If anime is bad for you, then so are nursery rhymes.

What is a “tuffet” anyway? ¹

When was the last time you even saw a live sheep, let alone found a black one, and asked him for wool?

Do you know any masters and dames?

AND WHY DO YOU TALK TO SHEEP?

Don’t even get me started on fairy tales and immigrants.

When was the last time you were asked about your family background and started your explanation with “once upon a time…”?

Yeah, immigrants. That wasn’t typo ². That was deliberate ironic prejudice. Picture this. Vancouver. Iranian cab driver. What mistakes do you think he made in his English? Hint: He didn’t talk like Dr. Seuss. He did, however, say “too many” when he meant “so many”. Another Punjabi guy said “can’t” when he meant “won’t”. It was the little things. The little things that, I would add, MCDs pound you on.

Can I tell you something I know about you?
Here goes, then. Here it is. The secret of the Universe:

YOU’RE NOT EFFING STUPID.

You’re not effing stupid. You weren’t effing stupid when you were a toddler and you’re no more stupid now. In fact, the only stupid thing about you is that you think you’re so stupid that unless someone spells everything out to you in excruciating detail, including all qualifiers, classifications and possible variations, then you won’t understand anything and you’ll get it wrong and start a war because of some minor verbal faux pas.

That isn’t true. But you think it’s true. And yet, at the same time, your actions betray you. Wanna know how I know? Because I know you’ve never read the Apple End User License Agreement on your iPad. Oh, you did once for kicks, but you’ve never been through any of the revisions. Why? Precisely because legalese is so explicit that it tires and confuses you. It literally wears you down. In fact, some legalese is said to be intentionally written and typeset like this, i.e. to discourage reading and comprehension.

Daniel:

The Japanese i[n] anime is as real as the English in books by Dr. Seuss. And as we all know nobody learned from them.
(Oh, wait…)

Malcolm Gladwell:

“Reading is a form of explicit learning… Video games are an example of collateral learning, which is no less important.”

You are capable of implicit learning. Yes, even from books. You are capable of unconsciously internalizing the context and appropriateness of the words you hear and see. You can tell just by the situation and tone of voice what phrases connote — often enough, you can even tell the entire meaning. You are smart in a way that computers aren’t. What you lack in linear, machine intelligence you make up for in parallelized, organic smarts.

You can learn things that haven’t been explained to you. Heck, you can learn things without even realizing you’re learning them! Arguably, most of what you learn works this way. ³ Most of your learning is not only incidental, but unconscious.

Here’s another interesting idea to ponder. One drawback of your “organic intelligence” — that actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise — is that it usually takes more than one “pass” for you to learn something, if by “learn” we mean “remember a fact to the point that you can retrieve (ouput) it”. In other words, with very few exceptions, a single exposure is never enough.

It takes a lot of passes, a lot of “hits” (a lot of “cache misses”, in computer memory terms) until your organic memory system goes: “oh, snap, this thing keeps coming up, let’s remember it”. It is this property of memory that the SRS recognizes and efficiently exploits, in order to aid (produce?) long-term retention. Of course there are other factors, like the emotional content of the memory, but even then, repetition is key to retention.

This “leaky bucket” property of organic memory ends up working in our favor, because it means that, assuming you acquire words in context (rather than from some context-free “vocabulary list”), by the time you know a word well enough to use it correctly, you’ll have been exposed to (heard/read) it so many times in context that you pretty much won’t be able to use it wrong.

And that is why you never went around using the word “tuffet” randomly, because you only ever heard it in the context of Miss Muffett, so you unconsciously knew — learned — that it was a Muffet-specific thing. But no one ever had to take you aside and sternly warn you that: “hey, kid, watch out for them nursery rhymes; that ain’t real English!”, did they? No, they didn’t. So why are you taking life advice from pompous, obnoxious forum trolls with no friends? ⁴ Why do you let them make you cower in fear?

In short, you’re not effing stupid, so stop assuming that you are and stop assuming that other people are and stop letting other people tell you you are. You’re ignorant; you’re noobish; you’re ugly…but you are not stupid.

You’re a duck. Don’t let trolls tell you how to fly or swim.

Turn the anime back on.

The attentive will recall that Jamie (an AJATTeer) came up with what I still consider to be the greatest analogy in the history of learning languages about a year ago. The attentive will also recall that a photo of Sarah Silverman on the pot was involved, something which totally wasn’t my idea by the way, plus you have no proof and you got nuffink on me and I have plausible deniability.

