The Japanese lover phenomenon has been documented innumerable times. This is clearly the best way to learn, but that isn’t a viable option for many. 
If you don’t mind, can you elaborate on that? Which school(s) and where, and what was the curriculum, and how well do you think it worked for you?
Where can I find one? Sign me up.
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I was part of KUINEP which was a year of study in Kyoto University. One could chose any topic they wished to study, alongside intensive japanese courses.
Some students could claim the credits back in their home countries, but for me it was a leap year in between my 2nd and 3rd year of University. I had applied for a scholarship, which allowed me to pursue this year fully financed.
It brought me from no japanese (« where is the bank? » type of level) to intermediate japanese; but once back I could not progress that much further (which is what I am trying to do now as I think it is mostly due to lack of kanji knowledge to build up vocabulary - it’s hard to remember new words when I don’t use them in practice).
It is definitely something I would recommend to everyone. I had during my career opportunities coming from this directly or indirectly (« your cv stood out because of Japan ») but more importantly it is personally and culturally enriching, which has served me my whole life. I plan to do something similar for my kids (in Japan or elsewhere) - that’s how much I think it really brings in terms of value.
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Yes, I think that matches my feeling based on what I saw when I was studying at Yamasa language school. I think also that I saw at least one person go from zero to conversationally solid lower intermediate in six months in their speaking focussed programme. That person was naturally extroverted and loved talking to anybody so they got a lot of speaking practice outside class too…
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And here I thought I was the only one engaging in such behavior.
I did a three month stint at Yamasa many years ago and at the end of it I thought if I stayed a year I might break through the wall, but alas, life had other designs upon my time. And the years have a nasty habit of slipping through your fingers without you noticing until the sands of time appear short.
If you’ve cracked the nut on this you could make a LOT of money by opening up a school or two. Even the US State Department which has decades of experience teaching English natives Japanese says it takes 88 weeks and 2200 class hours to achieve what they describe as “General Professional Proficiency”.
Even if you don’t give yourself a day off in that 8 months that’s 240 days times 4 hours per day, or 960 hours. Sounds extremely optimistic, but hey, if you have the system, where do I sign up?
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What about non-English speaking Japanese boyfriends?
I don’t even feel like the solution I’ve arrived at is even novel anymore - it just hasn’t been well-implemented by a big player. Comprehensible input, germane cognitive load chunking and eliminating infinitely doubling SRS timing systems in favor of spaced graded reading content = a process that works naturally with the way human brains actually learn and retain new information - by putting it IMMEDIATELY to use, along with basic dictation and aural processing SRS to distinguish long vowels and consonant stops, homophones, and a kanji SRS system that teaches kanji via vocabulary instead of the other way around and avoids other mistakes that many kanji SRS are currently making…
The framework skeleton for the system as I’ve described it already exists. Should I get a kickstarter started so we can have a few natives write out the tens of thousands of curated sentences needed to implement it, along with the creation of the website and the 100,000 digital flashcards needed?
You’re right 
Ought to work too. For some reason there was no such case in my class though (which I never thought about even thought genders were somewhat balanced in the group).
I am not surprised. The ratio of foreign male/Japanese girlfriend or wife to foreign female/Japanese boyfriend or husband or other possible combos is, based on my experiences (23 years and counting) and all the mixed nationality couples I know (a lot) very heavily skews towards the first case. Have had lots of interesting conversations around this (with foreign friends and Japanese friends - male and female and other).
Edit: Which does not jive with a 2016 study (Japanese government) I just looked up where the number of Japanese men marrying a foreign woman was about 3:1 vs Japanese women marring a foreign man. My personal data set is clearly skewed based on group(s) most of my friends are from, which while not limited to and does includes a variety, is certainly a little more heavy on people from a similar background to myself and mostly male.
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Nice to know I am not alone in this. Granted all of the ones I do own predate having electronic and online material like we do today. Jisho is so much easier and faster than pulling out that 2.5kg full kanji dictionary I own. Although I do still love having it around.
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The US State Department has effectively infinite resources and presumably the best language specialists money can buy. They could implement this tomorrow if they felt it would reduce the language acquisition time for Japanese to less than half they currently estimate. Why haven’t they?
