A japanese student rant…

13 comments

1. Honestly, depending on what you used your time on, it can be perfectly normal not being able to follow along with conversations.

   ……Unless a majority of your time has been spent on listening comprehension or just plain living in Japan 24/7 for a good while. In which case, there might be a problem if you had little to show for it.

   Otherwise, if you didn’t devote time to a specific skill, it should be expected that you still aren’t very good at it as a result. One key component to learning a language to a high level is the time spent interacting with the language. There are people who claim to have gone from zero to N1 in the time span you’ve been learning. While some of them are exaggerating, you should notice the most credible stories basically involve making Japanese-learning their full-time job for a while, at upwards of eight hours a day, almost every single day.

2. Underestimating the difficulty of learning it might be the problem. Give yourself five or even ten years.

3. When I took Japanese in college, it came very naturally to me. I was always at the top of the class and getting perfect or near perfect grades on written tests. However, I was very shy and hated speaking in front of people. I remember listening to my classmates speaking so effortlessly and being jealous that I couldn’t speak like them.

   Coming to Japan for a summer study abroad program really changed everything for me. I was staying with a host family, and going to a language school where speaking English was banned, so I had to force myself to speak. I gained a lot of confidence that summer and took some more advanced speaking classes at my college when I got back. As part of the course, we had to have a Japanese language exchange partner, and record some conversations to submit to the teacher to get feedback. I got a lot of useful advice to help my Japanese sound more natural.

   I graduated and came to Japan on the JET program a year later. While I was on a trip to visit my old host family shortly after I came back to Japan, their current summer student woke up and came out of his room, surprised to see me. He said, “I heard you talking from my room and I didn’t think you were a foreigner. I thought you were Japanese.” That’s the moment I realized my Japanese had improved a lot, and I was now in the position of the classmates I had been jealous of before.

   It took me 3 years of fairly intensive university study and then spending time in Japan to get to that point. I’ve been living in Japan for the past 16 years now, and I know a lot of people who have been here 5, 10, even 20 years who have never really learned much. It takes time, dedication, and innate talent for learning languages.

4. I’ve felt discouraged many times over the years. I’m still nowhere near I feel like I should be with how much time I’ve put into studying. So you’re definitely not alone in that feeling.

   がんばって ください！I hope things work out for you as you keep it!

5. This is a little bit of a guess not having seen the video, but I’m supposing this exchange was spoken at full natural speed, not directed at the camera mic and perhaps not picked up clearly, involving some terminology very specific to a cat cafe situation, and on the employee’s side answered in the kind of modern keigo that appears in employee manuals but not in textbooks (possibly slurred, contracted or rushed as said phrases are a bit burdensome).

   In short, I wouldn’t worry about it. With one year of study, if you’re picking up the narrated and subtitled parts of videos like that you’re already way ahead of most students.

   Learning materials are easiest, obviously, and after that slow, scripted narration on general topics (or topics you’re familiar with), and after that clearly acted dialogue (anime/dorama), and after that unscripted, natural pace narration or stage conversations (talk/variety shows, interviews, etc), and after that overheard natural conversations. (Conversations you’re part of should be tailored to your level if the other person is considerate so aren’t really at any specific difficulty).

   So your issue here is that you’re not accomplishing one of the most challenging comprehension tasks after a 2/3rds year break after a single year of study. That’s just not how it works. It takes time and consistent practice to get there. Less time the more thoroughly you are surrounded by the language, of course, but there’s diminishing returns to that and you presumably have a life to live.

   Probably the very *hardest* is overheard *partial* conversations, in dialect, where the people talking are not speaking the same dialect which I’m guessing is not quite what you had here, but you will at some point, and if it’s IRL or the language is unlabeled you might even think it must be Korean or some other Asian language until and unless a familiar phrase stands out. Even with years of practice there will be difficult to understand dialogue… but then again, there are native English accents that I can’t really understand… hello Geordie speakers.

   So you should expect to have this kind of experience again, no matter how far you progress, but you should not take it as a sign that you are failing to progress. It just means that there’s more out there that you could learn. Could, not have to. There’s no need to learn every obscure dialect phrase… unless you like that sort of thing!

6. Take a deep breath and realize you are not stupid, you don’t have anything wrong with you. I have to remind myself and my students that all the time.

   Personally, I do my worst when I am angry I can’t understand what is going on. No matter the situation from daily conversations, movies, books, etc. If I am getting emotional or asking myself why don’t I know this? I am taking focus away from enjoying the language experience. I am tripping myself up. It’s better to take a break and get up from the desk and relax.

