A reader named Kaba shares her AJATT success story. Yay!

Hello there Khatzumoto~ though I’ve only commented once on your blog (by the name of Kaba), AJATT has almost taken over my life.  It literally will when I quit my English-heavy preschool teaching job in August [Khatzunote-o: this was written back in June].  Anyway, my story mostly consists of how I found success through any little thing I could find to motivate myself.

Working my way through Heisig seemed as natural and ordinary as it could’ve been. There were two main sources of motivation in this stage:
1. Bragging family and friends’ ears off about my progress (”I was at 1200 last week, and now I’m at 1550,” for example.  I became a little too happy with the “wow”s and such). I’m just not too sure what to say about how this bragging business involves English-speaking. Anyhoo…
2. Recording this progress on a calendar. Each day, whatever kanji number I was at was written on the respective calendar day.  If Tuesday’s number on the calendar was the same as Monday’s, I’d become ashamed and make sure such a thing wouldn’t repeat itself.  Seeing the difference in numbers between each day was a nice concrete form of motivation.  Also, setting a “last day of Heisig” date was effective since I was always trying to see how many days or weeks before the date I could finish, just to be extra proud of myself and all.  Almost each day I would surpass my daily average amount of kanji, just so I could happily watch my deadline move up.

Now, in the sentence stage, I’m using pretty much the same forms of motivation.

The Kanji Poster: This combines both physical evidence of progress and the ability to show off (though more humbly this time).  Here is what I do: Each time I learn a new kanji reading I write the kanji down on an index card.  By the end of the week, the card is filled with kanji that I am now able to fill in with a red marker on the kanji poster.  Once the whole poster is red, I will have accomplished my goal.  This definitely brings on determination to learn more readings, and anyone who passes through my room is bound to say, “Hey, your poster there is lookin’ pretty red if I do say so myself ;)”  Take a picture of your reddening (or greenening or purpling) kanji poster each week and you’ll truly see your progress.

It’s fun to watch them merge into large blobs of blushing kanji.

My last key to my success is entirely different, and something I just recently started.  I’ve found that swapping emails with a native Japanese speaker does wonders for reading comprehension, knowledge of readings and all the other abilities that seem to appear magically.  And, it puts the pressure on you to truly make an attempt understand what’s being said.  It’s easy to give up when there isn’t another party on the other end waiting for your response, but when you know you can’t leave the other guy hanging, there’s an automatic need to respond with something related to the kanji after kanji of email that was sent to you (and if you’re typing in Japanese, ask for your native speaker friend to correct your mistakes).  I’ve exchanged about 20 emails so far and now I find myself speed-reading even furigana-less manga…

Working full time has bought me some nice media to pull sentences from, but it has me on a slow pace. My “stats” are as follows: 560 sentences in 2 months, 200 of which were done on my one week vacation.  So guess what? Bye bye job

To sum it up, my success is muchly due to shameless bragging, concrete evidence of progress, and situations where one must must must understand the Japanese that’s laid out in front of one’s face (and plenty of time away from other obligations).  Whatever bit of motivation you can find with undoubtedly lead to results, which will, in return, lead to motivation once again, and it repeats over and over from there.  Obviously there’s the constant audio-visual immersion as well, but what else can I say that Khatz hasn’t about that?

That’s her story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

The success story series continues. I don’t know about you guys, but these stories are really inspiring me. They really get me going. You may or may not find this hard to believe, but I sometimes doubt myself. I wonder whether the whole Japanese thing wasn’t just a random fluke. Yeah, crazy, huh? I guess it’s a natural consequence of having a somewhat slightly open mind and being exposed to people with differing opinions. Still, between these success stories, and other successful learners I run into every so often, there’s a lot to confirm what you see here. Dang, I need to go brush my teeth. While I’m doing that, you read Ivan the Terrible’s (still en route) success story.

Ask, and you shall receive!

Khatzumoto,

A (partial) success story, 為了提高別人的士氣! Though as applied to Mandarin rather than Japanese.

