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Couple of quick pointers wrt Japanese. First, human languages take a long time to get good at. If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I thi

Couple of quick pointers wrt Japanese. First, human languages take a long time to get good at. If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I think is not actually true, but it's a widely held belief), then it will take you 5 years to talk like a 5 year old, 10 years to talk like a 10 year old and 15-20 years to talk like an adult -- minimum. If you study very effectively, I think you can double this speed, but no more than that. Adult level proficiency is 15-20,000 word families. Ignore anything that tells you that you can be proficient with 2,000 words of vocabulary (even a 4 year old has more than that!) Specific advice about Japanese: forget polite form and learn plain form from the beginning. If you are in dire need of sounding polite, just put "desu" at the end of every sentence. It will be grammatically incorrect, but nobody will fault you for it (it's what children often do). The mapping from plain form to polite form makes total sense. The opposite is not true and complex sentences require that you master plain form, so this will reduce your effort considerably. Also, learn to read. This is especially true if you are coming to Japan. Hiragana and katakana will take you a few weeks. Try to learn at least 100-200 of the most common kanji as well. This will take you only a month or so and it will make your life dramatically easier. Learn full sentences and ignore grammar for the most part. I got to reasonable conversational level simply by memorising the example sentences in Tae Kim's grammar guide: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar. Use spaced repetition to help speed it up. Get the JLPT N5 and N4 vocabulary lists and memorise them. Even N3 is useful. These are words that map pretty much directly with English without a lot of nuance, so memorising them is efficient. Otherwise learn vocabulary in context by reading. I recommend manga because it will give you conversational Japanese. There is no description in comic books -- only conversation. They are perfect. Finally, get a phrase book and memorise some set phrases -- just to help you a long. Keep in mind, though, that a lot of phrases are regional and wherever you are going, they might say things a bit differently. Generally speaking you should be fine if you stick with common phrases, though.

mianos 10y ago
> If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I think is not actually true, but it's a widely held belief), Anecdotally, I saw my two children learn a foreign language in exactly the same place and over the same time as me. They learnt it to fluency in the same time I could barely communicate. Actually google 'scholarly articles on how children learn languages'. It's probably not just anecdotal.
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  Controlling for time availability and motivation seems both crucial to getting relevant results and damn near impossible to pull off. I'd be happy to CMV but it's not the kind of thing I'm willing to spend a day doing a deep-dive over.
  - agibsonccc 10y ago
    1 thing that helps a lot is immersion. I couldn't justify learning a language till I lived in the country where it was spoken. I am doing this in japan now (moved here recently)
    - mianos 10y ago
      I lived in a country town where my wife was the only person I knew who spoke English. She got sick of talking to me pretty quickly. Total immersion.
      - agibsonccc 10y ago
        It forces you in to a corner :D. It's kinda frustrating in a way. I'm not quite going to that extreme though, tokyo will allow me to "ease in to it".
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I'm not suggesting that adults will always learn faster than children. You will no doubt notice that you did not spend your time the same way that your children did. Did you spend 24 hours a day thinking and struggling in that foreign language? There is a big difference to being exposed to language and concentrating on it. Restricting your self to thinking only the thoughts that your language enables you to think is difficult for an adult (well, impossible really). I'm not entirely unaware of the literature in the area. I spent 5 years of my life teaching English as a foreign language. A large percentage of that time was spent doing research in language acquisition. As far as I am aware, ever since Chomsky the general consensus has been that there is no different mechanism for language acquisition in children than in adults. There are still some researchers who disagree, but that happens in every field and is healthy. But, you aren't going to beat a child in learning a language unless you do some very specific things. That's because they spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week learning language. Even when they get to school, their school work is primarily surrounding language activities until they get to be about 10 or so. An adult's secret weapon is the ability to read. If you use that to direct your learning, then you can go quite quickly. Like I said, though, getting to an adult level of proficiency in less than 10 years is pretty difficult, but it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. The same level proficiency for a 10 year old child is very, very unusual. For things like accent and getting tones correct all the time, that's a bit of a different story. Only about 2% of adult learners achieve native level proficiency in that kind of thing. But it's not something that will hold you back from normal communication. Event then, I'm aware of some specific language training you can do to help, but most people are not really interested in going that far.
Tharkun 10y ago
> Otherwise learn vocabulary in context by reading. I really enjoyed -- and benefited from -- "The Japanese Reader Collection". There's about 5 thin volumes available from Amazon. They're basically Japanese children's stories, written in Kanji with Furigana and lots of annotations. Every word and sentence is explained and translated to English. I started off by simply reading the Furigana at normal reading speed, without caring about reading comprehension. This greatly helped with my kana reading. It especially helped me learn to cope with the lack of spaces in Japanese. Then I started to focus on the meaning. And now that I've memorized most the JLPT Level 5 Kanji, I'm starting to focus on recognizing them in the context of these stories.
mnemonicfx 10y ago
I agree that plain form is important. Also your thinking on how children is learning. But, grammar is important. Memorising phrases only get me to be able to use phrases in a very specific situation. Once I am able to dissect a sentence and analyse how it's constructed, I am able to make similar form of sentences for a different purpose.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Hmm... I probably didn't explain this very well. You are correct that memorising phrases is not enough. That gets you a kind of grammar dictionary in your head, where you have a single example of that grammar. It will allow you to recognise the grammar, but not use it fluently. After that, you need to be exposed to many, many different examples of that grammar so that you can understand the context in which it's used and the variety of shapes that it takes. The easiest way to do that is to read (and when I was "studying" Japanese I would read 2-3 hours a day). In my experience, you need this exposure anyway, because memorising grammar rules allows you to construct sentences, but it does not allow you to understand how to use it properly in context. You have that awkward situation where you know you've said something correctly, but people are staring at you in confusion anyway -- because nobody says it that way. I'm certainly not against learning grammar, if you enjoy it, but my experience has been that memorising a single exemplar and exposing yourself to countless examples (that you can understand) will bring you to fluency faster. There are an infinite number of ways to make grammatically correct sentences, but the idiomatically correct sentences is a very small subset of that (and actually disjoint since quite a lot of idiomatically correct language is not grammatically correct). Learning by example allows you to reduce the problem space dramatically. Having said that, I know a lot of people really enjoy the process of learning languages by using grammar rules. If it works for you, then that's obviously the way to go!

