In Part 1, I talked about the grand experiment in inefficiency that was my Japanese studies up until about a year ago.  Today, I’m going to talk about the idea of total immersion language learning, also sometimes called the “input method”, since its core idea is to expose yourself to just a criminal amount of Japanese, or whatever language you’re learning.

I actually subscribe to more of an input/output split, but it’s all still 100% Japanese.

I’ve already started full immersion by this point, but  I wrote up some posts ahead of time so the blog could keep rolling.

So without further ado.

Enter, Total Immersion

So there I was, getting along ok. I had definitely not gotten worse at Japanese since coming to Japan, but I wanted to be moving faster than I was.  I wanted to be able to read books, and watch Japanese TV without giving myself a brain aneurysm.  I wanted to be funny and charming again damnit!

So I started scouring the internet for a way to self-educate myself in Japanese.  This eventually led me to the writings of a plucky young Kenyan-born, US-educated blogger calling himself Khatzumoto.  His blog claimed that he went from zero Japanese, to employed at a Japanese software firm in Japan, in about 18 months by employing a seemingly insane idea: All Japanese All the Time.  That’s right, a literal 18-24 hours a day doing something in Japanese.  He even listened to Japanese while he slept, just in case it helped. All without ever leaving the comfort of America.

The really fascinating part of Khatzumoto’s system though was that he wasn’t proposing that you “suck it up and buckle down soldier! Success takes sacrifice! If it were easy it wouldn’t be called work!” Rather, he was proposing that you go get yourself something fun, like a comic book, or a video game, or a drama, and watch read or play it in Japanese.  Repeat for 18-24 hours a day until fluent.

Make learning fun? I mean, after school specials and made for TV movies might get away with that stuff, but this is the real world Khatz!  But my curiosity had been piqued I decided to see just how deep the rabbit hole went.  By the time I realized just how much my idea of reality had been knowledge bombed into oblivion, 3 days had passed, and I had read every single post.

The first step he proposed was to learn the meanings of all 2000 or so of the kanji which a literate Japanese person is expected to know.  There’s a lovely old dude named James Heisig who developed a system to do this with the exciting title of Remember the Kanji.  Since I like kanji, I tore through this part of the pre-immersion process in about a month.  I felt like a god.  All those obscene little squiggles had meaning now!  Even if I’d never seen that word before in my life, by looking at the kanji like 証拠 and thinking “(evidence)(foothold)” I could get some idea of what it means.

But then, for I as true as there are idiots I am their king, I hit a mental wall.  I really wanted to do the immersion thing.  It seemed so cool on paper! But some part of me being on a tiny island in Japan, in a place where there were literally no other English speakers, made me hesitant to remove the one little oasis of familiarity and comfort I had at home.  This, my palatial island shack, would remain a free outpost of America!  Even if it killed me, or at the very least severely hamstringed my efforts to get face-meltingly good at Japanese.

Even though I started reading a lot of manga (comic books…basically) in Japanese, and even managed to finish my first honest-to-goodness Book in Japanese, I could never take that final step into full on immersion.  I always had my English music, and spent a lot of time on English websites.  There were also parts of my life which I just couldn’t switch over to Japanese.  Like, you know, the part of my job where I teach English.  Also occasionally my parents and friends like to hear that I’m still alive, and their Japanese is not so spectacular.  It’s almost as if most of them never studied it a day in their life.

My New Experiment: 30-Days of 99.99% Japanese, All Day, Every Day

In a month I will be sitting the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.  Personally I hate the living hell out of tests, and test culture in general, and value passing one of these tests as much as I value being able to spit the farthest.  Actually being able to spit the farthest would be pretty awesome.  So less than that.  Unfortunately most of the world won’t just take my word for it that I’m awesome at Japanese, so passing this test is something I’ll eventually have to do if I want to work with or in Japan, e.g. as a translator, interpreter, or sexy TV-idol.

I took my first practice test about 2 days ago and it soundly destroyed me.  Now I could certainly blame the fact that I was in a noisy office, in the middle of a hurricane, and hadn’t taken a test in about a year and a half, but either way this test is not going to be the cakewalk through picnic forest that I was imagining.  So I’ve decided that now is as good a time as any to really try and give 100% immersion a proper shot.  I may not pass the test, but I’m going to try something new and see how it goes.