I’ve been studying Mandarin for a long time. Well…’studying’ belongs in parentheses, I think. Huge amounts of time were lost due to procrastination, poor study methods, and simple disinterest. I started my language study the way a lot of people do: listen to language tapes or podcasts a half hour or an hour a day, practice writing a few characters every now and then, then set the language aside until tomorrow while I go off to play an English language game or watch an English language movie. ‘Language learning as daily chore’ about sums it up, and the result was I treated it precisely like I treat most chores:  put it off as long as possible and feel relief when it’s finally out of the way. A missed day wasn’t a rarity at all, and by the time I finished the third and final set of Pimsleur Mandarin CDs my Mandarin was still awful.

So I devoted more time. I bumped up the number of ChinesePod podcasts I listened to a day. I set aside two hours every night to studying characters (Heisig-less character study, which meant I found myself studying the same characters again more than a few times). I amassed gigantic piles of hanzi flashcards. Still, I felt something close to despair whenever I looked at a Chinese Wikipedia page. There seemed to be simply so much there that learning the language to any kind of fluency in any reasonable time frame would be impossible. I found myself on the verge of just abandoning the whole idea and taking on an ‘easy’ western language more than once. A westerner, learning Mandarin to fluency? Reading the two billion and one characters necessary for fluency just like a native? Saying a long sentence and hitting every tone right? Pfftt. The whole idea was hubris from the start.

A funny thing happened while I was browsing the forums at ‘How to Learn Any Language’, however. Someone put up a link to your web site, asking for opinions. At that time, I knew next to nothing about Japanese and had no intention of ever studying it, but I checked out the web site out of curiosity. I was more than a little skeptical about the claims (18 months to fluency? Who does he think he’s fooling?), but the more articles I read, the more excited about the whole concept I became. Even if the results weren’t true, my methods at the time were going nowhere. Besides, it isn’t like constant exposure could hurt my language ability. So I filled up my iPod with Mandarin language music and podcasts, ditched anything in English, and off I went.

At first, I have to admit maintaining the environment was tough for me. The siren call of English language YouTube had a bad tendency to lure me off the path, in those moments when the longing for words I could understand was particularly strong. The method itself is also a bit rougher for Mandarin, given that you have to learn thousands of more hanzi than the student of Japanese, and without a ready-made Heisig book to guide you step by step. I had to use the Heisig method for myself, starting from scrap and making up my own stories and keywords as I went using the character tree at zhongwen.com and a couple of character dictionaries I had lying around the house.

Nevertheless, the logic of the method becomes extremely obvious the farther you go. I used to wonder what possible use it could be to constantly listen to things in a language when you haven’t learned any of the words you’re hearing yet. The answer now is clear: you get used to it. Even when you don’t understand every word, the mind begins to accept these strange sounds you’re hearing day in and day out. They stop being foreign and start becoming the simple background of everyday life.

The greatest problem I once faced in Mandarin was that my mind kind of….rejected the words. Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. Every word had to be painstakingly drilled in order for it to stay there, and often ended up being forgotten anyway. It was like the immune system of the mind would leap on the new, obviously-not-English word like a foreign bacteria and chew it to pieces before it ever had a chance to stay in my long-term memory. Why couldn’t my mind simply accept a new Chinese word with the same ease it accepts new English words?

Because (of course) Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. As soon as conceivably possible, the mind must learn to treat the language as an old friend to be welcomed rather than a foreign intruder to be expunged. And the only way to make this happen is…wait for it….constant exposure to the target language.

Though it took me awhile to fully embrace the idea (I used to tag the English definition to every word I added to the SRS, worried that I would misunderstand if I stuck purely to Chinese), the monolingual dictionary is also an immeasurable help. Using one, you begin to understand two things:

1) There is a whole lot to learn. Much more than anyone can reasonably expect to pick up taking a language class a few hours a week. Learning a language to fluency simply cannot be a part-time project; there are a lot of objects and concepts in the word, a very large proportion of which must be mastered if you want to be fluent, so you must be able to approach it with passion for long periods of time. And, in order to do that, you must enjoy studying it. Anyone who views language learning as a matter of ‘willpower’ is taking the wrong view; you must find yourself in a position, as I have on occasion, where you are stuck doing something that isn’t in Chinese for a few hours and really wanting to go back and do a few more sentences/watch another Mandarin movie/play another Mandarin game. When you have to use willpower to avoid studying your language (because your boss at the Taiwanese 補習班 (cram school) doesn’t approve of the English teacher speaking in Mandarin all day, for example), you’ll know you’re on the right track.

