Classical or Romantic? Two paths to Japanese There are two ways of going about learning Japanese: immersion and study. They are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but I am coming to the conclusion that they constitute two very different “cultures” and relationships with the language. This feeling was recently confirmed by an article on a well-known Japanese-learning site entitled “What Would Happen if Your Japanese Got Too Good”. The question was essentially: would you be bored if you “finished learning” Japanese? The very fact that the question was asked is interesting, and so were some of the replies. “There is always more to learn: old Japanese, obscure kanji etc.”; “There are plenty of other languages to learn” etc.
The site in question is one that encourages an “RPG” approach to learning Japanese and likens levels of Japanese skill to levels in a game. In one way this is making Japanese learning fun, which I am all for. On the other hand, it is what I would call “meta-Japanese” fun. The fun of this approach is in “learning Japanese”, not in Japanese itself. This seems to go hand in hand with the fact that the site is over 90% in English and essentially devoted to “meta-Japanese” English discussion. Now I want to make it clear that I am not criticizing this approach. It works for a lot of people.
The site is a very good one and I have great respect for its founder. However, it is an example of the “two cultures” that I am speaking about. The article in question underlined what I have been thinking for a long time.
That “learning Japanese” can easily become an end in itself. Again, I am not criticizing. If studying Japanese is your hobby, please enjoy it. It is undoubtedly a good hobby to have. It just isn’t my hobby. I have never found much commonalty with the “language-learning community” because I am not interested in language learning.
I am in love with Japanese. I want to dive into Japanese and live Japanese. I regard Japanese as my language, not “a language” I am “learning”. What would happen if I “finished learning” Japanese?
Well, what happened to you when you “finished learning” your native language? Think about that for a moment. When did you “finish learning” your native language? Were you ever consciously learning it at all?
Did “learning” it matter to you? Or were you just interested in getting on with life: watching movies, playing games, reading books, talking with friends? Because that is my interest in Japanese. I am simply interested in getting on with my Japanese life.
The fact that I have to “learn” it is just something that gets in the way. It isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a thing. Like the small child who struggles to express her thought in her own language, or the older child who wants to read a book that has a lot of words and expressions she doesn’t understand. We “learn” by getting over the problems life throws in our path. But “learning Japanese” isn’t the game to me.
The game is the game. The book is the book. The movie is the movie.
A famous Internet personality founded what is broadly called “Immersion learning” in Internet circles today. He would write at length about how you don’t need to study you just need to dive into Japanese and “get used” to it. You just need to have fun and learn naturally. He would become very voluble (and at times a bit vulgar) about this. And I have to say that (minus the vulgarity) I agree with every word he said along these lines. The problem is, he didn’t believe it himself. And neither do the many people who currently follow some version of his approach.
While he preached immersion, sometimes quite ferociously, his recommended practice was something else altogether. What he actually said one should do is learn kanji via the Heisig Method, which essentially involves learning many hundreds of kanji “blind”, without knowing a single actual word of Japanese. Heisig-sensei himself likened it to putting oneself in the position of a Chinese student who begins knowing no Japanese but a lot of kanji. The other arm of this method was learning 10,000 sentences using electronic flashcards (Anki). Oh and while you’re at it, do a lot of passive listening to Japanese audio. Is this unfair?
A little, but it is essentially the case. What starts off (and I have no doubt this person was sincere) as an “immersion” approach becomes in practice a massive program of abstract study. Now I agree that pure immersion from day one is inadvisable. We do recommend and continuing to learn grammar as you go along. Like the site mentioned at the beginning, we do bring the RPG analogy to Japanese, but in a very different way. Rather than the RPG being a meta-Japanese game of “learning Japanese”.
We liken Japanese itself to a huge, complex RPG, and we liken abstract learning to the game’s huge manual. We recommend reading the introductory tutorial chapter of the manual, just to get enough information to get started, and then diving into the game itself, learning by playing and referring to the rest of the manual as and when necessary. We do not recommend a long preparatory phase with the goal of using Japanese somewhere at the end of it.
