OK, so…let’s make this one short and sweet. Asking questions is one of the most important things you can do in a language. You have to know how to ask questions in a variety of ways, depending on the social situation, the amount of knowledge you have, whether or not you give the answerer “response options” to choose from, and cetera.

The best place I know of on the Internet to get that kind of action in Japanese is: Yahoo Answers! Or, as it’s called in Japanese, Yahoo!知恵袋/ちえぶくろ/Bag o’ Wisdom. There are all kinds of cool questions and answers there. The fun and variety of a forum, with the focus of something like Wikipedia (you won’t really find stoopid arguments there). From what I’ve seen of the American/English version of Yahoo Answers, the Japanese version is tons better, so I do be recommending it.

There are also Chinese versions — Taiwan’s Yahoo Knowledge, and the Hong Kong version of the same; I haven’t read a lot on them yet, but I’m definitely going to, starting today.

And, yes, I wholeheartedly endorse Yahoo Answers for sentence-picking…There may well be errors on it, but (1) they’ll be native errors (2) a dictionary lookup will easily iron most out (3) those things that you’re still in doubt about you can either look up elsewhere, or just not add to your SRS.

By the way, the way I typically search for interesting question-answer discussions is to type in something I’m interested in in the search box. I like to read about how people perceive different ethnic groups, so I often find myself typing in the names of those [is this social voyeurism? I don't know...but it's cool to have this feeling of reading something that wasn't intended with you as its target audience].

Anyway, yeah, check it out.

First, let me say this: it sucks being famous and having snot-nosed kids like me who don’t know what they’re talking about make stupid comments about you. I think that almost all (if not all) the comedians on Japanese TV are funny, I just picked the ones that gave me the highest LPM (laughs per minute). Probably the main problem for those who have a low LPM is that they are in the wrong situations — Oriental Radio (オリエンタルラジオ) are amazing on stage, but don’t get the chance to shine comically in their current work as late night variety show hosts: the format just doesn’t work for them. Downtown (ダウンタウン) are funny, too — when they’re not just going through the motions out of boredom, i.e. not on their variety show but in those punishment game (罰ゲーム) specials they do, and in their skits from the 1980s and 1990s. And a lot of guys who I used to think sucked eggs are amazing once you take them off those variety shows and put them on a more personal program like Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents: Funny Stories (人志松本のすべらない話). As you can see, it sounds like I have beef with variety shows. I don’t, really, I don’t. It’s just that, when you think about it, having virtually all Japan’s comedians do variety shows is akin to having every athlete in the world play soccer, whether or not they were good at it or even like it, just because it was the only professional sport in the world. Variety shows are cheap and easy to do, and they may have been a good choice when Japan was poor and coming out of WW2, but Japan is rich now. And TV can act like it if it wants to…and get sets that don’t look like they were made by Miss Keene’s class at Pokey Oaks Kindergarten.

There’s also the interesting phenomenon of comedians who are funny in-studio or to other comedians, but not to the TV-viewing public at large. Denis Leary seems like an example of that in the anglosphere; other comedians find him funny. Downtown, when stuck on a variety show, are funny for their guests — if I were to be interviewed on TV, I’d want to be interviewed by Downtown, they seem like great fun to be around — but it just isn’t as funny for viewers.

Anyway, the list. I haven’t bothered to rank it, but there are ten of them.

