I’m in the UK so the easiest way I’ve found to rent Japanese DVD’s is an online rental place, like netflix in the USA. The UK one is called “lovefilm”, it’s seems very heavy on anime, shogun, yakuza and horror but very light on anything else.

I’m a huge gamer, it’s probably my second favorite hobby. E3 just happened, and they announced a lot of great games, some of which probably won’t come out in Japanese. Should I just not play them until I learn Japanese? Because that’s gonna be a loooooong time.

I should also mention that my main hobby is reading American comic books. I really doubt that I’d be able to read the Blackest Night or Battle For The Cowl in Japanese. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong, so please someone tell me if I am.

I’m just really confused on how to proceed in this whole Japanese thing. If anybody has any advice for little ole me, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks again Khatz!

After stumbling upon Gedo senki a week ago and enjoying it a lot, I’ve felt a need to watch some good anime (something I haven’t done in a while – my Japanese exposure has been mostly tons of music and rewatching my favorite shows). I’ve read a few reviews of some really good shows and I started sampling them. The problem is, I’ve approached them with extremely high expectations of the bad kind – “ok, if this show isn’t absolutely awesome in every goddamn frame I’m not watching it”. Ironically, by consciously focusing on fun in this way (“I MUST HAVE FUN ALL THE TIME”), I didn’t really give the shows a chance, because some shows simply aren’t mindblowingly amazing in the first 20 seconds – and when you decide that the beginning isn’t fun, you start skipping scenes, trying to find “the fun part”, which is more likely not to happen with such an approach.

I sort of realized what I was doing (koanishly – “looking for fun isn’t fun” ), but only after starting to watch Hatake no gotoku: because the show WAS a lot of fun in the first 20 seconds, I gave the rest of it a chance; And then I sort of remembered that even the best shows can’t be consistently amazing, not because the producers aren’t trying, but rather because between the awesome fights and the instances of hilarious humor you simply have to have some plain ol’ dialogue – you know, exposition, character building, people just talking etc. all of which, while not brimming with teh awesome, also has its purpose.

So, the lesson for me was: RELAX! Give whatever you’re watching/listening to a real chance. This doesn’t mean enduring stuff which is bad/boring/Belgium – when you realize that something simply lacks quality, drop it. It also doesn’t mean not having high standards. What I’m sort of trying to say is: relax and find the balance – skim, skip, but also give the materials (and peace ) a chance. Sort of like how you would enjoy stuff in your native language, no?

on the topic of SRSing, I pretty much agree with Rob. Apart from my parents translating some words for me in the beginning, when I was a small kid, I learned English without consciously using any sort of method – I simply enjoyed TV shows, comics, computer games etc.

But then again, I see that some people need an SRS. Heck, Kats achieved fluency using it. To quote the no doubt dashing Freakman “From my experience, intensive exposure will still lead you to a near native fluency in reasonable time, with or without an SRS. But the absence of an SRS makes it a bit more haphazard.”

To this, I would add: if you have the right knowledge and awareness of the principles of language acquisition (i.e. Khats’ method minus the SRS), and a judo grip on your mind to stick to them consistently, you can learn a language without an SRS. This requires lots of trial and error and unlearning some things and habits as much as learning new ones, but it’s possible.

This doesn’t mean that you MUST or even SHOULD learn a language without an SRS. If acquiring that judo grip in order to use the Khats-minus-SRS method is too costly (in time and effort), and if some people simply enjoy using an SRS (and we know that Khats’ method works, him being the living proof), then by all means use an SRS.

I’ve been learning Japanese on and off (in the AJATT sense) for what now amounts to 6-7 years (from about 18y.o to 24-25)
Of course, I didn’t realize I was learning for the first 2-3 years.
I simply did what lots of bored students do to pass time : watch anime (copious amounts of it – roughly 150 series over 3 years last time i checked). It was fun (for the most part – god knows Japan produces a lot of crappy anime…. I wouldn’t confess to watching 1/10th of it under duress) and I didn’t think about it too much.
My first idea of japanese was like “Man one would have to be a big nerd to go through the hassle of learning this language even aliens would be stumped by”, so I almost vowed not to learn it (just for the purpose of enjoying non-translated content at least)….. boy did my brain betray me on that.

