From what I’ve heard so far, what he’s saying seems to be pretty accurate. If what he’s saying is all accurate though, then I’m going to have to schedule in some listening, even if I understand none of it. Would music be good for that, or are podcasts superior?
It would help if you gave some kind of tldr for what he said that you think is accurate. From a quick skim though, I would be a bit wary of anyone claiming that you can absorb Japanese just by listening to a lot of Japanese because “that’s what babies do”. Listening practice is great, and it’s probably worth your time if only to get used to the pronunciation and “feel” of Japanese in general. But listening to Japanese in your free time is not remotely similar to a child growing up in a Japanese environment, hearing nothing but Japanese, trying to speak Japanese, and getting their mistakes constantly corrected both directly and by encountering new inputs naturally in their environment. I would recommend listening as a supplement, not as a primary method of learning, particularly if you’re not living in a Japanese language only environment.
To your other question, music is not a good way to learn Japanese. The pronunciations are often exaggerated and don’t reflect real world pronunciations, plus song lyrics sometimes use words that wouldn’t be used in the same way in real world speech because they are trying to be poetic. Japanese music is great, just don’t use it as listening practice. I think movies, shows, podcasts, and youtube videos would all be superior.
You definitely can get a “sense” of Japanese listening and reading but you’re right in that you can’t just absorb it like a baby, nor would you want to as it’s not efficient. Babies take years and thousands of hours of listening before they can even utter a coherent idea. Adults can get proficient much more quickly and effectively with direct study.
I see, thank you.
I wasn’t thinking of making only listening my main way of learning, I still plan on trying to make reading do that, but he certainly made listening sound effective. I suppose at the very least I can try listening to Japanese podcasts while I’m doing other stuff. Just a little extra on top of what I’m already doing.
Along with all you said (which I agree completely) I’ve always had a reservation with this claim due to the fact that babies don’t have an established linguistic point of reference, too. Everything they absorb is going straight to their foundational language skills, whereas someone who isn’t learning natively will intrinsically run it through filters of logistics based on how it compares to their own native tongue.
For them the learning path is largely as simple as
new information → comprehension
But for a non-native it’ll look more like (and this is fairly nonlinear)
new information → translation to respective meaning or context in native tongue → analysis of mechanical / cultural nuances → fight for equal mental capacity → comprehension
Saying that is the same thing as “what babies do” to me just seems like a huge, context-ignoring generalization bound to just add frustration more than anything else.
Plus, I think that (despite looking more complex) having a point of reference like that can ultimately be used as a tool to leverage more efficient learning if proper guidance is used. Seems like a waste to just immediately default to throw-at-the-wall constant immersion rather than building a decent foundation through small steps and feedback first. I would’ve given up on Japanese immediately if I was just told to watch Tokyo Story without subtitles or listen to podcasts rather than get my footing in a learning program / browsing websites / reading textbooks / etc.
I’ve seen this idea promoted around by even educated PhDs in linguistics and it might work for some people, but it simply doesn’t work for me. Also, why are we trying to learn a language like babies do? That is like what 9 years of being fully exposed to the language content, constant corrections, and presumably people reading the language to you. TV. Music. I’d be surprised if in such an environment you manage to not learn a language.
We are adults so we shouldn’t learn it the way babies do, but instead in a much more efficient and well-informed way because you already learned a language.
Also, I already tried the listening to a language to learn a language. The Japanese like a breeze site, and it did not cause the language to stick. Passive absorption doesn’t work, at least it doesn’t for me. People will really do absolutely anything but sit down do their flash cards, review their grammar points, read, and listen. And presumably also write and speak.
Having just watched the video, here’s my tl;dr: edgy youtuber claims to be dishing out harsh truths and ends up giving the most basic and widely trodden advice on how to learn a language.
It’s like one of those “the secret to wealth they don’t want you to know!” self-help books that end up telling you to buy real-estate.
At some point halfway through the video (at around 8minutes), after harping on and on about immersion he says (I’m editing Youtube’s autogenerated transcript, apologies for any remaining typos):
Now like I mentioned earlier the core of an immersion method is getting mass amounts of input and essentially learning through the same mechanism that a child does which is through comprehensible input. If you were to just listen to and watch content in Japanese 24/7 without any study or any lookup you would eventually become able to understand Japanese but doing so would take a lot longer than it realistically needs to.
Remember earlier in this video when I said you can leverage your adult knowledge as a catalyst for acquisition? This is where explicit learning comes in. You’re going to want to build yourself a very fundamental and basic knowledge of Japanese grammar. Just like learning kana it doesn’t really matter what you use to do it, just learn basic particle uses, sentence structure and how pieces of Japanese interact with each other on a
fundamental level.Many people in the immersion learning community have a lot of good things to say about Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese grammar so if you’re
unsure what to use then it might be worth looking into.
