Why do you study Japanese?

Japanese
#49

I’m probably a bit late but I’ll drop my experience regardless. Why not?

  1. Motivation. Honestly I’m just too invested in all things Japanese at this point. There’s a certain charm to be able to understand things directly, inside the framework of a language. I mean, there are lots of good high quality translated content, possibly too much to consume in a lifetime. But reading and understanding directly in the target language just hits different.
  2. Prior language learning experience. English isn’t my native language, so I had to study English too. I was very invested in Esperanto for a couple of years, but eventually abandoned it because various reasons. I studied French and German, each for around a month, but ended up dropping it. Make of it what you will!
  3. Attitudes toward immersion learning. Yeah, I think immersion is the most effective/important way to study. It’s just that with Japanese the entry bar is sort of high, so you have to be cushioned for far too long. In terms of feeling uncomfortable, these days it’s bearable, but when I just started immersing I think it was pretty painful for around a year.
  4. Role of immersion in your daily studies. I don’t really dedicate a special “immersion segment” in my daily studies, I just do my usual stuff but in Japanese. Like gaming, reading, browsing social networks. These days if I play something, 70% chance it’s in Japanese.
  5. Enjoyability. It depends, I tend to not think about it too much. I feel like discipline is more important, like trying to study each day (although life’s been rough so I don’t always succeed with that). I had high waves where I’d do my daily things in a breeze and ask for seconds. And I had low waves where I’d struggle to keep my daily routine for a couple of weeks. But if I realize after a while that I had improved, that makes the routine more enjoyable. But in general, I’m more happy to study stuff that is somehow related to what I usually do during immersion. In terms of role, I use SRSs to tell my mind “look, this concept/word exists”. It’s up to immersion learning to “actualize” that knowledge, put it in context, feel it. And maybe pickup more concepts/words along the way.
  6. Progress tracking. Locally, levels on Wanikani and progress bars on Bunpro help. More globally, once in a year / half a year I read something and realize “oh huh? looks like I improved after all”. It was easier in the beginning with lots of knowledge opening up very quickly, but for an intermediate-ish learner I often don’t feel any progress for months until suddenly evolution. I also like rereading stuff I struggled with before, and seeing how it’s now much easier.

Hope this helps!

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#50

At least to me, it did come across like a person will magically be able to speak Japanese by delaying output, especially when you say “until later stages”.

One of the reasons why I’m confident that this is not true is because, in my field, which is music (I also teach it), I’ve seen people delay performing live, or starting to improvise, because they think that it is necessary to reach a high level before they do. What ends up happening is, they’ll have a high level in the area they’ve worked on, but not in the one they haven’t (unsurprisingly). Then you have the people who start applying what they’ve learn almost immediately, and they’re the ones who end up progressing faster. Go figure!

Another example, I was into skateboarding back in the day. You can learn all of the theory behind performing an Ollie (or any trick, for that matter), but nothing, except practicing it, will help you achieve it. That’s why I said earlier that this applies to any skill. You have to use it in order to get better at it. All you need is a basic understanding to start applying it.

Anyway, if I misunderstood what you said, then I apologize. I simply don’t want people to think like some magic is going to occur without putting effort into a specific skill set. Which, btw, I don’t understand why someone would put this much effort into learning a language, such as Japanese, but not actually speak it. That’s kinda the point of learning languages (to communicate with others who speak them), but I digress.

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#51

That is certainly not what I meant to say. Output absolutely does require a lot of practice. Again, I’m not claiming that starting to output early is a waste of time, or that delaying output is the only way to go. I’m simply saying that there are some advantages to delaying output, such as:

  1. By the time you start outputting, you will have acquired a large passive vocabulary, which means that, while practicing conversation, you won’t need to struggle as much with comprehending what the other person is saying while you struggle with how to express your own thoughts at the same time.

  2. As a corollary to the point above, it is usually the case that when conversing, you don’t really need to be able to express yourself perfectly in order to be understood. Even very broken grammar can be more or less understood by a cooperative native speaker, so the bar for being able to convey your own thoughts to another person is comparatively low. However, if you can’t comprehend what the other person is saying, it’s quite hard to hold a conversation, so if your input comprehension is already fairly high when you start, conversation practice will flow more easily and be more fun to engage in for both parties.

