A lot of people have complained, well, complain is a strong word, but pointed out to me: “Hey, Khatzumoto. What the heck, son?! Your method is too writing-focused!”. To this I must heartily respond: “Um…bollocks”. No it isn’t. But, to be fair, I haven’t discussed listening and speaking as much as I’ve discussed reading and writing. Why? Well, literacy has been the largest (false) hurdle for adult learners of Japanese from outside the kanjisphere. Millions of people supposedly learning Japanese but being functionally illiterate — this is a bad situation, mate. It had to be tackled first. I figured everyone had the listening/speaking thing taken care of anyway, because it seemed like there were plenty of people who could speak Japanese but couldn’t read it worth a darn, although, now that I think about it, even those people who can “listen but not read” probably have weak listening comprehension outside of the most basic situations: when it comes to things like business, news and any expert/grown-up situation, if you can’t read, you’re just not going to have the vocabulary to handle the aural discussion…I think.

Anyway, a lot of you who have very kindly come and visited this website are now sentence-picking and SRSing, and generally getting your read on, so for all intents and purposes, I’d say that the Japanese literacy problem, to the extent that we can call it that, is solved. Just keep adding sentences and doing your reps. Case closed.

So, there you are. You’ve been mining your sentences diligently, but you still have trouble even following a conversation let alone participating, right? Maybe you still can’t follow your favorite anime. Right. OK, I have a question for you. How much Japanese are you listening to? Whatever your answer is, I can guarantee you that it hasn’t been enough for long enough yet. Which is why I suggest you:

Listen to 10,000 hours of Japanese over the next 18 months. [Arithmeticians: (1) yes, there are more than 10,000 hours in 18 months: it's called an estimate; (2) sleeping hours count, but obviously you're going to want tons of waking hours, too -- in any case, go for 24 hours a day; (3) this figure allows for those occasions when you perhaps can't listen to Japanese, but even in these cases, turn that Japanese right back on ASAP].

Why 10,000? Am I obsessed with this number? Kind of. But, it is based on a rough calculation. I was fluent (perhaps not native-level, but definitely, absolutely fluent) at about 18 months. Over those 18 months, I listened to 18-24 hours per day of Japanese, which comes to 10,000 hours. Because my learning was input-focused, my listening ability was even stronger (much stronger) than my speaking ability; everyone needs to be able to understand more than they usually use — you don’t talk like a politician or a newscaster, but you need to understand how they speak. And in order to get to this state, you need to spend every waking moment listening to Japanese — and every sleeping moment, too (just be sure to not pick Lord of the Rings for your sleepytime listening, because Frodo Baggins is a little screaming wusspot of a Hobbit: “ガンダルフー！！！アアアアアァアアァァ！！！”).

EVERY. WAKING. MOMENT. Of course, you may have school to go to, maybe a job. You can make small exceptions. But your school doesn’t run 24 hours a day, does it? You do sleep at night, right? Leave the Japanese on all night. You have class, right? Listen to Japanese in class if you can get away with it (i.e. if it won’t damage your learning experience). If not, listen to Japanese while you do your homework. You take lunchbreaks, don’t you? Listen to Japanese. You walk or drive or otherwise commute places, don’t you? Listen to Japanese while doing it. You do have free time, right? Japanese owns your free time. You do sentences in an SRS, don’t you? Good — listen to Japanese while doing your SRS entries/reps. Do you lie around and stare into space? Listen to Japanese while doing it. Do you take walks? Runs? Go to the toilet? Take baths/showers? Eat? Hang out with (Japanese-speaking) friends? Take road trips? Take plane trips? Listen to music? Surf the Internet? Cook? Clean? Wash dishes? Go shopping? Do pilates (sp?)? Tae-bo? Kung-fu? Listen to Japanese during all those times.

Remember that silence thing? Silence has left the building. Every moment of your life needs to be soaked in the sweet water of Japanese listening. I had Japanese playing even when I went out into the mountains behind Momoko’s house to watch the sunset. And in the toilet (pants down, headphones on, bombs away…No? TMI?). And in the shower. And in bed. This is serious business, dude — I am not messing around and neither should you. We’re talking about learning a language here, not cleaning the sock lint from between your toes. So be prepared to show the heck up, day in, night in, day out.