   I do my best and can operate smoothly when I have had time to prepare for the topic or situation. Making flashcards for common vocabulary or phrases. Practicing the kinds of conversation topics I am likely to hear at a drinking party for example. (Where are you from? Can you eat sushi…etc) But it comes with exposure. I’ve lived in Japan for over 5 years and when I visit my wife’s family for dinner after the 3rd hour rolls around my head is spinning and I simply can’t understand anything. It’s due to exhaustion and not knowing the topic.

   So it’s all about giving yourself time to get used to things and not get in your own way. Keep it humble and fun.

7. I actually feel really good about my japanese learning, even though I think at the moment after 6 months, I could barely manage anything resembling a conversation in Japanese and I can’t understand most listening content yet.

   But I’m being really patient about it and I understand that it’s going to take a long time before I’m ever able to speak naturally or understand fluently a typical conversation without any difficulty, in my case I’m guessing maybe at least 3 years, probably longer.

   My order of priority has been:

   * Hiragana/Katakana, understanding basic grammar
   * Building vocabulary to improve reading/listening (currently what I’m working on)
   * Speaking/spelling (what I’ll focus on once I feel comfortable listening/reading)

   I’m focused right now on just trying to learn as much basic vocab as I can and trying to improve my listening skill by doing lots of listening exercises. Because in isolation I can hear a word and understand it, but when it’s mixed into a long sentence of many words, it’s getting lost with the words I don’t understand. My gut instinct tells me, once I know a lot more words and can recognise them faster, something like a Japanese interview will start to make more sense.

   So I’m spending an hour or two each day trying to focus on ‘variety’ of practice, rather than just 2 hours of the same thing. So watch an episode of a show, do some flashcards, do a few duo lessons, practice in anki, watch a video about how the japanese language works on youtube, writing some words out, etc. Just a few different things, 15 minutes each, etc.

   And lately I’ve spent a lot more time just watching animes (mainly stuff aimed at children) and Japanese movie clips etc. Can’t understand most of it but the more I watch/listen to, the more I feel like my brain is getting use to the sounds and processing them faster, and over time, more and more words and standing out and I’m recognising them.

   I feel like I’m bashing myself against a wall but in a good way, and every time I bash myself against it, it feels like a bit of the wall crumbles. It’s still a pretty solid wall at the moment, but I can tell I’ve made some progress on it.

   Progress is slow, but I can feel it, little bits sinking in here and there.

   I had a similar experience with learning Hiragana/Katakana and now I feel like I can quickly and comfortably read most written Hiragana/Katakana (Kanjis are another story for now…).

   I think you shouldn’t underestimate the impact of not practising for a while. I find if I stop practising something, even for a month, I forget it. But I also find if I practice it just a few more times to refresh my brain, it comes back pretty fast. I think the goal is to just keep practising it until it can stay there long term.

   It really feels like the variety and frequency of practice is the trick. Repeatedly expose your brain to the same information over and over again regularly and it sinks in.

8. I would say its normal to start to get good at daily conversation around three years of study, they say its around 2,200 hours to get really good at japanese from english (that not class hours but just hours using the language in some way to be clear).

   There is nothing wrong with your ability or learning, japanese is very different from english and this means there is a lot more brand new concepts to learn — I think its a common mistake to try to compare learning speed to languages like spanish that have a lot less stuff to learn from scratch.

   After a few years break of not speaking a language, even native speakers might start to forget some things, if you start studying again you will pick it back up fast. I hope you find some classes amd maybe you can look at some free resources in the mean time to help get things going 🙂

9. You know, it’s like that song goes: “I tried so hard, and got so far, and in the end…”

10. I feel like that not just Japanese but any language you learn will take a lot of time to master , language is all about input , the more you speak it the better you get . I would suggest to talk to native people as much as possible and be around them even if you can’t contribute to the conversation at the moment but trust your brain it’s way smarter then you think . Before you know it , you’ll starting understanding those small talks like normal convo

11. When I get dismayed I think of my children. They spend every waking hour immersed in their native language and they take around three to four years to learn the basic language. Then comes all the subtleties, ideomes and what not that makes language proficiency and that easily takes another 10.

    I’m fluent in English as my second language but that did take at least ten years if not 20.

    On that scale not being able to follow a conversation after studying for a year may not be all that unexpected.

12. japanese is hardddd I’ve been studying it at uni since september and only recently started understanding what my teacher was saying in lessons like when she would ask us a question or tell us to do something

    i’m also a very visual learner so it’s tough learning japanese when being able to hear it and process it makes a huge difference in learning

13. Japanese people study the language for 12+ years in their peak learning years, not to mention are surrounded by people that speak virtually nothing else.

    Just sit back and relax, you’re going to be here a while.