We do not recommend hundreds of hours of kanji study, thousands of sentence flashcards or extensive textbook study. We recommend spending most of that time on actually using Japanese. You will need some grammar help, and you will need Anki flashcards for learning kanji, though. Essentially, at every point after the first few months of getting kana and basic grammar under your belt, you are using Japanese first and only “studying” as and when you need it as a support to your real-life use. In, using Japanese is primary. Meta-Japanese elements (study, flashcards, English grammar explanations and the rest) are exactly what the word meta implies.
Rpg
Something on the side of your real Japanese life. Now to be clear, I am not for a moment attempting to disparage all other ways of learning.
There are fundamentally two approaches, and both of them work. Ours isn’t new. We didn’t invent it. We did pioneer some of the ways to do it, but the world is in fact full of people who went to places where other languages were spoken and learned them (at least the spoken versions) just by being there and using them. The true “immersion method” is as old as language itself.
The “study-first” approach isn’t quite so old but it has a long, long pedigree. We are not claiming that true immersion is faster than study-first (no genuine method is all that fast) or easier than study-first (no method is easy). Which is fastest and most efficient depends on who you are, how you learn, and what your priorities are.
The real point is that these are two very different approaches. Two very different relationships with the process of acquiring Japanese. Many people thrive on study.
Many others burn out and give up before they get anywhere near the “goal” (whatever that actually is). Many people love raising their levels by study (the idea of treating them as RPG levels was inspired). True immersion learners probably have no idea what their level is (I know I don’t). On the other hand, they don’t much care. They are more concerned with whether they can enjoy this anime, read that book and express the idea that is in their mind.
I tend to think of study-first and immersion as the “Classical” and “Romantic” approaches respectively. If you want to pass exams the Classical approach is probably better. If you have a methodical mind you may well find it better (though I know some very methodical people who use true immersion). But: If your love of Japanese is such that you want to dive into its warm waters and swim toward the golden sunlight If Japanese feels like your true language, not just “a language” to “learn” If you see mechanics of learning as just a necessary evil and what you want is to embrace Japanese herself If you are determined enough to climb the sheer cliff-face of real use, rather than use the long stone steps of study Then the Romantic method will call to you.
I've been teaching myself some Japanese for a bit and although I haven't learned very much, I am still loving it. My motivation for learning Japanese is career/entertainment oriented.
I love video games, and there are many titles that are never ported over to North America or the PAL region, so the only options to play them are to get someone else to translate the entire game for you, or just do the translating yourself. I'm going for the latter. I'd like to ultimate work in the gaming industry, possibly in journalism (writing about games, reviews, previews, and the like). Obviously I'm not going to learn all that I need to read over night. I've gotten down all hiragana and am starting on katakana (I'm starting to learn some kanji as well). I don't know enough grammar to structure anything beyond 'Hello,' 'Nice to meet you,' and 'ビデオガームがすきます。' What I'd like help with is this: what common words are used in games, what sort of ideas I should be familiar with, what key grammar points should I absolutely learn, are there any simple games I could try to help build my Japanese, and any other points that might be vital to my success.
I should probably also mention that the specific type of games I am interested in are RPGs, the ones with rather in depth story lines. So if you have no idea what video games usually are like, I can deal with vocabulary and grammar usually associated with fairy tales and medieval chivalry stories. Stuff like that is somewhat close to RPGs. Hi JackiJinx! Video games are good motivation for learning Japanese They were one of the things that initially got me interested in Japanese, so I can definitely see where you are coming from. I will warn you though, that it will require a lot of time and effort, especially for RPGs.
The text found in RPGs is loaded with kanji and vocabulary you don't hear everyday (which you know, I'm sure) - you will need to give reading high priority in your studies if you want to be able to understand these kinds of games. Especially the kanji.! That's probably what you should focus on the most. As for vocabulary, I found these handy lists of video game vocabulary: and. I found these through a quick search on Google (I knew they had to exist!) so if you look around you might find some more! As for simple games, if you can I'd try getting a copy of something geared towards kids like Pokemon in Japanese. I can't remember if they even use kanji or not - but once you have all of the hiragana and katakana down it'll make for good reading practice and will get you used to playing through a video game in Japanese.
