I've been going on a bit of a Japanese hiatus as of late. I've been studying on and off for years, but since January 2010 or so, I've been listening to nothing but J-Rap ( http://goo.gl/PQgor ), to the exclusion of all other music. I am now way way way out of touch with American hip-hop.

6 months ago, I got a full-time job as a contractor, and just recently became a permanent employee. I initially had grand time management plans of expertly splitting the 3-4 hours I would get after coming home and before going to sleep into time evenly spent on various projects, language study, and entertainment. I quickly found that all it really did was slow me down in all three, even if I did have the ideal environment with no interruptions or unexpected activities.

I also came to a realization. My old "master plan" was to make money from my day job while working on my game development and Japanese language skills on my own time, then to move to Japan to work as a programmer for a Japanese game development studio.

This was dumb. I would be working long, shitty hours for terrible pay. I also probably wouldn't enjoy the job nearly as much as I would think (see

).

I've instead modified my plan to simply make games in my own time and sell them. This no longer requires knowledge of the Japanese language, so I've decided to, at least temporarily, stop studying. Since job success wasn't my only motivation for learning the language, I do plan to revisit it, but this would be after I've attained my financial goal: passive income of at least $80k. That is, I want to be able to not work at all for a full year and still have made $80k that year. This is entirely possible if I make one or more popular games (see Minecraft).

I know a lot of you might say that my goals are too lofty, but I disagree. I'm 21 right now, and am already doing pretty well for myself. I imagine that in 5 years, I'll be doing a lot better, and that in 10, I will have mastered most if not all of the things I've been doing that whole time. Japanese language acquisition is not some urgent matter I need to get done right away. I plan on doing it eventually, and at my own pace. If it takes me a while, then so be it.

Are any of you guys doing something similar?

I have a friend who's been doing something similar. You might find his recent post-mortem of a Flash game he developed and sold interesting.

Honestly I think about "taking a break" every couple of weeks... But instead of dropping it, I just cruise for a while, ie. not adding any new cards or doing anything that feels "hard" in Japanese. Sometimes I think it's only the fact that I've invested so much time into Japanese already that keeps me going.

Not sure if that's a great motivation though... :/

vgambit Wrote:This was dumb. I would be working long, shitty hours for terrible pay. I also probably wouldn't enjoy the job nearly as much as I would think (see

).

I came to that realization last week, although in a different field (engineering).

This required a complete overhaul of my outlook on my future, which I'm still not entirely sure about...

However, since I've been studying Japanese since June '09, I find it difficult to give up and I would hate myself if I decided to drop it. I already feel a bit bummed when I don't study for 4 days, I feel like I've forgotten so much. I can't imagine just outright quitting, at least not until I reach the level where I just need to watch TV and read books to maintain my skill.

If I drop it and pick it up later, all that time I just spent will probably be wasted, so I decided to keep going.

At the very least, I'd just continue to maintain Anki and not add anything new if I ever decided to drop the learning...


However, one thing I found difficult is that as I've picked up my language learning and really invested more time in studying, I stopped going to the gym. Doing both just tires me out mentally and physically... but on the other hand, I'm also getting pretty dang fat, I'm fatter than I've ever been.

I'm going to try hitting up the gym again, but hopefully I don't get stuck toiling at both instead of succeeding at just one...

I need to force myself to take a break. If I don't, my university studies will suffer.

Wow, it does sound familiar. I'm a developer working the usual 8-9 hours day. Always had a few too many projects in mind, working on my apps, learning japanese, learning to draw, building websites. Trying to fit that and some relax time in the evenings and week end, it doesn't work!

Overall, I'll agree with you, when you have limited time, best is to prioritize and focus on what's important to you. When I was developing a new app, I was completely devoting my time to it, and it worked pretty well. Right now my focus is japanese, so I try to spend as much time as I can on it, while it's ok if I skip a few coding time. As for drawing, I'll leave it on the side...

In any case, congrats on your new permanent employee status

SammyB Wrote:Honestly I think about "taking a break" every couple of weeks... But instead of dropping it, I just cruise for a while, ie. not adding any new cards or doing anything that feels "hard" in Japanese. Sometimes I think it's only the fact that I've invested so much time into Japanese already that keeps me going.

