regarding studying Japanese. I do want to help make this one nice and shiny though. I was also thinking about polishing off my "phrase book" and presenting that too. To repeat myself, it's a bit humorous, is that taboo here on Wikibooks? I don't know too much about the whole culture here on Wikibooks, so I'd like some feed back about that... and I'd also like a quick update summarizing what needs to be done with this serious book here. Cheers, Nesnad (talk) 16:16, 17 October 2008 (UTC)


 * There's already a phrasebook that you can modify if you wish. --Retropunk (talk) 05:26, 21 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't think light spirits are beyond the scope of Wikibooks. The Japanese Phrasebook (which was split from this book) isn't much at all yet, and quite dry at that. It might be difficult to merge your content into it, but go ahead if you want.
 * I would have no problem with multiple books as long as they are clear enough in their distinction for users and contributors to choose between them. --Swift (talk) 06:48, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No, no. Please don't merge my book with that dry list of a phrase book. Shudder ;-) I mean it's a good list and all, but mine is in a whole other style. My created book is a hybrid between learning and using a phrasebook, quite different than options currently available here so a learner can follow their own personal learning style. I think it will be quite useful, it even has sound files for each bit of dialogue. So now I will go about adding it to our virtual "bookshelf" after I tweak a few things. How should I go about doing that? Cheers, Nesnad (talk) 16:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)


 * How should you do what, exactly? Perhaps Help:Contributing to Wikibooks would be a useful place to browse around. Happy uploading and thanks for your hard work! --Swift (talk) 00:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Have we decided on a contents yet?
Hi I've been invited here and I thought I'd try and look around to see if I could help. I'm having trouble figuring out the outline of the book. The outline on the start page and the page you've called Contents don't agree. I do have some suggestions on what material could be included and how it should arranged, but I'd like some feedback first on what other people's thoughts are before I put work into something that conflicts with others' vision of the work.

I would appreciate it if people can identify for me the precise purpose of this wikibook? Who is it for, what does it cover, how is it meant to be used? Raichu2 (talk) 09:05, 9 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Welcome, Raichu2! This book doesn't have much of an outline. It used to be much worse, though. Discussions relevant to ongoing work is all here on this talk page.
 * In Wow. This is a mess we moved away from a strict vision to fill into, to organising the material available (see my personal treatise). This book is never gets attention for as long as it takes and unless we face up to that reality it will never mature, but continue to be rewritten from scratch.
 * In Categorisation we came up with the categorisation you see on the main page. The reason for why this doesn't match with the Japanese/Contents page is that before proposing a scheme, I dumped all of the Japanese book pages in |Category:Japanese onto the contents. Only after sifting through all of them and seeing what was there, did we set up the categorisation. Since the pages on Japanese/Contents don't yet fit the scheme, it doesn't make much sense to squeeze them into that mold.
 * So, the Japanese page is primarily for students looking for decent study material, while Japanese/Contents is mainly for contributors looking for existing material to work with (be it merging, re-factoring, deleting, or rewriting). If you would like to propose a change to either, please feel free.
 * Since June, we've deleted over fifty pages of unnecessary or duplicate material, navbars, printable versions, and templates. Deletion proposals and discussions go in Removal Suggestions.
 * There hasn't been much discussion on the actual content since Retropunk and I have been working on somewhat separate aspects of this book. How much to teach and Levels might be of interest. For development of a consistent curriculum see Retropunk's User:Retropunk/Japanese Curriculum. He does loads more work on actual contents and might even add information on his approach below. There is a list of proposals on Japanese/Contents.
 * As for your specific questions about the purpose of this book; every contributor seems to have a different take on that, much to the book's misfortune. I'm interested in accessibility issues to make it easy for users to find material useful to them and their level. I believe learners would benefit from various Learning paths. With as general a scope as "Japanese", I think we should aim to accommodate all.
 * That said; pick your path and be bold. --Swift (talk) 12:27, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Raichu, I'm glad you've decided to come and take a look. User:Retropunk/Japanese Curriculum shows some work I was doing.  The lessons I have in the first portion are not really written in stone, and they're an attempt to better mold the material into a lesson plan.  You'll also see Junesun's take on the first couple lessons, which she believes should be very short, concise and involving only a couple grammar points at a time.  You'll also see a big list of items that are traditionally seen on JLPT4 as per the Test Specifications.  I currently have an example from Junesun's lessons at Lesson 1, amd you'll see that only the copula and the question particle was really used with a handful of expressions.  Whether this is the best process, we could discuss it.
 * I'm really opened to discuss what should be used, and how it should be formed. We could probably get Junesun in here, too.  If you know other people who would like to contribute, by all means, invite them.  It's better to have more input.  I would like to know what ideas you have on organizing the material into modules / lesson plans.  --Retropunk (talk) 23:27, 9 November 2008 (UTC).