Now as Khatz has established before, there’s no problem with the Japanese presented in Anime. It is perfectly valid input, despite showing some slight bias (I mean, I probably learned 発射せよ・修羅場 before 会社…. but to be honest, everyday words bore me. I remember reading somewhere people usually speak a language using only 3000 words…. what’s the point of having hundreds of thousands of words in the dictionary if you’re only going to use a fraction of that ?! Shakespeare would weep. So I totally understand why Khatz always has the weirdest vocab in his japanese blog posts. (I mean, who uses 拙者 except for visual novels crossing into the 時代劇 territory ? )

Anyway back on the topic, after 2-3 years of watching anime, I could actually understand most of the simple dialogue in anime, with only specialized vocabulary being a minor annoyance. (Ghost In the shell is still to this day a ***** to follow)
The rest could be inferred from the context (and anime tends to be context heavy so it definitely helps).
To say this came as a surprise is an understatement. I mean I almost vowed not to learn this language, and the travesty : my brain actually learnt it just by being exposed to it ! I claim to be a victim of language poisoning.
As I was blissfully unaware at the time, I had simply followed Khatz’s method almost to the T, but minus the SRS.
So what did I do ? I indulged in my new found super powers. I started watching shows without subtitles (…. that’s probably just because I didn’t want to wait for subs ). It did feel slightly overwhelming at first without the safety net that subtitles provide, but I felt confident enough to not even bother checking words except on a few rare occasions (like …. WTF just happened? I think I just missed 80% of the plot). As someone said, not obssessing over things you don’t understand helps a lot.

My next evolutionary step was simple : the moonrunes ! I had pretty much run out of interesting anime, so I turned to the japanophile geek’s second favorite pastime : the visual novel. My problem was simple : I didn’t know the first thing about kanas, much less kanjis.
So I just rolled up my sleeves, whipped out the software du jour (namely Slime Forest), and learnt hiraganas & katakanas in a matter of days, then moved on to kanjis. The shortcoming of that game were soon apparent (you weren’t taught the readings, only individual meanings of the kanjis with mnemotechnic hints ala Heisig’s RTK). So it wasn’t fun for me. Simply because I couldn’t map the kanjis to the words I had learnt. I used a dictionary to try and do that, but the material (i.e the learning game) was not *fun*.
So I did the sensible thing : I took what I reckoned would be fun : a visual novel.
What I did with it was less sensible though : I pretty much brute-forced through the damn thing. I took an electronic dictionary (Jwpce), and proceeded to look up every single kanji I didn’t know. This basically amounted to forced SRS’ing except the text in the game was my only source of sentences. But I found it more enjoyable to do repeats on new sentences than to simply do SRS’ing for the sake of it. Overall, I gauge I forgot a kanji 5 to 6 times before it “stuck”.
It took me around 2 months to go through the game, but when I finished it, I could read hundreds of kanjis without having to look them up.

After that, the rest is history : I just kept practicing by reading with less and less lookup involved.
「There are plenty of anime and manga fans who can play through all of クラナド and ひぐらしのなく頃に without ever havin used an SRS.」
Now that one hit home a lot more accurately than a US bombing and took away the roof : Those 2 games were some of the first I played once I had a solid grasp of kanji

To sum up this rather bloggish comment, here’s the deal about SRS i.m.o :
Any intensive exposition to a language is going to cause repetition, simply because of the repetitive nature of languages (and I just meta-proved my point) Remember what I mentioned earlier about the 3000 words : well you can be sure those 3000 words you’re going to learn fast if you go through random material). The SRS is only a perfectionist’s tool : it’ll leave no holes and no room for chance.
From my experience, intensive exposure will still lead you to a near native fluency in reasonable time, with or without an SRS. But the absence of an SRS makes it a bit more haphazard. You will forget things, as such is the way of the brain, but the more you practice, the more you will remember.

So what are you waiting for ? Stop reading blogs, have fun, and learn Japanese like the best.

Note : this comment lacked remarks about the awesomeness of Khatz. So here are some : your blog is awesome ! You’re an inspiration to all the L2/3-challenged people in this world.

I can see where you’re coming from because for the better part of my first year with Japanese, I dumped my SRS and hated anything to do with sentence mining. I tried starting over dozens of times, but all in vain. I had two major burnouts during this period for the selfsame reason.

Nearly a year later, I’m back to SRSing and have managed to get my count up to 2250 (the number of course, doesn’t matter). I do it almost everyday and when I take vacations, I look at the huge pile and simply do them in small, managebale parts (and don’t add new items for a week or so).

Before doing this, I ran a short two-week experiment on acquiring vocabulary through simply reading/listening (mostly reading). The results were pretty disappointing if you want to look at it from the perspective of vocabulary acquisition. When you have more than 5 unknown words in a given document, it becomes impossible to remember them all. And that’s only one document.

There are certain things the SRS will do for you and there are certain things it won’t. I simply see the SRS as a means to keeping a lot of words at the back of my mind. I know that the only way I’m really going to master those words is if I see them repeatedly in different contexts. The SRS is just to keep all those words which I HAVEN’T mastered at the back of my memory.