Well, through the magic of the AJATT Facebook page, Jamie is back, this time with her very own German success story (as well as a couple of awesome new analogies):

Hey Khatz,
[You have such gorgeous thighs, and I don’t know how you do it. The ThighMaster may be a machine, but you are truly the master of thighs. Women love you and men respect you. It pains me to even shift the topic from you, but…] I’ve been “immersing” myself in German since December 2011. At first, it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t understand much from films, videos, music, etc and my output was simply horrible.

But after 3 months of immersion and SRS Vanilla sentences, I was able to hold basic IM chats and write emails in German with German and Austrian people. 99.9% of the Germans and Austrians thought that I was a language “Genie” ¹ and said that it was amazing that I learned German so “quickly” without any tutors or classes. I still believe that input (reading and listening) is still more important than output (writing and speaking) but once in a while I practice output.

I like writing German emails with my friends from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and I’ve had about 5-7 voice conversations over Skype in German. It wasn’t hard for me to understand what the native German speakers were saying. and most recently during Spring break 2013 in New York City, I heard a couple talking to each other in German and I just approached them by asking them in German: “Are you from Germany?” (kommen Sie aus Deutschland?) My brave action allowed us to have a short but good conversation — all in German. The couple said my German was very good especially considering “the short amount of time” I spent learning it, and not once did they try to switch the conversation to English.

So, how did all this “magic” happen? It ain’t magic. It’s just listening and/or watching to >90 minutes of audio in German during my waking hours and playing audio throughout my sleeping hours and making and doing SRS reps from time to time.

It’s about making it fun, doable, and practical to one’s OWN schedule. I learned Spanish from 2nd grade – 10th grade, but my Spanish input and output was NEVER was good as my German. The more I think about it, some of this AJATT stuff is really foolproof. “You are what you eat” and “You speak what you hear”…DUH!!

• You are what you eat.
• You write what you read.
• You speak what you hear.

Loners, “introverts” and card-carrying Libertarians, get out a change of panties, because the words that follow are going to make you wet yourselves with pleasure.

Live, direct human contact is not essential to getting used to a language. ¹ It’s useful and definitely desirable, even preferable. But far from essential.

People are wonderful. I love people. I live in a massive metropolis. My parents are people. My sisters are people. I grew up with people. I even speak Humanese. One time, I got a massage from a massage chair. That ###t sucked. It was terrible. It was torture. Worst. Massage. Ever. A true First World Problem.

But people get busy and impatient. People have exams to take and jerbs to use Facebook at and alcohol to drink. Conversely (SAT word!), recorded people — recordings of people — are powerful and tireless human surrogates. The machines of today are not the machines of our — well, my — childhood. They work it harder, better, faster and stronger. They are far sturdier and more reliable than the consumer electronics of even 20 years ago.

In terms of behavior, our machines undergo fundamental improvements while people remain fundamentally the same. In fact, we no longer replace our machines because they break; we replace them because our friends make fun of us for having an old machine.

Live human beings will flake on you like Kellogg’s. They will dump you like a high-fiber deuce. Your TV (well, laptop ) won’t. Your iPod won’t. Recordings of humans will be there for you. All day. All night. Every day. 24/7/365. When’s the last time your friends were willing to infinitely loop the same cool line or joke to you? When’s the last time your friends’ conversations came with subtitles? When’s the last time your friends were willing to tell you a bedtime story all night every night? ²

Make friends with your digital media devices. Thank them. They will teach you a language.

Like The Most Interesting Man in the World, despite living in Japan, I don’t always speak to live Japanese people. But when I do, I get mistaken for someone who grew up here.

Such is the power of media.

If you have access to people who speak the language but you’re avoiding them out of shyness, don’t. Go. Hang out. Be social. It’s fun and it’s good for you. But if you don’t have access to people, don’t let that be a mental block for you. You’ll be fine.

In terms of Japanese fluency, media got me here ³. My friends did not, not directly (they did indirectly; they were my biggest media suppliers ⁴; they complimented me constantly when we were hanging out and raised my self-confidence). They loved me. Their parents loved me. I know they did. I know they do. But too often they were too busy to be Khatz’s surrogate mommy/big brother. Having been raised in Japan, they were already predisposed to…using time-inefficient study methods ( zing!). Plus they were going to college in a second language, so they spent a lot of time hittin’ them books.

