Part 1: Clearing Up Japanese MythsOf all the languages on Earth, the one language with the most myths is Japanese. The first step to learning a language is dispelling misinformation, so I shall go point by point.
MYTH 1: You Have to Know The writing system To Understand Japanese The issue with this myth is due to how perasive it is within the language learning community. NEWSFLASH: langauge existed before writing. Learning the writing system of a language before you are fluent is useless, and in fact will harm your progress. If you really want to read something in Japanese, simply use a romanji(corrected japanese text) generator. MYTH 2: You can learn Language Through "Immersing" There's this lazy idea that somehow if you passively sit around and watch people using a language this will somehow endow you with the ability to flexibly produce a language in the same way you see others using it. People want to believe it because they want to be able to watch TV or play a cell phone game like Duolinguo or valueless Rosetta Stone-like software and somehow gain competence in a language. It's not going to happen ever. Learning to play a boring computer game using words from a different languages is not the same as learning to speak the language. You might say of "just listening to speech" that "that's what children do," but that's not true at all. Children try pretty hard to participate and understand conversation. They sometimes have a desperate personal need to understand each passing sentence and hear the language they are trying to learn for hours a day for years. You watching some forgettable movie in the background as you play with your phone don't. MYTH 3: I NEED To Know VOCAB This is hard for people to understand because I think most monolingual people think that languages are just different word lists that people use. As a result, 101 students will manually look up every word in the dictionary to translate. This actually increases the mental load of learning a language because people have the idea that to speak it, they have to think of something in English, then translate the sentence word by word, then say that. What a pain. A lot of language nerds love to email me about their Anki cards or their harebrained schemes for mass-memorizing words as if they're an Asian studying for a chemistry test. Given what I've said about "learning words," you can guess my opinion on that. Once people abandon the lazy route, sometimes they take up the via dolorosa: the route of suffering and assume that training themselves like a Pavlovian dog will help them become fluent in a language. I would say it's actually possible to fluently speak a language knowing only about 50 words. If you understand the "grammar" of a language, you can basically get by anywhere anytime with a couple dozen words only. What words you don't know can easily be figured out, but you can't wing it with grammar and you can't wing it with morphology. The next lesson will be on basic phrases to jumpstart your JAPANESE journey!
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AuthorHello I am Tim. I have became fluent in Japanese (Conversationally) in Just six months of study? How? Read my method on this site. ArchivesCategories |