Hi everybody,

I am a member of the RevTK site for almost a year now. This is my first post here so please be kind to me.

First time that I had to carry a conversation in English was at a job interview two years ago. I got the job and now I have to speak it almost every day (with my boss and some of the colleagues).
In school I started to learn English in 6th grade until end of highschool. Than came college with no English studies and then came another 7 years until the above mentioned job interview (I was 29 at the time).
With French I have almost same background (5th grade until end of highschool) but I can not carry a conversation in French.
You wanna know why? Only one word: Hollywood. In my country movies are not dubbed and most of them are Hollywood movies. My math teacher in highschool made a suggestion about how we can actually learn English by covering the bottom of the TV screen with a piece of paper so that we can not see the subs. I thought this was an interesting idea and practiced like this. At first I was just understanding like one word out of 30 (yes, I was that bad at it) but in time (maybe 2 years) I couldn't care less about the subs and I was often laughing at the way it was translated into my language.
Not the same story with French though. Alain Delon and Louis De Funes didn't make too many movies and so if I watch something in French I can get like 10% of what is being said. Sad but true.
Another success that I had was with Italian. In 10th grade I got cable TV and could watch Italia Uno (owned by Berlusconi). They had great movies and shows (Le ragazze di Non e la Rai was one of my favorites, Ambra rings a bell to anyone) and a good thing for me was that all the movies were dubbed (not such a good thing for the Italians though). In two years I could understand 99.99% of what was being said in a movie. And I was not the only one. Some of my friends were more advanced than me(more time spent in front of TV, cable TV before me ). There were also people who didn't trust me when I was telling them that I learned Italian from the TV only. I got also proof that I can also speak Italian when I had a 10 min conversation with an Italian over the phone.

A lot of people don't belief that you can learn to speak by listening only and this was the main reason for starting this thread (see the recent discussions in the AJATT's youtube videos...).

So if you have even better stories please share them here to make it clear to anybody who wants' to listen that the Input Theory is more than just a theory.

I learned English by watching TV...

In English!

And I'm American. What are the chances...

Joking aside. I was singing the Ninja Turtle Song before I even understood what most of the words meant. I was jumping out of tress shouting Kawabunga!!! I watched David the Gnome pretty much everyday and couldn't for the life of me figure out what a Ganome was. I've never been on a picnic, but for some reason I knew what was meant by "Picnic time, at Eureka's castle."

When I first met my cousin, I thought she was a mindless robot because she just repeated things off the television (even when uncalled for). Now it's clear that pretty much everyone is like this; taking random strings of input and learning from them.

Non-Native wise, Japanese now sounds like English mixed with Japanese to me. There are some moments where it's like I've been hearing it my whole life and others where I'm like WTF. I'm excited about what is to come.

I kinda learned English by watching TV (although I am not exactly fluent, probably should have mined sentences..) and movies with english subs. Now I try to do the same with Japanese, but more systematically.

[ファブリス]

Welcome incepator!

I think it's possible to learn purely by listening, but you may also be gifted for this. How you pay attention probably makes a big difference. I mean, if you just watch without trying to connect the dots, you may not get as much from it.

I have a very similar background with English, except I also played lots of adventure games so I had a lot of english reading practice, which gives more time to lookup words in a dictionary.

So, did you never ever read Italian?

I totaly agree with the input hypothesis and I believe you can learn japanese by reading and listening only. But I guess some people here won't be so nice.

The fact is that "Romanian is a Romance language, belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family" (from wikipedia).

I don't know how much Romanian and Italian resemble.
I'm Brazilian, I never studied Italian and I can understand italian quite well if spoken very slowly - tought I can only speak "porco dio" and "capicce". Same for Spanish, but spanish can go in normal speed (but not too fast).

I learnt English by going to a daycare/preschool-thing, with a fancy British Accent

Then I went to Canada and lost the British Accent... I watched an episode of Barney and Pokemon now and then...

ファブリス Wrote:I think it's possible to learn purely by listening, but you may also be gifted for this. How you pay attention probably makes a big difference. I mean, if you just watch without trying to connect the dots, you may not get as much from it.

I was talking more about learning conversation skills just by listening. I am sure I don't have any gift, but yes you are right about active listening.

ファブリス Wrote:So, did you never ever read Italian?

No I didn't, but it's mostly a phonetic language so most of the time what is written it's exactly what you hear (like my native language). It's a very easy language to learn.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I don't know how much Romanian and Italian resemble.
I'm Brazilian, I never studied Italian and I can understand italian quite well if spoken very slowly - tought I can only speak "porco dio" and "capicce". Same for Spanish, but spanish can go in normal speed (but not too fast).

People say that they resemble a lot. The fact is that when I listen for the first time I couldn't understand one word of it. I think knowing some French and English also helped me. I am sure that you can learn Italian and Spanish just by watching TV a lot. Same goes for me regarding Spanish and Portuguese.

