So, there you are. You’ve started learning Japanese. You’ve got your materials, you’re excited, you do your sentences. But you don’t feel that different from yesterday. You wonder, when are you going to get good? How do you know if you’re making progress?

Short answer: You don’t. It’s kind of like growing taller. Oh, it’s happening. Oh, the milk is helping. But it’s not like there’s a percent bar on your elbow that you can look at, really. There’s no green light that flickers to let you know that you’re increasing in height. There’s no bell that rings every millimeter you go up. You only notice after the fact when you start bumping your head on doorways and such.

So this is what I did when I was learning hardcore, and it’s what I still do right now. Here it is — if you have to ask how good you are at Japanese, or when you’ll get good, then either:

1. You still suck (but only for now…remember, sucking is a temporary condition healed through practice), so stop asking — it’ll probably only make you feel bad. Or,

2. You don’t suck. But,

either way:

3. You could be spending this time finding ways to get even better.

In other words, ask not what the language you are learning is doing for you. Ask what more you can do for the language you are learning.

Especially when I lived outside of Japan, I spent a lot of time trying to Japanize every moment possible. I bought a shower radio and a radio transmitter so I could listen to my MiniDisc player’s Japanese music in the bathroom as I washed filth from my body. I put my headphones on almost 24 hours a day (very important to acquire comfy headphones for this purpose; I like the behind-the-head kind). I got rid of all English books on my shelves and replaced them with Japanese ones, some I could understand, some I just wanted to understand. I put Japanese posters on the walls. I talked to cats and dogs in Japanese. I wrote any personal notes in Japanese. And I was constantly acquiring new Japanese shows to watch. What’s another random movie I like? Waterworld? Let’s buy the Japanese version. Hey! That unaccompanied child over there looks like he could collect a few hundred DVDs’ worth of ransom money…

I could go on praising myself for ever, but my point is this: it’s not like I thought up all these things all at once ahead of time. I just looked for gaps and filled them in. Can you get more films or shows to watch? Do you eat with chopsticks? Can you make sure you do your SRS reps first thing every day? Can you improve your daily consistency? Do you have to do whatever it is you still do that isn’t in Japanese? Can you do more sentences per day?

What don’t you know how to say that you want to know how to say? What word do you keep needing but forget to look up (in my case it was “plateau”/高原 (in the sense of a high-altitude flat area of land…not a word you always need, but hard to elegantly do without when you do need it)? Can you discuss the things you care about? The geography of your country? Agriculture? Ancient Rome? ‘Better read up on them in the old Japanese Wikipedia or something…

Spend your time getting better rather than worrying about when and whether or not you will get better. Spend your time filling all the cracks of your life with Japanese. Focus on the little things you do or could do. Some people say that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds take care of themselves — I actually think this isn’t entirely true — but I will say this: every step in the right direction is a step closer to your destination. So, if you take care of the practicing, and the sentences, Japanese will take care of itself. And at the end of the day, what is a language but a collection of sentences? What is being good but being well-practiced?

Anyway, as always, HAVE FUN!

This is super embarrassing to admit, but, when I was in college, I literally used to stalk East Asian(-looking) people; I’d even look through school phonebooks and other lists of names to find people from Japan. Before you call me an ethnically-biased stalker, remember that I effectively did it for you! I was like “I’m going to write a website about this one day, so I’d better take a hit for the team”. No, OK — I was looking for people to speak Japanese with. People’s whose Japanese I could listen to, and whom I could get to correct my Japanese.

Not much has changed since then. I’m still looking for Japanese friends (even though I live in Japan). But I’m not in college any more, so stalking could in fact have me acting out my own version of Prison Break…hmm, I could be Michael Scofield and C-Note rolled into one.

Back on topic. So there’s this site www.MyLanguageExchange.com. The color scheme isn’t about to win any awards, but that’s not what you go there for. It’s full of people who actually want to exchange languages — they will help you in your native language if you will help them with yours. The site isn’t limited to Japanese-English either, all kinds of languages and language combinations are welcome.