2) There isn’t really all that much to learn. Yes, a paradox, but a good one. Put simply, the more words you pick out from the monolingual dictionary, the more you see the same words cropping up over and over. A language is like a jigsaw puzzle; at first, you don’t even know where to begin, but as each piece/word/grammar idea drops into place, the whole becomes more and more obvious and easier to understand. Always keep in mind as you go that this is not an unending road; so long as you keep adding sentences to your SRS, there will eventually come a day when you stumble across a long, intricate definition and find you understand every word of it. How soon that day comes depends on how high you manage to keep your enthusiasm, and how high you keep your enthusiasm depends on how much you enjoy what you are doing.

Today, I live in Taichung, Taiwan. I’m not yet fluent, by any means, but getting closer every day. I have my characters and sentences separated into two Anki decks: the former is now up to 3500 characters and the latter up to 3000 sentences. Ripped audio from the Mandarin dubbed versions of The Incredibles (超人特攻隊), Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫, but to me it’s 魔法公主), alongside any number of songs and Taiwanese TV shows. When I find myself delayed, I always have a Mandarin book or 漫畫 handy (presently sentence-mining my way through Animal Farm; 所有動物生來平等，但有些動物比其他動物更平等!). When I get the chance, I end up playing the Mandarin version of Civilization IV (文明帝國四).*

Everyday conversation is rarely a problem. English speakers who have been here for years typically turn to me to translate Chinese characters for them. My computer uses a Traditional Chinese version of windows, which becomes easier to use by the day. I cannot yet hold a meaningful debate on particle physics, perhaps, but…eh, I can’t in English either.

What is my chief difficulty now? Containing my anxiousness to start Japanese. I never intended to study it before, but constant exposure to AJATT, KanjiClinic, Heisig, etc. has had an effect. I have learned to stop worrying and love the knji, and besides, it will feel good to finally know how all those little squiggly ‘hiragana’ things I keep seeing are pronounced.

* Antimoon mentions playing adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island in English, and if you’re studying Chinese, I cannot recommend enough picking up this game. Not only will you be bombarded with new vocabulary, complete with lots of helpful pictures, but it comes with it’s own internal 中文 encyclopedia for you to check that vocabulary as you play. I usually turn off the music and listen to a Mandarin movie soundtrack. Just wonderful in every way. Skip the expansions, though; no 中文 versions available.

That’s his story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people — including me — and you’ll save me some writing!

For your happy perusal, here’s a success story from a reader who goes by her Chinese name, Plum Ocean –  I mean, 李洋. Here are her words, digitally remastered in super ultra high definition wide screen Dolby 10.2 digital surround text:

Dear Khatzumoto,

I really want to thank you for writing your blog! [Khatzumoto: Yeah!] I have found so much success through your methods [Khatzumoto: Yeah!]. This isn’t really a success story as much as it is a thank you email [Khatzumoto: Yeah!].

I started learning Japanese in September of 2007 after reading your blog. It really encouraged me that even though there are no lessons around my area, I can learn Japanese. Soon I would find that the methods are much more effective than any text book, class, or listening CD anyone could find. The difficult part of this method is ignoring what everyone else thinks about your progress, and continuing on with doing what you’re doing. I really faced a lack of confidence after talking with a professor of Japanese. I was only a few months into learning Japanese when I told him about your method. He immediately shut down the method [Khatzumoto: Boooooo!], and told me he doesn’t think the way I’m going about learning Japanese is an effective way. He told me to wait for college to really start learning Japanese, rather than going about it in such a difficult matter. He warned me that because I’m learning Japanese from media, I’ll be learning random things, rather than what I’d be learning in a structured text book. Immediately, his comment made me forget about the progress I was making. After a few weeks, I was able to get my confidence up again, and to continue on with your method. I decided not to go to the college this professor was apart of because of his egotism, and because of how he shut me down. I started seeing more success. The more I was immersed into the language, the more I was able to hear the things I’ve learned in the dramas and movies I watch, and in the songs I listen to. The language was no longer a blur to me. I was able to type down the things I heard in Japanese, and study from what I took down. I was able to repeat the sentences I heard, but have never learned before, with correct pronunciation. Learning to read hiragana, and katakana was the easiest thing for me, I had already gotten that down the first few days of learning Japanese. The kanji came the more, and more I would read Japanese. I didn’t start using an SRS, mainly because I didn’t understand how to, until just recently. The SRS has really helped me study Japanese. Especially now, since I’m learning how to write. I regret not studying how to write the language early on. Mainly the reason was because I was to lazy, and would rather type Japanese. I use the SRS to help train me to listen to music I know, and to write down the lyrics while listening to it. I also use it to learn sentences, and grammar. I’ve decided from now on to write down any Japanese I see to help practice my writing skills. Even though I can recognize, and type the characters, when writing, it’s like I never had learned them, which is why I’m focusing on it now. Along the road of learning Japanese, I met a guy who is from Japan who helps me out. He has especially been a help with my grammar, and he corrects my sentences for me, so that I can put them in my SRS and learn from my mistakes. The SRS really makes it so I remember the corrections, so that I can avoid the mistakes in the future.

