I would also like to know that. But Krashen holding on to it and Kaufmann actually admitting that he was wrong after all this time puts a weight I can’t personally ignore on the subject, which is what I meant. I know Krashen saying something doesn’t equate invariable truth, especially when it can be a subjective experience.
1 Like
Sorry, I’m just used to people online treating Krashen as gospel, which is annoying.
2 Likes
Not meant to be a counter point, but just anecdotally every N2 or N1 passer I’ve ever met was decently competent in communication skills. To be fair, none of them were Chinese. I always found it perplexing that you’ll hear people talk about N1 passers as like… universally actually terrible at speaking Japanese or something, when it was so different from my experience. I get that some of that is probably salty people, but still.
5 Likes
Can confirm, when I was in Japanese School last year, my school had a segregation based on a small written essay - completely different from the “pick one of these” format of the JLPT.
Several Chinese people with N2 certificates were dunked into the most basic levels because of this. Then again, speaking Japanese was never about getting certificates, but about, you know, talking.
2 Likes
I’m wondering if anyone’s seen Matt vs Japan’s recent collab discussing learning methods with a Japanese Youtuber (in Japanese)? I follow the Japanese youtuber and was very surprised to see Matt in one of her videos.
Matt vs Japan Interview with Yoko (日本語ペッラペラな🇺🇸人と本当に自然な英語を身につける方法語った feat Matt vs. Japan (#1) - YouTube)
By comprehension, it is not necessarily meant that you understand like 90 per cent of what is being said, but rather just comprehending anything. And even if you were to not understand a single word of Japanese, you could comprehend e.g. an anime because theres visual comprehension as well, which is obviously why even anime fans might know a phrase or two even without having ever studied Japanese. I do not exactly know what Krashen meant by “comfortable”, because, as I just said, even if youre not comfortable language-wise, youre still learning, but maybe he meant the tolerance of ambiguity. That is, to feel comfortable when watching stuff you dont fully understand.
So, basically, any anime, and I really mean any, is good input. And if you already understand like 40 per cent, well, even better for you.
Krashen’s theory is mainly commonsense in that it is easier to learn following a simple progression. He labeled it i+1, but it’s really just the idea that language learners build up from understanding small parts to understanding larger chunks. Unfortunately, he minimized grammar (and so has Matt on his Refold page, although he himself went through 3-4 years of formal instruction while also doing self-study) in his theory, but grammar actually can help lay the path in the steps toward increasing comprehension.
I am.
I am tall.
I am a man.
I am a tall man.
I am a teacher.
I am a tall teacher.
I am a man and a teacher.
I like apples.
I am a man and I like apples.
Grammar study + Vocabulary study + pragmatics + some other language practice + input (reading/listening)/output(speaking/writing) is going to make you fluent.
2 Likes
I think the point is with a large amount of ambiguity it’s kinda hard to maintain your interest.
The rare case is that our interest is big enough to overcome the discomfort.
But for a general learner like me (who don’t have that big interest in so many Japanese things) it feels difficult (yeah that accounts for my little progress in language learning when I don’t have much interest in learning the language these days tbh). In terms of problem solving I find Krashen’s idea is so appealing, but hard for me to practice.
I want to listen to the audio from the shows I’m currently watching on my iPod nano, but I’m having some problems: The shows are on Amazon Video, and Disney Plus, and I can’t figure out how I would take the audio out of the shows, and then put them on my iPod. Thanks for any insight or ideas you might have!
You can use Audacity to record your speakers output. That’s how I pull the audio from whatever I watch.
1 Like
Ok! Thanks, I’ll try it out.
