I've been having fun reading VNs the whole time, the fact I'm learning a language while doing so is just a bonus.
Edited: 2015-08-15, 3:22 am
2015-08-15, 6:15 am
yogert909 Wrote:Now I am しょんぼり hearing that you were ever burned out.dtcamero Wrote:otherwise you risk depressive burnout like yogurt909 is talking about feeling.I don't think it's depressive burnout..that was last yearIt's just a realization that it's likely I will end up spending as much time learning the language as actually using it since I don't plan on moving to Japan.
There is nothing not cool about Japanese. The reading and writing (the part you are putting the real work in on) is hard, but consistently rewarding once you discover RTK, and more importantly, this site. for the first run through, and later reviewing.
I was serious when I said finish the RTK with English keywords ASAP, first then go back and do ongoing study. Once RTK is gone through once, there is fun puzzle aspect to all writing. Even in my first week of actually studying Chinese, I am getting annoyed with the fact they keep asking me to read PinYin, when they have these perfectly useful characters I already know how to read and write, just not pronounce.
And this is the same me, that despite living in spoken Japanese, assumed that I would forever by for all intent and purposes illiterate in Japanese because of the impossible taks of learning Kanji.
You have found the magic key to drastically shorten getting there (English keywords/RTK, and most importantly this site) As always, what Fabrice has done here is something I am constantly in awe here. By treating the intellectual property of the original books with respect, and, in fact, adding value to them and turning the community lose to help each other, he made the impossible possible to me.
One of the problems, that those people who are adding Kanjiwriting to a spoken base have, is that we keep wanting to make on/kun connections while doing the RTK, instead of just English key-wording our way through RTK. While that impulse is irresistible (since every single Kanji speakers learn can actually be put to use right away in a sentence or two), it is actually counter productive to getting the first round of RTK under the belt. I know, because when I finally just went straight Keyword, I finished the last ¼ in a week, when the previous ¾ took 6 months
After seeing how long I spent fighting through RTK 1, since I was adding extraneous to the RTK system info that was slowing me down, I realize that knowing less Japanese overall might let people just get RTK done faster, as long as this site is around.
More encouragement:
Some wise writer must said there is a constant fun/wow factor to actually being able to read (native) Japanese, even to the Japanese themselves, which is why the constant odd Kanji choices by the people liek writers who play with words for a living. Every Japanese person fought hard to learn Japanese (the written part). Of course they want to revel in it. The flood of emoji coming from Japan is not an accident. The play more with their written language than we do in English. We are stuck in roughly 26 letters. They have anything.
And the speaking (and 聞き取り) simply requires some time immersed in real Japanese. (Theere is another problem right there because Japanese people teach 'Japanese', rather than the language they speak, to students. But that's a topic for another day).
tl;dr Don't shombori. Finish RTK with Keywords as fast and as rough as you can (I say don't go to RTK 3 at all personally, just invent ways to fit all later Kanji into the RTK framework even). There is a cool place to get to when characters are just letters, even ones you have never seen before.
2015-08-15, 8:54 am
Holy shit this post turned out a bit longer than I thought.
TLDR: 'yes'
Anki tells me that over the last ~32 months I have spent 2062 hours staring at flashcards. On top of that I've spent perhaps 500 hours reading (grossly lop-sided in favour of flashcards, something I am in the process of rebalancing).
So all told about 2600 hours in the hole so far, a significant chunk of my free time over the period devoted to a not always entirely pleasurable activity sustained entirely by the threat that if I were to miss even a single day of reviews I would instantly face a crippling backlog of ~1500 cards. This dire threat has been by far my main motivator without which I would never have come this far.
But this 2600+ hours has been essentially free, in that it has been almost entirely at the expense of getting sucked into reading dreary blogs, watching TV and playing computer games, though I am now of the opinion that the latter two would be beneficial in moderation.
The whole thing started as a kind of experiment, really. I had always considered foreign languages to be something I had no aptitude for, so attempting to learn Japanese seemed like an interesting way to put that to the test.
Something else I wished to challenge was a toxic and destructive notion that has clouded my thinking throughout my entire life (and I suspect I'm not the only one), and that is the wholly absurd idea that since memory is finite (and subject to interference effects), learning one thing must necessarily displace and/or bias one's capacity against learning something else, making it important to focus one's attention as narrowly as possible on one's strengths so as to avoid wasting mental resources on 'trivia'. It's mightily embarrassing to admit it, but I have in the past made maladaptive behavioural decisions on this basis, applying it as a ready excuse for laziness in not learning stuff even that would clearly be of benefit.