Later he introduces Anki and vocab mining.
This annoys me frankly. This is not “learning Japanese through immersion”, this is learning the fundamentals of a language using conventional, artificial methods and then consuming native content. Downplaying the early stages where you have to go through your grammar book and your SRS decks doesn’t help anybody and sets bad expectations for beginners.
These early stages are exactly what any beginner is most concerned with. Intermediate learners who already have a good grasp of basic vocab and grammar don’t need these videos. Marketing these methods as “learning Japanese through immersion” is just misleading IMO.
You’re grinding textbooks like everybody else, but you pretend that it’s not important and you just watch Naruto all day and the Japanese knowledge passively infuses your brain. It’s always the same disingenuous trick.
Preface, i dont know what your level of proficiency is with japanese. Idk how many hours you have put in learning japanese, nor how dedicated you are to it. But please be wary of all the videos that claims “hey, jp is easy actually. Click my video”. Especially more so if you’re a beginner & have no idea where to start.
Language is not easy, and is extremely so with languages that are very far remove from your native tongue. It takes hundreds of hours of consistent practice to get a grasp of a language as a non native, and even then it might take much more to speak “natively” & “fluently”. Treating it as easy as walking or eating is a dangerous expectation to have
With that being said, this method of “listening to JP stuff while you sleep” seems much like a sham. You’d be ignoring a major part of a language like writing, speaking, reading, grammar, conversation, social cues. Not to mention, you might not even understand what you’re listening to anyway. Sure, you might memories a song’s lyrics to a tee. But thats it.
That being said, there are other more effective ways in having this “japanese immersion”. One is to include JP vocab in your daily life. Code switiching in between your native tongue and JP. E.g "what task i have for today? ohh yeah 台所を掃除する ", or “あ！眩しい！I forgot my sunglasses”, etc. It does helps in putting those words to use, and see how it works in context. Another is to consume JP media while not sleeping. Try to actively listen and understand what is being said. Maybe write down a few vocabs or phrases that seems interesting. Study the EN translation and see if what you think they are saying lines up with the translation.
Take this from some whos EN is a second language, and is learning JP as their third.
This part of the transcript is killing me
“Here’s my secret compelling advice for all you new learners: all of those things that take an immense amount of time, practice, nuance, etc. to master? Just, like, learn those. Yeah.”
Following that up immediately with the “my community of people who learn unconstrained by the rigidity of learning materials all seem to use and reccomend this piece of learning material” is even funnier
Thank you for taking the deep dive on that video for us here because it doesn’t seem like a very productive watch from the looks of things
I agree.
I heard this in the Youtube video too and it jarred with me. It might be true in the sense monkeys with typewriters and infinite time would come up with Shakespeare.
(In my opinion) babies as (somewhat) blank slates, have huge motivation to learn about the world by (amongst other methods) learning their first language. People talk to babies in ‘baby talk’ and say things like “aw, the baby said ‘Mama’” so repeating and reinforcing. And people talk to 3-year olds at the level of a 3-year old, and often: slowly.
Motivation, attention, energy and time are massively important in language learning. (Actually - motivation is probably the wrong word: only capitalist babies write a mission statement: the rest of us write unrealistic 5 year plans.)
I (we?) don’t really need studies to understand that comprehensible input that allows us to accumulate new words and internalise some grammar is the way to go. And it’s damn difficult with Japanese. But しょうがない.
And just because babies don’t routinely (as far as we know) use WK or Anki, doesn’t mean that they might not be useful tools.
I haven’t watched the video, although it definitely popped up in my YouTube recs at some point, but I will say that when I was a beginner learner, listening was the thing that scared me the most, so I put it off. This is a mistake. Listening is a key component of language learning, and you have to do a lot of it to become even basically competent in a language. So, I think you should start listening early and get used to being confused, even if just to break the ice, so to speak. But I also agree with other posters here that especially for Japanese, you also need to actively study, 'immersion" is not enough unless you have a dedicated adult explaining things patiently to you 24/7.
This sums it up really. I think one thing people severely underestimate is the effect of “necessity” on how your brain adapts. When you are truly in a situation where you have no choice but to try and understand, you are going to improve a lot faster. Practically no learner is going to be able to put themselves in that situation, even if on the surface it seems like they are.
With that being said, there’s also a subgroup of people who underestimate the value of trying to understand Japanese even when it’s exceedingly difficult for them. Im not really in the “just tolerate ambiguity and listen to stuff you understand 0% of” camp, but it isn’t uncommon for me to see people avoiding trying because it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If it’s easy youre not learning.
