Recently Cure Dolly has been very much immersed in finishing and preparing for the official launch of her new book Unlocking Japanese, but she found time to give an interview to Cure Tadashiku.

Looking back on some of the Japanese-learning innovations introduced by this site, Cure Tadashiku asks “Have they stood the test of time?”

Cure Tadashiku: So are you really a nine-inch plastic doll?

Cure Dolly: You can see for yourself, can’t you?

Cure Tadashiku: Yes, but the readers can’t.

Cure Dolly: Let’s leave some things to their imaginations.

Cure Tadashiku: Ryoukai. Let’s look at a couple of the innovations you have brought to Japanese learning and see how they have stood the test of time. First, your Dolly Sentences Method.

Cure Dolly: I wouldn’t really call that an innovation. It is a little thing I did for myself and I don’t know how many other people ever picked it up. As much as anything, I hope it gave people their own ideas on the creative ways you can use sound in learning.

Cure Tadashiku: Do you still use the method yourself?

Cure Dolly: No.

Cure Tadashiku: Are you glad you did use it for a while?

Cure Dolly: Absolutely. It was invaluable to me at the time. Some things you graduate from once you no longer need them. Hearing all those sentences really helped me to understand how words are actually used. I rely even more heavily on massive input now, but I still use a variant of the Sentences method.

Cure Tadashiku: What kind of variant?

Cure Dolly: I only have one Anki deck now, which is basically vocabulary. When I enter a word that needs it, I also pop in an audio sentence, sometimes even two, to clarify how the word is used. I always include the word’s own audio too of course. My Anki is very audio-oriented. Occasionally I even pull the audio sentences out of my old Dolly Sentences deck. There are better TTS services now, but Kyoko still holds up pretty well.

I intend to write something soon about integrating sound sentences with Japanese-Japanese definitions and creating an audio-based immersion-support deck.

[That article has now been written and is here.]

Cure Tadashiku: Do you still recommend the method to learners?

Cure Dolly: It is maybe a slightly odd method. Cure Yasashiku and you have never actually used it, I know. I would say to our readers that if it feels like a good fit for the way you learn, please give it a try. It was absolutely invaluable to me. I don’t use it any more, but I am extremely glad I did use it for about a year.

Maybe when one gets to the stage of doing Japanese-to-Japanese definitions, if one chooses to use audio-based immersion-support Anki methods, that is the point when the DSM becomes redundant. In any case, audio-based J-J will probably be used by a wider range of learners.

Cure Tadashiku: Out of interest, when did you drop it and why?

Cure Dolly: Last time I was in Japan, I was doing all kinds of things and found it hard to keep up with Anki. (I did do some every day to keep them down, but in the last few weeks that got more difficult.)  When I got back I had a backlog on both decks and I decided that one deck was enough. The sentences method had served its purpose and the time would now be better spent on real immersion.

I hope to be saying the same about the vocabulary deck eventually! Study aids aren’t supposed to be life partners. They are there to get you to the point where you don’t need them any more.

The Sound Sisters

Cure Tadashiku: How about the Sound Sisters? You introduced them nearly two years ago and recently created a free deck to help people learn them. But do you still use them yourself, or have you graduated from them too?

Cure Dolly: The Sound Sisters never grow old! Well, maybe they will one day, but actually I would say I use them more now than ever. Rather than growing out of them, one grows into them.

Cure Tadashiku: Would you care to explain that?

Cure Dolly: Yes. They are useful right from the start for all the reasons I have explained elsewhere. They do take a while to get to know really intimately, so your knowledge of them keeps on deepening and becoming more useful.

But more than that, they help to unlock the sound-aspect not only of kanji but of the Japanese language as a whole in one’s mind. I am continually discovering new “half-sisters” – sound elements that aren’t regular enough or widespread enough to include in the Complete Sound Sisters Deck. They are incalculably  useful, but even they aren’t the whole story. By using the Sound Sisters (and thereby becoming more aware of half-sisters), you become increasingly alive to the way sound works in Japanese. It is incredibly subtle and wonderful. I can often guess what a word means from the way it sounds now.

I’d love to write something about this some time, but right now it seems too subtle to formulate. Maybe it is something you “just have to get a feel for”. But then people have said that sort of thing about more apparently rarefied aspects of Japanese grammar and we have managed to pin them down to easily understandable concepts. So maybe we will end up with some similar breakthroughs in Japanese sound-association.

In any case, you do develop a sense of the “sound and feel” of Japanese, and I am certainly not saying that this won’t happen without using the Sound Sisters. Immerse in Japanese for long enough and it will.

But the Sound Sisters can give you a turbo-charged head-start in the process. And yes, I certainly still use them every day.

Cure Tadashiku: ありがとうございました。

Cure Dolly: どういたしまして。ところで、９インチなんかじゃなくて、１２インチなのよ。

Cure Tadashiku: ごめんね。