When I got over the incipient feelings of abandonment and realized that it was my responsibility to get good at Japanese, that the power lay in my hands — despite any apparent obstacles, (and that since (when we hung out) I did a lot of listening anyway, TV would be just as good as live people), then my linguistic life changed.

In getting used to a language, the presence of human beings is an asset, but their absence is not a liability. Not a dealbreaker. ⁵

Media will get you there. Recordings will get you there. No humans necessary.

AJATTeer Jake C shares this little story of how he learned how to use certain Japanese words and phrases before he knew what they actually  (literally) meant, because he was aware of their emotional content. I have had similar experiences myself in both Cantonese and Japanese, but didn’t have a  name for the phenomenon. Now, thanks to Jake, I do (“emotional context learning”, he calls it). It’s definitely one of the benefits of an immersion environment (one primarily based on FUNBUN ¹ media) as opposed to a classroom one — you learn stuff without even trying, at an almost physical, muscular level. Anyway, here’s Jake’s little story:

I feel as though I’ve hit on something no one else has considered before. It’s something I noticed in my own learning. I realized that humans aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure. When filled with a certain kind of emotion, attitude or mindset, I noticed that entire phrases of Japanese would jump into my head that I had never previously studied or reviewed. They must have stuck due to me comprehending their emotional context.

「一体誰の仕業なのか?」 ² came into my head in response to me actually holding that kind of emotion towards someone (a coworker). My mind had latched onto it through comprehending its emotional context, though I had never formally studied it before.

I’ve been repeating aloud the things I hear in the news or in anime while acting out the emotion or mindset the idea was conveyed with, and it seems to be super effective. Even conveying dry information still holds a degree of emotional context that can be acted out.

I personally think this is a fairly unique and cool way to engage in language learning: acting out (and thereby comprehending) the emotional content of the sentence, even if you don’t fully understand the words. I found out later what 「仕業」 meant, but I actually used the phrase before I even knew what it meant, which I find very weird and cool. I knew the emotional content before I knew its specific, literal meaning.

People, I am sick and phequing tired of hearing it.

Whether on the Internets or in RL, if Japanese is the topic of discussion, there always seems to be a kind, intelligent, well-meaning buck futter waiting in the wings to tell you: “Don’t learn Japanese from anime yada yada yada ¹“. It’s like Towelie from South Park, but pretentious and lame and unanimated.

• “Anime is bad for your Japanese” = “Futsal is bad for your soccer”
• A non-native-level user of Japanese worried about sounding like anime = a person in the desert, about to die of thirst, insisting on Evian.

“The Japanese” have a word ² for this foolishness: 贅沢な悩み ³. Luxurious worries. High-quality problems.

You are not in a position to be worrying about this kind of thing. You are literally covered in ignorance. You are in the ignorance toilet and need to wipe. Who cares what color the toilet paper is: wipe your behind first.

I mean, this is madness. Thus us Sparta. This is like getting a on baby’s case because she puts the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle when she says her first word. I mean, for the love of milk and cereal, man.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Let go. Let it go. Let it all go. Watch anime and talk like an anime character. It’s fine. ‘Coz guess what? Anime is Japanese! By Japanese people, for Japanese people. So saying you “sound like an anime” is just saying you sound Japanese, which is kinda sorta generally considered a good thing when you’re (get this…wait for it…hold…hold…) speaking Japanese.

Plus, you’re just a kid ⁴, Japanesewise. Talk like an anime. It’s a phase you need to go through . You’ll outgrow it and be able to talk proper — just like a stuck-up jerk on the Internet — later. So let’s review:

1. Childhood now.
2. Soul-deadening gayness ⁵ later.

End of rant. Now go back to your Ergo Proxy.

“I would rather learn from and speak like an anime character than spend so much time worrying about my source of learning that I don’t learn anything at all!”
May

Thus spake Skyler:

Hello Khatzumoto!

My ultimate goal is to learn to speak French with a native Parisian accent so I have been trying to only listen to content spoken by Parisians. I would think this would be easy to find but it isn’t. All of the content I find is either spoken by people from other parts of France or doesn’t state where the speaker is from. I have tried to search things like “Parisian French podcasts”, “Parisian dialogues”, and searches in French but nothing comes up.