I hope this helps Feel free to ask any more questions - I recently played all the way through my first RPG in Japanese (FF4) and made it out alive Oh, and one more thing: I like video games = テレビゲームがすきです。. It's hard to really target your learning, especially in this regard.
The thing about RPGs is that they draw from a much wider pool than most other things do. You'll be swapping around between casually talking about the weather, to giving keigo-filled speaches to the king, to reading magic incantions and ancient scrolls written in mock old Japanese, to learning about battle strategies and political maneuverings, to listening to knights/samurai speaking in a different kind of mock old Japanese, to having to deal with that one old guy who speaks some bizzare made-up dialect, to. Well, absolutely whatever else. Your knowledge just needs to be pretty broad (and people think video games rot our brains!). So, read a lot. And start playing games in Japanese. Nothing will prepare you for playing Japanese RPGs like actually just playing Japanese RPGs.
Jump into some of the lighter ones (as long as they're still entertaining) and get a feel for things. Don't worry about missing a little (or a lot). One problem with video games as opposed to certain other mediums is that they invariable do not have furigana, so unless you actually want to sit there and manually search for every unfamiliar character you find, you're just going to have to take a deep breath and let a lot of it go.
You'll learn a lot anyway. Consider playing games you already know and enjoy, so that you're not stressing about not understanding, and already know what to do. Focus on what you do understand rather than what you don't. As a beginner, this will mostly be inter-character dialogue, and not a lot of the plot-related exposition.
I'm near the end of FF9 myself, actually. That game's cutscene/gameplay ratio is ridiculously skewed to the former! But I'm not complaining; that's why I picked it.
I have mentioned Barry Farber's approach before on the forum, but maybe you'll find it useful for videogames. He suggests going through a newspaper in your target language. Pick a story and read it. Highlight anything you don't understand with a big highlighter pen. Then use dictionaries, friends, phrasebooks, grammar books - anything - to translate these bits, and put them on flashcards, and use those flashcards to learn it all. Eventually you'll be highlighting less and less and understanding more and more. I think you could easily adapt this to Japanese videogames.
Just pick a game that uses lots of dialogue box text instead of cut-scenes, and use SRS flashcard software such as Anki. It will be laborious at first, but gradually the process will speed up. And the advantage of this method is that it takes care of word frequency: If there are words that come up again and again in videogames you will learn them more quickly because you'll be using them all the time. Ganbatte kudasai! Tons and tons of games for the SNES use full blown kanji, particularly RPGs.
If you're first starting out, though, you might try something like Zelda 3, which uses plenty of kanji but is light enough on text not to be so overwhelming. Still, to do just about anything you're going to have to draw a line between enjoyment and comprehension- if you try to learn everything, your progress will be so slow that you'll cease enjoying the game. If you speed through and ignore much, you won't learn. What I've been doing is writing down every word I don't understand into a text file, which at some point down will be added to my anki study deck- there's no huge concern about memorizing it (or even reviewing it) at the time I encounter it, so that keeps the enjoyment level up.
Still, it is certainly not easy. And for fun: Though I'm hardly well versed in old titles, Rockman 4 is one of the few Famicom (NES) titles that I've seen that uses kanji in regular game text. I personally could not give you much direction for your studies but I did find a neat tool on itunes for use with the iPhone and iPod Touch if your interested. The tool is called 'Kotoba!'
And it is a 'multilingual dictionary based on Jim Breen's JMdict' (that's what the splash screen for the app states). You may be able to use it when u get stuck on something you don't know, I know since I found it I've just started randomly looking words up. Using the traditional Chinese keyboard you can even try to enter the kanji characters (have to turn it on from iPod settings).