I was wondering: is there a point in the process of learning Japanese where you can forget about your crutches - namely using a SRS to review your (RTK) kanji and mined sentences - and start "flying" on the language, that is, for example, reading web pages, mangas and novels from time to time (not even doing it on regular, daily basis) with ease and without forgetting core knowledge such as frequent kanji and so on.

My question may seem candid, but I consider myself "flying on English" while it is not my mother tongue. Nor am I living in an English speaking coutry or environment. Have some of you here reached such a proficiency with Japanese while not living in Japan? How much time did it took? What are the big mistakes you consider having done and that have delayed quite a lot your reaching that level of fluency?

Good question and would be pretty interested in seeing if anyone has ever really reached this point. Unfortunately what I wrote below doesn't even come close to answering the question.

From my experience, every person that can speak Japanese at a decent level that I've met here living in Japan is still either in the process of studying or hit a wall that was pretty hard to get past and decided their daily-use Japanese was good enough. After that, it doesn't seem to "naturally" increase in ability a lot unless you study it up to a rather high level at first and/or immerse yourself deeply in an environment where you use it on a daily basis. Not that I meet a ton of people who can speak Japanese here. heh...

Specifically, I had an old boss that had a Japanese wife and children. He's been in Japan for about 14 years and is married to a Japanese woman, with whom he has 3 children. He stopped studying about 11 years ago (3 years after coming to Japan.. he also majored in Japanese at university). He took the JLPT1 about 2 years or so ago and didn't pass it. At least half of his life is conducted in Japanese (his wife and children do not speak English, so his home life is almost 100% Japanese). Now I don't think this guy is a genius or even overly interested in perfecting his Japanese, but he obviously has put forth a fair amount of effort and is at the very least of average intelligence. Also keep in mind he did this quite some time ago using traditional methods. He didn't exactly have access to the (hopefully) more efficient methods we use nowadays.

Then again, I'd met immigrants living in the United States who had been there for quite some time and still had terrible English. But at the same time, I guess some people are quite satisfied with hitting a "daily use" level. I guess if you have a real desire to improve your English, then you'll make a little extra effort to remember things and correct mistakes while going about your daily life (non-studying time with a language).

I guess another very important thing in this is a true desire to access information in Japanese and not just accessing it for the purpose of practicing. For most English speakers (native or high-fluency), I guess this can be pretty difficult as just about any resource is available in English. The only stuff I'd think you can't find is information very specifically about Japan...and even a great deal of this can be found in English.

For a lot of people learning English, I think the desire to access the English internet plays a huge role in how quickly they acquire it. Then the internet basically fills this "environment" issue.

Furthermore, I'm assuming your native language is French, which is at least related to English. Those connections probably help hold it in your mind much firmer than Japanese would be. So Japanese would probably take a lot more usage. My guess, anyways...

This is a problem I'm extremely interested in hearing some answers about myself, as I'm going to be leaving Japan someday and am hoping my Japanese is at this "flying on the language" level by then.

(P.S. Sorry for the rambling post)

I've been studying for about 10 years, but I've been out of college for 5 years now, and since I don't live in Japan or use Japanese in my professional life my study has been pretty on-and-off. I'm not sure whether I could truly say that I'm there yet. I'm pretty sure that I could if I had studied more diligently. My Japanese is conversational, and I do read things like novels, but political and current-events stuff is slow for me because I don't have all of that vocabulary.

YogaSpirit Wrote:I was wondering: is there a point in the process of learning Japanese where you can forget about your crutches - namely using a SRS to review your (RTK) kanji and mined sentences - and start "flying" on the language, that is, for example, reading web pages, mangas and novels from time to time (not even doing it on regular, daily basis) with ease and without forgetting core knowledge such as frequent kanji and so on.

The second does not imply that the first has occurred. I'm certainly not past using an SRS to review mined sentences, but I read manga with facility (almost daily—I was stuck at my apartment sick this week, so I read through ten volumes of ぼくらの and half of AKIRA), light novels fairly easily, and while I encounter words I don't know pretty frequently in Battle Royale (original novel version) I rarely encounter a section where I come out without an understanding of what just happened.

So I'd say I'm some meaningful fraction of the way to your point. The big point where I'm lacking is simply vocabulary, which is merely a matter of time.

(For reference, I've been studying Japanese for about three, three and a half years now, though there's a dramatic inflection point in my progress about a year and a half ago when I went through an active readjustment of my approach to learning the language)

~J

woodwojr Wrote:I went through an active readjustment of my approach to learning the language)~J

And what was that? What was your learning approach during those 3 years and what would you recommend?

I think the answer is never.

As with anything, if you stop practicing you will eventually lose the ability. Even Japanese who have been living abroad start to forget kanji and vocabulary. Either you need to live there and be immersed in the language, or use some form of continuous study as a substitute.

YogaSpirit Wrote:

woodwojr Wrote:I went through an active readjustment of my approach to learning the language

And what was that? What was your learning approach during those 3 years and what would you recommend?