There is a catch — the site is free for passive use (i.e. just waiting for other people to contact you), but if you want to actively contact other users, then it’s US$6 for a one-month “Gold Membership”. I hate spending money, but, it was kind of worth it for a websiteful of native speakers of Japanese who don’t have to be stalked. The people there want to be contacted; they want to help and to be helped; they generally aren’t casual or half-hearted about it, so you will get replies to your messages (and then, of course, you can continue your friendship via email, voice chat, phone or whatever).

Especially if you’re away from universities or Japanese communities, for building a network of Japanese friends MyLanguageExchange.com is pretty durn good. By the way, if you know of any other reliable (and hopefully free) websites like this that actually work, feel free to let me and everyone else know.

This is a repeat of a previous post. I wasn’t happy with the wording the last time, it seemed unclear and difficult to understand. Truth be told, scoring repetitions requires some individual judgment, but much of it, I think, can be standardized. So here’s a second attempt at explaining how to score repetitions. Hopefully this time around things are clearer.

0 – Blank. Complete non-recall. You completely forgot the reading of 1 or more characters. You completely forgot the meaning of one or more words

1 – Completely wrong. One big error or multiple small errors. You got the reading of one or more characters COMPLETELY wrong. Or, you got the reading of 2 or more characters slightly wrong. This goes against what I said previously, but, I think a tone error in Chinese should be graded as “completely wrong” rather than “slightly wrong”. Tone matters that much.

2 – Slightly wrong. You got the reading of one character slightly wrong. You had a hazy idea of the meaning, and it was slightly off, or too broad/narrow

3 – More or less juust right. Weak, struggling, but right. No mistakes. Maybe you had the meaning or reading wrong to begin with, but then you corrected yourself

4 – Exactly right. Very good. Maybe a little slow or slightly halting, but not too slow

5 – Perfect. It was a breeze. Like breathing. In. Out. Next!

OK. Let’s talk more about your immersion environment for languages in general and Japanese in particular. From what I hear, this self-immersion thing is a bit of lifestyle change that some people have trouble with. And I can see why, so here are some tips on how to make the transition smoother. This is going to be quick and dirty, so here goes:

Before you jump, make sure you have somewhere to land
Today must be Trite Wisdom Day or something because I’m full of old adages. Anyway, here goes: nature abhors a vacuum. When you want to Japanize your environment/de-English your environment, you need something to de-English to. If you give up watching non-Japanese movies, do you have Japanese movies to watch? If you give up non-Japanese music, do you have Japanese beats to which to bop your head in rhythmic fashion? If you give up your English-speaking friends and online acquaintances, do you have Japanese acquaintances to “replace” them with? (Note: I’m not saying you should dump your English-speaking friends. But if they make fun of you, and try to stop you, and just generally get in the way, then they must stand down as you stand up to Japanese. Set them aside. If they’re real friends, they’ll understand, and they’ll be there when you come back. They may even follow you into Japanese!)

Do one thing at a time, one day at a time
Trying to change your environment in a single day is like transplanting an organ, in that your psychological “immune system” will just reject it (拒絶反応). It’s too much shock. Emotionally, I don’t think most people can just cut themselves off that way in a single day. But a week, a week’s enough. Two weeks is MORE than enough. So change out all your music one day, and nothing else. Next day, do the movies. Then, the posters on your wall. The books on your shelf. Et cetera! Either way, make sure you do something every day, just don’t try to do too much in one day.

Don’t just put it away, get rid of it
So where do you put the artifacts of your pre-immersion life? Where do you put your English-language stuff? In a closet somewhere? No. You get rid of it. Mp3s? Delete them. DVDs? Scratch, sell or slice them apart. Posters? Post them to someone else. Get rid of it. Delete, destroy, dispose. Suggestions: Sell that stuff on ebay and reinvest the funds in Japanese-language materials. Or, trade it with a kid from Japan who wants to learn English. I know it’s hard to give it up. I know you were or are a huge “Self” fan, and you’ve been in love with their music ever since you heard “Stay Home” on the closing credits of the first Shrek, and you loved their music even more when you found out they’d made an album using only toy instruments. I know, okay? I know! But dang it, son! (and I mean “son” in the unisex sense). This is about learning Japanese. Japanese is your life now. Japanese is your future. And you’re not about to give it up — you’re not about to let it go — in a moment of nostalgic weakness that leads to an all-night marathon of playing Michael Jackson music going all the way to back to when he was black — not that I would know. This is too important for that. You want Japanese too much. So let go. Get rid of the “Self” albums. Put down the ranger, and become who you were born to be. Become Japanese.