Now, the success. I would’ve never imagined being able to understand a song in Japanese, or a TV show in Japanese, but now, I am able to do these things. I write a blog on a Japanese hosted server, and in the beginning of the blog it was only in English, but now with every post I write more, and more of what I write is being translated into Japanese. One day, I hope to be able to express everything I write for my blog in Japanese. The guy I met from Japan corrects the Japanese I write on my blog so that I can learn from my mistakes. Recently, I have made a big step in my road of learning Japanese. My friend who lives in America, but used to live in Hong Kong, introduced me to a friend of hers from Hong Kong. Even though he speaks Cantonese, and I speak English, he’s been learning Japanese on his own for a long time, and we were able to become friends through speaking Japanese to each other. When I first attempted having an instant message conversation with someone in Japanese with someone who didn’t speak English well, but knows Japanese, I failed miserably. I was so embarrassed, because they couldn’t understand anything I was saying. However, now, I can hold conversations with people in Japanese. I’m very happy about this. The reasons why I want to learn Japanese is because I love Japanese culture, and I want to move to Japan to teach English. However, if you strip down my reasons to the bone, it is revealed that my real reason is because I want to connect with other people, and form new friendships I would’ve never been able to form if I didn’t speak their language. Making friends with this guy through speaking Japanese has been a success story for me, because I am starting to reach my goal (^-^). The whole reason why I’m learning Japanese is coming true. My Japanese learning road will never have an end. Continuously, I will meet successes, which will make walking on this road worth it. Successes like making new friends through speaking Japanese, becoming a really great teacher in Japan, falling in love in Japan, raising a child in Japan. These dreams are dear to my heart.

I have taken four years of French in high school. When I compare my progress in Japanese to the progress I had in French, there are many differences. I wasn’t able to reach my goal of making friends with a person through speaking French until the latter part of French IV, because I couldn’t hold a conversation until my fourth year of French. While for Japanese, it hasn’t even been a year, and I have made a friend through speaking the language, because I can already hold a conversation in Japanese. It took me four years to be able to listen to a French song, or movie, and sort of get an idea of what is going on, and I am already at that level with Japanese. When listening to French, it is still a blur to me. I can’t repeat every word I hear of it, yet in Japanese, I am able to. To me, it has been proven that your method is way more effective than structured classes because of my experience through learning a language through both methods. I’m not taking French next year, I will have to study it on my own now. The challenging part will be reversing all the methods I’ve been taught in class, and applying the methods I’ve learned through your blog.

Recently, I’ve started learning Mandarin. I know it isn’t good to focus on too many languages at one time, but to me, Japanese, and Mandarin are equally important. French is just a thing I’m keeping up with so that I can hold onto the friendships I’ve made through speaking French. I’m in love with Japanese. I really love learning it, and learning it is essential to go for my dreams of becoming a teacher in Japan. Mandarin has recently become something important to me because I sponsor a girl in China who is around my age. I want to learn Mandarin for her. The English I write to her is translated, but she gets both copies of the letter. When I write Mandarin to her, she is really happy. One day I hope we meet, and I want to be able to speak with her in Mandarin. So far, her English is much better than my Mandarin, but even so, I want to speak with her in her language. The friendship we have has made learning Mandarin important to me, even as important as learning Japanese. A plus to learning Mandarin is I also love to watch Taiwanese dramas.

