I was wondering how many folks are attempting to switch their inner monologue to Japanese and what methods they use.

I have been trying to do this for a while and one thing that I am finding works above others (for me) is corresponding and forum posting in Japanese (as well as talking of course). This is because I (I suspect like some others here) am fundamentally a communicative person. My reaction to things is mostly less "how do I feel about this" than "how would I communicate this (or my feelings about it) to (insert friend, forum, audience, whatever)".

So when most of my communication is in English, most of my 頭の回転 (a much better word, I think, since mine isn't a "monologue" exactly) is in English.

The more I am communicating ideas and feelings to various people in Japanese, the more my first thoughts about them are in Japanese.

I think a lot about language, for example. If I have to discuss my thoughts in English (here, on Kawaii Japanese, to a friend or whatever), I will think them in English. Conversely if I am going to communicate them in Japanese I think about them in Japanese, because I am thinking about what I might say.

Half this stuff might never even get written, or the imaginary conversation may never happen, but because its *potential communication* is Japanese it gets thought out in Japanese. So for me this is the number one way of switching the inner monologue.

Yesterday and today, I am delighted to say, on the KJ forums we started a real discussion, in Japanese, of the kind of thing that gets discussed here (it is about Anki, and I think some would consider it pretty heretical stuff, so not for the faint-hearted).

This really has the potential to switch vast swathes of one's *thinking* into Japanese.

This doll is excited.

There are other threads on this already, if anyone's looking for more tips:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=11440
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7978
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2969

Super useful. Thank you so much.

A month's total English-isolation. I wonder If I could arrange that. I spoke no Engiish in Japan, but I still blogged in English.

I started doing something like this a little bit recently. It doesn't come naturally yet for me though, I really have to focus and work at it. But when I have some mental downtime, I will just make myself think about something in Japanese. Maybe I will come up with sentences to describe some objects around me, or think about something that I want to say to someone later.

I definitely think (even though it might initially seem counter-intuitive) that outward communication is the key to one's inner 頭の回転.

That of course may only be the experience of a painfully shy hyper-extravert doll. But I do think that one uses explicit language in one's thoughts mostly because one is at least potentially communicating them. Language is, after all, a means of communication.

Now that the colour scheme doesn't make my eyes bleed I had a gander at your forum, but unfortunately barfed on the very first sentence.

キュアドリー Wrote:多くの日本語が習う人は暗記を使います。

I have so far done precisely zero 'output' but this immediately struck me as odd (should be 日本語を習う?). Nobody at the forum has picked up on it, not even リナ who is obviously very advanced.

Maybe it's not a mistake? Can を become が in subordinate clauses? To be sure about it I would have to do stuffy old textbook exercises instead of reading light novels & watching anime.

Somewhat ironic n'est pas?

No, I don't see anything ironic about it. There was no claim to be perfect, neither do I think that the point of communicative output is to perfect one's grammar. That is what massive native input is for and the two should go together.

And I have always advocated learning grammar. Look at my introductory article on learning Japanese through anime if you don't believe me.

I certainly make some mistakes, some of which, as in this case, are "slips of the keyboard" others of which are certainly genuine ignorance. I appreciate corrections from my senpai when I get it, but that is not their job, nor is it the purpose of the forum. In fact too much of it would turn it into a kind of "sandbox" or "practice arena" which is exactly what it should not be.

I was actually rather amusedly wondering if someone was going to do this. It seems to be the sort of thing people do. Rather the way if anyone has any kind of standards they are watched for some way in which they can be called "hypocrites"; the moral being that it is better to profess no standards and stay safe.

I have never suggested that if you have a lot of communicative input/output your Japanese will become perfect overnight. Of course it won't. And if you are afraid of making and seeing mistakes, massive output is definitely not for you.

I won't restate here the reasons why I think massive usage as well as massive input are so very important for truly absorbing Japanese, but it certainly was not with the implication that it was a grammar panacea.