If you don’t yet know all the dialogue and the lyrics, then it’s still worth repeating
Don’t use “lack of equipment” as an excuse to not get going. If you’re assembling Japanese-language tools, either do it quickly and in large volume, or use what little is at hand. Time is slipping through your hands, so use it wisely. Time is precious; it is perhaps the only thing you cannot take back. Money can be earned. Marriages can be repaired (lol — warning: do not take relationship advice from me). But time, once it’s gone, it’s gone. So don’t sit there thinking “Man, if only I had more stuff, then I could really get my Japanese on”. GET more stuff now, or USE what you have. Remember, if you still don’t know all the dialogue to that one movie or all the lyrics to that one song by heart, then it still warrants repeating. I don’t care if you’re bored and have seen or watched it a thousand times. Listen to it more carefully; try to pick out something new; I guarantee you’ll learn something. Of course, don’t go around being bored forever, that’s a recipe for disaster, do get something new to watch or listen to. But no excuses. Start now.

Get it
Is it in Japanese? Then get it. Most of my American friends don’t have this problem, but if, like me, you were raised by what can only be politely described as a frugal mother, then spending money on anything but the bare essentials is hard for you. I still don’t go to restaurants, and even when I do, I just sit there without ordering anything (it’s a sight to behold, my tableful of friends will be eating food and I’ll be reading a comic book).

Get it. Get the book, get the movie. Even if you don’t understand it yet. At first, just having it around you will be motivating. It’ll be another reminder of your goal and your future. Eventually you will actually understand it, either by working through it directly, or as a by-product of your sentence-mining and reading of other materials. To use a personal example — I had collected a lot of Japanese comics like Neon Genesis Evangelion long before I could really work through them or understand them in any meaningful way. Their very presence was a reminder of the joy I would be having one day. It was a reminder of the reason why I had really wanted to learn Japanese in the first place (yes, to read comics). Today of course, I can pick up a new comic I’ve never seen before and read it cover to cover the same day — like the dude said, in order to do something with ease, you must first do it with difficulty.

Now, we’re not all well-monied all the time. If you’re on a tight budget, do use a resource like your local library. But when and where the library fails you, loosen the pursestrings a bit. Ultimately, this is an investment; it really is. Your skill in Japanese can and will pay you back in cold, hard cash money bills. So pay up front for it. I know it hurts, but do it anyway.

Of course, this is not license to be financially irresponsible; we all need to be grown-ups about how we handle our business. But I am saying that money spent on Japanese-learning materials is money spent wisely; it is a worthy expense. Yes, that includes the Japanese dub of Independence Day. If nothing else, you’ve got to hear what they did with Will Smith’s voice.

Anyway, that’s all from me for now.

Just to start, let me say this. I love confessing other people’s sins. You know how it is — other people are just so messed up! Other people have so much crap for me to be angry at them for. And it’s so much easier than dealing with my own stuff. I could go on for days about other people’s mistakes. In fact, I could write a whole website about it (hmmm?). Take some of my friends from Japan. They want to learn English: “Khatzumoto, teach me English”. But they spend all their time with other Japanese people, listen to Japanese music, read Japanese comics. Great for learning Japanese, absolutely useless for learning English. So I say to them, I say to my friends from Japan who want to learn English, “go to www.AntiMoon.com. Most of what I did was apply their English-learning techniques to Japanese. They know what they are talking about. It is very effective. Follow their instructions.”

Most of these friends of mine can get through the English on AntiMoon.com. Oh, they understand the English. But almost none of them do anything. Almost none of them ever download an SRS and start using example sentences. Even if I I download it for them, I swear they never use it beyond the first demonstration. They just go on with their lives, content with the idea that “English is so hard, man”. Content with buying random books about English. Content with writing shocking English. Content with doing things the way they’ve been doing them.