I started learning Mandarin February of 2008. It has been five months, and seeing my progress reminds me of the progress I had in Japanese. Starting to learn Mandarin was the hardest part. Thankfully, I had my best friend who is from Mainland China who speaks Mandarin as a second language, and Cantonese as a first. She introduced me to pinyin, and taught me how to read it correctly. At first, I was embarrassed to speak Mandarin, because I feared not getting the tones right. Now, I am getting better at pronouncing it without having someone tell me how to first. Even though I learned the kanji in Japanese, I still have to learn a whole new character set, because I am learning simplified Chinese on top of Traditional Chinese (which has more characters than Japanese to begin with). From the beginning I was able to listen to Mandarin, and repeat exactly what I hear. My friend told me that I am amazing at learning languages because I have this skill. I think I only have it because I was taught how to listen through your method. That was very helpful in the beginning. What came later was remembering what I had repeated. Learning to read pinyin, oppose to the other method where numbers are used, has helped me tremendously to remember pronunciation. My progress has been very similar to my progress in Japanese. At first came being able to remember sentences. Now, I am at a point where I’m listening to dramas and songs, and hearing what I have learned in what I’m listening to. I find it amazing, because I am able to sing along with songs sooner than when I was able to in Japanese. I pick up lines more easily. Luckily, all the dramas in Mandarin have Chinese subtitles, so that helps me learn faster. Seeing the parallels in my progress with Japanese, and Mandarin really encourages me, because I now if I keep going, my Mandarin will improve to a point of being able to hold a conversation. At first, learning sentences from passages that were taken from things that don’t have a sound sample was hard for me. However, I have found that writing down everything I see while doing my SRS sentences helps me to remember the feeling of each word in that sentence, and to connect them together to form what concept the sentence is getting across. Now, my friend who was helping me is moving to another town, and she won’t be able to help me with pronunciation like she used to. I’m on my own. However, I’ll be okay. I’ll keep to the methods I’ve learned, and make sure to always get more input before outputting.

Because your blog encouraged me to learn Japanese, I am set free from needing a college that teaches it. When searching for colleges, my major disappointment was not being able to go to the college of my dreams, because it doesn’t have Japanese as a major. Now I am able to go to that college, because I am learning the language on my own! Your blog has made a major impact on my life. Thank you so much (^-^). I hope my long email hasn’t been tiring for you to read.

That’s her story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Continuing our success stories series, here are the words of an AJATT reader named Adam; I added part numbering for ease of reference (and ran a quick spellcheck):

Khatzumoto,

I wanted to contribute my story to the success stories page. I have been using your site and method for about 8 months now and absolutely love it, and figure I should contribute something. It’s kind of long so if you have to cut it that’s okay. Thanks for everything,

Here goes;

Part 1: Faulty Methods

I started studying Japanese during my last semester of college. They only had Japanese level 2 available so I lied to get in and said I studied elsewhere and that I would be able to catch up fine. (I was able to do this in about 2 weeks after studying hard) but this shows how ineffective college Japanese really is.)

I really wanted to improve my Japanese so I figured the best way was to study in Japan. Since I had no money, the only option was to go as an English teacher. So I moved to Japan shortly after I graduated, and ran into something that shocked me. No English teacher could seem to speak more than a few words of Japanese - maybe some important phrases, etc. And when they did speak a little, they sounded awful. It really made me worried, and think that it must be impossible [to learn Japanese]. I started to meet some of these teachers that had been living in Japan for 3, 5, 10, 15 years, were married to Japanese women, had children, and still had no Japanese ability at all. I decided I was not going to let this happen and I would never let myself fall into such a pathetic situation like this.

I cut off all my contact with the other teachers (spent all of my time at work studying when I had free time), made Japanese friends and worked my hardest to really improve my Japanese. My first year went great and I really felt I was way above any other foreigners I met. I was studying my ass off. I was probably putting in about 5 hours a day, which seemed like a lot at the time (though with my Japanese environment now it pales in comparison). However I was using so many faulty ways of studying that just didn’t work and it caused a lot of my great effort to be wasted.

