For the past year or so, I’ve been learning Japanese the way most people do it. I went through Genki I, learned about 500 words, learned about 150 kanji, etc. I started Genki II and planned on using Quartet 1 & 2 afterwards.
For a while I’ve been seeing videos like “Learn Japanese by Watching Anime!”, and that sort of thing, along with the infamous Matt vs Japan immersion method videos. I decided not to do what he was saying because it just seemed a little too good to be true, and just continued using my textbooks along with listening to simple podcasts and stories geared towards beginners.
Then I saw the video Learning Japanese Isn’t Actually That Hard. Basically what it says is that you can learn Japanese by just taking in several hours of input a day (whether it’s active or passive). It also says to use Anki to make flashcards (which I’ve already been doing—not with Anki but another SRS).
So my question is, is this actually true? If I put in earbuds for 3 hours a day and turned on some random podcast in Japanese, would I eventually be able to understand everything?
And should I keep on using textbooks? If the immersion method works, is there a point to getting more advanced textbooks? Also, should I finish Genki II and then start immersing? I always see people saying either “Use textbooks” or “Don’t use textbooks, just immerse”, but never in between.
What do you guys think? Does anyone have any experience with either method, and did it take you to an advanced level? I would really appreciate any comments or suggestions. (If you need any more information I’d be glad to share it)
You have to engage with the content on some level. The reason babies and children learn by immersion is because they interact with what they hear and confirm or disconfirm things as they learn them. Also, they’re generally listening to things that have visible context (facial expressions, reactions, people pointing at things, things that are visible in the room, etc.) so you may need to work harder when it’s a podcast that has no visible information.
As long as “put in earbuds for 3 hours a day and turn on some random podcast in Japanese” includes looking things up and getting help when you don’t understand stuff, yes, it is surely possible to make progress that way.
Yeah you still are going to have to look stuff up. Native learners have the district advantage of a) being treated like literal babies, b) 24/7 immersion and c) no shortcuts (alt languages etc) available so they have to learn (mostly). Immersion without lookups i don’t think is feasible. but immersion as a whole is very helpful imho in reinforcement for things you’ve already learned and finding interesting things to learn next
for me, improvement happened the most as i’ve done more output, interacting with japanese natives on things like twitter. for my specific situation that’s being a part of the disabled community and learning terminology that would never appear in a general textbook. having it become personalized has been a huge step forward.
You still need to put in effort to understand what you’re consuming.
The learning comes from understanding something after putting in effort to comprehend something you previously couldn’t. This can be in the form of making connections or drawing conclusions based on patterns/context, or it can be in the form of explicit lookup.
I more or less got to my level by doing that, minus wanikani and some core decks. Time wise, set decks and wk level 60 has been a very small fraction of my total time with the language. It was very helpful at the beginning.
I more or less learned 90% of my vocab and 98% of my grammar by just trying to read stuff, looking things up, and making flashcards. I didn’t use textbooks and turned out fine. Similarly for listening I just watched YouTube and some anime and audio books and turned out similarly fine.
It’s possible, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s easier than textbook learning. The fastest “traditional learners” are going to be much slower compared to the fastest “input centric learners”. But don’t think that it’s just some efficiency hack. Maybe there is some efficiency difference, but I’ll tell you that immersion focused learning that the hardcore guys do is often much more mentally and cognitively taxing. This shouldn’t be surprising unless you were planning on escaping the idea of “you get out what you put in” with some secret shortcut.
There are no shortcuts, unfortunately. Effective and fast learning through input is going to have you dealing with a lot of stuff you don’t understand. But it’s not like you just get to let that stuff wash over you (we call this whitenoising). How much you persue things that you don’t understand is a more nuanced point that I won’t go into here though.
In short, yes you can get to an advanced level solely by putting in work to understand native content. If you just put in earbuds and listen, no. You still have to put in the work to understand. Putting in the earbuds and listening simply gives you the opportunity to.
Unless you’re able to have native speakers around you at all times who are able to provide constant honest feedback the way parents and teachers do for children, work will be required on your end.
You can listen to a sentence a thousand times but there is no extra information that you will receive on the second or third or thousandth listen that will suddenly make it comprehensible. Seeking further context will be the only way to achieve understanding.
The whole textbooks vs immersion is a false dichotomy.
You’ve gotta immerse either way the difference is that you can do it while using the tools you’ve already got or waste a whole lot of time trying to decipher it on your own.