Incidentally, looking back over this post I notice that I wrote:

I appreciate corrections from my senpai when I get it...

Oopsydoo. Grammar faux pas: "corrections" and "it" do not agree in number. One does make slips. I hope I haven't corrupted anyone's English.

Oh, and

訂正してくれてありがとうございます。本当に。

Oh a small triumph report that may be of interest.

My kouhai was experimenting with streaming Japanese television all day yesterday. She is not a television person and found it a bit intrusive, and found herself thinking:

うるさいね！役に立つかどうかよく分からない。

She was talking to me in Japanese of course, but that is exactly what she thought. She was wondering if the noisy television was really doing any good, but wondering it in Japanese.

I guess that rather encapsulates why, while I can see how some people might feel guilty about using a forum that can involve them in imperfect Japanese, I feel a bit guilty about coming here and pushing my 頭の回転 into English.

PS. For those worrying that the standards are horribly low, while John-san says that there was an error in the very first line (and there was, so I suppose that part - being in the first line rather than the fact that errors exist -was a kind of irony) if the thread had been riddled with them I suspect that might have been mentioned.

anotherjohn Wrote:Now that the colour scheme doesn't make my eyes bleed I had a gander at your forum, but unfortunately barfed on the very first sentence.

キュアドリー Wrote:多くの日本語が習う人は暗記を使います。

I have so far done precisely zero 'output' but this immediately struck me as odd (should be 日本語を習う?). Nobody at the forum has picked up on it, not even リナ who is obviously very advanced.

Maybe it's not a mistake? Can を become が in subordinate clauses? To be sure about it I would have to do stuffy old textbook exercises instead of reading light novels & watching anime.

Somewhat ironic n'est pas?

While using が in that instance seems a bit weird to me too, I remember reading that Japanese will go out of their way to use the same particle as few times in a sentence as possible (even to the point of occasionally writing grammatically awkward sentences), especially が and を.
I'm not an expert linguist like some of us on this board, so that might be a topic for a different thread. It would be interesting to know if there's a logical process through which one can simulate this tendency (of course, native examples would be needed, for solid examination).

sholum Wrote:

キュアドリー Wrote:多くの日本語が習う人は暗記を使います。

While using が in that instance seems a bit weird to me too, I remember reading that Japanese will go out of their way to use the same particle as few times in a sentence as possible (even to the point of occasionally writing grammatically awkward sentences), especially が and を.
I'm not an expert linguist like some of us on this board, so that might be a topic for a different thread. It would be interesting to know if there's a logical process through which one can simulate this tendency (of course, native examples would be needed, for solid examination).

It may not be grammatically incorrect (although it's certainly awkward) to use が here but the meaning of the sentence changes drastically.
Japanese becomes the subject that is studying people. "A lot of Japanese (language) that studies people uses memorization." So that's a little odd.

CureDolly says it was a slip of the keyboard so we're all aware that it's incorrect!
I'm pretty sure no one would go so far as to completely change the meaning of a sentence to avoid repetitive particle usage.

drdunlap Wrote:It may not be grammatically incorrect (although it's certainly awkward) to use が here but the meaning of the sentence changes drastically.
Japanese becomes the subject that is studying people. "A lot of Japanese (language) that studies people uses memorization." So that's a little odd.

CureDolly says it was a slip of the keyboard so we're all aware that it's incorrect!
I'm pretty sure no one would go so far as to completely change the meaning of a sentence to avoid repetitive particle usage.

I hadn't read far enough yet to know that it was decided to be incorrect; just a bit of laziness on my part.

I didn't mean that people would intentionally change the meaning of a sentence to avoid particle duplication, just that it might end up that way. Of course, that's assuming that it's a thing that happens.

Since you know much more about Japanese than me, have you heard anything about this? I don't remember where I read about the tendency to avoid particle duplication, so I don't want to claim it's true.