Of course, this isn’t an excuse to not read. Of course not. You’re going to need to do both at the same time. The cool thing about audio is that it’s even more hands-free than text and video. You can sit, run, jump, kiss and listen all at the same time. You don’t always have to actively listen to the audio, not at all. In fact, I mostly “heard” rather than I listened. Just leave it on. Just hearing it, just having it surround you, is a great thing.

For maximum benefit, I recommend listening to things where you have some vague clue what’s going on. So, ripping audio from video you’ve seen before works really well. As does listening to music (you can go pick out the lyrics). But even if you don’t fully understand it, just keep playing it. You will get something out of it, you will. Trust me, you will get something out of it. Just do it. All Japanese, all the time.

This is another comment that grew so long as to deserve its own article. First, the original question:

See, everyone is so discouraging when you learn a new language and say you’ll always ’sound like a foreigner’ and this is a bit depressing. I realize that certain speech patterns are set and all that but what would be your advice and aquiring an authentic accent (Japanese or any other language)?

And my response:

ACT. Pretend you ARE from that country. Pretend you’re that Jared kid from The Pretender, and that your life depends on you convincing people that you were born and raised in whatever country has native speakers of your language. Pick specific people (often, actors) to imitate and copy their mannerisms, look at the way their mouths are shaped, their hand gestures, the facial muscles they use. Be like a comedian doing impressions.

You stop being foreign when you stop believing you are foreign, at least in terms of the language. Hold yourself to the same standard as a native speaker — if someone had to talk to you on the phone, they shouldn’t be able to tell. Never fall for the excuse of “oh, it’s not my native language”. You needn’t be harsh on yourself, just always be looking for ways to improve.

I had a Japanese friend who self-taught English, and when I first met her I thought she was Japanese-American: it was that flawless. She told me she’d watched a lot of TV and movies, and had changed the way she acted and used her facial muscles and shaped her mouth when making sounds.

So, input and imitation. Input, because you have to hear a lot of examples not just of certain words, but certain COMBINATIONS or strings of words. Words change a bit when people shout, intonation changes based on emotion.

Also, pauses. Use the same pauses and bridges as native speakers. So, no “um” because “um” is English, find the equivalents of “um” and “uhhhuhhh” in the languages you are learning.

What else…YES! I call it “doping“. In semiconductor production, doping is the process of deliberately introducing impurities into an extremely pure material in order to obtain better/desired performance properties. In learning a language, doping is the process of almost “dumbing-down” or de-streamlining your spoken language by introducing inefficient elements that have function but no meaning, and serve to make it more natural and native-like. You see, foreigners, tend to learn from texts and textbooks. And text is much, much more efficient (“pure”) than speaking. In text you get straight to the point:
A) “This is an example”. [4 words, 0 long pauses]

But in speech, you amble zig zigzag-zag toward your point:
B) “Well, um, this is, like, an example or whatever…kind of, I dunno”. [13 words, 1 long pause]

Native speakers are wasteful and inefficient. This is why the Borg in Star Trek despise human communication. In my experience, native speakers use perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of words they “need”, and all that extra baggage has no lexical meaning. “Um” does not mean anything. “Like” does not really mean anything. It’s all just filler.

Make your speech more native-like by making it more wasteful — I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. If you speak too plainly, without any flavor, you come out sounding robotic or just foreign (often both). Also, the wasteful pauses can help buy you time when you need to remember a specific word — you do this in your native language, too — you don’t remember a specific word or phrase, so you keep stringing words or phrases that are close to it in meaning and until you hit the jackpot. Examples:

A) “Is it like a wiki or a blog, or, like a CMS or something?”.
B) “I’ve never, like really had Japanese food, Or, I guess, been to a Japanese restaurant or whatever, at least on my own. I mean, I can, like, read the menu, but, um, you know, what’s actually inside it — the stuff, you know, the food, the tendon or whatever…Is what I want to know?”.

Not very good examples, but I think you get the point.

Finally, you want to swallow the words that native speakers swallow. For example, in Japanese, there is a word:　雰囲気. Technically, it should be pronounced “fun-i-ki”, but native speakers swallow it and say “fuinki”; I say it the garbled, native way.