I am a native Russian speaker, a language notorious for its conjugation system, which is way more elaborate than that of French. I write for a living, but I have absolutely no conscious knowledge of conjugations. Mind you, we conjugate everything - verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and even some of the function words. There is not a single chance in hell for a human brain to operate so much data while drawing from rules and table. Surely, you make a conscious effort to recall expressions and collocations, but they come in a ready-made form. Yes, there are slips of the tongue, but you correct yourself referring to statistical data (patterns), and no the rules or tables. Add here the fact that the vast majority of language people produce consists of prefabricated patterns (collocations, set expressions, arbitrary conventions of use, etc.) and the reason why language input is key become apparent.
Having said all that, I completely agree with you about the role of grammar. It can be a useful tool to enhance comprehension and draw attention to particular phenomena. Having looked through a declension table, you will at least have an idea that this phenomenon exists for a reason.
This aforementioned principle applies to everything is language. You have to make yourself pay attention. Grammar is certainly instrumental, but deliberate vocabulary study is too. If you have seen in a textbook on vocabulary (say, English Collocations is Use), that natives say “make a mistake” instead of “do a mistake”, you will pay attention the next time you see this expression used during your immersion. I guess if you are an extremely diligent and attentive student, who is also aware how to learn, you will have a chance to notice all of those things while simply reading, but I believe that priming your brain by firm reading about it wouldn’t hurt.
Plus, I think a lot of people misrepresent the ideas Matt actually has in mind. He is probably doing himself a disservice too, being a little vague at time. In reality, he recommends to sentence mine both vocabulary and grammar. He emphasizes active immersion with paying close attention and trying to understand over any passive activity. Passive listening was introduced as an alternative for people who don’t have enough time to immerse actively. Moreover, he’s changed his views quite a bit over the years. He used to be quite radical, now he’s saying that immersing for a couple of hours per day would suffice, albeit the result will be coming slower.
5 Likes
First of all, welcome to the forums!
I read your entire post, and I think we’re mostly in agreement, but I just wanted to clarify what I meant here: I don’t think anyone can or should attempt to memorise entire conjugation tables at one go for any reason. What I meant is that studying grammar allows you to be aware of the existence of different structures, and primes you to look out for them and learn them. Knowing that there is, for example, a ‘second person’ or a specific word for ‘he’ that is used with a specific form of a verb or adjective teaches you to pay attention to such differences. As I probably said, so many conjugations sound exactly the same in French. If you weren’t aware of the differences and did most of your French practice through listening and speaking, you’d assume that they’re all written the same way. Native speakers don’t need as much of this explicit instruction because they have sufficient exposure, help from adults, and an environment that adjusts to their fluency levels. Foreign learners don’t have that luxury, because even with huge amounts of immersion, their environment doesn’t adapt to their level of fluency, because some things just can’t be replicated, like the parent-child bond and on-the-spot teaching.
I agree that ultimately, once you’re fluent, how you’ll check whether you’re right is by checking yourself against what you’ve heard or see before: in essence, how our brains actually tend to learn is to remember each and every word or collocation individually once we’ve heard them enough. There are certainly a lot of things about each and every language that speakers don’t remember due to grammar study, but rather due to usage. I just feel that foreign learners could use a little more help from explicit study in the beginning.
I didn’t deny that input is important, and I never will, because in every language I’m fluent in, immersion has been among the most useful techniques I’ve used. However, what I’m against is focusing on input to the point of refusing to acknowledge the usefulness of everything else.
