Hi everyone,

I'm making a video series on learning Japanese by means of self-study and I'd like to include an episode with some motivational talk for beginners.

What would you say to a person who just started learning Japanese?
What advice would you have liked to get when you first started?

Please be as brief as you can, so I can quote you when making the video.


Thanks! ^^

「頑張れ」

On a more serious note: don't worry so much about optimizing details. As long as you get the important parts right, what matters is that you put the work in. Get started. Then, if something doesn't work so well, you can revise your approach as you go.

Use Anki(SRS) from the beginning, but don't let it become more than a tool to help you learn.

"Learn to crawl again with the language instead of putting it on a pedestal."

If there is one thing I could explain or tell, or whatever, to someone seriously considering learning a new language, I would probably hit them hard and heavy right at the beginning and ask them how seriously they take themselves and their ego, then throw it away and get used to the idea of "shutting up and listening to natives" and "learning to enjoy mistakes".

I don't think it's the language learning which is the hardest part of learning a language. I think it's the fact that adults tend to think they have a pretty good understanding of how the world works and have a certain egocentricity instilled into said knowledge and are afraid and arrogant about being wrong, or having to learn again.

It's pretty hard to listen properly and take things in, allow them to settle, and really enjoy the progress, if you are resisting every step of the way.

...or...

私はで馬鹿？大丈夫、大丈夫だよ。頑張れなァ。
ー＿＾

Learn from material that interests you.

Best advice: Finish RTK if you can. You'll never have to worry about kanji again.

Can you say "私はで馬鹿"? I'm very new at this whole Japanese thing, but the "で" sounds weird.

That's because it is weird, and shouldn't be in there.

Japanese takes a while to learn. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. So you need a marathoner's mentality. Sprinting leads to burnout.

RTK is good, Anki is good, but motivation is the most important, IMO. Without that, the best study method won't save you from your biggest enemy-- yourself.

Never miss a day of learning. Even if it's just 5 minutes.

Jump head in and don't look back! I would place emphasis on listening to audio dialogues. One of my biggest regrets from when I was a beginner was not keeping my listening skills reasonably proportionate to everything else. They're still drastically behind in comparison.

In one of the Read Real Japanese books (I think the fiction one), the editor included an introduction where he talks about langauge learning. He explains that learning a language is like getting on a long train ride in which you don't know the destination. That's all I remember that he said, but it's an apt metaphor. You might have a reason to get on the train, and you might even have a destination in mind. But the reasons will change and so will the destination, and you don't really know what new experiences you will have and what new places you will find yourself in because of the language.

Partly, this is because the journey is so long. It takes a long long time to be fluent in Japanese; you will change in that time naturally and the learning will also change you.

So that would be my advice. Start with a reason, but expect it to change, and expect it to be a long and interesting journey that's ultimately worth it.

Your japanese will be very bad for a very long time. But even a poor mastery of japanese is useful and enjoyable. Therefore use your japanese and accept a lot of uncertainty, and unclarity. Don't be a perfectionist. There is no magic pill textbook or course that can give you perfect error-free japanese and allow you to understand everything. Just continue studying and using Japanese regularly for several years and you'll improve at it.

[Zgarbas]

Stay calm and keep studying.

prink Wrote:I would place emphasis on listening to audio dialogues.

^This. Plus podcasts, stories, books, music/songs, movie audio tracks, etc. But first of all (and that's a big one), make sure that you actually understand whatever happens to be you are you listening to. Listening to meaningless stream of sounds is pointless.

Actually I found it extraordinarily helpful to listen even without understanding. It's just that adults don't feel like they're learning if they do it, so most don't realize the actual benefit it brings.

Listening is only as useful as the amount you are actually able to understand it. As a complete beginner, listening to incomprehensible audio will help accustom your ears to the language but will very quickly hit a point of diminishing returns. You'll start to pick out the words you know but the rest will remain incomprehensible. Listening combined with reading is a killer combination because when reading you can learn a lot of new vocabulary and check things at your own pace. To learn from audio alone, there needs to be some additional context from which the learning of new information takes place. This could be video, real life situations, teachers. I mean when your level is still low of course. The audio itself does provide some context if you are able to understand it. But people who speak of audio immersion on this forum tend to be recommending quite high level stuff intended for natives not stuff like sesame street.

edit: just to add to this point. It is very normal that listening comprehension lags behind reading comprehension. Unless one decides to learn from audio alone that is, which in my mind would be a very slow process indeed. My point is that listening is crucial but expect initial learning of new words and things to be much more rapid through reading.

Zlarp Wrote:Actually I found it extraordinarily helpful to listen even without understanding. It's just that adults don't feel like they're learning if they do it, so most don't realize the actual benefit it brings.

I would compare listening to incomprehensible audio to ability to read kana. It’s a one thing to be able to read/hear the sounds but it’s the other to make sense out of it. Here is a simple test for you:

にじゅういちにちのあさ

What does it mean?

you could have picked a harder example.

The issue is one of not knowing the words, nothing to do with kana/kanji. Listening to audio that is incomprehensible because you don't know enough or any of the words will not lead to magically learning those words.

What can I say, you are right of course.

As for the harder example - what about that one

ぼくはほんをかくにんげんで、ひひょうするにんげんじゃないから、しょひょうってできればやりたくないんだけど、そのときはじじょうがあって、「まあいいや、やりましょう」とひきうけた。

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not helping. Your subconscious is quite smart. There's not only conscious learning to be had, you know. It's all about getting used to the sounds and filling your head with Japanese. Context will help your brain sort things out.

Kids don't study their language using dictionaries either. Or do you think there's someone whose first words were "What does "mama" mean?"

Edit: and of course I'm not asking anyone to learn from audio alone. You shouldn't learn anything from only one source, just get under that waterfall of Japanese media and stop being picky

@Zlarp
I'm afraid, I can hear AJATT in your tone and that turns me off

Ah, bad experience?

I mean, I don't like Khaz's style of writing (though I find it enjoyable to read) and the snake oil he's selling for ludicrous amounts of cash, but I don't see anything objectionable when it comes to the idea of immersion.

Zlarp Wrote:Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not helping. Your subconscious is quite smart. There's not only conscious learning to be had, you know.

Or not.

Evidence?

Tzadeck Wrote:

Zlarp Wrote:Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not helping. Your subconscious is quite smart. There's not only conscious learning to be had, you know.

Or not.

Evidence?

You speak English, don't you? (or whatever your native language is)