When I started learning Chinese, I never once considered taking a class. The simple reason is that I didn’t have the time and didn’t want to pay the money. But it might be more accurate to say I didn’t think that classes were worth the time and money. And although I’m currently not too thrilled with my rate of progress (mostly because I study for only 2 hours a week and also because I’m a perfectionist), I know that I’m a lot better off meeting with my language partners twice a week instead of attending a class for the same amount of time. Instead of having one teacher who I’d not only have to pay for but also share with all my other classmates, I have two private teachers all to myself who can cater to my wants and needs. That sounds like they’re my servants or something but it just means I get to decide what I want to learn and how fast for the fair price of returning the favor with the languages I’m familiar with.

My language partner once told me he was surprised by how much Chinese I’ve learned considering the fact that I never took a single class. I might have said the same thing many years ago but after learning Japanese, I knew that the bulk of the learning happened in the real world with real people. It’s telling that everybody I know who can speak Japanese has gone through tons of real-world exposure and practice. You can’t spend every day using Japanese for 2 years without getting really good. However, you can certainly spend years taking Japanese classes and still not be able to speak or read one whit of Japanese. This applies to about 80% of the students in my Japanese class in college even though we went through the same 2 years of classes. How many times have you heard the phrase, “You’ll never really learn Japanese until you live in Japan.” The first question to that should be, “Well then, why should I bother taking a class?”

What good is a class, then?

Well, you certainly can’t beat a class if you have no idea where to start. In other words, if you have no idea what particles are, how to use a dictionary, or how to even begin learning Japanese, a class can certainly help you get started. Also, the classroom is simply the most efficient medium of teaching when there is limited teaching resources. If there is only one teacher available for a large number of students, a class can be very effective in distributing the teachings of one person onto many. And if you have a particularly skilled teacher, many can reap the benefits at the same time.

As you can imagine, finding a good Japanese teacher can mean the difference between night and day in terms of getting a good grasp of the language and having a good foundation to build upon in the real world. Unfortunately, finding a good teacher can be difficult because you can’t really tell how good she is until you’ve already learned the language! That’s where I’m here to help with a list of some important things to check for in a Japanese class. Check your course syllabus or textbook and if you find that your class is failing every one of my criteria, you might want to consider finding some language partners or a private tutor and going it on your own. My guide and forum can certainly help you get started on your own.

Signs of a Bad Class

1. Uses Romanji
Ahhh, the famous romanji that forces every experienced Japanese learner to cringe. And yes, I misspelled it on purpose. In any case, if your class/textbook doesn’t teach you at least hiragana from the beginning, quietly excuse yourself from the class and never come back. Also feel free to set fire to the book, and wave it around while laughing at your former classmates like a madman through the window.

2. Doesn’t use Kanji
This is my second biggest pet peeve. Even if your class is smart enough to save you from the monstrosities of romaji, most classes won’t teach you a single kanji until it’s far too late. Your teacher should introduce them very early and also stress how important they are in reading things like… oh I don’t know… everything?? Start with 一、二、三. See? They’re not so bad.

3. No Dictionary Form
I understand that politeness is very important in Japanese society but do we really have to start learning masu and desu before the dictionary form? First of all, casual Japanese involves a lot more than just using the plain dictionary form. In addition, to nobody’s surprise, all the verbs in the dictionary are in the dictionary form. So if your very first list of verbs consists of 「します、見ます、食べます」, you’re not even learning words you can look up. First, you have to learn to reverse-conjugate them to the dictionary form and then you can conjugate them into something else. Seriously, I saw one textbook with masu-form to dictionary form conjugation rules. It’s crazy! All of Japanese grammar is built on the dictionary form and the conjugation rules for the polite form are one of the easiest in the language. I can hardly see Japanese students saying 「うぜえよ、このくそばば」 to their teacher just because they learned the dictionary form first and learned to conjugate from there.

Dictionary forms first, it just makes sense.

4. No rational understanding of the language
If your teacher says, “は is the topic particle, and が is the subject particle”, and you ask, “So what’s the difference?”, and he answers, “は describes the topic, while が describes the subject of a sentence”, you can assume he has no idea how to answer your question. Native speakers are great because nothing is worse than having a 外人… excuse me, 外国人 Japanese teacher who… can’t speak Japanese! However, the drawback of native speakers is that sometimes the basic aspects of the language such as particles are so second-nature to them, they really don’t know how to explain or even really understand how they work. Having a feel for the language is great for the speaker but doesn’t really serve as an explanation when teaching somebody else. I can’t tell you how confused I was when I was learning 「んです」 for the first time. Saying that it adds emphasis doesn’t really explain things at all.

The best teachers really study their own language and are experienced in explaining them to clueless students. Also, there are the rare non-native teachers who are really freakin’ good at Japanese and know how to explain things in a way that made sense to themselves and will probably make sense to you.

