Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions for how to deal with the weird situation where a 日本人 who happens to know English will happily discuss things bidirectionally in Japanese for a while, before gradually deciding to respond more frequently in English?

Surely, even at this stage, my level of Japanese isn’t bad enough to make them want to give up, without complaint? Or maybe they’ve decided to switch tack, and see if they can either get free English practice (or implicitly try some sort of “role reversal” exchange where they decide to mutually respond in the other person’s second language (Japanese in my case, English in their case)/whatever’s easiest for both parties?

Either way, despite actually wanting to communicate with the other person (given that we seem to share some common interests, otherwise), it seems sort-of perplexing, given that I feel more at ease trying to communicate with other Japanese speakers in Japanese).

Still, I could just shrug it off, and see how things pan out in the long run…

Once a friend of mine/practice partner, Takehiko, told me that I ‘felt Japanese’ to him. I don’t think I understood it until now… now I need to find that feeling again.

I’ve only read three posts here and I already feel ready to really -do- things. Thank you.

I agree with what Mark said. Unfortunately our job is to be foreign…but only for 35 hours a week. The rest of the time is yours! Also, while I’ve found being at school pretty lousy for speaking, it is full of opportunities for listening and reading. Start reading the flyers, grade newsletters, etc. and don’t tune out during morning meeting (ok, this one I still have trouble with).

The best thing to cultivate a local identity is to do something where there’s not a lot of foreign interest- and here I am going to differ and say that a Japanese culture hobby isn’t the best way. I’ve found they get really caught up in showing The Foreigner something Japanese and while your language skills might improve the cultural divide doesn’t (I’ve also heard there’s less of this in martial arts, but from friends who have done tea ceremony/ikebana I’ve heard that). Pursue whatever you’re interested in (and if it happens to be Japanese culture okay), and let yourself get integrated into a scene naturally. This takes time but you become a part of the group *in spite of* the fact that you’re different, not *because of*.

You just can’t do it at school really… The only moderate success I had, was to talk to the kids in Japanese; completely disregarding the only English ‘rule’. As a result, I get to practice spoken Japanese at my own level with kids that will mercilessly take the piss if my pronunciation is off, but at the same time are more than keen to help correct my speaking/kanji/read things for me/etc.

The best option is to do something outside of school. Ikebana/Judo/learn the Tea Ceremony/etc.

In summary, there’s the Game Face ie at school and your Real face; outside school. You’re being paid to speak English at school so it’s fair enough, but outside school it’s up to you to make the most of your time, and there’s the added bonus that you can talk to people that are actually worth talking with.

I’m very curious as to how people create a local identity when they’re constantly being reminded that they’re not local, sometimes in a very unpleasant manner. Any advice?

I actually used a very similar book when I started along with manga. It was actually a English learning book, but they had the Japanese phrases along with them so I just reverse engineered it. So, nice work, good find.

One mistake I made with my book was to get a little lazy because the translations were already there. I didn’t really put many Japanese definitions, which I wish I’d done now. A dictionary for elementary schoolers is a great stepping stone to regular online ones, because they have the furigana in them too, and the definitions are just much easier to understand. I independently found the same one Khatzu recommends, so I guess this is a double recommendation for the チャレンジ小学国語辞典.

Of course the My First Sentence Pack is probably amazing. Along with the five Sentence Starte Pack pages: /sentence-starter-pack-1

Happy sentence mining!

Recently I found a book which is, I think, a real treasure for sentence-mining! The book is called “1001 expressions pour tout dire en japonais” (“1001 sentences to say anything in japanese”), even if there seem to be rather more than 2500 phrases inside.

The book was written by two people, a french person and a japanese person. It is not a grammar book, neither a vocabulary book; it only has sentences, every kind of sentences, with a lot of idioms and very useful and natural expressions like for example 「はい、これ上げる。」 (“take it, it’s for you”), 「昨夜ジダンが得点を上げた。」 (“Zidane scored yesterday”), 「あたってくだけろ！」 (“risk it all!”)