The problem with SRS as I see it is that people often add a ton of irrelevant, unimportant and BORING words which you probably will never encounter in real life. You waste hours reviewing all this **** which drains you of both your concentration and energy. Also, adding more than one sentence for a single vocabulary word can prove tedious in the long run.

In short, as long as you’re spending less time SRSing and more time reading, foruming and listening – you’re good to go I think. An SRS is a great tool for keeping a truckload of vocabulary in your active memory until you repeatedly meet such vocabulary in different contexts and finally master them.

As to whether one can get fluent without an SRS, I believe they can. There are plenty of anime and manga fans who can play through all of クラナド and ひぐらしのなく頃に without ever havin used an SRS. And we all know how visual novels are choc-a-bloc full of text. I don’t ever recall having looked up every word in a dictionary when I was reading Eragon.

So I believe SRS in moderation + intensive input (news, political mishmash and other boring stuff are out!) = fast fluency with a large vocabulary

Intensive input – any kind of SRSing = slow fluency with a small vocabulary

So I believe the only problem is the time constraint. I don’t see why everybody is in such a hurry to “master” Japanese to “native-level fluency” anyway. You don’t even need such a large vocabulary if all you do in Japanese is read manga, participate in forum discussions and watch TV dramas. I don’t see WHY it is mandatory for people (who are presumably never going to Japan) to watch news and read about politics in Japan (unless of course you’re a news junkie or really like pol science or….I don’t know). As long as you spend all your free time doing things in Japanese instead of in English, methinks you’re well on your way to fluency.

What actually started my thinking was awhile ago when I came across this old thread on How to learn any language’s forum regarding Julien Gaudfroy, who is French but taught himself to be fluent in Mandarin.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=7171&PN=0&TPN=4

The one thing he said that jumped out at me was, “Sometimes the more you think, the less you learn. Which also means that at the end you are less able to think.
Think of that: the main reason why we study a language faster in its country is because we don’t understand anything. You keep hearing words and wondering what they mean, and will remember them before knowing their meaning. Which means when you start using them you’ll do it naturally!”

Here is a video of him on a Chinese TV show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYlnJpvRwX8&feature=related

Anyway what he was saying stuck in the back of my mind. I also later found this paper which summarizes some of the natural acquisition methods.

http://homepage3.nifty.com/park/silent.htm

I think the ALG people have it right too, but the problem I’m trying to figure out is how to replicate “comprehensible input” without a native person and also finding some way I can actively respond to the input which a TV or podcast can’t provide. My initial thinking for a beginning to this type of process would be to start with a lot of kids videos where the basics of the language are reinforced with a lot of simple speaking and pictures. Then perhaps finding the right exchange partner on skype would be the answer to being able to have an active response to the input. We’ll see.

Does it make the process faster or more efficient? I’m not sure. I tend to think so, both because of the scientifically well-established effectiveness of spaced repetition for long-term memorization, and just plain old common sense (although the latter is infamously questionable in my case )

For my part, I love SRS’ing. It sounds weird, but I can’t wait to get up each morning, get my coffee, and do my reps. I get a huge sense of accomplishment from watching Mnemosyne’s “Scheduled” and “Not memorised” counters drop from two or three digits to zero every day, and that makes it fun. So it’s fun, and it’s in Japanese, and… hey! Don’t I recognize that formula from somewhere?

It’s fun in much the same way that RPGs are fun (YMMV), particularly RPGs involving lots of micro-management like Pokemon or Final Fantasy Tactics. Adding items, grading my performance, keeping track of statistics… it’s a form of instant gratification, in a process where delayed gratification is the name of the game. I like numbers and structure; that’s just how my brain is oriented. It’s not a choice, it’s a lifestyle! But it’s largely what keeps me going in my quest for fluency; if I didn’t have some kind of objective indicator of how much progress I’ve made and what I’ve learned so far, it would be all too easy to succumb to the old “when the heck am I going to get good, I haven’t learned a single thing in months, I’m sitting here pretending to read these strange symbols that I’ll never actually understand and I should just give up” trap. (Okay, maybe it needs a shorter name.)

Anyway, I’m not the sort of person who buys into ideas like kids-are-magic or east-Asians-are-magic, but I’m very much the sort of person who is quick to self-doubt. The SRS keeps me motivated and encouraged (not to mention organized and accountable), and that alone makes it indispensable in my opinion.

My experience has been that having a fairly good-sized Japanese vocabulary and a large set of stock phrases, along with being able to read and understand Japanese pretty well is really useful, even though my grammar is iffy once I wander out of my comfort zone. So I wouldn’t worry about getting to “native level”- I’d worry about getting to a level where you can read almost any modern Japanese, and you have no trouble getting your meaning across in conversation.