Signs of a Great Class

1. Teach casual Japanese at least somewhere down the road
It’s amazing to me that most Japanese classes never teach you everyday slang and casual speech. NEVER. I guess the idea is that you’ll somehow figure it out on your own (aah, the classic “throw them into the pool and watch them swim/drown method”). Or maybe they think there is no value in teaching a style of speaking that is used among close friends. Sorry, John-san, NO FRIENDS FOR YOU. I’m not even talking about the stupid stuff like 「ぶっちゃけ」 or 「私的には」. I’m just talking about everyday stuff like 「てしまう＝ちゃう」 or using 「の」 to ask questions. Is it so bad to teach, 「何してんの？」? OH MY GOD, WHAT DID I JUST WRITE??

2. Use a good Japanese-only textbook
Following up from #1, I was amazed when I saw one textbook that actually had a polite and casual version of the dialogue side-by-side. This was a Japanese-only textbook and upon further investigation, there appears to be a lot of excellent Japanese-only textbooks that you will never see in a store like Barnes & Nobles. (I went to the Kinokuniya in Seattle.) This is the kind of textbook they use to teach Japanese in Japan for people who don’t necessarily speak English.

Needless to say, I have yet to see a single English-based Japanese textbook that passes my simple criteria of a good textbook. Most of them have little to no kanji, some even use the dreaded romanji, they never teach casual speech, and they never explain things like particles very well. Japanese-only textbooks have some drawbacks as well such as very few explanations of how things work (it’s a Catch-22 because even if it did have a good explanation, it would be in Japanese and if you could read and understand it, you probably don’t need the explanation). However, they often do give you authentic, no-nonsense material and the rest can be taken care of by the teacher.

3. Teach the man how to fish, man!
No language class could ever go over every vocabulary or kanji needed to attain mastery of the language, so it’s inevitable that you’ll have to teach yourself at least some if not most of the language. I see this in advanced romance language classes all the time. They give you a novel and if there are words you don’t know, you’ll have to look them up in the dictionary and figure it out yourself. Big whoop. Ok, while it’s not as easy in Japanese, it’s by no means impossible. Your class should ideally teach you the skills to teach yourself.

Personally, I would explain how to study from example sentences from online resources such as alc.co.jp and the easiest way to look up kanji. I would also recommend some good electronic dictionaries with instructions on how to use them. There’s really no point in wading through a traditional Kanji dictionary and trying to identify the correct radical in our day and age. Also it doesn’t hurt to explain when to use 訓読み vs 音読み and yet, I don’t remember ever learning this in class.

4. Make the man fish even if he doesn’t feel like it
There’s really no way to become good at Japanese without practice and if a teacher’s job is to teach Japanese, he should make sure that his students get the practice they need whether they want it or not. At the very least, he could facilitate some kind of language tutor or partner setup. You can even match up classes from Japan via Mixxer. Ideally, practice should factor into the grading process like the Chinese classes at my college where meeting with language tutors was required. (Tutors were not required for the Japanese students which combined with the difference in how much kanji they learned, enforced the image that the Chinese students were just more serious than we were).

Personally, I would probably reserve one day of class to meet individually with the students if the class was small enough or make them find a partner/tutor somehow and reserve a day of class to present and grade on things they learned from their last session.

5. Teach what things really mean
When I ask my language partner how to say, “Can I go to the bathroom,” he knew the answer right away. But when I asked him how to say something like, “Even if I went now, I won’t make it in time”, he was stuck. This was very interesting to me because in Japanese, 「トイレに行ってもいいですか？」 and 「今行っても間に合わない」 uses the exact same grammar. As you can see from the literal translation, “Toilet go also is good?” and “Now go also won’t make it on time” is virtually the same sentence structure-wise. You can also probably guess that the negative such as 「今日行かなくてもいい」, which translates to “Today not go also is good” means “You don’t have to go today”. It really pays off to know what each part of the grammar is actually saying instead of just the English translation and your teacher should break it down from time to time.

6. Help students find what interest them
Mastering a language takes a lot of work and often times it can be a real drain to be constantly studying boring things like ordering at a restaurant or talking about the weather. I see people all the time having difficulty sticking with the language because of what seems to be an insurmountable goal, feeling of a lack of progress, or just a loss of interest. I think it would really be helpful if your teacher helped you explore what uniquely interests you about the language (hopefully it’s something a bit more inspiring than finding a Japanese girlfriend).

A good teacher should take interest in your interests and have a large library of movies, books, and other media of various genres that the students can freely explore. I would even put my PS2 in the student lounge if I was in charge. The really cool part is that it can only play Japanese games and DVDs. Another great idea is to have a budget for requests of stuff that the students are interested in (all in Japanese, of course).

Conclusion

So to answer the original question, “Should you take a class to learn Japanese?”, I think a good class can certainly be very helpful. Certainly better than no class especially if you’re a complete beginner and don’t really know where to start. However, there is nothing worse than having a bad class/teacher screw you up and create some very hard to break habits down the road. I think the field of Japanese-language education has been steadily improving overall but you still need to be careful. And with this post, I think you’ll have a good idea of some of the things to watch out for.

If you have any outrageous experiences in your Japanese class, please share them in the comments!

I was glancing through a thread about low and high tones on my forum and it made me realize that we don’t treat tones with as much care as we should in Japanese (ie, virtually none). For example, if I were to describe it in Chinese tones, you really do need to pronounce 日本 with something similar to a second and fourth tone. In contrast, 二本 is more like a fourth and neutral tone. And this really could potentially be an issue. What if you said 日本ください instead of 二本ください? Now you’re asking for Japan instead of two bottles! What a わがまま!

