Any dangers in speedrunning Japanese? I went too hard during a party and basically woke up with tickets to Japan

Japanese
#21

I was in a similar starting point.

Started learning in March, had a trip planned in September. So roughly half year. Except I didn’t have 500 days of duolingo experience. :rofl: - on the other hand I took preply lessons once a week mainly for conversation practice because I felt like I otherwise have no way to practice output whatsoever.

in September I was able to (from easiest to less easy):

  • Ask the Narita low-budget bus counter staff for a ticket to Tokyo
  • Navigate Konbinis, Restaurants, Hotel Check ins*
  • Various bar smalltalk
  • Follow directions when I booked a tour
  • ca. 60% of the overtime complaints of a fellow software engineer who was curious about whether we work this much overtime in Europe, too
  • ca. 30% of what the Izakaya chef explained about the food
  • 2-3 keywords in each sentence when I went out to drink with a friend who moved to Tokyo and his buddies
  • ca. 15-20% of what some Okinawan grandpa in a Doutor told me about his life story
  • ca. 5-10% of the trauma dump of some random girl in a bar in Shinjuku

Could I have gone faster: in retrospec, yes, but not with more SRS. Instead, the limiting factor was actually interacting with the language outside of SRS. I went to Japan with an on-paper vocabulary of ca. 2000 words, which isn’t much to begin with. But a lot of those words I had never actually heard in a sentence in the wild before. I am able to recall them in SRS, but if I hear them in the wild it’s like … uuuh?

Ever since that trip, my word count hasn’t increased a whole lot. I’m at ca. 2800 words now. My goal is 3000 by February to my next trip. However, I have dedicated substantially more time to immersion since September than I had before, and it feels like my actual comprehension has improved substantially.

I hope this helps.

*sometimes I said 分かりました, but I didn’t 分かりました at all

6 Likes
#22

You made me even more curious about that N4 so i went and took it.
And yes, the gap is huge compared to N5

image
image858×989 63 KB

In vocab I had to kind of guess in 20 or so cases.

In grammar & reading I ran out of time and had took random answer in last 3-4 questions

And funnily enough, I’m putting the least amount of focus on listening (out of these 3) and somehow I have the best result there :joy:

I’ll do another N4 mock exam in late January and will see what the difference is.

Even if real NX exam is not my goal, as a self learner it feels kinda important to me, because its pretty much the only thing where i can actually test myself in semi-serious environment.

As for choice of things to watch, I think I’ll stick to picking media I’d like to watch over the fact, that its the “everyday japanese”. But I agree, probably around April or so i’ll try to get some Italkie natives as a test run and ask them how cringe is my langauge.

@thelizard

Honestly, I think that duolingo experience is a bit overrated. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who actually intends to learn a language.

Yes, it’s a good way if you want effortlessly to start your language journey and then jump to something else once you get hooked into it. While I admit it will help you learn the basics without any prior research or preparation, it’s design doesn’t forces your brain to actually learn the language, but to learn the pattern on how correct answer in Duo’s looks like with minimal language skills. But still, 4 minutes a day just to keep streak rolling is a fun activity.

And as for your trip this sounds really good! How often have you ended up using the phone translator app to help you with communication? Or did you managed to do without it?

  • ca. 60% of the overtime complaints of a fellow software engineer who was curious about whether we work this much overtime in Europe, too

Oh boy, as a fellow engineer I already feel your smugness there :smiley:

  • ca. 5-10% of the trauma dump of some random girl in a bar in Shinjuku

I guess it works in any language with girls, just nod along :joy:

By the way, I feel like it was few times easier to compare map the Japanese grammar structure and logic behind it to some computer language than any of the actual languages I know. Have you noticed anything like that?

#23

I had the same thought. Japanese grammar often seems to map better to a lot of software development principles than to English. Specifically, the sentence core structure is much closer to object oriented programming than to English.

And I recall when first learning OOP, most books at the time pointed out the same issue that Japanese books do: It’s sort of backwards and you have to think the other way round. Except that OOP books in the late 90s had the arrogance of calling it “counter intuitive to the human mind”. I suppose the authors didn’t speak Japanese.

Of course this model doesn’t hold at all as soon as sentences become mildly more complex.

Last thing people want in those situations is advice anyway :rofl:

#24

I remember my first small breakthrough when I randomly decided to try to decompose any sentence onto quasi-logical structure full of brackets, AND’s 'n OR’s.

でも それ は
[ [ピアノを 弾けた] の ]           が        ([僕だけ だ]った) から
  ↑_____________↑                           ↑_________↑
  [ability clause → noun (+の)]            ([limited to me] + past) + because/from
                               ↑                                                             ↑
             actor (が)        IS          description

[but that is] + {[piano (play - can)] as a thing}   is  {[me (limited-to)]} + past + because
The one who could play piano is only me - that's why

It was a really wild ride :joy:

1 Like
#25

Hi eciu. First of all - I think what you are doing is amazing and keep up the great work. It is clear you have lots of passion for Japanese and you genuinely like the language. This is the most important ingredient to learn it.

I had a similar experience when I learned Japanese N5. I had to speedrun it in 3 months because I was to stay in Tokyo alone for 2 months during my studies.

That was 10 years ago and I didn’t know about Anki or Bunpro, so my approach was different.

I studied with a Japanese native 2h twice a week, and did around 10h of homework per week as well.

I didn’t start from zero too. As you, I had around 1000h of watched anime time and I knew basic words, sentence structure, and was familiar to how Japaneses sounds. No Duolingo though.

I did it and passed N5 exam with 90% score, and I was able to navigate Tokyo pretty well.

I couldn’t chit chat in bars, but I didn’t have problems with daily life. The highlight moment was when I lost a 5G modem on a train to Kyoto and had to go to lost and found at the station, explain what I lost, and get directions on how to retrieve it. It was soooo satisfying to get the modem back!

With your learning method, you will probably get SRS burnout, but that’s very easy to fix. Just stop adding new words and focus on reviews only for a week until they go down and you feel that you have energy and mental capacity for new vocabulary and grammar.

What many others are saying here and what I will stress as well that doing SRS doesn’t mean you actually learn the language.

In every language learning there are two activities, and different parts of brain are responsible for them. Recognition and recall.

Recognition is an ability to understand the word when you see it or hear it. SRS is great for that.

Recall is an ability to say or write what you want when you need it. SRS won’t help you with that.

Learning a language means you have skills in both recognition and recall. Otherwise you might know the 2k core words but wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent.

And SRS is responsible for recognition only. For recall you need to actively speak the language with others. Formulate your thoughts and decode what others are saying in context. No other way around it.

So bottom line, what you are doing is great and you are fully equipped to get to the conversational level around N3.

Add more speaking practice, ideally with natives, as soon as you can. If you won’t learn to talk you won’t be able to truly using the language.

In software terms it would be like you downloaded the app and have on your disk, but you haven’t installed it yet so your OS can’t use it.

Good luck on you journey! You got it!

3 Likes