Of course there are some places where a non-native can easily beat most natives. I can read kanji that very few Japanese can at this point. But… that mostly underlines the fact that that’s a pretty marginally useful skill. If the native speakers needed to be able to read those kanji they would be able to read them .

Anyway, david: don’t renounce the SRS- one of the things adults do really well is learn vocabulary. The SRS can help with that. But- you might _de-emphasize_ the SRS. I think that if you have a limited amount of time doing some reading or watching a TV show is more important than using the SRS. And also- sometimes the SRS is no fun- and if there’s one thing I think is true it is that it’s better to do something ineffective than to fail to do something effective. In the long run effectiveness is very much a matter of what you find it easy to keep doing. At least that’s my 2 cents.

A lot of what you’re saying goes almost perfectly with what they talk about over at ALG World (http://algworld.com). And, I think that they are right in their thinking over there. They teach language naturally, by having teachers come in with games and stories and activities. They say that, the adult learner can become fluent in the language after two years, and in fact, they learn even faster (twice as fast) as children would. (My guess is that it has something to do with the adult’s knowledge of concepts).

It would be nice if someone, anyone, would just decide from the start to take this natural approach to learning a language and give some feedback on it. I’ve thought about it before for my Japanese, but, it’s certainly hard to let go of the SRS and such.

Maybe you can hook me up with some of those articles or w/e that you read on this natural language acquisition. I’m interested in reading about it a little more.

Yes I think that is close to what my thinking is. Now I’m not at all claiming that this is my original thinking because it certainly isn’t. I just believe in the input/silent period method to naturally acquire language. (which is essentially Khatz’s method minus the SRS and dictionaries) It is also the hardest way for adults because we generally can’t accept not knowing the meaning “now”. We want instant feedback and want to check to make sure we are indeed getting it. But all of that analyzing and checking is not natural and I don’t think will lead to natural results. We all want to think and speak in Japanese as natural as we do in our native language and I think the only way to do that is to learn it like we did our native language. Essentially that breaks down to shutting up for 2 years, getting lots and lots of input, watching and listening intently, trying to infer meaning and moving on. Don’t stop and look up every word, don’t fixate on certain phrases, just let the brain take everything in. After 2 years or so, (could be less if you have enough time to put into it) then you should have a natural basis of understanding the language as a whole. You should be able to follow Japanese naturally like a 2 year old kid. Again these are not my ideas. You can do any search on natural language acquisition and find these concepts.

Also, I can’t say I’ve followed this recipe to a tee and in fact am wondering since I have been doing Japanese, first with an SRS and later a dictionary, if I messed up my chances at a natural native understanding. The other question that I wonder about is whether media like TV, movies, books, etc., can actually replicate the same input experience a child would receive growing up in a Japanese household. Another important factor that must be considered is motivation. I don’t think an adult could sit back and watch movies or listen to the radio all day and in two years be fluent. Young kids have a strong, strong will to speak and be heard. They really want to understand what is going on around them. So for the adult, there also must be some strong motivational force at work in order for a natural fluency to take hold. I am actually trying to work that one out myself as well.

I know where you’re coming from. It can be pretty tough convincing people to just let go of these sort of things and just completely focus on digesting one’s media and let the brain figure everything out. The SRS can sort of feel like stopping the flow of things to “pick up the pieces” that, if there weren’t any pieces to pick up, because the brain just took it all in and what it knowns now is a result of many many happenings in the language.

I mean, there’s this guy. And, from the sounds of things, he just read and listened and watched things in the language he wanted to learn and it just happened for him. This can be kind of hard to grasp for someone that’s always so focused on perfection (which using an SRS somewhat forces since it is memorizing certain information).

I’ve only been using an SRS for nine months, and, I have my difficulties with it. And, I’ve had some difficulties trying to get myself to believe that if I just read and listen and watch that things will make sense. And, here’s what I decided on. Instead of looking for sentences that push just a little further into the language, I let them find me, mark them up with a sticky-note (or, if it’s on a computer then I just copy and paste it to the SRS). In this way, the learning has already been done, I experienced these words that I’m copying in, and I’m using an SRS only to remember them, not to learn them. I like to think of this as the middle man. Honestly, though, I think that if you’re letting your brain figure things out, you’re going to be in great shape. Because, if you think about it, you’re constantly experiencing things in the language, and thus, building up all these mental images. And, as a result, you’ll have been “reviewing” all this time. And, the need for reviewing isn’t as needed in this way, because it’s backed my so many images and experiences.

Am I close to what you were thinking?