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 ).

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!

So, to my pleasant surprise one of the best/my favorite comedy duos in Japan, 爆笑問題/Bakushou Mondai/The Laughter Question/BSMD, do a radio show called 爆笑問題カーボーイ/Bakushou Mondai Cowboy (carboy?). Unfortunately, radio seems hard to get in Japan, at least in my experience — the signal strength for all stations is set to “super weak sauce”, so…you basically don’t get reception anywhere. Anyway, enough griping — fear not! There is hope! They have a podcast and a website right here.

The format is simple, OOTA Hikaru/太田光 does the dryly delivered silliness or “boke (呆け)”, 田中裕二/TANAKA Yuuji does the straight-man-slash-wisecracks-on-the-side or “tsukkomi (突っ込み). The quality of subject material, the timeliness of Tanaka’s tsukkomi, and how blase Oota can be while making ridiculous statements, make both BSMD as a group and this show, worth your attention. Oota manages to weave politics into a lot of his discussions without ever sacrificing humor. Tanaka’s rebuttal timing is perfect, down to the millisecond. And the fact that Tanaka can go from saying something very profound to something completely stoopid in the same tone of voice is always fun; that’s quality boke. The other thing that’s cool is that Oota sometimes literally falls in love with certain words or phrases. And he’ll get excited and keep saying them over and over again even when it doesn’t make sense “それからドーした？！！？”. I laugh just thinking about it. Funnily enough, I do the same thing a lot: a few weeks ago, my friend H-star had to listen to me say “豪華にね、ゴーカに” every few minutes for like 6 hours. I thought it was just something I did because Japanese was new to me — ‘guess not. Oh yeah, Oota is also a voracious reader, going through over 100 books a year. So you input fiends take note — if you want to talk like the man, consider reading like the man, too. And just when you thought he couldn’t get any cooler, according to the ‘Pedia, Oota was effectively banned for a time from Nippon Broadcasting System (NBS) in the early 1990s; the deal is that he was sitting in one night for Beat Takeshi, who had a severe cold, and as a joke he very gravely announced that Beat Takeshi had, in fact, died due to complications from the cold. If you know Oota, you can picture him doing something like that; reading about it, I thought it was hilarious. NBS appear to have had a cow…

Anyway, even if you don’t understand all the talk on Bakushou Mondai Cowboy, I encourage you, exhort you, call upon you, to listen to it. The dialogue is really natural, and it’s a good chance to hear someone explain themselves on the fly, as Oota does. You’ll definitely pick up a thing or two, and you’ll start laughing soon enough.

BSMD also do tons of work on TV, so…keep an eye out.

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.