  3. You will have acquired an intuitive sense for what natural language sounds like, which means you can, to some extent, self-correct your own output without having to fully rely on others correcting you when you sound unnatural.

But again, they are not iron-clad rules that must be obeyed, and you will obviously improve if you spend a lot of time practicing starting at any experience level. I think it might be more frustrating if you have to struggle a lot with some of the previously mentioned aspects, though.

Taking myself as an example, I have no plans on living in Japan and I’m not particularly interested in making Japanese acquaintances (not that I dislike them or anything, I just don’t have a preference for them over others), so I don’t really gain a lot of benefit from being able to output. However, I’m very interested in reading light novels, web novels and manga in Japanese, partially because I don’t have to rely on translator schedules and also because amateur translations often are highly flawed and lose a lot of linguistic nuance. So my main motivation for learning Japanese is acquiring reading fluency. I might put some effort into output at some point simply because I believe all four language skills feed into each other, and if I’m going for full fluency I might as well, but it’s a low-priority goal compared to reading.

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#52

In my experience of reading many online discussions that are similar to this one it pretty much always comes down to this. Similar to debates about pitch accent, arguments about when the most efficient time to start outputting are basically always academic as everyone involved is already doing something due to their inclinations or circumstances and it’s fairly unlikely that’s going to change. Like, if you live in Japan and/or want to learn to speak then you’ll probably output early. If you live in not-Japan and have no plans or easy ways to start speaking the you’ll probably delay output beyond an efficient point.

It’s definitely true that better comprehension and a better internal sense of the language makes output far far easier, kind of obviously, but I would say that having a large passive vocabulary and a small active one can be frustrating. Recalling words and grammar naturally and in the correct context during a conversation, even if it is painful, and then using it tends to cement it a million times better than seeing it 10 times in a TV show. Obviously you need the input side first. Also, conversation is a form of input and it is normally extremely engaging and level appropriate if you’re speaking with friends. Basically, assuming you can speak a little bit, it isn’t an either/or situation.

Equally, by having conversations you can more easily realise your limits and where your hidden weaknesses are. Many people I see online claim relatively high comprehension of TV or something but I bet if all their tools were taken away and a native sat next to them and asked them questions directly about the show they would realise they were missing a lot and, further, their grasp on relevant vocabulary was weaker than they thought as they can’t even use it in that very straightforward context. Seeing those limitations (normally not in such a contrived situation) sharpens your attention when getting input as you come to notice things you wanted to or want to say and then better recall them later. Outputting totally changes the quality of your attention when inputting.

Last point, very often these discussions are being had but everyone involved only has one experience and normally the division is between people who are still in a silent period (as they don’t really want to speak anyway) or people who early outputted (due to interest or necessity) but I’ve never actually seen someone who did a silent period then started to output in these debates. I’d wager it’s because no matter your comprehension output will always feel “early”.

To throw a meaningless hat into the ring, I started outputting at the absolute bottom ends of N3 but I think the bottom ends of N2 is probably a more reasonable time to start if you want to delay output. If you can do N1 in a year then it’s probably fine to wait to N1 but…

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#53

Anxiety go bruuuuuhh

I never noticed this consciously when I was at that stage before, that’s a good thing to recognize. :thinking:

I don’t know about your wager because I’m certainly one of these people who delayed output a lot, and I recognize it. But either way, this division between silent period and early output is quite interesting, something I can imagine is even rarer, is someone who did both approaches on different languages until reaching fluency. When someone reaches fluency using a certain method, there’s not much incentive in trying the other, specially in the area of language learning, where most people give up / “fail” before reaching a satisfactory level. There’s quite a lot of “filters” people have to successfully traverse before reaching fluency, after all. Well, I’m using the silent period approach for the second time, and I’ll probably keep doing it for the next language as well.

