I think people over-exaggerate the difficulty of native materials. You just need parallel e-texts with audio and a good mouse-over pop-up. There are enough tools nowadays to make such texts comprehensible.

An example.
Here's the beginning of a children’s story from a Japanese site:
　夏のある日、キリギリスが野原で歌を歌っていると、アリたちがぞろぞろ歩いてきました。

　One day in summer, when a grasshopper was singing in the grassy meadow, a group of ants walked by.
　夏のある日、キリギリスが野原で歌を歌っていると、アリたちがぞろぞろ歩いてきました。
　なつ の ある ひ、キリギリス が のはら で うた を うたって いる と、アリ たち が ぞろぞろ あるいて きました。

There are plenty of such materials available. You can find some of them here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain

I don't say you should ignore grammar (I never do, by the way), but it's perfectly possible to acquire it after enough exposure to personally relevant texts.

buonaparte wrote:

but it's perfectly possible to acquire it after enough exposure to personally relevant texts.

I've seen this claim for years, never seen anyone who actually did it.  People claim they did, but then it turns out that they say "I didn't study grammar" but they don't literally mean that they never used a grammar dictionary or textbook.

But there's "study grammar" and then there's using grammar dictionaries or guides such as Tae Kim's, to aid the understanding of native material on the side. Tae Kim is great for referencing to when you'd want to look up a simple pattern or particle and see some examples, and then move on.

When I first started out I wasn't using textbooks, but I was SRSing very simple sentences (due to inspiration from the-blog-which-must-not-be-named), and the example ones from initially even silly stuff like this while working upwards together with RTK and easy material was well enough to get over the beginner threshold. I don't see how it couldn't be.

If you know Steve Kaufmann and Moses McCormick's videos on Youtube, they'll suggest to get common beginner resources like Teach Yourself and Assimil, but to focus on the actual content -- the dialogue, phrases, sentences, while perusing but not trying to brutally memorize all the explanations as you go.

Last edited by TwoMoreCharacters (2013 June 11, 2:34 pm)

I'm not Joseph Conrad, but I've never studied English grammar, either, just read and listened to books and the radio (BBC 4). I already knew French and Spanish, though, so it was easy.

You went from absolutely zero English, and learned English through radio and books without ever looking at any sort of explanation of any English grammar?  You sound like you have a knack for languages, first of all, and second I was specifically talking about Japanese, not a related European language.

I just think it's unlikely that the average person wanting to learn Japanese from a Western country, with no experience or exposure to the language at all, can learn Japanese with no grammar study at all just by reading and listening to stuff and picking it all up.  It's certainly not something I would recommend to anyone.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2013 June 11, 3:13 pm)

I have to admit, I "learned" Spanish from telenovelas. As in, without ever having opened a textbook, book on Spanish, or any sort of formal or informal study material whatsoever, I went to Spain and found out I could speak it. The only time I'd been exposed to it were numerous hours as a child in which I'd watch telenovelas with my grandmother, and all the inside jokes which arose from telenovelas(not much).

But, I think there are a few important notes...
1. I was a kid. It was a critical age.
2. Spanish is ridiculously similar to Romanian. Half the time I can guess a word I've never heard before by taking a Romanian word and adding -os, -as, -a or similar endings to it. This has its disadvantages, though.
3. I was exposed to this language with word-by-word translations underneath at a time when I was learning 1-2 new languages and all its basics. I did not know what a verb was until I was 7, but I was overtly familiar with how one worked. Oh, and I was at first practicing how to read by listening to the TV whilst reading the subtitles, so I was paying attention to this by default.
4. I am illiterate. I cannot write in Spanish. I cannot conjugate non-intuitively. My vocabulary is limited, so while I can hold a conversation I will often fall behind if it gets serious. I will mistake articles, and basically talk like an idiot. I find it very difficult to study it formally without forgetting all I know. I could write the sappiest love poem in Spanish, but not talk about literature. In fact, I knew how to tell someone I was in love with them starting from the day we met and that I'm pregnant with their child (fictional situation, ofc) but not how to say "Go back and turn left".