Oh, one more thing: pick an accent. The easiest to pick is the standard accent since it tends to have the most materials produced in it. Either way, pick a focus: pretend the people who speak that dialect are your parents and classmates — functionally, they are.

Finally (for real), try recording yourself now and then. It can reveal where you need work. For more, try out these articles:

• Language is Acting
• How To Pronounce Japanese

Classes suck. But could they be made to suck less? Even, *gasp* worthwhile? A reader named Kurojohn asked me that, and I got carried away with the response, so for the purposes of easier discussion, here it is as an article. First, the question:

Khatzumoto, I know that language classes are not highly regarded by you, and understandably because they often become a barrier to effective language acquisition instead of a help. When I say language classes, I’m not thinking about eikaiwa schools, but courses offered in high schools or universities for academic credit where graded evaluation is a given. I would love to hear your thoughts on possibly how a language teacher in such a situation could teach in a way that is complimentary to this approach instead of a hindrance. How could a teacher encourage and facilitate this kind of approach and still take a graded progress evaluation? Any brilliant ideas? Would love to hear your thoughts, and of course anyone else’s.

I haven’t really been interested in making language classes better, but for what it’s worth, here is my response:

Wow, that’s a really good (and really constructive) question. I’ve spent so long either ignoring classes altogether or talking about how they suck that I haven’t given much thought to how they might be made to work.

As I see it, language is a very all-encompassing thing. Virtually anything and everything could constitute language practice. Part of the reason classes suck is they’re designed to optimize grading and not learning — to be easy to grade, but not necessarily to be easy to learn. “Why should they be easy to learn?” someone might say? Well, because learning is easy. You take one block of information and tie it to another. It’s easy. OK, but you know that already, so what you’re wanting to know is how we might:

>still take a graded progress evaluation

I think something that takes the SRS into account could be key. The teacher could take a student’s SRS database, and randomly select questions from it to produce a test; the random selection could bias toward older information that’s been reviewed a lot, which is even more interesting because it’s older information that usually trips up students. That way, every student could be tested on chunks of information that they actually were interested in [so, if you like Star Trek, more power to you!], and that connected to things that they wanted to know, because that’s what a language is (or should be) for — doing (reading, watching, listening to, writing and saying) what YOU want.

That test, randomly produced from the student’s own SRS, could take several forms to test different skills. There could be a part that just tests reading comprehension (given a sentence, read it out loud). Another part that tests listening comprehension (teacher dictates a sentence to you from your own SRS collection, and you have to write it down). Maybe a little spoken test where the student just talks about one of the materials that were the basis of her SRS entries (so, say she watched Cowboy Bebop, she could explain an episode, or explain the whole series, and answer questions about it); as a cautionary note, this spoken test shouldn’t be about how well the student knows the material in question — that’s not the point of the test — but about her Japanese: can she talk her way through and/or around a complex situation, with natural pronunciation, usage and cadence? Even if you don’t know the word for “spaceship”, if you can say “a space-travelling vehicle”, or you don’t know the word for “bounty hunter”, but can say “people outside of government organizations who catch criminals for money”…even if you forget something, or stumble, if you break out of that stumble in a Japanese way, then that has to count. The essence of fluency isn’t rote. It’s being quick on the old feet.

The SRS combines a lot of features that students and teachers both love. The teachers love the fact that an SRS rewards a consistent effort — not cramming. The SRS can also crunch out numbers that the teachers can combine in a more or less objective evaluation — number of items, number of kanji (variability), kanji frequency (quantity), average length of items, reps per day, adds per day, etc. Simply put, you can’t much lie or cheat past an SRS because it’s all about long-term effort. Furthermore, the teachers are also freed of the burden of making a test, the SRS randomly (and so, in a sense, fairly) creates a test based on the self-directed work of the student. The students, on the other hand, get freedom to choose their materials: no stupid, expensive textbooks, instead, the teacher could have a recommended list, and even build a library of student-suggested materials (books, comics, videos, the whole gig).

It’s the 21st century. People have access to information, to use a hackneyed phrase, “at their fingertips”. You don’t need a textbook, and you don’t need a teacher to give you information. You don’t need a supervisor sternly watching over you with carrot and stick. BUT, a consultant, someone who can tell you the things you can’t look up, someone to advise you on methods, someone to encourage you when you’re down, this is the kind of teacher that is appropriate to the situation we live in now. The teacher need not teach; the students can teach themselves. The teacher just needs to stand back, guide if asked, and evaluate fairly — almost like an uneven mix of coach, line-judge and referee.

