How do you learn Japanese?
Read, listen, learn. That’s it. That’s the post. Thanks for reading.
Just kidding. That’s not too far from the truth though. If you’ve read a bit about how to learn languages you’ve more likely than not come across Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis. He actually has five hypotheses, which are all definitely worth looking into, but this is the main one that people bring up all the time. The core idea of it is that learners acquire language by being exposed to comprehensible input. That is, they learn by reading and listening to things that they can understand. Now understandably, if you know literally nothing about a language, it’s going to be really difficult to find comprehensible input. That’s why for Japanese we study the kana and basic vocabulary and grammar. Once you have a basic understanding of the language, your immersion rapidly becomes more and more comprehensible and thus, more valuable. So theoretically, that’s pretty much it right? Just learn your basics, then immerse, and you’ll be fluent in no time. Well, yes but also no. This is still a very simplified version of the process. It doesn’t really say anything on how to get comprehensible input, or how to cope with the fact that when you’re just starting out, more things are incomprehensible than comprehensible and it can kinda just suck sometimes (🥲). I’m going to talk about how I personally dealt with these issues, and how I’ve come to love the process of learning Japanese.
Focus on enjoyment before efficiency
For many learners, myself included, there is a temptation to optimize the process and learn as quickly as possible. With the knowledge of how language acquisition comes through comprehensible input, this led me in my early days to constantly chase after content that would maximize what Krashen describes as i+1, stuff that strikes that perfect balance between being easy enough to understand messages while still containing new components. It makes sense right? If you want to learn the language quickly, then just immerse in stuff that’s in that ideal zone. That is substantially easier said than done, though. Furthermore, it can very easily lead you into watching a lot of boring content. Technically ideal for acquiring the language, but realistically just leads to burnout. That’s why I think it’s important to instead focus on getting a lot of enjoyable input. By essentially casting a very wide net, you’re bound to come across i+1 in your immersion. But again, that’s a lot easier said than done. So the current issue then becomes “how do I find enjoyable input?“.
Finding enjoyable input
Finding input that you enjoy can sound very difficult, but it’s actually not too difficult. To get it, it’s important to look back on why you’re learning the language. For me, it’s because I like anime. So what did I do? I watched anime 🥳! More specifically, when I first started, I tried rewatching anime that I had already watched with English subtitles before.
I’ll finish this later LOL