Anyway, I think I will use it a lot! I guess it’s easier for me to do this way, because I have trouble to watch a movie and to pause it every 2 minutes to check the words, the same goes for books and games. Moreover, in the sentence books I have the guarantee that the translations are accurate (which is not the case when I check myself the expressions from a movie in a jisho).
I still can watch movies and read books anyway, the sentence-book will just be my source for the sentence-mining, like 2 pages a day (about 1 hour). This way, I will just use for adding sentences the time I previously used for adding kanji.

Do any you also have this kind of book?

I would be interested to get your opinions about it.

Khatzumoto has talked a lot about grammar books and text books, but not about this kind of books which seem to have been written just for SRSing 🙂

I guess I didn’t really understand your situation when I made that post. I always make mistakes so take everything that I say with a grain of salt. If you’re planning on stopping your other studies when you graduate, it means a lot less time with the languages than going to full fluency. So that changes the situation a bit. Completing Heisig is a big deal too so you’ve already shown you have the time for some Japanese in your life. I just felt like you might be going overboard and trying to do something unrealistic, and wanted to warn you about that.

I only say this because about a month ago I started Korean, but realized that it would be better to commit that time I was spending learning hangul to more Japanese.

If you want to do it then go for it. Even Piotr Wozniak, the godfather of all SRSing, recommends at most one hour of reps. So if you have some free time it’s better than nothing. Just make the most of the time you do have and enjoy the ride.

So anyway, if you’re going to do it than no one can stop you and thats the greatest feeling to have. I recommend some manga with furigana in it (One Piece is still my favorite), thats what I really was absorbed in right after Heisig, and since you studied before, the grammar shouldn’t be too much of a big deal for you.

Also, you have about 6 to 8 hours a day that you are probably not making the most of right now. That’s right…sleep. I swear, this might be the greatest piece of advice Khatz has ever dished out. An article or two has been published since about the value of hearing things you’ve studied during the day while asleep. But I say this from experience: it works. It’s especially powerful during that period of time between the sleep and awake states in the morning, as you’re just rousing. I think the brain is just extra open to stimulus during that period, because some pretty cool things have happened to me before when I began doing it with Chinese a year or so ago. Like dreaming that I was in the back of someone’s car while two Chinese people were conversing, waking up and realizing that I was just listening to a radio talk show. I really felt like arguing about whatever they were saying and seriously considered calling in to the show. Anyway, if nothing else, it helps your ears get used to the language. Listening to L2 while asleep is anxiety and distraction free immersion, if you can handle it.

Incidentally, regarding your particular sickness, you do take a high-dose fish oil supplement, correct? I’ve read a few books about inflammation and as a result take between 3000-4000mg of FO a day, has really given me some good results in overall general health.

GLHF!
Patrick

Michael: Thanks for your response, and my best wishes to your mum. That makes sense about the whys of not starting sentences. I don’t think I’m going to skip ahead to sentences for now, but I do think maybe I’ll start looking back over some of my beginner’s books, and maybe work on picking up a little vocab. that way, which I can do while the audio is playing. I agree diet is essential, especially with inflammatory illnesses like this. I became a vegetarian when I took the Precepts to ordain as a Buddhist layman, and it began making a huge difference. Also, avoiding refined sugars and bleached flour helps keep the inflamation and swelling way down.

Patrick, Maybe I can make a game of looking for patterns of repeated words and phrases during my watching, and look those up, as a way to keep myself engaged and involved with it instead of just zoning out like I’ve been doing.Also, I myself enjoyed my Japanese classes, I just didn’t ultimately learn very much. I will say, though, that Japanese grammar is really easy for me now, after two years of Uni level Japanese, and that is something. At the same time, I feel like all of Khatz criticisms of classes is quite fair and accurate. I wouldn’t go back and untake them or anything, but I sure as heck would have finished heisig before I took them, and done the immersion thing while I was taking them.

Gassho!
Kendo

@post Anyway, I’m posting this after actually just rereading this post. I think it’s really given me perspective, because this is really the essence of why I learn Japanese, and for years, I think I’ve been going off track and just learning to learn. I feel like what someone earlier said, about their friend impressing people more because they could fit in better to be true. I’ve felt this myself. Just yesterday, I was at the library with Japanese people, and bringing up popular shows (Downtown no gaki no tsukai ya arahende :D) was more impressive to them then my kanji knowledge (even though that shocked the hell out of them, even though I’m only 1325 into RTK). Anyway, yeah, I really felt this post, I really think it’ll help me keep on track this time.

