Choose wisely
Last summer, as often happens when one is carelessly browsing the internet, I stumbled upon a random website, this one known by the name AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com. If you are reading this blog, you no doubt have read that one. As a guy who knew nothing about language acquisition (outside of a four begrudgingly earned C’s in mandatory high school Spanish) I was immediately smitten with Khatzumoto’s radical methodologies. In a matter of hours I transformed from a sufficiently content monoglot into a philologist in the purest, least academic sense of the word. Three years earlier, I had studied and loved Latin in college. But to study a modern, spoken language? The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until I finished reading every article at AJATT. As soon as I was done, my God, how could I say no to such emotional potential energy suddenly residing inside me? I had to know if it could be done! I immediately purchased Heisig’s Reviewing the Kanji, downloaded Anki and a metric butt-load amount of Japanese media, and got to it.
This was a mistake.
In my zeal to test out these new methods, it didn’t cross my mind that a language is not an end in itself, but merely an acquired by-product of spending time immersed in your target culture via television, music, podcasts, and native speakers. You don’t immerse yourself in Japanese; you immerse yourself in Japan. About six months in, after finishing RtK and acquiring a comfortable understanding of the language, I realized something was wrong. Technically everything was fine; I had finished and maintained my Anki RtK deck, and I had a nice grasp of the language. Everything worked exactly as Khatzumoto, Ramses, and others had said it would, and I was learning Japanese quickly and easily. The problem was that I didn’t enjoy immersing myself in the culture. I made the mistake of believing that a language was somehow separate from the people, culture, and media that utilize it. This is simply wrong. In a moment of clarity I reassessed my situation, prudently cut my losses, and prepared to start over with both the technical experience I had gained and, more importantly, the wisdom to choose a path that I wanted in its entirety, linguistically and culturally.
Japanese is not a hard language. In fact, I think Japanese is simply pronounced, logical, and predictable, which is the of the opposite of hard. No, the hard part was being immersed in an environment that just wasn’t for me. This is why I have made it farther in French than I ever did in Japanese, both in acquisition levels and in hours committed to the journey. Learning French has been great because it is not an experiment that requires forcing myself to learn a language in spite of the media, but rather a series of pleasant experiences that happen to provide a by-product known as French. Call me crazy, but I just plain enjoy turning on my TV in the morning and watching pretty French girls talk about the global economy.
If you are like I was last year, rapidly absorbing all the methods and tools found on the language-blog circuit with a singular focus that would make the Borg blush, you need to be aware that all the tools and methods in the world are meaningless if you are working against your own interests. Remember that language is a by-product of your environment, and cannot exist separately from culture any more than fitness can exist separately from sport. If you have to force yourself to watch your L2′s media “just until you finish learning it,” you should realize now that you will have to spend time in that culture forever to maintain it, be it physically or via media and digital tools. You can’t spend two years becoming an awesome runner and then quit “because you’ve achieved fitness.” That’s crazy talk mon ami.
Remember that guy in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade who drank from the wrong chalice and turned into a skeleton and then exploded into corpse dust? He chose poorly. Don’t choose poorly; don’t choose a language attached to a culture you aren’t truly, deeply interested in. All of the people I know who have mastered something, be it physical, musical, or creative, got that way by spending ridiculous amounts of time in a lifestyle they found pleasant. Their mastery was a by-product of a way of life that jived with them (along with clever practice methods of course). I am interested in French because I like the news and media, I like the podcasts, and I like the music. I can picture myself watching France 24 news fifty years from now. I don’t have to force myself to immerse so I can learn; I would turn this stuff on anyway, and I learn as effortlessly as I breathe. If you pick a language in spite of its culture, mastery will be achieved only if you can summon enough long-term willpower to overcome your instincts (pro-tip: your instincts are usually right). Pick a culture that excites you and mastery is not only likely, but damn near inevitable.
“But don’t take my word for it.” – Senator Pat Benatar
The Gentlemanly Alpha-Gentleman’s Guide to Language Learning Part II: Pick Your Poison
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Khatz’ philosophy includes “having fun”, but with your Japanese “studies” there wasn’t much fun – so it didn’t work…
Well it did work, quite splendidly actually. But once the new-car smell was gone, the fun stopped because I had chosen to study a language rather than a culture I truly wanted to immerse myself in.
Thanks for the comment!
This is me agreeing with you completely. I think Spanish is a cool language, but I more or less began learning it because I live in Texas and have a Hispanic background. Deep down inside, though, I always felt like I would have more fun learning a more exotic language. I think Asian culture is awesome and I’m having a blast learning Korean right now.
The holy grail for me is Mandarin, though. I’ll make it to China one day, hopefully.
You'll make it to China, dude. This summer, on a whim, I flew to Korea to visit a friend and had the best trip of my life. As a certain child-labor-law-violating shoe manufacturer says, just do it!
As for Spanish, I live in San Diego so I felt like I should learn Spanish as well. But hey, you can't fight your heart over these things. As usual, thanks for commenting on my posts!
This is something that took me a looong time to work out. I worked in Japan a couple of years, had an AJATT epiphany, built an immersion environment and became completely swept away by obtaining Japanese for about 3 years. I certainly don't regret this – I made good friends, found unforgettable film, music and literature, an awesome career in translation and now I have a much better understanding of the culture. But I noticed that when I was at my local Tsutaya DVD store I would rather rent Japanese dubs of 80s Arnie films than wander across the floor and pick up a new Japanese release. I wanted the language, but I just didn't want to spend any more time looking at Japanese stuff. I had to admit when I got back to my home country that there were just too many things about Japan that weren't for me and keeping up the immersion was giving me soul ache.