I know how they feel. Who wants to start something new, right? But still, I don’t get it. I mean, dang, man — what more do you want? The road has practically been laid out for you, you need but follow it! And so I used to lie there in bed, thinking “Dude, WTF?! Just do something! Learn it!! Stop whining about how it’s hard or about how school sucked or about how your dad should have accepted that posting to New York so you could have grown up speaking English or how your teacher was stupid or how English has more phonemes than letters and the whole writing system is a slimy, tangled morass of contradictions and exceptions to shaky rules and there are so many accents and dialects and sub-dialects and some people misspell on the Internet and what’s a Germanic language doing with this much Latin in it in the first place and ‘these sounds cannot be heard by the Japanese ear’ and AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”.

Other people are so messed up.

But then it hit me what the problem is. I know it’s a problem I have. I think it’s a problem we all have. It’s the difference between the people who achieve something and those who don’t. Before, I thought that the problem was that people’s desire was lacking, I even touched on it in a previous post, but perhaps that was inaccurate — or at least incomplete. Anyway, here is what I now think is the real problem.

You see, everyone has desire. Everyone wants to be good at something. Everyone wants to know a cool language, everyone wants mad kung-fu skills, computer-hacking skills…you name it. Everyone wants to be able to play a piano concerto with their eyes closed using only their big toe. So, the difference between those who do know a language, do have kung-fu/computer hacking skills — et cetera — and those who don’t must, in fact, be very small, and it is this: Those who have the skills didn’t just want to be good, they decided to be good. Want or decide — one is a wish, the other is a choice. One can get crushed, forgotten and swept away by the hectic business of everyday life; the other is inevitable — it sweeps everything out of its path, it crushes, avoids or otherwise overcomes obstacles. Like commercial breaks or uninvited missionaries, it’s always all up in your face.

So, if you want to be good, then good luck with that. If you’ve decided to be good, then gosh help anyone or anything that gets in your way!

How about you? Do you just want to be fluent in Japanese, or have you decided to be?

Anyway, enough soapboxing from me. It’s time to go back to wanting to kick rear like Bruce Lee…(sigh) those abs, man…those abs.

A while ago, someone asked me what it’s like in the beginning. What it was like for me when starting on this journey to becoming one with Japanese. It’s a great question, and I think the answer will be valuable, so here are some points I thought up.

1. It’s scary

When starting out Japanese, the idea itself is intimidating. You see a wallful of kanji, and it’s intimidating. You see a pageful of Japanese, and it’s intimidating. You hear real Japanese, and it’s intimidating. After all, how are you supposed to learn all that? No WAY! No WAY! It’s too much, it’s too scary. If I just read a lot then in the near future I’ll be able to do that? To understand that? Pull the other one! Well, you will.

2. You only understand a little

I say to watch TV and movies, listen to music, eat food, hang out with people, all in Japanese. But, yeah, you won’t understand a lot of it. But that’s why you have to expose yourself to it. Because I guarantee you will pick up one word. Now, look up that word. Get an example sentence with that word in it. OK, back to TV. Pick up another word. Get an example sentence of with that word in it. OK, back to TV. ‘Nother word. ‘Nother sentence. Back to TV. Repeat…You see where this is going? What’s that, you picked up a phrase? A sentence? A scene? You go on, building, growing, increasing until the situation inverts such that eventually you’re no longer looking up the one and only word you do understand, you’re looking up the one and only word you don’t understand.

No matter how complex and impossible it may seem, remember that there are a finite number of words used in Japanese. It’s spoken daily by a finite number of human beings who learned it in a finite time with finite resources using their finite energy, just like you. You may have far to go, but it’s far from impossible. It may take time, but since you’re going to be spending the time anyway, you might as well spend it learning Japanese.

