(Oops, looks like I spent over 3 hours writing this thing. I tried to keep it as short as possible, but.. Despite the lenght I believe you should read it and think it over carefully!)



I've been reading this forum for a long time without participating in the discussions, but I could no longer keep my mouth shut about this particular topic which, as far as I'm aware, is not often discussed here or anywhere else for that matter so I decided to finally create an account.

So, the reason for this post is the Japanese-only forum created by CureDolly. Everyone knows her blog and has seen her posts in the Koohii forum, right? But almost nobody uses her forum and until recently I didn't either. I didn't think using the language early on was really that important. I have never been so wrong! Let me explain in detail.

I started my serious study of Japanese in the fall of 2014 by doing RTK1 and some beginner textbooks. For the last six months or so, I've been studying RTK2 and DoBJG and my plan was to finish them while cramming more and more vocabulary in Anki. After that I was planning to start slowly reading native Japanese material to learn more and more vocabulary while proceeding to the more advanced grammar books. Sounds like the average study routine, doesn't it? I mean, that's how things are learnt: by studying them!


I thought that it's not so important to use, to output, that is, the language. At least since I don't have any way to get a face-to-face conversation partner I thought I could let the output wait until I pass the highest level of JLPT some day. That's pretty much how I learnt my second language so why wouldn't I learn my third one in exactly the same way, I thought. And since I am now able to read or write anything I want to in my second language (with some errors every now and then, but still) I must really know what I'm talking about.

However.. A while ago I was asking people about their language learning experiences. "If you had to pick one thing as the most important language study method you used, what would it be?", I asked around. My dad told me he had attended a conversation group when he was studying German as his third language. They didn't have any "real" German speakers there, only students of the language. I thought it sounded stupid and such a method would only make their beginners' mistakes stick to them forever since there were no native speakers correcting every little thing they did wrong.

Later I realised, as I may have already told you, that I was horribly wrong. My dad write his doctoral thesis in German, and even though I don't know much about such complicated educational matters I'm pretty sure it would not have been possible if he were still repeating his beginners' mistakes, those supposedly glued onto him by conversating in the language in an early stage with other beginner level students.

I was somewhat confused and had to think things thoroughly. How did I REALLY learn my second language? Should I do something differently this time after all?

Well, it turned out that, while planning my study of Japanese, I had completely omitted the fact that since I was around 11 or 12 years old I have been conversing in my second language almost every single day ON THE INTERNET because I thought it was not "real study", that it was not time spent on language learning but rather time wasted on playing around. And the amount of mistakes I must have done at the time I was 12... Well, I probably did nothing but mistakes for a long time at first, but now I'm 100% sure that no matter how many times I said something wrong because I had not yet learnt the right way to say it, I got instantly over it after I was taught the right way.

I took a language class last time at the age of 15, so the stuff I learnt by studying in class was never anything advanced. Until recently, if I encountered an unknown word, I didn't even bother checking it's meaning. Sooner or later I learnt it by just reading it over and over again in different contexts, with a couple of exeptions of course. So, I have been "wasting time" on the internet without taking language classes for about 9 years now.

I don't really know for sure if I'm fluent in my second language or not because I have never had the chance to have anyone analyze my writings for that purpose. But, hoping I could fool someone to think I'm a native English speaker, I didn't yet mention that English is my second language. But whether or not I write like a native speaker is not important here. The important thing is that I can understand everything I read and you can understand everything I write and this level of language skill was aquired by six years of unmotivated studying in elementary school and a decade of hanging around the English-speaking internet. And why that is important? Because I never wanted to learn English! I was forced to study it like everyone else and then I was forced to use it because everything I needed to read was only available in English. But what if one is really motivated and keeps always studying grammar and checks every new word he encounters? It's not far-fetched to say that the time spent for fluency could be halved of what my years for English fluency were.

But there's one more important thing. After understanding all these things, I headed to CureDolly's forum to start using my Japanese. I didn't really expect any immeadiate gain. I WAS WRONG AGAIN! After posting there ONCE, just ONCE, I started to spontaneusly think in Japanese. I never expected that to happen! I mean, I'm only about N4 level or something, I have no clue how this can work so well so early on. But it does. Its extremely useful to spontaneously think about how to express something in Japanese since it just keeps happening all day and often leads to a situation where I have to check things from my grammar book just to finish my thought process.

After that I also realised the reason why my mind's language changed. It seems CureDolly also wrote something similar in her blog. The thing is, when I talk to my family and friends in my native language, my thoughts about those conversations, whether future or past ones, are in my native language. When I have, for example, read a thread about something in the Koohii Forum, all my thoughs about it are in English - and this is not some kind of forced behaviour, in fact, quite the opposite and I find it hard to think about English discussions and writings in my native language.

So my claim is that ONLY by using Japanese daily in conversations you will be able to learn to really think in the language. I also claim that writing or reading a foreign language requires one's thought process to be in that language at the time it is used. Is it too dramatic to say that only then you will be able to LIVE THE LANGUAGE? Well, I say so anyway.

