Everyone loves a success story. I know I do. When I was learning Japanese hardcore, I looked high and low for stories of other people’s journeys. Anyway, here’s one from a reader who goes by the handle Awkward Map on this site. He’s finished RTK (Remembering the Kanji) and is now three months into sentences. The following are his own words:

To start with, I’d like to express my displeasure with classes. The only thing that I gained from my two years of Japanese at college is that it would take me 10+ years to get good at it if I continued on that path. The professors’ grasp of English was equally saddening, as clearly whatever methods they used to learn it were not very good. “If these people are what I’m going to sound like in Japanese, I’m in trouble,” I thought.

I picked up the pieces from my last attempt at Heisig and began searching around for the methods people used to learn Japanese to a fluent level. On a newsgroup I found a link to Khatzumoto’s website and was stunned at how quickly he was able to learn Japanese. I found out what an SRS is and if that was the only thing I found out I was already doing great, because that meant I was able to pitch 800+ cards that were already done up for Heisig’s system (pain in the butt, right there). My two months with that SRS before going into the sentences phase showed me that an SRS really can work for securing long-term memory.

At that point, I went AJATT. Goodbye friends, non-Japanese websites, all the things I used to love. “Headphones up, drown out the English,” was my motto for those last couple of months at school. I began working through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, mining sentences in concert with reading a bit from my Japanese textbooks from school (Genki I, II).

At the same time I picked up Death Note and starting mining sentences from that. Talk about repetition! 犯罪者 this, 死因 that, and some 病死 added for good measure. Amusingly for the first month I did it wrong and translated from Japanese to English. Amusing, I know. Also lead to extreme despair for the next couple of weeks as I fixed the sentences.

Anyways, I kept reading on there about “monodics” and thought “man, I’m only two months into this, can’t do it.” Instead of admit defeat however, I just started using Sanseidou for everything. It was tough, but not impossible to understand things and it did take a while. At the beginning it was perhaps 2-3 sentences per day (with maybe 3-4 hours available) with the monodic, which is hard to rationalize against the many more that I could be learning with a bilingual dictionary (bidic?), but the more I used the monodic the more it rewarded me with vocabulary seen over and over. Now on a good day spending about 8 hours working on sentences I’m able to put in 25-30 sentences using a combination of monodics (Sanseidou, Yahoo!, and Infoseek) to reliably check my understanding using different terminology.

(However, with the addition that the sentences should be the length you mentioned, this may balloon to more per day. I was doing sentences a wee bit bigger than that as an average for a while there…)

I still run into stuff over and over that I’m not able to decipher completely, sadly, but it’s just a matter of time. Using a monodic has given more perspective on how the language works and its incredible compact and condensed nature that kanji allows it to have. So… yeah. Right now I’m at 976 sentences, but I’m pretty confident that this is going to just get faster and faster the more sentences I put into my SRS. Just like how I was only able to put one sentence in per hour before and now it’s 3 or 4, pretty soon it’s going to be even more. The “back” sides of my cards are still friggin’ huge, however, what with the circular nature of definitions.

Right now I’m starting to read about the Japanese video game scene because they were a big reason for my interest in Japan (Pokemon, oh yeah! Dragon Warrior! Woo!). So, I’m picking up a lot of stuff that I already knew from one source or another about video games. Good ol’ Japanese Wikipedia has been my best source.

“Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier ― but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.”

is also, like, such a great quote and so true.

Anyways, there’s where I’m at after three months of sentences.

以上。That’s his story. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Email it to me! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Yo. There’s a lot of misconception out there about the supposed difficulty of Japanese. There’s a lot of misconception about Japan itself. And here I am preaching to you about misconception, but I grew up with kung-fu movies, too, just like you. I thought all East Asians knew martial arts, ate rice (wait, this one’s true!), meditated daily on the Analects, and were just generally superhuman. But Japan is, at the end of the day, a country of human beings, just like you and me. Lazy, candy-eating, comic-reading people who wish their parents would just can it so they could play some more PlayStation; who learn their own language like we all do — because it’s there. As Oscar Wilde once put it:

“The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”

Way to bring us back to reality, Oscar Wilde. You go, boyyy.

Back on topic. Everyone loves a success story. They inspire us; they drive us; they let us know that our dreams are possible because someone’s gone done already done it. So here are links to stories of people who have had success learning Japanese.

• His Excellency James W. Heisig, Prince of the Kanji Realms himself. A lot of people give me guff and accuse me of making up all this Japanese fluency crap. But it doesn’t compare to the guff that Heisig has been getting ever since the very inception of his method. You go, boyyy. Speaking of which, there are two quotes from Heisig in this interview that I really love: “the only languages that should be learned in school are dead languages” — although, if this is anything to go by (thanks, quendidil!), maybe not even dead languages fit that rubric; I certainly don’t think they do. And then there was his thing about going to: “live in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture, where he ‘played with the children there and learned how to speak.’” Good stuff.
• Manny Sultan, an architect from Egypt. In his own words, he turned his room/apartment: “into a Japanese language camp. There were kanji cards on the ceiling, the walls, all over the floor. It was a challenge. I had put myself into a corner; I had to perform or sink. I believe in that sort of situation, the human mind has no limits.” You go, boyyy.
• Arudou Debito (formerly David Aldwinckle), a naturalized Japanese citizen and political activist. Also a published author in Japanese. I love his, to paraphrase: “get the heck fluent before coming to Japan” advice. If you’re already in Japan but not yet fluent, don’t worry — just hurry up.
• Dr. Mary Sisk Noguchi, university professor and head of KanjiClinic. She learned kanji using the Heisig method, and then learned readings by reading (duplication duplication woo!) furigana books. You go…boyyy.
• Chris Houser, the guy who told me to use SuperMemo (an SRS) for learning kanji. I pestered the poor man with emails for weeks thereafter. He doesn’t actually have his success story up there, not in full anyway. Maybe you can pester him for it.