I think this is a good idea, and I do it all the time (albeit without flashcards of any sort, which is what’s included in his method since he mentions Anki). However, my issue – which I think many of the questions on these forums reveal – is that most people, at least as beginners, have a lot of trouble understanding why they don’t understand, which makes picking out new grammar very difficult. Very often, new grammar is part of a giant phrase that a beginner doesn’t understand, which is then learnt as new vocabulary while being treated as a giant chunk. Worse, that’s how many Japanese resources teach new grammar points whose meanings can actually be derived from simpler grammar or words e.g. かもしれない and 〜ていられない. I’m obsessed with breaking things down into their constituents and do it so much that it’s a reflex, so I’m usually OK studying on my own unless I’m facing a structure whose parts don’t come to mind at all. My first Japanese textbook also provided literal translations of Japanese sentences that served as sentence breakdowns so that sentence structure would be obvious. On the other hand, many of the grammar questions that come up on the forum have an answer on the first page of Google search results, but people aren’t able to search for the answers themselves because they can’t see the grammatical pattern or because they’re used to learning things as set phrases. They haven’t learnt how to abstract the words they already know or which are likely not part of the grammatical structure. That’s the sort of ‘explicit grammar study’ I think people are lacking, and that’s why I say immersion alone isn’t good enough. You certainly can learn all these things without ever breaking them down, and they’ll stick with enough exposure. Plus, once you really know what they mean, then regardless of how you first learnt them, you won’t really have to think when you encounter them: you’ll just understand. However, if you’re able to break them down into things you already know, you can learn a lot faster and you won’t have to treat them as separate objects: you immediately know why they mean what they do, and you don’t have any extra work to do to make them stick. In my opinion, if you haven’t done at least some basic grammatical study, particularly with a lot of sentence breakdown practice, you won’t be able to do such breakdowns spontaneously, which will slow you down when sentence mining and make your mining less effective than it could be. That’s all I’m saying. Grammatical knowledge isn’t just a stack of useless, rigid facts. It can be a skillset too.
PS: I’ll admit one thing – I may be a little biased towards explicit grammatical study because even though I’m an English native speaker, I was taught grammar very young, at the age of 7. That’s how I learnt English. It turned out well for me. However, this sort of learning isn’t for everyone, and I can accept it if people prefer to learn through intensive immersion and habituation without thinking too much about how everything works. I have a friend studying in Japan right now. He’s very fluent, and he learns from context without trying to break things down much.
2 Likes
Japanese people in the comments seem very impressed at his fluency and surprised that he didn’t grow up in Japan and isn’t a ハーフ or anything…all the extremely passionate Matt haters in shambles rn
Jokes aside though, can anyone here who is actually fluent hear any mistakes in his speech? I’m curious if he actually is native-passing or if Japanese people are just being polite when they say he is
90% this but his accent is also really good.
Kaz is probably the best analogy of this with English. https://youtube.com/c/eigonodo
He’s done a few videos with Matt as well: https://youtu.be/GzifHrUUSr4
Matt’s Japanese skills aren’t in question. It’s his ability to successfully teach Japanese to other people and the efficacy of his methodology that aren’t proven yet.
If you look at someone like George from “Japanese from Zero”, his accent isn’t the greatest but he’s got quite a bit more experience in teaching using more traditional methods.
3 Likes
This is a pretty old video (about three years old at this point), but here are some examples of mistakes that Matt has made. Most of his mistakes seem to be intonation mistakes. I believe his grammar is fine, but I have to admit that I might not be fluent enough to check everything he’s saying myself:
There are some other examples, like this one here:
Around 13:50, Yoko says,「どうなればそのレベルなのかっていうのをわかってない人多すぎる」and around 13:55, Matt responds,「あ、それは…とても。」I can’t be utterly certain, but I personally think とても is not the most natural response here, because it seems that he wanted to say, ‘Ah, that… yes, very much so.’ However, I believe you’re supposed to use とても on its own as a response when it can simply be used to modify the verb or adjective in the previous sentence. Using it after それは is strange. Plus, I don’t think「とても多すぎる」is a natural expression. ‘Very much so’ is more like… 「まさにその通りです。」(This was something I came up with at random based on what I thought I’d heard in anime before, and it’s exactly what my English-Japanese dictionary suggests.) Other shorter options that might have fit into the conversation at that point: 「そう（です）ね」or「確かに」. I’m definitely not as fluent as Matt overall, and perhaps I’m just nitpicking because I’ve never heard とても being used in such a context before, but since @Lahoje asked if anyone could hear any mistakes… I’ll just say that hearing 「とても」jarred me here.