Of course, the above is nothing more than a rationalisation of the fear of treading into areas where I know I will not shine, thus coming face to face with my own limitations. This fear persists to an extent even now with my reluctance to begin speaking Japanese, because I know I'm going to suck at it forever no matter how hard I try.
What learning Japanese has taught/given me:
- Entirely expunged the above pernicious meme from my thinking. I now want to read and learn about anything and everything: history, geography, science, art, literature. Any old shit. The only problem is that I now want to do it in Japanese so that it's a 'twofer'. Ho hum.
- How foreign languages 'work', and how to learn them. This is something I was entirely ignorant about before, despite having 'studied' French at school for 5 years (and reaching a level attainable in about a week with efficient methods). Having learned Japanese I now regard learning to read another European language as essentially effortless, and something I fully intend to do at some point, time permitting, and moreover know exactly how to go about it. You just read stuff and put bits and pieces of it into Anki. Job done. And with something like French you could probably skip the Anki part altogether.
- That 10,000 is not a large number of things to learn, particularly given the structured nature of the information. At first, 2000 kanji sounded like a lot. Then 6000 sentences sounded like a lot. It seemed plausible in the beginning that being able to read 6000 sentences would necessarily imply fluency, what with 6000 being such a big number and all. But this is just that same old pernicious memory-as-a-limited-resource meme speaking.
If you want to talk numbers and take, say, the entries in JMdict as a yardstick and ask how many an educated Japanese person would be able to read and understand (in the sense of being able to pass a flashcard review), the number would be well over 100,000 imv, given that a significant proportion of it consists of expressions and derived compounds. Add to that the countless phrases and collocations both passive and active, not to mention name readings and cultural junk, and the numbers get ridiculous and well beyond intuition. One disadvantage of SRS is that it does tend to put numbers on things that are inherently innumerable. I guess a more interesting enumeration would be some kind of basis set of examples from which the rest can be generalised given existing knowledge and reasonably felicitous capacity for inference. Still going to be a lot more than 10k though, and that's the point: one's capacity for learning is beyond intuition. IIRC I read a pep talk on AJATT along these lines prior to starting RTK, something about African vs European attitudes to learning. That's pretty much what got me started on this path, come to think of it.
- How ideographic writing systems work and why they are necessary. Had no clue about this before.
- Access to a wealth of entertainment that I can enjoy without it feeling like a waste of time. I haven't read fiction in English for ages because I just end up skimming it and feeling like I'd rather just read a summary of the main points on Wikipedia, or imagining plans to become an author. Reading in Japanese is like reading as a kid again, having to visualise every scene just to keep track of what's going on, making the experience all the richer. And the kanji do begin to look like little pictures once you get into it.
On the downside, learning Japanese has skewed my lifestyle even further from the norm that it was before, having entirely displaced TV and computer games and thus eliminating two modes of shared experience with most people. I also suspect that it has made me even more introverted and less interested in social engagement than before, though that may change if I can get into speaking on Skype etc and being less passive in general. I just need to find something to talk about other than what I spend 90% of my time doing ...
TLDR: 'yes'
Anki tells me that over the last ~32 months I have spent 2062 hours staring at flashcards. On top of that I've spent perhaps 500 hours reading (grossly lop-sided in favour of flashcards, something I am in the process of rebalancing).
So all told about 2600 hours in the hole so far, a significant chunk of my free time over the period devoted to a not always entirely pleasurable activity sustained entirely by the threat that if I were to miss even a single day of reviews I would instantly face a crippling backlog of ~1500 cards. This dire threat has been by far my main motivator without which I would never have come this far.
But this 2600+ hours has been essentially free, in that it has been almost entirely at the expense of getting sucked into reading dreary blogs, watching TV and playing computer games, though I am now of the opinion that the latter two would be beneficial in moderation.
The whole thing started as a kind of experiment, really. I had always considered foreign languages to be something I had no aptitude for, so attempting to learn Japanese seemed like an interesting way to put that to the test.
Something else I wished to challenge was a toxic and destructive notion that has clouded my thinking throughout my entire life (and I suspect I'm not the only one), and that is the wholly absurd idea that since memory is finite (and subject to interference effects), learning one thing must necessarily displace and/or bias one's capacity against learning something else, making it important to focus one's attention as narrowly as possible on one's strengths so as to avoid wasting mental resources on 'trivia'. It's mightily embarrassing to admit it, but I have in the past made maladaptive behavioural decisions on this basis, applying it as a ready excuse for laziness in not learning stuff even that would clearly be of benefit.