But someone who have tried both approaches and SUCCEEDED in both of them could give quite useful insight into the discussion. If they failed in one of them, the opinion would be too biased as well. Someone wants to be the guinea pig? :rofl:

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#54

I should probably clarify that I meant delaying until one has a comprehension level the same as one’s native language (I have never seen anyone actually argue for this but it is sometimes implicit in the more zealous arguments I have seen - not in this thread though).

Once my Japanese is stronger, likely in a couple of years time, I am very interested in learning an “easy” European language but pretty much just for reading. I have no use for speaking French or German but there are a number of books I would like to read. Ask me again in a decade and perhaps I can tell you which method worked out better. I suspect the answer is just “it depends on your goals and motivation”.

I have noticed people learning Japanese tend to more strongly advocate for extremely long silent periods comapred to learners of other languages. The cynical part of me kind of feels like they just don’t like talking to people to begin with and are giving themselves an excuse to avoid an anxiety inducing situation… Outputting can be very socially painful sometimes and can shatter the ego quite a bit on a bad day. I think there is value in that ego shattering effect though as you are forced to ask yourself “If I am not the well spoken person I thought I am then who actually am I? In this situation, where I cannot fully express myself with words, how do I want to comport myself?”. I think most adults struggle with those questions and it can just be easier to retreat into a situation where you are in control or there is less chance of looking stupid (i.e., just immersing or only speaking in a classroom environment).

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#55

Well, “silent period” is a bit of a vague term, but I’d say that when I was learning Spanish I spent comparatively huge amounts of time and effort on input (Duolingo, comprehensible input and native podcasts, reading with the help of Lingq) for the first year or maybe more and very little on output, although I can’t say I didn’t attempt to dabble at all, but as I described above it did feel very frustrating because I felt very hampered by not being able to understand the other person (my wife at the time, who is a native speaker) and she was equally frustrated by how inefficient our conversations became. And then at some point after first year I started gradually shifting into doing more output and found it much easier at that point, in the ways I described above. So while it wasn’t like a complete “silent period”, I’d say my experience of learning Spanish was highly input-front-heavy at least.

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#56

This is certainly an important factor, but I think it can be another argument in favor of delaying output. It’s easy to tell people to become someone who can just get over it and accept the judgment of others without losing heart, but if that doesn’t work and it just adds stress and anxiety to the language learning process, it might just demotivate them and cause them to give up entirely. If you can give someone a small degree of control and minimize that shame they will have to endure when they start actually talking to people in the new language, that might be valuable.

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#57

100% agreed. As a teacher I actually spend a lot of time working explicitly on this issue.

I am interested to hear how you find Japanese outputting compared with Spanish when you start outputting. It is supposedly more difficult but I am not sure if that is genuinely true or if people tend to overestimate their Japanese ability compared with other languages.

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#58

I believe I started outputting around 6 months into my Japanese journey, which I admit was a bit early given I was just starting N4 content at that point in time. That’s why I think that N4 (as in, you can pass the JLPT N4 test) to early N3 is a good time to start outputting. At that point, one should have enough vocabulary and grammar to have a decent conversation with natives.

And, let me tell you, the first time you engage in a conversation will still suck. I promise you that! The only thing that can mitigate the blow on your ego are things like shadowing and/or monologues. Another great thing is recording yourself speaking Japanese (or whatever language you’re studying). That’s gonna be another shocker, lol. Outside of that, what will happen is the same thing that happens to people who can completely understand a foreign language but can’t speak it. Like them, you won’t be able to express yourself, at least not in the way that you think. No amount of listening/reading comprehension, nor grammar knowledge, will get you to speak fluently, only speaking the language will. You have to exercise those muscles in order to make them move the way they need to, and also engage the brain in real time thought processes in order to recall words in time. Those are all completely different skills than the skills needed for input.

In short, while I do agree that one has to wait until enough knowledge has been learned before outputting, I think that waiting longer than the sweet spot (which IMO is around N4 - early N3) is probably not providing extra benefits. If anything, it’ll make the feeling of not being able to communicate at the same level as the ability to comprehend that much more frustrating. Then again, I’m not an expert in this area, so even though I stand by what I’m saying going from experience, it is in no way scientific, and more anecdotal, so please take what I say with a grain of salt :blush:.