Another thing — I’m envisioning this class having little or no class time. Or, it should only meet for administrative purposes — share SRS items, ask the teacher tough questions, borrow materials, share techniques and experiences. The main learning has to be done by the students in their own time; the students should spend less time with each other and more time with native speakers (whether in real life, or in simulo through audio and video); I think that one should always try to be outnumbered by native speakers. In my experience, anyone who thinks that classtime — an hour every weekday with 20 people who have no clue and one person who doesn’t care (to be fair, they may not have enough time to care) — is going to lead to real language proficiency is kidding themselves.

Anyway, thank you so much for that question. If you or anyone else have something that comes to mind, please feel free to add.

Ever wanted to know how to read numbers in military situations in Japanese? Of course you have. So here you go. But be careful — unlike in English (where military culture has mixed into popular culture more), relatively few people in Japan know these numbers…you probably can’t use them successfully on the phone with a civilian (trust me, I tried…the lady was like “huh?”: contrast this with my experience with American UPS, where no one batted an eyelid when I said things like “zulu” and “niner”). So this one goes out to the geeks and nerds. Enjoy!
0　まる
1　ひと
2　ふた
3　さん
4　よん
5　ごう
6　ろく
7　なな
8　はち
9　きゅう

Um…I guess I’m going to keep this short. I went on a really long walk today, through forests and leafy neighborhoods and narrow streets. Anyway, near the very end of the walk, it occurred to me that learning a language is like boiling water.

When the water has boiled, you have reached fluency. Thereafter, you can keep the water at boiling point with less input (of thermal energy) than it took to get it there in the first place. Where a lot of people right now fail with language-learning is, they try to boil water…but then they keep turning off the fire, and when they do turn it on, it’s only for a short time (they’re being three-day monks). So they wonder why their water isn’t boiling, after all, they turn on the stove for 3 seconds once a day(!!!?!?!??!). And then they think: “maaan, water is so hard to boil!!!”

Yes, let’s blame the task instead of realizing that the process is faulty. Doing things that way is not the way to boil water. In fact, doing things that way, the water will likely evaporate before it boils — the language itself will change or the learner will die before ever having learned it.

Turn on that fire, and turn it on high, and keep it on high. The way to boil water is in a single, continuous stream of intense heat. Forget your worries about whether or not the water is going to boil or whether your pot is the right colour — leave that to the laws of physics — just focus on keeping the fire lit.

I guess a picture of boiling water would have been more apropos…

Last night, Khatzumoto, a friend, and I sat down for a marathon of the first season of Trick, our favorite mystery-comedy series starring Nakama Yukie and Abe Hiro. I was feeling a bit discouraged because my level of comprehension was the lowest in the group. But after watching nine episodes in a row until the wee hours of the morning, I unexpectedly reached a new milestone last night: I dreamed in Japanese.

Now I didn’t have a dream where everything was in Japanese. But I definitely remember trying to understand or speak real Japanese words in (hopefully) meaningful sentences—just like I’d been trying to understand the dialogue in the show. After six hours of listening, the language had become so familiar that my mind was reproducing it on its own. Cool.

I honestly never thought it would happen so soon. My listening level is still abysmal, my speaking level practically non-existent (although my pronunciation isn’t bad ). Dreaming in Japanese was the last thing I was expecting. But it happened, and (if it hasn’t already) it can happen to you too.

The key, I’ve found is simply listening, for long periods of time. I wasn’t pausing and writing down sentences or anything; we didn’t even have Japanese subtitles turned on. I was just trying to follow the show. Pausing, looking up words and checking subtitles is certainly important, but so is pure continuous listening. The first helps you build up vocabulary and match sounds to words; the second gets you used to real-time speed and rhythm and tests how fast you can recall what you’ve learned.

I’ve gotten pretty good at reading Japanese, but since the last Obon visit to a Japanese friend’s house, I realized: I have to practice this listening thing more if I ever want to carry on an actual conversation. Well, I’m off to the video store now to pick up the second season of Trick and hoping for some more pleasant dreams in Japanese.