So from now until the test on December 5th, I’m running under the following rules:

1. There should at all times be something in Japanese going on in my environment.  Japanese books at hand at all times. The TV on in the background.  My small collection of Japanese pop and rock albums set on repeat.  If I even have a thought in English, I damn well better think of a way to say it in Japanese right after that.
2. I’m aiming to pick up the pace on my SRSing (Spaced Repetition System. More on this in an article to follow, but for now think of it as flashcards + robot secretary who can read my mind) but I’m not going to stress about it too much.  If I’m doing fun things in Japanese SRSing is, surprise surprise, actually really fun.  It’s like the save button on all the new Japanese in my head.
3. The few daily English tasks which I can’t avoid I’m going to try and limit exposure to.  Not my job of course, that would be silly.  But checking and responding to e-mail, maintenance on this blog, etc. I can lump together and get done in one shot, once a day.  The TV or music will be on in the background.
4. If anyone wants to talk to me who doesn’t speak Japanese, they should try to find a way to do it on the weekends.  Conversations are one thing which require a certain degree of focus, so even though as per rule 3 I can have the TV on in the background, too much English conversation in one day tends to throw a wrench into my general immersion trend.  If anyone has any important or emergency type stuff that needs to be talked about, I’m ok with breaking this rule, but I’m going to try to bunch up the bulk of my English conversation on the weekends.
5. Due to the nature of my job, there are a few other unavoidable moments of English.  When the ALT from the next island over comes to Kikai, I’m either going to have to ignore her, speak English, or participate in one of the most contrived games of charades ever conceived.  So I’ll probably speak English if she comes over.  Similarly at some point I’ll be going to the mainland for a seminar, and I’m pretty sure that will be in English. I may try to sneak an iPod in to the seminar hall with some Harry Potter books on tape though. Love me some J.K. Rouringu.

Don’t worry about the blog. I mentioned it at the top of the post, but much like when your 1950s mom goes out of town for the week, I’ve got a few articles chilling in the freezer so that you all don’t starve in my absence.  So even though I won’t be writing, the blog will keep on being updated.

I’ll be back in person after the test in early December, to tell you all how the grand experiment went.  For anyone trying to improve, or learn a language of their own, feel free to try one of your own immersion experiment.  We can compare notes after the break.

Total Immersion is a fairly simple idea.  Remove all forms of English from your life, and use Japanese for everything.  Japanese books, Japanese music, Japanese conversations, and as much as you can Japanese thoughts.  I’ve decided to test it out for the next 30 days or so, but before I explain the rules of this little experiment, there are a few things I want to get on record.

Ehem…

One way or another, I am going to walk away from Japan fluent in Japanese. Not just regular fluent. Talk-circles-around-Japanese-people-dream-think-breathe in Japanese fluent.

Tim Ferriss, a blogger/author who makes sport of breaking the preconceived rules of reality (and is loved and/or reviled for it) once wrote that you could learn enough of any language in 3 months to be at about 95% comprehension and 100% expression, i.e. become functionally fluent in the language. (For evidence that supports this, see Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months, who has done this about 7 times) Tim further argued that the other 5% might well take you 10-15 years and be more effort than it was worth for most people.

Well…

I want my 5% Tim.  I want it more than I want air.

Any other language I will ever choose to study, I am perfectly happy with “basically fluent”.  If I learn French, it will mostly just be to chat up French girls anyway.  I don’t need to be able to discuss nuclear physics.  But by the mighty hand of zombie Christ, I am going to master Japanese.

One way or another, my life appears to have become inexplicably tangled with this goofy little string of islands half-way across the world from the place I was born.  I love Japan and Kikai as much as any place I have ever lived, and it’s not just because people think I’m Leonardo DiCaprio.  Even after I have moved back to America, odds are good that my job will in some way involve Japan, and Japanese.

My current level of Japanese is pretty good.  I can talk my way around any problems or gaps I might have.  I can tell jokes, and be both funny and charming in Japanese.  I have read books in Japanese.  I occasionally dream in Japanese.  I have my 95% comprehension 100% expression taken care of. I am functionally fluent.

From here on out, is the part where I go from functional, to eloquent.  The sticking point is how exactly to do that, and here’s where things get a little bit complicated.

Since this post ended up being just about as long as the Old Testament, I’m breaking it into 2 parts.  This part, part 1 if you will, covers the twisted Japanese road I walked up until I came across the idea of Total Immersion.  Part 2 will cover Total Immersion, and the rules of the experiment.

Adam in Japanese-Land: A Semi-Historical Account

Even though I majored in Japanese in college, my love affair with Japanese didn’t actually begin until I got to Japan.

