Bilingual people might have an advantage over monolinguals, but motivation is still the most important reason for one to succeed. I grew up bilingually, had French for five years in school and and hardly ever managed to formulate a proper French sentence (honstly, I was one of the worst students in my class). Reason could be that I'm not interested in France. I actually strongly disliked everything French back then, now I regret that I never learnt French properly) I studied Latin in Highschool because it sounded like a language that educated people should know. I never understood Latin. When I took up Japanese classes things seemed to repeat. I couldn't understand anything, the only thing I learnt were the Hiragana and Katakana. I quit.

But I continued my Japanese studies thanks to Pimsleur. I completed the first Pimsleur lesson and realized that I was able to speak Japanese even though I didn't really understand anything (grammarwise). I continued my studies and today I watch Japanese TV-Dramas without the help of subtitles, talk with Japanese people in Japanese and I'm currently working myself forward to literacy in Japanese after RTK1. What has changed in these years is the attitude I have towards foreign languages. I now believe that I can learn any language I want (will tackle French soon). And I don't care if there's something I can't understand grammarwise. If encounter things often enough, repeat the texts over and over, I will slowly come to understand everything about these foreign languages.

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That's great watashimo, so you're saying basically that you learned to effectively speak and understand everyday Japanese without working on grammar, is that it?

i supose if you have learned a second language you would do beter when learning a third language then if you only know your native tongue, i think this is becouse once you done the process one time the second time you benefit from the experience you got.

@Fabrice: Yes, more or less. I spent around four months in the Japanese class that I had, which was mainly grammar. So I did study grammar in the beginning, though I hardly understood anything.
Pimsleur showed me that it's possible to speak a foreign language without understanding grammar. At that time I spent a lot of time browsing the internet for information on studying foreign languages and Japanese. On the "How to study any language" forum I found several posts by Ardaschir on shadowing.

"Shadowing" is a technique where you listen to a text in a foreign language while speaking along (kind of echoing). This sounded like a good follow-up to the Pimsleur lessons.
I learnt most of my Japanese from Assimil Japanese I and II. Both books have around 100 short lessons. Every lesson is written in normal Japanese with Furigana (first few lessons romaji), a German translation and a literal translation. The lessons are fairly short, so it's easy to figure out the meaning of the Japanese text even without grammar explanations. I would then spend the whole day shadowing the lessons while walking around, going to work or wherever. After I got used to it, I could shadow new lessons on the bicycle without even fully understanding what I was actually saying.
Some of the more difficult lessons took me days until I could shadow them easily. Even when there are grammar points that I didn't really understand I would continue to the next lesson after I managed to shadow the text. The grammar points would be repeated in later lessons, so I would shadow these problematic parts several times in different contexts. And then understand it somehow later on.

The books do have grammar explanations (every seventh lesson is a grammar lesson). I read the first few, but skipped later ones. I never actually finished the book. I did shadow to the end, but I only know the first 70 lessons by heart.

I did this for nearly seven or eight months before I dared to hold a real conversation in Japanese (I had a few Japanese friends back then, but avoided conversations in Japanese because didn't feel confident back then). This conversation was around five minutes and I just used Japanese.

Until this day I don't know about the different verb groups and conjugations. Whenever I need to conjugate a verb that I don't know, I would try to use the verb like in one of the sentences from Assimil (yes, I actually remember a lot of the phrases from Assimil). I still do make mistakes sometimes, but I can hold myself fairly well in an everyday conversation.
Vocabulary is still a problem though.

The other two main resources for my Japanese are Japanese TV-Dramas, where I learnt a lot of everyday Japanese words (I write down recurring words that I don't know) and Japanese with Manga. Japanese with Manga is good for informal Japanese, slang and such. Hm, that is kind of a grammar book. I never did any of the excercises, but I used the book to understand verb forms from films that I couldn't understand.

BTW, I haven't done that in a long time, but I used to rip the audio from films, TV-Dramas or animes for my mp3 player. I could use the audio for passive listening or shadowing.

One advantage with shadowing is that my Japanese accent is rather good. Probably not perfect, but I don't sound like one of these gaijins from Japanese films.

For a few months I did shadowing with Korean (another language that I want to study). When using these sentences with a friend's Korean friend she first couldn't believe that I've never been to Korea because of my accent.

So, with my limited experiences in foreign languages, I would say that Shadowing is a very efficient technique to practice speaking a foreign language.

