Feed Me Japanese

A quote from a discussion over at Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum:

What can I do to review Japanese at this advanced level? Reviewing grammar is painfully boring now — heck even have most of the guide and the grammar books that I read memorized –, and the only other option for any real growth is watching dramas and stuff, and recording and analyzing what is said. But this is tedious, as i have to post(sic) every 10~20 seconds to type down whats been said.

On top of that there are no 日本人　around here to practice with.

So what can I do that is fun and stimulating?

Running out of things to study is a very strange statement. You aren’t learning Japanese just so you have something to study. There is something you want to do and you need to know Japanese to do it.

You want to watch Anime in Japanese with no subtitles and get every joke. You want to read Japanese newspapers without a dictionary and see world events from a different perspective. You want to talk to native Japanese people on the phone and speak so well, they assume you’re Japanese as well.

I had a conversation with my younger cousin this past Easter Sunday. He’s learning Spanish in his High School classes. I asked what his teacher recommended that he do outside of his class assignments.

She recommended watching some Spanish TV, reading something, or speaking to a fluent Spanish speaker. Wonderful.

Here is my question: Why doesn’t learning a new language begin with watching, reading and listening?

Why don’t we first cultivate an interest in the culture? Wanting to get more out of the books you read and the shows you watch is a great motivator for study.

It also provides context for everything learned in a textbook or a classroom. There are many words in every language that have no need whatsoever for an SRS or any kind of review. They are spoken and written so often that the only reason you would study them is if your only interaction with the language was studying lists of words.

Why do we look at new vocabulary and then go hunting for examples? Why aren’t we consuming so much of the target language, that plucking out new words for further review is almost effortless?

How do we come to think that watching TV, reading books and newspapers and simply enjoying them without analyzing every-single-phrase is a privilege for those who’ve mastered the language?

How is taking a day off from study to relax and read a book for a couple hours a lack of discipline? Even if your reading pace is slow and you have to skip whole sentences because you don’t know the Kanji or the grammar - Even if you don’t understand 90% of the conversation during the movie, you’re making progress.

You get more of what you reinforce.

If you think, “study, study, study”, that’s what you’ll do and that’s what Japanese will become: something you study.

But if you think, “explore, explore, explore”, you will constantly find things to drive your interest in the Japanese language and culture. The greater your interest, the easier it is to take a break from smelling the roses and do some studying.