My college Japanese studies were punctuated with what can only be called “glaring adequacy”. As long as my grades were good, my goal was to do as little work as humanly possible, freeing up valuable time for watching bad TV, and going to parties.  I was quite good at this, managing to get through a solid 2 and a half years of Japanese without ever actually trying.  I wasn’t the top of the class, but I was doing alright, and was (as far as I know) the only person in the class who could say “I have to go make Milton kill Mr. Cactus now” from memory.  Oh college.

At the ripe old age of 21, I came to Japan for the first time on a semester abroad program.  Full of pluck, and cactus related witticisms I set out to conquer Japan in a manner fitting one such as myself.  Straight-A report card 2 and a half years running! I’m unstoppable baby!

Realization: I absolutely sucked at Japanese.  Turns out that casually dicking around for 2 and a half years does not produce any significant gains in speaking ability.  Who knew?  Before my landmark study, probably no one.  You may inform the Nobel Prize committee at your leisure.

So I signed myself up for the most intensive Japanese course I could find, and decided I was going to start taking this seriously and study my ass off until by god I could talk to my host brother about something other than the weather.  Turns out that there was one fatal flaw with this plan.

2nd Realization:  If the main reason you’re not studying is “because it’s boring”, trying to do 4X more of it will not only not work, it will make you want to jump in front of a train.  Especially if you have to get up at 5:30 am in order to get to class in time, and stand near just an awful lot of trains during your hour and a half commute.

After dropping pretty much all my other courses to keep up with the work/stress load from the Japanese, I eventually decided to white flag it out, and return to my usual holding pattern of doing the absolute minimum possible to avoid failing.  And then The First Great Miracle of Adam’s Japanese Adventure occurred.

With my new found free time, I spent a significantly larger part of my day talking to my host mom, and hanging out with my host brother.  A truly criminal amount of Wii-sports was played, and the epic “無限ボーリング” (Infinite Bowling) variant was invented, in which my host brother would reset the game every time he missed a pin.  He really, really wanted a perfect game. (Never got it.)  I started going to his hip-hop dance classes, hanging out with a lot more Japanese people, and generally using Japanese in a way which was a hell of a lot more fun than anything I’d done up to that point.  For the first time since I started learning Japanese, I was actually doing something with it, instead of studying for the fabled day when I might do something with it.

When I pen my first novel in Japanese, Ryunosuke and Atsuko Furukawa are getting a shout out for getting this ball rolling.

By the time I left Japan, I wasn’t conversationally fluent, but I had made some significant progress in that direction.  For the first time, I realized that I actually could learn a foreign language, despite the 3 years of Latin, 2 of Spanish, and 2 and a half of Japanese telling me it was more or less impossible unless you were one of those naturally gifted types.

But then wouldn’t you know it, I get back to America and go right back into doing absolutely nothing.  In my defense, my Econ major was coming on fast and furious at that point, and I was grateful for a class I could sleepwalk through.  But it wasn’t exactly like I did anything out of class either.

I think my mistake was that I looked back on my time in Japan, and concluded that rather than the the hundreds of hours spent speaking Japanese, instead my Japanese ability was the result of me actually being one of those “naturally gifted types”, and it just didn’t manifest itself until I was in Japan.  I was the kung-fu film hero, who can’t use his ultimate technique right up until the moment where he has to fight the final boss, and then suddenly something in his enemy’s sneering face drags it out of him.  Like that…only with a hundred million sneering Japanese people.  I’LL SHOW YOU JAPAN! LANGUAGE ABILITY MULTIPLICATION TECHNIIIIIIIQUE!!!! Explosions the size of Earth as I perfectly conjugate the past-passive-causative.

So I knew that as soon as I was back in Japan, I would be right back to winning linguistic hearts and minds.  I didn’t need to study.  I was just naturally awesome, and this non-Japan environment was throwing off my chi.  And I was half-right.  Once I graduated, and moved to Kikai, my language ability did start improving again. Or at least stopped getting worse.  But now I was out there on my own.  I didn’t have a class pushing new material into my brain, so I had to go find my own way of getting new material to test out.  I used the JET Program’s series of textbooks for about 30 minutes, before deeming them utterly worthless tripe, unfit to grace the halls of my palatial island shack.

I tried a bunch of other really random, really stupid ways of teaching myself Japanese after that, ranging from online textbooks, to literally printing out every word required for the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test and trying to learn them.  Alphabetically.  My daily interactions with Japanese friends and coworkers was enough to smooth out my conversation abilities, but I could feel the wall in front of me.  I was progressing incredibly slowly, and it was starting to bother me.

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Stay tuned for part 2, where I’ll tell you all about the crazy solution I came across, and the experiment I’ll be running with for the next month or so.