貴様の負けだ！！！！
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What always gets me about claims like this is the insistence that people don’t study their own native languages. Maybe not when they’re a little kid learning for the first time, but when they get into school, English speakers still have English class. And you have to go through that if you want an understanding of the language that’s deeper than just being able to socialize on a basic level.
I also wouldn’t be comfortable making the claim that being able to socialize is the end goal for most language learners. I know I’d like to be able to do things like have decent workplace communication skills and read books, something these methods tend to conveniently gloss over.
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You can indeed brute force some languages and it’s very common to read about people learning English by playing videogames. I just don’t think I’ve actually seen the same for Japanese.
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Pffff, 6 months is too long. Daniel Tammet became fluent in Icelandic in one week on live TV. He is also an autistic savant and calculated pi past 22,000 digits so…
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This is so true. The other day I walked up to a Japanese person and told them “watashi desu konnichi wa jouzu anata” and they smiled at me and then quickly backed away, clearly impressed by my native-level mastery of the language. I was able to achieve this superhuman feat after only 2 hours of browsing /r/anime and eating a box of Pocky. Later I was riding the bus to a sushi restaurant and I proudly told everyone that I am a self-assessed N1 and the whole bus clapped. 
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the feels man. you made it!
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the reason this doesn’t work is that you first have to know the kanji with a minimum of 1 reading each to be able to look it up, that’s tiring and not “playing” anymore.
the reason all this pure immersion learning works for romance/germanic languages is the huge number of cognates and the fact that many grammar elements are shared.
grammar isn’t even really a problem in language learning. even langs like russian with it’s cases aren’t so tough in the end, because grammar is not something you memorize, it’s something you learn, and then you understand it.
repeated exposure will then do a lot of work for you.
japanese vocab has nothing in common with our languages, apart from the katakana words. it’s writing systems are a big obstacle, because even if you know all characters, you can’t be sure of the reading, so the main tool to learn by immersion, reading, is not accessible.
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In short, it is…sorta.
As others have said, he doesnt really explain what his definition of “knowing” a language is and he focuses mainly on speaking.
The one thing he does say is that at 3000 words, you know a language (iirc). As someone who knows over 10,000 words in japanese, I can tell you this is extremely misleading and borderline bullshit. Yes with enough grammar you can express all you really need to express, but unfortunately when youre talking with natives and reading native material they dont just stick to those words. No they pull from a pool of tens of thousands of words. And sometimes you can guess the meaning through context, but a lot of times you cant.
All I’ll say is, the person has the bar set real low so he can tell you you did it in a quick 6 months. He makes some good points, but his overarching statement is pretty worthless imo. Its just something to get peoples attention.
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The other issue with the “know this small set of words and you know 95% of everything said” is that the 95% is just glue for the 5% of content words that actually hold the meaning of the sentences, more often than not.
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Yeah, Im sure pronouns make up like 10% or so of japanese or any language. But knowing all your pronouns wont mean that you understand 10% or so of what is thrown at you.
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I’ll bet he knows my uncle. Is that how he learned all the cheat codes?
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This is an interesting article on this subject.
The main takeaway for me was that there are some people who are really quick at learning languages, and the more languages you know, the easier it may be to learn others. So I guess there are people who could become fluent-ish in Japanese in 6 months, but probably not most people.
I’ll walk that back a little, though. I do believe that if starting from scratch, we went to an intensive Japanese language immersion program for six months with hours of classes every day, where we did a homestay with a Japanese family and were forbidden to speak any other language, we might in the end get pretty ペラペラ.
Unfortunately that kind of program/situation is out of reach for most people.
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Yeah, it all depends on what level “fluent” actually means. And not everyone’s six months are equal. It kind of loses some meaning if you say that 6 months assumes that you are singularly devoted to that language the entire time… because barely anyone can do that, so we have to assume people aren’t totally giving up their way of life.
And I just end up having more time to study languages as an ALT than a salaryman will.
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Dead!
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A bit late, but I just watched the video, and it seems pretty obvious to me, since he said that 3000 core words in English + basic grammar = fluent.
Basically, somewhere between A2 and B1 on the European scale. You’d be able to have everyday communication with people, plus a bit more technical in your area of interest (work, hobby). You’d be functional, if unrefined, in everyday life.
That does sound doable in 6 months with the strategy mentioned.
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He does throw various numbers out, but I didn’t recall him actually saying those were the thresholds he was referring to for the “if you can do this that equals fluency and you can do it in 6 months.” But maybe I’m being too strict about his actual wording. He was like “3000 words is 95% of the language you’ll hear” but as we said, that still means you will basically still be in the dark most of the time because those remaining 5% of words are really important for comprehension. I do agree that you can do that in 6 months, but it doesn’t really align with what people call fluent (or certainly not within the arm’s reach of native level he suggests it is).
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Well, that’s not what he said. He literally says that those 5% are “icing on the cake”.
He also expresses many times that conversation at that level of fluency would involve a lot of body language and so on, and poor grammar.
He does hand-wave the native level part. He says that it took him 6 months to fluency in Chinese and “a little more until native level” (plus literal hand-waving).
Well, it doesn’t align with the level of fluency I want, but I don’t think he is disingenuous with his use of the word. It’s still functional fluency. 
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Basically, I would have no problem with it if he said “you can get to B1 in 6 months and then C1 in less than two years” or something.
But “native” is so weird. And B1 is not that great.
“Native” doesn’t even fit on the scale, because C2 is so crazy high, it’s a higher level of proficiency than many natives ever achieve, but you still wouldn’t be “native” if they could tell it’s your second language. Like, a professor teaching a subject in a foreign language is probably approaching C2, but they will likely still have an accent.
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I just jumped around through the video again, and I couldn’t see a mention of native level except at the beginning were he said he challenged himself to reach native fluency in 2 years, (and that it took him “a little bit longer” than 6 months to get there).
Well, yeah, but that’s kinda what I heard him say 
It was not explicit, though, so who knows what he really meant.
It’s enough to become a French national, though.
I don’t think “native” means “could be mistaken for a native speaker” (or at least it shouldn’t). Just that you have the same level of proficiency as a native. So C1~C2 would fit the bill, I guess
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