This is in answer to an email which raised some really cool questions, so here it is for your benefit (I’m all “because I know what’s best for you!!”)…Whatever, anyway:

“…I can certainly see how an emphasis on reading sentences leads to a large vocabulary and an intuitive sense of grammar and usage. However, what about listening and speaking? To what extent have you found that reading skills transfer over to these areas? On the site you talk about surrounding yourself with Japanese TV, movies, and music, but unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult to capture in an SRS. I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much. Do you recommend the use of simple (yet admittedly contrived) audio resources like Pimsleur, JapanesePod101, or something else?”

Perhaps there’s nothing intrisically wrong with your typical language-learning tape, but:
1) I never used them
2) The people I have met who have used them, have trouble with real Japanese as it is spoken by actual Japanese people…
…because, as you said, they ARE contrived. So contrived as to be almost useless. Have you heard the kinds of tapes people in Japan and other countries use to learn English? Let me give you an example:

“How do you do? My name is Smith”
“Pleased to meet you. My name is Tanaka.”

The same Japanese people who listen to this kind of thing are the same ones who can’t successfully order fast food at a Wendy’s in America, or follow an episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”. These are the people who blame English for being “hard”, blame people for “talking too fast”, and/or buy into some quack-science nihonjinron theory that “the Japanese ear cannot process those frequencies”, because, well, it certainly couldn’t be the case that their learning methods were deficient to begin with, since they spent so much time and money on them, right? Hmm…

You see, the stuff on those English tapes, it’s not that it’s not English, it’s just that it’s the dead corpse of English injected with linguistic formaldehyde(?)…that was a spectacular failure of a medical metaphor…Anyway, it’s not alive. It’s like a wax sculpture of the actual living person that is English. I mean, who in their right mind goes around saying: “how do you do”? The English tapes would have you believe that that’s normal. And to top it off, those tapes tend to be about as entertaining as watching nails grow. Fake and boring — not a great recipe for learning.

“unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult”

Aha! There’s a contradiction. Most people go around wailing about the perceived difficulty of written language. Now it’s spoken language that’s the problem. It can’t be both. Which is it? Well, in truth it’s neither one. I will admit that listening to real Japanese and reading/writing real Japanese require attention, effort and some time. Which is exactly why you can’t afford to put them off. You HAVE to start with them as soon as possible because they are “difficult” (which really only means “different” — you just need to get used to them). So start with real Japanese audio-visual sources right now. Of course, you won’t understand most of what’s said, but I guarantee you will understand at least one word. That’s how you start. With one word. For the longest time, you’ll only be able to pick up individual words. But from words you’ll grow until you pick up whole phrases, then sentences and then, eventually, the entire show. It takes months, but it is a finite process. And it’s not just words — the rhythms and cadences of real Japanese are important for you to hear, too. There are sounds that Japanese people naturally shorten, lengthen or combine. There are places in the sentence where you pause or don’t pause. The visuals — the facial expressions, the shape of the face/mouth, the bridges (”さあ”, “ええ”）. The hand gestures, the body movements. All of these are part of Japanese, too — a part that is a heck of a lot more easily, more enjoyably and more effectively (in terms of memorization) learned by direct observation than by having some textbook just list them for you.

Of course, it’s rough when you start, but it gets easier. In the beginning stages, take words you hear on TV and get short sentence examples of those words, then build on that. Nouns of course are a big part of any language — always learn a noun together with a verb that acts on it. Adverbs with verbs. Adjectives with nouns. Pay attention to what particle (wo, ni, de, etc,) is used with it. Start taking small, single steps every day while literally keeping your eyes and ears on the prize (reading, speaking and understanding REAL Japanese), and you will get there. It’s not a matter of “whether”, but of “when”. And the more time you spend on it on a day-to-day basis, the sooner “when” will come. The more you are exposed to real Japanese, the more comfortable you will become with it. It will become your default daily reality because you’ll have made it so.