The whole point of learning any language as a second language as an adult is that you are able to comprehend complex ideas that kids cannot, whether it’s meanings of single words or complex grammar points. You can reck your brain trying to figure out patterns while listening or simply open a textbook or a bilingual dictionary that will give you the explanation, which will help you recognize recurring patterns faster.
This a thousand times over. You need both. Especially if you want to be able to communicate naturally with natives.
A lot of people over-study without finding practical use and then hit a wall. Or go all in on immersion, get to a certain point and then hit a wall. Ideally, you need to find a balance between both. Getting enough input, knowledge coming in, and output, practical use to deepen that understanding, so you don’t get overwhelmed on either front. Though that balance isn’t static either and needs to be reevaluated every now and again. Generally starting with a heavy focus on study, and then slowly lowering the study time and freeing that up for immersion as you understand more and more on your own.
There’s a lot you will never learn from a textbook. But it takes a textbook to get your basics down enough to get to a point you can intuitively pick that up when it arrives.
I’m mostly immersing at this point, but I still study some too (and that’s not even counting all the lookups I still do)
Probably the only way to learn through just immersion is with comprehensible input/n+1, where you can understand the majority of it and figure out the rest through context… but to do that, you still need a pretty good foundation first.
I dunno, if you’re really dedicated to finding only n+1 content to read and listen to, maybe you could do it, but that effort’s probably better spent studying alongside your immersion. This also has the benefit of being able to prioritize interest over ease of comprehension, which in my experience has actually helped more since I was more engaged even if it was a bit above my level.
People may say, “Just immerse!” but that doesn’t mean “only immerse and nothing else.” What it really means (or should mean) is “don’t be afraid to just jump in and give immersion a shot.” The majority of people are still going to need to study in some form or another alongside it, even if it’s not necessarily with a textbook.
Many moons ago, after a trip to Norway, I started listening to a radio station from a small fishing town that I had visited there.
I would put on the headphones for three-four hours every Sat and Sun morning and listen to those guys chatting on their morning shows. The intention was not to learn the language, I just liked the way it sounded.
This went on for a few years, regularly. Aside from a few words I had picked up from other sources (English subtitles when watching Scandinavian films), I never actually understood anything from what was being said on the radio. Audio input only never got me anywhere, YMMV (or not!)…
As for video+audio content:
I breezed through Genki 1+2 recently and besides the grammar there I now have some basic vocab from Genki and from WK.
When I watch JP films with EN subtitles, it’s easy to recognize in dialogue the words I’ve learned beforehand, informed by the subtitle translation.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to start watching a TV series - 結婚できない男 / He Who Can’t Marry. Funny enough, this one’s mentioned by that Matt dude. That wasn’t the reason though, just because I like the two leads in the first season. Only one niggle: no EN subs, only JP ones.
Now, this being a TV drama made for a Japanese audience, the speech is much faster and dialogue is denser than in feature films (at least the over a hundred I’ve watched this year). And my JP reading is nowhere near fast enough to be able to keep up with the JP subs.
Visuals help only to a limited extent, especially when characters have a long dialogue but in a static setting… there are no additional clues as to what is going on.
I gave up after 4 episodes, I just wasn’t able to understand anything (properly) and there was zero enjoyment
I would recognize some words here and there (but far fewer than with EN subs to aid) and some grammar structures but without knowing what was being ‘conjugated’.
I’ll maybe revisit it in a year or three once I’ll have learned more vocab and improve my reading speed to perhaps catch more of the JP subs.
I suppose this kind of immersion might work for those who are willing to put in months/years of not actually enjoying the experience of watching something…
Note that it’s “Use textbooks”, not “Use textbooks, don’t immerse”. The people who say that using textbooks is useful aren’t also telling you to never immerse, just that they think it’s more effective to use textbooks before/while also immersing. And I think most immersion folks are also not telling you to only immerse, but tell you to also use SRS, read a grammar guide to get started, google questions you have and so on. So it’s more a matter of focus, not two polar opposites.
You can decide yourself how much time to dedicate to tools for learning grammar and vocab (textbooks, SRS etc.) and how much to actively trying to understand Japanese content. You can also rebalance it as you see fit during your learning journey.
You definitely don’t “need” textbooks. Im all for appreciating how helpful they can be and their pros in general, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
This just doesn’t feel like my experience with the language. Some of it you can intuitively pick up, sure, but 95% of stuff “not taught in textbooks” I learned the same exact way I learned almost all the other stuff. I just googled it and clicked some stackexchange answer or yahooanswers link. If anything the basics was the stuff I got down intuitively and that was through repeated exposure because they’re the basics and you’ll see them a ton.
