Also, I have a friend who’s been in Japanese classes for 2 years, and I know a good ammount of kanji more than her. She says she can understand Japanese in bits and peices, but cant really understand everything. At hearing this, I (kindly) told her I would pass her up, and went back to doing reviews. She insists I’ll never do it. Im gonna prove her wrong~ ;D

Just think how many lives could have been saved over the years if our late night city streets had only drunks trying to ride unicycles!

I don’t think I need to go into to much detail, I can basically some it up by saying, *”Japanese is my cocaine, and Chinese(Mandarin, Cantonese) is my speed”*. And its taking more effort then it should to cut this speed addiction ;_;

I have a half-dozen language I need to learn and use… but I can’t wait 30 years to reap the benefits. I need something faster.

Sometimes, you just have to be a polyglot to get a job done. Now, my European languages may not be as good as my Chinese, since I only need to read them and I have to do actual fieldwork in China, but I’m really glad I half-assed those languages when I was a teenager to get them to the point where I can read academic papers.

That being said, I love you Khaz and all that you do.

To cite an example, I believe most Indians are bilingual (if not trilingual). As far as most “big cities” are concerned, everybody can read, write and speak English. Of course they also speak their mother tongue(Bengali/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/Malayalam etc) and the national language (i.e. Hindi) [in most cases]. There are very few people I know from english-medium trained backgrounds who are “literate” (in the native-level sense of the term) in their mother tongue/Hindi.

Well so what? My point is that such people can still have “deep” and “meaningful” friendships with people who speak their language even though they may barely be able to read a newspaper. IMHO I don’t think it’s all about knowing every word of every sentence or “mere” spoken fluency being functionally useless. There are plenty of words I don’t know in my mother tongue (Bengali) but I can communicate in it just fine. In the end, its all upto individual discretion. I still can’t fathom *why* somebody who doesn’t care about moving to Japan would ever *have* to watch Japanese news (unless he enjoys it of course 🙂 ).

Of course, there’s no real point in learning a few well-chosen phrases either. If there does exist a lower limit for proficiency in a given language, I’d certainly like to know about it.

I only add SRSs, media, RTK, and that like because I know I want to pwn Japanese just as much! I think however if you make sure to balance a lot of what you enjoy into the activities you don’t, you wont feel burnt out. I think that’s the key.

You know, the whole, spoonful of sugar with your medicine adage. Also, I’ve met a lot of people who claim to speak multiple languages, though they really don’t know how to do much more than communicate on a basic level. That may be useful if you’re traveling all over the place with no real destination, but to me, the whole point of learning a language is to be able to live in the language and evolve. Some people don’t even do that with their native languages anymore (like Grammar Nazism and old folks who say groovy).

One thing I think you might need to be a teeeeny bit careful of Khatz is playing up the couch potato thing. It could be lead to people thinking they can just sit and watch anime all day and the fluency will just magically appear. Of course anyone is welcome to try that, but I bet they’ll be in for a big disappointment later on.

A problem that I don’t think you’ve fully addressed (I could be wrong here) is the definition of fun. The thing that is stressed most on this site is indeed having fun. However, each person’s definition of fun is going to be different, and the resulting activities from this “fun” will invariably differ in terms of how beneficial they are to actual language learning.

For example, in your (Khatz) case, I’m guessing that on top of just watching tv or playing video games, you also enjoy reading and acquiring knowledge. So reading through a manga or book, looking up words, picking out sentences, is a pleasurable thing for you. But what about the people who don’t find that fun at all? How about the kid that only likes to what American movies? Ok, so he finds them dubbed in Japanese. This is his idea of fun. Reading and sentence picking are not anywhere on his list of fun. Where will his Japanese be after a year? This is where trouble arises in blindly following the fun trail. There should be certain core elements (activities?) of language acquisition that can based on what one thinks of as fun, while the elements or activities themselves might not be considered as such.

Being able to enjoy the awesome movies, dramas, manga, music, and anime was/is just an added bonus. 😉

I never wanted to learn Hungarian. That happened on accident. And I’m still not sure what to do with it 😛

Most of my Japanese input comes from my laptop (i.e. Japanese radio, music, news podcasts, SRSing, etc) so I sit on the couch till my rear is numb without any guilt of being lazy!

@Chuck. You probably like trying to learn 60 words because it’s a nice, hard earned victory. I think giving yourself small victories is one of the best ways to prevent burn out.

Outside of school, everything else is Japanese now. Just like you, I’m a diligent couch potato. I hope to someday be able to transition from couch potato to book worm, but I have to learn more kanji first.

Also, for some reason I highly enjoy trying to stuff 60 vocabulary words into my head in a day. Why is that?