IMO – I ignored Kanji too much in the beginning and realize in hindsight that you learn not only vocab, but the derivation of many words (a lot of which really ends up making sense). Recommendation for those that read this post in the future, check out (google search) for WaniKani. Great SRS kanji system that teaches in about 1 – 2 years (depending on individual pacing), ~2000 kanji and some ~6000 vocab.

But anyway, I think it’s important to the make the time you do have as enjoyable as possible, not to try to force yourself to do too much. It’s not a race to see who can get ten thousand hours the fastest.

Any ideas on how to immerse yourself in Japanese while not distracting yourself from work? I think it’s pretty difficult.

But OK. Since I have listened to Japanese music and watched anime & stuff for a few years now, I guess I already collected a few of these 10.000 hours.

What’s next? There’s a Japanese bookstore that also imports magazines so… I’ll subscribe to Shounen Jump. I read some of the mangas anyway. I can also spend my manga reading time learning Japanese. Even though Shounen Jump is about twice the Japanese price here…

and does “bilingual multitasking” reallly work?
eg. read AJATT while listening to music (or vice versa)

Monolinguist haterss have been addressed, so have people that are too scared to break away from their comfort zone. but what about 1/2 & 1/2? I’m talking about 日英語 JAPANGLISH
[or whatever variation of the concept you happen to be dealing with]

I sent khatz an email………
but i fear it’s at the bottom of his massively overloaded inbox(es?)…

If anyone has any advice on either of those, i’d appreciate it, J or E.

1)Play Japanese music, podcasts, drama cd’s, or audio ripped from a drama while doing my homework(this especially helps when I have no time to watch a drama)
2)Put all need-to-memorize material on Anki so that I HAVE to go to Anki to study. While I’m there, might as well do some kanji reps.(This also improves your school study habits)
3)Try to mentally translate random phrases into Japanese whenever I feel like it.(I wonder what Dalton’s Atomic Theories would be in Japanese…hmmmm…)
4) I always keep manga in my backpack or purse in case I have a free moment. Only comedy though. If it’s complicated or too deep, I’ll never bother reading it. I also keep a mini notebook to write vocab in. And a dictionary. It’s alot of books, but with the size of my textbooks, it’s nothing. If all else fails, manga is key.
スクーランブルは一番好きな漫画。
5) If you have a Japanese friend, tutuor, teacher, neighbor, anyone who speaks Japanese, talk to them( in Japanese). Also ask them to correct your mistakes no matter how many there are. Sometimes people will think they are being rude to correct you, and will be embaressed(picture yourself correcting a foreigner who speaks really bad English..embarassing isn’t it). Assure them that you want to be corrected. This will help your Japanese A LOT.
Pretty much, I find that multitasking will get you to do the most. Easy,quick tasks are second best. It’s better you do something tiny than nothing at all. がんばって！

It also means that I have no personal income and my husband’s income goes to little luxuries like food and electricity. He’ll buy me the occasional Japanese concert (like for my birthday, if we can afford to get me anything at all) but, really, he hates Japanese music and doesn’t care to learn to speak it either, though he is otherwise encouraging of my determination to learn. So I can’t replace our stuff; I can only add to what we have… and I’m being quite literal when I say there is 0 money to spend on movies and books in Japanese.

The music, well, I had 11 years of collecting that so I’m good on that front; it’s all I’ve listened to for so long that I already had a nice collection before I became a stay-at-home wife.

Any advice on ways I can, within those limitations that I cannot change, make this the most immersive environment possible? I’m gonna start looking for websites in Japanese and try to use Japanese whenever I’m talking to myself (which is embarassingly often) or my cat. I have a word processor that lets me type in Japanese easily so I was thinking I’d start with getting all my romanized song lyrics into proper Japanese and delete the old romanji ones plus turn the file names and tags of my digital backups of my music collection to Japanese.

I got the Anki program to do SRSing also but beyond this, I’ve run out of ideas to make this an immersion environmet. My mom says when I was a little kid I used to read the dictionary for fun (I know, I know… wierd kid, huh?) so I was thinking if I could find a free online Japanese dictionary (not a language to language one but an actual all-Japanese dictionary) that’d be great. It’d be like when I was a little girl wanting to learn all the words I could.

