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.

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?

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

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 October 04, 1:46 pm)

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.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 October 04, 7:46 pm)

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.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 October 04, 4:16 pm)

@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 .

Yet another settling for mediocrity.

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.

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

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.

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

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 October 05, 9:05 pm)

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?