Not sure if that's a great motivation though... :/

I do that too, keep reviewing for a while with occasional new card added (new vocab learned on this forum). I did it a few times and so far it turned out great, I feel such rest is needed and gives me time to internalize knowledge I've accumulated through more active study. It also helps my motivation since I can stop feeling like I MUST study everyday and instead I WANT to do it, after a while I get back on track naturally.

->Are any of you guys doing something similar?

I dunno, I've intentionally tried quitting studying Japanese already 2 times and failed



I mean, Japanese is so integrated into my life.

Japanese always disturbs my daily plans at least a bit.
For example I see a word somewhere and want to look it up, then I look it up and start thinking about Japanese, then talk to my friends, occasionally come to this forum, read stuff and...

You know, it's hard to quit learning Japanese. I think that even If I wouldn't study actively at all from now on, I would still be near-native fluent in about 3-4 years due to my natural daily schedule.


But, yeah it's definitely much better to pick your favourite 1 thing and do something outstanding.

For me it's been Japanese in this recent year.

I'm making a big push on Japanese this year. I find that I plateau, then make a breakthrough, then plateau again, then breakthrough again, then more plateau.

I usually feel like bagging it for a while every time I hit another damn plateau.

I quit for 2-3 years after I studied Japanese in grad school as an elective. It was a pain in the butt to restart from essentially scratch. Anki and RTK made a huge difference.

Now when I want to bag it for a week or two and don't feel like learning, I just review what I've already learned, and just read trashy stuff in Japanese to keep my level up.

But yeah, plans change, so I hear ya. You can acquire languages effectively at any age, really, so long as you don't melt your brain too much in your teens and 20s.

vgambit Wrote:I also came to a realization. My old "master plan" was to make money from my day job while working on my game development and Japanese language skills on my own time, then to move to Japan to work as a programmer for a Japanese game development studio.

This was dumb. I would be working long, shitty hours for terrible pay. I also probably wouldn't enjoy the job nearly as much as I would think (see

).

I wouldn't give up on this so easily. I was on the gameplay programming team at a company (not in Japan) last year working on a game you've heard of, and I can say that actually, if you love video games, working in the games industry can be fun as hell.

That video seems to be aimed at people who have no skills and just want to become a "game designer". If you're a programmer, that's not you.

The pay's not as good as some other industries (e.g. finance), but it's still decent for programmers.

I wouldn't want to work in Japan. But in the US you'd be fine in terms of working hours.

fakewookie Wrote:I wouldn't want to work in Japan. But in the US you'd be fine in terms of working hours.

Really - ok working hours in the games industry?

Interesting I recently moved into the games industry, but am now getting out of it again, and moving towards a situation like the OP - work a regular IT 9-5 to pay the bills, and do games programming in my own time.

For me the work and working environment were great, the pay was *ok* (used to get alot more doing 10x less work as a system admin), but the kicker was the insane amount of overtime expected when the project was nearing a milestone. Working every night till 9 or 10 and being expected to eat dinner at the office (they bought in pizzas for us) was not worth it just because I like video games; working hours are incredibly important when you have a long commute and a family waiting for you at home.

so yeh screw that, OP has made the right decision.

Depends on the company, depends on the project. Depends on the person. The fact is, a lot of people work in video games, and a lot of people enjoy it, including myself. I see no reason to abandon pursuing it without experiencing it for yourself.

I have - only 1 project admittedly, but it was hell. Like I said, 11pm finishes every night for 2 weeks when gold was coming up. Employees were sleeping at the office; I've never seen anything like it. Exactly the same experience for all my friends who work in the industry, they often end up going in to work at weekends.

I'm sure there are big rich games companies who can afford slippage, and therefore don't expect (by "expect" I mean subtly "insist") you to work insane amounts of unpaid overtime, but those studios are so rare it's hardly worth mentioning them.

Btw, not saying the work isn't fun or satisfying, it totally is, just for me not wasn't worth it.

rich_f Wrote:I'm making a big push on Japanese this year.

