Toddlers speak your language, but they don’t know how to read or write usually.

20 comments

1. > the way children do it

   You would need two years for your first two word sentence.

2. I forget specifics, but for the first several years of life children soak up knowledge like sponges. It’s how they learn language, among other things. I think it slows down around 6 or 7 years old. I’m afraid your brain is literally programmed different to a child’s, so you can’t rely on the same passive learning methods.

   Unless you have a teacher who can speak both languages and carefully translate different phrases for you until you memorise everything, I don’t think you’ll get far without at least some written learning materials. If you surrounded yourself with people who only spoke Japanese, it wouldn’t have the same effect as it would if you were still a toddler. You’d be terribly confused, you could probably learn things with dramatic pointing and pictures, but I imagine some finer features like grammar would take much longer to learn.

   If you really want to avoid learning the writing systems (though I personally don’t see the point of that), perhaps see if there are any video tutorials that focus on speech and conversation. I wish you luck.

3. I’ve learned a lot from first just watching anime with subtitles. Where I live, almost nothing, apart from kids shows, is ever dubbed, so I’ve used to reading and listening at the same time. After that, I’ve used some apps, like duolingo, and at some point I started to watch anime without subtitles. Shirokuma cafe was great for that, it has 2 smaller stories in one episode, each one of them a full story, so if you miss something in one episode you won’t be too confused in the next. Other thing, they talk about everyday stuff, so not a lot of fantasy worldbuilding words. Also they speak slowly, which is nice.

   You can learn like toddlers do, but remember: toddlers are immersed in the language for 24/7, so if you practice 2h/week, you won’t get results as fast as they do

   After you have learned to understand spoken Japanese, it’ll be easier to learn to read, I think, as you aren’t doing it all at once. Just be careful to not get some bad habits

4. To learn like children do it you’d have to have native parents speaking to you all day and be surrounded by native speakers. Also it’ll take you 5 years of constant immersion to have the level of a 5 year old kid.

   I really doubt a 5yo kid could understand me when I talk with a friend or my boss, or understand tv shows that are not aimed at kids. I think you’re way overestimating toddlers language abilities.

   But if you want to do it as a challenge or for some reason, just learn basic grammar like anyone, learn basic words and then the words you hear (you can type in romaji on [jisho.org](https://jisho.org)) and listen a lot. I’m sure you can actually have decent results but it’ll take a few thousand hours just like people doing it the “normal” way. Anki will speed the process greatly, just create your own deck with romaji or pictures.

   ​

   Learning kana is around 0.1% of the way (5 hours out of 5000+) and will save you a LOT of time in the long run so except if you have a real reason I really suggest you don’t skip it.

5. the toddler way? so you will rent yourself 2 native speakers that stay with you for several years 24/7 and not only speak to you all day long in normal language and “toddler friendly” language, but also correct your wrong copied sentences? im pretty sure this will be not only very expensive but almost impossible to recreate

6. I don’t mean to sound rude, but if you don’t have the discipline to learn even the most rudimentary Japanese script, I question your ability to stick with learning the spoken language at all.

7. The standard way seems hard enough honestly. Pioneering a method like this does not sound worth it at all and would be harder to use in conjunction with existing material. Formulating a question during your journey that is understandable and understanding an answer would be way harder if you’re actively avoiding most reference points the average learner uses.

8. You can’t do it the way children do it because, well, you’re not a child anymore. Apart from the fact that you pick stuff up faster as a child, I imagine you don’t have the time to do nothing but listen to people speak Japanese all day for several years (and keep in mind, that would only get you to the level of a *toddler*).

   I personally was more interested in conversation than anything else, and still am. I have decent conversational ability while being able to write very little, but I still read. Being illiterate closes you off from many learning resources, native practice material, and also prevents you from interacting with native speakers online. So even though it may seem like learning to read will take time away from being able to learn to speak, skipping it will actually slow you down even more, especially if you don’t even learn the kanas.

   Basically it boils down to this- Do you want to sound like a toddler after five to ten years of studying? If so, go ahead and skip reading. However, if you want to actually be able to use the language in a meaningful way, reading is not optional.

