Because this is off topic to the **Your**Guide to Learning Japanese thread, but worth talking about (maybe?).

yogert909 Wrote:I'm still curious about your beginning phase. Presumably you didn't go straight to conversing with customers 8 hours on your first day studying the language. How did you get to the point you could converse effectively?

You would think that, wouldn't you? But I was put in charge of groups of people from day one, even if I could not actually speak to them. I had no exposure to Japanese at all before starting working full time in Tourism. I had a very specific set of skills that got me hired (best read in Liam Neeson's voice for fun.)

Any language skills, non-existent. As the joke goes おはよう is the place where I could find Cleveland, and I was amazed to hear Japanese people talking about it all the time, first thing in the morning. Did they really, eally want to go to the Rock'n Roll Hall of Fame or something?

I learned noises that made the right things happen at first. Magic spells, the mere invocation of which made the right things happen. Of course if the magic spell was said incorrectly, nothing would happen, or an unexpected result would happen. First step of immersive learning: Treat noise coming from the mouth as spells to get what you want, rather than representing what you think you want to say. It does not matter what I think, or even if I understand what I am saying, it only matters if the result I want happens. Make good noise, get candy.

Instant feedback. Bad accent = no result. Using at the wrong time = no result. Learn to use a couple hundred magic spells effectively by imitation of Native Japanese workers doing the same sort of jobs. Spell works= good pronunciation. Had to use memory since I had no access to anything written down during work.

Lather, rinse, repeat. It's how everyone who learned languages learned them for most of human history, and it is still far and away the best way for spoken language.

Every other approach that 'language learners' use nowadays try and bend the new language to how they think languages should work, or insert multiple intervening layers, way over meta-meta meta-fying it. Putting multiple layers of abstraction between themselves and what they want. It does not help that Japanese, who for the most part are the people teaching language students are adept at believing in and worshiping layers of abstraction in their own language. Probably the best thing to happen to me is that I never studied Japanese from a Japanese language teacher, so I never learned all the never used Japanese in books like Genki. I tested out of all the Japanese (3 years roughly) offered at the University nearby.

If spoken words treated as spells to make things happen, then there is simply no intermediate layer. Put noises into world, world gives you what you want. When world fails to give you what you want, search for someone whose spells are effective, and copy them exactly. Appropriately react when spells are cast at you.

It's a pretty effective metaphor, because it explains why so many people put 'effort' in to language study, and get no return on it. Actually it is a pretty good metaphor for accomplishing anything, or why people fail to do so. Intervening layers just keep people from what they want.

It is exactly on point for Japanese trying to 'learn' English as a spoken language. Unfortunately, everything but speech is happening in the standard Japanese person's English education.

Thanks for outlining the way you learned Japanese. It seems to have served you well. It seems to be similar to Benny Lewis' approach.

I don't have time to write a lot, but it seems like your method might work well for a specific type of person in a specific situation, but maybe less well for others. For instance, it worked well for you because you are probably an outgoing person with an intuitive feel for communication, and a ready supply of Japanese natives to practice casting spells on. However, the vast majority of people, myself included aren't as outgoing and don't have many natives to test out spells on.

Actually, it's just that work is work. The take home is not what an opportunity I had, but what it takes to get fluent. Imitation of natives.

People learn to speak by speaking. And they learn to speak by imitating effective speech patterns others use.

What people who don't have the initial opportunity to immerse need to take away is that time spent reading is a resource for learning about Japan, but it does basically nothing to make one capable of speech in Japanese. Which is fine, if speaking Japanese is not the goal.

Japan is strongly influenced by the Chinese tradition of strong separation of written and vernacular speech. If a English speaker thought of making the analogy that written Japanese is to spoken Japanese as Latin is to spoken English, they would be better off. Learning Latin is a great way to learn all about English (and Spanish, and Italian, and French), but it is not going to teach someone how to speak English.

kapalama Wrote:People learn to speak by speaking. And they learn to speak by imitating effective speech patterns others use.

Thanks for relating your story. It's fascinating actually. I really do think that learning by doing IS the best way of learning. And I do think you're onto something about people putting layers of abstraction between ourselves and the language. I'm not sure how to apply it to my or a lot of other people's situation, especially in the beginning if we are not in Japan. But I am getting to the point where I cam going to transition to native materials very soon. That was my original goal - to get to the point where I could stumble though reading Japanese well enough where I could bootstrap my way into learning more and more. Anyway, thanks for telling your story.