I said this exact same thing two winters ago. I had a solid 2 weeks of free time with no school and nothing on my plate. Around halfway through, I got fed up with SuperMemo and decided to switch to Anki, and it set me back so much that I just couldn't get back to where I was. I didn't study again for another 8 months or so.

I've been working on RTK since 2007, and have been studying Japanese one way or another since 2005. I still haven't finished RTK, and I'm still almost completely useless in the language.

fakewookie Wrote:I wouldn't give up on this so easily. I was on the gameplay programming team at a company (not in Japan) last year working on a game you've heard of, and I can say that actually, if you love video games, working in the games industry can be fun as hell.

That video seems to be aimed at people who have no skills and just want to become a "game designer". If you're a programmer, that's not you.

The pay's not as good as some other industries (e.g. finance), but it's still decent for programmers.

I wouldn't want to work in Japan. But in the US you'd be fine in terms of working hours.

I dunno, man. I don't want to program the dust on the main character's shirt, but I've played games that had shit like that, so someone must have sat down and done it. I've read of artists who had dreams of working in the video game industry and ended up doing nothing but draw noses.

The other day, I was reading a tutorial on UnrealScript. The author also had his resume on his site, so I started reading it. He programmed the butler's speech system in Fable 3's pause menu. It would figure out what to make the butler say depending on the state of the game. ***** that.

I do QA for healthcare software, and if I do well enough, I'll soon become a full-fledged developer for the company, which was just bought out by an international corporation. That means job security and room to grow both in rank and in pay. In the game industry, I could work on a highly-anticipated game only to be laid off once development ends as the company gets shuttered. This seems to happen at least once a month. It also doesn't take into account things like the EA Spouse, the Rockstar Spouse, or the EA Louse.

Big-budget game development lost most its appeal for me since I graduated from college. I'd rather use my skills and resources to make games on my own time and on my own terms.

If that's the case then I think you can consider quitting yeah.

After all you don't have to do it, it's your choice to study Japanese.

You can always come back when you start missing Japanese.

Whatever the thing I think that the beginning is the hardest and the least motivational.

It seems that you have other interests in which you are more skilled and have spent more time on. Those activities are probably much more rewarding.

jettyke Wrote:If that's the case then I think you can consider quitting yeah.

After all you don't have to do it, it's your choice to study Japanese.

You can always come back when you start missing Japanese.

Whatever the thing I think that the beginning is the hardest and the least motivational.

It seems that you have other interests in which you are more skilled and have spent more time on. Those activities are probably much more rewarding.

That's the thing. I would really like to learn Japanese. I watch Japanese shows and think of how nice it would be to understand Arino's comments in Game Center CX, or laugh at anything beyond basic slapstick in Downtown Gaki no Tsukai. I read manga and either get mad at the ridiculous amounts of Japanese left in the translation and explained in the margins or get mad at the amounts of edits made to the source material that I know change the message the author was trying to get across. I play Japanese video games and either get mad at the bad dubbing and low translation quality or get fed up because I can't understand even 1% of the dialogue.

RTK is boring. I've restarted so many times that if I were to restart my studies again, I would cruise effortlessly through the first 1000 kanji or so, but then I would start coming across key words that I've never seen in before in regular books much less with the intention of associating them to a kanji (mandala? decameron? really?).

I even tried buying a bunch of books to supplement the RTK grind. Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar? Too boring. Japanese The Manga Way? Information overload. I found myself struggling to remember kanji, meanings, vocabulary, readings, and grammar points simultaneously. I was almost completely unable to bring any of the information in the early chapters to the later ones. Instead of i+1, it was i+10. Hell, even Tae Kim's guide lost me, thanks to its focus on strict drilling and workbook problems.

