So, I wanted to make this post to share a personal experience I've had regarding my studies and maybe see if others had the same experience.
I've been studying Japanese for about 4 years now. I've grinded it quite a lot in the first two years, finishing Genki quickly then basically hopping into immersion territory, reading manga and doing Anki (6k core + my own deck).
Over the years I've also branched into anime, a bit of VNs and dramas and recently also light novels.
I also had to take a "break" for about two years as I was learning Chinese through Uni and the two languages was too much for me. Had to put JP on the back burner for a while and focus on my Chinese. Then after these two years (a couple months ago) I went back to studying the language. Again – through more immersion.
I felt quite confident in my skills, although they were extremely lopsided. My input was very strong compared to my output which was abysmal, since it's just much easier to just read and listen to stuff than hiring a teacher or finding a friend to practice writing/talking with.
Then, I got to Japan. Was accepted to an exchange program in Kyushu University, and then the shock happened.
At first when I got to Japan it wasn't so bad. Was able to speak with some locals on different occasions despite my very broken Japanese. But then the placement test came, and then the first lesson I had today in class.
Usually when I read stuff it's manga or LNs. They always have a certain "flow" and context. Manga especially have mostly dialogue, and pretty short sentences. But then when I came here I'm met with a huge wall of text about something random and then I got stuck.
I actually talked to my teacher after the lesson and explained my situation to her and she was very understanding. She indeed said that there's definitely a difference between the Japanese that I can learn from the media compared to "textbook" Japanese that I get in Uni. But at the same time, both of them are still Japanese and are still important to know.
So yeah, that's my story. I definitely feel like I learnt a new aspect about the Japanese language, and something I'll definitely have to work for to fill all the missing gaps on my knowledge.
Has anyone else also had a similar experience to that?
by dadnaya
14 comments
I think the main call out here is that you didn’t learn through immersion. You learned through manga and anime.
For clarity, “textbook Japanese” here refers to “textbooks designed for Japanese people” rather than “textbook for learning Japanese”.
I also just watch anime. Written Japanese looks freaky, cause no one talks like it.
“I spent years reading comic books, watching Spongebob and Fairly OddParents, and a few YA books like Twilight, but WOW, when I went Harvard, they asked me to read “Crime and Punishment” and it’s so different!”
>I definitely feel like I learnt a new aspect about the Japanese language
I mean, what you just described applies to every language lol. Not trying to cut you down haha. These experiences are funny to me because it really shows how much we either take for granted or just not realize until we learn a 2nd language.
Even something like word count, it’s sometimes dizzying to think about how much we latently know in our native language. I used to think learning all the 常用漢字 would be an impossible feat, and now that I’m past it, all I can think is “my god, I’m just scratching the surface lol”.
But hey OP, just imagine how even better you’ll be after all this! That’s awesome that you’re able to even be at a College level.
Japanese is one of those languages where you learn a rule only to find out ordinary speakers dont care/never heard of this rule and break all the time. And there’s 20 different ways to say what you want to say depending on context haha
I’m a Japanese teacher.
If I can use a gardening metaphor:
Textbook Japanese is your tomato cage or trellis: something to help guide you in a direction. Manga and books and movies and so on are fertilizer. They give you more so you can grow.
If you can read LNs fluently, I’d wager you’d be fine with a placement test. VNs and the like are mostly dialogue, but if you can read a LN and have some basic grasp of dictionary vs です/ます forms I’d be very surprised if a uni placement exam would throw you.
OP, what caused you the most difficulty on the exam? If it’s vocabulary, しょうがない。 If you were were genuinely lost, don’t take this the wrong way but you may have been bullshitting yourself into believing you understood more than you did.
Meanwhile, I’m over here looking at my final goal ([reading works by mareni](https://t.vndb.org/sf/03/8403.jpg)) and thinking that I’m never going to be able to get to the point where I’m able to read this comfortably lol.
I mean, I had some trouble reading newspapers at first but (I think in part because I’m studying linguistics and I’ve listened to a lot of linguistics content on youtube) I caught onto the Japanese in my textbook pretty quickly. I see jargon like 音素認識 or アウトプット仮説 and immediately know what it’s referring to.
It’s pretty normal to struggle in a new domain of language use, but once you’ve built up a solid core vocabulary, it should only take you a few months to acclimate! I do wonder if it would be harder if I started studying something like sociology or psychology in Japanese, though, where I have no background in English. Do you think you would be able to understand your textbook content in English perfectly, or would a lot of the jargon still be new to you?
How exactly is watching anime “immersion” all of a sudden? If your Japanese is “broken” then you didn’t learn through immersion. If you’re learning through immersion then you have to be able to output Japanese as well, since you’d need to actually talk to Japanese people/native Japanese speakers in order to be immersed.
I don’t get this thread at all.