Of course, the above is nothing more than a rationalisation of the fear of treading into areas where I know I will not shine, thus coming face to face with my own limitations. This fear persists to an extent even now with my reluctance to begin speaking Japanese, because I know I'm going to suck at it forever no matter how hard I try.
What learning Japanese has taught/given me:
- Entirely expunged the above pernicious meme from my thinking. I now want to read and learn about anything and everything: history, geography, science, art, literature. Any old shit. The only problem is that I now want to do it in Japanese so that it's a 'twofer'. Ho hum.
- How foreign languages 'work', and how to learn them. This is something I was entirely ignorant about before, despite having 'studied' French at school for 5 years (and reaching a level attainable in about a week with efficient methods). Having learned Japanese I now regard learning to read another European language as essentially effortless, and something I fully intend to do at some point, time permitting, and moreover know exactly how to go about it. You just read stuff and put bits and pieces of it into Anki. Job done. And with something like French you could probably skip the Anki part altogether.
- That 10,000 is not a large number of things to learn, particularly given the structured nature of the information. At first, 2000 kanji sounded like a lot. Then 6000 sentences sounded like a lot. It seemed plausible in the beginning that being able to read 6000 sentences would necessarily imply fluency, what with 6000 being such a big number and all. But this is just that same old pernicious memory-as-a-limited-resource meme speaking.
If you want to talk numbers and take, say, the entries in JMdict as a yardstick and ask how many an educated Japanese person would be able to read and understand (in the sense of being able to pass a flashcard review), the number would be well over 100,000 imv, given that a significant proportion of it consists of expressions and derived compounds. Add to that the countless phrases and collocations both passive and active, not to mention name readings and cultural junk, and the numbers get ridiculous and well beyond intuition. One disadvantage of SRS is that it does tend to put numbers on things that are inherently innumerable. I guess a more interesting enumeration would be some kind of basis set of examples from which the rest can be generalised given existing knowledge and reasonably felicitous capacity for inference. Still going to be a lot more than 10k though, and that's the point: one's capacity for learning is beyond intuition. IIRC I read a pep talk on AJATT along these lines prior to starting RTK, something about African vs European attitudes to learning. That's pretty much what got me started on this path, come to think of it.
- How ideographic writing systems work and why they are necessary. Had no clue about this before.
- Access to a wealth of entertainment that I can enjoy without it feeling like a waste of time. I haven't read fiction in English for ages because I just end up skimming it and feeling like I'd rather just read a summary of the main points on Wikipedia, or imagining plans to become an author. Reading in Japanese is like reading as a kid again, having to visualise every scene just to keep track of what's going on, making the experience all the richer. And the kanji do begin to look like little pictures once you get into it.
On the downside, learning Japanese has skewed my lifestyle even further from the norm that it was before, having entirely displaced TV and computer games and thus eliminating two modes of shared experience with most people. I also suspect that it has made me even more introverted and less interested in social engagement than before, though that may change if I can get into speaking on Skype etc and being less passive in general. I just need to find something to talk about other than what I spend 90% of my time doing ...
Edited: 2015-08-15, 8:56 am
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2015-08-15, 10:35 am
I've never regretted learning anything. I doubt many people have.
But that's a far cry from saying that you regret learning the language.
anotherjohn Wrote:Holy shit this post turned out a bit longer than I thought.Well I would regret doing that...and I do regret some of the choices I made while learning Japanese.
TLDR: 'yes'
Anki tells me that over the last ~32 months I have spent 2062 hours staring at flashcards.
But that's a far cry from saying that you regret learning the language.
2015-08-15, 10:43 pm
anotherjohn Wrote:On the downside, learning Japanese has skewed my lifestyle even further from the norm that it was before, having entirely displaced TV and computer games and thus eliminating two modes of shared experience with most people. I also suspect that it has made me even more introverted and less interested in social engagement than before, though that may change if I can get into speaking on Skype etc and being less passive in general. I just need to find something to talk about other than what I spend 90% of my time doing ...I know how you feel; apparently, I was actually more interesting before I started spending almost all of my free time on Japanese (and pointless YouTube videos...); the metric of 'interesting' being the number of topics I could readily talk about with some knowledge, especially in regards to recent scientific and technological advancements.
Now, the question "What have you been up to this week?" gets them a mildly surprised look of 'people experience conversation worthy things in the span of a single week?' and a verbal answer of "Studying, as always. Same subjects too". Then I have the difficult task of coming up with a good topic when I haven't even had time to consider it.
That's actually one of the things that's keeping me from speaking and writing: I can't think of anything to talk about other than what I study (and the occasional story about a computer I fixed recently); and most people aren't interested in learning methods and the way various electrical/electronic things work (well, they are at first, but once it starts going over their heads...).