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#59

This is probably one of the reasons why the JLPT test doesn’t have a conversational (nor writing) portion like other language tests do. Imagine how much lower the attendance rate would be. Or the passing rate!

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#60

Spanish grammar does seem quite a lot less dissimilar to the languages I already spoke before starting to learn it compared to Japanese. It’s not uncommon that you can translate sentences almost word for word from English or Swedish into Spanish and it’ll turn out more or less natural-sounding. There are certain grammatical quirks that throw curveballs sometimes, but on the whole you can tell that they are fairly closely related linguistically. Japanese on the other hand tend to build sentences in an entirely different way (almost like they are built up backwards compared to Germanic or Romance languages), so I can imagine it’ll take some getting used to switching between those two modes of thought. This is mere speculation though, the brain is probably really good at adapting to such things given enough practice. I’ll get back to you if I ever get to the point where I can respond to your question with empirical data.

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#61

  1. I “started” when I was in high school (when I was 13 or 14). Now I’m 24. When I was 13 i used to watch subbed anime, and I grasped some hiragana like “の” and some Japanese words like “shoganai”. I learned hiragana/katakana thanks to “Remembering the kana”, a few grammar (AはBです) and then that’s all. I think at that time I was interested in the language because of anime, but also because the script (hiragana, katakana and kanji) was interesting. I stopped watching anime (and doing anything because uni was too much), but I picked it up again when the workload lowered, buying Minna no nihongo, then I started watching anime again, and I finished it a couple years ago and got N4.

  2. English Isn’t my first language. But, as a lot of people from my generation, I don’t really get how I learnt english, I guess it’s impossible not to do inmersion by being chronically online xD

  3. Inmersion is really important, but perhaps more so on the independent levels. At the start is so frustrating that its not worth it imo. Going to conversation exchanges is another thing, because the listening is not one sided. The other person sees your face of “わからん” and might try and say it another way, so you end up communicating. But watching a movie, listening to a podcast or trying to pick up a book with an n5-n4 level is… humbling to say the least

  4. My primary source of studying now is bunpro/anki. It’s kind of a “maintenance mode”. Then, when I have vacations at uni, I advance with grammar and inmersion.

  5. Streak goes brrr. And every time I’m watching something in japanese and I pick something up… chefs kiss

  6. My only tracking is Noken. And for that, the grammar points/words needed as they appear in bunpro/jpdb. I’ll try and get N3 this winter.

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#62

That‘s so smart! I am struggling to balance my programming course and my Japanese self studies, so I will probably try your method :grin:

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#63

temos um infiltrado aqui! Nice to find a portuguese learner out there haha

#64

何のために日本語を勉強するかと言うと、実はわからない。この段階では、わからなくなるほど、そんなに長い間勉強しているものだ。このごろ、考えずにやり続ける。

Why I study Japanese, I don’t really know. At this point, I’ve done it for so long I forget why I was doing it in the first place. It’s just something I kinda do now without thinking about it.

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#65

I went through all the responses in detail, summarizing responses and categorizing people’s learning styles and attitudes toward immersion. After doing this, I found that while pretty much everyone on this thread spends time immersing (by which I mean consuming materials made for native speakers of the target language, rather than materials made for learners of the language), there were two main sub-groups in how people engaged with their immersion:

  1. Those who engaged actively with their immersion, and consequently felt the need to restrict their immersion to materials that are at their level (e.g.: watching kid’s shows, presumably not because that is the most enjoyable content for them); and
  2. Those who immersed passively, and consume whatever media they found most enjoyable, even if they couldn’t understand it.

One rare group was the type that immerses actively (e.g.: looking up words, creating flashcards, shadowing, trying hard to understand, etc. instead of just watching/listening for pure enjoyment), but don’t limit the materials that they consume. I was part of this group, and from the looks of it, the few others who were part of this niche group also felt quite burnt out, especially with the lack of measurable progress.

However, overall, it seemed that most people fell into camp 1. where they immersed actively and preferred to consume media tailored to their level, or into camp 2. where they preferred to immerse more passively without as much regard for the difficulty of the language in the media.