• [雨上がり決死隊/Ameagari kesshitai/The Suicide Mission Squad at the End of the Rain(?)]: Ameagari Kesshitai, a duo made up of 宮迫博之 (MIYASAKO Hiroyuki) — the tanned one — and 蛍原徹 (HOTOHARA Tooru) — the round-headed one, are that very uncommon thing in comedy (at least it seems uncommon to me) — the perfect combination and execution of both slapstick and verbal comedy. And it’s not the stupid kind of slapstick, it’s the original, funny kind. The kind that you would laugh at even if it were just your friend doing it. That thing where Miyasako slaps his own face and then looks into the camera, or the two-legged flying kick of punishment for saying something wrong that sends Hotohara crashing to the ground. And then there’s the look that Miyasako gets on his face when he’s about to tell a joke [see picture], so you kind of get to laugh twice — once for the look and once for the joke.
• [JINNAI Tomonori/陣内智則]: Jinnai is a rarity in that he works alone. His skits often involve uncooperative machines — lewd passport photo-taking machines, arrogant arcade games, sassy car navigation systems. Big laughs to be had.
• [Impulse (インパルス)]: super-funny skits! Mostly revolving around portly 堤下敦/TSUTSUMISHITA Atsushi playing straightman or authority figure to slim 板倉俊之/ITAKURA Toshiyuki’s abject inappropriateness. One of their funniest recurring characters is Johann Riebelt, a young Japanese man with a bad case of alcohol poisoning and major delusions of grandeur who thinks he’s German. They’ve also done great one-shot skits like フック船長/”Captain Hook” and “Mafia Boss”.
• [Drunk Dragon/ドランクドラゴン]: Another portly-skinny duo. In that sense, they bear a shallow resemblance to Impulse. The content of their comedy is different though, often revolving tangentially around the entertainment industry itself — silly TV shows for learning English, awkward and uncalled-for displays of English “proficiency” [some middle-aged men in Japan looove to whip out the old English to impress other Japanese people...when they really should have kept it zipped up], fanboys who are waaay too overprotective of the object of their fanaticism, and cetera. And of course, it makes you laugh.
• [Garage Sale/ガレッジセール]: these guys are sketch comedians. Their best stuff is on the show One Night Rock and Roll, where Gori cross-dresses as Gorie.
• [Bobby KONDA/近田ボビー]: Nigeria in the hizzouse! Although he is actually Japanese now. And technically he’s a tarento rather than a comedian. But he’s funny as heck. I loved reading on Japanese Wikipedia about how amazing at Japanese he has to be in order to suck as much as he pretends to. Playing the fool and raking it in — genius. AFAIK, he acts under his old name, Bobby Ologun (ボビーオログン). Bobby also happens to be an example of a comedian who shines on variety shows.
• [Taka and Toshi/タカアンドトシ]: 欧米かっ！”What are you, Euro-American?!”, the signature wisecrack of this pair, frequently rolled out when too much katakana Japanese is used. I find it quite useful in my daily life…
• [Lover Girl/ラバーガール]: do really funny skits often involving one person speaking polite or otherwise euphemistic Japanese and the other person taking liberties with the literal meaning of what was said. That makes it sound really technical and it makes Japanese sound hard to understand, neither of which are true. Anyway, the point is, you’ll laugh.
• [The Laughter Problem/爆笑問題]: politics is a dish best served hilarious.
• [Untouchables/アンタッチャブル]: I’ve only ever seen one or two of their skits, but I laughed so hard that they earned a place on this list.

Honorable Mention

• [Ungirls/アンガールズ]: these guys LOOK funny…tall, lanky, gangly…awkward in a good way, just like their skits.
• [Anjush/アンジャッシュ]: have made a career of doing situational misunderstandings. Some of the skits are a bit forced, but some are pure genius.
• [Oriental Radio/オリエンタルラジオ]: rose to fame on エンタの神様/Enta no Kami Sama with their ヒップホップな武勇伝 (“our hip hop legends”) skits. Since that time they’ve been stuck on a boring variety show, so there you go.
• [Downtown/ダウンタウン]: one of the longest-running and most highly respected comedy outfits in Japanese history. They’re not always as funny as they used to be — not because they can’t be but more because they almost can’t be bothered to go trying to get laughs any more; they’re “beyond that” if you will. But, yeah, look out for their old stuff.

Recently, I met this one girl. She’s really cute. And she knows Japanese. Fluently. Native-level fluently. After only studying it four years. She talks circles around people who studied it for four years in college.

Why is this girl so good at Japanese?

Because she spent 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a years studying Japanese. She has spent 40,000 hours listening to Japanese. Her name is Didi.

The people who went to college spent 5 class hours a week, plus perhaps 1-2 hours out of class per hour in class, for 52 weeks a year. That comes to 2000-4000 hours a year, being generous. This is an order of magnitude less than Didi.

Didi is just shy of four and a half years old.

Don’t ever talk to me about how kids are magical until you spend 40,000 hours listening to your target language.

