I never had a denshi jisho back in the day, but I did finally get a Pomera recently (which has one built in) and yeah, there is something to be said for the cognitive friction that you get from a (nearly) single-purpose device.
I think having access to iPhone apps dramatically helped my Japanese learning in the late 2000s (I came here in 2008), because I probably wouldn't have had the patience to hand-write flash cards and so on, but I suspect you're right that we're overcorrecting. I'm certain I wouldn't have had the same motivation to actually learn the nuts and bolts of the language if Google Lens and ChatGPT had been around.
I went to a press conference today and used a Pixel to record and transcribe the Japanese speech in real time so that listening back is a matter of editing rather than writing. That's a meaningfully useful feature that has saved me countless hours over the years. The live phone call translation, though, just makes me very uneasy, even though there's also an accessibility case to be made.
Thanks for the perspective. the single-purpose device, coupled with immersion in a coherent information environment is what did it for me.
Auto transcription does sound nice…but yeah, I am interested in seeing what sort of guardrails people put up in educational environments and during things like exchange experiences to ensure that they end up spurring cognitive development rather than outsourcing it
Thanks for the app links. I’m struggling these days to find a proper tool to read a kanji or a word I don’t know. So, I may check those . 20 years ago I tried to use electronic dictionaries also but somehow the old printed heavy vocabularies served me better…
Thanks for reading. I do think it’s worth the investment to have a good dictionary app and not rely on free tools. Paper books were definitely the best thing for me in terms of learning systematically, with the denshi jisho as a supplement.
I never had a denshi jisho back in the day, but I did finally get a Pomera recently (which has one built in) and yeah, there is something to be said for the cognitive friction that you get from a (nearly) single-purpose device.
https://www.multicore.blog/p/pomera-dm250-review-king-jim
I think having access to iPhone apps dramatically helped my Japanese learning in the late 2000s (I came here in 2008), because I probably wouldn't have had the patience to hand-write flash cards and so on, but I suspect you're right that we're overcorrecting. I'm certain I wouldn't have had the same motivation to actually learn the nuts and bolts of the language if Google Lens and ChatGPT had been around.
I went to a press conference today and used a Pixel to record and transcribe the Japanese speech in real time so that listening back is a matter of editing rather than writing. That's a meaningfully useful feature that has saved me countless hours over the years. The live phone call translation, though, just makes me very uneasy, even though there's also an accessibility case to be made.
Thanks for the perspective. the single-purpose device, coupled with immersion in a coherent information environment is what did it for me.
Auto transcription does sound nice…but yeah, I am interested in seeing what sort of guardrails people put up in educational environments and during things like exchange experiences to ensure that they end up spurring cognitive development rather than outsourcing it
Thanks for the app links. I’m struggling these days to find a proper tool to read a kanji or a word I don’t know. So, I may check those . 20 years ago I tried to use electronic dictionaries also but somehow the old printed heavy vocabularies served me better…
Thanks for reading. I do think it’s worth the investment to have a good dictionary app and not rely on free tools. Paper books were definitely the best thing for me in terms of learning systematically, with the denshi jisho as a supplement.