During the initial period, my "learning approach" was "sign up for class, attend, wait for magic to happen". Exposure to authentic Japanese material was mostly incidental; I had a gig translating H-manga and would read (to the limited extent I could at the time) occasional weekly manga releases in Japanese because I didn't want to wait for the internets to do its magic, but I never reached a point where doing that sort of thing was natural or where I was actively trying to increase my exposure to Japanese materials.

My learning approach now is pretty much the standard approach for this site; there are variations (I've transitioned mostly away from Heisig, for example, and I have a much heavier emphasis on simple consumption of target-language material than on explicit study than appears to be typical around here—this is because I'm lazy, mind you, it's definitely working for me but I have no evidence that there isn't benefit to increasing explicit study to at least some degree), but mostly it's just "do whatever floats your boat, as long as it's in Japanese".

I don't mean to say that the time spent futzing about in class and not much else was wasted, mind you—I think it positioned me very well to advance in an immersion-focused environment. Whether it was better or worse than starting out with an AJATT-style approach I really can't say (well, aside from the fact that taking classes boosted my GPA, which an AJATT-approach by itself wouldn't have ). Still, the class approach pretty clearly wasn't going to take me much further—I took the last class our university offered after going immersion-based, and while it did help me with some grammatical points, ultimately there's only so much grammar and the limiting factor had clearly become vocabulary some time previously.

I sorta went off on random tangents there. If there's anything I didn't address that you'd like to know, please let me know.

Edit: regarding recommendations, I really think the big win for me was reaching the point where what I did for relaxation was in Japanese. I went through something like a six-month period where I did no explicit Japanese study at all, but because I was reading manga constantly during that period I suffered setbacks in only a few areas and overall came out more competent than I went in.

~J

YogaSpirit Wrote:I was wondering: is there a point in the process of learning Japanese where you can forget about your crutches - namely using a SRS to review your (RTK) kanji and mined sentences -

Huh... de ja vu....

YogaSpirit Wrote:What are the big mistakes you consider having done and that have delayed quite a lot your reaching that level of fluency?

I don't know about delay "a lot", but here are a couple of recommendations based on my own mistakes and observing some of the mistakes of my students.

- Don't neglect pronunciation. There's a tendency to think that if you've learned to read the kana, you know how to pronounce Japanese. But there are a lot of little aspects to Japanese like nonvoiced vowels and the "n" mora that take a little work. Japanese pronunciation is undeniably simpler than many other languages, but that doesn't mean it can be neglected entirely.

- Don't neglect grammar explanations. I know this is a controversial statement, and I want to make it clear what I'm saying here. I absolutely agree that the most important thing to do is read/listen to a lot of Japanese, but reading good grammatical explanations along with the Japanese sentences can go a long way towards helping you avoid mistaken inferences. (This is drawn directly from my own experience -- when I began teaching Japanese and had to intensively study the grammatical explanations in Japanese: The Spoken Language, I found quite a lot that I didn't know or had learned wrong, and it improved my comprehension of Japanese a great deal even though this was an introductory textbook and I had passed JLPT 1. As a specific example, at this point I had played hundreds of hours of Japanese RPGs and seen "wa" and "ga" many, many times, but it wasn't until I read JSL's wa/ga explanations and really started looking for how it was used that I started picking up on a lot of the finer points of its use.) You should always be reading Japanese a lot, lot more than reading about Japanese, though.

Some people will claim that you don't need grammatical explanations because you will eventually develop a "feel" for how things work, but unless I am just particularly bad at making inferences, your "feel" will sometimes turn out to be wrong. I've seen some people go on to say that even if you're wrong at first, you'll eventually correct yourself, but I also don't think this is true -- once you have the conception that you think you understand something, it's very hard to figure out on your own that you actually don't.

- Don't neglect katakana. There is a lot of katakana in native Japanese material, and an inability to fluently read katakana strings (and understand what words they represent) will harm your ability to read Japanese fluently. Especially since so many of these words you already know from English, having a mastery of katakana gives you a huge benefit. There's a tendency for people to look at kana as something you have to get out of the way as quickly as possible so that you can start on kanji, but this can lead to problems.

- Don't neglect the readings of kanji. I'm not talking about RTK here; I'm talking about when you are actually reading real Japanese sentences for practice, don't let yourself get away with "I know what this means but I don't know how to read it". If that's the case what it probably means is that you're switching back and forth between Japanese and your native language (i.e. connecting kanji with your native language rather than Japanese), which is a barrier to fluent reading.

I think that's the major points for me -- as for your main question, I think it was maybe 5 years before I was reading things I was interested in with substantial comprehension and reasonable dictionary use. Other people may take less or more time; I don't know.

yudantaiteki Wrote:There's a tendency for people to look at kana as something you have to get out of the way as quickly as possible so that you can start on kanji, but this can lead to problems.

Not kana. Just hiragana. I think there is so much of that you'll invariably learn it through exposure alone. Katakana is a nightmare, though. Even though a lot katakana words come from English, you'll get a headache trying to connect the two.