Personally, I’ve had times when I would ask somebody about a new word I just learned and the person would have no idea what I was talking about. Then I’d write the word and he/she would say, “Oh you mean [X]!” and pronounce the word exactly the same way but with different pitches. See, without context you really do need to get the tones right.

And sure, context will cover your ass and prevent any mishaps most of the time but is Chinese any different? You know in Rush Hour 2 when Chris Tucker attempts to speak Chinese? It was hilarious but in real life, if you messed up all the tones, it just becomes gibberish. There are a few insidious homophones like eyeglasses vs eyes: 眼睛(yǎnjīng) / 眼鏡(yǎnjìng), but overall context should take care of one or two mistakes. I’ll have to watch that movie again now that I know some Chinese to see if they were really clever enough to teach Chris the wrong tones correctly to actually say the unintentional but hilarious lines.

Chinese has always had a notorious reputation of being insanely difficult due to the tones but I actually think Japanese is more difficult. With Chinese, at least all the tones are laid out and stay (mostly) the same. In contrast, Japanese really has no rules for pronouncing words with the correct pitch and it would probably change anyway depending on how you’re using it. Unlike Chinese, you’ll probably be understandable even with all the wrong tones, but you will still sound foreign and may even be difficult to understand.

We really should start thinking about patterns in Japanese tones and how we could effectively teach students how to pronounce things correctly not just phonetically but on the tonal level. For example, I’ve noticed that long vowels are often a high and flat tone (first tone in Chinese). Just listen to how train announcers pronounce 東京. (Tones are more clearly enunciated in formal settings like announcements and news broadcasts.) I’m sure by just practicing the long vowel sounds in this manner, you can significantly improve your pronunciation and sound more “Japanese”.

Can you think of any other neat tips for getting the right tones?

Just a quick post since I’ve been very lazy lately. I just wanted to ask: Is there anybody in the world that learned how to write Japanese with James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji? And notice I didn’t say Kanji because I’m sick and tired of hearing people say, “Yeah, I learned like 2,000 kanji in like three weeks!” Wow, that’s awesome. Now you can start actually learning Japanese!

You see, thinking “logic” and being able to write 理 doesn’t mean anything. First of all, 理 isn’t even a word. 論理、理論、理解、料理、管理、修理、義理、心理学 are words and until you can write real words in real Japanese, I’m not impressed. So I’d like to know: Is there anybody that learned to write a reasonable amount of vocabulary using this approach? And by a reasonable amount, let’s say about 10,000 words which is the amount JLPT Level 1 claims to cover. (You see, once you change Kanji into actual words, you’re in a whole different ball game.)

*Not that I’m promoting it but you can download a portion of the first book to try out here.

In my post about Language Learning Tips, one of my main points is that you actually have to engage in a certain activity if you want to get better at it. For example, if you want to learn how to talk in Japanese, you need to find Japanese speakers and talk with them as much as possible. However, as with all things in life, that’s easier said than done. So, I’m here to talk about how you (yes, YOU!) can go about finding language conversation partners.

I’ve become very familiar with this topic because I recently moved back to the US and am finding that you really have to go out of your way to find people to practice with even in an international city like Seattle. However, within the past few months, I have found not only Japanese people to chat with but also Chinese people for my burgeoning (ie poor) Mandarin.

Finding real life partners

Real life language partners are better than any form of online partners because of the real-time interaction and improved physical inputs (ie gestures and facial expressions). That all sounds like techno mumbo-jumbo but it just means the best 3D environment can be found by turning off your computer and (gasp!) actually going outside.

Personally, I’ve had great luck with www.meetup.com, which is a site for creating meetups on any topic. I met a bunch of great people by going to meetups like the Seattle Japanese Language and Culture Meetup or the Seattle Chinese Language Meetup.

Meeting in a group is always a great opportunity to practice speaking and listening to the language of your choice but you can’t beat 1 on 1 language exchange. It is the best way to really ask questions and practice at your current language level. In Japan, because English is such a popular language, it’s a cinch to find people willing to teach you Japanese in exchange for English lessons. You can check out your local 市役所 for activities or bulletin boards at your school. Or if you can navigate through the Japanese interface, you can also check out language-related communities at mixi.jp, the biggest Japanese social network site. (You can ask me for an invite if you’re interested.)

If you’re not living in Japan, there are still some ways to find offline language partners depending on where you live. You can post or look for an ad on Craigslist . You might also want to check with your local community, nearby schools, etc. for events and opportunities to meet with people who speak Japanese.

When I was learning Japanese, it was easy for me to find Japanese friends on the college campus. However, now that I’m already out of school, I have to do a bit more work to find people to practice my Chinese. I found my first language partner (English/Chinese through Japanese) in Japan through international activities held by 川口 city. （国際化 is kind of a fad at the moment for municipal governments.） In the states, I found a language partner through Craigslist (English/Chinese through English) and another through a Chinese meetup (Chinese/Japanese through English). Because everybody speaks English in the States, you have to be a bit more aggressive and enthusiastic to get somebody to want to learn English from you. Unlike the case in Japan, people won’t be like, “Please teach me English!” because they see English everywhere. Now that the shoe’s on the other foot, you need to be like, “Please teach me Japanese! I can teach you English!”