Don’t ever talk to me about how you’ve spent 4 years studying Japanese when really you’ve only spent 3-6 months, counting by hours.

Don’t ever blame on something as nebulous and BS-ological as talent, what can much more easily be explained mathematics.

Put in your hours. And you will be rewarded. It’s that simple. It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in.

For the record, I have logged about 20,000 hours of listening since June 2004. And my vocab is easily far larger than Didi’s (sorry, Didi! you’re still my friend!). So chalk another one up for adult learners.

Adults can do it. You can do it. Japanese — any language. But you need to step up to the plate; you need to show up; you need to not have the temerity to think that 1000 classroom hours and some homework is an acceptable level of effort. Because it isn’t. Come back with 5 figures, and then we can talk, literally .

Steve Kaufmann does a much better job explaining it than I have. If, as he says (and I think he is absolutely right) most vocabulary is learned incidentally rather than deliberately, then it is crucial that we give the vocabulary lots of chances — lots of “incidents”, lots of hours of input — to hit us, and thereby be learned.

This is not fluff. This is not theory. This is cold, hard, listen to effen Japanese in 5-figure+ quantities if you want to get good at it. That’s all you have to do. But you do have to do it. As Jim Rohn suggests, success is easy; the things that you need to do to succeed are easy. But the reason so many fail is because: “The things that are easy to do are also easy not to do”.

Language is easy. There may or may not be difficult problems in life, but language is not one of them; get it out of your head that it is.

Now get listening!

We will fight them on the beaches!

So…a feature that was annoying a lot of people was the whole “make you do an item a kajillion times over” plan. That has now been changed, so that if you get an item wrong, even if it gets set to be re-tested on the same day (rather than at a later date), it will go to the “back” of the stack of items for that day, so that you get tested on other items before you get re-tested on the original failed item.

The second and feature that has been removed is the annoying \”backslash action on quotes.

Big thanks to everyone who shared their opinion on these features and suggested more desirable behavior.

Let’s keep this one short.

Every so often in the history of humankind, a book comes along that will forever change us. Or not, I don’t know. But really, every few weeks or so, I find a book that is just so perfect that it’s as if it was written just for me to read it (you: “yeah, no kidding”). It seems like the author sat down and thought: “and it shall come to pass that one named Khatzumoto shall walk through the doors of a bookstore, and when he doth gaze upon this tome it shall be fitting for him to purchase it. So it shall be written, so it shall be done”. Anyway, this book I found owns, and not only that but it also has a sequel. The book is:

英語は絶対、勉強するな！：学校行かない・お金掛けない・だけどペラペラ
Absolutely DO NOT Study English: Get fluent without spending tons of money or going to English school

and its sequel:


英語は絶対、勉強するな！２：不安が消える・疑問が打っ飛ぶ・マジでペラペラ
Absolutely DO NOT Study English 2: Clear your doubts and worries and get seriously fluent.

It’s significant that this book should be coming out of Korea (the Southern flavor), whose scores as a nation on, I believe it is the TOEIC test (some random, stupid English test) are at the very bottom of the world: only Japan’s are worse. In today’s Korea, English schools are raking in tons of cash; parents are freaking out about their kids “needing” to know English; the government is in constant panic mode about how and where and when to get more English taught in public schools; businessmen “need” to know English; university professors of English have terrible English; people who can speak well are mistaken for being intelligent. In other words, Korea and Japan are in the exact same position. Now that I think about it, the Japanese/Chinese situation outside of the kanjisphere is the same: most people outside of East Asia are convinced that they cannot be literate in Chinese and Japanese, let alone speak them; their typical rationalizations fall into one of the following extremes: it’s either the “we’re not as smart as East Asians” camp, or the “East Asians are stupid and our writing system is better because the Greeks molested boys and used an alphabet too and there’s nothing wrong with liking boys” camp.

Along comes 鄭讚容 (CHON Chan Yon) to the rescue. Kicking butt and taking names, he very frankly lays out that the English situation in Korea right now is abysmal but that it need not be so. He then proceeds to give his own recommendations based on a method he developed for himself. In terms of philosophy (you CAN do it) and overall method (focus on understanding real English and imitating native speakers, not the crap that passes for English you find in textbooks) it’s very similar to AntiMoon which — along with that scene in The Thirteenth Warrior — is the source of many of the ideas you find on this site. Chon’s book and AntiMoon were written with English in mind, but they clearly have advice that essentially applies to all languages.