I was wondering if you knew a better way to go about this, and if you try to only listen to a certain accent/dialect when learning a language? Thank you and your blog is seriously the best when it comes to language learning! I mean that!

Skyler

Skyler, my cup runneth over with thy flattery. As for your question:

I was wondering if you knew a better way to go about this, and if you try to only listen to a certain accent/dialect when learning a language?

No, I just go with the media that are available…I end up with a neutral mix accent…native/native-like but unplaceable. I did want a specific regional accent (Kansai for Japanese), but it was too much trouble trying to acquire and limit the media.

Having said that, one thing I did specifically do was to pick a particular actor and imitate (shadow) him in detail…he thus became my “surrogate parent” and my speech would sound more like his than anyone else’s…so that would be one way of going about it — rather than fuss about dialect-specific media, just pick an individual performer you like and watch and listen to a lot of his or her stuff — that’s of course assuming that this person doesn’t do too much dialect-shifting in their work.

For the record, my surrogates for Japanese have been:

• 長瀬智也 – Google 検索 j.mp/pb5Fu3
• 太田光 – Google 検索 j.mp/okYBqP

Don’t learn Japanese from novels. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from scientific journals. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from manga. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from newspapers. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from sports. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from comedy. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from young people. You’ll sound like a chav.
Don’t learn Japanese from advertisements. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from anime. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from women. You’ll sound like a transvestite.
Don’t learn Japanese from shop clerks. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from road signs. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from downtown Tokyo. You’ll sound preppy.
Don’t learn Japanese from children. You’ll sound like a retard.
Don’t learn Japanese from legal documents. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from audiobooks. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from old people. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from music. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from regional dialects. You’ll sound like a hick.
Don’t learn Japanese from computer user interfaces. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from fora and textchat. It’s all slang and wickedness.
Don’t learn Japanese from men. They mumble. You’ll sound like a yakuza.
Don’t learn Japanese from self-help books. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from science fiction. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from video games. No one talks that way.
Don’t learn Japanese from native material. There’s too much slang.
Don’t learn Japanese from TV. No one talks that way.
Learn Japanese from textbooks. That’s the real shiz, playa.

中國人嘅姓係放喺前面嘅。
zung1 gwok3 jan4 ge3 sing3 hai6 fong3 hai2 cin4 min6 ge3
Chinese names go surname first.
Source: CantoDict

There it is ↑ . The most important sentence in the entire Cantonese language…slash…dialect.

But why? It’s so simpo! It’s so basic!

Yes. It is.

And that’s exactly the point. This sentence is:

1. Simple
2. Basic
3. (Surprisingly) quite reusable, and
4. Almost impossible to circumlocute succinctly and unambiguously

“Nonnative speakers usually don’t have a good sense of which kinds of words or phrases are the most useful or common. As a result, they (unintentionally) learn lots of uncommon words and never get around to learning basic words.” ~ Robert Nagle

If you’ve ever tried to speak a “remedial native language“ ¹, after a certain intermediate point, you’ll find that it’s not the big things that trip you up. It’s the little things. It’s the small stuff. Prepositions. Tiny verbs for physical actions. Relative descriptions, demonstrative pronouns. You’ll find that you can read the newspaper, but you can’t explain how to tie your shoelaces or play ultimate frisbee or tag or hide-and-seek.

“But Khatzumoto,” you protest, “I’m not a pedophile; I don’t need to know how to play children’s playground games; this GPS ankle bracelet was just for a minor drug violation”.

It’s OK. I believe you. But…how do I put this:

• Your ability to explain new and/or complex ideas well, is predicated upon your ability to express simple ideas: Ironically, the newer or more complex an idea, the more it requires reference to simple, childlike, playground metaphors.
• A lot of the conversations we have in ordinary daily life (like asking which train route would be the best to take given certain conditions (price, time, occupancy etc.), or telling a funny story about a recent incident) can:
  • be very complex structurally — nested referencing, multiple simultaneous actors, shifting of narrative perspective (external situation, inner monologue), and
  • require the use of uncircumlocutable words — words that do not readily lend themselves to tidy circumlocution.

