What are the best ways to get immersed by living in Kansas with my parents???

5 comments

1. Movies and tv are great. When I was learning French watching French children’s shows helped a lot. Maybe those shows for very little children?

2. How much studying have you done? Immersion is pretty useless if you’re just getting started. Make sure you’ve at least got a foundation of all the basics before you start throwing yourself at content made for native speakers.

3. It depends on what community you want to get immersed in. You are simply referring Japanese with anime and manga. But of course there are many people who have rarely touched these kind of Japanese subcultures in Japan. If it’s for someone involved with Japanese cuisine, you better learn about the food except for sushi and ramen. If it’s for 2D geeks like “otaku”, keep going your good deeds.

4. There are lots of Japanese language instructors who do podcasts and YouTube shows. I think those are often better than anime/manga because it’s normal people talking about normal things, as opposed to stuff that happens in anime (example, you’ll spend a lot of time reading about “kagune” and “kakaju” in Tokyo Ghoul but those are made-up words for that specific series). NHK News has both regular news and “Yasashii Nihongo” ([https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/)). The other major news outlets also have podcasts and other recorded audio, but the NHK link is specifically designed for language learners.

5. AH, so the first thing I would say is that it is definitely the right move to pick children’s manga at the start. 🙂 Anime can be kind of.. maybe not useless, but the thing about anime is that most of the characters don’t talk like people normally do in japan. If you speak like an anime character you are probably at best over-the-top sounding and worst, super rude/thug-like sounding. (or so I have heard. I am still pretty darn new to proper study of Japanese.)

   For me, I have found children’s manga good to just get character reading practice in. It’s really easy for me to read single hiragana characters but I really struggled getting used to some of them being next to each other. I have dyslexia and learning new kana was kind of hard for me. (specifically characters like ツシソン). So just practicing reading the characters comfortably, without really paying attention to the story much helped me out. You can also try to pay attention to the particles you learn, like の、は、が、か、まで、etc… though that might just be something I found useful. I also get a little boost as I come across sentences or phrases that make sense to me, and that has helped keep me motivated.

   Something I definitely recommend is getting a Japanese tutor at italki once you have gone through maybe one good Japanese book (like Genki). It’s hard to take advantage of italki if you can’t really speak in Japanese at all yet… but you can get hour sessions for the cost of a few coffee drinks. 😀 It is super helpful once you get going. You mentioned you lived with your parents.. if you need to do some extra chores/mow a lawn/etc to get the money for a tutor I would still recommend it.. it’s so important to actually talk to someone in the language you are learning.

   One last little word of advice.. you should think of your ability to speak Japanese almost separate from your ability to read it. I found out, much to my horror, that I couldn’t speak Japanese at all even though I could read it and could say things to myself. Like sure, I could do the coursework that says “Ask Takahashi-sensei what the class hours are” and I would know how they should respond.. but when actually talking I realized that I had failed to train a part of my brain and that I was super slow at actually recalling what I knew for conversations. That’s why I really really recommend getting in with a Japanese tutor of sorts or to look for local groups of Japanese learners so you can get used to talking to others with Japanese.

   PS: This is unrelated, but you will probably see that a lot of people will kind of look down on you or try to “dash your dreams” of learning Japanese if you mention Anime and Manga.. Not in all communities, but it seems that this really happens a lot. I would wager the reason your question is getting a sort of rough mix of upvotes/downvotes has to do with that. ^^;; All I wanted to say is this: let Redditors that try to discourage you from learning anything for any reason go jump off a bridge. Don’t get discouraged.. learning a language is a self-improvement thing. It makes you smarter, the hard work makes you stronger, and whatever drives you give you energy. If that’s anime/manga then give the haters the finger and keep going at it! 🙂 Life is hard and you shouldn’t let others on the internet get between you and your self-improvement. Just remember that a lot of the ones that discourage you are bitter because they failed.. so good luck!