But my point was that you don't need necessarily to speak to anybody to have decent conversation skills. If you just listen to other people talking eventually this will come naturally also for you. It's not important how you actually learn the language (formal like in school or in some other informal way).

There is a point when you study a language where you can understand everything or almost everything but you are still not able to have a decent conversation. In my opinion what you need is to listen more. That's it. If you just listen more at some point in time speaking the language will became natural to you.

I agree. I did roughly the same for english.
But we still need to prove it for japanese.
Welcome on board.

I was more fluent with Italian after two years of study at home than I was with Japanese after 5 years high school.

With Italian you have the huge problem that about half the verbs are irregular, plus a lot of detailed rules (I can't believe that verbs sometimes inflect with gender of subject or object!). However, the writing system is trivial, a lot of vocab overlaps with English and a lot of grammar with Greek. And I only learnt it from reading a couple of textbooks. Oh maybe one of the books had a tape. And I asked an Italian workmate some grammar questions. And that's all. With a good dictionary and verb charts I can read most anything and at least get the gist of it.

Compare Japanese. After 5 years back in high school, and a few years in recent times, I still know only ~1000 kanji, not enough to read fluently (in the sense that I know the meaning and at least the most common reading--I'm not count just knowing the RTK keyword), and the grammar of many common sentences seems really odd to me.

Personally I think that the main difference is that Japanese is a different family. It's not Indo-European so the way you think about how you put your sentence together is way different. Like in Indo-European languages, every sentence has to have a subject. It's intrinsic in how you think. In Japanese, there is no equivalent to the Indo-European subject. You have が and は but neither of those are the same thing. And verb tenses are all different. In English, Italian, etc. you have past/present/future. In Japanese you have past, but future and present are combined, and you have the strange ましょう future tense instead. Plus Japanese has its several levels of politeness making it almost three separate languages--all languages I know have plain/polite/honorific ways of speaking, but Japanese has made that an art form!

As for learning by listening only, I agree with Fab. You'd have to be born with a knack for it to be able to do that. I reckon most people would either need to learn some grammar and vocab to start them off, or be able to stop and ask questions of a native speaker and get immediate feedback on their comprehension. Depends how fast you want to pick it up to. My teenage son has picked up a few words from watching subbed anime for a couple of years, but not more than that. It hasn't taught him to put sentences together.

I took five years of French. I've almost aquired more Japanese in 4 months than French in that entire span.

Self study, with the right sources, is far better than traditional school method.

kazelee Wrote:I took five years of French. I've almost aquired more Japanese in 4 months than French in that entire span.

Self study, with the right sources, is far better than traditional school method.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true and depends 100% on the school. People here are learning Japanese fast, but then again, many of em are spending over 5 hours a day studying, in traditional school you train like.. 4 hours a week.

Sadly, there's never any "proof", just evidence in support of it.

What I don't getting is all the balking at the idea. What is wrong with saying "Hey, listen to the language a lot". "Hey, when you listen to it, listen to stuff natives listen to".

I think the main complaint is listening to material you don't understand 100% or close to it.

Granted, the full theory (I think) is you don't have to study at all. That's the extreme end of the theory that I don't think has practical application outside of people that are unable to write or speak due to injury or illness.

Tobberoth Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:I took five years of French. I've almost aquired more Japanese in 4 months than French in that entire span.

Self study, with the right sources, is far better than traditional school method.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true and depends 100% on the school. People here are learning Japanese fast, but then again, many of em are spending over 5 hours a day studying, in traditional school you train like.. 4 hours a week.

Hence the problem when people say "I've studied Japanese for 5 years", "I lived in Japan for 10 years", "I've done Japanese for 6 months" and each could be at the same level. It's more honest and easier to gauge when someone can guestimate the number of hours he's been studying. Two hours a day studying with 6 to 8 hours a day just listening/reading Japanese for fun every day for 6 months equals 350 hours of study and 1300 hours of listening/reading. Like Tobberoth says, that's going to exceed someone that ONLY does a Japanese class or two for those six months.

Even at our fast pace, we can't expect fluency fast. We have to hold this pace for two to three years, which calls for quite a bit of dedication and motivation. It's easy to lose heart and get dejected when you see your efforts producing minor results every day.

Ah, Nukemarine said it better than I could have. When I read Tobberoth's post, I was thinking the same thing.

The secret to doing anything well is to put in the hours.

The problem with merely listening to Japanese is that unlike romance languages, it's very sound poor. Which is why a ton of Japanese television programs, from the news to comedy plaster huge Japanese subtitles over everything because even natives would have trouble piecing together some topics without anything to distinguish the homophones.

It's also often times difficult to distinguish between a lot of sounds when simply listening to native speech. Take 最悪 [さいあく] and お愛想 [おあいそ]. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what the hell my kids were saying when they said "さい~やく" until I happened to come across the compound in my own study and realized that the way they were inflecting it was different from the real sound itself. お愛想 was even worse. I learned that 3 years ago from my host mom, and for three years I said [おわいそ] at restaurants. It wasn't until I saw it in context-- read it, that I realized my mistake and corrected myself.