Oh, and a nice thing I noticed:
I decided to do a little reading for Tadoku last night, and easily read what used to take me several hours (and leave me mentally exhausted) just a couple years ago while I was tired and about to fall asleep. I easily remember what I read too, but it's still 'in English' (when I recall a scene, I internally describe it with mostly English terms, instead of the Japanese that it came from).
Edited: 2015-08-15, 10:44 pm
2015-08-17, 4:37 am
I'm kind of surprised at how many positive replies there have been to this question. I'd have to give a more mixed response.
I enjoyed the journey of learning this language very much. Especially when I really started to get into watching and reading things directly in Japanese. There was also a lot of positive benefits as a result of all the effort. A scholarship. Friends. And now a fairly interesting job for a time.
On the other hand, I've kind of "seen through the eye of a needle" when it comes to too much stuff I was happily ignorant of before (https://youtu.be/3TlwsjGB32c). Living in Japan and knowing Japanese, you have to cross over from being the pleasantly ignorant outsider to somebody within the social and economic system they have set up here. It's like working really, really hard to give up being privileged and turn your previously pleasant life into a hell. If you think about it, that's very perverse. Much worse than if life became hell accidentally, because you've gone and done it to yourself. OK. If you are mid-career or lucky, it might actually be a relatively painless transition. It helps if you have a Japanese spouse I guess. Or maybe are coming from Eastern Europe and are happy enough to take some of the rough as part of the deal. But if not, well. And me with a partner from a developed part of China going through 就職活動, getting deceived by a ブラック企業... seeing and dealing with that shit, is like being Super Hans after coming out of that party. And then people ask me if I love Japan or assume that I'm 親日 while trying to casually slag off China to me.
Tokyo was a shock after Kansai, but has actually grown on me. I can handle the coldness and keeping to yourself. Bookstores. Parks. Bars. 高円寺 is cool. But human relations in and out of work, ideology, and the exploitative economy are just too much. Hence we are both leaving soon.
Was it worth it? Kind of an impossible question to answer. It's just who I am now, and I don't feel like negating that. The good and the bad are intertwined. Ask me a year ago I might well have said "no". I'm feeling less bitter and persecuted now. They are going to do what they are going to do and be what they will be. I'll just be somewhere else far away in the meanwhile. Maybe I'll visit sometimes for a little while and say hi to old friends.
Would I give encouragement to somebody else who is thinking about learning Japanese? Not really. I wouldn't strongly discourage them, but I would suggest they think about it carefully. What their plan is. Certainly there is a lot to recommend in any kind of serious endeavor like this. A lot of opportunities for new experiences and growth. And if you have the financial security or plans that mean you don't actually every find yourself job seeking or working in Japan in a low level corporate position, then you can skip a lot of the nastier stuff, which is great. But yeah... personally the difference between actual lived life here (something which I know of course is greatly subjective and variable), and the fun of the experience of learning the language, was almost too much to handle for a while.
I enjoyed the journey of learning this language very much. Especially when I really started to get into watching and reading things directly in Japanese. There was also a lot of positive benefits as a result of all the effort. A scholarship. Friends. And now a fairly interesting job for a time.
On the other hand, I've kind of "seen through the eye of a needle" when it comes to too much stuff I was happily ignorant of before (https://youtu.be/3TlwsjGB32c). Living in Japan and knowing Japanese, you have to cross over from being the pleasantly ignorant outsider to somebody within the social and economic system they have set up here. It's like working really, really hard to give up being privileged and turn your previously pleasant life into a hell. If you think about it, that's very perverse. Much worse than if life became hell accidentally, because you've gone and done it to yourself. OK. If you are mid-career or lucky, it might actually be a relatively painless transition. It helps if you have a Japanese spouse I guess. Or maybe are coming from Eastern Europe and are happy enough to take some of the rough as part of the deal. But if not, well. And me with a partner from a developed part of China going through 就職活動, getting deceived by a ブラック企業... seeing and dealing with that shit, is like being Super Hans after coming out of that party. And then people ask me if I love Japan or assume that I'm 親日 while trying to casually slag off China to me.
Tokyo was a shock after Kansai, but has actually grown on me. I can handle the coldness and keeping to yourself. Bookstores. Parks. Bars. 高円寺 is cool. But human relations in and out of work, ideology, and the exploitative economy are just too much. Hence we are both leaving soon.
Was it worth it? Kind of an impossible question to answer. It's just who I am now, and I don't feel like negating that. The good and the bad are intertwined. Ask me a year ago I might well have said "no". I'm feeling less bitter and persecuted now. They are going to do what they are going to do and be what they will be. I'll just be somewhere else far away in the meanwhile. Maybe I'll visit sometimes for a little while and say hi to old friends.