Finding online partners

While real life partners are great and at some point indispensable, you might want to find online conversation partner if some of the conditions below apply to you.

1. There are very few to no Japanese speakers in your area.
2. You want to talk from the comfort of your home without spending the time and/or money on transportation.
3. Your schedule or those of other people makes finding the time to meet with people in real life difficult.
4. Your time with real-life language partners are just not enough and you want more practice! More! More!

Mixxer is a great site for finding a conversation partner on Skype. Now Mixxer has its downsides such as almost no search capabilities and not being able to sort search results but it gets the job done, which is simply to get in contact with somebody to do language exchange. And it’s free so you really can’t complain.

All you have to do is register and fill out your profile, which is very simple (because it doesn’t try to be an international dating site), look for people that match your language profile, and contact them via the site, Skype, or email. That’s it. It’s simplicity is it’s best feature and it really does its one job well: finding somebody who wants to learn your language and speaks the language you want to learn.

I tried out the site and there are surprisingly a large number of people registered. I’ve had all sorts of Chinese speakers contact me either through the Mixxer or Skype. As a native English speaker, I’m sure you won’t have much trouble finding a Japanese speaker to talk to. The only drawback is that the time lag makes it difficult to arrange a time and it’s far too easy to slack off. There’s nothing like having to actually go out to meet somebody to really motivate you to keep studying. Another thing to be careful about is if neither of you speaks a language in common to some degree, there can be a bit of communication breakdown. If you are a complete beginner at Japanese, you really need to find somebody that speaks at least some English.

Conclusion

I hope you got some good ideas on how to go about finding your own language partner because you’ll never learn how to speak Japanese until you actually go out and practice speaking it for real. I’ll also talk about how to make the best of your time with your language partner once you’ve found one so stay tuned!

Over a month has gone by since my last post, which means the guilt trip is baaack! Ok, since nobody barfed at me the last time I did this, here are some personal updates that just might have interested you if any of you cared.

I’m back in the States!

Yes I know, you’ve seen it countless of times. These so-called “Japan” blogs always ends with: “Ok, I’m ending this blog since I moved out of Japan and there are no more freaky, crazy things that I can blog about.” But don’t worry! I’m different because my life in Japan consisted of sitting at a desk for 10-12 hours. I didn’t have anything interesting happening in my life to begin with! They should make a t-shirt that says, “I worked in Japan and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a tattered, bruised remnant of my soul.” I would totally buy that.

But seriously, while I don’t use Japanese as much as I used to, the city I live in (Seattle) is large enough that I managed to find Japanese people to hang out with once in a while. What’s even cooler is I found someone to teach me Chinese in exchange for teaching Japanese! (I’ll talk about finding language partners in my next post so stay tuned!)

My Chinese got good enough to suck

Speaking of Chinese, yes I’m still working on it. I’m proud to say that my Chinese has improved from being virtually nonexistent to just really, really bad. Since I’m not a big fan of structured classes (or more specifically, too cheap to pay for classes) meeting with language partners every week really helps me to stay motivated and keeps me thinking if not in at least about Chinese.

It’s contextual spam so it’s OK

Finally, to make this post at least semi-related to Japanese, I’d like to talk the startup I’ve been working on these past few months: MegaBuzz.com. I haven’t talked about it until now because the site itself has nothing to do with Japanese. However, we just launched a new feature today that allows you to create a page about any topic. You can make and answer questions, post YouTube videos, and all that good ol’ Web 2.0 stuff. I’ve already created the Japanese page so I hope you guys will join in and we can quiz each other in Japanese.

Last but not least

Before I go, I’d just like to mention that we got a dog a little while back. He’s four months old and his name is Chewy. He’s very, very whiney.

そうそう。前回の投稿では、ブログを日本語で書くって約束したから一応何かを書いてみることにしました。俺は、仕事で臨時作業依頼書だの障害報告書だの、普段何の役にも立たない文章しか書かないので、ちょっぱし苦労はすると思うけど、それはいわゆる「成長」というやつかな？とにかく、何か間違いがあったら是非教えていただきたく。

まぁ、俺にとっていい練習にもなるし、みなさんのためにもなると思って今これを書いているわけだが、肝心の問題は・・・
　
何について書けばいいのか？
　
こういう時は、たいてい自分がやったことや思ったことを書くんだが、俺の普段の生活はとんでもないぐらいつまらないということもあり・・・。

そうだな。例えば、先週末に何をやったかといえば、「涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱」というアニメを部屋一人で全部観ました。情けねえな～。

でも、アニメ自体は本当におもしろいですよ！最初は、ＤＶＤを買おうと思ったんですが、一枚で６０００円・・・　L(･Ｏ･;)」オーマイガーッ
　
んなもん買うか？！
　
あ～あ、やめた、やめた。
　
幸い、Youtubeに全部載っていました。どうやら、klisa0506という物凄い親切な方が１０分置きに分けてPart 1,2,3という形で１４話を全てあげたみたい。ありがとうよ、klisa0506さん！Youtubeだから、画像はもちろん小さいのだが、タダだから文句はいえねーな。
　

