The other day, a handsome young AJATTeer (and South Park fan) named MGV sent me this handsome email:

On your site, which is awesome, you mention that you should spend 18-24 hours a day doing something/anything in Japanese. I’m in high school, grade 10. I have school Monday-Friday. I worked it out on a piece of paper, and the most time I can spend listening to Japanese is about 10 hours, and I was a little generous.

Anyways, I was hoping you might have some suggestions on how to listen to more Japanese each day. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’m wondering how often you had college classes. In other words, how did you find the time to “get used” to Japanese.

It’s not just with listening, at most I can review about 5-15 kanji a day. At that rate it will take ages get through the kanji phase.

Life is very busy, and school is just terrible for Japanese, since everything is in English (the E word!) and it’s loud and hard to have your headphones on in, and also, the worst, school issues hours of homework!

Sorry to ramble, you may have heard it all before. It just seems like learning to understand this language is gonna take a lot longer than it has to.

If you have any suggestions, please please please write them to me or post them in some immersion article or something.

Khatzumoto’s one-line answer:

Just focus on the time you do control, rather than on what you don’t.

The government and your legal guardians practically force you to be in school, but no one’s forcing you to watch English TV in your free time, and no one else but you controls the contents of your iPod, and no one’s got a gun to your head telling you to read English websites.

Control what you can control. No one reasonably expects any more of you. Do all you can when you can. And you’ll be surprised by how much you do progress and do get done.

Limits are not always a disadvantage. What seems like friction can actually be traction — just as professional runners use spiked shoes that actually get stuck into the ground (which would seem to suck) to give them more power to push off. In fact, people with all the time in the world can be very unproductive, unless they start to give themselves some self-made traction.

All your friction can be traction. All your friction can be a gift — a brand new pair of shoes . Limits are your friend.

Think of Japanese less as something to “get through” and more as something to “be”. Japanese is just who you are. As long as you’re doing even the smallest thing in Japanese, there’s nowhere you need to be other than where you are. The thing with AJATT is that you’re not directly forcing growth, you’re just ensuring good “nutrition”, knowing that growth will naturally take care of itself.

One inch counts. One kanji counts. One minute counts. Try holding your breath for one or two minutes (ok, don’t), and you’ll quickly see that it is a very long time.

P.S. When I was kanjiing hard core, I found my daily upper limit was 25 new characters per day (plus about 100 reviews), no matter how much time I had.

P.P.S. SRSing your school subject material could help you save time. The key is to make sure the format of your SRS cards is as good as possible a  reflection of your exam style.

P.P.P.S. Anyone with any suggestions — especially people who’ve faced and solved a similar problem — please feel free to share your advice.

Like I’ve said before…the set of tools/methods described on this site…I don’t know why it all works; looking at and thinking about how people learn their native language, it just all seemed obvious to me. In other words, I knew what I needed to do to achieve fluency…but not much more.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio – keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (“Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19. Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon. But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane. In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle – you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet – feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized – movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

Creating a language immersion environment is almost inevitably going to require the use of headphones. In this post, I’d like to share with you the headphones that have pleasured my ears with Japanese and Chinese sounds, and invite you to share your own recommendations, advice and experiences.

To start, I was faithfully served by a pair of Sony MDR-G42 behind-the-head headphones for almost the entire duration of the hardcore phase of my Japanese.

After that, for a year and change I used a pair of Sony MDR-NC22 noise-cancelling earphones, the first earphones that had ever fit my ears — I often forgot I was wearing them! They’re pricier, and I only justified buying them because it was for “educational” reasons. They were great back when I was using trains a lot — you know how loud that can get.

Currently I use speakers quite a bit at home (since my living arrangements allow it), supplemented by some Pioneer SE-MJ5 headphones.

On the road, I use a pair of Phillips SHE-9500 earphones. Good sound, nice small size…The cable’s kinda short though, so I often need to use the extension they came with. One thing that’s really amazing about these headphones is that you can actually sleep in them comfortably, despite the fact that they’re not marketed for that as such. Plus they don’t look as ridiculous as the actual “sleep headphones” that are on the market right now. When I’m sleeping, I want to know that I look good.
[Update 2008/12/4: It turns out these were making my ears itch...earphones and I just don't seem to get on -- so I went back to basics, to neckband-style headphones: Philips SHS8200]

Headphones are a peculiar product. For one thing, above about $15-20, there seems to be virtually no correlation between quality and price; my less-than-$40 Pioneers (SE-MJ5) destroyed all the $100-$300+ pairs around it at the store I went to — so you can’t just spend a lot and be guaranteed a good unit. Nor is there always a strong correlation between make and quality. While all my headphone choices so far have skewed to industry leaders, all the industry leaders produce both gold and duds [I don't mean go get a no-name brand: those will almost certainly suck. I mean that you still need to find a good pair within a good brand. It seems like brand definitely matters in headphones, but by itself it only offers the possibility of quality, not a guarantee]. Moreover, headphones need to be equal parts good-sounding and comfortable; neither condition takes precedence over the other. Speaking of sound, if you listen to hip-hop, make sure your headphones have a good frequency range, especially at the low end (they should at least be able to go down to 8Hz [or, as close to single digits as possible] if not lower).

So, the best advice I can give you is not a single product recommendation; it is this: TRY ‘em. And if the shop won’t let you try them, make sure they accept returns in the event of suckage. Try the headphones. Bring your player and play the things you listen to. Real, live experimentation is the only way to really guarantee getting something that’s worth it. Given the amount of time you’re going to be listening to audio to produce an immersion environment, the trip to the store or wherever will be worth it.

