I ask for lesson plans so I have some idea of what the school wants me to do that day, other than of course be aggressively white.
Let’s see what they have in store for me today:
Well…gosh. My morning greetings don’t usually involve excrement. But…
I guess it would be rude not to? ♥
You might think from the title that this would be a story of me walking in to the testing hall, 4 weeks of nothing but Japanese on my mind, waving to the only other white guy in a room of 60 Taiwanese high school kids, then sitting down to obliterate the highest level Japanese test they’ve got.
Man, it would be great if I could write that post.
I won’t say I definitely failed the test. People have a habit of low-balling their expectations as a coping mechanism. I will say that there came a point about half way through the kanji and grammar section where I decided reading the question was only taking up valuable time which I could devote to less pointless questions. Maybe it helped me, I can’t say until I get the results back in February.
So what does this mean for the idea of total immersion as a language learning tool? Well, maybe nothing.
There are a number of ways to view the situation, depending on where your loyalties lie.
A total immersion “input” learning supporter
“See, this just goes to prove that the test isn’t really testing your ability to speak and understand Japanese. It’s just studying your ability to memorize obscure grammar points in a book. It’s also a completely unnatural way of accessing the information. When, but a test, will you have to answer 70 questions and read 10 reading passages within a 2 hour time limit? Failing the tests just means you’re bad at tests. Besides, eventually your Japanese will be native level fluent if you keep accessing native materials, and then you can walk in and pass the test on intuition. Suck it up, and go read something in Japanese while listening to J-pop to make yourself feel better.”
A textbook/studying learning supporter
“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t learn higher level Japanese without going out of your way to focus on and study it. You can’t have enough exposure to higher level Japanese by randomly stumbling across it, even if you make a flashcard or two to represent that grammar point, or word. There just isn’t enough random exposure to progress to a deeper understanding. Studying can be unpleasant, but the idea that you can do nothing but fun, fluffy stuff and expect to make serious high level gains is ludicrous. Suck it up, get it done, thank me later.”
An immersion “output” learning supporter
(I don’t know exactly what to call it, but that comes close. This would be the work of Benny over at Fluent in 3 Months.)
“See, this just goes to prove that you can’t internalize a language into your subconscious unless you are actively using it in conversations. Massive output is the only way your brain can really come to understand all that information, and if you do it right you can be speaking fluent Japanese, which is the fun part anyway, not reading books, a hell of a lot faster. As far as the test goes, tests throughout history have always suffered from a profound disconnect from reality. Suck it up. Learn the test. Study specifically for the test. Treat it as something separate from your real studies if you have to.”
Let’s start with the total immersion crowd, since that’s the one I was specifically playing with this month. Did it help my Japanese? Sure it did. I learned all sorts of interesting words, from hand grenade, to indecisive. I’m also sure hearing and reading the same grammatical structures thousands of times, helped to imprint them into my subconscious Japanese brain.
Using native materials is also a great way to get native sounding Japanese. If nothing else I think the decision to favor materials designed for Japanese people was infinitely better than anything designed for people learning Japanese, because you are guaranteed natural Japanese. Too many textbook learners sound like robots.
But.
At a certain point, I am forced to acknowledge the writing on the wall: fun and progress are detrimental to one another if you try to combine them. If all of my fun is tainted by work, then I enjoy it less. If all progress is filtered through repeated exposure in the name of fun, then I progress significantly slower from all that redundant effort. The point is not to disguise work as something fun, so that you can eat it 24/7, 365. Fish oil in a glittery capsule with a cartoon dog mascot still tastes like death. Similarly, even if you can get something good out of it, junk is still junk. Chocolate chips and sugar is still bad for you, even if you sprinkle in some granola.
Also I think it begs mentioning that the guy who came up with this idea reads almost exclusively non-fiction. If you’re, say, the type of person who doesn’t happen to like self-help books, you might find that there’s a certain range of Japanese you just don’t get enough exposure to. That is, unless you force yourself to read something, well, kind of unpleasant. And even if you do, you still suffer from the same wasted effort problem.
Admittedly the idea of total immersion works fantastic for the first 90% of a language. Really. If you’re aiming for functional fluency, I think grabbing a bunch of native materials and stewing in them is probably the most absolutely painless way to bring your abilities up.