There's just a tendency to avoid repetition overall. Much like in English where we wouldn't say something like "John told me that John was going to go get John's car from the shop tomorrow" in English unless we had three friends all named John. Buuut you shouldn't see things going grammatically wonky just for the sake of avoiding repetition unless the speaker in question is a poor speaker. I think one of the most used examples I can think of is switching が for の or vice-versa (when they can be so used).

The other one that immediately came to mind is avoiding long strings of の (generally 3 or more).
Some examples and how they could be fixed here.

I did hear someone - actually a professional translator - say that Japanese is much more tolerant of repetition than English is. Apparently not in the area of particles though. I wonder what ways it is more tolerant of repetition?

CureDolly Wrote:No, I don't see anything ironic about it. There was no claim to be perfect, neither do I think that the point of communicative output is to perfect one's grammar.

If that's what you thought I meant by irony my post must have come across as a lot snarkier than intended, for which apologies.

The irony I was referring to was in the previous sentence, i.e. that early output necessitates far more directed study in the form of textbooks and classes than mere passive input via exposure to native materials - hardly 'organic'. Delaying output means never having to practice verb conjugation based on memorised rules, for example.

I don't mean to imply any personal criticism towards yourself, as you seem nice, but since these are ideas we are discussing I will respond to some of your other remarks, even at the risk of belabouring the point:

CureDolly Wrote:I was actually rather amusedly wondering if someone was going to do this. It seems to be the sort of thing people do. Rather the way if anyone has any kind of standards they are watched for some way in which they can be called "hypocrites"; the moral being that it is better to profess no standards and stay safe.

I have never suggested that if you have a lot of communicative input/output your Japanese will become perfect overnight. Of course it won't. And if you are afraid of making and seeing mistakes, massive output is definitely not for you.

This seems to be based on the above misunderstanding, though I don't see how it could be taken as an accusation of hypocrisy. It certainly wasn't intended as such.

CureDolly Wrote:I won't restate here the reasons why I think massive usage as well as massive input are so very important for truly absorbing Japanese, but it certainly was not with the implication that it was a grammar panacea.

I hesitate to ask, but who else advocates this method? Advocates of delayed output include Stephen Krashen, a widely respected expert on language acquisition, plus Khatz and JLUP, both of whom have reached very advanced levels in Japanese specifically.

CureDolly Wrote:Incidentally, looking back over this post I notice that I wrote:

I appreciate corrections from my senpai when I get it...

Oopsydoo. Grammar faux pas: "corrections" and "it" do not agree in number. One does make slips. I hope I haven't corrupted anyone's English.

People here aren't beginners learning English as an L2 with a totally alien grammar - the situations are not comparable.

CureDolly Wrote:... while John-san says that there was an error in the very first line (and there was, so I suppose that part - being in the first line rather than the fact that errors exist -was a kind of irony) if the thread had been riddled with them I suspect that might have been mentioned.

Just because I only pointed out one error doesn't mean there weren't others - I just didn't want to belabour the point or come across as hostile.

What motivated me to point it out *at all* was the fact that the very same construction appears again a few sentences later in the same post:

キュアドリー Wrote:多くの日本語が習う人には「私たちはアメリカ人(など)。日本語は習った外国語だ」と思います。

You have now fixed the first instance, but have so far not fixed the second.

BTW absence of comment on the rest of this sentence is not to be taken as endorsement - in fact it seems problematic to me, but I can't say for sure. Need more input, I guess

Similarly, I made no comment about the rest of the first sentence for fear of overdoing things, but since we are well past that point, I'll say it. In the first sentence and throughout the rest of your posts you have uniformly used the Japanese word 暗記, meaning 'memorization', to mean Anki, the software product. Note that this is not a mistake made by リナ. I would also observe that this is a rather 'gaijin' mistake to make

CureDolly Wrote:I wonder what ways it is more tolerant of repetition?

You see this a lot in the stories on Hukumusume.com - they very often don't even bother to give the characters names, just use their descriptions every time. My brother (a translator) also commented on this last time we Skyped. Companies writing marketing waffle etc repeat looooong strings of words describing the product or whatever *every time* it's mentioned, posing a rather tricky problem for translators.

