Where do you personally draw the line between study and play when it comes to your Japanese learning experience?
Many learners are now using native material of their liking as a significant, or even central part of their learning. Doing things such as,
\- Reading untranslated manga, light novels, and other types of books they find interesting
\- Playing/reading untranslated visual novels
\- Playing RPGs and other text-heavy games in Japanese
\- Watching Japanese bloggers on youtube, gaming streamers, listening to radio shows, watching anime
while learning new words, phrases, and grammar from these sources, either from just looking things up repeatedly, or putting them into SRS like Anki for later review.
If you are one of these people, where do you draw the line between study and play? Do you consider just the SRS study, and the media play? Do you consider all of it a combination of study and play? Is the media still too hard for you to feel comfortable considering it “play”?
19 comments
In my view:
SRS, dedicated grammar/vocab/kanji study, JLPT test prep, intensive reading: Study.
Shows, games, extensive reading: Play. Without this component, though, I don’t think I could do the study part without slowly going mad 🙂
For me it’s:
Study: SRS, grammar/readings from textbook, intent reading of (untranslated) novels, intent listening (e.g. sakura tips), learn new vocab, learn new kanji
Play: Play a video game in Japanese, passive listening (not listening too hard…), read reddit
I’ve heard foreigners say: study= not fun, tiring and tedious but in the end teaches you the language. Play=pretending to learn because you don’t want to study, but i can see the benefit in consuming some native content if you really enjoy it
What? This posts and these comments are silly. Who cares what the difference is between the two? Do what you want, and what you enjoy, and only do that, if you want. If that means learning Japanese by playing Apex Legends with your Japanese friends, or playing video games or visual novels, you’ll likely learn more effectively doing those with a dictionary on hand than any study system. The brain learns best by association and through grounded experiences.
That being said, isn’t the whole damn point of learning a language is so you can engage with new people, art, and media? If Japanese is only ever flash cards to you, I feel sadness.
Yes, studying when you don’t want to is great, but just relax.. nobody is holding you at gunpoint to know some obscure Kanji
Play is learning.
I tell myself I watch vtubers for learning Japanese, and I did, but really its not that efficient. Only when I came across words they spoke but I don’t understand, I then note the words down, so like 5 new words a day from hours of vtuber stream? Reading textbook definitely serve the ‘learn’ purpose better, but oh well, I enjoy vtuber streams.
I consider it study if I’m sentence mining it. Otherwise it’s play. Once I mine ten sentences in a day it’s all play after, as I don’t want to make my anki deck unwieldly by putting 20-25 sentences a day.
I mean I have no reason that I need to know japanese, it’s all play. If i didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t do it.
Basically whenever I’m not reviewing or making new Anki cards, it’s playing
I don’t draw the line–it’s all only play.
I… don’t, really. I *used* to. And that difference was “Am I actively dissecting this piece of media in an effort to understand it?”
But I dunno, as long as I’m paying attention, these days that’s good enough to call it productive.
What I’m getting at is I think it changes the more you learn.
It’s nearly the same thing. But there are small differences.
For example, once I’ve noticed that I started to completely ignore how unknown words are pronounced or even look in Japanese, and I immediately rushed to see the translation. This makes learning so inefficient that it hardly can be considered as such activity. Something similar can happen when people already know 15-20k words, so context is enough.
On the other hand, even if you don’t try to memorize, but still look at Japanese word and it’s meaning, you give yourself an opportunity to learn naturally and this is enough for studying. So for me pure having fun is when we completely ignore something new.
If it’s for fun, play (like reading manga or playing games). If not, study (like daily anki or grammar study).
I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re learning, you’re learning.
That being said, I count anything that’s very language dense (ie podcast, book, visual novel) as learning, and anything that’s not very language dense (ie most action movies, video games, etc) as ‘kinda learning but not really’.
gamification is a thing. You learn while you play
You are studying in order to play. It’s a feedback loop of playing, encountering a road block, studying to clear it, and playing again.
I don’t really differentiate between the two, cause I try to integrate te elements of one activity into the other. When I’m watching TV, I’m trying to learn and “get of it as much as I can. When I’m learning, I’m trying to make it as enjoyable as possible. Writing grammar in my beautiful notebook and perfecting my Kanjis is quite fun for me as well! But maybe I’m just easily entertained 😅
I don’t any more. I read Japanese content because I enjoy it. That it improves my Japanese is nice.
I probably could learn more quickly by doing spaced repetition again, but I don’t, and I mostly only look up things to make it more enjoyable.
Going purely off vibes
Study: Intensive reading, textbook work, WaniKani, composition practice
Play: Tiktok, talking with friends, Youtube
For extensive reading, watching TV, and podcasts it depends on my mood. Basically those are all the things that I enjoy, but have to actually focus to understand. So whether or not it feels like study depends on how lazy I’m feeling and how much I have to force myself to do it