So it does happen, if the conditions are perfect, and if you don't mind being at a pretty weird basic level.

Fillanzea wrote:

There's a lot of variance from person to person when it comes to how much confusion or ambiguity they're OK with -- if you take a dozen people of the same level, I think some of them are going to be OK with a sentence like that and some of them are not.

(You could make the argument, too, that textbook situations like "Buying a train ticket" or "Talking about your job" are more personally relevant than fables; I think the best argument for using children's stories is not that they're personally relevant, but because textbooks alone don't provide nearly enough input.)

day 1 after RTK, i wouldn't have been comfortable at all with that. a

new vocab, new kanji readings, new grammar, slow reading speed... i would be staring at that sentence for a long time.

I'm not sure it's useful at all to compare how you learn languages that are fairly close to your own to how you learn languages that are vastly different.  I never took Spanish or German but when I see people speaking them in context I can figure out some of what they are saying.  But take Chinese or Arabic or something and I have 0% comprehesion.

To the OP: Normally, I would just recommend reading your way to fluency (be it textbooks, educational websites, or native literature). It's what I did for several languages. But, with Japanese, the writing system is such a huge hurdle that I have to say focusing on listening comprehension first, reading comprehension second is really helping me (I didn't do it on purpose, I just happened to like a bunch of stuff I've been watching and listening to so much that it happened by itself).

I don't mean that you should be fluent before you touch written material, I just mean that it's a good idea to be ahead with listening comprehension. That way, when reading manga for instance, you can use furigana to your advantage, and you can focus on learning the writing of words you already know the reading of, rather than the reading and the writing together.

But the "RtK first" principle still stands. Keep reviewing the RtK deck, don't neglect it.

As far as what to do regarding listening comprehension, I won't write a huge essay again, you'll have to search around for details, but:
- repeated listening to audio you've studied (watched with subs and then ripped, or songs you studied the lyrics of, etc.)
- watching stuff with and then without subs;
- SubstoSRS
etc.

There's massive amounts of Japanese media out there to pick from. Key is to watch them while paying attention to the language, and re-watching or ripping suitable audio from them for further study.

yudantaiteki wrote:

I'm not Joseph Conrad, but I've never studied English grammar, either, just read and listened to books and the radio (BBC 4). I already knew French and Spanish, though, so it was easy.

You went from absolutely zero English, and learned English through radio and books without ever looking at any sort of explanation of any English grammar?  You sound like you have a knack for languages, first of all, and second I was specifically talking about Japanese, not a related European language.

I just think it's unlikely that the average person wanting to learn Japanese from a Western country, with no experience or exposure to the language at all, can learn Japanese with no grammar study at all just by reading and listening to stuff and picking it all up.  It's certainly not something I would recommend to anyone.

I doubt English grammar is more similar to Polish grammar than Japanese is. Second, it's not rare for people to learn new languages without ever paying attention to or studying grammar. Third, Japanese grammar is not more difficult than the grammar of other languages. If anything, it's relatively easy.

Yes, paying attention to grammar helps certain types of people (people who are used to analytical thinking, like to have a reason for where everything is) in learning a new language. But the notion that it's a must is just wrong.

Tzadeck wrote:

I'm not sure it's useful at all to compare how you learn languages that are fairly close to your own to how you learn languages that are vastly different.  I never took Spanish or German but when I see people speaking them in context I can figure out some of what they are saying.  But take Chinese or Arabic or something and I have 0% comprehesion.

Why use Spanish and German as an example (languages that are very common and you hear all the time), and compare them with Chinese and Arabic?

Why not pick two languages that are just as similar to yours as German, but aren't as common. For instance, Swedish and Icelandic, two other Germanic languages. That way, we can eliminate the incidental familiarity you have with German as a factor, and objectively look at only the role of the similarity between languages in how well you comprehend them.

