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I lived in Japan when I was in high school for a year. I went without knowing a word of Japanese. After I was there for a week, I tried out konnichiwa on a few
by xrd 4y ago
I lived in Japan when I was in high school for a year. I went without knowing a word of Japanese.
After I was there for a week, I tried out konnichiwa on a few ten year olds in the neighborhood. They howled with laughter and I felt so ashamed.
I was a Rotary student there. Most of the other Rotary students came with a few years of Japanese study under their belt.
I was better than all of them within three months.
The first takeaway was that it was harder for them to unlearn bad habits they learned when studying Japanese back in the US. A kid in class would mispronounce something, and because that kid often did that from the same perspective as the rest of the class, it was sticky. You learned bad habits easier than good ones. And, it was really, really hard to unlearn those bad habits.
I never had that problem because I only heard Japanese from natives.
A corollary to all this: if you want to learn a language, living there is 100x better than any other method. Not the most practical, but it's the best way.
- robocat 4y agoMy advice: listen to people who have learned English-as-second-language, and watch for the patterns in their mistakes AND patterns to the successful learners. We are very finely tuned to hearing mistakes in our own language, so we can at least recognise errors. Watch why they don’t learn to correct glaring mistakes. Watch how highly skilled learners pick up the language. While we are learning another language, it is very hard to recognise our errors, or diagnose or systematic errors. There are systematic patterns to our mistakes, and a lot of mistakes are inherent in the way languages are usually taught (reading before learning conversation being a #1 issue). Also watch how babies and children learn, and try to replicate that as much as possible. I learned conversational Spanish reasonably well, which was in part motivated by having a patient girlfriend whose mother-tongue was Spanish. I met a Japanese guy with fantastic English, who had learned English by living in East London and Australia, and it was amazing to hear his accent change mid-sentence from perfect Cockney to perfect Ocker, especially for phrases and colloquialisms. A demonstration of the power of mimicking via ear, not via writing.
- wanderingstan 4y agoA similar lesson served me well when learning German while living there. My German pronunciation (and some grammar) improved in lock step with my ability to mimic a thick German accent in English. Being able to systematically reproduce typical German “errors” in English taught me how to speak correctly when I switched to pronouncing German words.
- robocat 4y agoYeah: that is a brilliant technique that (1) encourages you to learn to not be embarrassed to use the correct sounds, and (2) really helps others understand what you are saying (especially if you have a strong local accent like me as a kiwi). In Spanish, I also tried to use words with Latin roots, and avoid words from other languages. Often pure guesswork, or even making up words by changing endings, but sometimes worked surprisingly well if you know a little etymology and have learnt a little feel for the grammatical rules. Then again, made some doozy mistakes too - mostly hilarious or surreal!