All the headphones I’ve mentioned do start to hurt eventually, but only after several hours of use. So, yeah, rich sound (to me, at least…I’m not an audio buff) and comfortable wearing. Anyway, what matters most is you and the shape of your head/ears; I think I must have weird ears, since most headphones simply don’t fit me. Or maybe headphones are a metaphor for life and how we need to take control if we want to be happy.

Whatever.

The floor is open to your comments and suggestions .

I saw this page from How To Learn Any Language a while ago (it might be that someone put it in comments) but neglected to link to it despite how cool it is: a headshot jackpot mother lode of Japanese audio materials with transcripts. They range from children’s books to some more, what’s the word, anyway, there’s a lot of range. What’s exciting to me about this is that it has links to all those European fairy tales you and I grew up with (yay!). I’ve been listening to Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes this morning. Anyway, give it try. AFAIK, it’s all free! Freeee!

A while back, I wrote an article on how to teach yourself to understand Japanese (TV) news to basically 100% comprehension. Essentially a “how I did it and how you can, too”. A young, virile, extremely good-looking man named James followed that advice. This is his story, in his own words.

Understanding the News

This article is about how I learnt to understand the news. I started by listening to the Yomiuri News podcast and the Nihon Keizai Shinbun Podcast when ever I had a moment’s spare time. At first I understood close to nothing, maybe the odd word or two. However the more I listened the more I understood. As a result I now have the confidence that I will understand it all first time. What was particularly helpful was the reading TBS or Fuji News Network articles in the morning and then listening to news podcasts later in the day. Generally they all report the same news so having that initial knowledge about a story helped astronomically in boosting my understanding. What I also did was read articles/editorials/anything news-related and if there was a word phrase I didn’t understand I would simply copy and paste into Mnemosyne/Khatzumemo. This to me is the definition of sentence mining. Harvesting any sentence that you would like to be able to say or want to understand. This is really a simple process but is essential to get the large amount of names of people/places/crimes/boats/buildings/etc. into your SRS and thus into your brain. I didn’t actually read many ‘newspapers’ as such but I read editorials and articles from online sources (much easier for SRS entry) and since these are practically the same as newspaper articles you will be able to understand real newspapers.

My typical day in the ‘news’ phase would be: get up read listen to news online whilst having breakfast. Walk to uni whilst listening to News podcasts. If the lecture was boring, I would listen to news podcasts and try to write out what was said (or the headline) on the notes in front of me. Any free time during my day where I was alone, I read news articles online or listened to news podcasts. A lot of the time I would just walk around listening to news on my iPod and mimicking (albeit very quietly) the news reader. I tended to mix my focus on news with other Japanese studies such as books, magazines, Youtube videos — pretty much anything that was in Japanese. The best thing about this was following a news story for weeks and seeing how it developed over time.

One thing I struggled with was understanding the headlines of news articles. Often they rely on Japanese people’s knowledge of kanji to decipher the meaning or simply are just words with no particles in between them. As you learn more and more Japanese you will understand the incredible flexibility of Chinese characters and hence will become able to, as the Japanese do, to grasp the meaning simply from seeing the characters in the Headline. To this end, knowledge of ALL 2000 odd characters is essential as they ALL appear in news no matter what internet forums/idiots may say about the lesser-used ones.

As Khatzumoto has recommended previously, using the FNN Video News (http://www.fnn-news.com/) would be a good place to start as the videos’ text is in the corresponding article on the main page. If you loop the video the same news articles repeat — thus giving you reinforcement of the content. I combined this with podcast listening.

In my opinion the most important thing for the learner of Japanese is knowing all the general-use kanji. Everything stems from this. I can concretely say that if I had not done Heisig, I would have quit Japanese years ago. Anyone who has done the Heisig method will tell you it works perfectly and it is 100% worth doing. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of knowing ALL the kanji in general use; they are the foundation of Japanese and will provide a helicopter to the top of the mountain that is Japanese whilst everyone else falls by the wayside.

He’s right about the kanji, you know…

So, I was sitting at the train station, about to go to the starting point of one of my epic walks, listening to my meager collection of Cantonese hip-hop which consisted (consists?) entirely of the few LMF songs I was able to scrape together. But I was really enjoying it, and realizing that I understood a lot of the words, like 開開心心(hōihōisāmsām)、唔該(mhgōi ) and cetera. And it struck me that rap was “nothing but” words attached to music. I thought of making and recording my own Cantonese raps, but then that seemed like too much trouble, and I wouldn’t want to get creative yet, for fear of picking up bad habits. Then I realized that I have Cantonese words — audio made for Mandarin- and Japanese-speaking learners of Cantonese. And I have music — lyricless electronica from the likes of The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, The Daft Punk and The Soundtrack to Ikebukuro West Gate Park. Why not, eh, how do you say, combine them? So I did . Now I have more Cantonese “rap”. And I have a way to get me to listen to those useful but by themselves rather bland language-learning audio tracks. So, I’m pretty 開開心心(hōihōisāmsām) about it. Just to give you an idea of what I made, here are some 30-second samples of my simple sound-mashing.

• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Gustav Holst – 早晨+木星
• [sample] 香港広東語会話 feat. Mussorgsky – これは何+Promenade.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Daft Punk – 簡單問句+Aerodynamic.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. Mr. Oizo – 約會+Flat Beat.mp3
• [sample] 基礎廣東話 feat. The Prodigy – 簡單答句+The Way It Is.mp3

I used the program Cool Edit Pro to do it. I’m sure there are free programs out there that can do the job for you. If you’re reading this and you know of such an app or apps, feel free to let the rest of us know. Also, if anyone knows good Cantonese music of any genre, feel free to share. 唔該(mhgōi ).