Yeah, I said it. Sacred. For once, I am deliberately courting a dogmatic approach and intepretation of AJATT “canon”.

TL;DR: if ever in immersion doubt, prioritize your ears. Anchor your ears in your L2. Where your ears go, your eyes will follow.

Japanese Ear, English Eye

So, I’ve often played a game called “Sensory Split“. Basically the idea is this: you can’t always do the “all” in “All Japanese All The Time”. And that’s fine. But you can almost always run a “Some Japanese All The Time” game. SJATT. Wow, that…sounds better…like “Stir Fridays” in “Archer”.

Hold on though, first of all, I want to sincerely thank Idahosa Ness, a guest contributor over at Benny the Irish Polyglot’s “Fluent in 3 Months” blog. His post on “Sound Rehab“, which I didn’t even have to read in full to be totally electrified by (every paragraph contains enough insight to get you off your duff and implementing for days and weeks at a time), is what inspired me to act and reflect and go back to basics on this idea. I could literally quote the entire article and that would be giving it too little credit. So definitely go over there and take a look.

Anyway, so…dang that article’s good. Too darn good. I don’t even feel like writing any more, because Idahosa tells you everything you need to know. You know how, when you’re a kid, you’re growing really fast, and changing shoes sizes every 3~6 months, so, like, even though your parents are well-off, they like to act like they’re not, as if they hadn’t gotten the memo that they’re doing well, so instead of buying you “Reebok” shoes, they buy you “Roebuck” shoes and hope/pretend you won’t notice because you’re just some dumb kid that came out of their nutsack?

Well, this article is the Roebuck to Idahosa’s Reebok. His is the real deal, mine is a pale imitation. But I’ma do my best anyway. Um…talking points…where was I…so…OK, yeah, so there’s this AJATT idea of sensory split. Basically, you can have one sense in your L2 and the other (linguistic) sense in your L1. So, listening to L1 audio books while reading L2 text. Or, listening to L2 audio while reading L1 text. These two processes are affectionately known as:

• “Japanese Eye, English Ear”
• “Japanese Ear, English Eye”.

They both have the same initials so you can’t tell them apart. But which of these is better?

Wait, hold on, did I mention how awesome Idahosa’s article is? No, the man goes deep, he goes into how our entire education system values vision above all the other senses, quite in contrast to all of preceding human history and prehistory (including the “Classical” — Graeco-Roman — education that is purportedly the foundation of our system), which has always been very aural/oral. And it’s not just about whether or not a civilization had or valued writing, this visual bias has infected and affected everything, down to how we now read in silence instead of aloud — apparently that didn’t used to be a “thing”.

As biases go, it (the visual bias) is a relatively benign one, but it still deserves correction. Good news: I’ve heard it argued by no less than, if I recall correctly, the guy who organizes the TED conferences that YouTube and things like TED are sorta bringing back oral/aural learning, and I couldn’t agree more. I believe it was Earl Nightingale who called audio learning tapes the greatest learning innovation of his time, or something to that effect. And, yeah, for real, the ability to cheaply and effectively “can” actual sound and carry it around may well come to rival text and literacy in sheer impact; Nightingale was probably seeing something that we haven’t even quite begun to fully experience. Of course, the irony of it all, as Mihai Nadin points out in The Civilization of Illiteracy, is that this putative resurgence of oral culture came about thanks to text — in other words, what you’ve got going on is this sort of “neo-oral culture” that Walter Ong describes in Orality and Literacy. I said putative, I meant incipient. No…impending.

Ha. I got to say “putative”, though. Looks a bit like “punani”, so I like saying and writing it 😀 .

“This punani resurgence of oral culture”.

Oh, you were thinking it, too!

OK, so Japanese Ear/English Eye and Japanese Eye/English Ear. Which of these is better? Well, by far, the Japanese Ear/English Eye process is the more powerful one. If ever in doubt, let your eyes run free range linguistically, but fix — immerse — root your ears deeply in Japanese or whatever language it is you’re trying to get used to. There are several reasons for this, many of which are in my head but only a few of which I can really articulate clearly.

We are a very visual generation/culture of a very visual species and I am certainly no exception to that. As people go, I consider myself a very visual person. I’m a bibliophile; I buy and read books like…like dominoes, just one after another. I’ve had a TV (computer and projector now) in my bedroom since I was 11. I literally go through Tyrone Biggums withdrawal symptoms if I don’t see kanji for a while. My idea of visiting a city or country is visiting its bookstores. Our work and our play are mediated through literacy; we’ve all become writers as well as readers, Twittering and Facebooking and texting and generally freaking ignoring me when I’m speaking: I’m talking to you, every woman in the world 😛 . Even my mother’s addicted to texting.