“Japanese people have no clue what is difficult for English speakers. Really, with just a lot of book study, I think anyone can learn grammatically correct Japanese by memorizing sentence patterns from textbooks. ‘Pub talking’ in a natural way — that’s the hard part.” ~ Cathryn Mataga

As long as you know the vocabulary, reading an academic paper, newspaper or physics textbook is actually really easy. Person and tense rarely change; most of the sentences are straightforward and declarative “X said Y”, “Q is R”, “A because B”; they are written from a single perspective (“impartial observer”) from which they almost never shift; variables are deliberately limited.

I submit to you that, unless you actively intervene and actively learn “simple” words, you’ll find yourself able to discuss anesthetic with your dentist (and its effect on your duodenum) before you can explain what that drunk guy was doing on the other side of the train.

Don’t assume you know it because it’s simple. Don’t assume you’ll have access to it because you know the individual words. It’s not just the combinations — it’s the permutations as well. Memorize that noise. Memorize those permutations. Memorize those strings. Use MCDs or some other high-redundancy method. Get them firmly into your head — into your active memory. Make them second nature.

Love the small stuff. Learn the small stuff. Mastery isn’t doing the big things well. Even monkeys fall from trees; even masters trip up on the big things. Mastery is doing the little things, the small things, the “easy” things — effortlessly, automatically, “perfectly”. Mastery is mastering the basics.

““One day I was trying to tell him this is how you button your shirt,” he said, switching into Cantonese. “But then I couldn’t say it in English, so I had to ring up a friend and ask.”” ~ A Chinese speaker

Like I’ve said before…the set of tools/methods described on this site…I don’t know why it all works; looking at and thinking about how people learn their native language, it just all seemed obvious to me. In other words, I knew what I needed to do to achieve fluency…but not much more.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio – keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1” (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (“Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19.

Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon.

But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane.

In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle – you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet – feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized – movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

This is another comment that grew so long as to deserve its own article. First, the original question:

See, everyone is so discouraging when you learn a new language and say you’ll always ’sound like a foreigner’ and this is a bit depressing. I realize that certain speech patterns are set and all that but what would be your advice and aquiring an authentic accent (Japanese or any other language)?

And my response:

ACT. Pretend you ARE from that country. Pretend you’re that Jared kid from The Pretender, and that your life depends on you convincing people that you were born and raised in whatever country has native speakers of your language. Pick specific people (often, actors) to imitate and copy their mannerisms, look at the way their mouths are shaped, their hand gestures, the facial muscles they use. Be like a comedian doing impressions.

You stop being foreign when you stop believing you are foreign, at least in terms of the language. Hold yourself to the same standard as a native speaker — if someone had to talk to you on the phone, they shouldn’t be able to tell. Never fall for the excuse of “oh, it’s not my native language”. You needn’t be harsh on yourself, just always be looking for ways to improve.

I had a Japanese friend who self-taught English, and when I first met her I thought she was Japanese-American: it was that flawless. She told me she’d watched a lot of TV and movies, and had changed the way she acted and used her facial muscles and shaped her mouth when making sounds.

So, input and imitation. Input, because you have to hear a lot of examples not just of certain words, but certain COMBINATIONS or strings of words. Words change a bit when people shout, intonation changes based on emotion.

Also, pauses. Use the same pauses and bridges as native speakers. So, no “um” because “um” is English, find the equivalents of “um” and “uhhhuhhh” in the languages you are learning.

What else…YES! I call it “doping“. In semiconductor production, doping is the process of deliberately introducing impurities into an extremely pure material in order to obtain better/desired performance properties. In learning a language, doping is the process of almost “dumbing-down” or de-streamlining your spoken language by introducing inefficient elements that have function but no meaning, and serve to make it more natural and native-like. You see, foreigners, tend to learn from texts and textbooks. And text is much, much more efficient (“pure”) than speaking. In text you get straight to the point:
A) “This is an example”. [4 words, 0 long pauses]

But in speech, you amble zig zigzag-zag toward your point:
B) “Well, um, this is, like, an example or whatever…kind of, I dunno”. [13 words, 1 long pause]

Native speakers are wasteful and inefficient. This is why the Borg in Star Trek despise human communication. In my experience, native speakers use perhaps 2 or 3 times the number of words they “need”, and all that extra baggage has no lexical meaning. “Um” does not mean anything. “Like” does not really mean anything. It’s all just filler.

