Reflections on learning Japanese on the JET Program
4 habits that keep me going and that I think beginner learners should follow.
4 habits that keep me going and that I think beginner learners should follow.
I started to study Japanese about a year before I came to Japan. While I only dedicated about a half and hour a day to it at the time, I tried to at least understand the basics, learn some kanji, and try to have a few video calls with Japanese speakers.
It wasn’t until I came to Japan on the JET Program, however, that I really began to dig deep into Japanese. I forgot about my other hobbies (like writing) and tried to dedicate as much of my time as I could to studying. I used apps like WaniKani, Bunpro, Satori Reader, Anki, and Migaku. To this day, I am still a frequent Bunpro and Migaku user.
While I have been learning steadily for about three years now (four if you include the year before I came), I know that I am far, far from the end. In fact, I think there is no such thing as an end in a language learning journey. The more I learn, the more I realize that I need to learn.
However, I have found some habits that have helped me over the years and I wanted to list them out, so that if anyone reading this if just starting out in their Japanese learning journey, hopefully it can help you too.
Habit #1 — Engage with real materials, not just with SRS, flashcards, or study apps.
This one is tough to do, especially when you are first starting out, but I think it’s one of the most important to set yourself up for success.
It’s important not only to engage with Japanese through the apps that you use to study, but with real material made for native speakers. I don’t think it matters if that material is anime, manga, novels, dramas, etc., but just try to make time to engage with that.
Too often, I found myself spending all my daily studying time on SRS (Spaced Repetition System, which is just like flashcards, but with an algorithm) and while that is helpful and good, there are less and less returns over time with SRS. Once you get to the intermediate levels, it becomes much harder to advance your studies meaningfully only through this method.
If you are a true beginner, even watching anime with subtitles in your native language can be helpful, eventually switching them for Japanese subtitles when you feel comfortable enough to do that. Migaku is a great tool for making flashcards from subtitles on Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube, but a browser extension and Anki can work just as well with a little more setup.
There’s also something really important that you can get through engaging with native materials and that is understanding cultural communication. Just as important as the words you are learning are the ways in which people use those words in expressions, combine them, stress them, use nuance with them, etc. You often don’t get this just in flash card study. I have often said that the hardest part of learning the Japanese language is understanding Japanese people’s way of thinking. While this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, the truth behind this statement is that, at least for a native American English speaker, the way we conceive of and portray the world around us with our words is very different from a native Japanese speaker. This is a tough concept to grasp, but one that will come more naturally with time, and can became even more natural the more one engages with native material.
Habit #2 — Create small goals. What’s yours?
Become fluent? Speak with lots of Japanese people? Be able to recite all 24 episodes of Evangelion from memory? We all have different reasons for studying Japanese. After I came to Japan, mine became pretty pragmatic: I wanted to make life as simple as possible by being able to communicate. But I also have deeper, personal reasons that have shifted and changed over time. I love books and manga. So, being able to read anything off the shelf without a dictionary on hand was and still is a goal of mine. I’ve also married a Japanese girl, so being able to communicate effectively in my marriage is also a huge inspiration.
The reality is, for most of us, we are going to be better at certain areas in a foreign language than we are in others. I think there are a lot of Japanese language focused YouTube channels and posts on social media where people talk about going from nothing to fluent in a year, or going from learning hiragana to passing JLPT N1 (the Japanese Language Proficiency Test’s highest level) in six months. The reality is, unless you have a full-time’s job worth of extra time laying around, this is going to be a long journey. So, appreciate the little steps and little victories. And above all, don’t compare yourself to anyone else. It’s never helpful because learning a second language is a lifelong journey. If you keep that mindset that you had at the beginning, humble and ready to learn from those who know more than you, I think you’ll suddenly find yourself in the category of teaching and helping others. But I think learning from others and comparing yourself to them are two different things, and comparison is an especially dangerous game when it’s to faceless strangers on the internet.
This is where I think setting little goals helps a lot. Rather than, “I want to be able to read without a dictionary by the end of the year,” say, “I want to read ten pages of manga a week.” This may feel slow at first, I know it did to me, but I suddenly realized that consistent, slow progress was propelling me forward faster than my peers. Over a three year period I excelled a lot just by doing at least a little bit on most days.
Also, don’t be afraid to take a day off. I usually take Sundays off. I might still do something like anime for immersion, but I won’t make flashcards or try any serious studying. This helps me reset and get at it again the following week. Despite the fact that the hardcore SRS community will tell you that you will die an extremely painful death if you miss a day of flashcard reviews, I can assure you that you will definitely not die of a missed SRS review day. There’s more to life and Japanese than flashcards.
Overall, I just think it’s important to remember that “getting fluent” is a lifelong goal that is broken down into almost endless parts. The sobering fact is, many of us will likely not even reach the point where our second language is anywhere near as good as our first, especially if we have a way with words in our mother tongue. So embrace your strengths, work on your weaknesses, and set achievable goals to keep the momentum up.
