So i started learning Japanese about a year ago. Stuck with it a few weeks and it dropped off. Trying to start back up, doing the AJATT method and i have one major question.

How do you learn to speak/understand Japanese?

It seems to me studying the Kanji/Kana and sentence mining would work very well for text based communications but i don't understand how it helps verbally.

Do you just pick pronunciations up?
Are you supposed to stop TV shows every ten seconds to look up the meaning of the one word out of hundred you actually understood well enough to figure out how to look it up?
Do the kana take care of how to pronounce things since they're syllabic?

All i could find on AJATT about this issue was a post in which he responded to criticism that he didn't help with verbal communication enough by saying that most people have no problem with that aspect. If that's true then is all the difficulty in learning Japanese simply written grammar?

I apologize if i come off as a noob, I'm still in the midst of Remembering the Kanji 1.

Thanks <3

Basically

You listen a whole lot.
You read a whole lot.

Speaking comes later* and involves practicing what you heard and read with Japanese people.


*Speaking well comes much later
*Basic Japanese comes fast

** There are some people that I have met that flipped this around and figured out how to speak long before learning to read. But this still involved a ton of listening. Really deep concentrated listening.

Being able to speak Japanese is useless unless you are able to understand most of what you hear. Tons of input is required for that. Watching Japanese TV shows is fun but inefficient in the beginning. Small digestible clips with Japanese subtitles/captions work best. Learning to read Japanese first will make this a fun and easy way to improve listening skills. Smart.fm has thousands of sentences you can practice reading while listening to them being read. I like to use online new sources like FNN.com that have transcripts I can read along with during the 30 second clips.

Listening to lots of Japanese will train your ear to hear Japanese words. Yes, you can pause the video or song and look up the one word you actually understood. That's what I did when I first started listening to Japanese before I started learning it and it worked well enough.

You don't really learn to communicate (in any form including written) until you try, try and try again failing numerous times along the way and having people correct you on your mistakes until you've just kinda nailed it and it comes to you. Learning to understand Japanese is magnitudes easier than learning to speak it and as you'll come to find if you stick with it is that your understanding will always be far ahead of your speaking. If you practice output as a skill it will improve and you will get better at speaking but it just so happens that you can't speak something that you don't even understand yet so the more input you get, the more you understand the more READY you will be to learn to speak. It's a bit of a myth that 10,000 sentences later you'll be speaking fluent Japanese, it's just not true. However one could say that it does provide an excellent foundation or perhaps training wheels to begin speaking.

What AJATT (and the whole method) entails is basically an efficient way to open Japanese up to you so it becomes like an open book rather than a big jumbled mess that must be learned from boring text books and word lists. The idea is to have fun because that will keep you motivated. Personally I see AJATT as learning rather than studying but in the beginning stages you do actually have to put in a lot of study to get to that point where you can just switch to cruise mode and learn passively.

Learn the kana first and that will take care of pronunciation, dunno why he says learn Kanji first then kana (it's a bit backwards).

DoctorColin Wrote:Are you supposed to stop TV shows every ten seconds to look up the meaning of the one word out of hundred you actually understood well enough to figure out how to look it up?
Do the kana take care of how to pronounce things since they're syllabic?

IMO

I wouldn't do this at all. At the beginning level watching dramas should be a passive exercise.

Your concentrated listening should be on shorter material that you understand well. Things like textbook dialogues. Listen to these dialogues over and over again while gradually working your way up adding new chapters and learning more Japanese. . . . . .

After a few hundred hours of this you can jump into the native stuff and not have to look up words every 10 seconds. Maybe every 45

Japanese pronunciation is fairly standard. But there are a lot of dialects that can throw you off but this isn't really a pronunciation problem but more a thing of differing conjugations.

That's my opinion.