Oh, and another question if you don't mind.. How would you recommend learning Japanese for someone who doesn't have a ready supply of Japanese people to converse with and is more interested in reading and watching Japanese shows than having long conversations in Japanese? Thanks

You have the work ethic down.

My strong recommendation is to take a break from every other bit of studying, and commit to getting through RTK1 with English Keywords as fast as possible. One month is plenty of time to finish from where you are now. Don't worry about readings, or Japanese Vocabulary or grammar. Those will just slow you down, and keep memorization from happening. Remember what the introduction to RTK talked about: Kanji is just a huge alphabet. Learn the alphabet first, then work from there.

(As I am now learning (written) Chinese, I see the huge value in just having a sense of the whole picture of Kanji, since Chinese is nothing but Kanji, and learning Chinese is just stupid easy once you learn how to decode the simplification. The English keyword meanings are basically the same for the Chinese characters as the Japanese.)

Once you have the 2000 characters in your pocket, it's entirely reasonable to pick up something like 女性セブン and read the gossip in there straight out, since you already have some background. My personal take on reading material is that popular media about popular culture is the way to go, rather than the direct products like manga and anime, music and the like. There are a bunch of reasons, but they mostly boil down to this: Japanese public discourse (dramas, anime, manga, idol group presentations, TV news, op-ed pieces, newspapers, the internet forums, basically any printed material other than gossip rags) have an hyper-stylized aspect to them.For native Japanese surrounded by friends/family who don't do any of that stylization it is easy to step away form the stylized world and just be human.

If you don't have the real world conversations, then you do not have access to this awareness.

I am trying to think of an example, and the best one I can offer is this ななめ45° was (is?) an comedy troupe who entire shtick when they started out was that one guy spoke/acted like a train conductor all the time.

And while that example is about speech, it also is about stylized presentation. Japanese take for granted the ridiculously stylized presentation of everything in popular culture. This is why for reading (女性セブン and the like), and for listening, the unscripted talk of variety shows. It's as close as you can get to watching the way real people interact, when their so little time to massage the product before it comes to screen/print.

(A side note: if you are actually in Los Angeles, you do have a huge population of Eikaiwa students, and Japanese tourist personnel there, as well as Japanese tourists. Both groups will have basically non-English speakers in abundance. A lot of the Japanese who travel overseas to study English (as opposed to enrolling in regular colleges) are there to hang out in a foreign country with fellow Japanese speakers, not to learn English. I do not know if you are male or female, but either way, you have potential targets there.)

kapalama,

I just wanted to say thank you for posting. I took N1 this past July and I've been on a kind of mental vacation since walking out of that exam room. I think I passed, but even assuming I now have N1 out of the way, I realize there's a ton of useful stuff I don't know yet and there are still lots of times where I need to ask people to repeat what they just said. Basically, I still have a long way to go and your post motivated me to get back on the path of learning.

(Also, thanks for always putting example words in your kanji stories, especially the obscure post-常用 stuff. After a while I found myself hitting Ctrl-F and searching for "kapa" on new characters. )

Bashful, but happy!

I am so glad that this place is here. I am so glad I helped in whatever small way I did.

kapalama Wrote:What people who don't have the initial opportunity to immerse need to take away is that time spent reading is a resource for learning about Japan, but it does basically nothing to make one capable of speech in Japanese. Which is fine, if speaking Japanese is not the goal.

You really think that you learning Japanese this way is proof that no other language learning method could possibly work?

yogert909 Wrote:Oh, and another question if you don't mind.. How would you recommend learning Japanese for someone who doesn't have a ready supply of Japanese people to converse with and is more interested in reading and watching Japanese shows than having long conversations in Japanese? Thanks

Listening and reading works just fine. Trust me, I learned several languages that way. Including the one we're speaking in now.

You can learn a language without ever attempting to speak it, and be able to speak as soon as you get off the plane in your target country. You certainly won't be speaking it confidently, it will be awkward and intimidating, and you'll be pausing and thinking (and panicking, and getting embarrassed) a lot early on, until you get into a groove, but you will be speaking. And, withing a few weeks of practicing your speaking, you'll be on the same level you would've been if you had started speaking from the start.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Listening and reading works just fine. Trust me, I learned several languages that way. Including the one we're speaking in now.

Pretty sure we are not speaking right now.

kapalama Wrote:Pretty sure we are not speaking right now.

Some of us are certainly not adding much to the conversation.