Another overall trend I found was that most people, including the passive immersers (camp 2), did not believe that only passively immersing would be an effective way to acquire the language (which I interpreted to be a rejection of the “input hypothesis”). So those who fell into camp 2. would often supplement with guided resources.

After thinking about all of these responses, I was thinking a cool idea would be an automatic learning roadmap generator for anime shows/TV/arbitrary media. You take a quiz that allows us to estimate your passive vocabulary, and then choose any show you want to watch, and then rest assured that when you come back to our platform, we would have a learning roadmap to extract all the relevant language learnings from that TV episode for you. As you take the lessons, our estimates for your passive vocab get updated, and we can give a better estimate of your progress through an immersion approach.

Also, the cool thing about this idea is that it appeals to both camps. The camp that is currently limiting the materials they consume now have the opportunity to explore any materials they find interesting, and rest assured that they don’t have to understand everything when they watch it, because the learnings they could make from that episode will be extracted into lessons for them. Of course, the people who really cannot tolerate ambiguity could also continue to watch kids’ shows and beginner content, but in either case, they can rest assured that they extract the max learnings possible from what they watch.

On the other hand, it appeals to camp 2. as well because now they can check what learnings they should have made/can make from the show they just watched, and make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. And instead of learning actively with supplementary materials in the hopes that it shows up in their immersion, they can rest assured that what they learn is directly applicable to the content they already consume, because it was generated from that content itself, for the sake of making that content more understandable as quickly as possible.

I still haven’t decided if this will for sure be the final product I work on, but I am excited about the idea. If I had this earlier on, it would have saved me a lot of heartache, because I wouldn’t feel the need to constantly pause the TV shows and would be able to more easily separate my active learning from my consumption for enjoyment.

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#66

Try
https://japaneselevelup.com/difficulty-level-guide-everything-japanese/

he used to have a site called Wakarukana - Find Japanese You Can Understand Now
with rankings of difficulty of different immersion content and reading comprehension.
The recommendations and quizzes were all written by Adam, not an AI. If you asked him, he might sell it to you. He posted on his blog that he’s looking for a buyer.

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#67

Now that you mention it, improvising is easily my weakest area, especially on the piano. I always got that message to prioritize sheet music as a beginner and then sort of thrown to the wolves once I hit intermediate. Even though I’ve practiced banging out ostinatos with my left-hand for a song, even transferring that to improvisation is a totally different skill set.

Really, where I disagree with Refold is, the last time I checked that site, the authors seemed to imply that one shouldn’t start outputting until they can comprehend a high percentage of input. I’ve always kept output as a low priority myself, but now I’m at a point where I’m relearning proper usage and pitch accent for words that have been in my active vocabulary for years, which is frustrating.

I agree that output isn’t terribly important if all of one’s goals are input. But I also believe I’ve had some gains in input that I only got because I was outputting. As with the music example, I regret with Japanese that I didn’t try more things and let my skills cross-pollinate more. I didn’t know better but it’s hard not to regret having made suboptimal use of so much time.

My Spanish and Japanese have both gotten me laughed at countless times. At least now I’m at an age where I have the wisdom to tell myself, “You’re learning a language. You’re supposed to get laughed at.”

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#68

Originally it was video games. I like them, and I long wanted to be able to play games in Japanese. Then I got busy with life after school. I worked for the last decade or so, and have settled into a pretty reasonable professional life.

Now, it’s different. One, I’ve always wanted to learn some second language well, that’s been a dream of mine since I studied Linguistics in college. I’m getting older, and learning a new language doesn’t get easier, and Japanese is the language I’ve studied the most so far, so I’m rededicating myself to that. I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I really want to try something else for a bit, and so I’m going to be going to Japan to study the language full-time for a year and see how that works.
I’m hoping this also enables me to work professionally in Japan for some time. I think it would be interesting to experience that. We will see. It might not work out; I might not like living in Japan. We will see.

Finally, a minor thing. I used to do some research on Ainu, and the resources in English on it are very limited. I would like to be able to learn more about that, which requires knowing Japanese. It’s also one reason I’m going to study in Sapporo.

Fun stuff.

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