もし、「涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱」を観ていない方がいらっしゃったら是非観てみてください。俺みたいなお金のない方は今の内にYoutubeで観るといいですよ。（いつ消されるかわかんないから）

個人的には放送順に観ることをお勧めします。（話の順番はこのサイトの「サブタイトル」という部分から参照できます。）

んなわけで、どうでもいいことでずいぶんと自分一人で盛り上がったんですが、次回はもうちょっとまともな内容を考えてみますんで、またきてね。 ♪(#^ｰﾟ)v

（そもそも次回があるというかなり怪しい前提だが・・・）

Japanese blogs are good reading practice if you can find some interesting ones.
　
Most share some unique characteristics.
　
I don’t know who wrote the rules of Japanese blogging…
　
…but you have to use the “Enter” key a lot.
　
The writing tends to be kind of aimless as well.
　
I think celebrity blogs are probably the biggest in Japan.
　
If you’re an attractive celebrity who also happens to be an オタク geek like しょこたん, you’re bound to get a huge following of fantasizing geeks.
　
It’s like the ultimate fantasy.
　
Sometimes, I wish I was a hot, geeky celebrity. Then my blog would be popular.
　
But I don’t want geeky, fantasizing fans. Yuck! ＼(≧≦)／
　
Oh yeah, don’t forget to use lots of cute smileys.
　
Here’s another one:
　
( ^ーﾟ)bグッ! All right! (Pat myself on the back!)
　
There’s one more crucial aspect to writing a Japanese blog…
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　　
　
Frickin’ make you scroll forever to see what comes next!!!
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
It’s supposed to build suspense but it’s…
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
SO ANNOYING! ＼(*＞＜)／
　
I enjoy a number of Japanese blogs like うまのホネ.
　
For instance, one of her posts is about strategies for milking herself reserves for the baby so that she can drink alcohol.
　
That’s my kind of wife!
　
Another one I enjoy is by yet another hot, (kinda) geeky celebrity: 眞鍋かをり.
　
You can tell she’s geeky from the following excerpt:

凌南戦でメガネくん（小暮）が決めたスリーポイントシュートくらい絶妙なタイミングだったんですよ。

　
That won’t make any sense unless you’ve read Slam Dunk, which I think is one of the first steps to becoming a geek.
　
Of course, I have read all 31 volumes. <(｀ー´)>
　
Those are supposed to be arms tucked smugly behind my head, in case you didn’t get it.
　
This next blog is so popular, they made a drama of it and a PSP game: 鬼嫁日記.
　
13 millions hits on the counter! (゜_゜;)
　
It’s very funny but has lots of scrolling. (;´ヘ｀) はぁ～
　
Tell me your favorite Japanese blogs in the comments!
　
Next time, I’ll try writing a real Japanese blog post in real Japanese!
　
またきてね！♪(#^ｰﾟ)v

Now that I’m studying Chinese from scratch, I’m back to where I was when I started learning Japanese six years ago. (My god, has it been that long already?) It’s great because it really reminds me of what it was like to be completely lost in a new language. In fact, I think foreign language teachers should study a new language every now and then to really see what it’s like to be the student.

Anyway, since this is a blog about Japanese, I thought I’d share with you some common ideas and strategies I found to be effective in learning a new language whether it’s Japanese, Chinese, or any other language. While some of these ideas might seem obvious to those who have studied foreign languages, I mention them here because it is very easy to forget and to fall back into bad habits (including myself).

Language is drawing a line in the sand near the tide (TM)

Ok, I didn’t actually trademark anything but that’s how clever I thought the title was. We should spread the phrase by saying it was first said by a wise Chinese monk or something. The conversation would look something like this.

Some Dude: Hey, can you teach me Japanese?

You: I would but “Language is drawing a line in the sand near the tide”.

D: Huh?

Y: It means that you must constantly be studying a language in order to learn it. If you stop, it’ll all just fade away.

D: Isn’t that like, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”?

Y: Not exactly. What I said was first said by a wise Chinese monk.

D: Whoa… that’s deep.

Don’t fall for the “Master Japanese in just XX days/weeks” gimmick. Learning a new language is a long-term commitment. It’s different from learning how to ride a bike or how to whistle. No matter what your goal is, whether it’s native level or just some travel phrases, if you don’t keep practicing, you will forget.

You only truly learn a language with continual practice. It’s like biking up a series of hills and plateaus. As soon as you stop learning or practicing, you’ll start to slowly roll back down. Once you’ve reached a plateau (long-term memory), the knowledge will fade less quickly but if you ignore it long enough, you will eventually slide back down, eventually going back all the way to the beginning, leaving all your efforts in vain.

Even native speakers often complain of how they’re forgetting their native language once they stop using it. What chance do you have of retaining a foreign language then? Of course, by now, your native language is deeply rooted in your long-term memory so it’ll soon come back as long as you don’t neglect it for too long. However, new, short-term memory of a foreign language doesn’t stand a chance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to study every minute of every day. It doesn’t have to be a big commitment just a consistent long-term one. In fact, I would advise going your own pace rather than trying to study too much at once and burning yourself out. It’s a marathon rather than a sprint… a very long marathon that never ends.