I've been doing the AJATT method for around 5 months. And in terms of listening i can understand way more than i can speak or write. Same goes for reading i can basically read alot but not can't really write them. So for those specific skills such as writing+speaking. You must train those skills. It be best to get to a good level in terms of understanding and reading before trying to tackle mastering speaking+writing as understanding+reading are far more important in the beginning. In terms of 10,000 sentences do not worrying too much about this. I mean worry about types of things you would want to learn in the beginning. Such as dates,times,names,etc,etc. The list goes on. I'm personally at around 6800+ sentences in 5 months. I have improved greatly but i'm no where near fluent in terms of writing+speaking or reading. Understanding has become high but only for certain things such as manga+anime. But in terms of news and some songs. I still have trouble. You will learn to adept to japanese, once that's done eventually you'll start to be able to understand the little things. Like words. Then you'll be able to pick up entire sentences easily and understand them. And once you understand alot of context+words+sentences. It'll open a door to understanding new words+sentences,etc. It just keeps going basically. So just keep going in terms of understanding+reading. Until you reach a good level then try outputting

DoctorColin Wrote:Are you supposed to stop TV shows every ten seconds

There should only be about 10 words you don't understand at most, 5 is ideal. It's the same for when you're picking out a new book to read. If a random page in the book has more than 5 words you can't understand, the book is too hard for you and you should be reading something easier. It's the same for TV shows. If there's more than 5 words in the first 10 minutes that you can't understand, the show is too hard for you.

I think starting with music was good for me because songs are short and enjoyable even if you understand nothing and can be repeated over and over which gives you opportunities to look words up.

Of course in the beginning you'll have zero vocab but you know you gotta start somewhere. Grind through textbook stuff to get the real basics down (do tae kim for starters) and that'll build a small vocab.

Realistically you won't start understanding native stuff til you have a few thousand vocab under your belt and that's quite a way off yet. However, the way I see it is if you don't understand something then that's exactly the reason you need to watch it/listen to it/read it. You'll soon start understanding things if you do that.

You don't have to understand everything to enjoy it, and you don't have to look anything up to start figuring out what things mean.

Did you look up any English words as a toddler? No, you just listened to your parents and watched cartoons or whatever.

While doing the kanji, I've been watching some stuff in Spanish, which I understand fairly well, and some stuff in Japanese. Without actually studying any Japanese outside of the kana and the kanji, I'm finding that I'm starting to understand quite a bit.

The first things I understood when watching the Japanese were set phrases that are commonly used on their own. There is a lot of repetition in language, and the human brain is somewhat good at piecing that together... so after I knew very well the type of situation in which some Japanese guy would make a certain series of sounds, then I started hearing those sounds spoken in the context of full sentances. Occasionally they spend a long time talking about a certain noun, and say the word for something so many times that you would have to be TRYING not to pick it up and confirm the meaning to yourself when the same word popped up in a different context and you saw that they were talking about the SAME OBJECT.

The same thing happens when they use the imperitive form of a verb. You may then start hearing the other forms of that verb as well(yay!).

The words that put everything together(in Japanese I think that the main ones are called "particles" or something... I heard somebody talking about them) are so common that once you know a few nouns and a few verbs, you pick them up extremely quickly.

Repeat for hours on end.

Quote:There should only be about 10 words you don't understand at most, 5 is ideal. It's the same for when you're picking out a new book to read. If a random page in the book has more than 5 words you can't understand, the book is too hard for you and you should be reading something easier. It's the same for TV shows. If there's more than 5 words in the first 10 minutes that you can't understand, the show is too hard for you.

I have to wholeheartedly disagree.

Andd.... my 10 minutes on these forums for the day are up. leechblock https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476 is yelling at me.

Thanks for all the advice.

Sounds like the best thing to do would just allow AJATT to lull me into Japanese passively while I'm working on the Kanji and Kana. After I'm done with those, start focusing on music I've heard several times and am familiar with? Figuring out what they're saying, and remembering it.

I assume RtK 2 and 3 will teach me the basics of reading and grammar?
Honestly I'm just frustrated at not being able to understand a single thing.
I can tell this will be a difficult process for me, as I'm one of those people who plan everything out, and if i can't get it to my liking i give up. Looks like a good opportunity to get past that character flaw.

Thanks again.

DoctorColin Wrote:Thanks for all the advice.

I assume RtK 2 and 3 will teach me the basics of reading and grammar?
Honestly I'm just frustrated at not being able to understand a single thing.
I can tell this will be a difficult process for me, as I'm one of those people who plan everything out, and if i can't get it to my liking i give up. Looks like a good opportunity to get past that character flaw.