It’s definitely not the fastest. It assumes that you cannot actually get anything done if you’re not constantly having fun. It assumes you will give up if it’s hard. Personally, working 24/7 is unsustainable, even if it’s fun. I’m sure people would say I’m missing the point, that it’s not supposed to feel like work. But there’s a balance. If the returns and progress I’m getting on my invested time are too low, then even if it’s supposed to be fun it instead becomes ungodly frustrating because of all the missed opportunities, all the other stuff I could be doing with my time. Learning is fun unto itself for me, so the efficiency of the system is a big part of whether I’m enjoying my time, or forcing myself.
No one likes to work hard, and achieve nothing.
But I think for people who have a hard time motivating themselves to do anything, it is an amazing way to overcome that hurdle. The system seems designed for people who have been chronically bad at making any kind of progress in their lives. It removes all the barriers. For most people who’s idea of studying Japanese is lamenting the fact that they should be studying Japanese, this is an incredibly powerful place to start.
Yes and no. If your goal is to pass the JLPT, I suggest you approach it with the following mindset:
The JLPT is not Japanese.
Study for the JLPT as an exercise in learning the test. Assume that after you are done you will maybe have learned some new Japanese, but mostly you will have learned to pass the JLPT. It’s like the SATs, or whatever arcane testing system they threw at you in high school. You’re not really learning all those words, or how to do all that math, you’re just learning what they like to throw at you, how they think, and how to beat them. How else could income correlate so strongly with test scores? Rich kids get all the cool toys, that’s why.
The JLPT is basically the SATs, in Japanese.
When it comes to actually learning Japanese though, the “suck it up and study” crowd is, in my opinion, just as wrong. You’re just as likely to have tons of wasted effort by studying. After a certain point, hell, even from the very first page in some cases, most textbooks for learning Japanese don’t use vocabulary you actually want to know, or will use frequently. The grammar is equally hit or miss.
And the drills and exercises are absolute garbage.
There’s a difference between using something 100 times, and applying something 100 times. The best (musicians/athletes/scholars/etc.) in the world aren’t the best because they’ve put in the most time, it’s because they’ve put in the most quality time. And every textbook I have ever seen is just too simple to engage your brain on the level it needs to be engaged.
The monotony of it all, one of the things which the immersion system goes out of it’s way to overcome, not only leads to slow progress, it leads to a pretty high degree of burn out. Especially if you’re out of school, and don’t have a grade to motivate you.
If you’re finding that the textbooks are working, by all means plow ahead. Personally, I can’t handle them.
There has to be a better way.
Total input immersion “works”, but it’s inefficient. This is actually something Khatz over at All Japanese All the Time himself seems to be coming around to.
Textbooks probably don’t work, unless you’re a textbook type, because your odds of quitting before you reach fluency are rather high, and also because they are, all said and done, pretty irrelevant to what you actually want to use the language for.
I think the solution might lie somewhere in between All Japanese All the Time and Fluent in 3 Months. I haven’t talked about Benny and his craziness yet, because I’m extremely conflicted about the man. His basic shtick is to speak the language as much as possible, massive output, rather than read or listen to the language, massive input. On the one hand, he gets results. Crazy results. On the other hand, he writes at you, not to you. Like I’m a 4 year old. Like anyone who doesn’t speak 8 languages by the time they’re 30 is not only a failure, but a stupid one, because it’s all your fault. I also get the feeling lately that a lot of what he’s preaching now doesn’t work nearly as well if you haven’t already learned at least one language. There are certain fundamental truths he has begun to take for granted.
Regardless, for now I think it might be time that I shelled out for his language hacking guide, and see what the man has to say. I will admit, the curiosity has been building.
Ultimately what I come up with is probably going to be a mix of all sorts of different systems, as it should be. I think people can get really devoted to systems and teachers that have given them some results, so much so that they never take the time to evaluate what parts of the system are working, and what parts aren’t. Take the best parts, and leave the rest.
I learned a lot from All Japanese All the Time, and am really grateful for how much it moved me forward. If I hadn’t stumbled across the site, I’d probably still be poking my JET program Japanese textbook and swearing I’ll catch up tomorrow…on the year and a half of backlog. But while I totally agree that native is the way to go, I definitely disagree with the “all the time” part, and think the input/output question still needs to be worked out.
Stay tuned.
This being a blog about Japan, and Japanese being a pretty big part of living in Japan, I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear on the language learning front. Being a language learner, and also a language teacher surrounded by frustrated students, it’s something of an obsession of mine.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.