Oh, by the way, the forum is here: http://kawaiijapanese.freeforums.net

I think you are right, it's important to express yourself in the language, even I am a user in that forum but unfortunately I find still to hard to express myself in Japanese so I don't write much. This is the same reason why I don't write on Lang8 anymore. One advantage of kawaiijapanese forum is that the users are actually interested in the conversation, while on Lang8 all revolve around corrections and I've found hard to make friends there.
It would be cool to have some Japanese people on CureDolly's forum, maybe in a separate section, where to talk about music and the like with native people. I think the fact we are all non-Japanese people gives away part of the motivation to talk in Japanese :/
Also I don't think those who suggest not to speak earlier don't call into question the usefulness of output, their point is more about the effort needed to speak in the target language when you have a limited knowledge of it.

I think its best to communicate with native speakers, but given a situation where you can't or wont speak with native speakers, I suppose this is the next best thing. Any time you are actively using your Japanese is better than if you are not using it. I would just be very careful that you do not use other learner's writing as examples of how to speak in Japanese, because you never know if what they are saying could be right or wrong.

That's great! At this stage it would likely help to meet some native speakers though. Natives can offer better corrections, and you won't have to worry about picking up language mistakes, like when chatting with other non-native speakers.
Try some sites like http://www.language-exchanges.org, where you can meet Japanese people interested in language exchange.

↑↑ I agree. Using your Japanese with other learners of Japanese is probably better than not using it at all but you have to stay (constructively) dubious of the correctness of both yourself and your fellow learners. If you have even the slightest feeling that something might be funky Japanese, you can always check with Google! Putting a phrase or certain combination of words in quotations in a Google search is a fast and fairly reliable way to see if what you're trying to say is actually being said by Japanese netizens.

<slightly related (but also unrelated) anecdote- RE: language of memory>
I often remember English events in Japanese and Japanese events in English. So.. that's fun.

Very valuable introspection, tikka.

Another way to generate *spoken* output: if you enjoy video games, go play with the friendly guys and girls at KotobaMiners.org: join their forum and LINE group to find out when they play, then go online and chat via TeamSpeak while playing games. They also have an excellent manga reading circle or two. It's all run by a Koohii alumnus!

cophnia61 Wrote:I find still to hard to express myself in Japanese so I don't write much

If I remember correctly, you said somewhere that you have learned English as your second language. If so, do you think expressing yourself is easy in English? Was it always so? What, in your opinion, were the important factors in becoming fluent in english?

Zarxrax Wrote:I would just be very careful that you do not use other learner's writing as examples of how to speak in Japanese, because you never know if what they are saying could be right or wrong

That's a pretty important point for the sentence mining method fans indeed.

Bokusenou Wrote:Natives can offer better corrections, and you won't have to worry about picking up language mistakes, like when chatting with other non-native speakers.

But.. Lets say I'd never heard of the weird english plural of the word "sheep". Let's say I'd use the word "sheeps" for a hundred times without anyone bothering to correct me. But when someone would finally do it, I think having said it wrong many times would be only helpful. You know, like "whaaaat, I've been doing this wrong all the time!" and it would be a bit embarrassing. The little feel of embarrassment would make it easier to remember the correct way later. Kind of in the same way when someone mentions "vessels" in a non-kanji-related conversation but still that image of the turkey's crotch fills your mind for half a second just because it's such a strong memory from RTK1.

Or, an extreme example, if someone tells you not to play with fire, you can forget it instantly. Everyone forgets things, it's normal and the brain does it for a reason. But if you actually do play with fire and your house burns down, you are more likely to remember it for the rest of your life and use those candles correctly later.

The harder something is, the more likely you are to make mistakes doing it. But the more you screw up the more impact the correction is going to have on your mind. For example, the English word "obligatory". I never remember whether it means something you have to do or something that is optional. I have it in my anki deck and I am still struggling with it. What if I would one day use it incorrectly to, for example, make a statement like "learning the kanji is not obligatory" when discussing Japanese literacy. People would throw stuff at me and galaxies would explode as result and the "learning impact" would be great. I'd remember the word's meaning for the rest of my life, unlike if it would just be shown to me in Anki or, even worse, in some native speakers text where it's meaning would be obvious from context.

aldebrn Wrote:...

Thanks for the tip!

tikka Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:I find still to hard to express myself in Japanese so I don't write much

If I remember correctly, you said somewhere that you have learned English as your second language. If so, do you think expressing yourself is easy in English? Was it always so? What, in your opinion, were the important factors in becoming fluent in english?

I understand english from many years of reading but I began to speak it only recently on this forum. Honestly I think my output is still bad and it was way worst the first period when I began to write here. This is to say that you can read tons of books but still suck at speaking the language or, in other words, in order to be able to speak you must speak. I must add also that my output in english was slightly better months ago when I used to write, and consequently to read, more on this forum. Lately japanese has taken much of the time I used to pass with english, so my english output is suffering from that.

So yes, I think you are right. Mine was not a critic, I want to write more and I know this would be beneficial to me, but I find it so stressful that I end up not writing at all :/ But I think that CureDolly's forum is great so by any means I suggest the other users to write there!