Now that I've finished RTK1, I have to think about a way to become literate in Japanese. The AJATT method sounds great, so I will probably try this method out to learn reading and to acquire more vocabulary (My Japanese is pretty useless when it comes to news. Or even the negations or meeting scenes in Yakuze/Action films.)

Thanks for this site. Without this site, it would have taken me much longer to finish Heisig I.

watashimo Wrote:"Shadowing" is a technique where you listen to a text in a foreign language while speaking along (kind of echoing).

I went to a Japanese language school in Tokyo where some of the teachers wrote a book on shadowing. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%B7%E3%83%...983&sr=8-5

I wrote all of the English translations in the book.

wrightak Wrote:

watashimo Wrote:"Shadowing" is a technique where you listen to a text in a foreign language while speaking along (kind of echoing).

I went to a Japanese language school in Tokyo where some of the teachers wrote a book on shadowing. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%B7%E3%83%...983&sr=8-5

I wrote all of the English translations in the book.

A Japanese friend gave me this book; I think it's great!

styrmis Wrote:A Japanese friend gave me this book; I think it's great!

If you look on one of the back pages, you should find my name. The book comes with a CD but I think that my school created files to put on an ipod which would display the dialogue on the ipod screen. I've never had an ipod but I always thought it was a good idea.

I'm glad you liked it, it took quite a while to translate everything in it. Did you get the jokes? e.g. このカッターは切れなかったー！ etc. My teacher was the one who slipped them in.

I've been guilty of going off topic on this thread a couple of times now, sorry about that because I think it's interesting. If you want to talk about Shadowing in another thread then I'd be more than happy to join in.

wrightak Wrote:

stehr Wrote:I think that being good at learning languages has nothing to do with being monolingual or bilingual to begin with.

Are you saying that you think that people who grow up speaking two or more languages will not tend to be better at learning new languages? I appreciate your point about motivation being very important but do you really think that a person's linguistic history will not have an influence on his/her language learning ability?

No I don't think that people who grew up speaking two or more languages will tend to be better at learning new languages. I think it depends more on how much effort is put into learning the language. I do think that someone who grew up speaking Chinese would be able to learn Japanese pretty easily given the proper setting. Just as someone who grew up speaking English could learn French without too much sweat. But I honestly don't think that being able to speak any combination of English, Italian, German, Russian, French, etc. is going to give someone much advantage learning Japanese.

Even with my Vietnamese studies, and Vietnamese words are 70% Han Dynasty-Chinese, it still doesn't help all that much with my Japanese studying. Vietnamese is also only 1-3% romantic language based. Sure, if I was fluent in French I would know the word "xa bong" = "soap". Or knowing Portugese I could learn the word "pan" = "bread" faster than a monolingual, but does it really help that much?

Perhaps bilinguals who are used to thinking and speaking in a foreign language are unafraid to speak out and make mistakes. They may have better trained listening skills than monolinguals. This could expidite fluency. Also someone stated earlier that knowing English helped them to study because the books were of better quality and volume than the ones in Italian, which can help learning. Other than those small advantages, I fail to see why someone who was, say, bilingual French/German would have a leg up on any hardworking monolingual when learning Japanese.

Learning a language = thousands of hours of (studying+talking+listening) people who can do this are likely going to learn more than one language. I personally know several lazy bilinguals who can barely speak either of their own languages, much less learn another one! So I really don't think that being bilingual has much magic to it.

btw... I grew up bilingual Portugese/English

stehr Wrote:I do think that someone who grew up speaking Chinese would be able to learn Japanese pretty easily given the proper setting.

Why do people think this?

Chinese and Japanese share similar writing systems and perhaps counting systems, but overall they're not that similar I believe. Linguistics don't classify Japanese as coming from the same language family as Chinese (last I saw they are actually quite bewitched by Japanese regarding its language family) and though I only took a stab at Chinese for about 6 months in a class, the grammar and structure really seemed closer to English than Japanese.

Of course a person who learned Chinese growing up could adapt to the reading and writing system of Japan much easier, but you (and many others I have seen) seem to imply learning the language as a whole, including speaking, would be easier for Chinese. Where does this come from?

sutebun Wrote:Chinese and Japanese share similar writing systems and perhaps counting systems, but overall they're not that similar I believe. Linguistics don't classify Japanese as coming from the same language family as Chinese (last I saw they are actually quite bewitched by Japanese regarding its language family) and though I only took a stab at Chinese for about 6 months in a class, the grammar and structure really seemed closer to English than Japanese.