Using authentic materials — that is, materials created by and for native speakers of Japanese, is hard work. But it’s a good gauge of where you are, and it can actually be really motivating; it’s a living reminder of what you’re shooting for. To make the things easier, I would suggest you do two things.

a. Initially, do use materials intended for learners of Japanese, but always have real Japanese in your immersion environment, and start to gradually wean yourself off Japanese-English materials as soon as you can.

b. No matter what your level, always feel free to use and enjoy materials that were originally in your native/base language, but have been translated into Japanese by pros. Hollywood movies are a great example. Watch American movies and TV shows dubbed into Japanese. Right now, I’m big into Princeton Break, I mean, Prison Break. Wentworth Earl Miller III is my new favorite action hero. And like Crystal Kay, he is, in fact, black.

3. Failure is the mother of success

This is true of both input (reading, understanding) and output (writing, speaking). You’re going to “fail”. A lot. “Fail” is a strong word, but it’s the only short one I could think up. Every time you don’t know what something means or how to say it, we call it a “failure”. You recover from this failure by either inferring what could be meant, restating/rewording yourself, consulting a person or dictionary for the correct way to say something, or some combination thereof. And after each of these “failures”, you make sure to enter it into your SRS, so that you’ll remember it. The next time you are in a similar situation, you will not “succeed”; eventually you’ll increase your successes and reduce your failures to a point that you can be called fluent.

4. The Exam Effect

Another thing I will add is this: once in a while, when you look up a new word in order to understand a sentence, you may still be standing there not knowing what the sentence means even though you know what every individual word in the sentence means. No matter. Learn example sentences that use that word where you DO know what the sentence means. Some time later, you will come back to the original sentence, and you will understand it completely, and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

I don’t really know why this is. Maybe there’s just some background knowledge of the underlying linguistic logic of Japanese that’s lacking. It’s like when you’re taking an exam, and you read a question and you’re completely stumped (like, “WTF? This is gibberish; there goes my GPA”) and you skip over the question, but then you come back to it later, and it makes perfect sense, you answer it instantly, your GPA is saved and you get to keep your scholarship. The only difference is that, in the case of a Japanese sentence, the time will be on the order of weeks rather than hours.

5. Work Now, Payoff Later

Let me be frank. Mining for sentences is fun, but it’s intense and it can get tiring.

Payoff comes later. That’s why it matters to much that you enjoy your study materials, because you will be using and reusing them so brutally. You’re going to watch Independence Day a lot, and you’re going to wear out the “pause” button on your remote. You’re going to keep pausing it and mining the subtitles for new words. So if Independence Day bores you, your life will start sucking. Conversely, if it doesn’t, then things are good, and you can keep pausing and mining for hours on end.

Because you work so hard on the material, you don’t get to sit back and relax with it as much. This does take out some of the enjoyment. Not a lot, just a tiny deduction because you’re exerting yourself so much. So make sure you watch and listen to things you really, really enjoy, in order that you don’t feel that much of an enjoyment deduction.

This is not at all to say that work in the beginning sucks; it’s fun; it is fun. But the true reward comes later—days, weeks and months down the line when you’re doing something else and you again hit that word you had learned a while ago and that you’ve been diligently reviewing in your SRS, and you know exactly what that word means because you learnt it and you know it and it’s yours, and not only do you know what it means, but you know its reading too. Or you see a joke or a reference that you wouldn’t have understood if you hadn’t stopped and learned something a while ago. Or you’re sitting down, reading Japanese emails and you understand every word because you used to sentence-mine emails. THAT’S when the payoff comes—you get to coast (at least in some areas) because you had been revving up your engine so hard; you get to slide down the hill because you worked so hard to push your mental sled up it in the first place.

Let me give you a concrete personal example. The first time I read Neon Genesis Evangelion, I didn’t get to enjoy it that much. It was fun, but I wasn’t all curled up on a designer beanbag engrossed in the adventures of Rei and Shinji; I’d be walking to class or sitting up at my desk, highlighter in hand, circling words that I needed to look up or phrases that I wanted to remember; it was more like plowing a field than surfing. But months later, the second time through, I actually read it like a book; I lived the dream — poring through volume upon volume of Japanese text, unencumbered, enjoying it for enjoyment’s sake, on a beanbag. The payoff had come but it took a while.

The payoff will come for you, too. Just keep on keeping on. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Stargate SG-1 needs me to watch it…and laugh at Teal’c’s comically deep Japanese voice.