In my case, while I had the opportunity and luxury to study and practice Japanese virtually every day with native speakers during college, I’m taking a more conservative pace with Chinese due to the constraints of my full-time job. I usually only study during my commute once every couple of days, probably no more than 2 to 4 hours a week. I also spend about 3 hours every Sunday with a native Chinese speaker practicing for about an hour and a half in exchange for teaching English. Even though I only spend a total of about 3 to 5 hours a week studying Chinese, I am fairly satisfied with my rate of progress. The most important thing is to keep at it with consistent study and practice.

You have to grab language by its horns

During my college days, I spent my first trimester of Japanese doing what every college student is supposed to do: go to classes, do the homework, and study for tests (all at the last minute of course). If you do just that, you might do ok in class (I got a B+), but that doesn’t mean you’re learning the language! No matter how great the teacher might be, the classroom format is simply not enough.

The biggest problem with the classroom format is that you never use the language for your own purposes. You are always being told which grammar to use, what vocabulary to memorize, how to say something, etc., because after all, that’s what teaching is. With homework and tests, you have to come up with the “correct” answers as well. The only difference is that it’s done at home instead. Unfortunately, while there are a whole lot of wrong answers or things that make little to no sense, there are no right answers to good communication. But with classroom material, you never learn how to express your own thoughts and feelings in the way you want to express them. If you never get the chance to make the language your own, it always feels like a language that is… well foreign.

At my school, the Chinese students were required to meet with a language tutor every week, which I think is a great idea. Unfortunately, meeting with a language tutor was optional for us Japanese kids. I did it anyway though. It was great. I got to meet and talk with fellow students who also happened to be Japanese. They got paid, I got practice, learning how to say what I wanted to say, and we had a great time overall (or at least I did). As a bonus, all of my tutors happened to be female and some were even cute! I can’t believe most of my fellow classmates didn’t even sign up. If you would turn down a great opportunity like that, it probably means you’re doomed to fail for reasons I will describe at the end.

Now that I’m out of college, I no longer have such a wonderful opportunity to practice Chinese but I did manage to secure a tutoring session once a week by hanging out at local international events. Although it’s free, I have to teach English in exchange and she is at least over 15 years older than me but she’s a nice lady so I can’t complain. The moral of this story is that you should take advantage of the resources available to you to make opportunities for speaking the language.

Practicing [A] doesn’t improve [B]

The fundamental reason why it’s absolutely necessary to go out and actually use the language for your own means is because practicing one thing doesn’t automatically improve something else. This may sound obvious but many Japanese students are under the illusion that taking tests, answering questions in class, and filling in worksheets will somehow magically enable them to learn how to read, write, speak, and hear Japanese. This is not the case!

If you’re wondering why you can hardly speak Japanese after taking Japanese classes for so many years, ask yourself this, “How many hours did I spend speaking Japanese? How many books have I read? How much Japanese have I written?” You need to ask yourself the same type of question for each aspect of the language because practicing one thing doesn’t automatically improve something else. It might help but each aspect of the language is only improved by actually practicing and refining it in the real world.

If you want to improve your reading skills, go read some books. If you want to improve your writing, find something to write about. Speaking and listening often go hand in hand so go find somebody to talk to if you want to improve those skills. It seems obvious but many students at my school couldn’t understand why they weren’t improving even though they haven’t spent a single minute outside of class speaking Japanese or even meeting anyone who can speak Japanese. They also haven’t read a single book, magazine, comic, short story, anything, much else write something on their own. All I can say is, “What do you expect, man?!” Of course it’s not completely their fault. After all, none of us were required to do any of those things for class. So, unless you are in an immersed environment such as living in Japan, you have to motivate yourself to go out and use Japanese.

Input before Output

Those who are new to learning languages might be under the mistaken impression that languages make sense. You might think that if you learn the vocabulary and grammar, you can string the vocabulary together with the correct grammar to make sentences. This might work to some degree for some languages, but with Japanese, it’s almost guaranteed to not work. Japanese is not a language you can figure out with logic, which is why finding somebody you can ask questions and learning vocabulary with context is so important. Take a look at what might happen if you try to figure things out for yourself.

Method 1: “Figuring it out”

You) I want to say, “I miss you,” to my girlfriend so let’s see… according to my dictionary, “miss” is 「欠ける」 so “missing” is 「欠けている」. Great, now I just need to make “you” the direct object with 「を」 particle and the verb goes last so “I’m missing you” should be 「私はあなたを欠けている。」 Great!

What a disaster! While the sentence is grammatically correct, it doesn’t make any sense and worse, it’s kind of insulting because 「欠ける」 means something is “lacking” with a very negative connotation. Now, let’s see what would have happened if you were smart enough to learn from example.

Method 2: Asking a native speaker

You) I want to say, “I miss you,” to my girlfriend. How do I say that?

Native Speaker) Well, we don’t really say “I miss you,” in Japanese. We usually just say we’re lonely or “I want to meet you”.

Y) Oh, how do you say that?

N) “Lonely” is 「さびしい」 or 「さみしい」. “Wanting to meet” is 「会いたい」.

