Language crumbling and movie books.

I never seem to find time to update my blog, but I thought I'd post an update today because some interesting things have been happening recently.

This one is about Japanese fluency or perhaps, it's about fluency in languages per-se.

First, a bit of background. I started learning Japanese around the spring of 2011. However, for the first year, I didn't really learn very much at all. In fact, the first time I spoke Japanese with native wasn't until the middle of 2012. That's when I realised how pitiful my speaking skills were!

Since then, I've learned a lot about "how to learn to learn languages" and tried to put what I've learned into effect. As many well regarded polyglots will tell you, there really isn't a "one size fits all" approach to learning a language. You have to try things out and see what works for you ... and whether you enjoy doing it.

I took part in five of the Add1Challenges and each time, I definitely made a lot more progress than if I'd have gone it alone.  In fact, on the second Add1Challenge, I spent a month immersed in Japanese and came out of it speaking Japanese pretty fluently. When I say, "fluently", I don't mean anything like speaking like a native - what I mean is, that when I talked about a familiar topic, even with my very limited vocabulary, I could maintain a pretty good conversation that to someone who spoke no Japanese would sound as if I was fluent.

Then, in September 2014, I moved to Japan and got a real buzz from being able to converse pretty well from the get go. All said and done, if the conversation was a typical "getting to know you" conversation, I'd be able to handle that pretty well. As soon as the topic changed to anything else, I'd be completely lost. Added to which, I would always find myself lost for words over seemingly basic things.

About two months ago, I started reading Star Wars in Japanese. That's been really good for keeping me consistent in language learning.  I know the story so well that if you show me a scene with the sound off, I can pretty much guarantee I'd be able to recall the dialogue word for word.  So when I started reading Star Wars in Japanese, given that there's a lot of katakana words (English words / names written in a Japanese script) I'd get a lot of reference points to fill in / guess the missing information.

 For example: ハ/Ha ン/N ソ/So ロ/Ro = Han Solo  or レーザービーム = laser beam. If those words are written in the same sentence, I at least know that it's got something to do with Han Solo and a laser beam. When I replay the movie in my mind, nine times out of ten, I'll guess what the verb means even when I've never encountered it before.  With a passive vocabulary (words I know if I encounter them, but perhaps not be able to recall when I'm talking) of about 1,700 words, I found that I can happily sit on a train and read Star Wars without a dictionary. I don't have mobile internet, so I was kind of forced into having to not stop and look up every new word I encountered. That seems to have been an absolute blessing in disguise. I circle the unknown word and write what I guess the word means on the page. Then when I next study Japanese at home, I go through the pages and look up the words and see whether I was right or not. It really helps that the kanji has furigana, because whilst I know some kanji radicals, I'm not really at the stage where I can look up kanji in a dictionary yet.

Pretty often I'm not right .... but the word I thought it was is usually synonymous with my guess. That in itself seems to help me make a mental connection between the word and it's meaning. If you think about it, I understood the gist meaning, but then the surprise of not having guessed accurately seems to make the connection that bit stronger.

Typical page of Star Wars - A New Hope. 

I've also noticed lots of grammatical structure that gets repeated again and again ... and whilst I haven't been too focused on grammar, I've noticed that when I'm speaking Japanese, I'm more likely to try saying something that instinctively sounds right ... again, I often make whopping great mistakes that I then subsequently backtrack and rephrase shortly afterwards. Now, that's another awesome gain in my opinion too ... because, before I was doing so much reading, I was definitely more restrained about what I would attempt to say. To anyone else learning a language, I'm sure you've experienced not being able to say what you want to say ... so you mentally try and figure out what is the nearest thing you CAN say that conveys the same meaning.  Still, all said and done, there's a massive difference between knowing lots of words, understanding the grammatical constructs etc etc and being able to converse!

Which brings me to my second point in this blog post. I went out for a drink last week and was sitting with a couple of guys who've lived in Japan for fourteen and eight years respectively. They were talking to some Japanese folk throughout the evening and were talking, from my perspective, pretty damn fluently. Occasionally, they'd break out of the conversation and ask me if I was following what they were talking about ... 50% of the time, I'd have understood the gist ... the rest of the time, I'd be completely lost. Interestingly, I noticed that anytime I'd engage in the discussion, the group seemed really interested in what I had to say. In hindsight, I'd define this as "the man of few words" syndrome ... we've all been there in our native language haven't we ... it's the person who chips into the conversation occasionally that we're automatically more interested in hearing than the people who are blaa blaa blaaing away all evening!

That was quite a good evening on three counts. Firstly, it was great for my listening skills. Secondly, it was pretty encouraging that I was able to express my opinions well enough to feel the evening was getting closer to having an evening in the pub back in the UK.  Rather than the conversations I'd have had when I first arrived in Japan, they'd be about where I've travelled, what music I'm into etc etc ... topics that I'd become pretty proficient at talking about. Now, I wasn't in control of the topic, but could just about manage to understand enough of what was being spoken about to chip in with my own thoughts. And even if I wasn't completely sure what was being said, my new trump card was just to say, 同意するけど、どう思いますか。 (I agree, but what do you think?). That way, I stayed in the game ... ha ha!!!

The third thing might well be the most important lesson in language learning I've had this year. I came away from the night in the pub thinking, "hmmm ... I wish I could keep talking the way those guys were able to" ... you know, instead of only being able to dish out occasional comment and then quickly retreat into listening again before the next opportunity to chip in arrived. But then, actually ... I can .... and think that's the most amazing thing ... I can ... simples!!!

When I started thinking about that more, I realised that actually, in my italki sessions over the last couple of weeks, I've spent a good ten to fifteen minutes of the session just babbling away in Japanese. I've pretty much split my half hour sessions into fifteen minutes of catching up on telling the tutor what I've been doing since our last session and then fifteen minutes working on a language function.

Last week was all about using "______必要がある" instead of trying to remember how to conjugate verbs. For example, I'm fine with conjugating verbs that I use all the time: 行かなきゃ = gotta go but let's say a verb I might not use very often .... um ... 諦める (to give up) ... how do I conjugate that verb ... errrr ... 諦めなきゃ probably ... but I'm not very sure or confident ... and that makes all the difference when you're talking. So, using ステーキを食べるのを諦める必要がある  to say, "there is a need to give up eating steak"  is a lot easier to output because I'm not doing any conjugating at all ... both verbs stay in their dictionary form ... YAY!!!  That's really important because by not conjugating verbs, you don't have so many of those long pauses in a conversation when you're scrambling away to figure out how to transform the verb. So then, because you're not slowed down by that, the conversation flows much more easily.

In the last week, I've talked with members of my favourite Japanese band, Broken Doll, people I met while walking around Yoyogi Park, the lady that I always talk to in the convenience store, the old lady that lives across the road from me ... and instead of keeping the conversation short, I've actually kept the conversation going ... sure I'm making lots of mistakes etc ... but it doesn't matter ... its like I've overcome another obstacle to my progress.  That's where I'm at right now ... I'm really excited about the next few weeks because it feels like I'm on the cusp of where I've always wanted to be ... able to just keep a conversation going and really start using verbs that I don't often use because I always struggle with how to conjugate them. That can wait ... it's more important to just keep talking than anything else.