I mean, I don't want to be antagonistic, but you seem to be implying that those who aren't lucky (or unlucky) enough to land a job which requires being fluent in Japanese without actually being fluent in Japanese, or a similar circumstance, will never actually become fluent. I'll agree that I doubt you can speak in a way that sounds natural if you don't actually use a language in real contexts, but you can certainly learn a foreign language at home (I have, two of them - and I learnt how to pronounce one of them by the time I was already reading high literature in the original), and the Internet is full of natural-sounding material.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

kapalama Wrote:Pretty sure we are not speaking right now.

Some of us are certainly not adding much to the conversation.

Let's engage in the exchange of ideas, please, in the thread with the title "SPOKEN LANGUAGE"

If you don't understand the point of what I said, then you don't. That does not mean it is not there. If you cannot figure out that point, then I have to assume most of what is said in a non-native tongue similarly flies over your head. Every language is deep with incomplete syllogisms. "Shut up" is an argument that "うるさい" makes the other way, by leaving out the other two the three parts of the syllogism. Both arguments though are BOTH *valid* and *complete* to a competent speaker of the language.

Knowing what you have to leave out, and what you cannot leave out, is a basic hallmark of adult language capability. If kapalama replaced the word "I" with "kapalama", in every post kapalama ever wrote, kapalama would not be making a mistake, kapalama would be failing to write English. See? Syllogisms, allowable replacements, and required replacements. Now imagine kapalama speaking in that same non-English way, in a bad accent, and it would not be a surprise if kapalama got ignored by any Japanese natives.

Does kapalama being a dick make the conversation go anywhere? No. Now let's back to the parent's table, together and converse passionately but not childishly.

Japanese people will flat *ignore you* if you speak with an accent in some situations. Or if the speaker blah blah blah. A speaker has to use words that a Japanese person uses, in the accent they use. Not words that kinds of sound like the ones Japanese people use, put together in a way kind of like they do. And all the time spent on the internet sites sites like iTalki and Lang8 and the like won't help as much as one would like, because only a self-selecting group of Japanese are there, (and foreigners that want to see if they can pass as Japanese). From the Japanese side, these are often basically lonely hearts clubs dating services. Which is fine adn we can definite take advantage of that for our own ends, but let's accept them as being in part like that. And, not as the best way to make sure your spoken Japanese is good. They have their uses, but at some point you have to get outside the kindness bubble, and see if you Japanese works when the person you are trying to talk to has no stake in you at all. IE immersion.

This is dramatically different than someone who learns English and speaks with a British accent or a German accent, or a Russian accent or a French Accent or a Spanish accent, or an Italian accent. Hell each one of those languages functions as a lingua franca over broad swaths of the globe.

Japanese is a language to precisely one country. This is exceptional probably to the point of being the only case worldwide, where the mother tongue is only spoken in the native country and there is no lingua franca to bridge the gap with other cultures. So learning Japanese is in fact not usefully analogous to learning any other language in many ways.

Add to the fact that Japanese shares the Chinese disdain for the vernacular, and this spells trouble for most learners, because most learners get taught by Japanese native educators who orientalize their own language because:

1. Japanese is exceptional probably to the point of being the only case worldwide, where the mother tongue is only spoken in the native country and there is no lingua franca to bridge the gap.

2. Kanji is a quixotic writing system, and the reading of the writing is even more quixotic

3. General disdain for the vernacular.

That's not true. Japanese has multiple accents and dialects and is spoken in countries outside of Japan as well.

ryuudou Wrote:That's not true. Japanese has multiple accents and dialects and is spoken in countries outside of Japan as well.

(Ignoring the accent/dialect because that is in fact one of the biggest problem college Japanese learners have. I am not clear how to re-construct an argument that makes accent/dialect a point about anything except what I already said, since that is kind of at the base of my complaints about college Japanese, that it is taught in an odd way that ignores vernacular, because Japanese educators always pretend the vernacular does not exist, since it is rarely represented in written form. Japanese language education in spectacularly solidly based in prescriptive linguistics.)

But that's like saying Polish is spoken in America. Yes there are groups of new immigrants in every country. That's not at all like saying it is spoken in those countries. Even in the lands once held by Imperial Japan, where compulsory education was done for 40+ years in Japanese, Japanese is basically non existent. No one says Taiwan speaks Japanese, even though there are people who received their compulsory education solely in Japanese, and pursued college level education in Japan. "Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation" is a kind of so-so written book full of amazing ideas that talks about the Taiwanese identifying as Japanese.