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While you have every reason to be skeptical of some person on the internet claiming they’ve made a breakthrough with little to show for it (so am I), expecting the government to be first on the ball for anything groundbreaking in the IT field seems a little optimistic. Projects of passion often die to committees and red tape in the public sector.
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Hard disagree on this. I’ve started studying Japanese 10 months ago spending roughly two to three hours daily working on it and I’m nowhere close to that level. I also speak 4 other languages so I’m used to the drill and have been significantly more effective in my studies than most of the first-time language learners I see in these forums, so I’m probably faring better than the “average person” for that reason alone.
Of course one big factor is that it’s all self-study, I don’t have a tutor guiding me. Having a native/fluent speaker of Japanese by my side at all times would certainly help a lot, but not to the point where I could imagine becoming fluent in Japanese after ~900h of study. It’s completely unrealistic IMO. Even double that is very ambitious I think.
There’s only so much content your brain can assimilate in a relatively short amount of time.
Now if you say that after 900h of Japanese lessons you could be a solid intermediate speaker able to use Japanese effectively in all sorts of situations, then yes, I agree, but that’s nowhere close to “near-native”.
Improvements to processes and methods can of course yield better results, and I’m sure you could streamline and optimize the process, but returns tend to be asymptotic and not exponential. Again, in the end the limiting factor is not so much data presentation (although it is of course important) but the ability of our brains to memorize an assimilate these concepts and constructs.
I hope I don’t sound too antagonistic with this comment, I think it’s an interesting discussion, but I always feel like chiming in when people give (in my opinion) unrealistic timelines for language acquisition because it’s a good way to demotivate inexperienced learners when they eventually figure out that, when all is said and done, they aren’t fluent in Japanese after 6 months…
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Specifically as a response to US government websites - have you ever used one? By the time each facet of government involvement has skimmed their portion of the budget from the top, what is left over is about enough for an indie developer on Fiverr to throw something together in about 7 minutes.
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I don’t think the word “near-native” means what you think it means…
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Are you saying that near-native is at an even lower level than that? Or are you (mistakenly) implying it’s higher?
a) This isn’t IT. It’s language acquisition. Technology can facilitate acquisition, but the problem here isn’t the lack of tech, it is whether or not the basic science of language acquisition is understood well enough. I won’t make a claim to know definitively one way or another, although I do own enough language textbooks, including those inherited from grandparents in the late 50s, early 60s, to have seen the transition in the last 50+ years of how Japanese is taught.
b) To summarily dismiss state department employees under the guise of “government is dumb” is disrespectful of the people who dedicate their career to the job. I would hope for better from this forum, but unfortunately kind of expected that response.
c) The government funds groundbreaking research year in and year out. The very medium with which this communication is made possible was funded by such research. You don’t recognize what is being funded today for the same reason that if, in the late 70s and early 80s you were alive and someone said to you, “The TCP/IP and ARPANET research being funded by DARPA will change the lives of pretty much everyone on the planet.” You would have said, “Huh? That stupid government, that wasted all my money in Vietnam? You expect those people to overcome the insurmountable red tape wall?”
So yeah, make your case why the state department can’t or won’t adopt new methodologies, but don’t do based on tired tropes of government ineptitude.
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Near native after 900h of practice is ridiculous, period. There’s absolutely no argument here. I consider myself near-native in English and it took me thousands of hours over like a decade to get here. And it’s much easier for a frenchie like myself to get near-native in English than in Japanese for obvious reasons.
Language learning is asymptotic, not exponential or even linear. Near-native is a very, very high bar to clear. You have people living and working in Japan for years who can’t claim to be “near-native”.
The generally accepted time to reach N1 is around 4000h, and N1 is a very long way from “near-native”. You claim that you could achieve a vastly higher level in less than a quarter of the time. It’s preposterous.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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Perhaps he was referring to a more practical application of government IT, such as the implementation of the Obamacare application website that many of us remember (trying) to use, and which was woefully underprepared for that task? There is a track record of public-facing government-funded websites underperforming.
Over the top hyperbole with no actual data to support the claim.
Honestly, this thread is devolving into “bash the government” which plays right into the hands of the divisive partisanship that is tearing the country apart. See prior post for context on why this is just silly.
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