CureDolly Wrote:I did hear someone - actually a professional translator - say that Japanese is much more tolerant of repetition than English is. Apparently not in the area of particles though. I wonder what ways it is more tolerant of repetition?

It's true that repetition can be used as a tool in Japanese to grab the reader's attention (yeah that can be quite annoying in ads) or as a sort of literary device BUT when not being used intentionally (and in the correct way) is considered poor writing!

Quote:多くの日本語が習う人には「私たちはアメリカ人(など)。日本語は習った外国語だ」と思います。

This feels like an English thought trying to express itself in Japanese and as such only really makes sense (in Japanese) if you also know English. Plus a grammatical mistake or two. Not that there's anything terribly wrong with that as a learner of Japanese. It's unavoidable in early stages of output... but a monolingual Japanese native would have trouble untangling sentences like this one. If you just want to change it enough to make sense (using the same format) you could say 「日本語を習う人の多くは「私達はアメリカ人だ」とか「日本語は(私達が)習った外国語だ」とかと考えてる(と思います)。」 and you'll be understood but there's still a lack of information there that makes it a little hard to understand what you want to say. This is just an excerpt from a larger passage though, right? So that can't really be helped!

[Disclaimer: I'm not a monolingual speaker of Japanese so I'm pretty sure I knew what you wanted to say. I had to run this idea (along with my correction) by a monolingual speaker a moment ago to verify. ]

This is one possible reason that Khatz and the like advocate waiting to output. This is also one reason that I don't know if actively trying to swap your thought process into Japanese is a good idea. With enough input you'll find yourself able to switch without too much trouble.. but it takes a lot of input to organically feel out what's awkward and what's not. Early output WILL, however, get you used to expressing yourself in another language and that's an invaluable asset! Knowing what's wonky and what's not will come later with added exposure.

Yes, it was from a longer passage.

Thank you so much for the correction. I really appreciate that. I will look at it very carefully and try to learn.

I really agree with everything you say (if it isn't a bit brash to say that to someone so much more experienced than myself).

I am very aware of the problem (theoretically: obviously not aware enough to correct it yet) of using Japanese in an Englishly-structured way (Eihongo, one might say. The counterpart of Japlish). I am determined to overcome it, and I realize it is going to take time.

And yes, a lot of native input, as you say. That is the most vital single element I think. One has to develop an instinct for what sounds right, I think, and nothing but a lot of native input will do that.

Naturally we will make mistakes, especially when we are punching above our weight in theoretical posts. I firmly believe that is an important part of the way we grow linguistically. If one keeps going (and of course has native input) we will outgrow our mistakes. All of us can look back at the mistakes we made even a few months ago and feel embarrassed. But I believe that is a very valuable part of how we develop.

John-san, thank you for such a detailed comment. I did not mean to accuse you of accusing me of hypocrisy (giggle, this is getting complex). I just meant that kind of thing. "Ah! There are mistakes! That just proves..." I am not quite sure what it does prove. I never claimed one would not make mistakes.

However, it seems you didn't mean anything like that at all. Unh 恥ずかしい恥ずかしい.

I hope I didn't come across as hostile. I am really not a hostile kind of doll, though probably over-excitable. Dolls tend to be. I mean, we have to lie still such a lot that when we come to life we tend get all bouncy.

You are definitely right about 暗記 by the way. It was silly and slightly affected of me. I was already thinking that by the later threads in the post but thought maybe it was better to keep it consistent. I put it in Romaji in a post I wrote today on a slightly different subject. One lives and learns, I guess. And yes, of course there will be errors to pick up on.

Thank you for your input, and if I came across as a grumpy doll, please forgive me.

I never tried to switch my inner monologue to Japanese, it just happened after a certain period. Also, it never fully become 100% Japanese either. Half the time I think in Japanese and half the time I think in English. My inner monologue just found a natural balance between the two languages.