Y) Great, can you write the kanji for me?

N) Sure.

Awesome, now that you are able to express your dire need and endless love to your girlfriend, hopefully, next time you meet, she’ll be all over you like hot butter and syrup on a pancake. Way to go!

Of course, in real life, things don’t always go so smoothly. You might not know enough of the grammar or vocabulary to understand the answer. You also need to go home, sit down and study the grammar and vocabulary using textbooks, workbooks, dictionaries, the grammar guide, whatever you prefer. But the important thing is to get input first before you try coming up with your own output. And even then, it’s a good idea to get somebody to look at your output to make sure it’s correct.

Learning old material with new material

Now that I talked about what you need to do, let’s look at some ideas on how to go about it.

Generally, you need a lot more input before you can generate output of similar quality. In my case, I usually have to see something about five or six times in completely different contexts before I can internalize it enough to use it myself. Of course, it all depends. Fundamental concepts and conjugations require a lot more exposure and practice than simple vocabulary.

So the best way to internalize material is by running into it here and there over a long time span. You can optimize this by overlapping new material with old material. This is called pipelining in computer chips and is used extensively to increase the performance of your computer. You can do this too by learning new material even if you haven’t completely memorized the old material. When old material shows up in new material, you will start the process of internalizing the new material while you’re reviewing the old material.

What you should never do is stop learning new things because you haven’t completely mastered something else. You might hear people say, “Oh no, I can’t learn the next chapter because I don’t completely understand the last one.” or “I’m not going to learn that because we haven’t gone over it in class yet.” or “Learning that now will just confuse me.” This is the wrong approach because looking at just one thing over and over doesn’t increase comprehension. You need to look at it in different contexts, used in different ways for different purposes. You need to look at all the angles before you can say you really understand the material. And if you can start learning new material at the same time, that’s another bird with the same stone.

You shouldn’t underestimate your brain’s ability to absorb new material. You might hear a word and think, “Oh, I’ll never learn that” but on the contrary, you’re already learning it! If you ever thought, “Hey, this word sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before?” you’re closer to memorizing it than words you’ve never heard before. If you do this often enough, you’ll be remembering words you don’t even remember learning! This is essentially how you learned your native language. Let’s take a look at the continuation of the previous dialog asking how to say, “I miss you”.

Y) Is 「会いたい」 an adjective?

N) It acts like an adjective but it’s the 「たい」 form of the verb 「会う」, which means “to meet”.

Y) Oh yeah, I remember! We learned that form in class last week. What was the conjugation rule again?

N) You change the 「う」 to 「い」 and add 「たい」.

Y) Ok, got it.

See? In that short exchange, you managed to review the 「たい」 form while at the same time learning 「会う」. The next time, you might learn, for instance, 「飲み会」 and you can use that opportunity to review and reinforce 「会う」. Keep repeating the cycle and you’ll start making all sorts of connections and memorizing things left and right in no time.

It’s the attitude that counts!

In the end, the thing that matters the most is your attitude. If studying or practicing Japanese feels like a dreadful chore, you are doomed to failure. I can attest to this because I hated learning Spanish in High School and the only Spanish I know now is, “Donde esta el bano”. But hey, you’re in luck because Japanese is much more interesting than Spanish!

Nevertheless, if you somehow find that learning Japanese is boring or a chore, you need to incorporate things into your study that will make it fun right away! In my case, I enjoy reading, playing games, drinking, and eating so I study by doing those things in a way that incorporates Japanese such as reading Japanese novels. (And all my games are strictly for “educational purposes”. Honest.) I also enjoy hanging out and chatting with friends so making Japanese friends and hanging out with them improved my speaking and listening skills. And if I can get drinks and food into the mix every so often, even better! (Fortunately, many Japanese people love to eat and drink.)

To give you another example, I don’t particularly like watching TV that much but a friend of mine does and that’s how she learned Japanese; by watching a lot of Japanese TV. It must have worked because her Japanese is quite excellent.

Whatever floats your boat, you should incorporate it into your studies to make learning more enjoyable. For example, lots of people on my forum are learning Japanese with anime because that’s what they enjoy. This is great because it often leads them to explore and become interested in other areas of Japanese lifestyle and culture, which in turn increases the incentive to learn more Japanese.

Also, I think it’s pretty much a given that we all enjoy making friends and socializing so that’s one activity we can all do. If there are very few or no Japanese people in your area, you might try finding a conversation partner online, study abroad, or just move! C’mon, get out of that rural backwater and go someplace more international!

If you’re socially inept, making friends while learning a foreign language is perfect for you. It levels the playing field because it’s hard to be suave when you can hardly speak the language. Hey, that’s a great strategy for getting a girl, I bet. Cleverly hide your lack of social skills with your inability to speak the language. I don’t know how wise this is for serious relationships though…

Here are some useful sites for studying Japanese. I will keep posting more useful links as I find them.

Is there a cool site I should be looking at? Let me know in the comments!

(Updated 2006/6/1) Cool, looks like the free pdf lesson material at the Meguro Learning Center are back up.