I guarantee you, it won't be well at all. If you've never studied Swedish before, you will understand about as much Swedish as you understand Arabic, thus proving your theory wrong.

Tzadeck wrote:

You really can learn most Germanic and Romance languages faster than Japanese (and Chinese, and Arabic), if you are a native English speaker.

In the post I was replying to, you were comparing German to Arabic, not to Japanese.

The reason why Japanese is the hardest language to learn is the Japanese writing system, not the language, or its supposedly different grammar, or anything like that.

The same does not apply to Arabic. In fact, I bet Arabic/Hebrew is easier to learn to a Polish or English speaker than German. German is pretty tough. I don't have experience with Arabic, but I looked into Hebrew, and seemed like a piece of cake compared to German.

Obviously, if you speak English, French is easy. That's however not because French is a Romance language. That's because, as the English language was forming, England spent three centuries under Norman occupation. Half of English vocabulary is actually French. Not Latin, mind you, but French. That's a different kind of connection than the superficial connection English has with other European languages.

I think you'll find that you'd have a significantly harder time learning some other Romance and Germanic languages you're unfamiliar with. The supposed similarity would help you very little.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 June 11, 9:32 pm)

Stansfield123 wrote:

In the post I was replying to, you were comparing German to Arabic, not to Japanese.

The reason why Japanese is the hardest language to learn is the Japanese writing system, not the language, or its supposedly different grammar, or anything like that.

The same does not apply to Arabic. In fact, I bet Arabic/Hebrew is easier to learn to a Polish or English speaker than German. German is pretty tough. I don't have experience with Arabic, but I looked into Hebrew, and seemed like a piece of cake compared to German.

Japanese is not the hardest language to learn.  I'm basically just going by the language program made by the US military, but it seems that Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are all very difficult to learn for native English speakers.  They are of similar difficulty, and German is considerably easier.  There have been threads about this before, and you can look them up if you want.

I'm not gonna argue my point about understanding those languages to some extent without studying them, because I don't think it's really an important one so I'm not willing to put the time in.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2013 June 11, 9:43 pm)

Tzadeck wrote:

Japanese is not the hardest language to learn.  I'm basically just going by the language program made by the US military, but it seems that Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are all very difficult to learn for native English speakers.  They are of similar difficulty, and German is considerably easier.

So the claim is that a person who never heard German or Arabic in his life, will learn German faster than Arabic, because German is related to his own language, English? How on Earth did the US military determine this?

Could it be that they just looked at the success rate of learning the two languages among soldiers, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that German is related to English? Or did they rule out all the other, far more likely explanations, such as:
1. German culture is closer to American culture than Arabic, making it more enjoyable to study German than Arabic, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
2. German is a more popular language in the US than Arabic.
3. Soldiers see no real use for learning Arabic in civilian life, so many of them never even tried to learn it. Meanwhile, German is a very useful skill to have once you leave the military.

I submit to you that, in an alternate universe where everything is the same as in ours except for one difference: in Germany, people speak Arabic, and in the Arab world, people speak German, suddenly Arabic would become the easier language to learn for Americans and other Westerners.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 June 11, 10:05 pm)

Stansfield123 wrote:

So the claim is that a person who never heard German or Arabic in his life, will learn German faster than Arabic, because German is related to his own language, English? How on Earth did the US military determine this?

Could it be that they just looked at the success rate of learning the two languages among soldiers, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that German is related to English? Or did they rule out all the other, far more likely explanations, such as:
1. German culture is closer to American culture than Arabic, making it more enjoyable to study German than Arabic, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
2. German is a more popular language in the US than Arabic.
3. Soldiers see no real use for learning Arabic in civilian life, so many of them never even tried to learn it. Meanwhile, German is a very useful skill to have once you leave the military.

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.co … difficulty

Apparently Japanese is actually the hardest to learn for english speakers, wasn't expecting that.  There's a lot of research on the topic, you can look up the full FSI report if you want probably has more explanations but i'm too lazy haha.