I don’t actively oppose audio-learning tapes like I oppose classes, but it seems to me that they give you a false sense of security and achievement. In reality, Japanese is never going to be spoken as slowly, clearly and precisely as it is on those tapes. People (especially women) are going to talk FAST. Men are going to mumble. Things are going to be shortened — “azzaimass” is as common and natural as “arigatou gozaimasu”. Better that you face reality on a daily basis from the beginning than be lulled into safety only to have it pounce on you suddenly. The fact that people who listen to language tapes of Japanese/French/whatever are STILL floored when they go to the country only underscores the fact that those tapes can’t have been such great preparation in the first place.

“I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much.”

Right. That is true. But I would still recommend that you watch as much TV as possible. Nevertheless, understanding only bits and pieces can be unsatisfying after a while. That’s why I also recommend JAPANESE-DUBBED VERSIONS of movies and TV shows you already know and like. In my case, that meant lots of things like “Star Trek”, “CSI”, “Monk”, “The O.C.” and “Independence Day”. You know the premise; you understand the relationships; you know the plots and you may even have all the dialogue memorized. So it becomes a matter of seeing and hearing the stories you love recounted in Japanese. Since you know what’s happening, you can focus on the Japanese. I’ve found it to be fun, effective and satisfying. Even crappy B-movies turn to gold in Japanese because the predicability of the plot and dialogue frees you from figuring out “what the heck is going on here?”, allowing you to focus on “oh THAT’s how to say ‘arm photon torpedoes’ in Japanese”. You never know when you might need to have a photon torpedo armed :).

In terms of learning languages, cause and effect behave strangely . If you want to get good at listening to real Japanese then the way do it is by listening to real Japanese. In other words, being able to function in real Japanese settings is both the effect and cause of exposure to real Japanese settings.

Language tapes make you feel like you are really learning something; they give you a sense of progress and achievement…But again, sometimes, I’m afraid this is a false sense. For one thing, you will almost never hear or have the same conversations as are on those tapes. Even if you ask a question that you learned from the tape verbatim, will you get the same response? Almost certainly not. But those tapes don’t prepare you for the asymmetry of reality — there are a myriad of ways to say the same thing; other people are going to use words and expressions in a quantity and variety greater than you personally ever will. Your ability to understand can’t just be on a par with your ability to produce, you have to understand much more than you will ever produce. Going back to the Japanese people who’ve learned English but have trouble at fast-food restaurants: “Here or to go?” and “Shall I supersize that” were the questions that stumped them.

What was the problem? You could fill reams of paper with the answer to that question. They didn’t know about the “verbing” of nouns, compound words, slang…whatever.

What is the solution? Put more fast-food sections on the English tapes? No. That’s simply patching a problem without actually solving it — treating a symptom without curing the disease.

You can’t just increase the amount of vocabulary either, at least in part because the obvious basic features of a language (standard grammar structures, noun vocabulary) alone will not allow you to function smoothly in that language. Not even close. As much as the more obvious features of a language are necessary, equally necessary is a deep or deeper understanding of the underlying logic of a language. I don’t know what this understanding should be called, some people call it an instinct or an intuition, but that almost sounds too intangible because whether or not someone understands this underlying logic very tangibly makes or breaks them in a language. Not understanding this underlying logic is the cause of translations that are grammatically and syntatically correct but that just don’t “work”. They just don’t “sit” right. They’re awkward, stilted. They’re not “wrong”, yet they are completely wrong. For proof, watch any Japanese TV commercial with English in it: “For your number one”, “Inspire the next”…Hurrrnnh?

There are linguists who devote their careers analyzing and explaining this underlying logic. And that’s a good thing. Meanwhile, textbook writers try (and almost always fail) to codify this logic, which leaves a student confused; or they ignore and sidestep it, leaving a student ignorant and defenseless: after months or years of fake, whitewashed textbook-style Japanese, some students never recover from the shock of “real” Japanese and give up, mystified and mystifying this “impossible Eastern language”, because, you know those East Asians, so “inscrutable” (*eyes roll into back of head*).