I think I would have an easier time of Japanese if it didn't have so much breadth to cover. I'll use programming as an example. It didn't really "click" for me until my professors let us loose on our first largely-unsupervised game development project. We had 8 weeks to make a game. We decided to split our game idea into manageable chunks; Levels, a Player, Enemies, a Boss, Sound, Music, Input, Animation, and so on. From there, we would break it down even further; a Level had a background, platforms, and a foreground. The player had to be able to interact with the platforms (i.e. stand on, jump through, or be blocked by them), so they had to have special properties in the code. We would be reusing images, so they had to be constructed programmatically. Having the level designer have to compile the game in order to test the levels is stupid, so they should load at runtime from human-readable text files.

Japanese isn't so easy to break down. Say you have a sentence. In order to understand it, you need to know how to break each kanji up into proper compounds. You need to know what each kanji means given the context with the other kanji. You need to be familiar enough with the language to know what knowledge is assumed (and thus left out of the sentence, like the subject). To be able to explain what the sentence meant, or read it out loud, you would have to know how to pronounce each kanji based on its current compound. You would have to understand how each particle modifies the idea of the sentence. None of this even takes into account the cultural aspect of whatever it is you're reading, which could change the meaning completely. A red face in America means you're blushing or cold. In Japan, it means you've been drinking. A nosebleed in the states means you've been picking your nose with sharp fingernails, or you're sick. In Japan it means you've got a boner from seeing a woman do something sexy.

I initially thought that Japanese was as straightforward as finishing RTK then moving on to Tae Kim's guide or one of the other well-received intermediate studying sources, using the newly-formed kanji "cubbyholes" in my head and a good SRS to help retain all the new, finally practical info I would be learning. It would take a couple of years, but would ultimately result in fluency. The problem seems to be that this study comes at the cost of the other things you would like to spend your time on. If I study Japanese at a non-trivial rate, I probably could be fluent in 2, 3 years, but I wouldn't be very good at anything else outside of what I do at work. I wouldn't have any high scores in the games I enjoy. I would still be terrible at competitive fighting games. I would still be a junior-level game programmer. I would still suck at making music and DJing.

The main issue, to me, seems to be that language in itself does not provide enough positive reinforcement for people to stick with it for the long haul. Some people have the will to do it, but most don't, which is why being bilingual is so amazing to those that didn't grow up in bilingual circumstances. It's just not rewarding enough. I work at it, and enjoy the process for its intrinsic value at first, but it quickly becomes a drag, no matter how I try to trick my mind into doing it anyway.

Side note: The idea of a 24/7, 365 Japanese immersion environment aiding in language acquisition is complete nonsense. I've been doing it on and off (mostly on) since 2007, and have seen the progress it provided. I went from not knowing any of the obviously Japanese-sounding gibberish I was hearing to memorizing it enough to sing along to some of my favorite J-Rap tracks in a convincing Japanese voice, but only actually understanding the bits of gibberish that I thought sounded cool enough to put through Google Translate when I remembered to. And there are very, very few of those bits.

Also, I know I'm probably being too long-winded, but these are realizations I came to after years of study, and I've never really spoken about it like this before. I wanted to make sure I left out no detail.

Well I studied RTK killing myself after the first 1000. Somehow I made it in 7 months.
As soon as I finished I stopped reviewing and haven't done RTK since.

Yea it is boring, I'd say that you should have stopped RTK in that case and go do something else that's more fun. I've never done anything more boring than RTK, except listening to a couple of episodes of pimsleur which I abandoned real quick.



I don't feel that learning Jap is a pain. Actually It's the biggest passion that I have.

"It's not hard, you're just doing it wrong "
It's true, really.


The immersion environment is in my opinion the whole key of learning jap actually.

Thanks the immersion coming from different sources It's usually impossible for me to live a day without learning at least a little bit of jap.

I don't mean the "just listen to japanese even if you don't understand it" part,

But what I really mean is integrating Japanese into all aspects of your daily life.

Fe, one part of it is searching for Japanese stuff that you like like mad. And start using them every day. Usually it's good to start from the easiest stuff like music and dramas and real life friends.