I studied in a language program for fun after graduating with an engineering degree with a 3.7 gpa, and TOTALLY failed all of my classes, haha. I have ADHD too that I was unmediated for, and was totally burned out from college during COVID, which didn’t help either. But honestly, it was such a shocking experience to me and I really wanted to give up because I felt so dumb compared to everyone else for the first time in my life. I left barely knowing anything after 6 months, other than survival Japanese pretty much.
Then I casually did Refold for a year at home and went back this March for a 3 month business trip, and my Japanese was so much better. Since returning home again, I’ve been actually doing a significant amount of immersion and formal studying at my own pace, and it’s way more enjoyable. Formal classes put WAY too much pressure on me, and if I did them now even, I think I’d not do as well as I would during casual study. I’m moving back permanently in 2 years for my job, so I have plenty of time too.
That’s my story. Hope that helps!
I also noticed that there is a different Japanese compared to real life in a lot of media.
That’s actually the reason why some people say to not use manga or anime to learn Japanese because in some anime/manga the characters speak in a way that sounds unnatural in real life. But I didn’t start speaking like an anime character by watching anime. I have Japanese friends and I was quickly able to distinguish their way of speak with the Japanese in anime. This way I can differenciate anime from reality and sound natural when talking with my friends.
It happens a fimilar thing with western cartoons. For example, nobody sounds like Homer Simpson, but by watching *The Simpsons* you don’t start speaking like the characters because you know that real life English doesn’t sound like that. If you think about it, a lot of media sounds “unnatural” when compared to real life conversations because they use typical expressions for that specific type of media.
Another example is with light novels and visual novels. Some light novels I’ve read have expressions that you see often in writing works and you barely see in real life. This doesn’t happen only in Japanese litterature because, for example, if you take English litterature you can notice some expressions used in the narration by the writter that you will not see often in real life conversations.
So this happens with every type of media no matter the language. But as your teacher said, it’s still Japanese and a Japanese person can understand the content. So, as long as you’re able to know how real life Japanese sounds like, you will never speak in a weird way. Which is your case because you’re actually in Japan and you can notice how real life Japanese sounds like. You can still immerse and learn more about the language with anime, manga, light novels, visual novels, textbooks, etc. But at the end not everything you can use in real life
What got me was the textbooks made it out like there’s a specific order for Japanese but it makes you sound like a robot to people.
A bar owner literally went “beep boop beep boop”. It’s a lot more flexible than the books make out
First of all, you did do a lot of anime, drama, and of course, manga and light novels.
The problem with those sources, however, is that they are made for specific audience. The worst are probably anime/manga which are made for kids to understand. However, you have to learn how to communicate like an adult, which is the issue here. The same applies to light novels. Drama is a thing, some Drama like “The Days” are very deep into specific topics and pretty difficult to understand, while others such as Seigi no Mikata or good morning call simple. Overall, those sources are nice to have a basic for Japanese but nothing for understanding anything above that, because they are generally made easy for a big audience to understand.
What I clearly miss here is your everyday experience you actually collect. You did not mention, for example, youtubers, interviews or news. There are plenty around and if you really watch some Japanese news/Youtube Channels, your experience should grow a lot more compared to light novels. Don’t worry too much about not understanding everything, or even just a tiny bit, try to understand, re-speak it by yourself and maybe use automatic translated subtitles for the time being.
I mean it’s mostly about consuming input from one particular type only. Obviously textbook Japanese is everywhere. Had you been reading online articles, newspapers, and Wikipedia on the side you’d have developed a strong grasp of it as well. Even a lot of fiction that isn’t dialog heavy liberally uses it, and it’s even common in many dialogs.
But yeah, I feel this is a common issue that people’s input is not diverse enough, not only do they end up finding a lot of grammar difficult, but they outright gain a wrong conception of words. But that can even apply to native speakers. I had a fascinating discussion about the meaning of the Japanese word “異世界” here the other day. The way I said the word was used was supported by a Japanese dictionary, Japanese Wikipedia, and the Pixiv definition as well as how bookstores used it to tag certain things. Under this definition, *Frieren* and *Dawn of the Arcana* are “異世界” because I always felt that unlike the English “isekai” the Japanese word does not assume transfer or reincarnation from our world. Any story that takes place in a different, strange world with a different history is “異世界”, but the other user pointed out a conversation with many native speakers that all disagreed and thought it did imply transfer and never thought to consider it different. After that, I again asked some native speakers and they all agreed with me that it didn’t and that there’s nothing weird about calling *Frieren* “異世界”.
So, are all these native speakers simply living in a bubble and consuming the type of fiction where it does always involve transfer, what the other user called “なろう系”, the stuff with “light novel protagonists” and thus gained that idea while other native speakers don’t think so? It’s an entirely possible but it simultaneously both shows how easily it is to get a different conception of a word, and how much it probably doesn’t matter too much if it can even happen to native speakers.
I see the same thing in English too, people just having weird usages of words or expectations thereof that make it clear they consume a very limited set of input. In fact, I’ve had many discussions on 4chan with people who became completely convinced that various “manga English” renditions, as in, the type of English one really only encouners in translations from Japanese is completely normal English.