The On readings of Kanji are linked directly with Chinese, which make up 60-70% of the words commonly used in East Asian languages (the big 4). For example the word "college" is "dai hoc" in Vietnamese and "Daigaku" in Japanese, how are they so similar? -> Chinese origin. Gold -> "kim" (VN) kin (JP). Tea - tra(VN) cha(Jp), White -> bach(VN) haku (jp),, etc.. (Sorry I don't know Chinese yet so I'm not sure of the "Chinese-Chinese" readings)

The part of the East Asian Languages that is different is the "base" language which makes up 30-40% of the language and is used the most frequently during daily life (90% of the time). In VN these are called "chu Nom" in Japanese they are the Kun readings. This is the part of the language that is unique to the country/area and is used for things like: household objects, basic action verbs, anything that's easy to explain. So yeah if a Chinese person were to learn Japanese then the On readings and On based words would be very easy for them, but they would have to learn the Kun from scratch like everyone else.

The four East Asian countries are linked very deeply (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) both culturally, racially, and linguistically, just as many European countries are.

While I'm not sure about how well a Chinese person could learn Japanese, I can say that a Vietnamese person would have a distinct advantage when learning the On readings, and I belive the same would be for a Chinese person. As this makes up at least 50% of Japanese words I would say that's a pretty good advantage.

stehr Wrote:Perhaps bilinguals who are used to thinking and speaking in a foreign language are unafraid to speak out and make mistakes.

To step above technical/linguistic details and build on what you said here, I think bilinguals may have a psychological/personality advantage. They may be less likely to get frustrated at having to put on a new personality/new identity when learning the new language, as they have already successfully navigated multiple "faces," so to speak, in daily life.

stehr Wrote:Or knowing Portugese I could learn the word "pan" = "bread" faster than a monolingual, but does it really help that much?

Perhaps bilinguals who are used to thinking and speaking in a foreign language are unafraid to speak out and make mistakes. They may have better trained listening skills than monolinguals. This could expidite fluency. Also someone stated earlier that knowing English helped them to study because the books were of better quality and volume than the ones in Italian, which can help learning. Other than those small advantages, I fail to see why someone who was, say, bilingual French/German would have a leg up on any hardworking monolingual when learning Japanese.

Thanks for your detailed post. As you say, most of the factors you gave above are small reasons for a bilingual advantage but I think you're underestimating the "better trained listening skills". I believe that the single biggest advantage that knowing several languages gives you is the ability to recognise, remember and process sound patterns.

In my experience of observing classmates in language lessons, it tends to take longer for monolinguals to remember words and phrases just by hearing them. Their pronunciation also tends to be much worse. They're not as good at finding alternative ways of saying things when you can't say what you want directly. They're also slow at applying grammatical patterns when speaking e.g. あかい→あかくない、　おもしろい→おもしろくない etc. These are all skills that you pick up when you learn your first language and that you already have if you move on to a second. Learning a second foreign language is therefore a faster process because your brain has been trained with a lot of the skills it needs.

Quote:btw... I grew up bilingual Portugese/English

The above comment leads me to believe that you may never have been truly monolingual? Perhaps from a young age, your brain developed the skill of flicking between two languages whenever you like. Maybe I'm being unfair but perhaps you're not aware of the effort that it takes to train the adult mind in the skills I mentioned above because you gained many of them when you were young.

sutebun Wrote:

stehr Wrote:I do think that someone who grew up speaking Chinese would be able to learn Japanese pretty easily given the proper setting.

Why do people think this?

Because they understand what the words mean. Take the word かぞく. I may think I know what it means, but it doesn't mean family, it means 家族. I don't know what it is in Chinese, but I'll bet that it's pretty damned close to 家族.

Another example might illustrate the point a bit more clearly. Take the word 縁　（えん）. The meaning of this word is distinctly eastern and it took me a long time of reading and listening to examples before I came to the point of understanding I'm at now. Even now though, I'm uncertain of whether I'd be able to always use it correctly in a sentence. The Chinese and Korean people in the class I took understood the word immediately.

Certainly the grammar is completely different but Chinese people have an enormous head start with vocabulary. When learning French, no one had to tell me what the word "information" meant. A Japanese person would need a translation.