http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_lear...japan.html

Friend posted this on facebook, and I found it interesting. A Japanese man teaching English decides that reading and listening to things you enjoy is an effective way to learn languages (gasp!)
His 3 rules:

Quote:Professor Sakai has his three rules for his approach to learning through reading and listening.

1) do not look words up in the dictionary
2) if you are stuck, move on, don't ask questions
3) if you do not like what you are reading, get something else to read.

I agree with 2 and 3, but 1 is how I learn new words...I look them up and stick them into Anki

Either way, it seems like Japan has got their own Khatz now (or at least something better than grammar drill, grammar drill)

It is true that if you do keep reading/listening it will improve all your other skills in the language, any language. You cannot output unless you have heard the spoken language for quite a large amount of time, it's only natural.

As for looking up the word not sure, I do have a large vocab deck so it's kinda rare to run into something I do not know now but there are always more learning to be done.

It's not 'Japan has realized." It's "A single teacher in Japan has realized." 1 person is a far cry from a whole country.

wccrawford Wrote:It's not 'Japan has realized." It's "A single teacher in Japan has realized." 1 person is a far cry from a whole country.

Unfortunately this is very true; The country itself is still hooked on the traditional style.

It's a shame that not as many people find people like this, Antimoon, etc...
I think it's a big part of the reason that Japanese students can study 6 years of English and still barely manage to make it through a self introduction.

Asriel Wrote:I think it's a big part of the reason that Japanese students can study 6 years of English and still barely manage to make it through a self introduction.

Actually, I think the biggest part of that is that student study to pass tests. It doesn't matter how you make them study, they will always optimize for test passing.

However, people who actually want to -use- the language will optimize for that, instead, unless the education gets in the way and forces them not to.

The not looking up words in the dictionary seems a little silly to me. It's going to take you a heck of a long time to learn words, especially if you know none to start with.

Kewickviper Wrote:The not looking up words in the dictionary seems a little silly to me. It's going to take you a heck of a long time to learn words, especially if you know none to start with.

I'm of the opinion I'm reading for enjoyment. If I'm putting down the book to look up every 20th word it will get boring and discourage me from reading. Yeah, I might miss some key plot points, but the flow of the narrative keeps me interested.

That said, I do have subs2srs and other flashcard sentences that I helps me learn words. That's studying, and not leisure, and they're not normally from books I'm reading.

Kewickviper Wrote:The not looking up words in the dictionary seems a little silly to me. It's going to take you a heck of a long time to learn words, especially if you know none to start with.

I think this might be to stop people reverting back to their native language - it's better to just keep immersed in the language you are learning, you can get into a "flow" and start thinking in the language, rather than translating everything internally.

avparker Wrote:

Kewickviper Wrote:The not looking up words in the dictionary seems a little silly to me. It's going to take you a heck of a long time to learn words, especially if you know none to start with.

I think this might be to stop people reverting back to their native language - it's better to just keep immersed in the language you are learning, you can get into a "flow" and start thinking in the language, rather than translating everything internally.

I agree, it gets you used to the language. You don't want to be translating everything you see.

There's a time and place for working on building vocabulary. Sometimes, that might mean looking up something you read because it interests you and you want to know what it means. But, most of your immersion time will be more effective if its A) fun and B) actually spent immersed.

I imagine this teacher also uses some sort of textbook or other method for building vocabulary and grammatical understanding, but when its time to "just read" he means "just read". Makes sense to me.