Thanks again.

RTK 2 and 3 don't teach grammar at all.

I love this series to learn the basics.
http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/index.en.html

Remember you don't have to wait to finish RTK to start learning Japanese.

ocircle Wrote:There should only be about 10 words you don't understand at most, 5 is ideal. It's the same for when you're picking out a new book to read. If a random page in the book has more than 5 words you can't understand, the book is too hard for you and you should be reading something easier. It's the same for TV shows. If there's more than 5 words in the first 10 minutes that you can't understand, the show is too hard for you.

We speak an average of 150 words a minute and there is an average of 250 words on a page in a book. That would mean we should understand 99.997% of everything we listen to and 98% of everything we read or it's too hard.

I doubt even native speakers understand that much of their own language.

hereticalrants Wrote:You don't have to understand everything to enjoy it, and you don't have to look anything up to start figuring out what things mean.

Did you look up any English words as a toddler? No, you just listened to your parents and watched cartoons or whatever.

Most todlers access the on-live search engine Momipedia with these keywords an average of 897 times each day:
How come, why, where, what's that, who, when?

bodhisamaya Wrote:

hereticalrants Wrote:You don't have to understand everything to enjoy it, and you don't have to look anything up to start figuring out what things mean.

Did you look up any English words as a toddler? No, you just listened to your parents and watched cartoons or whatever.

Most todlers access the on-live search engine Momipedia with these keywords an average of 897 times each day:
How come, why, where, what's that, who, when?

I don't know, in my experience those keywords just send Momipedia into an endless redirect loop. Not a very useful resource for the inquiring mind.

haha. So true. Luckily, as adults, we have other resources available. So maybe we can toss these attempts to equate childhood language acquisition with adult second language learning?

' Wrote:Repeat for hours on end.

Sounds dull. Why not combine exposure with other approaches and get the same results in fewer hours? :-)

Because people equate studying grammar with classes, and classes with sucking and failure. And therefore grammar sucks, or something. o_O

The quickest way to learn a language is to have a very good teacher that, from the very beginning, knows how to teach you to pronounce things correctly and stops and tells you every time you get it wrong. As you learn grammar and vocabulary you learn to use everything you know in real situations and with all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening). Everything you learn is just a step up in difficulty over what you last learned, and you continue to use skills and vocabulary you've already learned often.

If you want to learn Japanese as quickly as possible, apply to a program that does this and does it well (see the programs at Ohio State University, Cornell, MIT, and Harvard for examples). Some people are this forum tend to think that SRSing and AJATT are the fastest methods, but they're not. I would bet a lot of money that if you take 100 people who did the one year intensive Japanese program at Cornell (in which all the classes the students have are Japanese classes, most of which are entirely in Japanese), and 100 people who did AJATT/SRSing for a similar number of study hours, the people at Cornell would almost uniformly blow them away.

An SRS method, however, might be the fastest way to learn on your own, and might be the fastest way to learn how to read. It's also cheap.

You will notice that skills other than reading are lacking, and they always will be unless you do other things. Listening is also relatively easy to learn on your own. Writing and speaking will always be waaaay more behind than they should be when AJATT is done the way most people are doing it on this forum.

hereticalrants Wrote:The words that put everything together(in Japanese I think that the main ones are called "particles" or something... I heard somebody talking about them) are so common that once you know a few nouns and a few verbs, you pick them up extremely quickly.

If you think you have picked up Japanese particles "extremely quickly", you only have a surface understanding of them.

ocircle Wrote:

DoctorColin Wrote:Are you supposed to stop TV shows every ten seconds

There should only be about 10 words you don't understand at most, 5 is ideal. It's the same for when you're picking out a new book to read. If a random page in the book has more than 5 words you can't understand, the book is too hard for you and you should be reading something easier. It's the same for TV shows. If there's more than 5 words in the first 10 minutes that you can't understand, the show is too hard for you.

One unknown word every two minutes is too difficult? You don't need to understand things word-for-word, and if can you're probably not going to learn anything. If you can understand enough to follow what's going on, and gain exposure to words and structures you know being used in context, then there's plenty of value in watching/reading something.

