Hi all, I’m new to WaniKani (but not to Japanese, me coming to WaniKani is actually a sort of last ditch effort to try and get better at Japanese). I’ve been trying, and failing, to learn Japanese for a little under a year now and I’ve been enjoying it - I have been making alright progress but I don’t really have a good study habit or a good way of learning.
Anyway, I read somewhere a while ago that thinking in Japanese is a good way to practise it, and I was just wondering how long/how much vocab would you need to know before you can start doing that. Right now, I know about 80 kanji (the ones on N5) but not how to read them. I know it’s not mandatory, but I think it would be something that would be nice to be able to do, at the very least it would give me a better understanding of how to skip the EN → JP processes and just speak directly in Japanese (which is really my ultimate goal, to be able to flip a switch and speak in Japanese without having to translate everything from English).
I don’t know if this is a silly goal or not, which I guess is why I’m reaching out to all of you to get your thoughts
Around level 3 or 4 I started getting vocabulary of people or objects within my house and I would just say the word out loud when I passed by it. I would look at my door and say 戸 or 戸口 out loud for example. To take that a step further, I put different actions to that idea like 出る if i was exiting, 入る if i was entering, and eventually 出かける for leaving. Once I’ve got enough household objects I’ve thought of putting stickers of the vocab I find in my own house like a language classroom. I’m trying to layer the concepts of language in my head, so I can equate it with my own knowledge of english. Hope that helps! it helps to go beyond just the computer for me, I’m only level 5 and I wanna retain the most I can from the lower levels before I open a textbook.
I think it just happens naturally as you progress, so IMO it’s not something you’ll need to actually force… and it’ll not happen across the whole language at once. You’ll have words you’re so familiar with you might draw blanks if you’re asked to translate them into English, and there’ll be words you’ve recently learned as a translation of an English term…
Also if you start having conversation practice you’ll likely not be translating while you speak, except for the odd word where you’ll know what you want to say in English but struggle to come up with a Japanese word…
Also, an amusing thing that happens to me while I’m learning a new language is I’ll try to say something in my own mind and without even noticing I’m replacing words I don’t know with ones from other languages… like when I started learning French I’d slot in Japanese to fill the gaps and only realize it afterwards! (I think my brain just has Japanese as its default “language I don’t quite know yet”)
Hey that’s pretty helpful! I’ve kind of been doing something like that already, so it’d good to know that I’m on the right track! Best of luck on your journey!
@Nb2 Thank you, I will take a look at this - seems quite helpful!
@crihak yeah, I’m not trying to force it, that’s unproductive and only leads to frustration. That’s sound advice though, thank you!
Another thing I do since i don’t have much speaking practice yet is to rewind the anime I’m watching like 30 seconds when I see a waninaki vocab word in the subtitles and listen for it in context. Thanks so much, best of luck on your journey too!
Come to think of it, I may have some actual advice as well! (Not just “don’t worry about it” advice).
I think I’ve (mostly by accident) set up my Anki decks in a way that actually promotes thinking in the target language.
The way they work is that I have a single word on the front and on the back the main “answer” is a context sentence, not an actual translation. (I have a translation as well, you just have to look a bit further to see it).
Seeing the sentence is usually enough to jog my memory and as a consequence I find that I often (not always) don’t really think of the words in terms of its English translation but rather by how it feels in a sentence.
My deck is listening practice, so I have spoken word - spoken sentence, but I think it applies just as well to text-based cards.
A similar thing happens to me. I spent a semester in Japan almost 10 years ago (cries), and suddenly I remembered so much more Spanish because my brain knew it needed to use “not-English” And when I was in Israel I remembered more Spanish AND Japanese because I didn’t know any conversational Hebrew.
As for thinking in the language, I couldn’t really think in Japanese until towards the end of my semester study abroad, so about that length of time in an immersive environment, if you’re me? Nowadays, if I marathon-watch a show all day, by the end my thought pattern is definitely following that structure.
I think that’s my target too, I don’t want to think like an English speaker talking in Japanese but as a Japanese speaker speaking Japanese. Sort of like a professor of Physics learning to drive - s/he isn’t thinking like a Physics professor (thinking of how the engine turns the wheels, and the friction between the wheels and the ground makes the car move) but instead like a person driving a car (gas pedal + correct gear makes car go brrr, also watch out for things on the road). Don’t know if that’s a good analogy but I think it sums up where I want to get with my Japanese (and don’t worry - WaniKani isn’t the only program I’m using!)
Yeah, I get you. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position where I’d naturally get immersion (I work a full time job, while studying for university, while having various other obligations). I watch anime and other Japanese media where I can, but I’d only have an hour before my brain is done for the day and I can’t focus any more. I was reading the road to lvl 60 in ~300 days post and I’m going to try actually doing the spaced repetition (do it while getting breakfast - then at lunch, then in the evening). I suppose once I get enough vocab I can start passively taking in the media which is my short term goal.
i don’t know about thinking in a language, but i have a very persistent inner monologue (apparently not all people do, i only learned that recently). i’ve been learning japanese for a year today, with about 2 hours per day, and my inner monologue has started to switch to japanese occasionally (in a very fragmented form, a few words or a sentence or two). perhaps that could be described as thinking in a language?