I believe that the individual wanting to become a native-like speaker is best off training her brain’s instinct to simply DO it. To get it right and “keep it real” from the beginning. Leave the analysis for the academic discussion because it’s too long-winded and clumsily-worded to be useful anyway — you need to know real Japanese and you need to know it soon. You need to be flexible, fast on the uptake and quick on your feet. The way to do that is to expose yourself to authentic, by-and-for native-speakers Japanese on a constant basis — to observe, understand and imitate real Japanese. Face reality from the beginning.

And that’s not all. Don’t even get me started on different regional accents. Where’s the tape for those? Just think of how many accents you as an English speaker can deal with, even though you may only speak with one. Japanese has dialects, too. You don’t need to use them, but you can’t pretend they don’t exist.

Just because you feel like you’re learning, that doesn’t mean that you really are. Just because you feel like you’re drowning, that doesn’t mean that you won’t swim and live. Feeling that you know Japanese because you can follow fake tapes of it is like feeling like you know an animal because you’ve seen it stuffed in a museum or tamed at a circus. It just doesn’t work that way. You need to see the critter “alive” and in “the wild”. Build yourself a “hidden observation post” ( i.e. acquire and surround yourself with real Japanese materials whether or not you are in Japan) if you need to. Or, if you’re in Japan, turn on the TV and radio; go down to the video store. Whatever it takes. You can take this “language as animal” analogy further. Who are the Western world’s greatest experts on gorillas and chimpanzees respectively? Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. Both these people literally surrounded themselves with the subject of their study. They didn’t go to the circus, the museum or the zoo. They went to forests in Cameroon and Rwanda to see the real thing. It’s not that they were smarter than their colleagues — they just had better methods. The same goes for language, except that language has the benefit that you don’t have travel to it in order to “feel the realness”. The very nature of language allows you experience it across space and time. In other words, you can bring the language to you; you can turn wherever you are into a little Japan without any fundamental loss of authenticity.

I know I’ve said some harsh things here, and it’s not meant as an attack on any particular audio publisher. They are all trying their best to help people. And there are, in fact, realistic audio tapes out there (I used some for Chinese once), but I definitely get the impression that these are few and far between, the exception rather than the rule — the same company will produce one or two good (realistic) tapes, but then put out a lot of cookie-cutter stuff, too. When learning a language HAVING FUN is crucial. If something gets boring, take a break. If something is always boring, throw it out. Life is short, so do things that are fun and productive.

A baby is born into the world. She doesn’t know ANY language or ANY customs. Three years later, she’s not only talking, she has to be told to shut up. “Well, babies are magical”, people say. Bollocks. Babies are stupid and ignorant. But with that ignorance comes an ignorance of embarassement, of fear, of limitations. 24/7/365 for 2-3 years, they are exposed to their native language(s) and as toddlers “suddenly” become quite fluent in it/them; no one ever tells them that it’s “hard” or that “it can’t be done”.Nothing is ever expected of babies but success. There is no magic to it; it’s not a “miracle”. If you take a seed, plant it, water it and give it light, don’t act surprised when one day things suddenly start shooting up out of the soil. If we really look at the conditions under which babies are working we see that their success is virtually inevitable. When we as adults work with the daily devotion and unshakeable conviction of a baby combined with our extensive knowledge, life experience and abstract reasoning abilities, we also inevitably succeed; we work our own “miracles”. You and I have to believe that we adults have a lot more going for us cerebrally than babies. What, then, stands in our way? Only ourselves.

Spoken and written language are not hard: if given the chance, they come naturally to all of us. Just think of all the idiots you’ve met in your life ;)…most could speak and write just fine.

This advice applies specifically to Mnemosyne, KhatzuMemo and SuperMemo, since they all share a 0 — >5 scoring system. It may well apply to other SRSes, too.