I don't understand this 'speaking comes after' mentality either. If you download Skype you can start speaking now. It doesn't matter how crap you are, and it doesn't matter if you make more than five mistakes every 10 minutes. You can only learn to speak well by speaking, no matter how big your vocabulary is. You'll start off making all sorts of stupid mistakes that you'd never make during writing, you'll struggle to remember words that you could recognise in an instant, and you'll sound extremely strange because you won't have developed a proper speaking style that suits you. You can either do all that in 2-3 years when you consider yourself a fluent reader and feel extremely inadequate, or you can develop all of your skills at once so that they can progress together and benefit each other.

ocircle Wrote:If a random page in the book has more than 5 words you can't understand, the book is too hard for you and you should be reading something easier.

The dope hip hop thread is too hard for me

If you want to speak, you should start speaking. There are lots of illiterate English speakers out there, probably because all they do is speak and not read.

If you screw up you really need someone to tell you that you're wrong. When I was 5, I distinctly remember my dad telling me to stop saying "More better" and say "Much better." Problem is, when we grow older, we don't appreciate people correcting our English at every turn. But since we are learning a new language we can demand that we be corrected. =) And it's much easier to accept correction when you're just starting out than when you are at an intermediate level.

Quote:Do you just pick pronunciations up?
Are you supposed to stop TV shows every ten seconds to look up the meaning of the one word out of hundred you actually understood well enough to figure out how to look it up?
Do the kana take care of how to pronounce things since they're syllabic?

I had an anime background when I started and it was all subtitled in English, so when I started studying I could pick out words and pronunciation easily in speech... but that was never the goal when I watched anime, I just watched it because I enjoyed it.
I'm not a big fan of pausing TV shows to look up the meaning of a word because you might lose context because it's only used in a certain way or something, especially if you can't understand most of it.
Kana sort of helps with pronunciation, if only because you can now see how words are organized.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

hereticalrants Wrote:The words that put everything together(in Japanese I think that the main ones are called "particles" or something... I heard somebody talking about them) are so common that once you know a few nouns and a few verbs, you pick them up extremely quickly.

If you think you have picked up Japanese particles "extremely quickly", you only have a surface understanding of them.

When I am unsure with which particle would be most appropriate and ask my Japanese friend, at times she also struggles with the answer. She will repeat the sentence a few times each way to see which feels most natural.

Thora Wrote:Sounds dull. Why not combine exposure with other approaches and get the same results in fewer hours? :-)

Uh... ´cause I'm just watching TV while I'm studying and stuff. Haha. And no, it's not dull.

I have school, yah know, and I'm still studying the kanji...

Quote:If you think you have picked up Japanese particles "extremely quickly", you only have a surface understanding of them.

I understand them well enough to figure out how words are related to each other.

I'm not saying I can synthesise grammatically complex Japanese all on my own, here.

Yeesh

hereticalrants Wrote:

Thora Wrote:Sounds dull. Why not combine exposure with other approaches and get the same results in fewer hours? :-)

Uh... ´cause I'm just watching TV while I'm studying and stuff. Haha. And no, it's not dull. I have school, yah know, and I'm still studying the kanji...

My misunderstanding, sorry. I thought you were suggesting osmosis and no study was the way to do it. Good luck with both.

I'm starting to think that students today have more evolved multi-tasking brains. I need to block out distractions when I need to concentrate.

My niece (12) walks, talks, listens to music and texts at the same time. There's even an app which displays what's in front of you as screen background to prevent you from walking into a pole or something. That cracked me up.

Thora Wrote:

hereticalrants Wrote:

Thora Wrote:Sounds dull. Why not combine exposure with other approaches and get the same results in fewer hours? :-)

Uh... ´cause I'm just watching TV while I'm studying and stuff. Haha. And no, it's not dull. I have school, yah know, and I'm still studying the kanji...

My misunderstanding, sorry. I thought you were suggesting osmosis and no study was the way to do it. Good luck with both.

I'm starting to think that students today have more evolved multi-tasking brains. I need to block out distractions when I need to concentrate.

My niece (12) walks, talks, listens to music and texts at the same time. There's even an app which displays what's in front of you as screen background to prevent you from walking into a pole or something. That cracked me up.

Media multitasking doesn't work say researchers