Oh, I tried that. I still enjoy playing Cave shoot-em-ups. The problem is that for me to enjoy something in Japanese, language has to be a minimal part of that enjoyment, to the point where the benefit gleaned from the small amount of language it has is so small that I might as well not even bother. If language is a big part of the game, then I won't enjoy it, and will probably be frustrated. I played a lot of Super Robot Wars on the DS, reveling in the fact that I could actually read 90% of the attack names since they were all katakana loan words, but I got frustrated when I had to skip through the umpteenth conversation. Playing the game without having any idea of what's going on in the story diminishes the experience quite a bit if the gameplay isn't extremely interesting in itself. It's even worse when the gameplay depends on that dialogue (e.g. Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban, Professor Layton, Legend of Zelda).

vgambit Wrote:RTK is boring. I've restarted so many times that if I were to restart my studies again, I would cruise effortlessly through the first 1000 kanji or so, but then I would start coming across key words that I've never seen in before in regular books much less with the intention of associating them to a kanji (mandala? decameron? really?).

You could/should have gone for alternative, rtk isn't the only way to learn kanji.
*hint* Kanjidamage *hint*

Well I'm not into gaming so I don't know very well...

but I tried to play FF13, patapon(probably) and 1 other game in Japanese and I'd say I didn't like to use games for learning but my level was also quite low.

I've repeated this quite much on this forum, but things that make me progress daily are:


Real life friends

skype friends

mixi

twitter

easy manga(like chobits)

drama without subs(I look up words when I watch them)http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7443

only Japanese music( and I'm so addicted that I listen for about 8 hours every day)

J-hop for srsing and motivation

my pc is in Japanese

I take notes in Japanese

motivational graphs, spreadsheets in japanese

I repeat cool phrases or sing along to songs without noticing it

I sometimes listen to a rap song and try to rap some random stuff of my own to the beat ( improves my thinking skills +speed)

I have some Japanese books and manga I lent from friends which I want to read soon.

And as I improve I pick up new manga from my shelf or borrow them from friends.

I have Japanese art in my room

Whatever the case I search the meaning of a word that I hear (the ones that I hear repeatedly or want to know)

I exchange emails with friends

correct emails on lang-8

I do some random tasks in japanese ( for example right now I'm translating articles about the architecture of Portugal from Japanese to Estonian for Art history , even though the task was to translate from english to Estonian (I talked to my teacher in advance).

Some people know that I study Jap (like my art history teacher) and that's why she puts lots of Japanese stuff in our lessons, for me! . And with other people I just talk about japan and it motivates.


wow that's a long list. I didn't know that it was this long...

Wow. It's hard to know where to begin, since you (vgambit) bring up so many things, but here goes.

vgambit Wrote:That's the thing. I would really like to learn Japanese....RTK is boring...key words that I've never seen in before in regular books much less with the intention of associating them to a kanji (mandala? decameron? really?).

RTK may not be interesting, but I've certainly found it to be the most effective thing I've tried yet. Yes, some of the words are unusual, and some are too close to others in meaning for my taste (salary/income, beguile/entice/tempt), but these are just minor deficiencies in a powerful tool. If this tool doesn't work for you, there are others - maybe you just need to find which one is better suited to you.

vgambit Wrote:I initially thought that Japanese was as straightforward as finishing RTK then moving on to Tae Kim's guide or one of the other well-received intermediate studying sources

Japanese is one of the top 10 hardest languages for English speakers to learn, according to various sources. I think some of your frustration is probably from the fact that you've given yourself quite a daunting task, especially if you're coming from a unilingual English background. Two other points:
1) The more languages you speak, the easier the next ones become. Maybe not very helpful in this case, but there are other benefits to language learning, too.
2) I'm also at the "Where do I go from here?" point. The main difference this time around is that instead of jumping from a base of 500 somewhat-understood characters, I'll be going in with the full set. It'll still be a lot of work.

vgambit Wrote:The problem seems to be that this study comes at the cost of the other things you would like to spend your time on...The main issue, to me, seems to be that language in itself does not provide enough positive reinforcement for people to stick with it for the long haul.