The “readings” are of course pronunciations for characters.

The “meaning” is the meaning+context+intent of the sentence. Of course, many sentences can have slightly different meanings in different contexts; you should only tackle one at a time — it will make life simpler for you. What I mean is: one sentence, one meaning. Fix a context. So “A bun in the oven”, cannot refer to both baking and pregnancy. Make one “card”/QA pair that’s about bakery, and a separate card about babies. Better yet, give extra context so there is less ambiguity. OK, I’m waffling about a problem that doesn’t often come up, but there it is as advice.

So, here is how I would and do score a sentence:

0: You had no idea whatsoever what the sentence meant, and/or you did not correctly reproduce readings for multiple characters.

1: You had an idea, but were completely wrong about what the sentence meant, and/or you did not correctly reproduce readings for multiple characters.

2: You just missed it. You were slightly off on the meaning OR slightly off on a reading. So, for Chinese-learners: if you give the right sound but the wrong tone, that counts as “slightly” off.

3: You got just got by on this one. You knew what the sentence meant. Maybe you even initially gave the wrong reading but then changed your mind to the right one. Or, gave the right one but changed your mind to the wrong one.

4: You knew exactly what the sentence meant. You read it out correctly with no mistakes in readings, BUT, even though you got it correct, you have/had some doubt. At no point did you give an incorrect reading for a character; you were just slow/stumbling a little and lacked some confidence in your answer. You didn’t instantly give the right reading for one or more characters — you had to think for a relatively long time.

5: You knew exactly what the sentence meant. You read it out quickly, confidently and clearly with all readings correct (no mistakes). This sentence was a cakewalk for you.

Anyway, that’s how I have scored and continue to score my sentences for both Japanese and Chinese. You are of course free to have variations of your own, let one hundred flowers bloom and all that; I don’t think there is a “right way” to do this, as such. As you advance, you might want to narrow your grading down to the part of the sentence that you were aiming to learn (since you advance gradually, almost every new sentence will only be partially new to you). So there you have it, a rough guideline.

OK, so you’re learning Japanese; you’re going for the fluency; you’re going for the native-level proficiency. And as part of that, you want to be pronouncing it right. You don’t want to have the “stupid foreigner accent”. You don’t want to be doing the Japanese equivalent of “eet’s a-me, a-Maaario!”.The answer is simple, folks. Let’s break it down.

1. Talk like a robot.
Yes, I am dead serious. If you want to speak good-sounding Japanese, then talk like a robot. “But Khatzumoto, on TV and in songs, they sound so animated”. Well, not you, my friend. Trust me on this one. You see, compared to English, Japanese is sound-sparse. Very sound sparse. If you intone in Japanese like you do in English it will sound AWFUL. “KerNEEchewa! NiHON toTEmo DAIsuki deSUUU”. No. Cut that crap out. Today. It grates on the ear. Every time you do it, a clown dies. This is part of the reason classes suck—classes are full of girls called Stacy who do that.

Talk like a robot. Flat, monotone, one-beat-per-kana. Give every kana the same length. Ev-er-y-ka-na-is-one-syl-la-ble. Also, two-kana situations where you have one kana smaller than the other—ちょ、しょ、りょ, etc.—these-count-as-one-syl-la-ble-too.

2. Keep it tight
So, when I told my brother-in-law this, I said something to the effect of: “keep your mouth tight, as you would with other body cavities were you in prison”. That kind of innuendo has no place on this website! But, Grasshopper, there is much truth in this correctional advice.

OK, I’m assuming you speak English. So, English has a lot more sounds than Japanese, right? Which means that, when speaking English, you move your mouth in all sorts of shapes and configurations. Stop that. Keep your mouth tight in Japanese. There are only 5 vowel sounds. Stick to them. Do not introduce sounds that don’t exist. That’s the biggest mistake English-speakers make—introducing sounds that have no place in Japanese. Narrow your range. Shorten your stride. A. I. U. E. O.