Would I give encouragement to somebody else who is thinking about learning Japanese? Not really. I wouldn't strongly discourage them, but I would suggest they think about it carefully. What their plan is. Certainly there is a lot to recommend in any kind of serious endeavor like this. A lot of opportunities for new experiences and growth. And if you have the financial security or plans that mean you don't actually every find yourself job seeking or working in Japan in a low level corporate position, then you can skip a lot of the nastier stuff, which is great. But yeah... personally the difference between actual lived life here (something which I know of course is greatly subjective and variable), and the fun of the experience of learning the language, was almost too much to handle for a while.
Edited: 2015-08-17, 4:53 am
2015-08-17, 5:19 am
Yes, overall its good for my career.
By some chance I managed to go to Japan working in an internship for a couple of months in 2010.
During this time I learned some phrases as I did not expect to return to Japan.
However by other random chance I got to return to Japan for a different company in 2012.
I learned the basics and passed to N4 the next year. After passing N4 I continued studying for N3, however I left Japan and done an inter-company transfer back home after getting tired after not learning anything new after a year at work and Japanese work ethic sucks ass so by going home I got more money and more free time while hopefully learning some new things. Depending on situation maybe i will go back.
Regarding Anki I have been using it for a few years now and not sure of its effectiveness, if i don't review something for a few days then the content is usually forgotten.
I have also noticed that there are people who study Japanese and never traveled or lived in Japan. I think this is quite strange to be honest. It takes alot of time and effort to study and if you ever go to Japan your expectations may not be quite the same as you hoped. But on the other hand learning a language is better than frying your brain watching crap tv.
By some chance I managed to go to Japan working in an internship for a couple of months in 2010.
During this time I learned some phrases as I did not expect to return to Japan.
However by other random chance I got to return to Japan for a different company in 2012.
I learned the basics and passed to N4 the next year. After passing N4 I continued studying for N3, however I left Japan and done an inter-company transfer back home after getting tired after not learning anything new after a year at work and Japanese work ethic sucks ass so by going home I got more money and more free time while hopefully learning some new things. Depending on situation maybe i will go back.
Regarding Anki I have been using it for a few years now and not sure of its effectiveness, if i don't review something for a few days then the content is usually forgotten.
I have also noticed that there are people who study Japanese and never traveled or lived in Japan. I think this is quite strange to be honest. It takes alot of time and effort to study and if you ever go to Japan your expectations may not be quite the same as you hoped. But on the other hand learning a language is better than frying your brain watching crap tv.
2015-08-17, 12:48 pm
redshoulder Wrote:I have also noticed that there are people who study Japanese and never traveled or lived in Japan. I think this is quite strange to be honest.I find it quite funny that anyone would think that way. And funnier still that anyone would leave their own country to live somewhere else.
Anyway, the Gutengberg Galaxy is my home.
2015-08-17, 2:46 pm
buonaparte Wrote:As to Japanese audiobooks - almost a complete disaster. Had I known they had practically no audiobooks, I'd have chosen Mandarin instead. A funny side effect: I've become an expert on Jehovah's Witnesses as I used THEIR audiobooks to learn Japanese. Simply because everything was there: good audio, etexts (no need to proofread them), English (or French) etexts. Making parallel texts extremely easy, just a couple of clicks. Used their materials to learn other languages too..Excellent suggestion. Did you just do this in parallel texts, or take anything and place it into Anki as well?
2015-08-17, 4:09 pm
Just a note to say a +1 to what Danchan says. This ties into how I began my answer which was, "Well, you're going to get a lot of survivor bias here".
2015-08-17, 5:02 pm
anotherjohn Wrote:..this 2600+ hours has been essentially free, in that it has been almost entirely at the expense of getting sucked into reading dreary blogs, watching TV and playing computer games, though I am now of the opinion that the latter two would be beneficial in moderation.anotherjohn's whole post is almost exactly my experience. I couldn't believe it as I was reading how familiar everything sounded. You wrote it much better than I ever could.
The whole thing started as a kind of experiment, really. I had always considered foreign languages to be something I had no aptitude for, so attempting to learn Japanese seemed like an interesting way to put that to the test.
...the fear of treading into areas where I know I will not shine, thus coming face to face with my own limitations. This fear persists to an extent even now with my reluctance to begin speaking Japanese, because I know I'm going to suck at it forever no matter how hard I try.