As far as time is concerned...it's trite to say it, but that's life. I've been putting the time into RTK, so my other reading has fallen off dramatically. However, that's true of anything - doing one thing always leaves you with less time for other stuff. The best we can do is make optimal use of our time (and the best way to do that is hard to figure out, too). As for reinforcement, I'd say that's not language in and of itself, but your perception of it. Not saying you're wrong - if you don't feel language study is worth it, then it's not worth it...for you. Some people might feel the same way about game development.

vgambit Wrote:Side note: The idea of a 24/7, 365 Japanese immersion environment aiding in language acquisition is complete nonsense.

Completely disagree with you here, with one caveat: if you mean an approach like AJATT, well, that's probably dependent on the individual and how they work it. But if you're living in Japan and actively trying to acquire the language, you're bound to make huge strides compared to people who aren't in that environment.

vgambit Wrote:If I study Japanese at a non-trivial rate, I probably could be fluent in 2, 3 years, but I wouldn't be very good at anything else outside of what I do at work. I wouldn't have any high scores in the games I enjoy. I would still be terrible at competitive fighting games. I would still be a junior-level game programmer. I would still suck at making music and DJing.

at one point in my life last year...
i woke up early to input new japanese cards in anki
i studied during lunch break at work
i went home and did a 2nd review session

then depending on the day of the week, i either went to an SF4 event or practiced online, OR i went to the gym. on the weekends i vegetated.

during that time i made considerable improvement at all of them. people noticed that i was working out, cards were being cleared and my japanese was getting better, and i was placing higher in tournaments (no longer dropping bad games to bad people) and having more competitive matches in general. (in SoCal too, where there are lots of good people just around the corner.)

i eventually quit sf4 and the gym due to fighting with friends, but when i think about it, it was all doable. in fact, i might restart it just now. after that last post i hit the gym and some of my strength is still there.

with anki, i definitely feel like you can make a minimum of progress. we don't always have to add 50 cards a day and study two hours a day to become "fluent." i even had gym days where i was just exhausted and just did light lifting.

Quote:The main issue, to me, seems to be that language in itself does not provide enough positive reinforcement for people to stick with it for the long haul.

there's plenty of positive reinforcement. the small steps i have taken every day really start to add up.

i've gone from understanding words to whole sentences to whole paragraphs to whole articles, a lot of times from the same source. i've read and re-read azumanga daiou so many times and every time i discover something new in the language that i didn't know before. even now, i'm rewatching drama that i've seen months before, and things i didn't catch before come easily to me now. and back then i was happy that i understood things i couldn't before.

for sure, rtk doesn't really give you that. but even knowing basic sentences and finding them in native material and understanding that made me happy. heck, reading karaoke lyrics made me happy when all i really knew was kana, i was fascinated at being able to put together words from characters.

mlorenz Wrote:1) The more languages you speak, the easier the next ones become. Maybe not very helpful in this case, but there are other benefits to language learning, too.

mlorenz, how many do you speak?

I've never heard this thought. What makes you say this?

jettyke Wrote:

mlorenz Wrote:1) The more languages you speak, the easier the next ones become. Maybe not very helpful in this case, but there are other benefits to language learning, too.

mlorenz, how many do you speak?

I've never heard this thought. What makes you say this?

Barry Farber, who has studied 25 languages, says this in his book. I think it makes sense. Once you learn one second language to a proficient level, you know most of techniques you need to effectively learn a language, and can apply that knowledge to your next endeavors. And the more you know, the easier it is to make mental connections and remember new information faster, thanks to related word roots and similar grammatical structures.

vgambit Wrote:The main issue, to me, seems to be that language in itself does not provide enough positive reinforcement for people to stick with it for the long haul. Some people have the will to do it, but most don't, which is why being bilingual is so amazing to those that didn't grow up in bilingual circumstances. It's just not rewarding enough. I work at it, and enjoy the process for its intrinsic value at first, but it quickly becomes a drag, no matter how I try to trick my mind into doing it anyway.

Agree with most of your points, especially this one. Language learning is 99% motivation, 1% actual skill - if stupid people and babies can learn a language, of course any adult can, but are they willing to put in the time?

I disagree about not being enough time in the day though. When I started Rtk1, I got up 30mins early every morning, and did it all before work. If you're motivated enough you'll find the time - conversely, if you're not motivated, you'll always find other things to do / excuses.