English for a coffee – just a way to get to know more people and as a famous Roman Emperor might have said once ‘Give the people what they want,’ and then they’ll probably be more willing to give you want you want.

I’m alright with the kids TV at the moment. It’s simple and easy to follow and feels good because it gets easier quickly. I also watch some ‘science/educational’ programmes aimed at teenagers and that’s enjoyable because the theme is obvious. I find adult programmes much more difficult to watch at the moment – though I’ll definitely look out for Dutch Southpark.

International High Fives all round

Some people definitely do take the passive listening thing to heart and think that’s all they’ll really need.

If they actually took the time to read the site properly they’d see how much work Khatz really put into things with learning lots of vocab (though disregarding learning grammar in the conventional sense) and actually speaking Japanese as often as he could to people around him.

Passive listening is very important, having a firm foundation in fun is very important, but so is actively learning new things and speaking the language after a while.

@Chagami: No, we are actually talking about the japanese online Yahoo dictionary (dic.yahoo.co.jp/) where you can just type in a word, check the 英和 below the search field, press enter and get tons of example sentences!
Google translate can be totally off the mark unfortunately…

Just my opinion though…

75% of my input at this point is TV, and I’m definitely learning.

You know, if you want a way to test your comprehension, get a movie in a language that you don’t know. I did this by accident by watching the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (or something like that.) It was in Swedish I believe, and even though it was subbed in English, I had a hard time understanding anything!

Anyway, Chris, be careful with kid’s shows. From personal experience, if I’m watching something that I wouldn’t be interested in if it weren’t for the Japanese content, I’m setting myself up for failure. I’m the kind of person who can put massive amounts of effort into something at the beginning, even if it’s rather tame or laborious. But it isn’t long before I burn out, and end up being worse than when I started.

Maybe you’ll be better off finding some Dutch South Park, or whatever would interest you more than a kids show 😀

Don’t worry Chris, we’re all in this together! From The Netherlands to Korea to Canada, international high five! XD

*raises hand*

Given that Dutch is much, much easier to workout than Japanese and a lot of words are practically the same as English, I can also confirm that a ‘time-wasting’ activity such as TV watching is so helpful.

Even within the proper gibberish (Dutch that is not obviously related to English), some of this is now familiar in terms of sound, even if I haven’t worked out the meaning yet.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. I do really want to learn from people too, but I’m currently a friendless and unemployed jerk, so haven’t had that much chance so far.

If you have trouble with any of this.

You need more input. No questions…you need input. LOTS of input.

Here’s why: inputing is a necessary part of the learning process, but it only really allows for subconcious aquisition (sp?). Over time, that subconcious knowledges gets transfered to your long-term/active memory, but that transfer is relatively slow & inefficient (especially during your first ~10-15k hours of exposition to the language). During that lag, there are often unaddressed holes/gaps in your knowledge that you’re not even aware of yourself (after all, how can you be conciously aware of a gap in a process that is ~98% subconcious?). By outputing, and being corrected at every turn, these unaddressed gaps in yoru knowledge being addressed, which allows you to conciously & deliberately improve (deliberate practice, anyone?).

Example: at one point, I didn’t know when い needed to be replaced with く; I would say things like 顔は赤いになった (instead of 赤くなった) or 無いようになった (instead of なくなった). There was a point in which a (Japanese) friend of mine constantly corrected/reminded me about this, and after about 1-2 weeks I started using it correctly. Problem solved.

I could have theoretically just kept my mouth shout (no output) and waited for the subconcious input process to teach me how to say it correctly, but this would’ve taken longer. This, IMHO, is a huge advantage that adult learners of languages have over babies: we are capable of making the process partly concious and deliberate, allowing us to get farther in a shorter amount of time.

I started up my immersion environment about three weeks ago, so I’m not much better than those people. As Khatz had mentioned before, there’s multiple stages to passive listening:

Stage 1: It’s all gibberish
Stage 2: You pick out a few words
Stage 3: You pick out phrases
Stage 4: You pick out the few words you don’t know

I’m already at the initial stages of Stage 2. I’ve only spent three weeks in a Japanese environment and I’ve already started to pick out words here and there that I find familiar, and after a short while, understand their meaning.

So to those who are skeptical about starting the Japanese immersion environment, I’m only slightly further into the journey than you and I can tell you that there will be results.

Just remember, creating a Japanese immersion environment doesn’t mean you have to throw away your old life, just convert it into Japanese.