Another example:
At 1:39 in this video, he says「決して」as ‘ke-SHI-te-e’ (caps = higher pitch). Maybe Japanese people actually do that when they get stuck on a word and want to drag it out, but the sudden pitch drop from ‘SHI’ to ‘te’ was weird for me. It should have been ‘ke-SHI-TE’ (ending high). Also, after that, at 1:44, he says「それでは」‘so-RE-de-HA’ when he essentially wants to say ‘well then/anyway’. That intonation is very American (or at least, very ‘English-speaker-y’) – imagine a sing-song ‘well, anyway-YY’. The classic intonation, which you’ll catch in almost any Japanese conversation where it appears, is ‘so-RE-DE-ha’. It’s a really common phrase, used both for moving on to the next subject in a conversation and for farewells. One example: The Rising of the Shield Hero Episode 7, in the middle of the episode right at end of the interlude and just before the main cast checks into an inn. A lady has just finished going over some merchandise with the protagonist and says「それでは」before taking her leave. You can hear the intonation difference very clearly.
Again, at present, I’m definitely nowhere near as good as Matt is overall. I’m sure some parts of his experience are very inspiring, and others might be helpful for other learners. However, since a question was asked about mistakes… well, there you go. I definitely make intonation mistakes too, so I’m not perfect either, but this is what I could catch. (In any case, my native accent for English is different from his – it’s neither from the US nor the UK – so the intonation mistakes I’m prone to are likely quite different, and I’m doing my best to work on them.)
3 Likes
Not to belabor this discussion (I don’t even have a side I’m on), but I’m not sure this is quite the right metric for comparison. Matt and Refold is geared at people who want to become fluent. George has a lot of experience teaching people who “want to learn Japanese” in some vaguer sense. Most methods, textbooks, and teachers get students to an intermediate stage that is nowhere near fluent.
Are there examples of George’s students reaching some level of fluency? If so, then George’s traditional methods are a good example of working in contrast to Matt’s methods. If not, then I’d say George’s methods are actually quite poor in achieving what Refold’s supposed goals are.
2 Likes
I think that’s self selection bias. In any group, the most motivated individuals are going to succeed regardless of method. That’s not in question.
George was just an example of using traditional methods. And of course there are people who have gone on to fluency with traditional methods. They’re all over YouTube.
The question is, what is best use of my time for the next 3 years?
With traditional methods, I am guaranteed to get to at least intermediate level like you said. With Refold, I’m dubious of their claims.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I don’t think immersion works. I just think that it would be better to get to that intermediate stage traditionally and use immersion to supplement that rather than as the method in and of itself.
3 Likes
Late to the convo, but I’ve had some valuable experience from active and passive listening. Since I’m only a month and a half into my studies I don’t really have a large vocab, but while I was in the shower I heard the speaker of my podcast say 丸い. Thanks to Wanikani I knew this meant round. Suddenly I heard it again, and again. Now I never fail that word during my reviews because my brain is associating experiences with it.
Likewise, I was watching a speedrunner play Legend of Zelda yesterday and kept hearing them say ほろ and やっぱり a whole bunch. I looked both of these up because I kept hearing them over and over, and now I notice them being said all the time! That’s one more piece of the Japanese language puzzle!
I’ve also been doing Anki, Wanikani, playing animal crossing in Japanese, and Genki Textbook. Like the refold strategy suggests, I’m not really understanding the things I’m watching / Listening to / playing. But every day I learn something new from Anki, Wani, and Genki, and what do you know most times I notice these things while immersing! And boy oh boy does it feel good.
Just thought I’d pitch in with my experience so far with trying to immerse as often as I can.
3 Likes
I happened to stumble upon this video today, and in the last minute of it Matt points out his own past intonation mistakes (and explains in the comments how that video of him speaking is from early 2017 and from before he began working on pitch accent), which I found pretty interesting:
1 Like