I've been thinking about it, and I think the most challenging aspect is that our audience is the entire world. To be useful, this book (1) needs to cater for readers at all levels, from complete beginners, through those who have done some study but wish to continue learning, to more advanced students who want to improve; and (2) to be really useful should be usable as a reference guide for easily looking up specific points.

We can achieve (1) by a series of graded lessons, where the list of links to the lessons clearly identify what each lesson will teach. That way readers can easily skip material they are know already and can quickly identfy what pages they want to need to visit. Of course beginners should be able to learn by following the pages in order from the beginning.

I don't think we should neglect (2). One cannot remember everything one learns. You might forget how ばかり works, for example. Then when you encounter it in your reading, you would like to quickly find the lesson that deals with it and reread the material. Or you come across something you haven't learned yet, so you might wish to peek ahead so you can understand what you are reading. A simple way to achieve it is an alphabetic list of links to the relevant lessons.

Any comments?

Anyway, I'll have a poke around the existing material and get back to you with any further thoughts I have. I really don't want to start working on individual lessons unless the overall plan is established. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Raichu2 (discuss • contribs) 04:56, 14 November 2008


 * I think graded lessons are useful, and here the various syllabi will come in handy. I also agree that like your idea of a topic index. It will be very tricky to update, though. It'll take some thought to do properly. I think another useful approach is referencing lessons with related material (this will also help students pick the lessons of their choice without having to rely on a specific path).
 * Regarding waiting for the overall plan: This book will still be useful if it doesn't cater to all or doesn't provide an all-encompassing syllabus. Yes, we shouldn't set our scope too narrow, but we shouldn't aim too high, either. Why? Because we don't want to end up like the others. Then what can we do? Structure needn't precede all lesson writing and there's plenty of material here to work with. For all the good intentions, the majority of systematic work on this book seems to have been on contributors' guides and course structure.
 * Now I don't want to detract from the valuable work on these areas by dedicated contributors (such as Retropunk). If you want to work on structre you should collaborate with him or come up with your own. See Japanese/Contents for more ideas to work with. If you're interested in writing actual lessons, don't wait for structure, just go to work where your interests lie.


 * Contributors to actual lessons are somewhat of a rare commodity. For all the good intentions, many seem to have run out of steam before completing the vision they worked so long to develop. None of the pages linked to from the main page are original, but rewrites and refactorings of existing material. There's plenty of grammar points in Japanese/Contents that would be useful if patched up and posted on the main page. They'd serve both as lessons in their own right and to benefit whatever learning paths comes along.
 * So if lesson writing is your ultimate goal just start editing. Go to the Japanese/Contents page, pick a topic from Japanese/Contents or Japanese/Contents (e.g. adjectives, a specific verb form or expressing time and/or date), fix what's bad, split up the unrelated, merge the duplicates and add what you feel is missing.--Swift (talk) 04:36, 14 November 2008 (UTC)


 * A couple comments. I do think we should cater to the masses to make this a great book, and if we lay down the framework, we just need to invite people to participate and hopefully have them adhere to the framework.  These people can be regular contributors, one-timer contributors, guest contributors, or whatever.  The only reason I'm looking at JLPT4 as a basis is because it's generally perceived as the "Beginner's Japanese."  I was using it as a starting point on generating a framework for topics.


 * The topic index is a good idea. See Talk:Japanese for my concerns about grouping topics and the strict syllabus (i.e., everything goes chronologically.) If it doesn't make sense, it's okay.  I was probably pretty darn tired when I wrote it.  Just ask for clarifications.    If you would like to discuss lessons and combining grammar/vocab into lessons, you can do so  here.  I have a bunch of the JLPT4 points  here, but be aware that some may be wrong and feel free to modify the page.  You can also go ahead and review the first lesson I started, and need to finish over  here.   Feel free to comment on it or give feedback.


 * As for future lessons, I'm basically stuck on a few concepts - how to organize the grammar points into lessons and how to go about with the lesson (i.e., use a story, or just give a bunch of examples). Junesun gave a bunch of ideas on how to organize lessons  here and here, so it may be fruitful to try and model it after that. If we find it to be too conservative or liberal, we can go ahead and modify it slightly.  This solves the presentation and amount of material to cover, but this still leaves a few problems: finding the grammar points to use, and showing the points in use (e.g., conversation, posters, and etc.,).


 * Lastly, as my contribution history will show, I can become quite busy at times. I generally can reply around here within a day or so, but sitting and actually writing content or proposing content can sometimes be sporadic.  Don't feel hesitant to add material. If there's some disagreements on presentation, there's always talk/discussion pages.


 * Let me know what you think, and happy editing. --Retropunk (talk) 06:30, 14 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry I don't understand what Swift means by referencing lessons with related material. Could you elaborate?
 * As Retropunk says, I think that if we get a good structure and plan at the outset, then the rest becomes a matter of people filling in the details over time. Raichu2 (talk) 06:23, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

A proposed outline
Moved to User Talk:Retropunk/Japanese_Curriculum/Outline.