Someone once posted saying that katakana words have no shape. After playing hours of Japanese games I can say for certain that is not true.

Yeah, I agree that hiragana tend to be a lot easier than katakana to get a hold of.

One other thing I forgot about:

- Don't ignore politeness. Politeness and formality is one of the most difficult topics in Japanese (I personally consider it the most difficult, even more so than kanji), but there is no better way to make a good impression on Japanese people than to correctly use polite Japanese (which also means not using Japanese that is *too* polite for the situation). Even if you're not going to speak it often, politeness levels are used frequently in fictional works (particularly anime/manga). People sometimes get the misconception that polite language isn't used very often (or that it's archaic or used mostly by old people), and this misconception is often spread by Japanese people themselves.

My experience confirms your comment on politeness: from where I am, that seems to be a huge barrier to understand some sentences due to suffixes and others that I don't already know.

@YogaSpirit I've been wondering about this thing for some time, I really want to get to the point (just like English) where SRS doesn't matter in Japanese, but I know it's there because I've already reached it in another language.

I don't believe that I'm gonna add 10,000 sentences to my SRS, I will get out of the "Study" frame as soon as possible, and just "use" the language. Sorry that I can't tell how much it's gonna take .

Matthew Wrote:I think the answer is never.

As with anything, if you stop practicing you will eventually lose the ability. Even Japanese who have been living abroad start to forget kanji and vocabulary. Either you need to live there and be immersed in the language, or use some form of continuous study as a substitute.

Yeah, that's basically what I was going to post. If you are in a situation where you have Japanese in your daily life, you can probably stop studying and retain what you have. But if you aren't, and you just watch movies/read books occasionally, you will lose it and the SRS is necessary to maintain your ability.

Yet another settling for mediocrity.

lol @ Yonosa
i think Japanese has different levels of importance to different people in their lives. often, things happen in people's lives where they change their goals and what not and shift away from what they began in the 1st place.

on another note though, i met a German guy in Japan who lived there for 10 years... he spoke both Japanese and English fluently at a speed i have never seen yet from another foreigner. i met him at a youth hostel where he was staying at while working at a japanese company. he told me he was in the process for preparing for the 漢字検定
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei level 1 (requires you know 6000 kanji) so yeh, those people with extreme fluency in the language do exist..

I don't think it's a bad thing to have modest goals; it certainly doesn't mean you have to stop there. I have attained all the goals I had when I started studying Japanese, but I don't consider myself "done" studying, and I've created new goals to aspire to since then.

Hashiriya Wrote:lol @ Yonosa
...on another note though, i met a German guy in Japan who lived there for 10 years... he spoke both Japanese and English fluently at a speed i have never seen yet from another foreigner. i met him at a youth hostel where he was staying at while working at a japanese company. ....

wtf - after 10 years in japan the best he could still do was a youth hostel? I guess this shows that (near) fluency is not the path to riches that many believe it is (and surely with his Japanese level he could have found a nice young lady to umm share living costs with).

i think he made plenty of money but he was just more of a penny pincher... plenty of japanese living there for cheap too

Rooboy Wrote:I guess this shows that (near) fluency is not the path to riches that many believe it is.

You lie!!!

I shall become fluent. From there I shall become rich. What happens in between, only the gods may know.

After a discussion with magamo, I believe 15 000 words is the level one needs to hit. I read English exactly like Swedish. I don't even notice when I run into words I don't know, so I couldn't use an SRS even if I wanted to. I know over 98% of the words I encounter, so when I run into a word I haven't seen, it feels like I know it anyway and it's either ignored or the meaning is picked up from the context automatically.

What one needs to do is hit that level. In the time it takes to learn 15 000 words, any normal person will have had more than enough exposure to grammar etc to use it properly.

Although I would think that by the time you hit the 15000 mark you would long ago have lost track of how many words you know. I have absolutely no idea what the size of my Japanese vocabulary is.

Tobberoth Wrote:I know over 98% of the words I encounter

I should hope so. I realize you're going for a general sense of "almost all", but with a recognition rate of as low as 98% you'd be hitting new vocabulary several times a page—some random person on the internet quotes 80,000 words in a representative book, so taking that simply for argument you'd need better than 99.9999875% accuracy to expect to not find new words in a given book (if you want "likely" rather than "expected", it gets even worse).

This, incidentally, is the bane of speech-to-text and OCR; "poor accuracy" can start with three nines.

~J

Yonosa Wrote:Yet another settling for mediocrity.

This from a guy who just put up a thread titled "Should I quit studying Japanese?"

You can throw rocks once you become fluent, not before.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Although I would think that by the time you hit the 15000 mark you would long ago have lost track of how many words you know. I have absolutely no idea what the size of my Japanese vocabulary is.

How would one measure their vocabulary? If I have an anki deck of my sentences, I can measure my Kanji count, which is a crude measure since it doesn't measure density (number of times each character is seen in sentences). Any ideas?