9. There are youtube channels like Learning with Noriko and Comprehensible Japanese but even then you were supposed to reference a transcript for most of the channels

   Learning hiragana is easy to do, even if you aren’t willing to learn the kanji. It’ll save you a lot of time if you can read it, and reading is a great way to practice too

10. Children learn by constant audio and visual input and it takes years and is slow and inefficient compared to what an adult can do but what I really want to point out is that just speaking a language is not enough, unless you can read you’re going to struggle a lot so it’s worth the effort

11. Unless you live in japan and are surrounded by japanese all day and only japanese no other language, you cant do it. Even then its difficult to do, because you basically cant look up any words you dont know or you cant read about grammat that you dont understand. You wont get further than some simple sentences like hello, how are you, the weather is good, the sky is blue.

12. I feel like when people say they want to learn the way children do what they really mean is they want to learn “without effort”.

    You’re not going to learn much without putting in effort. There’s no getting around it. Children are constantly trying to make sense of their environment, what seems effortless to you when you look at a child or recollect was in actuality a deluge of new experiences you weren’t making complete sense of.

13. Rosetta Stone is how I started learning Japanese and while I’ve moved beyond it, they do a great job simulating what you’re looking for. They show pictures instead of using English so you associate the Japanese word with the concept rather than the English word. They do teach you hiragana and katakana but the progress feels more fluid and natural than other methods I’ve used to learn Japanese. I’m glad I got my baseline there instead of something that uses English

14. I want to learn Russian, but I don’t want to learn Cyrillic

    lul

    no offense op I can understand disliking having to learn kanji but kana are really simple theyre basically like a phonetic alphabet.

    In general if you really want to go to great lengths to learn a language there are no shortcuts by “just” learning how to speak, as soon as people start trying to tell you how their names are written you will immediately hit a brick wall for not knowing how to write or atleast wanting to

15. >Toddlers speak your language

    Actually, no, they don’t. Toddlers, too, are *learners* of their native language, and in a modern first-world country, they can’t hold a conversation to an adult standard until *long* after they learn how to read, in a process that takes a decade at **minimum**.

    Stop being lazy and bite the bullet. There is no logical reason to avoid kana and kanji, they aren’t cursed. This recurring theme needs to stop.

16. I look forward to speaking to this person in the future when they use the following in conversation: “owl” for “bag”, “spider” for “cloud” and “anus” for “assistant”.

    “I am Mr. Sakamoto’s anus.”
    Um, okay.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go learn the guitar by randomly banging on the strings for a few years, so I need to get started right away.

17. Toddlers have an absurd amount of exposure as well as trial an error in their speech development. Also, why not just go read the other 10 posts about this same topic in the last few days.

18. This question seems to come up periodically in Japanese learning communities, with some variation on the same reasoning of “I only am interested in speaking Japanese/conversation, so I only want to learn spoken, not written Japanese.”

    I think part of this due to overestimating the difficulty of learning written Japanese, and underestimating how much learning written Japanese will help your spoken Japanese. I also suspect people think it would be easier or take less effort to get to their target level of speaking skills if they cut out the written portion of the studies, which they overly simplistically see as excess baggage and unrelated to their language goals, but I think that even if your goal was only to reach the casual conversation level of a 10 year old, avoidance of learning any written Japanese would actually make it harder and take more effort overall for you.

    The good news is that if your end goal is really just to get to a casual conversational level, you probably don’t need to learn nearly as much kanji as you would if your goal was to read novels in Japanese.

    If after considering all this you still wish to attempt to learn Japanese without learning any written Japanese (which I honestly think is shooting yourself in the foot), the best resource that I can think of is the trilogy of textbooks called “Japanese: The Spoken Language” by Eleanor Harz Jorden. These textbooks were popular several decades ago are written completely in roman alphabet characters, not even using hiragana and katakana. At the core of the books is a series of drills and exercises based on common conversational patterns, although the focus is more on polite desu/masu register than casual register.

19. You can’t do it the way children do it because I assume you are an adult, meaning you have responsibilities. You can’t just lie around for 3 years absorbing everything around you 24/7 without having any responsibilities.

    What I am hearing is “I want to speak Japanese without putting in any effort”. Not going to happen. With this mindset it is unlikely you will get anywhere. You either put in the effort to learn a language or you won’t be able to speak it.

20. Well go watch anime for 2 years and let me know if you can learn spoken Japanese just from that.