http://tinyurl.com/mazqy7

I saw it in a bookstore today and shouted “I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!” :/

The 10,000 hour business. As far as Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic and Korean are concerned 10,000 hours looks about right.

The FSI students need around 4000 hours to reach level 3 (self-study hours included). Levels 4 and 5 are uncharted territory – no course will take you that far and from what I was able to read about it, these levels require exponentially more study time. It is possible to conclude and guesstimate from this information that in order to reach level 4+ (native-like) most students will indeed need around 10,000 study hours.

http://language.tiu.ac.jp/

Copy and paste any Japanese into this, click the 日->日　button, and it breaks down each word with a J-J definition on the right hand side with the English also under it.

“I have noticed from time to time that the romanization method first used tends to influence one’s accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese person with a very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say, Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese.”

This I think is why extensive listening practice, before you even attempt to read the language, is an important part of developing a good accent.

Throughout the whole article I kept going “No, wait … he’s gonna say he’s joking …. now….ok,now…..omg I think he may actually be serious…” And then slaming my head onto my keyboard.

Fair enough to believe that yourself. People believe all kind of crazy things. But, for me, spreading that garbage is disgusting, and downright un-professional from someone in their positon. And damaging to; he basically tells people to not even bother with Chinese, coz they’ll never be any good.

I recently stumbled across this beauty, which I found to be hilarious: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

You rock.

I’d say this is some pretty good evidence that it does exist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGx7Ecqy8g

http://jrek.ta2o.net/

Screw you man, now I have to try and find that show in Japanese and it probably doesn’t even exist.

Darned blogosphere, always resurrecting my childhood without warning…

That’s exactly what my guitar teacher told me…

Whenever people menton that I’m “really good” at Japanese… I just point out that I’ve been at it since high school and lived there for six years. Seriously. It’s not that I’m smart. It’s just that I’ve been doing it foreeeeeever.

Argh. Now I just gotta motivate myself to do more of other stuff I need to get good at!

I gotta get that book.

When I used to weight-lift, I noticed that if I worked out only once a week, I could maintain my level of fitness- it took more than once a week to improve. I think most skills are like this- I’ve played volleyball for over 10 years, and the amount of enjoyable hours I’ve put in is incredible. However, after college (and due to winter) I didn’t usually play consistently- I’ve often stopped for months (years?) at a time. When I get back on a court it usually doesn’t take me long to get back in the swing of things, but that doesn’t mean I can count all those hours and say “ok, I’ve played volleyball for 5000 hours, I should be pretty good.” Language is the same way- maybe it takes 30 minutes of Japanese a day to maintain my current level- if I don’t do that 30 minutes, I get worse and have to spend time the next day making it up. And the longer you take off, the faster the rate of knowledge loss increases. I would also guess that as you get better it takes more time to maintain, but you also get worse more slowly (like the volleyball example, I may stop for a year, but I don’t have to go back to square one).

I think this is one of the reasons beginners are so frustrated, they work hard for a month, two months or longer but then they take a break and so much of that hard work leaks away. If they would have just consistently practiced, they would have been better off. And this is coming from a very inconsistent person, which likely explains why I’m good at many things, but not great at anything. Curse you atrophy!