When I flipped my immersion environment over to French a few months back it was like a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. Japanese TV made me angry with the world, but I could watch Canal+ shows and their shamelessly gorgeous presenters all day long. My reasons for running with French are because people seem to be so much more expressive, tactile, direct, passionate and alive, music and comics are legitimately awesome and all the French people I've met locally are cool. It fits me better than Japanese ever did.
Cheers for the post!
To be fair, I’d watch 80s Arnie movies over almost anything. It took all my willpower not to watch Total Recall at a friend’s house earlier today.
As always, I appreciate your comments here, and thanks for sharing your story!
The problem with this theory is that there isn't just ONE Japanese (or any other language/country) culture. There are all kinds of subcultures, regional variants, and millions of different types of things to get into in every country.
Of course there are, but even within these subcultures there are influences from the "main culture", even if you don't like it. I mean, take these Japanese lovin' kids in the US. They aren't like Japanese kids in Japan, they're just American kids who happen to love Japan, which means that most things they do are based on American standards.
Ok, firstly, it's not a theory, it's been proven in a laboratory of science and technology.
…just kidding.
Honestly, I agree that in any country there are many subcultures and different things to get interested in. But there is without a doubt a dominant, financially powerful mainstream media machine that creates the vast majority of the media in any given country, and that media will be created in the image of its host culture. Watching the national news in San Diego is not that different than watching the national news in Miami. Turn on your television or go to your movie theater in any American state; the shows, though certainly for different demographics, are still flat-out American shows made for American audiences. I don't think the U.S. is unique is this regard; the same applies to any country's media, at least in my experience.
I appreciate you posting your point of view, and thanks for commenting!
I absolutely agree AND I’m learning Japanese right now and can’t wait to visit the country. However, if you weren’t really interested in Japanese culture and wanted to visit Japan, then I’d definitely tell you not to try learning Japanese. Mind you, I’m somewhat familiar with the culture and am definitely interested in it.
I’ve told people this before, in fact I just recently went over it in my post on motivation which is what this post is ultimately addressing: you have to have a REALLY good reason to learn the language, and if you’re not that interested in the culture and the people, then it’s almost certainly not going to work for you (unless you’ve got some other reason to learn it, like it’s required for your job and you’ll get fired if you don’t). The best motivation for learning a language is because you want to be able to talk to the people who speak it, period.
Cheers,
Andrew
Matt,
Great observation and it explains why so many people are unable to gain any real traction when learning a foreign language, even if they've spent years trying to conquer it.
I teach English as a foreign language to Spaniards and I find that those who view English as something separate from culture, as solely an item they can add to their resume or CV, are the ones whose English never really improves very much. They sign up for course after course because they feel obligated to do so but they're not learning much because nothing sticks or stands out in their minds. They're not interested in the culture so the language that they're learning has no connection to anything. It's just a series of words and sounds. Then they complain about how English is difficult or they'll make the excuse that they are bad at learning languages.
Meanwhile, the Spaniards who are genuinely interested in some aspect of culture in English speaking countries (whether that be movies, music, books, history, pop culture, even the way of living) are more motivated and more enthusiastic about learning English. They are the ones who will eventually find themselves with a good level of English.
The ones that view English as something separate and distinct from culture wind up never significantly advancing their level and then they wonder why it's so difficult for them to speak English.
This reminds me of what has happened recently with my language studies. Spanish has pretty much been put on the back burner now, though I fought it for a while. The core of the issue was that I was learning Spanish because I wanted to continue learning Spanish. (I started in high school and was really interested in it originally. In fact, I even had some Spanish CDs, books, etc., but those materials no longer interest me and I've yet to find myself motivated enough to seek out new Spanish materials that do.) On the other hand, I was learning Korean because I had developed an interest in Korean media before I had even considered starting on the language. On the Spanish side, it was "I need to find some Spanish shows to watch."…which never actually seemed to happen. However, on the Korean side, it was the near exact opposite of "I need to stop queuing up quite so many Korean shows as it's taking up all my free time." instead.
So for now, my plan is to dedicate my time almost exclusively to Korean. I do intend to go back to Spanish in the future, but I need to find something interesting enough to "hook" me first, then let the interest spread from there (much like it did with Korean).
Having just posted a comment on your newest article, detailing my current method of acquiring Japanese, I'd like to ask a simple question. If you were in my shoes, and you were acquiring Japan(ese), what would you do? Would you do what you did with French, then learn the writing system later? Or would you continue from where you already started (with your own exploits in Japanese)?
An answer 43 weeks after the question was asked: I would do exactly what I am doing with French (focus on video/audio first, and writing later). As you get comfortable with the language, I would pick "a thing" to learn the hell out of (say, Spirited Away). You just keep coming back to it maybe once per month, and every time you hear a complete sentence/conversation you understand, turn it into an Anki card so you don't forget it.
When you feel like it, bust out Remembering the Kanji and breeze through it in a few months, then get some easy reading material (video games and comics FTW), and baby, you've got a stew goin'.
Sorry to answer your question so late!
-Matt