Your Success Story

But enough about other people. Now it’s your time to shine. I want to hear your success story, partly out of curiosity for myself, but more importantly, to help those like you who will come afterward. I’m going to put them up on this site, and people will read them and feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So, if you’ve been using the methods discussed on this site, and you’ve had success and you’re willing to share (you’d better be!), email me right now! Operators are standing by! “What operators?”, you say? — Shut up and start typing!

…Not really. Not yet, anyway. But, see, the thing is, this site was written as a blog. Which was nice in terms of allowing it to be written incrementally, but sucky for reading once it got really big. It definitely needed some logical linearization (rather than the chronological kind that comes by default). So here it is: stuff for you to read. In order. Kinda. Sorta. More or less.

Do you like how I’ve been overusing tricky, catchy titles lately?

Anyway, it lives here. You can also get to it by clicking on “Newcomers Start Here”. It’s basically just a table of contents for the site, with an extra diagram and a rant. It doesn’t quite touch every article, but it touches the important ones. I will keep updating it for almost 100% coverage (time-sensitive announcements won’t count).

Enjoy . Oh yeah — please share any ideas or comments or point out any mistakes on it if you see any.

Hey…how’s it going? Looking forward to any blockbusters this summer? Me too.

But back on topic. So, there’s this store called YesAsia, and they’ve been around for a while, but I never really took them seriously back then. Maybe it was because, unlike Amazon, product reviews by users were so few and far between, and when they did have them, they were sort of ungrammatical, or at least nonstandard, like: “Gilian Lweung is teh ossum!” [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [SICK!]

Also, their shopping cart system just used to feel clunky.

So, my “suppliers” were primarily Amazon.co.jp and books.com.tw. Books.com.tw has been acting up for a couple of months now - the site often won’t load properly if at all, and so it’s become a very hit-and-miss thing as to whether I can go there and actually order some cartoons, I mean, learning materials, for myself. Meanwhile, Amazon.co.jp has admittedly pretty durn high international shipping (what I used to do was ship it to my Japanese friend’s house, and then have him ship to me).

Which brings us to…(why are my posts so long!) YesAsia. While they certainly don’t have the selection of regular books that Amazon does, they do still have quite a bit, especially in the manga department. And I’d say they’re basically even with Amazon in terms of videos; they even have the Hollywood dubs. Also, they supply Japanese, Chinese and Korean stuff, fully covering the northeast Asian spectrum. As my kindergarten teacher used to call it: “full spectrum dominance”, as in: “Khatzumoto, get inside at once, or I shall use my full spectrum dominance on you!!“.

But what really got my attention focused on YesAsia was their current free worldwide shipping offer. That means, folks, that the price you see on the item is all you pay. No more waiting to “batch up” your items to minimize shipping cost. You can make a purchase as small as you want, and make more frequent purchases.

You can also use their truly multilingual interface (one of the few on the internets), to navigate in Japanese, Chinese, Korean or English.

Finally, I really like the option to pay by PayPal; I’m not particularly inclined to baramaku (scatter) credit card numbers to the four corners of the interwebs, so that some enterprising youngling, feeling his oats, can come hack into a server and take them away to sell it on IRC…

TMI?

Anyway, I’m going to go feed my cats their precious raw bird flesh now before they mutiny. Do give YesAsia a try if they have what you’re looking for. As long as the free shipping thing is going on, it should be worth it. When buying DVDs and stuff, be sure to double-check the language.

(P.S.: If you’re in Japan looking for Japanese stuff, then buying used on Amazon.jp would probably be best. But if in Japan looking for Chinese/Korean stuff, or outside of Japan looking for Chinese/Japanese/Korean materials, then, yeah, try YesAsiaing it).

Yeah…it’s coming. Soon. “Soon” being Japanese for “at an indeterminate time in the geologically near future”.

Explosions, action, fast-paced hip music.

Save that for other movies. This one just has me in it. And that, friends…is enough.

Khatzumoto: The Movie. Presented in ultra high-definition flash video and shot using the latest two-year-old Japanese cellphone technology. This summer, prepare to be shocked and awed.

First, let’s discuss the different types of white meat.

White Meat: Chicken

The Other White Meat: Pork

The Other Other White Meat: My roommate R-star from freshman year at college. He was in ROTC and seriously pumped. Hunnnh!

Which brings us to the Other Other Other White Meat. This guy.

He learned Japanese using very similar methods to those you find on this site, but all before this site existed. We have so much in common, OMG! He essentially didn’t take classes (technically, he did a bit, but they sucked and he sucked); he had never been to Japan, but learned Japanese by living it, by changing his environment, all while in New Zealand (or one of those countries with weird English). Anyway, screw me telling you. Listen to his story.