Make your speech more native-like by making it more wasteful — I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. If you speak too plainly, without any flavor, you come out sounding robotic or just foreign (often both). Also, the wasteful pauses can help buy you time when you need to remember a specific word — you do this in your native language, too — you don’t remember a specific word or phrase, so you keep stringing words or phrases that are close to it in meaning and until you hit the jackpot. Examples:

A) “Is it like a wiki or a blog, or, like a CMS or something?”.
B) “I’ve never, like really had Japanese food, Or, I guess, been to a Japanese restaurant or whatever, at least on my own. I mean, I can, like, read the menu, but, um, you know, what’s actually inside it — the stuff, you know, the food, the tendon or whatever…Is what I want to know?”.

Not very good examples, but I think you get the point.

Finally, you want to swallow the words that native speakers swallow. For example, in Japanese, there is a word:　雰囲気. Technically, it should be pronounced “fun-i-ki”, but native speakers swallow it and say “fuinki”; I say it the garbled, native way.

Oh, one more thing: pick an accent. The easiest to pick is the standard accent since it tends to have the most materials produced in it. Either way, pick a focus: pretend the people who speak that dialect are your parents and classmates — functionally, they are.

Finally (for real), try recording yourself now and then. It can reveal where you need work. For more, try out these articles:

• Language is Acting
• How To Pronounce Japanese

At university, I was in a comedy troupe. No, the comedy troupe. The best comedy troupe at my school. The greatest comedy troupe since the previous greatest comedy troupe. And I was in it. And I loved it.

By the time I’d gotten into the troupe, my Japanese project was also underway — I listened exclusively to Japanese music, ate Japanese food, et cetera. Anyway, one day, during one of our bi-weekly “rehearsals”/shouting matches, I was sitting at a desk enjoying my dinner, when one of my buddies in the troupe goes: “there’s Khatzumoto with his chopsticks; he thinks he’s Japanese”, or something to that effect.

And then it hit me.

So after only one semester, I left the best comedy troupe on campus, explaining that it was in order to prepare for grad school, which was true at the time — I had wanted to go to grad school in Japan.

Language is acting. All language is acting. When you’re a kid, you copy your parents and schoolmates. Do you think it’s an accident that you speak like them? Do you think it’s a coincidence that you use the same phrases? What are the odds that, of all the accents in all the languages in the world, you would have yours? And what makes it yours? What gives you the right to it? Why is it “normal” for you to eat with a knife and fork and not your hands or chopsticks?

You’re a fraud. You’re nothing but a degraded copy of your earliest and/or strongest linguistic influences. There’s nothing “normal” about the way you speak. There’s nothing “normal” about the writing system you use. The only reason you don’t realize that this is all an act, is because you’ve been acting at it for so long; you’ve forgotten that it was just an imitation, an impression.

Kind of like the stereotypical undercover cop movie; you know “I no longer knew whether I was a cop pretending to be a thug, or a thug pretending to be a cop”. But unlike the police officer, you have barely any memory of your previous identity and the little linguistic ruse you pulled. But think. Think hard. Think for a moment, and you’ll remember. If only faintly, you ‘ll remember at some point or other, consciously copying a phrase you heard an adult use, consciously pronouncing things like the people around you.

You who had no language now have at least one language, your “native” language. What makes it so much yours? Let me tell you something, there’s nothing “native” about it. If we are to take the word “native” back to its roots [from Latin nātīvus, from nātus, past participle of nāscī, to be born], then, in a way, there is no such thing as a “native” language; if there were, you’d have been born knowing it. But you weren’t. You stole it as you went along. You copycat ;).

All that make a language “native” to you are your beliefs about it. Your almost unshakable belief in your right to it; your unquestioned conviction that it belongs to you, and that you have both the competency and the right to use it. Your years-long habit of using it, day in, day out. If nothing else, it may be the only language you own right now. And that’s another factor: the “what else do I have?” factor. That “native” language may well be all the language you know right now. So for you to speak, read and write in it is no luxury; it’s a necessity for life; you almost have no choice. That’s a pretty realistic belief.

Use that belief. Paint yourself into the same corner with Japanese. Make it a sink or swim situation. Cut off all the other exits. Don’t visit non-Japanese-language web sites, don’t watch non-Japanese programs; don’t read non-Japanese documents. Japanese is the only language for you; you have no choice BUT to understand, read, write and otherwise use it. You can’t slink away by the English side door. There is no English side door. You don’t know any other languages. だからこの言語しか無い. This is it. This is your only language.

