I’ve been playing the Japanese version of Monster Hunter 3 (an online game with chat capabilities) and have been enjoying chatting more than playing the actual game… but anyway, the responses I’ve been getting from the 日本人 are typically nothing short of admiration with “上手！” at every turn … but I don’t feel like I’ve been doing anything impressive. Kanji in particular they find astonishing that I can understand, where in reality that’s one of the easiest parts of the language. None of this happens if I don’t introduce myself as an American, as they just assume I’m another Japanese. I don’t consider myself fluent yet though, even though they keep telling me I’d be fine if I moved to Japan today.

The important thing is that I’m in direct conversations with people, which I can’t ignore. Nothing bad happens if I put down a textbook or passively ignore a podcast. When I HAVE to respond to chat aimed at me to communicate, that’s great incentive to pay attention and learn.

By the way, I didn’t understand what duodenum meant, so I followed the link, and the kanji explained it to me.

I think I went through three phases (so far) with my Japanese, the first phase was crappy, but got loads of praise from native speakers. The second I was at a higher level but often got salty looks from people, like as if I was close to expressing stuff but actually everything was wrong. The third was at a higher level and I got more praise from Japanese people again, but at this third phase I was always like “why is that impressive? All I told you was where I met this one dude.”

And when you think of it, it’s the people who can do “pub talk” or just gossip, rather than the people who can describe some international crisis that really seem natural. I mean who talks like a newspaper anyway? A-holes thats who.

All I did was carry a tiny dictionary in my pocket, paid attention when people spoke, and tried to always speak Thai even if I fumbled through the words in the beginning.

Flash forward to now after years of active Japanese study. Even though my Japanese vocabulary probably triples my Thai, it still can’t come anywhere close to my Thai in terms of having regular everyday conversations.

I was totally clueless as to why it was effective when I was in Thailand, but now I realize it was because I unknowingly forced myself to focus in on only what I heard face to face and what I wanted to say in everyday life. I never cared to watch the news or read the newspaper at that time (later on I learned to read), and I think that was a very good thing. I only did the basics over and over and nothing more.

I was so clueless that when I started Japanese I did the exact opposite for the most part. I only got adult-level reading material, listened to a lot of news and adult targeted shows. I scoffed at anything “basic” thinking that would only slow me down in getting to my goal of native fluency. How wrong was I…..

I also noticed that a lot of phrases children use are used by everyone, only not as much (despite hearing that if you learn from children you’ll sound weird and people will laugh at you). Japanese people grew up speaking like that then learned more complex patterns, but they are based on and built upon all the language they used as children. Of course this is different from generation to generation, but I think learning from the ground up building a foundation on simple stuff will definitely help you master the language in the long run. All this by the way was inspired by something khatz said last year about how most learners don’t master the basics and how they were important (thanks khatz!).

Had a conversation with someone saying that they didn’t like graded readers (for Japanese children) because they contain little to no kanji and therefor it’s hard to know what the words are, so they preferred more adult (or as they put it Authentic Japanese material lol). I remarked that how silly it was to try to read something for adults if you can’t understand something for a 2nd grader. Children learn to understand first by mastering the basics, we forget that and skip them thinking that if we get the complex stuff we’ll be ok, will we?

sorry for the long comment 😉