Remember, Japanese pronunciation is cake. It’s easy. For starters, you don’t have to make any sounds you’re not already making as an English speaker. You’re using a subset of the sounds in English. So keep it tight.

3. Record yourself, and play it back.
If you’re anything like me, then this will feel like the linguistic equivalent of going to the toilet and looking closely at the results—they tend to stink. It’s gross. I hate the sound of my own voice recorded. I keep thinking I sound so cool, unti I hear the evidence and am reminded that I sound like an idiot; this is true regardless of the language in question.
So, why the torture? Because it’s good for you, and because you’re voice isn’t all bad. Playing back your own voice will help you realize where your stuff is good and solid, and where it needs work.

You don’t need to go overboard on the recording. Once a week is more than enough. Record yourself reading something aloud, hear what needs work, and work on it.

4. Pick up intonation piece by piece
Now, there is intonation and emphasis in Japanese. But, like I said, it’s far less prominent than it is in English. So much so that talking like a robot does not sound weird. It sounds good. It sounds like good Japanese. I did it for a long time.

Of course, you’re not going to want to talk like a robot forever—not because it’s bad—but because you’re no doubt going to want to express emotions through the tones cadences of your voice. This is where you’re Japanese Immersion environMent (JIM) comes in. Yes, I just made that up. The TV, movies, radio and podcasts you watch or listen to are you’re source. Watch, watch, watch. Listen, listen, listen. Over time, you will start to pick up little pieces.

You’ll notice that “desu” and “-masu” almost always get shortened such that they come out as “dess” and “mass”. Kind of like how “What the HECK” comes out as “ ‘the HECK?!”. There is this leftover ‘intention’ to say the whole word, and your mouth even more or less makes the right shape, it just doesn’t come out.

You’ll notice how people say “KANkei NAI darou!”. And so on. And so forth. One piece at a time, one expression at a time, you’ll pick it up. If you turn every available waking moment of your life into a JIM, it will come to you. Any moment of the day you do not have to speak or listen to a language other than Japanese, you should—must—speak or listen to Japanese. In the shower, while you sleep (if it doesn’t disturb you), when walking, eating breakfast, making love. Whatever.

5. Adopt a Parent
This is really an extension of the idea of picking up intonation piece by piece. Anyway—have you ever noticed that a lot of people share the speech patterns and mannerisms of their parents? This is no accident—a lot of people spend a lot of time with their parents. You probably don’t have a Japanese-speaking parent. But that doesn’t matter: you can adopt yourself one for free. And they don’t even have to know it.

Learning a language is a lot like acting. Scratch that, it is acting. In many ways, all you’re doing is an impression—an imitation—of other people. As you grow older within a given language, your awareness of this imitation decreases; the imitation has become so natural that you don’t notice it. Plus, you may even have added some unique, personal innovations of your own. Nevertheless, I can remember, even into my early teens, consciously imitating people in my native language.

The point is this—kick-start that imitation again. Pick someone and copy them. Make them your “parent”. If you’re a guy, you should pick a guy to copy; and girls should pick a girl. Watch, listen, imitate. Yes, this is sexism, but it is sexism with a purpose: there is quite a sizeable gender spectrum in Japanese. You can situate yourself somewhere in the middle, without being too macho or too girly, but there are expressions/emphases that are almost exclusively female and ones that are almost exclusively male. Also, men mumble more than women; women intone more than men; all of which perhaps explains why a lot of people initially find feminine/women’s speech “easier to understand”.

Back on topic—you probably do impressions of people already, when you’re making fun of them. Just keep doing that, and strive to make your impression an accurate one.

You don’t have to “set aside time” for this. Since you’ve created a JIM (Japanese Immersion Environment), you can just do it while you’re relaxing watching TV, or listening to radio/podcasts, or whatever. It’s not something complicated; it’s just something you do.

Closing
Anyway, that’s how I did it and it worked well for me. Remember, as always, have FUN!