My Language Learning Guide

So, I've been learning Japanese for a while and I've just thrown French in the mix as well recently.

Learning a language like Japanese in Canada ends up being a good conversation topic a lot of times and it gives me a fair chance to talk to others about their experiences learning languages. I've also experimented a lot in my own learning and I'm starting to develop an idea of what works (at least, for me).

Everyone is different, but I think this is a good generalized sort of guide.

I personally didn't have much luck with learning languages in school. And I think this boils down to 2 problems; we study to pass tests and then we don't use it again. Even if you're genuinely interested in learning a language, classes tend to run for a set period of time and tests still end up being the only useful benchmark as a result. So, we tend to cram and worry more about getting things into short term memory before the test rolls around than worrying that they actually stick long term.

If you can get into a structured environment which doesn't have that drawback, or you're in or going into an environment where you'll have a chance to make regular use of what you learned... a structured class approach will probably beat out what I'm about to say.

As I said above, I live in Canada. My chances to be immersed in Japanese? They don't exist. I don't have tons of time to devote to it (I try to spend between 30-60 minutes a day) and I'm fairly laid back and casual. And here is what I find has worked (and maybe some notes on what hasn't).

Step 1 - If different than your own, learn the writing system:
I think that this should be the first thing you do. Firstly, it opens a lot more in the way of learning materials. And secondly, it helps mentally separate your native language and target language. When I read Japanese in romaji, even when I KNEW it was romaji, I could feel myself making a conscious effort not to read or think of similar English words. When I read a Japanese word in Hiragana... it is always, immediately 100% Japanese.

I'll also say, from a motivation perspective, that learning a writing system is generally quite simple. It is a great way to feel like you're making a lot of progress in a short period of time and that helps to keep you going. There are definitely some exceptions to this, like Chinese. But, I learned both Hiragana and Katakana to a passable level in about 2 weeks. And that was super casually. Some people cram them all down in a day or two. I guarantee if you put your mind to it, you'll be blown away by how quickly you can pick up another script.

Basically, if you desired language uses a different writing system, learning it gives you a fairly cheap confidence boost. It can also make separating words from your native language a lot easier and help in learning in that way as well.

Step 2 - Basic Grammar:
Next (or first if the above doesn't apply), find some sort of structured app, course or book to teach you the basics. Learn the most common grammar, during which time you'll probably pick up the most common or at least most basic vocabulary as well. At the end of the day, language is grammar and vocab. You need a lot of both to be fluent, but you need only a small amount to get started.

For Japanese I started with the Human Japanese Beginner app on Android. This taught the writing system and basic grammar. By the end of it, I knew the "standard" way to conjugate verbs formally and probably a few hundred vocab words. The amount of vocab was small enough that I could either memorize or at least decipher pretty much all of it (as long as it was spoken slowly enough, or written without Kanji). But, I was pretty much useless at this point because even a 4 year old has a larger vocabulary.

I moved onto to the Advanced app from the same series. I finished maybe 5% of it. It was too slow and I was accumulating too many grammar rules. While I had mostly memorized the other ones, it was still just that, memory. I was reading a sentence, remembering a grammar rule, and THEN understanding it. New rules just became grammar overload. I wasted a lot of time not getting anywhere at this stage. Even now, it was one of the few struggles where I feel like I got no benefit at all from the time spent here.

As far as immersion goes, I've been watching anime since long before I started, but I wasn't FORCED to use it, so most times I relied on sub titles and would sometimes realize AFTER reading the English that I could understand the Japanese. In short it wasn't really immersion, or helpful. If I was actually immersed in a way which forced me to use what I had learned, moving onto the advanced app might have been more helpful. If the first set of rules had actually become natural, adding on more wouldn't likely have been such a struggle.

Step 3 - "Flash Cards":
I put "flash cards" in brackets because I'm not talking about paper cards. I'm talking about apps like Anki or Tiny Cards. Find an app and a deck with full sentences and audio. If you use a popular enough platform with support for importing and exporting decks, you'll probably be able to get a number of pre-built decks by difficult level or with the X most common words, etc... Find these, and start using them. At first, you'll fail. Miserably. Every. Single. Day. (Probably). But, that should be expected if you only know basic grammar rules and a few hundred words.

At this stage, you're basically just trying to jack up your vocab.  With complete sentences, you may also "accidentally" learn new grammar rules. My approach at this time ended up being very successful. I had a deck of the top 2k vocab words in Japanese. Each word had a card with just the word and a card with a sample sentence. I'd either be shown the text or played the audio for the word/sentence. When I got just a word, I would be fairly generous in Anki with hitting the "Good" button as long as I didn't struggle or outright forget the word.

When I got a sentence card though, the first time around I'd be happy if I got the just word correct. But, after I had seen a sentence more than once or twice, I would start pushing myself identify the whole sentence. I'd give myself 'good' if I could easily get the whole sentence. 'OK' if I got the sentence eventually, and the target word came easily. 'Bad' if I struggled at all on the target word. And 'Again' if I missed the target word at all.

Somewhere in the 2-6k words range if you have exposure to full sentences... you will probably start being able to get a better understand of what is going on. You probably won't follow a whole paragraph or even sentence perfectly. But you hit a point where you start to know what you don't know in a sentence. Whereas, before you started this, if you didn't know 100% of the words, you probably couldn't even identify which parts of the sentences were separate words.

And, while you probably can't understand everything that goes on at this stage, you'll probably find many times where you do know EXACTLY what is going on.