Anyway, the best thing is to go and read both books. Here’s a gem that struck me, from page 225 of the second book:

「第一ステップでは、とりあえず英語を「無意味な音声」と考え・・・」
[On learning to understand normal, fast spoken English] When you start out, just accept it as sound without meaning…

Chon wants us to get used to the sounds of the language. As you listen, you’ll naturally start to make sense of it. Like a fog clearing, the sounds will start to get clearer and clearer; you’ll pick out more and more. Chon calls these “little miracles”. He also suggests you imitate these sounds, just as sounds, regardless of whether you understand them or not; get your mouth making the sounds of the language.

These words on page 27 of book 1 amused and inspired Momoko:

「親が赤ちゃんに『さあ、これから言葉を学びましょ』と言って、単語や文法を教え、これが主語、それは動詞で、あれは副詞なんて言うのを見た事が有る？」・・・どんな親も『可愛い子ねえ、お中すいたでしょ。おマンマ食べようね』『あらあら、おしっこしたのね、お締めがびしょ濡れよ』などと、赤ちゃんが理解しようがしまいが、とにかく愛情と一緒にたくさんの言葉を色々と浴びせ掛けるよね。そうやって親の言葉を始め、テレビの音、家の外から聞こえて来る声など、色々な音や言葉が赤ちゃんの小さな耳に休み無く吸収されて行く訳だ。」
Do you ever see parents take their baby and go: “right, Timmy, settle down and sit tight, it’s time for you to learn LANGUAGE!”, and break it up into vocabulary and grammar and explain how this is a subject, this here’s a verb and that there is an adverb — I mean you just don’t see that…All parents go “You’re such a cutey! You’re hungry, aren’t you? Time for foody-woody, isn’t it?”, “Ooo! You went pee-pee; your diaper’s aaaall soaking wet!” — whether the baby understands or not, they shower her with love and words. Day in day out the baby’s little ears are constantly absorbing this endless stream of words and sounds — whether it’s the words of his parents or the voices of people outside or whatever.

Another place where Chon really lays it out for me is here on page 28, again of book 1:

「無条件に何でもたくさん聞けばいい」
Unconditionally, constantly listen [to your target language].

Chon further advocates the use of English-English dictionaries. What else…oh — he has a cool name for his method: “英絶方式”, the Absolute English Method, or as I like to call it: “All English All The Time” .

Anyway, so…yeah, they’re good books, the Japanese is of course A-OK; translated by someone I presume to be Japanese-Korean. Chon is, like me, not an expert linguist, just a guy who learned how to do something and is sharing it with the world. He takes flac from people with established ideas, but he speaks the truth: don’t kill the language and “study” it — instead, live it, become it. Highly recommended.

First off, let me share that I believe that everyone should, no MUST, follow their own personal preferences when it comes to selecting learning materials. In order for you to learn Japanese voluntarily, it has to be enjoyable, and for it to be enjoyable, you have to be able to watch, listen to and read whatever you want that is in Japanese — or, indeed, any language. So these aren’t the best Japanese shows, they’re just the ones I like best as of right now (late 2007). Having said that, if you’re just getting started with Japanese, and/or you don’t know many Japanese shows, and you don’t live in Japan, it helps to have someone who’s watched a lot of stuff give you some tips.

Take note: a lot of these shows don’t have subs, Japanese or otherwise. But that’s fine, believe me, you’ll work it out somehow — even being able to understand only small bits and pieces is fine and normal. Also, all these shows are either comedies, dramedies, or somehow funny. Now, a lot of people will go “in learning a new language comedy is the hardest thing to understand”. No. It. Isn’t. (Dewd, I don’t know who went around spreading the bad news and deciding what’s “the hardest” in the world of everything…whoever they are, they suck!). Comedy isn’t intrinsically “hard” to understand, no more than news or a children’s book is. What perhaps sets comedy apart is the necessity of prior knowledge in order for the comedy to be enjoyed. That prior knowledge may be the source of whatever reference or parody is being made (by the way, a lot of really good comedy often contains a lot of internal, self-contained references, so that abbreviates the prior knowledge requirement right there). Or it may be prior knowledge of whatever social norm/status quo is being inappropriately ignored or applied. So, if, as Stephen Colbert and others have suggested, comedy is about status change and betrayal, then you need to know what the original status is or was, in order to recognize the change and therefore (perhaps) find it funny.

