I guess I see a difference between “a lot of Japanese” and “immersion.” If you’re out at sea drowning, you have to learn to swim. But if your boat is right there, you can be “surrounded” by water and never learn to swim, because you don’t have to.
Truly having no option but to communicate in a foreign language feels like what I’d call immersion, but maybe that’s just me.
EDIT: I live in Japan, I have a Japanese girlfriend who doesn’t speak English, but since I am an English teacher, and I consume a lot of English media, I don’t consider my experience to be immersion. It’s a lot of good exposure to Japanese, but I just draw the line in a different place I guess.
I would call that total immersion (a term I’ve heard thrown around much more inaccurately by language companies), but there’s really no right or wrong way to define it, so we already have a common understanding.
Thanks for bringing this up. Adults being unable to learn a new language (etc.) is an oft quoted excuse based old views and anecdotal evidence.
@crollins7 as @Sextron stated you need deliberate study to have anything stick. I too live in Japan. I pretty much started learning when I got here two years ago. The two months prior to moving to Japan I learned the basics (e.g., introductions, greetings, and the syllabaries). Since I live out in the countryside, I had to put a lot of effort into studying so that I could have some independence. After spending a ton of time studying going to classes purposefully meeting people to have conversation exchanges and such, I feel that I’ve reached a point where I feel more confident in my ability to communicate in various contexts. I wouldn’t quite say that I’m fluent, but I can hold my own.
I would say the best advice is to not be so self-conscious about your mistakes and start speaking. If this means that you need to find a conversation partner outside of your household to feel comfortable, so be it. Everyone who’s learning goes through the broken speech and babbling phase. But the more you speak, the more you will improve. The more you are corrected, the more opportunities to grow. If you stay positive and try not to sweat the small stuff, it will eventually become easier and easier. Reading is a great way to acquire new vocabulary as well as cement established grammatical patterns in your mind as well.
Being fluent in a language is about being able to identify and apply thousands of new concepts without effort.
Studying a grammar rule and applying it without any difficulty whatsoever is being fluent in that concept. In this case, you’re not fluent in the language, you’re fluent in a concept. For example, I’m studying for JLPT N4 now. I can’t consider myself fluent in the language at all. However, there are already concepts formed in my head/頭 that I won’t get wrong anymore. When I write them to my language partners and they tell me that I wrote it 100% right, I get a click. It’s working. Am I fluent? Of course not. I was just able to apply a few concepts. That’s the point.
Language learning is not about blindly studying until you get the click.
Language learning is about being able to identify the small clicks every day and using them as motivation to keep going.
Noticing those clicks depends on you. Valuing those clicks also depends on you. You might want to say a word to your wife/kid in Japanese and you don’t know it (you created a need). Then, you go and search for it. Finally, you apply it. You apply it enough times that it sticks. Your wife won’t care less if you can’t say the whole sentence, but she will notice that you were able to insert a small concept there (a word) and that you didn’t stop using it since then.
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day–if you live long enough–most people get what they deserve.” - Charlie Munger
I’m maybe the wrong person to talk about this, in that I’m not as far along in japanese as I have previously been in Russian or Hebrew (or potentially even Spanish, though that was over 10 years ago, so the memory’s a little hazy). Still it does seem to me that the “clicking” will be at different levels for different skills and in different contexts.
To illustrate this point, I can think of WK clicking. Pretty much every item from level 1-10, and a smattering of kanji and vocab (maybe 20-30% I think, but I don’t know really; all the kanji and vocab I’ve burned and some I’ve not yet burned) is clicked into me at this point, ie: i can read and understand those kanji and kanji-related vocab in pretty much all contexts, provided they’re not using an obsolete or special alternate handwritten form. Then there’s meaning but not reading clicked vocab and kanji, where I can easily identify the meaning based on context but the readings will jump around in my head with neither assuming the role of onyomi or kunyomi– this is what I’m estimating at roughly 30-40% of the kanij I’ve learned after the first 10 levels. Conversely, there’s the odd situation of words whose sounds I remember but whose meanings I’ve forgotten, which I’ll liberally estimate at 7%, and the rest I think I know but don’t consider the knowledege clicked in, i.e.: I don’t yet trust that I can identify it outside of the WK interface with ease, or in all typefaces, or more usually that I’m not solid on the reading, meaning, usage, or all three.
I feel the same complicated way about my WK knowledge as I do about my grammar knowledge, my reading capacity, my speaking ability you name it. I expect it’ll keep on being that way until the floor moves up sufficiently that I find few enough disfluencies in communicating in daily life that I can simply talk/google translate around them without losing the flow of the moment i’m in. I’m hoping that’s in two years time, but who knows.
I never experienced any clicking in Japanese, personally, but if you want to improve but don’t want to switch the entirety of the household into Japanese 100% every day, you can use one of these approaches:
Set a daily hour when you, your wife, and your kidlet only have to communicate in Japanese. After the hour make sure you actually understood what was happening.
Divide the day into 3 parts - morning, afternoon, evening (until the kidlet goes to sleep or about an hour before you and your wife go to sleep). During that part only speak in Japanese. Switch ‘shifts’ by the week/month so you’ll learn how to talk about certain time-related activities. (This might actually be good for your kidlet to learn typical child-language at home, and for you to be exposed to it.)