...On the downside, learning Japanese has skewed my lifestyle even further from the norm that it was before, having entirely displaced TV and computer games and thus eliminating two modes of shared experience with most people. I also suspect that it has made me even more introverted and less interested in social engagement than before, though that may change if I can get into speaking on Skype etc and being less passive in general. I just need to find something to talk about other than what I spend 90% of my time doing ...
2015-08-17, 5:48 pm
For something to talk to other people about, how about current events? http://theskimm.com has been really helpful to me for quickly summarizing current news. It's from an American perspective, so it might not work for those looking for a European perspective, etc, but there might be similar European sites out there. I didn't watch TV or movies much even before I started Japanese, preferring books instead, so I started looking for ways to get a summary of major news stories.
Edited: 2015-08-17, 5:53 pm
2015-08-17, 7:44 pm
As others have already mentioned, I also suspect that we have a strong survivor bias around here. I therefore decided to share my personal evaluation, which is way more mixed compared to most previous posts.
Disclaimers:
1) It's somewhat hard for me to separate learning Japanese with my time in Japan as they mostly coincided.
2) My views have changed quite a bit over time, so ideally I'd wait some more years before arriving at a conclusion.
During the time I lived in Japan, learning Japanese was definitely worth it for me. Depending on the place, one can of course rather easily get by without it and arguably also spend a much nicer time being ignorant about ones surroundings, enjoying the foreigner bubble. Personally, that's exactly what I wanted to avoid, and learning Japanese has definitely helped me to pop the bubble that danchan described so eloquently. So it's been most helpful in that regard, and of course also very useful for a slew of other practical reasons such as daily communication, making friends, etc.
Back home, my continued study of Japanese has been somewhat in vain. Initially I continued to study Japanese just out of sheer habit and also for the challenge it represents. And of course, I too am a sucker for the sunk cost fallacy. But because I personally have no interest in manga/anime/literature/arts etc., there are very few practical benefits that knowing Japanese affords me. Furthermore, I don't really have any concrete plans to somehow tie my career to Japan. So the cynicist in me would say that Japanese has been relegated to a party trick for me. I'd argue that one can learn way cooler party tricks in way less time.
Then there's of course also the journey of learning Japanese. It has given me some confidence for future endeavors, some discipline, and I've picked up some useful techniques. Still, I'd argue that this isn't really intrinsically coupled to learning Japanese. Spending a similar amount of time on another project would probably have yielded similar payoffs.
Lastly let's address the squishy things: I'd argue that learning Japanese has given me a much better insight into Japan - a culture quite different from my own. I've learned about other ways of thought, different modes of how to express oneself and interact with others, and new ways of how to think about things. Currently, I'd say that going forward, this will be the most useful outcome of me learning Japanese. Being good at interacting with other humans is very important. Having seen some different modes should be most helpful in that regard.
One could probably also learn quite a bit about the Japanese mindset without ever learning a word of Japanese just by reading books about it. However, I'd liken this to learning quantum mechanics based on accounts found in the popular press. Besides some very misguided accounts, they usually do a somewhat reasonable job of describing what's happening. However, it's still really hard to really learn the real deal just based on these accounts that usually have to rely on terribly stretched analogies that may hold for the example they're illustrating, but break down miserably in other regards (that are usually conveniently omitted). So to really understand it, you have to learn it from first principles, which means learning all the gory maths as well. I'd argue that a command of Japanese plays a similar role in understanding what's going on in Japan. Of course, the very analogy I just made also breaks down in some regards and there are exceptions, so take this with a grain of salt.
In conclusion, learning Japanese was probably somewhat worth it for me, depending on how I weigh different factors. While in Japan, it was most useful, afterwards much less so.
As for encouraging others to learn Japanese I think it is somewhat simple: Just let the other person figure it out on his/her own. Many people start, a few persevere, and that is perfectly fine.
Afterthought: It'd probably be interesting to nudge 'JapaneseRuleOf7' aka seeroy-sensei into writing a piece about this. I'm quite sure he could write an entertaining piece, half-joking, half-serious about the ups and downs of his journey!
Disclaimers:
1) It's somewhat hard for me to separate learning Japanese with my time in Japan as they mostly coincided.
2) My views have changed quite a bit over time, so ideally I'd wait some more years before arriving at a conclusion.
During the time I lived in Japan, learning Japanese was definitely worth it for me. Depending on the place, one can of course rather easily get by without it and arguably also spend a much nicer time being ignorant about ones surroundings, enjoying the foreigner bubble. Personally, that's exactly what I wanted to avoid, and learning Japanese has definitely helped me to pop the bubble that danchan described so eloquently. So it's been most helpful in that regard, and of course also very useful for a slew of other practical reasons such as daily communication, making friends, etc.