At the end of the day, I think what determines success or failure isn’t going to be anything about your study routine. There’s already so much information out there and your routine will improve and evolve as you do, anyways. I think the actual deciding factor is more just about who you are as an individual, your work ethic, and your reasons for learning. It’s not like we are trying to win a gold medal in the Olympics or anything that requires us to be exceptional among the exceptional.
I don’t think the video is really THAT bad. Broadly, yeah, this is how learning language works. I think by emphasizing so called “passive listening” he’s excessively minimizing the amount of effort needed to put into looking things up and generally focus hard on understanding to not whitenoise things, but I certainly do put on Japanese when I’m only half listening sometimes cause catching some of it’s better than nothing so I feel like I get the point, but he could’ve presented it better. I also think waiting to read because of influence on pronunciation is laughable. A little more effort should be put into presenting how you make input become more comprehensible.
I dunno man, it’s almost Christmas so maybe I’m feeling generous but I don’t think there’s anything that wrong or harmful here. Feels like in the guy’s head he’s responding to the traditional classroom studying methods and thus emphasizing the way you get to just listen and read and have fun. And I mean, you do. Yeah I spent ~6 months on grammar and a year on WK but even that is technically optional based on someone’s patience for looking things up, and even assuming a more standard need to lay the groundwork that was a small part of the 5 years I’m going on now so I really do conceive of what I’ve done as learning through reading and listening, with a little bit of groundwork to unlock the ability to do that. Is that so bad? On the other hand I was happy to hear him say you can let the grammar stuff be a little uncertain and hazy and just keep moving and it’ll all make more sense later because a ton of learners really, really need to hear that one.
Again I just think he could be communicating parts of this better because he doesn’t really explain it but I think I get the title too, because I would also describe learning Japanese as easy in a sense. The amount of time it takes is ridiculous (which is explicitly called out in the video), but I’ve found it’s both hard and easy by different definitions. It takes even longer than my already very high expectations because it’s just impossible to conceive of how huge a language truly is. But on the other hand I didn’t expect it to be this easy, in that if you show up and read/listen to something and really try to understand it, it’s pretty much impossible to not succeed. It felt like it would be much harder to me before I started, and in that sense I understand the urge to downplay the difficulty for someone starting.
My actual advice for the OP is there are a lot of opinions out there about the little details, intensive vs extensive, if you should do anki, how you should do anki, should you study kanji, which grammar source is good, which level of difficulty is right, and a million other things. Interacting with the real language and making a solid effort to understand it will always get you there one way or another, so all anyone can really talk about is one way that worked for them. Thus, don’t listen to one single person TOO much, but just put a bunch of time in it, experiment with stuff that people who have made a lot of progress recommend, and find what seems to work for you.
This. More specifically, find someone who did what you want to be able to do in a time frame that is appealing to you.
It’s like “how many calories should I eat a day”. Diet is a complicated enough conversation as is, so it’s like at least narrow it down
Advice for a little 7 year old girl isn’t going to be remotely similar to good advice for a 26 year old 195 centimeter person training multiple times a week at a gym. Similarly there’s going to be quite a lot of variance in Japanese learners. Get advice from people whos footsteps you want to follow in.
One issue with this is that we tend to be unreliable narrators of our own language learning journey. I’ve noticed a deep tendency, in myself and others, to downplay the amount of time and efforts it takes to go through the early stages of the learning process.
I think it’s because we tend to reframe and relativize this part of the process in hindsight: if we spend the first hundreds of hours of our studies mostly focusing on textbook stuff and SRS but then spend the next, say, 5000h hours basically only inputting, it makes sense that we end up reframing these first hours as a secondary thing that’s not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
But if you’re giving advice to a complete beginner, telling them “yeah it’s mostly about input. Learn particles and the て-form and stuff, but really just go on YouTube and watch Japanese content 12h a day” is really not practical or helpful advice I think. Learning particles and the て-form and stuff is precisely where 99% of the people starting to learn Japanese are going to give up. If you’re already at the point where you’re consuming basic native content, you’ve basically already succeeded and the hard part is behind you.
That’s what frustrates me with this video: the actual advice is not bad but it’s presented backward. He starts by retreading all this stuff about immersion and learning like a baby, dismissing Duolingo and Genki as being the wrong way to do it, but then when he eventually gets to the step-by-step instructions it’s “learn kana then pick up a textbook and also Anki”.
Ok so we’re not learning like a baby at all then, are we? We’re just back to Duolingo and Genki but this time it’s Anki and Tae Kim and we call it “immersion” for some reason.
