I pretty much have to hide all things related to Japanese or risk getting ridiculed by everyone. All I hear is, “stop learning Japanese dude, it’s retarded, dude, you’re a weaboooooo.” Now, I personally stopped caring what other people say/think around 7th grade, but it’s still a nuisance.

If you’re here, you probably already know how to use an SRS, so use it to help get good grades and leave everyone else behind in the dust. And use your knowledge of Chinese characters to show that you can learn a “hard” language, and therefore impress the ignorant masses with your mad lurnin skillz.

Be the very best, like no one ever was.

Today, all the spanish class students had to go the whole day only using spanish. This already made my day worse seeing how my school forces output. (This is only their 2nd year learning in classes.)

Then in science class, some girl saw me taking notes in pseudo-japanese (didn’t khatz talk about something like this?) And she was all like “wtf are you doing?”

My teacher walks over and essentially says the same thing. (I try to keep my japanese immersion on the down-low with school seeing how everybody is too immature and judgmental at my school)

Then somehow we got into a talk about languages since the spanish kids are being forced to output for the whole day.

It ended up talking about which languages to learn and the teacher brought up how difficult japanese and chinese are to learn.

“They have to learn all these characters and blah blah and grammar is difficult blah blah blah”

While the chinese kids are feeling great about themselves because they are essentially being praised on how they know such a “hard” language.

At this point i just felt like exploding, like she knows how hard a language is to learn when she hasn’t even attempted. Besides, nothing is hard if it’s fun.

I also do not see why some of my chinese friends drifted away from me after i told them about what i’ve been doing for the past couple months.

Word, bro, word 😉

Cheers,
Andrew

And it’s an addiction, the more you do it, the more you want it. That’s why many people who learn a language really well learn other ones…it’s fun…..

When you were a baby/toddler, you had learned your first language through immersion. You were able to do it then, so you should also be able to do it now. No one is expecting you to grasp (or perhaps even understand at all) what you’re hearing/reading. In the beginning, you do in fact know nothing, but you have to start somewhere.

Now, when it comes to your computer, it’s actually fairly easy to switch over to Japanese. I find that *a lot* of system menus use katakana, so it isn’t much of a stretch. Also, you’d be surprised by how many little things you have memorized anyway.

Do you like anime? It’s fun to watch, right? Well why not watch it raw? Maybe not understanding anything would make things boring, but that’s why you should turn to anime you already have watched.

..or even Japanese dubs of things you’ve already seen in English. Do you like The Lord of the Rings? Well I challenge you to hear Gollum say in his creepy voice “itoshii” and not understand that he means “precious”.

I understand where you are coming from; I was in your same situation only a few months ago, but believe me, it gets better and fast.

Don’t worry, we’re all in it together, and as long as we try, we’ll all be able to make it 🙂

If you are looking for basic learning of Kanji etc => watching Seinfeld on TV then you are sure to be disappointed. If, however, you are happy with it being stimulating/interesting (even if mildly), then we are good to go. The problem here is that many people associate the words ‘learning’ and or ‘study’ with pain. Hence they can run miles away from knowledge that is classified in this traditional way, while meanwhile becoming world experts on something they allow themselves just to enjoy, like the makes and models of race cars. Don’t associate Kanji with ‘study’ or ‘learning’ then. Try and find a way to make them an interesting puzzle to you, or a mystery. Above all keep it light. Once it starts to feel like you are grinding, take a break. Do it in little bursts here and there.

キャッチャー小木
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7mxVwIMflU

Definitely. For a long time, there would be a two-tier system, the “naturals” and the UT users. Also, a UT, at least early on, would act more like an interpreter than anything else, so you would have to finish your sentence before it got to work, and that would be slow.

Assuming limited AI/inferencing, naturals would also delight in inventing slang and other wordplay faster than the UT was able to keep up.

If I switch my OS to Japanese (Which I’ve been debating on doing) wont it be way out of my league since I’m not too yet experienced to get a handle on it? Or is that much immersion important regardless of where you are?

I think that regardless of your answer, it’s kind of apparent that you’ve yet to fully set up your immersion environment. Once you have that down (and maybe it’s the hardest part of learning a language) you’ll find your question a little humourous.

Perhaps there is no fun way to learn a language, but there certainly are many fun things to do in one.

Seeing how you’re posting stuff and surfing the web, can I assume you enjoy being on the computer? I’m sure you do! So, put your OS in your target language and bam! Target language + fun (your computer) = “The Fun Way”.