Sorry this is so long of a comment; it’s just that after reading all of this stuff from the AJATT site, it’s gotten me all excited about the thought of not only understanding what they’re saying in the songs I can sing along with but also what they say in the skits they stick in the concerts I got before we were completely broke LOL

What do you mean by “fluent” when you say you became fluent by 18 months? Could you provide descriptions of the type of communication you were comfortable with by that time? Thanks.

Scott

I hate that! It happens to me every time… I always say I’m going to get a ton done over the weekend but I always end up doing what you described. Guess it goes back to the “People with all the time in world get nothing done”.

Music: Find good japanese music and listen to it, when you’re at a high enough level start looking up the texts and make sure you understand the whole song (mining what you feel like too, of course). Then when you can’t use your iPod, tune into the songs. I don’t know how common it is to be able to do it, but I can be listening to japanese music in my head while simultaneously listening to teachers, friends anyone and being able to respond if I need to. I hear it more clearly if I can sit tapping my foot too. If you can’t do this, then try at least remembering fragments of conversations, thinking about grammar points or other stuff that can be worked with mentally to make you used to the mindset.

Not just iPod everywhere but book everywhere: if you have ANY japanese books make sure you have one with you whenever you can. Again, if you can multi-task it, read during lessons. (yes, ideally you mentally play music while reading in Japanese and listening attentively in English) An important reason all this works is what Khatz says in later posts about skipping. Most of what your teacher says isn’t that important. You can ‘skip’ it, you don’t need to hear every word just understand the meaning of it. Usually I’m able to follow the lesson better than others in fact because I’m NOT BORED. How could I be? I’m reading an awesome story while listening to cool music, writing mindmaps in a creative way (not in Japanese yet in my case tho) and at the same time learning interesting stuff.

Now, remember. You’re like, what, 16? You probably have a long way to go in many ways, and you NEED friends. You cannot deny them in the same way, make a choice in the same way 20-somethings can. If you do you will be incredibly pissed at yourself. Believe me, I tried doing that (for reasons other than Japanese) and yes, worst decision of my life so far. Share your Japanese interest as much as you can, but don’t push friends away even though you won’t go back on studying Japanese. Of course, if you can find Japanese friends too that’s a huge bonus, but either way you need your friends and family. Make sure you seriously sit down and decide just how important you want Japanese to be for you, to what degree you can let it affect other aspects of your life. And remember to not limit your influences too much, don’t make your world too narrow (oh hey I just thought about something. GO LOOK AT A WORLD MAP RIGHT NOW. There’s a huge risk that you have a very skewered view of the world and this hopefully gives you a wake-up call in that case. Look at it for real, checking wikipedia for random countries just seeing how huge everything is.)

Last paragraph, promise.
Let your interests influence your Japanese learning, look up gamer communities, cooking shows, popular Japanese sports, whatever in Japanese related to your interests.
Let Japanese affect your interests; maybe there’s an association where a lot of people with Japanese background go in your town? Look up culture you meet through your immersion; try asking your religions teacher what she or he knows about Shintoism.
Use the skills you’ve gained from learning other stuff, if you find you’re really good at remembering with the help of making acronyms well apply that to Japanese, of course, and remember that even though Japanese culture is different and you’re speaking a different language, your social skills make all the difference.
And the other way around is DELICIOUS. I was doing pretty good for myself in high school but ho boy, if I knew all the things I’ve learned from Japanese then school would be a breeze. Try to see not only the Japanese you learn but what you learn on a more general level: simultaneous input, memorization, creativity from those wacky RTK stories, leading a more relaxed and fun life that leads to success in your goals, staying humble. Use it in your daily life and you will hopefully find you have more time on your hands for doing Japanese, which will make you grow even more, and SO ON!

You’re doing more than just learning Japanese. You’re becoming a good dude.　An even gooder dude. While having FUN! Good luck.