Feed Me Japanese

First off, my apologies for falling behind in posting.  I was doing some experimentation with learning Japanese.  But it all relates to the question at hand.  What is “study” for?

This question isn’t unique to language learning, we could ask it for anything that takes years to learn.  But it’s a question that, I think, is never truly considered.

The obvious answer is: You study to learn.  But what do we usually do with what we “study”? We regurgitate it on a test.  Is perfect recall the same as knowing and understanding?

I’ve taken a lot of physics and mathematics courses over the years.  I found that even when I could ace the exams, I didn’t understand the material until much later - sometimes years later.  Why? Because it was over the following years that I used, played with, experimented on, failed and succeeded with those principles and equations.

In class, I studied the answers.  In life, I learned the questions.

OK, that sounds pretentious. Let me try again.  The great minds in mathematics and physics made their discoveries by observing and trying to understand the world around them.  They wrote down what they discovered, and today, we study their conclusions.

What we don’t do, is attempt to observe the world as they did and arrive, on our own, at the same conclusions.

There’s a school called the VanDamme Academy that sells a physics course using a “Historical, Inductive Approach”.  The gist of it is that you learn physics in the same chronological order as it was originally developed.

In doing so,  they’ve had students ask the same questions that the original discoverers asked and even make the same discoveries.  Many discoveries logically follow from previous discoveries, if you have the opportunity to make the same logical jump as the original scientist, how much greater will your understanding be?

Newton, Fourier and Volt didn’t have the answers.  They could not study to learn what they learned.  They had to play, to explore, to experiment.  And no one would dispute that they had a true understanding of the principles they discovered.

Now, to be sure, they did have the answers from what many scientists did before them.  They weren’t starting from a blank slate.  The point is that whether you are given the answer or not, true understanding takes exploration.

The herein lies the problem: When you are given the answer, do you continue the journey to actual understanding or do you check it off and move on?

I’m not arguing that “study” is bad.  It’s a tool for getting answers in your head.  But it’s not a substitute for the journey.

And when I read about others on this journey to Japanese fluency who say they stopped studying for a while and forgot almost everything, I have to wonder: Where was the play?

You can stop studying and keep watching Japanese TV. You can stop studying and keep reading Japanese websites or have conversations or flip through some Manga.  You can tire of study, but you probably won’t tire of comedy, drama, news, victory, defeat, triumph and struggle all at the same time.  Unless you plan to take a few months off from all of humankind, the journey can continue.

Study and Exploration are related, but exploration can exist without study.

The purpose of study, in my opinion, is to guide and complement exploration.  Study without exploration is a recipe for unnatural language production and burnout.  Exploration without study takes longer because some fundamentals are very hard to figure out without hints.

You explore what interests you - but while you’re out there, keep an eye out for these words.  Take note of this grammatical pattern.  Look out for this Kanji.

No matter what you’re learning or how hard you study, eventually you have to play and explore if you are ever to get true understanding.

How many people do you know who’ve taken a class for something but have no understanding?  Compare them to the people who played with the subject before class and continued to play afterwards.  The class, the study, was very helpful, but without the play and true understanding, it just fades away.