Eh… like I said, maybe I’m being strict, but native isn’t really any level of proficiency, since even a 5 year old is a native and I know more words than them in Japanese.
So that would only leave “can be mistaken for a native,” but like you said he doesn’t really bring it up again. I just have trouble taking him seriously after hearing it.
Sure, I said it’s not that great, but it’s not bad either. It’s just not amazing or shocking to get to, I guess.
true dat
A friend of mine downloaded a spanish c2 exam, and we were perplexed by some of the questions ourselves.
Regarding the topic, hmmm, well, the feeling of fluency is something subjective. I do believe there are people out there that can do it but for the average person it’s nigh impossible to achieve, so whenever i hear that kind of claims I approach with caution, skeptical, because I know that I am average but in search of some wisdom
The only people who’ve made these claims and have provided some compelling video evidence to back it up are some of the people who’ve gone super serious with the AJATT method. Though I’ve incorporated some AJATT techniques into my own studying, the level of extreme immersion the people who’ve advanced that quickly is to the extent that I’m not willing to do it (nor would most people I’d guess). Khatzumoto, the guy who pioneered the method, would even do stuff like wear earbuds inside a movie theater to simultaneously listen to Japanese while watching a movie. Yeah, like I said, a little too extreme for me…
let me chime in, since part of this thread is moving in a strange direction.
you need B1 to work in various fields in europe, for example as a nurse in germany. B1 is the lowest you can get for “functional in daily life”, plus some limited ability in a chosen field.
anything below that goes into “train where?” “food how much?” “eat cake?” territory and only has to do with fluency in so far, as you can probably utter such phrases.
you being functional then requires extremities, which you hopefully have (someone without hands to wave around and fingers to point at stuff is out of luck).
now, fluency can also be A1, speaking phrases and greetings. it only refers to ease and reaction time, and is not the same as competence. the european reference frame cannot measure fluency, it measures your actual ability. i can sing 残酷な天使のテーゼ fluently, that makes me fluent (in one song), but not competent in anything.
what you can inspect in japanese in 6 months is a very shaky A2. you can be as fluent as you want, it’s not even nearly enough for daily life, and worlds apart from what people think “fluent” means.
even B2 is still very primitive, but now you can say most of what you want to express, and in japanese, this takes years, and preferably in the country. this is what most people would think “fluent” means - and sorry, that’s attainable in spanish (if you study hard), but japanese… no way.
I would wager that the possibility of doing something like this also vastly has to do with how similar the language is to your native language, or other languages you know. Spanish and English are both latin based and even English speakers with no knowledge of Spanish can fairly easily pick up on the structure and patterns of words within sentences, because they are fairly similar to English in that way (with minor exceptions like adjectives coming after nouns). Japanese has such a vastly different sentence structure to English, and many things simply omitted and left to context, and of course particle words that have no literal translation to English. I think it would be much harder to actually learn Japanese this way. A friend of my boyfriend says he learned Japanese from watching anime and can understand it even when out of the room listening to it. I would wager that tone and repetitive/cliche writing have a lot to do with that. A lot of meaning can be conveyed by tone and pacing alone, also sound effects and musical cues. He probably understands the general feel of the conversation more than the actual words like he thinks he does. I’ve never seen him actually speak Japanese.
Side note: Am I the only one who thinks that Ted Talks are more often pep-talk and ego-stroking than actual substance? I have honestly grown an aversion to them…
TEDx Talks are all over the place. I’m not sure I’d put them in quite the same category as the main TED Talks.
I thought before watching TED Talks that they were motivational speeches lol
The one I like the best is about how bilingual babies process sounds and how their brains work vs monolinguals. I like the thought of children being bilingual/ multilingual.
I agree, children being bilingual/multilingual is really cool! I grew up with Afrikaans, and English. I’m equally comfortable in both languages, and sometimes I have a little trouble remembering whether someone told me something in English, or in Afrikaans.
I think learning a new language would be much easier for bilingual people than monolingual people. I’m already used to making certain Japanese sounds that English only speakers often have trouble with, just because Afrikaans has similar sounds.