Believe that, and I think it will make your Japanese better. It will give you that insatiable drive to understand and to be understood, and prevent you from falling back into a different language, even if and when someone makes fun of you, you won’t quit because you can’t quit; because for you, to quit Japanese is to quit the enterprise of language altogether, and we all know that wouldn’t work out too well.

Believe in your right to use this language and in your (growing) competency in it. Really, it’s no more a Japanese-born person’s than it is yours (and your language is no more yours than a Japanese person’s). Or, more accurately, all that makes it more a Japanese person’s than yours is:

1. our hypothetical Japanese person’s belief in their ownership,
2. the fact that he may not know any other languages well,
3. the fact that he has lots of experience in Japanese to back up his belief, and maybe
4. his incompetency in other languages’ making Japanese the only method for him to communicate with other people.

When you think about it, anyone can make that connection to any language! All you need to do is:

1. believe in your ownership of Japanese,
2. pretend to not know any other languages, and
3. practice; that’s all.
4. Skip # 4.

All you have to do is take it and hold on to it, and it will be yours, too. Genetics? Passports? Please.

Update [2008/9/22]: I’ve finally found the original source/basis for the advice I’m giving here — the very article I read. It was this paper from UC Berkeley quoted by a Tom Hodgers in this thread of the Wakan Project forum. The key points are right here:

We would not deny that “accent is an issue,” but we think imitating native speakers, whether in real life or on the tapes that go with your textbook, is more likely to produce natural-sounding results than attempting to fabricate the sound on your own from a notation or explanation given in writing. This is true for all matters involving pronunciation, which is exactly why our pronunciation guide has the disclaimer you mention …

It’s interesting to note that native Japanese speakers outside Tokyo speak otherwise standard Japanese (hyoojungo) with different “pitch accents” (this is what we are speaking of here, not dialect accents) and never have trouble being understood. For the student of Japanese, a flat, even intonation will always be understood, and for Americans (and some Europeans) who tend to give their words very marked pitch accents, this may be a good way to eliminate some un-Japanese sounding speech habits.

When two or three words sound exactly alike except for pitch accent, context is going to resolve the ambiguity virtually 100 percent of the time. In practical terms, accent is probably the least important aspect of Japanese pronunciation no matter what your level of language skill.

On the whole, we think most people are best off following Jack Seward’s advice … “the degree of variance in pitch is so small that the beginner is advised to voice all Japanese words … with a steady evenness of pitch … Sooner or later, depending on the sharpness of your ear, you will come to be able to distinguish among and mimic the existing minor variations in pitch.”

[…]

People without hearing impairments can mimic the melody of language, but they can hardly interpret visual accent markers into the oral/aural domain without special training because visual and auditory stimuli are processed very differently in the human brain. In all likelihood, the author of the above-mentioned letter simply feels more comfortable visually with accent markers. But using such markers to speak Japanese creates pronunciations that are worse than a crude synthesizer.

OK, so you’re learning Japanese; you’re going for the fluency; you’re going for the native-level proficiency. And as part of that, you want to be pronouncing it right. You don’t want to have the “stupid foreigner accent”. You don’t want to be doing the Japanese equivalent of “eet’s a-me, a-Maaario!”.The answer is simple, folks. Let’s break it down.

1. Talk like a robot.
Yes, I am dead serious. If you want to speak good-sounding Japanese, then talk like a robot. “But Khatzumoto, on TV and in songs, they sound so animated”. Well, not you, my friend. Trust me on this one. You see, compared to English, Japanese is sound-sparse. Very sound sparse. If you intone in Japanese like you do in English it will sound AWFUL. “KerNEEchewa! NiHON toTEmo DAIsuki deSUUU”. No. Cut that crap out. Today. It grates on the ear. Every time you do it, a clown dies. This is part of the reason classes suck—classes are full of girls called Stacy who do that.

Talk like a robot. Flat, monotone, one-beat-per-kana. Give every kana the same length. Ev-er-y-ka-na-is-one-syl-la-ble. Also, two-kana situations where you have one kana smaller than the other—ちょ、しょ、りょ, etc.—these-count-as-one-syl-la-ble-too.

2. Keep it tight
So, when I told my brother from another mother this, I said something to the effect of: “keep your mouth tight, as you would with other body cavities were you in prison”. That kind of innuendo has no place on this website! But, Grasshopper, there is much truth in this correctional advice.