Nowhere is anything like French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, English, Italian, Portuguese, (or even Carolinian to use a local example) and the list goes on. I don't really know the non-English Lingua Franca in the Indian Subcontinent. The Devanagari script is shared, but I do not know about speech.

kapalama Wrote:Japanese people will flat *ignore you* if you speak with an accent in most situations. Or if the speaker blah blah blah. A speaker has to use words that a Japanese person uses, in the accent they use. Not words that kinds of sound like the ones Japanese people use, put together in a way kind of like they do. And all the time spent on the internet sites sites like iTalki and Lang8 and the like won't help, because only self-selecting group of Japanese are there, (and foreigners that want to see if they can pass as Japanese). From the Japanese side, these are often basically lonely hearts clubs dating services. Which is fine, but accepting them as that, and not ways to make sure your spoken Japanese is OK is better.

That's your opinion. Many of us have gotten hundreds of hours of useful practice out of sites like Lang-8 and iTalki. And none of our Japanese friends or acquaintances or even random strangers we meet in bars seem to have much trouble understanding us.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:That's your opinion. Many of us have gotten hundreds of hours of useful practice out of sites like Lang-8 and iTalki. And none of our Japanese friends or acquaintances or even random strangers we meet in bars seem to have much trouble understanding us.

(What's this 'we' shit white man? We forming gangs here? I got friends somewhere here, maybe. (checks) OK I don't have any friends here. But what does that have to do with the ideas which are the topic of discussion? Your ideas and experiences can stand on their own, or they cannot. It really does not matter how many people you think agree with you on the internet. Go ahead and use the word 'I' unless you are at the keyboard with someone else in your lap. If you got someone in your lap, stop typing and get to work.)

You quoted where I clearly overstated. I fixed that. If iTalki's all you got, then it is. It will at least keep a speaker from stopping translating in their head.

But there is a problem with those. People who have developed speaking ticks in front of easy crowds (iTalki, friends, people in bars) will often find those ticks hard to fix once they are in front of people who are not the slightest bit interested in who the speaker is.

If the speaker treats every chance like a chance to conform speech to those around them, then they are doing immersion (in my sense) even if it spread out over time. I never said that would not work.

kapalama Wrote:If you don't understand the point of what I said, then you don't.

I understand what you said. And it's wrong. It's so ridiculously wrong that it doesn't even warrant debating any further.

kapalama Wrote:

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:That's your opinion. Many of us have gotten hundreds of hours of useful practice out of sites like Lang-8 and iTalki. And none of our Japanese friends or acquaintances or even random strangers we meet in bars seem to have much trouble understanding us.

(What's this 'we' shit white man? We forming gangs here? I got friends somewhere here, maybe. (checks) OK I don't have any friends here. But what does that have to do with the ideas which are the topic of discussion? Your ideas and experiences can stand on their own, or they cannot. It really does not matter how many people you think agree with you on the internet. Go ahead and use the word 'I' unless you are at the keyboard with someone else in your lap. If you got someone in your lap, stop typing and get to work.)

I think the meaning of "many of us" and "we" is pretty clear here. Multiple people on this forum and elsewhere have used these tools with success. That's not to say I'm automatically right because VAST MOB OF PEOPLE WITH PITCHFORKS AND FIRE, but to cite multiple data points.

kapalama Wrote:But there is a problem with those. People who have developed speaking ticks in front of easy crowds (iTalki, friends, people in bars) will often find those ticks hard to fix once they are in front of people who are not the slightest bit interested in who the speaker is.

But that can be true no matter where/who you learn from - iTalki, friends, people in bars.

After several years on this journey, I (look, ma - "I" language!) realized it's very easy to overthink learning methods. One can easily, as we say in the software industry, end up letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Absorb the language anywhere, any way you can, and don't overthink it. More importantly, ENJOY it. That's my approach, anyway.

kapalama Wrote:If the speaker treats every chance like a chance to conform speech to those around them, then they are doing immersion (in my sense) even if it spread out over time. I never said that would not work.

Totally agreed. The key is to keep listening actively.

[Zgarbas]

I was quite fluent in japanese before i had my first conversation, and only had 63 hours of spoken japanese before i got to japan (42 class hours online, 15 minute interview, 21 hours of work interpreting techical japanese; the classes were not 1 on 1 and i spent most of my work time being idle so it probably amounts to less)
have had no problems living in japan and doing grad school in japanese with only that serving as speaking experience.

There is no one best way to learn a language.

Also, while i never partook in japanese work culture so obviously we are exposed to different types of people, i find japanese people extraodinarily understanding. In my experience none had pretended not to understand me simply becauee i have an accent and make the occasional mistake. Unless i genuinely phrased something too poorly to be understood, they do their best to understand me. I'd place them high on the 'understanding towards foreigners' scale, somewhere beneath spanish speakers. In my experience chinese and brazilian people would be the lowest on the scale.