Dictionaries

1. Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC – This site has an extensive Japanese to English dictionary with example sentences and an equally extensive Kanji dictionary with animated stroke orders for all of the 常用漢字. The multiple radical search method is also the easiest way I’ve found for searching for kanji (outside of copying and pasting). Unfortunately, it’s almost useless as an English to Japanese dictionary.
2. 英辞郎 – A great dictionary with a huge number of expressions and example sentences in both English and Japanese. I especially recommend this dictionary for English to Japanese lookups since it has the ability to search a surprisingly large range of English expressions.
3. Yahoo!辞書 – I highly recommend this dictionary if you are an advanced learner of Japanese. It’s a dictionary for Japanese speakers so you’ll get Japanese definitions of English words instead of translations (which never works anyway). There’s also lots of example sentences in the definitions and I prefer it now over goo 辞書.
4. Denshi Jisho – Despite the misleading name, Denshi Jisho has nothing to do electronic dictionaries. Instead, it’s a great new interface to the WWWJDIC dictionary. It’s not just a pretty, new face, it adds a variety of neat features such as instant partial results in the multi-radical kanji lookup. In addition, you can use * to conduct wild card searches, which is great for cheating on the 四字熟語 game on 「もっと脳を鍛える」. I’m sure there are other great features but the biggest disadvantage, compared to the WWWJDIC, is the lack of stroke order diagrams. (Perhaps due to copyright reasons.) It would also be nice to have a mirror in my area like the WWWJDIC does because it tends to be slow at times.

Grammar

1. Tae Kim’s Japanese guide to Japanese grammar – My guide to Japanese grammar. I really hate to blow my own horn since I’m not even finished yet but other grammar resources usually use only romaji, which makes them completely useless for learning real Japanese.
2. Jgram – A wiki approach to Japanese grammar. It has short English definitions for a wide variety of grammar organized by JLPT level and accompanied with examples sentences.

JLPT

1. MLC Meguro Language Center – An amazing resource for studying the JLPT and all for free! You can download hundreds of pages of study material in PDF format.
2. JLPT Study Page – A very helpful site for studying the JLPT for levels 3 and 4. It has a variety of sample problems from past exams so it’ll really give you a good idea of what the JLPT is like. The site has a forum as well. Unfortunately, level 2 is hardly covered and level 1 not at all. Since the JLPT is useless as a credential unless you pass level 1, I look forward to seeing more material for the higher levels.
3. JLPT Kanji Project – You can review the kanji that you will need to learn for each level of the JLPT. This site will give you a good idea of which kanji you’ll need to know for the JLPT but not much more than that.

Audio Resources

1. Nippon VoiceBlog – The name speaks for itself. Each entry in this blog features a narrative about various topics in Japanese. It even offers podcasting so that you can listen on the go. The site now has transcripts so it’s also a great resource for picking up new vocabulary. The narratives themselves are fairly interesting and you’ll probably learn some interesting trivia such as the origin of umeboshi.
2. ECIS インターネット放送局 – A large number of videos on various topics in quicktime and real player divided into three levels. Transcript of video and quizzes are provided as well. All speakers are native but I can just barely tell that the male on the other line of the phone conversations is not. You can find more videos here, as well.
3. Advanced Listening Exercises from Cornell – Though the pronunciations are a bit too clear and the conversations still sounds a bit fake, the speed is pretty much similar to real life (which is a lot faster than many educational materials). The vocabulary is fairly advanced but it is a good resource for getting an idea of how real Japanese conversations sound. My only major complaint is that all the conversations use the polite form only.
4. NIHONGO-JUKU – There seems to be all sorts of audio blogs popping up for Japanese lately and NIHONGO-JUKU is one of the better ones geared for intermediate to advanced learners. Each podcast comes with an complete transcript.

Free Learning Tools

1. Moji (Firefox extension) – For Firefox users, this neat extension will allow you to quickly look up words on websites via a handy sidebar. The site has a more detailed description and screenshots.
2. 理解.com – For those of you who don’t use firefox or don’t want to install anything, this website will also translate words on Japanese websites by providing popup definitions. Unfortunately, this site is blocked at my work so I’ve never tried it myself.
3. rikaichan (Firefox extension) – Here’s another firefox extension that will do essentially the same thing as 理解.com but without having to go to the site. The constant mouse popups might get a little annoying but you can set a hotkey to easily turn them on or off.
4. WaKan (Windows-only) – I can’t say too much about this program since I couldn’t get the fonts to work but I hear it’s a great tool for learning Japanese. The features page has more detailed descriptions and screenshots so you might want to check it out.
5. JWPce – It’s been a while since I last used this program but I mainly used it as an offline dictionary before I bought my electronic dictionary. The word processor function is very clunky and practically useless but the program is still a useful tool as a substitute for WWWJDIC when you can’t get online. But first, I suggest you download the newest version of edict to update the dictionary.

Will from nihongojouzu.com did an email interview of me several days ago so if you are remotely interested about where I come from, here it is:
http://www.nihongojouzu.com/2006/04/learner_stories.html

Hmm… is this bad taste to link to my own interview?

Anyway, he also has neat tips such as how to put Japanese notes on your ipod so why don’t you check it out?

On a sidenote, I will put up the third skype lesson details this weekend and email the participants. Unfortunately, next, next Sunday is no good for me because I have to go to work!!