Anyway, the comedy itself is not very hard. Like I said, a lot of the best comedy is actually very high in self-references. This may be because, as Jerry Seinfeld suggested in his comedy book, a comedian generally needs to be able to build some kind of semi-realistic logical baseline from which to launch her jokes. As such, a skilled comedian may build a very good baseline: so good that she re-uses it. Or not, I don’t really know. My point is that you can do it. You can enjoy comedy: a lot of it is physical, low-brow or self-referential (and therefore, more or less universal) anyway, so the bar is nowhere near as high as many people appear to contend. Furthermore, the comedy itself can serve as a place for you to learn what the social norms are, such that the next time you see a joke based on the same material, you’ll be informed, and therefore in a position to enjoy it as comedy.

Oh, and by the way, if there’s ever some comedy you don’t seem to get, it may just be the case that it simply isn’t funny. Like any country, Japan is subject to a variant of the Pareto principle, whereby maybe 90% of the consistent laughs (high LPM rate throughout the show) are produced by only maybe 10% of the comedy shows — the rest of the shows suck and aren’t funny. It’s not a bad thing and it’s not a rare thing — after all, Comedy Central is built almost entirely on Chappelle, Stewart and South Park.

Where was I? Yeah, comedy is good, and I watch a lot of it. So here is my list of the best Japanese TV shows (highly biased towards comedy), for informational purposes rather than for recommendation purposes. Do with it as you will. The list is in no particular order.