Pick a day or two a week as your Japanese-day, from half an hour after getting up (to strategise what’s happening that day) until your kid goes to sleep (to figure out what actually happened that day).
Naturally, revert to English during emergencies and/or time-sensitive situations when it’s absolutely imperative for you to be understood.
(At no point stop speaking to your kid entirely in English yourself, especially if you you shift to more Japanese at home. If you lose the habit, the kid will lose a lot of progress later on and might lose a lot of their skills on that front.)
It sounds very artificial and I guess it is, but I suspect that after the initial discomfort of getting used to something like this it’ll become a good and unique family bonding experience as well as a good learning experience
It also depends on how you treated your body the previous years. Alcohol, bad sleeping cycles, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, lack of brain stimulation… all that leads to inferior learning. Age influences learning but not as much as any of the things I mentioned.
Hell, even if none of those were an option and it was 1965 you could still count the strokes, identify the radical easily and look it up in a paper dictionary. There are many ways you could both look up the word, hazard a decent guess as to the pronunciation (phono-semantic compounds are a thing), and make a guess at its meaning if you know at least part of it.
The irony of that post seems to be that it sounds like someone who knows absolutely zero about Japanese or Kanji.
Not fluent in Japanese, but I’ll talk from my English learning perspective.
I agree with others in that a foreign language doesn’t just “click”. There’s not a point in your learning when you just say “Oh, I get it. Now I’m master of [Insert Language]”.
At least for me, it was more like stopping one day and realizing how much you can do with the language. Really, learning a language is a never-ending process. Of course, there’s a point when you have a solid enough background that makes learning the rest there is to learn easier, but that only comes after years of practice/study.
When I first passed the TOEFL test (as in, I got a score that put me in the “advanced student” category) and stopped actively studying English I thought I was pretty fluent, and that there was not much room for improvement for me. How wrong I was. Back then I struggled to watch English media without subtitles and since I didn’t have much chance to practice speaking, having conversations in English was pretty tough too. I’ve improved so much since then, yet I know I’ll keep learning English my whole life. Same for Japanese, though that has been a more exciting roller coaster to ride, I have to say.
I’ve never really understood this either but if you try hard enough you can just not learn Japanese in Japan. No shade specifically to this poster, working on a Naval Base is way different. I spent some time living in Japan and would meet foreigners all the time who just “didn’t have interest” or “just never really picked it up” ??? And they got around ok, even in a smaller city where we lived. They were certainly always a burden to the Japanese people we interacted with, at the stores or restaurants. But what quality of life do you have if you can’t speak with people around you ??? It was always weird and kinda sad to me.
In defense of that tho, If you don’t know what someone is saying to you, you can’t ever really learn it? Unless you put effort into learning it? Somethings will sound more familiar but that’s not really learning, ya know?
In the Google Translate/Google Maps world that we live today, it is certainly possible to live anywhere an not pick the language. I’ve met lots of people that have that experience living overseas.
In the particular case of countries like Japan or Korea, expats tend to live in their “Gaijin bubbles” that helps them to do this. But it really depends on every individual experience. I’ve met some people that had no option but to learn Japanese because they had no access to such comfortable circles.
Well, I can relate to your situation on a number of levels. I live in Japan but have the luxury of a fluent, native-speaker (my wife) who takes care of everything for me, mainly because it’s easier for everyone involved. On the other hand, almost no one else in my world speaks English, and I push myself to study and interact with more people every day, and go to language classes at least twice a week. I also listen very carefully to what people around me are saying, and make sure I repeat it to myself or to them, and maybe search words in my phone so I don’t forget them. Wanikani vocab has been surprisingly useful in daily life, too.
At some point after the year two mark, I started feeling oddly confident. That was a “click” moment, where I knew I could talk myself through or out of any situation, even if I had to revert to caveman grammar sometimes. I still get into situations where someone asks me something, and I need a second go around to absorb the question, but even those are getting less frequent. The bottom line is that the feeling of shyness or fatalism that made speaking a chore in the beginning just sort of lifted away over the course of a few weeks.
You can tell you’re getting there when you know things like vocab or grammar, but have no idea why you know it or where you learned it from. That’s when things start to fall into place.
In fact, I really recommend avoiding the bad habit of asking “why?” about grammar rules and such. It never leads to a productive discussion, since native speakers rarely can explain the “why” behind their own language.
I started studying Japanese in my early 40s. After 6 years I can carry on a general conversation fairly easily, but my Japanese reading level is that of 4th or 5th grade child.
OTH, I studied Latin and French in high school and I can read a newspaper in any Romance language(i.e.ones that I never studied) with higher fluency than a Japanese newspaper.
It’s Possible, well it’s really only possible if you can speak English, or in Japan possibly also Mandarin. But if you only speak something like Czech, you’re fucked.
However, unless you’re on a Military base, your quality of life can’t be that high. One thing tends to be common among the people who end up complaining about everything in Japan and the people, their lack of Japanese skills.
You may be able to live in Japan without speaking Japanese, but there are a lot of things you won’t be able to participate in.
This is, sadly, the case of many JETs and international students in Japan. I guess I should have added that it’s possible but not necessarily pleasant.
I have to disagree. Surely if you put enough effort into it you can “make it click” even above 40. It may be a lot harder, but it should still be achievable.