And as languages go, I consider Japanese a very visual language, if such a thing can be said. That right there is probably the least controversial AJATT assertion in the history of AJATT assertions. And there’s no reason, no excuse to remain illiterate in Japanese if getting used to Japanese is something you want to extract out of life, out of your time here on Earth. Nevertheless, like Idahosa, I don’t buy into the “learning styles” / “learning modalities” spiel; it’s always struck me as just another cop-out, another way for people to claim that they’re stupid and handicapped and “can’t” do something. Almost like a dyslexia lite or an ADD junior. Just yet another sub-clinical “pathology”, another “disability”, another way to disempower ourselves, to make ourselves weak and broken and…yeah, lame.

And at the same time, Idahosa’s helped me understand how/why it is I got addicted to audiobooks these past, I dunno, 18 months or so. Learning by ear is powerful, just as powerful (and in some ways more so) than learning by eye. Here’s the thing about making your ears a sacred L2/Japanese space:

You can listen (well, hear) far more than you read. So there’s a volume issue. Even with the amount we read nowadays, there are plenty of times when we’re staring into space or when we simply can’t read for logistical reasons — our hands are literally too full for literacy (you like it when I do that, don’t you?). Some people drive, others walk (I read while walking quite a bit, but traffic safety concerns curtail the amount I can get away with this), some people get just too plain tired, either in the eyes or in the whole body. Sometimes we can’t focus. Again, back to talking about me (my favorite person and topic), I have great vision, but yeah, my eyes tire. Not to mention the biggest visual shutdown of them all: sleep. We even call it “shut-eye”. And let me hit you with some knowledge, sister: sleep is a major hole in your reading time.

Ears on the other hand, never get tired. Not in the same way. They can always be kept busy. No matter what you’re doing. Even when you’re tired. Even when you’re walking. Even when you’re daydreaming. Even when you’re sleeping. Will you always be focussed? No, but that’s fine. The same can’t be said for books, you can’t passively read in the same way you can passively hear (there is something to be said for “visual cues” and “ambient text”; they are good and they are valuable; what I’m talking about here is not about the presence/absence of power and value but about an overwhelming differential in power and value). Aural cues and ambient sound are just that much more impactful.

Here’s another interesting thing I find about always hearing your L2. OK, so it’s easier to keep Japanese or Cantonese or L2ese in your ears at all times than it is to keep it in your eyes, right? No argument there; I’ve told you nothing new. But here’s what I find that’s exciting: always hearing your L2 acts as a reminder that “hey, we’re playing the L2 game”. No, reminder’s the wrong word. “Reminder” is an English word for “annoying thing telling you what to do but that you ignore”. Reminders are Google calendars and bossy little sisters 😛 . No, it’s more subtle and powerful than that: it’s a nudge. A nudger. Mothernudger.

Because, here’s where it gets weirder, when I hear, say, Japanese, it makes me want to read Japanese more. It doesn’t inspire guilt, it inspires desire: that’s why it’s a nudge, not a reminder. It inspires behavior. Like, it feels…right? It feels comfortable? Sort of like how certain foods go better together, or certain foods make you want other foods? Due to my low mental age, I’ve never drunk or smoked, so I can’t speak from personal experience there, but I hear, for example, a lot of drinkers who don’t otherwise smoke say that when they drink, they start to want a smoke.

So, yeah, like that. Like milk and cookies or milk and cereal. Or strawberries and cream.

Big dairy fan talking.

Speaking of which, did you know that Tom Cruise’s real/government surname is “Mapother”? I did not know that. Saw it the other day on WikiPedia Japan.

That totally came up out of the blue. Apropros of nothing. I have no way of connecting it to anything else we’re talking about here today.

So, yeah, reading even very relaxed, skimmy, AJATT-style reading, is relatively effortful whereas hearing is extremely effortless. You have to be in the same room as text and looking at it. Obviously the same is not true of audio, which is not constrained to line of sight, so it’s not just a sensory issue, it’s even a spatial one. Which is weird because photons are kind of…I dunno, cooler…sexier…than air vibrations but air vibrations are actually…pretty awesome as a carrier medium for information.