Back home, my continued study of Japanese has been somewhat in vain. Initially I continued to study Japanese just out of sheer habit and also for the challenge it represents. And of course, I too am a sucker for the sunk cost fallacy. But because I personally have no interest in manga/anime/literature/arts etc., there are very few practical benefits that knowing Japanese affords me. Furthermore, I don't really have any concrete plans to somehow tie my career to Japan. So the cynicist in me would say that Japanese has been relegated to a party trick for me. I'd argue that one can learn way cooler party tricks in way less time.
Then there's of course also the journey of learning Japanese. It has given me some confidence for future endeavors, some discipline, and I've picked up some useful techniques. Still, I'd argue that this isn't really intrinsically coupled to learning Japanese. Spending a similar amount of time on another project would probably have yielded similar payoffs.
Lastly let's address the squishy things: I'd argue that learning Japanese has given me a much better insight into Japan - a culture quite different from my own. I've learned about other ways of thought, different modes of how to express oneself and interact with others, and new ways of how to think about things. Currently, I'd say that going forward, this will be the most useful outcome of me learning Japanese. Being good at interacting with other humans is very important. Having seen some different modes should be most helpful in that regard.
One could probably also learn quite a bit about the Japanese mindset without ever learning a word of Japanese just by reading books about it. However, I'd liken this to learning quantum mechanics based on accounts found in the popular press. Besides some very misguided accounts, they usually do a somewhat reasonable job of describing what's happening. However, it's still really hard to really learn the real deal just based on these accounts that usually have to rely on terribly stretched analogies that may hold for the example they're illustrating, but break down miserably in other regards (that are usually conveniently omitted). So to really understand it, you have to learn it from first principles, which means learning all the gory maths as well. I'd argue that a command of Japanese plays a similar role in understanding what's going on in Japan. Of course, the very analogy I just made also breaks down in some regards and there are exceptions, so take this with a grain of salt.
In conclusion, learning Japanese was probably somewhat worth it for me, depending on how I weigh different factors. While in Japan, it was most useful, afterwards much less so.
As for encouraging others to learn Japanese I think it is somewhat simple: Just let the other person figure it out on his/her own. Many people start, a few persevere, and that is perfectly fine.
Afterthought: It'd probably be interesting to nudge 'JapaneseRuleOf7' aka seeroy-sensei into writing a piece about this. I'm quite sure he could write an entertaining piece, half-joking, half-serious about the ups and downs of his journey!
2015-08-17, 8:08 pm
From a strictly practical point of view, learning Japanese has not been worth it. Too many hours studying, too much money dumped on books. But it IS fun.
2015-08-18, 12:11 am
supermancampus Wrote:It's offtopic. But...buonaparte Wrote:As to Japanese audiobooks - almost a complete disaster. Had I known they had practically no audiobooks, I'd have chosen Mandarin instead. A funny side effect: I've become an expert on Jehovah's Witnesses as I used THEIR audiobooks to learn Japanese. Simply because everything was there: good audio, etexts (no need to proofread them), English (or French) etexts. Making parallel texts extremely easy, just a couple of clicks. Used their materials to learn other languages too..Excellent suggestion. Did you just do this in parallel texts, or take anything and place it into Anki as well?
NO. I'm at least a triple unbeliever: I don't believe in SRS, Heisig, and furigana.
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http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_m...c346179174
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http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840
2015-08-18, 12:27 am
buonaparte Wrote:NO. I'm at least a triple unbeliever: I don't believe in SRS, Heisig, and furigana.Continuing the off-topic direction here but..
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http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_m...c346179174
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http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840
Interesting. Perhaps I am mistaken by your own methods seem to resemble Steve Kaufmann's quite a bit. Apart from the grammar study. ;-)
Regarding SRS, with Mandarin I use it for comprehensible input more than "memorization" per say. Yes there is the word I am learning through repeated exposure on the front, but there is also the rest of the sentence it comes with, and also a sound file attached (I have the sound play on both the front and back). I get about 30 minutes of comprehensible reading and listening just from my reviews each day while commuting. Not much maybe, but over four years of very gradual card adding I've got a basic grasp of all kinds of grammatical structures without ever formally studying the grammar. Of course it helps a lot that I already know Kanji, and that Japanese grammar has many similarities. If I have a translation of a sentence it is into Japanese rather than English, and this seems to feel more natural.
Edited: 2015-08-18, 1:44 am
2015-08-18, 3:09 am
buonaparte Wrote:I'm at least a triple unbeliever: I don't believe in … Heisig,Why are you at RTK, then? Not challenging, just curious.