Step 4 - Advanced Grammar:
This is tough. Having gone through flash cards in Step 3, most learning resources will either start out way below or way above your current level. But, sooner or later you need to start filling in the gaps in your grammar knowledge. If you can find a flash card deck with grammar points, that might be a good path. Otherwise, maybe looking for something online.

Basically, try and find something to push your grammar game up, and either keep learning new vocab or find something which integrates the two.

Step 5 - Pain:
At this point... well, it gets REALLY tough. You've probably got a good idea of most of the common grammar points and a vocab of (ball parking it) 4-6k words.

Which means, what is left is a combination of rarely used grammar, casual grammar and domain specific vocab. And you'll be hard pressed to find learning resources targeted at just these things. Let alone be lucky enough to find one which doesn't bore you to tears.

You could read through a hundred pages of learning materials to only come away with a couple new grammar points and a dozen or so new vocab words at this stage. But, at the same time, it probably feels like there is still so much you don't understand. And that is probably true.

You need an outlet. Find something to translate. Songs are good. Short articles. Kids stories. You may be able to go deeper than that depending on how solid your grammar is and how big your vocabulary is at this stage. Hopefully though, by this stage, you're both able to find and identify level appropriate resources.

Whatever you're translating, you'll know you have a good level of stuff if you're regularly finding stuff you don't get, but understand at least, say half of the material.

I used subs2srs to make an Anki deck from an anime called Flying Witch when I was probably still wading through my first 2k vocab words and before looking at any real advanced grammar. It is a slice of life show, and the language is fairly simplistic, but it was way over my head at the time. Now I'm doing the same with Midnight Diner, a TV show which isn't staggeringly hard, but definitely more advanced than Flying Witch and it is feeling very doable.

Overtime, you should ramp up the difficulty as you feel you can.

But, if you can't find anything... go back to steps 3 and 4 and up the ante there if you can.

If you go back, but you can't find anything, then try a different medium. TV Shows are very engaging. But, if you need help with every single word and every single sentence it can take weeks to get through just one episode and make you hate the whole experience.

Songs were my first shot here that worked. Songs are easy to listen to repeatedly for me. So, if I could find a song I enjoyed enough, I could even trudge through it when I understood next to nothing. After a while I did news articles, TangoRisto is an app which can serve of NHK Japan's "easy news" which is short. Usually 3-5 paragraphs. And the language in the easy articles is just that, fairly easy. The content isn't always all that exciting, but I generally just read through once or twice.

And there is the secret... finding that balance between how much of something you can handle and how long it takes you to feel like you've gotten through the whole thing successfully.

Step 6 - Relief:
I'm not there yet, but I know this is the next step. After spending a decent amount of time with native reading/listening materials and getting to a point where you can understand most or all of what is in them, you should have a vocab and grammar level at least to measure favorably to a High School student. Which is to say, you will probably be able to decipher most conversation and be able to handle day to day activities in that language.
Just like a high schooler, it won't be unheard of to encounter new words in the language. Nor, will you necessarily be able to do things like filling out long government registration forms, etc... but, you'll probably have enough mastery of the language to get the assistance you need to get it done.

Step 6 may be optimistic. But, even if it is. Step 5 is pretty impressive, even though I called it "Pain". That is where I consider myself to be in Japanese. I could probably express 90% of what I need to express in day to day life, even if some of it would be horrible, broken Japanese. I could also likely understand the same amount if I asked the person speak slowly or in simpler terms.

Bonus:
If you're learning Japanese, you should probably add a Kanji deck somewhere before Step 4 or 5 and at least commit yourself to learning the meanings of the standard use Kanji. I feel like you'll learn the readings with practice and stroke order is only SUPER important if you want to write or need to read hand written Japanese.

Also, the occasional infusion of random reading up on things never hurts.

Conclusions:
I'm NOT following this with my French learning. And I know I'm learning far more slowly than I was in Japanese. I basically skipped to somewhere between Steps 3 and 4. I don't need Step 1, but skipping Step 2 left me ill prepared for Step 3.

Very little is sticking. I don't have the basic building blocks down, and I'm not pushing myself hard enough on it. I totally think this strategy can work as well, but it needs the time and effort. If I took every single sentence and made sure I understood every single piece and how it worked before moving on, it would effectively be the same merging steps 2 and 3 and potentially 4 as well depending on the difficulty of the cards. But, again, if you're reading this, you probably aren't wanting to commit to that effort either.

My approach, as detailed here, I think works best for anyone learning casually.

Note how I don't have timelines associated with any of these steps. Obviously, the less time, the longer it will take. And I think it even scales up OK to a point. If you can commit to more than, say, 2-4 hours a day though... I'm going to wager that while this may still work, that you may find better techniques.

This approach relies on short lessons for things like grammar and sentence structure and relies much more on spaced repetition for everything else. While SRS systems can definitely fit into a more structured learning plan, I think it really shines when you're not otherwise applying what you're learning but still need a vehicle to get that information all the way from short term through to long term memory.

In that light, you can look at the steps like this:
1 - Learn the writing system, so words don't look like scribbles.
2 - Learn just enough so that every sentence no longer looks like complete nonsense
3 - Commit an ass load of common words and phrases to memory
4 - Learn just enough more that complicated sentences stop looking like nonsense
5 - Hope you've learned enough to actually start assimilating native materials. Otherwise, repeat 3-4.
6 - Profit?

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