I’m in a similar boat—I’ve spoken basic beginner Japanese for over half my life but I’m trying to get that up to fluency.
The best thing you can do is immersion practice: watch Japanese media without subtitles. While you do it, try to think of what you’re thinking in Japanese. You’ll have to force it at first, but it’ll feel more natural over time. And maybe one day you’ll do it all the time, but I’m not there yet either, so I can’t promise!
For me a good starting point is to imagine there’s a Japanese person next to me and try to explain my thoughts to them. It’s good practice and a great way to get an idea as to what vocabulary/expressions you know and what you still need to learn.
I don’t have a very good answer, and you can definitely accelerate the process by trying to talk to yourself in Japanese, but it’s kinda like… well, you need to have enough vocabulary to think to yourself in complete sentences (even just short ones like 「あ、いいね。」) before you’ll really start ‘thinking’ in Japanese. If you don’t have enough vocabulary to hold a mini-conversation with yourself, it probably won’t happen. You should also consider what sort of stuff you usually think about: if your life revolves around school or, say, scientific research, then you probably won’t be able to think in Japanese because the Japanese words relevant to all that is something you haven’t learnt yet. If your daily life overlaps a lot with the Japanese words you know, then you’ll have an easier time starting to think in Japanese. That aside, you should be prepared for it to happen in drips and draps. You might start with random little remarks in Japanese. Then you might start making sentences, only to stop halfway because you realise you don’t know a word you need. However, eventually, when you’re really fluent, things will just keep flowing, and you’ll find it a lot easier to get around words you don’t know. I think when it starts really depends on the individual. For now though, don’t worry too much about it and enjoy the ride.
Source: I learnt French to fluency, and that’s more or less how it happened. After consuming lots and lots of French content, especially news articles and videos, and writing essays for French class, my brain started to remember the words I needed/found interesting, and I started using them in my own thoughts. I did make an effort to block out English as much as possible when I was using French, but it wasn’t always possible to think 100% en français to begin with. It’s easier now, but it definitely didn’t happen right away, even when I probably knew enough words to do it.
Honestly, I’m into anime and since I watch it in Japanese with Spanish subtitles, (way before WaniKani) I started distinguishing words one by one, and then for some reason I just automatically apply them in my brain. For example, itadakimasu, I caught on to that pretty early on, and two days later I started saying that every time I eat.
It’s pretty cool because now I’m constantly thinking things in Japanese, I couldn’t even do my French homework ;-;
I am new to Japanese and the only comparison that I can make is with German. I am fluent in German but it wasn’t until I reached level C1 that I could think in my head completely in German. If I am not mistaken C1 is equal to JLPT 1. It took me around 3-4 years to reach this level.
But beware! I mean completely thinking German. That doesn’t mean that phrases didn’t pop up in my head before that.
Best advice is to be patient. At first it will require effort and you brain will feel weird. But once you overcome that it becomes unconscious thoughts.
I think that just starts happening once you start speaking in Japanese.
I think the first thing I noticed was when I would rehearse a conversation in my head, just like I would in English, but using Japanese. Or if you talk to yourself in Japanese, like 次、どうしたらいいかな as you go about your daily tasks etc, you’ll find yourself saying stuff like that in your head.
But neither of those things is really possible until you can speak somewhat naturally. So maybe it’s just a matter of how much conversation practice you do, as others have mentioned. Long time if you get a lot of conversation practice, shorter time if you don’t
You can’t start thinking in a language that you can’t speak…kinda. And you can’t speak a language that you can’t think in…kinda. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all for this. In fact, the more it gets answered in that way, the more it can be discouraging…because you’ll never learn or reach your goals as fast as that person did.
With language learning, I like to use the analogy of exercise. It’s like you’re trying to work a new muscle group that you haven’t used before. It can be awkward and make you sore (though some people get sorer than others). Keep trying and using the different muscle groups, and stick with it. You can’t compare yourself to the other people at the gym, you just need to keep going at the pace that works for you. Eventually you’ll start using those muscles with greater ease, and you’ll even do it without thinking about it as much (pun intended).
Yeah that’s what people mean when they say “thinking in a language”. I can’t really shut mine up whenever I’m not actively focused on something so I could understand how people consider it almost synonymous with conscious thought. I’m also incapable of reading phonetic scripts without experiencing a sensation of speaking and hearing the words, so Kanji have provided me with a very bizarre and enjoyable reading experience which is absolved from that.
Now as for the OP, It really just comes down to 2 things: Basic grammar, and basic vocabulary. I’m not fluent, not really even close to fluent in Spanish, but I can force my thoughts into Spanish and manage to describe most basic daily events and thoughts in some way, sometimes without strain. Yet in Japanese… where I’m pretty sure my vocabulary already has a greater count of words than my Spanish thanks to WaniKani, well at this point I think I’ve formed a total of about 3 sentences of my own, and I’m not convinced they were all correct. I mean that’s all according to plan for me. I wanted a Kanji base first to just get that brick wall out of the way, but the point is that if you focus on core grammar and the basic verbs of a language, the to be/come/go/have/do and the… well all the various things that become just particles in Japanese, along with some immersion, you can start to “think” in a language very quickly.
And when I was in Israel I remembered more Spanish AND Japanese because I didn’t know any conversational Hebrew.