As someone who’s only been learning for 5 months, it’s true. I have only scratched the surface of of the beginning stage 
This happened to me while learning English. I’ve been learning for around 8 years, and I told myself that the way English finally stuck with me was through immersion after some failed experiments. But then I remembered that I spent the first year or so learning through texbooks, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t help.
I feel this happens with a few of the people that champion the “full immersion” method: they actually learned through other methods (maybe books, srs, etc.), thought they were “useless”, and then pivoted into immersion, without realizing that those early studies actually did help them understand better 
.
Yeah, but that’s a statement about people in general. You should still find advice from people whos footsteps you want to follow in. Other wise you’d be listening to inaccurate retellings of journeys you don’t even want for yourself in the first place 
even though I agree with most commenters here that the general idea of “just throw yourself in the middle of the ocean, you’d figure out swimming sooner or later” is not a practical approach to learning any language (least of all Japanese) -
there is something to be said for immersion in general.
if I take the specific example of myself - I:
I am still at a very unsatisfactory level. I guess you could say I’m somewhat like an unstable N4+N5 with some foot in the N3 domain -
but my knowledge is very technical and filled with “intuition” (e.g. “かならず。。。I kinda know this term! what was it again though…?”), and not the type of well-ingrained “auto-pilot” type of knowledge. To speak (or write) in Japanese I usually have to mentally construct sentences like legos.
ALL of this - is the result of lack of immersion. i.e., focusing too much on acquiring technical knowledge (sometimes with too long breaks) and not enough hard-work of just sitting down and forcing yourself to consume material over, and over, and over, and putting that knowledge to use.
“learning” is easy: oh, here’s a new grammar point. here’s a new word. just memorize it to death until you can recognize it when you see it (or even recall it in reverse via kaniwani etc.) — that still would not equal being able to use that knowledge in practical conditions (watching a video / movie or reading a book or trying to talk or write).
It might allow you to do “lego-work” (i.e. pause the Youtube, replay the sentence 19 times until you can deconstruct all of it and realize you understand it, or — spend 3-4 minutes writing a single sentence making sure you fetch all the vocab you need from memory, and gradually lay down the grammatical structure, or - spending 30-60 seconds to express a single sentence or thought - and it comes out broken or ungrammatical, and by the time you reach the 2nd half you don’t even remember what you already said - and neither does your partner).
All this to say, the most important step of language acquisition is usage. Rules, vocabulary, etc. is just the tools. Like Morpheus says in the Matrix: there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. You MUST walk the path in order for your brain to actually be wired in a way that it can rapidly process the language in multiple modalities without spending too much on computation.
And - it’s true that you will never be able to learn the language if you wait for perfect knowledge before you start putting it to use, and it’s true that if you try to constrain the content you consume (or the things you try to write or say) etc. to the same old patterns, you won’t learn anything. You have to challenge yourself, to always be just one or two steps beyond the area of comfort. And because it’s difficult to always accurately match the level of content to your actual level, you might be in situations where you only understand or can utilize 20-30% of what is needed. that doesn’t make it worthless.
So, the claim that immersion is crucial and that it’s worthwhile even before you understand everything (or even most things) = TRUE
The claim that you can just give up the legwork of studying vocab, grammar rules, etc. in favor of just trying to SHOVE raw Japanese into your brain (unless you’re some kind of prodigy) = FALSE.
Are you reading my mind or something? 
My own path so far has been a bit of a “dog’s breakfast” - I’ve reached an ‘advanced beginner’ level somewhere akin to “more than N4 but less than full N3”.
And my current somewhat unstructured path has me following an “all of the above” approach - some half-hearted attempts at textbook study and review, maybe will restart WK, watching anime with English subtitles, watching various levels of YouTube videos, occasionally trying to read stuff “in the wild”, but most recently also watching J-dramas (police or detective shows, some slice-of-life shows, some news shows, etc.) without any subtitles in either English or Japanese - which is not quite “immersion”, but rather is a step in that direction.
Depending on the show, I think that I may be understanding 10 to 20 percent of the dialog, stopping the video and doing lookups when I hear the same unknown word repeated enough times, sometimes it sticks and sometimes I find myself looking them up again and again - but I am encouraged by even that relatively low amount of overall comprehension, because there is new/unknown vocab and grammar embedded within speech that I do understand well, and so I feel like I am making progress.But I would not find it so useful if I weren’t making an effort to use supplementary sources to understand the dialog. It’s not quite what I would think of as “true immersion”.
Yeah, even if all you want to do is read manga, learning to speak (and by extension write) the language is necessary, I think. Or rather that is my experience.