A few methods I wish I had never used:

1) Using massive amounts of textbooks. I did get through them all. But after doing all the lame fill in the blanks, reading comprehensions, kanji exercises, etc. by the time I finished I had retained only about 15-20% of it. They were mostly incredibly boring so I never wanted to go back and review them. So I’d just go to the next textbook and continue this cycle. Textbooks are boring, no matter how many you do, your progress will be slow and they will never really help you get through to the real fluency.

2) Listening CDs. God, never use these. But Khatzumoto touches on this.

3) Listening to Japanese try to explain their language in English to me. There are some good English speakers living in Japan, but they are absolutely terrible at explaining their language. They give the wrong meanings, translate badly, and try to force their methods on you. I remember two examples. I was told ってか means `by the way` and that I should always use 僕 in all situations polite or impolite. You should’ve seen me try to start sentences with ってか and how wrong I sounded.

4) Language exchanges; Nothing but Japanese people trying to get as much English out of you, and hope that you really don’t have an interest enough in Japanese past a few phrases.

5) Japanese-English dictionary; Always Japanese to English never once Japanese to Japanese.

6) Dating a Japanese girl who was dead set on being an English master. This just lead to unending conflicts and a breakup.

Part 2: More Faulty Methods

Year 2, I finally started to realize that I had to get my hands on more Japanese materials and real stuff. However, I found new faulty methods:

1) Watching Japanese dramas and anime with English subtitles. This accomplished nothing.

2) Reading books, but every time I found a word I didn’t know, I’d look it up in English and then actually write the English word in the book. It took me forever to read books, was boring, and I never ended up looking at those words again.

3) Not worrying about mistakes at all, and thinking that Japanese people would correct my mistakes if I made them. This just caused unending mistakes that never got corrected.

4) I gave up writing kanji and figured I would never need to write them out so what was the point of studying the writing.

Part 3: All Japanese All The Time

In my 3rd year, I finally started to realize things on my own, before I reached the AJATT site, that coincide with it perfectly. I stopped using subtitles for TV dramas, started putting dramas on my iPod and just listening to them over and over. I also started reading straight without relying too much on a dictionary.

I felt like I put more time then anyone else into studying, yet I still wasn’t seeing the results I felt I deserved. I was understanding dramas and books but not to the level I wanted. Newspapers were still way over my head. I starting feeling as though this was as far as I or anyone could get. A decent understanding of Japanese but never really truly understanding it or feeling natural with it.

And then (*drumroll*) I stumbled across this website around November of 2007. At first I thought this guy Khatzumoto was just bulls****ing around not knowing what he was talking about. But as I started to read more of his articles I became intrigued and figure I would give the SRS system he talked about a try. I also started to use the listening environment he talked about (which I was already developing as well, but not to the extent he had recommended). I started listening to Japanese 24/7 (though I’ll admit I still can’t do it in my sleep — it gives me a headache), and I put in about 1000 sentences in Anki (though I also like Khatzumoto’s as well, but my internet connection wasn’t so great).

And immediately I was hooked. My level skyrocketed from doing these sentences (I started right off with Japanese to Japanese since my level was fairly good). I immediately decided that if this one thing was so good I wanted to go the whole way. I found out about the advice to do the Heisig method as well first (Which I always thought was the worst way to study Japanese), and after hesitation I finished the Heisig in SRS after about a month and a half. My level once again jumped up to new heights. I read through every article on the website (more than once) and it gave me incredible inspiration and ideas that I was so happy to finally found. Now, I’m up to about 6000 sentences, still doing the reviews of the kanji, and have reached new levels I never thought possible. I’m still going for the goal of 10,000 sentences (higher of course is the real goal). I get through about 30 new sentences a day now. I understand Japanese dramas and news and books really, really well, and am starting to feel more like a native speaker. I can read tons of kanji that Japanese can’t. I’ve listened to IWGP (Ikebukuro West Gate Park) about 200 times. I love Japanese and am so thankful to find this great site. I’m finally leaving Japan next month where I’m returning to study international business law in law school and hopefully will be able to continue to make use of my Japanese.

I wish everyone the best of luck. Have fun, don’t let other people get you down, remember your goals and use good methods.

Adam

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!

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!

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…