Something occurred to me while reading all the responses. I can already understand a fair amount of Dutch, and German without studying them at all, because Afrikaans, among other things, is a derivative of these two languages. So I might be able to learn how to speak Dutch or German, in the way the video describes, because there is a lot less that I need to learn, compared to something like Japanese. But even in my hypothetical example, there’d still be so many gaps that need to filled in, like I’d still need to learn how to read and write the language.
It seems the big take away from this discussion is, that it’s pointless to try and create a general estimate for how long it will take anyone on earth, to learn any language. There are just too many factors to take into account.
Another take away from the video that everyone seems to agree with is: That regardless of what language you are trying to learn, you need practice listing to, and speaking it, and that’s obvious, it’s been know for a long time. The important difference is, that you can’t only listen to, and speak the language, you also need to learn about the grammar, and learn the meanings of specific words. All of these different parts of language learning need to be mixed together in the right ratios at the right time, otherwise you won’t be able to get the most out of your studies, and the right ratio of these elements is different for each person. Am I correct with this understanding?
Did not watch the video since the title made it seem like the standard clickbaity YT fare.
Unless you are Korean or Turkish and have looots of free time i don’t see it happening.
Of course in theory it is possible for everyone, but in practice since these languages are from the same family ( Altaic ) native speakers from those languages stands the most chance, but even then it is extremely unlikely.
I’m Turkish, i have loots of free time and i have a Japanese friend whose been helping me on daily basis. On top of that as i mentioned above i have a big advantage since Japanese and Turkish are in the same language family. This helps tremendously as i don’t have to force myself to go through an artificial phase where i translate everything in my brain beforehand/deciding which word goes where in sentence structure ( they share the same structure to an eerie degree 99% of the time ).
Even by her extremely high standards i’ve made tremendous strides since i started ( October 5th ) but i don’t see myself reaching native level anytime soon.
As i said in theory it’s possible and there may even be few extraordinary people who accomplishes that in practice, but ( extreme ) exceptions does not make the rule and you should not judge yourself by those standards.
You’re talking about this, right?
Yep and as i’ve said both in general sentence structure and expressions/words used they are similar almost to an eerie degree
Have you read that article?
Not wanting to derail this thread, but could you give some examples about the similarities? Genuinely interested, I wouldn’t have thought there could be obvious similarities between those languages.
Edit: Especially for grammar. Words can easily travel to different languages, but grammatical structure doesn’t as much.
@Leebo i can’t read it as wikipedia is banned in Turkey.
@banira i was thinking of opening a thread in this subject, actually i have been preparing examples to highlight the similarities. Should be ready in a few days, i hope we can discuss it with more detail without the worry of derailing any threads then.
Out of curiosity, I plugged this guy’s name into my university library database and all I got were papers about sports psychology, nothing linguistics related. I have a feeling there’s an awful lot of anecdotal evidence being used all around here.
At this point, claims of fast fluency aren’t worth much of anything unless someone brings actual evidence to back them up other than “I totally did this. Believe me.” Sure Jan, whatever you say.
It talks about how it’s a hypothesized language family that has almost no supporters among modern linguists. I’m not trying to say there aren’t similarities between the various languages, surely that’s what inspired the hypothesis, but it doesn’t seem to have support and seems like a controversial claim at best.
Interesting… I wonder how he got the gig. Maybe I could give a Tedx talk as well!
@Leebo can’t speak from a scientific perspective, just going off from my own experience and from that experience i assure you that they are as close as a two languages can be in sentence structure.
Heck they are even close in verb conjugation, which is quite surprising since Turkish is a unique language in verb forms with a agglutinative approach.
My friend who has been living here since 99 also agrees and we have been preparing examples to highlight it.
Anyways, hopefully you can decide on your own regarding the perceived similarities between these languages in a few days.
Again, it’s not a question of if they’re similar or not… It’s the question of if they are in the same language family, which is not really the same thing. Things that didn’t evolve together can have similarities for other reasons. I’m not going to weigh in on what languages are in what families over linguists.
Live your dreams friend!
I plan to give a talk next month about how I learned how to ice a cake one afternoon and became a highly accomplished pastry chef in just two months!
This actually has lead me down an interesting rabbit hole with his references to Krashen’s language acquisition theories. May delve into that for a bit then report back if I find anything interesting. There could be something of merit in the way he’s presenting it or it may be entirely out of context, let’s see.