How I Learned Japanese
I was first introduced to learning Japanese in my freshman year in highschool when my friend, Tatiana who’s half-Puerto Rican and half-Japanese suggested it. She gave me a random CD-Rom (yes I’m that old) of some obscure Japanese learning program. I took the CD-Rom home, booted it up onto my computer, followed all the little prompts to install the thing, and started trying to learn Japanese. The program was not very effective unfortunately. The only words I took away from the experience were クレジットカード (credit card) and ピンク (pink). Not all that useful considering they were just kana-fied forms of English words I already knew.
Years later when I was nearing the end of my Bachelor’s degree, I was getting into self-help books. One of the self-help books suggested creating a 5 year plan where you would detail what your life would look like in 5 years and work backwards from that goal to create a little sub-goals that would get you closer to your main goals. In that plan, aside from finding a job and buying a new car were a few other items including Learn Japanese. The only methods I had heard about at the time were old programs like Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone. Initially that’s where I had planned on starting. Thankfully I never used them as I feel like Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are the Duolingo of yesteryear; best to avoid.
Luckily for me I had a friend that was also wanting to learn Japanese and he introduced me to All Japanese All the Time (AJATT) during a gap semester between my Bachelors and my Masters. I would not have achieved the level of fluency I currently obtained without learning about AJATT from that friend.
AJATT is pretty simple in concept, but a bit difficult to implement in practice. It was aimed more at people that don’t currently live in Japan and just as it’s name implies, it meant trying to do as much Japanese stuff everyday as you possibly could. From what I remember based on my experience with AJATT, the method revolved around a few key ideas:
Create an immersion environment
Learn all the common-use Kanji
Learn vocabulary words in the context of sentences
Use a spaced repetition system (SRS) to review content
So based on these ideas I began creating an immersion environment. There’s a saying along the lines of, “ If you want to change, don’t change yourself, change your environment.” At the time I was living in house with a number of roommates so what I did was take everything that I owned that was in English that I didn’t need for University, and dropped it off at my parent’s. From there I slowly started to build a library of manga in Japanese, changed the operating systems on my phone and computer to Japanese, and and started researching Japanese shows and YouTube creators.
Finding shows in Japanese was really important as I would take the audio from shows I had seen once with subtitles and put them onto an MP3 player so that I could listen to Japanese from the moment I woke up, to the moment I went to sleep. The immersion environment was key as it helped me get used to the way Japanese flowed. It taught me the specific rhythm with which Japanese is spoken. It strengthened my pronunciation, provided ample vocab review opportunities for the words I knew, and provided an endless source of new vocabulary words that I would add to a Google Doc (in a later post I’ll share how to go about creating your own environment in detail).
A bit before getting the immersion environment set up, I used an SRS app called Anki to learn the hiragana and katakana (I’d write them down on graph paper to help remember them). After finishing the kana deck and being all proud of myself for having done so, I go back to my friend and say, “I’m ready to begin learning vocab and grammar.” He says back to me, “Ha! Didn’t you know that there are these Chinese characters that are used in Japanese called the Kanji and that you need to learn about 2000 of them.” I still remember thinking, “Oh, crap. What did I get myself into?” My friend though, told me about how Katz from AJATT used a book called Remembering the Kanji to learn all of those common-use kanji.
So while getting the immersion environment set up, I continued reviewing the kana with Anki, and downloaded a new deck that paired with the Remembering the Kanji book. I don’t know who’s idea it was, it could have been my own or maybe it was Katz’s, but I decided that I wouldn’t start learning any vocab or grammar until I finished RTK. So that’s what I did. I used RTK, Anki, and a website called Kanji Koohii to initially learn about 20 kanji a day. I changed my desktop wallpaper to a giant list of kanji in the RTK order. I bought an RTK poster and as I learned new kanji, I’d mark them off on the poster. (seeing your progress visually is always helpful). As I neared the halfway point I started to get impatient and upped my new kanji from 20 to 30 just so I could get to the end and finally start learning real Japanese. It took about 3 months total to learn the kanji in RTK, studying everyday including weekends. In the end I was really glad I stuck to this insane goal as it later made learning vocabulary words way, way easier (in a later post I’ll detail how and why RTK works and how it inspired Kanji Stories).
After learning the common use Kanji I took what I had learned from AJATT about sentence mining and started creating my own custom Japanese vocabulary deck. Katz had suggested a concept called micro-close deletion for learning new vocabulary words where you would create a flashcard where only one character from the vocab word was hidden and you were tasked with trying to recall the missing character. I implemented this idea as I built my vocab deck starting with mining Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese. I gave myself a goal of initially learning 20 new words a day. I slowly worked through Tae Kim’s, while also sometimes including words I had encountered often from my immersion environment.
The topic of sentence mining can get pretty deep as you want to implement the idea of learning only one new word per sentence. You get sentence branching as you encounter more than one word in a sentence that you don’t know. At some point you switch to using Japanese definitions and those are full of words you don’t know as well. But keeping to i+1 is important for obtaining understanding (more on this in a future post).
Sentence mining took up the majority of my active studying for the better part of a year and a half. It was a grueling process where I would spend on average 2 hrs a day just trying to find example sentences from websites such as Tatoeba.org. Throughout the day during downtime’s here and there I would get my old and new reviews in for all the kana, kanji, and old vocab. This grind is where the majority of my Japanese acquisition happened.
While doing all this studying I also went to a weekly 会話 where I got to practice listening to real people speak Japanese. It took over a year of grinding vocabulary and being immersed in Japanese before I was able to fluently output any Japanese. But over time it got easier and easier. The words I was hearing went from being mere sounds to connecting directly to concepts in my brain. To become fluent you cannot translate the language in your mind, you have to be able to think in that language. You have to go from looking at a word or phrase, hearing a word or phrase, and that concept in your brain directly lighting up. Translating is too slow and gets in the way (I will post a future article on Hebian learning and the neuroscience behind language acquisition). While I could think in Japanese, going to 会話 helped bridge that mind-mouth connection that’s required to speak fluently.
In the end it took about 2 years of immersion and grinding to get to a level of Japanese fluency where I would be mistaken as a Japanese person when making dinner reservations as well as being able to interview for Japanese tech companies. The original goal I had set for myself was that by the end of my Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering (this normally takes 2 years) I would go find a job in Japan and move there permanently. I attended the Boston Career Forum and interviewed with a number of companies. In the end I opted to stay where I currently live. In the decade since learning Japanese I have just been passively entertaining myself in the language while learning Mandarin and brushing up on Spanish. It is only recently that I have decided to take my experience in learning Japanese (and other areas) to create a more streamlined and effective learning methodology.
Please follow for more. I’ll share in detail how you can learn Japanese for free, effectively and the science on why and how immersion based methods work.