I didn’t start my 10 month long exchange in Japan back in 2003 with ‘nothing’. At that point I had been through 4 years of primary school Japanese and 3 years of high school Japanese. After 7 years of Japanese study, where did I stand? I could basically read and write all the hiragana, struggled with katakana and knew maybe 20 kanji (as in I could recognise but not write, could guess at a reading that I had already memorised but could not guess variations). My vocabulary would’ve been low, maybe a few hundred words. I knew some basic grammar patterns but probably no more than 5 or 6.
However I of course thought my Japanese was amazing and I was looking forward to getting to Japan and having long conversations with my host family etc. Fast forward to arriving in Japan, and then I very quickly realised I did not understand anything, could not read anything, couldn’t even do a basic self introduction and couldn’t even pick out a single individual word when people spoke to me. That period lasted for at least 6 months, at which point I was able to recognise certain questions and respond, and it wasn’t until about month 8 when I was able to have basic conversations. At about month 10, I was feeling very confident with my Japanese, at which point my exchange was over and I went home.
AFS, the organisation that sent me to Japan, provided me with some textbooks, a translator at school(!), a tutor and lots of emotional support (I was having a hard time because I couldn’t deal with being surrounded by people constantly speaking, listening and having a good time while I sat there totally confused). I’m extremely grateful for how much AFS helped me out. They also suggested that every student go for the JLPT. Back then there were only 4 levels: 4級、3級、2級、１級. The revamp of the test slotted in an extra level between 3級 and 2級 and renamed them. So technically while I took and passed 3級, it’s roughly equivalent to today’s N4.
So what was my study schedule like? Being an exchange student living with a host family gave me a lot of free time to study. At school, I had no idea what was going on except for in Maths and English, so I used to just drill vocabulary by writing out long word lists in my textbook, covering a column and then going from J->E or E->J. I would also try and write out the kanji. I ended up dropping a few classes (Japanese history, Japanese) because these were even a struggle for all my classmates and I was never going to be able to catch up to enough kanji to have a hope of ever understanding what was going on. This meant that I was allowed to go to the library to study by myself. I used this time to go through my grammar textbooks, and when I got bored of that, I would take a book off the shelf and try and read it.
When I got home, I would try and do an hour or so of study in my room and then join my host family to hang out and watch TV. Interacting with native speakers in this environment is obviously what helps to put all the study into practice. You get to hear how Japanese people talk, react to certain questions and how certain words are only used in certain contexts. You get to see how even basic Japanese constructions can be used skillfully to convey information and really see how the Japanese mind works to create sentences. This is why immersion and sentence mining, as opposed to looking up words in a dictionary is so important.
I would constantly bombard my host mother with questions. “Is this kanji right?”, “how would I say X?”, etc. I carried physical flashcards in my pocket with certain phrases like “write that down please” so that I could always ask questions without having to rely on my memory. My host mother could speak decent English but I soon asked her to stop because there is almost no way you can progress quickly if you’re switching between the two languages. It is slightly depressing to put yourself into this type of isolation but it certainly helped my Japanese.
I would study on the weekends, most of the school day, after school and constantly approach people who had learnt to speak English, to get tips on how to get better at language study. I started to notice a common theme, the people who were really good at languages didn’t so much study them, but made it part of their life. They listened to ‘western’ music, watched ‘western’ movies, made friends with native English speakers (many people sought me out once they heard there was a native English speaker living in their neighbourhood) and so on. It taught me that trying to drill grammar, vocab and make sentences like:
SATOU WILL EAT SUSHI
SATOU ATE SUSHI
SATOU DIDN’T EAT SUSHI
… gets boring pretty quickly. It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. By and large, the eureka moments never came with my nose deep in a textbook. They happened when I was struggling through trying to say the most basic of things, and then getting a correction from a Japanese speaker. They happened when I was watching TV and someone said something and then did an action and then realising that the link between what they said and what they did. They happened when I would listen to how my host family, classmates, whoever interacted with each other.
So yeah, I studied almost every day for 10 months, sometimes up to 6+ hours a day. I also was surrounded by Japanese 24/7. Can I point to a single thing and say: ‘Do this for instant Japanese improvement!’? No. But without a holistic approach, you’re not going to get there. So that means watching a English subbed anime once a week or doing 15 minutes of app study a week is not going to get you to your goals in your lifetime.
Set goals. Work towards them. Here are some non-negotiable ones:
- Learn hiragana and katakana (ローマ字禁止 after 1 week of Japanese study)
- start on a kanji course of some description
- start learning grammar (most textbooks suck, even if they have a workbook)
If you find that you are not good at self-directed learning, contact me through the contact tab or via cafetalk below where I am offering several coupons. I have been through every single which way to learn the language, and I’ll be able to tailor make a study plan for you that will help with your weaknesses and improve your strengths.