mianos 10y ago

> If we think that children learn faster than adults (which I think is not actually true, but it's a widely held belief), Anecdotally, I saw my two children learn a foreign language in exactly the same place and over the same time as me. They learnt it to fluency in the same time I could barely communicate. Actually google 'scholarly articles on how children learn languages'. It's probably not just anecdotal.

jjoonathan 10y ago
Controlling for time availability and motivation seems both crucial to getting relevant results and damn near impossible to pull off. I'd be happy to CMV but it's not the kind of thing I'm willing to spend a day doing a deep-dive over.
- agibsonccc 10y ago
  1 thing that helps a lot is immersion. I couldn't justify learning a language till I lived in the country where it was spoken. I am doing this in japan now (moved here recently)
  - mianos 10y ago
    I lived in a country town where my wife was the only person I knew who spoke English. She got sick of talking to me pretty quickly. Total immersion.
    - agibsonccc 10y ago
      It forces you in to a corner :D. It's kinda frustrating in a way. I'm not quite going to that extreme though, tokyo will allow me to "ease in to it".
mikekchar 10y ago
I'm not suggesting that adults will always learn faster than children. You will no doubt notice that you did not spend your time the same way that your children did. Did you spend 24 hours a day thinking and struggling in that foreign language? There is a big difference to being exposed to language and concentrating on it. Restricting your self to thinking only the thoughts that your language enables you to think is difficult for an adult (well, impossible really). I'm not entirely unaware of the literature in the area. I spent 5 years of my life teaching English as a foreign language. A large percentage of that time was spent doing research in language acquisition. As far as I am aware, ever since Chomsky the general consensus has been that there is no different mechanism for language acquisition in children than in adults. There are still some researchers who disagree, but that happens in every field and is healthy. But, you aren't going to beat a child in learning a language unless you do some very specific things. That's because they spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week learning language. Even when they get to school, their school work is primarily surrounding language activities until they get to be about 10 or so. An adult's secret weapon is the ability to read. If you use that to direct your learning, then you can go quite quickly. Like I said, though, getting to an adult level of proficiency in less than 10 years is pretty difficult, but it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. The same level proficiency for a 10 year old child is very, very unusual. For things like accent and getting tones correct all the time, that's a bit of a different story. Only about 2% of adult learners achieve native level proficiency in that kind of thing. But it's not something that will hold you back from normal communication. Event then, I'm aware of some specific language training you can do to help, but most people are not really interested in going that far.

Tharkun 10y ago

> Otherwise learn vocabulary in context by reading. I really enjoyed -- and benefited from -- "The Japanese Reader Collection". There's about 5 thin volumes available from Amazon. They're basically Japanese children's stories, written in Kanji with Furigana and lots of annotations. Every word and sentence is explained and translated to English. I started off by simply reading the Furigana at normal reading speed, without caring about reading comprehension. This greatly helped with my kana reading. It especially helped me learn to cope with the lack of spaces in Japanese. Then I started to focus on the meaning. And now that I've memorized most the JLPT Level 5 Kanji, I'm starting to focus on recognizing them in the context of these stories.

mnemonicfx 10y ago

I agree that plain form is important. Also your thinking on how children is learning. But, grammar is important. Memorising phrases only get me to be able to use phrases in a very specific situation. Once I am able to dissect a sentence and analyse how it's constructed, I am able to make similar form of sentences for a different purpose.

mikekchar 10y ago
Hmm... I probably didn't explain this very well. You are correct that memorising phrases is not enough. That gets you a kind of grammar dictionary in your head, where you have a single example of that grammar. It will allow you to recognise the grammar, but not use it fluently. After that, you need to be exposed to many, many different examples of that grammar so that you can understand the context in which it's used and the variety of shapes that it takes. The easiest way to do that is to read (and when I was "studying" Japanese I would read 2-3 hours a day). In my experience, you need this exposure anyway, because memorising grammar rules allows you to construct sentences, but it does not allow you to understand how to use it properly in context. You have that awkward situation where you know you've said something correctly, but people are staring at you in confusion anyway -- because nobody says it that way. I'm certainly not against learning grammar, if you enjoy it, but my experience has been that memorising a single exemplar and exposing yourself to countless examples (that you can understand) will bring you to fluency faster. There are an infinite number of ways to make grammatically correct sentences, but the idiomatically correct sentences is a very small subset of that (and actually disjoint since quite a lot of idiomatically correct language is not grammatically correct). Learning by example allows you to reduce the problem space dramatically. Having said that, I know a lot of people really enjoy the process of learning languages by using grammar rules. If it works for you, then that's obviously the way to go!