Literacy in Japanese is almost, but not quite a completely different skill than listening, unlike the languages most of us are used to. There are a ton of Japanese people, for example, in America who can speak Japanese, but are illiterate.

Tobberoth Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:I took five years of French. I've almost aquired more Japanese in 4 months than French in that entire span.

Self study, with the right sources, is far better than traditional school method.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true and depends 100% on the school. People here are learning Japanese fast, but then again, many of em are spending over 5 hours a day studying, in traditional school you train like.. 4 hours a week.

To add,

Schools where a person would actually learn the lesson at a similar pace are usually specialized. Specialized schools aren't what I'd count as traditional.

I'm pretty sure 'Japanese is so sound-poor that even the Japanese need subtitles to understand it' is one of the many falsities people say to further mystify a language that's already been incredibly mystified and which isn't actually very mysterious. It's true that the news and variety shows tend to caption certain parts, but I don't believe that has anything to do with confusion of homophones (usually the captioned things aren't confusing, anyway). Anyway, dramas and anime rarely feature captions except for additional information and comedic effect (because they are funny, and it's probably why variety shows use them), and the audio drama genre is very popular in Japan. I don't believe they experience confusion any greater than in any other language.

The 最悪 and お愛想 examples just demonstrate issues with false sound perceptions that always plague cross-language communications. The most straightforward example with Japanese has always been 円, which is simply えん, but which we perceived as 'yen' in the same way that you perceived あく as 'yaku', because of our expectations from our native language and it's orthographic system. A similar thing happens when they convert over most of our 'ca' sounds - they become キャ, which can confuse us, but it's actually pretty accurate coming from their perspective. Their orthographic system is actually so accurate at the moment (thanks to the nature of the language and mostly to the, relatively speaking, recent reforms) that we should really be thankful for only small misunderstandings like that. The combination of English's incredibly rich sound library and our rather complicated (if ultimately useful) spelling system makes English examples of this sort of confusion much more severe.

Please, please, please don't mystify a language that's already suffered so much unwarranted mystification. Very little of it's true.

QuackingShoe Wrote:I'm pretty sure 'Japanese is so sound-poor that even the Japanese need subtitles to understand it' is one of the many falsities people say to further mystify a language that's already been incredibly mystified and which isn't actually very mysterious.
...
Please, please, please don't mystify a language that's already suffered so much unwarranted mystification. Very little of it's true.

Yes! He's so right here!

FutureBlues Wrote:The problem with merely listening to Japanese is that unlike romance languages, it's very sound poor.

I don't get that. If anything Japanese being "sound poor" makes learning from listening to it a lot easier than with languages that have more complicated sounds.

Well, it makes it harder and easier in different ways. Words in English are (comparatively) easy to keep distinguished from each other, because there's no other word in English that sounds like 'refrigerator' or 'cobalt,' and infamously, nothing rhymes with 'orange'. Learning the individual sounds and the words has some extra difficulty to it because they're so FAR OUT from each other, but at the same time, at least they're not easily confused. A language like Japanese has the exact opposite problem. No word you ever hear will have sounds you haven't heard before, so that makes things easier. But it also means there are five other words that sound exactly or almost exactly the same, dozens that rhyme, and hundreds that are similar in some way.

So, it is harder. It's just also easier.

Refrigerator?

Surely you must mean refurigiita.

If the captions are not for clarification, I'm curious to know what they are for? Isn't it because news contains vocabulary that is not used in every day life and kanji are given b/c the word may not be obvious from the sound alone?

Drama dialogues don't present the same problem.

I would think that the potential for homonym confusion is indeed more of an issue in Japanese than in English. People will occasionally draw kanji on their hand in conversation to distinguish homonyms.

These are the kinds of posts that motivate me so much (well, the original post, not the stuff after that). It really makes me feel that one day I will be able to sound like a native Japanese speaker. I look at incepator's writing and think that if he didn't say so himself, I would be very hard-pressed to believe that he wasn't a native speaker of English. If he can get this far, surely I can take what ability I have and keep nurturing it though simple stuff like reading and watching Crayon Shin-chan and one day I will be able to hold an intelligent conversation in Japanese.

Thanks for sharing your story!

I normally don't want to listen to statements that are informing me about how hard or difficult it is to learn a particular language. Any type of particularity just makes it interesting not difficult. I think that one proof of that is that 2 years seams to be enough to learn any language I heard of if you really mean it. If a language is hard I would expect that one would need exponential time to learn it compare to some easy ones.

On the other hand, if you want you can find many reasons why English is a hard language to learn. Some of them are written here:
http://www.glowingfaceman.com/2008/09/10...guage.html
If you need more I can give you more and I think the other members who are not natives can help me put together a pretty long list but I think that's not the point here.
I just want to enjoy the ride. Please come aboard!