(as an aside, before now, I’d never managed to get past 500 in RTK, even though I’d tried twice before to get through it)

Thank you very much for answering. Of course I’ve read the posts of Khatzu about multiple language learning (actually I’ve read all the articles of this website, and more than once for many of them). I would love to follow his advice and focus on japanese. The problem is that, since I prepare a diploma for english and italian in college, I can’t stop learning it, I mean, I have no choice, I spend 35 hours a week in the classroom for it.

However, Japanese is the language I really love. After high-school, I went straight to college in order to learn it. I just gave up after one year because I thought it was too difficult. And in 2008 I went to another college, to learn two other languages I didn’t love as much as japanese, but which could be useful, and I had no other idea of what to do anyway.

This was before I discovered Heisig and AJATT a few months ago. Now things are different. I’m now done with Heisig. My friends are japanese, my girlfriend also (we’ve been together for a year), even if all of them can also speak at least a bit of french or english. I’ll go to Japan during 2 months this summer (for the first time).

Everyday I regret to have left my previous college. With hindsight, I realize the sentence “I wanna become fluent in japanese so bad and asap” sounds childish and stupid; sorry about that, I guess sometimes my english is not fluent enough to express my exact thoughts. What I meant by “asap” is that I don’t want to waste time anymore, especially because I know the process is gonna take years. I don’t want to wait for graduation (middle of next year) before focusing on japanese.

That’s why I need advice. You say, TripleZ, that I’m biting off more than I can chew; so dou you really think I should wait graduation before learning japanese? but I managed to finish Heising in 5 months despite the college work (spending about 2 hours a day for it); so I guess there is a way I can also manage the immersion thing somehow, at least in part?

The point is that Heisig is easy to deal with, it’s just a book, you go from the first page to the last page with your brain, your pen and your SRS; I didn’t need any advice to use it (that’s why I’ve never posted on the site before).

But now, with the immersion environment and the sentence-mining, things become more complicated, because they take much more time than Heisig alone (supposed to be All The Time)…

Hmm, I don’t get what the problem with anime really is. With low comprehension, I find anime a bit easier to sit through, at least there are colorful moving pictures to look at and some have enough visual content to be understandable even without any language at all. Drama can be pretty impenetrable — I don’t get bored, but I can fall into a weird trance, where hours disappear and I don’t remember anything I just watched.

I think that it may be worth it to look up words that you are hearing over and over again while watching video and maybe write it down somewhere on a paper (not in Kanji if you haven’t learned the characters yet). Only words that you hear more than one or two times I would say. I understand your feeling that it is very difficult to enjoy watching video of any sort since it is demanding your full attention and you are comprehending very little of it. Being a perfectionist myself, I can’t stand to let sentences go by with unknown vocabulary, or even unexplained grammatical points. It’s hard to come to a happy medium between looking up everything (which is easy to get caught up in doing, and I think it’s MOST ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY NOT the correct approach) and looking up nothing (not so bad and not completely useless, but still the feeling of progression is minimal).

Essentially, on the order of Comprehensive Input, I think the more you hear points the more you will naturally get a feeling for what they mean. Otherwise, we have to be child-like in looking up certain words that we keep hearing and have no idea, similar to how a child will ask an adult when hearing it while watching a movie or whatever.

Hopefully others will chime in as well with what they do to cope with the frustration of understanding minimal amounts. It’s really easy to avoid things that are almost entirely foreign to the ear. That’s why I think small steps in understanding words or phrases heard more often than not are a good step forward. Frustration is somewhat of an opposite of fun and is a good indicator that a change is needed.

The question of when to input the items you learn into SRS… perhaps while you are Heisig’ing your way to Kanji Stardom, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to make a pre-sentence deck or something, shrug. 🙂

Anyway, experiment, find out what works for you. Many of the suggestions on AJATT I find to be not working for me after trial and error. For example, I happen to find classes wonderfully fulfilling while maintaining immersion… something that everyone who posts on AJATT is vehemently opposed to. However, the core concept, FUN and ENJOYMENT makes learning more solid and, yeah, fun, is something that I keep at the root.