Also: About sharp and rusty knives. It is entirely possibly to observe this happening, even in your first language, even when you are monolingual. If I spend too much time away from certain books, my speaking patterns change, my vocabulary becomes simpler, and overall, I start sounding like the people I hang out with. I will actually struggle to think of words and phrases.

Halfway through a Jane Austen novel or Dickens, the complexity of my sentences picks up, I return to sounding like myself, and then end up unintentionally going further, using unnecessarily complex grammatical forms, speaking in incredibly long sentences, and overusing verbiage.

My point is that all language suffers from disuse, not just languages acquired later in life; if Japanese comes a little slower after spending time around English speakers, I’d guess English would come slower if you went for a month’s vacation in Spain. It’s all immersion, even first languages.

Sub out English for X and you’re spot on about every single person.

It’s fairly amusing.. Can always tell a foreigner from a native, not from their accent, but by how good their command of the language is. Native will use slang, drop out letters, usually vowels. -.- And so on. A person who has learned the language because they love it however, they’ll structure a sentence properly, use vowels, and very, very quickly pass 95%+ of the speakers in the country they’re in.

Note: All statistics made up, probably exaggerated. Nothing based on official reports, just a heck of a lot of train hours.

Simultaneous learning replaces maintenance. In other words, if you learn all you need at the same time, you’ll get rid of reviewing. Now, Khatzumoto said he learned Japanese in 18 months. If he had chosen to study Cantonese/Mandarin/Russian/Japanese everyday instead of “All Japanese All The Time”, he would have learned everything he wants in six years…

…Or maybe not.

Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin share a lot in common, enough to speed up the process IF they’re learned together. Otherwise, it’s just… maintenance.

And you can get things done even faster if you use the same material over every language. You’ll hardly find anything but Disney movies and American series, but that’s enough to begin with.

And, of course, SRS. And maybe some tryptamines ( 4-HO-DMT, N,N-DMT , 5-Meo-DMT ), and that’s all.

Bruce Lee. 🙂

I was having an off day motivation-wise with my language study, but one word in this article completely turned it around:

“Harro”

LOL

Thanks 🙂

I know it’s a bit late, but I just wanted to thank you for writing this article. I ran into a member of the ISJR not too long ago. He was an American who learned Korean and Mandarin, and a friend of mine hired him as a Korean tutor not too long ago. I was excited to speak to him, as I always love talking with people who learn languages as a hobby. He already had a vague idea of the method I’m using to learn Japanese (i.e. yours) and, as most people educated in some school system, he found the idea laughable. He was certain that I knew close to nothing. And to test my Japanese skills–get this–he had me try to read some Mandarin. Simplified, nonetheless. Of course, his sentence was filled Chinese exclusive characters, yet he claimed that they were direct cognates in Japanese. I worked out a basic meaning from my kanji knowledge and tried to explain to him why that was an idiotic task, but he just laughed. Anyway, the whole exchange left me feeling embarassed, defeated, and really just pissed.

I spent hours afterwards just reflecting on the experience thinking pretty nasty thoughts, thinking “what’s the point”, and just getting ready to give up. But then I remembered this article. As soon as I identified this person as just another member of the ISJR, all my negative feelings were replaced with feelings of joy and accomplishment. I actually burst out laughing thinking that this guy’s attitude had any bearing on me whatsoever. Afterall, even if I did have to prove something about my Japanese abilities, it certainly wouldn’t be to an English speaker.

Thanks again for writing this. You saved me a whole lot of pointless negativity 🙂

I managed to have a nice chat with the lady I dealt with in customs– granted, my Japanese is pretty wretched, but I was still able to communicate with her effectively. (Effectively enough, anyway to get me into the country.)

I had fun talking to a cabdriver in Kyoto. Granted, I wasn’t saying anything deep, but it was fun chit-chatting with someone in his language, and he really appreciated it.

And then I spent an hour or so talking to an older couple in Hiroshima as I was doing my laundry at their laundromat. (It’s 3-4 blocks from the JR there, by the way.) When my Japanese failed, or their English failed, we’d just try to figure it all out with broken bits of whichever language worked. Very nice people.

My trip wasn’t all smiles. There were some ISJR incidents, but I try to forget those as a favor to all the nice people I did meet there.

But it’s amazing how far you can get with just ~お願いします、~下さい、どうもありがとうございました、すみません、これは何ですか？、失礼します… you know, just a few polite phrases. It’s amazing how nice people are when you just treat them politely. (Especially in their own country.)

Anyway, back to my SRS.

how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=300&PN=1

···直射日光等を避けて保管して下さい
As a matter of fact, my doubts with this sentence (at first I had taken とう as reading) were that ちょくしゃにっこうとう didn’t sound very nice. I’d prefer など here for that reason.

You’re right about など in the list, I did read about that somewhere.

I know I said 等 for など is a 熟字訓, but it might be more accurately a 義訓 since it’s only 1 character. I believe it’s based on the Chinese usage of the character, which does occur in 漢文. They probably took the kanji originally since it was just about analogous to など in that situation.