My second question in a day: do translations of western books into Japanese make good ‘orchards’ for sentence-picking? My assumption is that, because translators from Japanese is the native language are doing the translating, the sentences will be ‘good’ idiomatic Japanese. Is this assumption incorrect?

“Anyway, I simply cannot fathom settling for foreignerness in any language; that’s just weaksauce.”

There’s a theory that’s pretty simple called “linguistic convergence/divergence.” Converging means to try and talk like the person you’re talking to/divergence means you try and act really differently. So a simple example in English would be like, an American and a British meeting and one of them would try and speak like/come closer to the accent of the other (converge), or they could make their accents a lot thicker (divergence). My teacher talked about a French/Spanish (I could totally be making that up) actress who spoke Spanish as a child but always speaks with a French accent to stand out. I doubt most people are consciously doing this though, and are unaware that they’re doing it (when it comes to foreign languages at least) as they’ve probably never considered the fact that they can obtain the same accent as a native.

You stop being foreign when you stop believing you are foreign, at least in terms of the language. Hold yourself to the same standard as a native speaker–if someone had to talk to you on the phone, they shouldn’t be able to tell. Never fall for the excuse of “oh, it’s not my native language”. You needn’t be harsh on yourself, just always be looking for ways to improve.

I had a Japanese friend who self-taught English, and when I first met her I thought she was Japanese-American: it was that flawless. She told me she’d watched a lot of TV and movies, and had changed the way she acted and used her facial muscles and shaped her mouth when making sounds.

So, input and imitation. Input, because you have to hear a lot of examples not just of certain words, but certain COMBINATIONS or strings of words. Words change a bit when people shout, intonation changes based on emotion.

Also, pauses. Use the same pauses and bridges as native speakers. So, no “um” because “um” is English, find the equivalents of “um” and “uhhhuhhh” in the languages you are learning.

What else…YES! I call it “doping”. In semiconductor production, doping refers is the process of deliberately introducing impurities into an extremely pure material in order to obtain better/desired performance properties. In learning a language, doping is the process of almost “dumbing-down” or de-streamlining your spoken language by introducing inefficient elements that have function but no meaning, and serve to make it more natural and native-like. You see, foreigners, tend to learn from texts and textbooks. And text is much, much more efficient (“pure”) than speaking. In text you get straight to the point:
A) “This is an example”. [4 words, 0 long pauses]
But in speech, you amble zig zigzag-zag toward your point:
B) “Well, um, this is, like, an example or whatever…kind of, I dunno”. [13 words, 1 long pause]
Native speakers are wasteful and inefficient. This is why the Borg in Star Trek despise human communication. In my experience, native speakers use perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of words they “need”, and all that extra baggage has no lexical meaning. “Um” does not mean anything. “Like” does not really mean anything. It’s all just filler.

Make your speech more native-like by making it more wasteful–I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. If you speak too plainly, without any flavor, you come out sounding robotic or just foreign (often both). Also, the wasteful pauses can help buy you time when you need to remember a specific word–you do this in your native language, too–you don’t remember a specific word or phrase, so you keep stringing words or phrases that are close to it in meaning and until you hit the jackpot. Examples:
A) “Is it like a wiki or a blog, or, like a CMS or something?”.
B) “I’ve never, like really had Japanese food, Or, I guess, been to a Japanese restaurant or whatever, at least on my own. I mean, I can, like, read the menu, but, um, you know, what’s actually inside it–the stuff, you know, the food, the tendon or whatever…Is what I want to know?”.
Not very good examples, but I think you get the point.

Finally, you want to swallow the words that native speakers swallow. For example, in Japanese, there is word:　雰囲気. Technically, it should be pronounced “fun-i-ki”, but native speakers swallow it and say “fuinki”; I say it the garbled, native way.

Oh, one more thing–pick an accent. The easiest to pick is the standard accent since it tends to have the most materials produced in it. Either way, pick a focus: pretend the people who speak that dialect are your parents and classmates–functionally, they are.

Finally (for real), try recording yourself now and then. It can reveal where you need work.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/language-is-acting
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/how-to-pronounce-japanese

See, everyone is so discouraging when you learn a new language and say you’ll always ‘sound like a foreigner’ and this is a bit depressing. I realize that certain speech patterns are set and all that but what would be your advice and aquiring an authentic accent (Japanese or any other language)?

Thanks again!

Oh, yes. I see this every day on writing forums. The best way to keep from achieving anything is to spend that time arguing with people who haven’t achieved anything.

quendidil, if you have iTunes, try iConcertCal. It’s an iTunes plugin that basically works as a concert calendar for your music collection. You plug in a city, and it cross-checks with all sorts of concert listings for approaching concerts in that city by artists in your catalogue. I use it in the US, but I think it works around the world, too.

カツメモは本当に毎日復習できる例文の数を百個に制限しますか？この状態を変えることは可能ですか？

子分のジェームス

and this direct link: Lifehack Japan!

>How do you know the proper reading for the kanji in the sentences if they have two or more with the exact same definition?
Well, in theory, you don’t. You have to confirm with a third party. By the way, in that case, you would want to read it as “ゆき”. I could give you a rule of thumb for telling when to say いき or ゆき, but it’s just based on my personal observation and I’m not sure that it always works…I learned it case-by-case myself.

Also, I was reading this article:

http://www.antimoon.com/other/myths-country.htm

Which when I think about it does make sense. How many foreigners live here in America that still speak broken English, one wonders? I see them all the time. But still, children live in the country and they end up speaking fine, so what’s the difference? It seems the difference to me is that kids are taken care of by their parents: There’s no need to speak, to produce output early, to survive. While a foreign adult is expected to find work, food, shelter, and all other essentials for himself, unless he is married and has a spouse that will take care of that for him and will work to socialize him into that country. I call it the “Caretaker effect” in language learning; it is probably by that effect that the best language learning at all occurs.

Also, I’m taking a class at my local university called “Introduction to Japanese Literature and Culture”; when I saw the course title, I thought, great. This is a class that will get me to read Japanese and then test my reading comprehension abilities to see how well I’m coming along. You know, I always thought my reading comprehension was bad (it was pretty bad when I was as kid too). I also thought this was an opportunity to keep up with the Japanese people at the university. Well, I attended the class for the first time today, and I’m already disappointed. I forgot that it was also a “culture” class, and it’s like an advanced conversation class. I hear classmates speaking poor Japanese and see the teacher wanting to get the students to produce output right off the bat.

It’s not like I just want to give them the middle finger or anything; these are probably good, fun people in this class–it’s just I’ve already gotten defensive, because I really don’t want to produce output right now. (Then again, I was never the most social person in my life). I had been producing shoddy, poorly spoken output for 2 years leading up to a few months ago, when I changed my methods. I wonder if the class is really that worth it (and I’ve regretted taking it, because I could have instead taken something that would have helped me progress in my major, for which I’ve already met all the foreign language requirement). I’m considering dropping it now.

What do you think?