• エンタの神様 (Enta no kami sama/The kami of entertainment).
  A cross between stand-up and sketch comedy, comedians (usually in duos, sometimes alone, rarely in larger groups) perform on stage in front of a live studio audience. The Enta no kami sama people seem to work really hard to make sure that the people on the show are funny, so…highly recommended. It also has subs for the punchlines.
• トリック (Trick)
  [Season 1, vol. 1] [Season 1, vol. 2] [Season 1, vol. 3] [Season 1, vol. 4] [Season 1, vol. 5]
  トリック2 (Trick Season 2)
  トリック: troisieme partie (Trick Season 3)
  トリック：新作スペシャル (Trick: The New Special)
  トリック劇場版 (Trick: The Movie)
  トリック劇場版2 (Trick: The Movie 2)
  トリック 堤幸彦演出研究序説 (The Making of Trick, behind the scenes footage and discussion with director TSUTSUMI Yukihiko)
  I don’t know if you can tell yet, but…I love this show. The plot is basically UEDA Jirou (an arrogant, cowardly, well-endowed physics professor) and YAMADA Naoko (a modestly-chested magician who’s useless on stage and chronically strapped for cash but also something of a genius in term of investigation), go around busting a string of shady psychics, cult leaders and other pretenders to paranormal abilities. Ueda pretends to use physics to bust them while Naoko does all the real work. Hilarity ensues. So, I guess it’s a mystery-dramedy, with LOTS of laughs, and great supporting characters, and all kinds of random regional dialects. Most Japanese shows don’t run more than one season. Trick ran for not one but three seasons and had not one, but two movies released in real theaters. A show has to either (a) be backed by the Illuminati, or, (b) be really good, to get this far. The answer is (b).
• ハンドク (Handoc/half-doctors)
  NAGASE Tomoya was one of my surrogate parents for Japanese (he doesn’t know this, but…). Anyway, so this show’s about new doctors (who only have half the skill of experience doctors, therefore half-doctors), working in a top-flight whiz-bang super-elite hospital run by a chief surgeon who is as unethical as he is skilled. But it’s not like your typical American medical drama. This one is genuinely funny, has actual direction, and doesn’t try to use blood-spewing emergency room patients to push up its ratings…oh, did I say that out loud?
• ごくせん (Gokusen/Yakuza homeroom teacher)
  [Season 1, vol. 1] [Season 1, vol. 2] [Season 1, vol. 3] [Season 1, vol. 4] [Season 1 Special]
  ごくせん2 (Gokusen, Season 2)
  Usually, when a show has a formulaic plot, it’s a bad thing. But Gokusen uses that to its advantage and just takes things to a whole ‘nother level. NAKAMA Yukie plays a homeroom teacher who’s secretly a yakuza. She’ll roundhouse kick her wayward students (all boys) for going out of line, but also beat up anyone who tries to harm them. And try to keep her yakuzaness a secret from the school board. By the way, my spoken Japanese became really vulgar as a result of watching this show (テメエ、▲▲▲じゃねえぞぉ！). That’s not meant as a warning, but actually as recommendation — this show is fun. Just be sure to pretty-up your Japanese later. Gokusen has two seasons. [Edit: the name ごくせん is a portmanteau (?) of 極道 (ごくどう -- the road of crime, gambling, drugs) and 先生 (せんせい -- teacher), so, yakuza teacher: for some reason, I missed the part where this was made clear on the show, if there was such a part, so this is for everyone who's wondering].
• タイガー＆ドラゴン (Tiger & Dragon)
  + Tiger & Dragon special prequel double-length episode
  This show is in terms of structure, content and characters, one of the best shows I have ever had the pleasure of seeing. I don’t mean to talk it up, but it’s an AMAZING show, and super-rewatchable. Go judge for yourself. P.S. — it has exact subs!
• ココリコミラクルタイプ (Kokoriko Miracle Type)
  Viewers send in real-life stories which become sketches which make you laugh.
• ワンナイR&R(Wannai/One Night Rock & Roll)
  Along with Kokoriko Miracle Type, part of a Wednesday night line-up called 水10 (すいじゅう/suijuu). The two shows are separate, they just run/ran back-to-back. Both are really funny. Wannai is a sketch comedy show, more fictional, but like In Living Color, having a lot of recurring characters like 轟 (Todoroki), ゴリエ (Gorie) and チョコボーイ山口 (Choco-boy Yamaguchi). The names alone will get you giggling.
• アイチテル! (Aichiteru/I rabu you)
  A roomful of foreign women from around the world (Africa, East Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and cetera) who speak fluent Japanese, and two of the guys from Wannai combine for fast-paced, talk-based and often pretty biting humor. Really funny.
• はねるのトびら (Haneru no tobira/you knock on a jumping door)
  About 6 comedy duos (most comedians in Japan run as duos and do or can do 漫才/manzai) combined to make this youth-oriented sketch comedy show. A big hit with the twentysomething crowd, and with good reason. Funny stuff. カワイイ！
• サラリーマンNEO (Salaryman Neo)
  First, this show will have you on the floor laughing. Then…you’ll break your jaw when it hits the ground when you realize that NHK, the GOVERNMENT station, made one of the funniest and most sardonic TV shows to ever hit Japanese TV screens. Who says the gubmit can never get it right!? Semi-prerequisite: have worked in a Japanese company or know what it’s like to do so.
• 池袋ウェストゲートパーク(Ikebukuro West Gate Park/IWGP)
  If you only buy one Japanese TV series, buy Tiger & Dragon. If you only by two, buy Ikebukuro West Gate Park. IWGP is one of the best TV shows ever to be produced in any language…ever. It’s no surprise that it was written by the same guy who wrote Tiger & Dragon, one 宮藤官九郎 (くどう かんくろう/KUDOU Kankurou). It also stars the same guy as T&D, namely Nagase Tomoya, in the role of Makoto.

  IWGP has lots of laughs, lots of action [a little violent at times, actually], great characters and a bumping soundtrack. It also serves as a great window on contemporary Japanese youth and street culture; Kudou has a real ear for dialogue and a sense of situational realism. I’m not going to tell you any more, you have to watch it for yourself. It’ll have you saying “面倒臭ええナァ！”…

  I can’t believe I almost didn’t add IWGP to this list. It brings the total to eleven, but whatever. Definitely an example of “last but not least”.

  By the way, if you only buy three shows, buy Trick…