Habit #3 — Eyes on your own paper.
I mentioned this in the point before, but I think it’s important enough to be its own habit. In today’s world, we have more resources and online communities at our fingertips to learn Japanese than ever before. This is a great thing, but it’s also the worst thing that’s ever happened to language learning.
Okay, a bit of hyperbole, but the fact is that joining an online community of people who are learning a similar language can be good, but it can often feel like a contest of which person can “out Japanese” the rest.
As a beginner, I was often scouring these communities searching and searching for the best resource, but there is no best resource. There are resources that are probably better than others, but what works for you is the best. I’ve also learned that there is no one stop shop. I have not used the same resources throughout the entirety of my studies, and you likely won’t either. Changing, engaging with new material, growing from it, and knowing when to move on is one of the best skills you can learn early on.
However, through scouring these communities for resources and advice, I often found myself discouraged through comparison to the people on forums and Reddit threads who made posts like, “I went from beginner to N1 in a year and a half reading Naruto. “ I knew that these posts were often meant to be encouraging to others, but I often found myself depressed that while I thought I was studying hard, there was someone else out there who did it better.
Comparison is the thief of joy, as they say. Learning a language is so personal, and like I mentioned in the goals section, it’s something that everyone does for a different reason. It’s also not a contest. There’s no winner or loser. It’s a marathon where you have to battle your own mind day after day, year after year in order to keep improving. So, I encourage you to ignore social media and the polyglot YouTube channels. Find what works for you and when that doesn’t, switch it up and find something new. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your language skills.
Habit #4 — Stress quantity over quality.
I won’t lie, this fourth habit went against everything that I stood for when it came to hard work and achieving goals. It’s something that I honestly learned very recently in my Japanese journey.
For as long as I could remember, I always believed that quality was better than quantity. I thought that putting full effort into and producing one great thing was better than giving less effort and producing a few good or okay things. I still believe this for the most part, but my perspective has shifted when it comes to something like acquiring a second language.
This is an endless journey and in the pursuit of perfection, I often found myself doing less studying than if I just didn’t care about the perfect resource or the perfect anime to watch or the perfect method of vocabulary retention. Doing something is always better than doing nothing, in this context. So, if you’re wondering whether x resource is worth it, I say, if you will use it consistently, it’s absolutely worth it. If you won’t, then it doesn’t matter how great it is, your return on investment will be very small.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t push yourself or focus hard when studying, but trying to reach this level of “perfect studying” every time you crack open a text book or immerse in some way just isn’t quite feasible. Building the bridge to fluency one plank at a time is a much better goal, and I think that gets lost in the pursuit of perfection. You will likely gain more from watching 100 minutes of a drama without stopping on every word that you don’t know than you will watching 10 minutes of a drama but stopping and looking up every word you don’t know. If you do this over weeks, months, and years, all of a sudden those 100 minutes accumulate, and those 10 minutes, no matter how diligent they were, will eventually fall behind in terms of words seen and heard. Exposure is key and limiting yourself only hurts that.
Ultimately, it’s better to try to absorb as much as you can, rather than perfecting a small portion of something in a more meaningful way. I think this also takes the stress off a lot of studying and allows you to enjoy immersion more and reach higher levels of language acquisition in the end.
Okay, so why 磨?
Now, just to wrap up, I want to talk about why I chose the logo for this site. This kanji is often seen in its verb form 磨く, read as migaku. This means to polish, to shine, or to refine a skill, to improve, or to hone. If you paid attention in the begining, one of the apps I use is called “Migaku” for this very reason. Using it will hone your Japanese skills.
I think this kanji is very apt for me for two reasons. The first is that I often find that all of my achievements come from hard work. I believe that we make our own luck, but I feel that many of the things I have achieved over my life, not just in studying, were through my own drive and refinement. Most of it was not given to me, but was a byproduct of me working hard and seizing the opportunity. So, I see this kanji as a fitting reflection of my journey and personality.
Secondly, my name in Japanese is read as “ma-ru-ko.” While I usually write my name in katakana (which is the alphabet in Japanese mostly reserved for loan words like foreign names), one day I asked my wife what kanji she thought would be good for my name. She came up with this:
磨瑠湖
Since 磨 can also be read as “ma,” she thought it was a fitting kanji for my name and personality. The second character means “lapis lazuli” and the third means “lake.” So, something like “refined lapis lake.” Pretty cool, right?
So, I wish you good luck in your studies and I hope that this post could help at least one person recenter and think about their goals and aspirations when it comes to learning Japanese. Learning a second language has been one of the most fulfilling journeys of my life , so I encourage you to keep on the path and keep “migaku-ing” those skills!
Originally published at http://marcoblasco.com on June 5, 2024.