2015-08-18, 4:33 am
Hmm... To respond to the "lots of survivor-bias/positivity" views, I feel I should clarify my position as a (Japanese) student.
I love learning things and I'm really only learning Japanese as a hobby (that is, there are no immediate reasons for me to do so, other than "I want to"). Just like all of my other hobbies, it takes quite a bit of time and effort to get anywhere, with almost pointless results (if we're just looking at real-life application). For example, gaming is unlikely to ever be profitable for me or provide social advancement; in fact, it's a giant money sink that has my greedy side appalled at the waste, and it keeps me locked in my room more than I'd otherwise be. In the same way, I spend time (and money) preparing to take a test that may or may not have any weight in my future career; and on a language that is all but unused in my part of the world.
But I enjoy both, and feel accomplished when I progress.
It's not always the most exciting thing, when your progress is nearly impossible to recognize in a human time-scale, to do Anki reviews or struggle to understand an audio clip or reading passage; however, neither is it always as exciting to practice a song over and over, loose arrow after arrow, or shoot bullet after bullet until you're satisfied with the results.
While it's not always super exciting, I've never found any of these things to be boring. This may not be the case for some (or potentially most) people, but it's a big reason why I have nothing negative to say about my experience learning Japanese.
TL;DR
Because I like learning and have almost nothing at stake, I have no negative feelings towards my Japanese studying experiences.
I love learning things and I'm really only learning Japanese as a hobby (that is, there are no immediate reasons for me to do so, other than "I want to"). Just like all of my other hobbies, it takes quite a bit of time and effort to get anywhere, with almost pointless results (if we're just looking at real-life application). For example, gaming is unlikely to ever be profitable for me or provide social advancement; in fact, it's a giant money sink that has my greedy side appalled at the waste, and it keeps me locked in my room more than I'd otherwise be. In the same way, I spend time (and money) preparing to take a test that may or may not have any weight in my future career; and on a language that is all but unused in my part of the world.
But I enjoy both, and feel accomplished when I progress.
It's not always the most exciting thing, when your progress is nearly impossible to recognize in a human time-scale, to do Anki reviews or struggle to understand an audio clip or reading passage; however, neither is it always as exciting to practice a song over and over, loose arrow after arrow, or shoot bullet after bullet until you're satisfied with the results.
While it's not always super exciting, I've never found any of these things to be boring. This may not be the case for some (or potentially most) people, but it's a big reason why I have nothing negative to say about my experience learning Japanese.
TL;DR
Because I like learning and have almost nothing at stake, I have no negative feelings towards my Japanese studying experiences.
Edited: 2015-08-18, 4:34 am
2015-08-18, 5:56 am
kapalama Wrote:Our sense of duty.buonaparte Wrote:I'm at least a triple unbeliever: I don't believe in … Heisig,Why are you at RTK, then? Not challenging, just curious.
OK, to share stuff. We (I mean my sister - buonaparte - and me -aYa) had plenty of it. Somebody else might use it.
Edit
The spiritus movens was my late sister - buonaparte/atamagaii and so on.
I'm just lingering on.
Edited: 2015-08-18, 6:02 am
2015-08-18, 6:52 pm
I'd say yes, although studying the language has taken me in a different direction than I thought it would when I began studying 9 years ago. Many of the things that drove my interest then - anime, manga, J-pop - are no longer driving interests for me, and even though I live in Japan now, I'm not even familiar with recent developments in those areas anymore.
Despite this, I have gained an appreciation for Japanese literature and history, have been able to communicate with and become friends with people I otherwise wouldn't have been able to, and have been able to experience living in another country without feeling like a complete outsider due to a language boundary. It's also served as a bridge to travelling across East Asia, with kanji knowledge really coming in handy while in China and Taiwan. It's been a gateway to understanding the culture and civilization of another part of the world.
My interests may have changed much in the past 9 years, but rather than fading away, my interest in Japanese has simply evolved to suit my new pursuits. Hopefully, it will serve to further illuminate new ones.
Despite this, I have gained an appreciation for Japanese literature and history, have been able to communicate with and become friends with people I otherwise wouldn't have been able to, and have been able to experience living in another country without feeling like a complete outsider due to a language boundary. It's also served as a bridge to travelling across East Asia, with kanji knowledge really coming in handy while in China and Taiwan. It's been a gateway to understanding the culture and civilization of another part of the world.
My interests may have changed much in the past 9 years, but rather than fading away, my interest in Japanese has simply evolved to suit my new pursuits. Hopefully, it will serve to further illuminate new ones.