Zgarbas Wrote:I was quite fluent in japanese before i had my first conversation.

The statement that you were 'fluent' in Japanese before you ever had a conversation is simply a mistake in the application of one of the terms by one of us, or a fundamental disagreement in meaning.

It's also worth noting that written English can get relatively close to spoken English, but this is an oddity, including amongst major European languages. "Hatred of the vernacular" is the norm really, yet language learners do just fine (seriously. I strongly doubt the gap between manga speech and spoken Japanese is wider than the gap between written French and slangy, urban, French or rural French; in Italy everyday speech is heavily influenced by languages which aren't even Italian in the first place; the list goes on.)

Also, do you know the typical speech patterns of expats in supposedly more relaxed countries (according to some cryptoxenophobic conception), or of your average migrant worker? Like repeating "you know" or "my friend" every two words? Or using slang words and strong language so much that they're almost always out of place? These people learn "the spoken language" without any textbooks and generally they don't sound terribly natural (in the case of expats they usually sound positively idiotic), although I wouldn't say they aren't fluent. Dunno. As always with language-learning methods, ymmv.

poblequadrat Wrote:It's also worth noting that written English can get relatively close to spoken English, but this is an oddity, including amongst major European languages.

Here's something I was clearly unaware of. Is this a historical accident, do you think? Or are there factors unique to English that allows this?

I am trying to make some hay out of the fact that two simultanesous empires (American and British) were both using it as their language. But that brute fact is all I can come up with, because I am well out of my depth in linguistics.

It's frustrating, though, just how many odd opinions professional linguistics people have about Japanese though. It does not help that the average Japanese teacher still is trapped in presrciptive linguistics mode. So those Japanese people (Japanese native with both English and Linguistics training) who could speak sense to other linguistics people (who do not know Japanese) fail to do so. The end result is linguists who don;t know Japanese having some unintentionally strongly prescriptive beliefs about the nature of Japanese as a spoken language.

I proofed a couple of publications that a college Japanese teacher (linguistics PhD from an American university) was publishing, and it was weird to see how she viewed her language.

poblequadrat Wrote:Also, do you know the typical speech patterns of expats in supposedly more relaxed countries (according to some cryptoxenophobic conception), or of your average migrant worker? Like repeating "you know" or "my friend" every two words? Or using slang words and strong language so much that they're almost always out of place? These people learn "the spoken language" without any textbooks and generally they don't sound terribly natural (in the case of expats they usually sound positively idiotic), although I wouldn't say they aren't fluent..

(Responding separately because two different ideas.)

Those people are learning from the actually spoken language though. Their success, whatever it is, is from partial immersion.

My point about Japanese is that since it has never been used as lingua franca, it may be far less capable of being bent and not yet broken by people not immersing, which is a different thing.

The counter is that merely listening and reading (and never practicing production and looking for feedback) might allow for more fluency than I am saying it could. My experience has not shown this to be the case, and in fact has a high degree of counter examples. (This of course has lot to do with Japanese being taught badly, and not much to do with it being learned badly.)

Including people who spoke pretty 'broken' Japanese copied from various sources ('broken' only because they learned from different people with different speech patterns at different times, and Frankensteined together something no one Japanese person would maybe ever say.

[Zgarbas]

kapalama Wrote:

Zgarbas Wrote:I was quite fluent in japanese before i had my first conversation.

The statement that you were 'fluent' in Japanese before you ever had a conversation is simply a mistake in the application of one of the terms by one of us, or a fundamental disagreement in meaning.

-
I could read novels, both contemporary and modern, news articles on unfamiliar topics, could watch stuff without subss IF i wanted to (I prefer subs in all languages due to hearing problems tho), and when I did encounter Japanese people I could hold my own in conversation without much problems, though it did take me a while to integrate more natural speech patterns (about 2-3 months). I also wrote a research proposal in Japanese, was able to take grad school classes as soon as I got here, and had passed the N1 while still in my home country.

I think I fit the definition of fluent, thank you very much.

It's cool that you managed to learn Japanese in such a stressful, tedious and chaotic manner, but to claim that it is the best is a bit exaggerated, to say the least.

I did learn one language via spoken immersion with no theoretical support (Spanish), but it took years, and my level is nowhere near what it could've been via traditional means, and I had a lot of favourable circumstances (similar to my native tongue, understanding environment, and a lot of exposure as a child). I still have a thick accent in it, much thicker than in Japanese.