Very consise and accurate description of the actual majority opinion for each of the “groups”.
‘cause looking up a term in a book appendix and reading the explanation vs searching google and reading the explanation on stackexchange is essentially not the same action. It’s a well known fact that the internet doesn’t use text you just immerse in the screen
I mean, I think there’s a very large distinction to be made between going through a text book and it’s exercises as opposed to going through native content and looking stuff up as you go. The latter is just using stack exchange and stuff as a reference in order to aid comprehension.
Assuming you’re not just trying to crack a joke, would you equate 30 hours of working through a textbook with 30 hours of reading a book while looking up stuff you don’t know? Because I certainly wouldn’t.
As enticing as it is, don’t bother feeding this and move on. A lot of people get really weirdly defensive like this with weirdly aggressively worded arguments from a perspective only they can be correct with JP studies, even if the difference is simply a semantic one, and I’ve learned it’s best to just not engage and let them stew for themselves.
It doesn’t have to a be a traditional paper textbook, you can learn grammar etc. from other sources. (Might be a semantic point; might also be that they met people who think traditional paper textbooks are superior to all other sources.)
They think that working through native content is more productive than working through textbook exercises.
What ever floats your boat, Vanilla. at the end of the day textbook no textbook anyone who learns a foreign language will eventually need to look up stuff while reading native content there’s nothing unique about it. People do that with their mother tongue as well when they learn to read. It became a thing because people wanted to sell you something either their learning program or their superiority, but it is not a thing, it’s just part of language learning, nothing more nothing less.
People can choose which ever way suits them, they will always get to this point if they want to read native content regardless of the language.
The problem with moving on is that you get people asking question about immersion as though it’s a unique process or something and what would make them learn faster or better. The only thing that would make people learn is doing the work and the work is hard.
It doesn’t matter how you got there, when you started reading, such a non issue. Just do the work. If you can deal with native material from the get go go for it, if not use a text book or an app or something, the whole point is transitioning to native material only, nothing unique or better about it, it’s just how things work. The problem starts when people look for magic solutions or shortcuts or what not. So it’s important to point this out because there are still beginners who aren’t fully aware of what stands behind people claims and what it takes and how long it takes to learn a new language.
And also
If you’ll immerse in it enough one day you’ll understand why the distinction you’re making is hilarious.
More productive in specific situations, but I guess I was more just trying to draw what I think of as a very big distinction.
I have friends who learn similarly to me by reading visual novels and look up grammar with yomichan or a Google search and get back to their visual novel when they find the answer. I also have a couple friends who are currently going through sou matome at some pace and then have lessons with a tutor about what they learned or their exercise.
To me, they’re studying in very different ways. The latter is what personally comes to mind when I hear “using a textbook to learn Japanese”. The former is more just looking for an answer to a question you have and is more like a short side quest, often lasting just a few seconds.
I didn’t expect it to be such a polarizing opinion to want to distinguish the two. Regardless, whatever you want to call it, I think lookups to aid comprehension are good. I think looking for answers to your questions are good. What I personally don’t like is trying to prelearn grammar or words (exceptions apply) so you won’t have any or as many questions when you read. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad, but I don’t personally like it and didn’t really do it. But then again, I don’t necessarily recommend people replicate my method universally.
It seems the people I upset would rather just take sarcastic potshots at me, but for anyone who is curious what I was trying to get at, hopefully that clears it up. Thanks Tobias for seeing the points I was trying to make and for anyone else reading. Any time this sort of stuff comes up there is always a bit of nastiness but at the end of the day we are all on the same side.
I’m starting to think there’s a huge misconception here when it comes to immersion.
“foreign language instruction in which only the language being taught is used”
This is the Merriam-Webster definition of immersion.
They do this in language schools where the teacher speaks only the language being taught, and for independent learners it means well the same with whichever kind of material they use - Japanese only.
Reading Japanese material while constantly referring to english explanations is not immersion. Reading Japanese material and constantly referring to Japanese explanations without translating it to another language is immersion.
I think that’s where the whole misunderstanding stems from - people use the term immersion incorrectly for stages it does not apply to.
It’s just one of those things that has been used wrong so many times it’s become the normal way to use it. It is what it is, but I agree its pretty ambiguous and gives the wrong idea. That’s why in my original post I came up with this phrase
‘cause looking up a term in a book appendix and reading the explanation vs searching google and reading the explanation on stackexchange is essentially not the same action. It’s a well known fact that the internet doesn’t use text you just immerse in the screen 