OK, I’m assuming you speak English. So, English has a lot more sounds than Japanese, right? Which means that, when speaking English, you move your mouth in all sorts of shapes and configurations. Stop that. Keep your mouth tight in Japanese. There are only 5 vowel sounds. Stick to them. Do not introduce sounds that don’t exist. That’s the biggest mistake English-speakers make—introducing sounds that have no place in Japanese. Narrow your range. Shorten your stride. A. I. U. E. O.

Remember, Japanese pronunciation is cake. It’s easy. For starters, you don’t have to make any sounds you’re not already making as an English speaker. You’re using a subset of the sounds in English. So keep it tight.

3. Record yourself, and play it back.
If you’re anything like me, then this will feel like the linguistic equivalent of going to the toilet and looking closely at the results—they tend to stink. It’s gross. I hate the sound of my own voice recorded. I keep thinking I sound so cool, unti I hear the evidence and am reminded that I sound like an idiot; this is true regardless of the language in question.

So, why the torture? Because it’s good for you, and because you’re voice isn’t all bad. Playing back your own voice will help you realize where your stuff is good and solid, and where it needs work.

You don’t need to go overboard on the recording. Once a week is more than enough. Record yourself reading something aloud, hear what needs work, and work on it.

4. Pick up intonation piece by piece
Now, there is intonation and emphasis in Japanese. But, like I said, it’s far less prominent than it is in English. So much so that talking like a robot does not sound weird. It sounds good. It sounds like good Japanese. I did it for a long time.

Of course, you’re not going to want to talk like a robot forever—not because it’s bad—but because you’re no doubt going to want to express emotions through the tones and cadences of your voice. This is where you’re Japanese Immersion environMent (JIM) comes in. Yes, I just made that up. The TV, movies, radio and podcasts you watch or listen to are you’re source. Watch, watch, watch. Listen, listen, listen. Over time, you will start to pick up little pieces.

You’ll notice that “desu” and “-masu” almost always get shortened such that they come out as “dess” and “mass”. Kind of like how “What the HECK” comes out as ” ‘the HECK?!”. There is this leftover ‘intention’ to say the whole word, and your mouth even more or less makes the right shape, it just doesn’t come out.

You’ll notice how people say “KANkei NAI darou!”. And so on. And so forth. One piece at a time, one expression at a time, you’ll pick it up. If you turn every available waking moment of your life into a JIM, it will come to you. Any moment of the day you do not have to speak or listen to a language other than Japanese, you should—must—speak or listen to Japanese. In the shower, while you sleep (if it doesn’t disturb you), when walking, eating breakfast, making love. Whatever.

5. Adopt a Parent
This is really an extension of the idea of picking up intonation piece by piece. Anyway—have you ever noticed that a lot of people share the speech patterns and mannerisms of their parents? This is no accident—a lot of people spend a lot of time with their parents. You probably don’t have a Japanese-speaking parent. But that doesn’t matter: you can adopt yourself one for free. And they don’t even have to know it.

Learning a language is a lot like acting. Scratch that, it is acting. In many ways, all you’re doing is an impression—an imitation—of other people. As you grow older within a given language, your awareness of this imitation decreases; the imitation has become so natural that you don’t notice it. Plus, you may even have added some unique, personal innovations of your own. Nevertheless, I can remember, even into my early teens, consciously imitating people in my native language.

The point is this—kick-start that imitation again. Pick someone and copy them. Make them your “parent”. If you’re a guy, you should pick a guy to copy; and girls should pick a girl. Watch, listen, imitate. Yes, this is sexism, but it is sexism with a purpose: there is quite a sizeable gender spectrum in Japanese. You can situate yourself somewhere in the middle, without being too macho or too girly, but there are expressions and emphases that are almost exclusively female, and ones that are almost exclusively male. Also, men mumble more than women; women intone more than men; all of which perhaps explains why a lot of people initially find women’s speech “easier to understand”.

Back on topic—you probably do impressions of people already, when you’re making fun of them. Just keep doing that, and strive to make your impression an accurate one.

You don’t have to “set aside time” for this. Since you’ve created a JIM (Japanese Immersion Environment), you can just do it while you’re relaxing watching TV, or listening to radio/podcasts, or whatever. It’s not something complicated; it’s just something you do.

Closing
Anyway, that’s how I did it and it worked well for me. Remember, as always, have FUN!