Anyway, I could go into how…

• basically, the difference between a native-level speaker and a linguistic foreigner is that the foreigner lacks a critical mass — sheer volume — of auditory L2 exposure. ¹
• audio recordings allow us to get this exposure “for free” for next to no effort.
• auditory exposure acts as a pivot/lever: a small effort on the front end yielding big results and a cascade of knock-on effects (like the aforementioned “hearing Japanese makes me want to read Japanese” effect) on the back end.
• you don’t “learn” a language: you get used to it. How you don’t “know” language, you live it.
• all that hearing/listening will provide you tons of opportunities for incidental learning (which is easily 99% of all learning).
  • Plus it’ll give you opportunities to shadow.
• the world is now literally awash in embarrassment of podcast riches, something you couldn’t have said in 1999.
• contrary to popular belief, we are not aware of when and what we are learning.
• a lot is happening to us subconsciously, in the background that we neither fully understand nor realize.
• in my experience, everyone who sneers at the idea of “passive” hearing/listening also curiously seems to suck at every language but their native one (of which they have passively heard a metric crapton)
• hearing will inevitably lead to listening
• hearing and listening will improve your listening comprehension (which, contrary to popular belief, is more important than active vocabulary as a conversation maker/breaker).
• hearing will allow you to improve your accent and sound more native (both with and without shadowing).
• many deaf people, like (for example) Marlee Matlin, who is hot stuff (check out The L Word), sound “weird” to us when they talk because they don’t get to use their ears for feedback, and how, to the extent that we don’t hear or haven’t yet heard our L2 enough (volume and frequency of exposure), we are kind of “deaf”, too…because we haven’t…we haven’t trained the ear to hear those L2 sounds to the point that it can regulate our speech.

I could go into all of that up there ↑ …

…But I’m not gonna because my eyes and fingers are tired right now and I can’t be bothered and I’m not so hot at convincing people to do things and I’ve covered some of that ground before and other people are or are going to be doing a better job of talking to you about it all anyhow.

My eyes are tired now and need a rest. But my ears? Still goin’ strong. Still listening to (hearing — I’m not always focussed and that’s fine) “Powerpuff Girls” in Chinese, which has been on this whole time. How do you like them apples? Your ears are your friend: use them.

One more thing: you probably have a life going on in your L1. A life that needs to be attended to. But guess what? Precisely because our modern culture is so visual, even more than it was a generation ago, you can, in most situations, safely and easily dedicate your ears almost completely to your L2 while having your eyes float in and out of your L2 as necessary to handle your…yeah, your life. There remains a good deal — not too too much, because Japan has a great translation culture, but a good chunk — of information that I can only access in English. “Locking” my ears in L2 mode allows me to read this information guilt-free (yeah, even I have AJATT guilt — can’t be a hypocrite, right?) while also naturally, effortlessly and almost imperceptibly pulling me right back to L2 stuff as soon as I have “done the needful”.

Listening and hearing stuff makes you want to look it up and google it and wiki it and just generally get more deetz; you keep hearing it, so you keep wondering what it’s about. You keep hearing it, so you eventually start saying it. Anyone who has a baby or a baby sibling knows this is true: yeah, the babies imitate us, but we also imitate them. Many family nicknames are baby-invented mispronunciations. And they tend to stick for life: my middle sister’s teenhood friends are still calling her what I called her when I couldn’t talk properly.

Hearing and listening to Japanese — and I use this word cautiously but deliberately — religiously, was definitely a (the?) cornerstone of the original 18-month AJATT success story and all its side stories (the news success…like, I pounded the news. And what I did was, watch the news once, record it to MiniDisc (this was a long time ago) and then listen to it all day). If you look through the success stories of other AJATTeers, both in Japanese and other languages, you’re going to notice a strong aural trend. James (news), Jamie (peeing, German). Errybody. Of course they were visually engaged, too, as was I, but the aural engagement is the real magic. And it is the aural engagement that, I would argue from experiment and experience, drives visual engagement.

Aural engagement drives visual engagement. Not the other way around. There is a tendency among AJATTeers — indeed, among schooled people period — to turn this into an SRS game. All reppy, no heary. “Just do my reps and I’m cool, right? Screw all this listening.” ² Wrong. SRS is the glue of the metaphorical Book of AJATT but media exposure is the paper. Think of it as though your ears just got tattooed with Japanese flag colors, and you’d be on the right track 🙂 .

Anchor your ears in your L2. Where your ears go, your eyes will follow.

Aural engagement drives all engagement. Again, I am not downplaying literacy in any way. I am literacy’s bulldog. You’re not going to learn to read a language you don’t get to see that often. And I think ignoring the writing system of a language with any considerable literary output is comically stupid and unnecessary and will also, ultimately, suppress the quality of one’s speech and even comprehension. You know how native speakers who don’t read a lot habitually missay (and no doubt misunderstand) certain things? Yeah, like that. You don’t need that. There is no need to be illiterate. Writing systems are meant to be understood; they exist to be understood ³. That is their entire purpose.

A big, big thank you to Idahosa, the Reebok to Roebuck writers, for teaching me about myself again, and no doubt teaching all of us about ourselves.