How NOT to Fail in Japanese | Most fail. You don't have to. Super important video!

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[LimeGreenTeknii]

Foreigner learning English online: "I must apologize for my terrible English in advance, for it is not my native tongue, so please bear with me with every foolish mistake I make along the way."

Native English speaker: "Lol, it okay"

[SpecialKapson]

Oh boy some serious facts have been stated here.
I'm not a native english speaker but I've eventually achieved a level of fluency, and I did that through consuming massive input (games, the internet) over the years. And the reason for doing it was very serious - 10 years old me, wanted to play video games really badly and there were no translations into my native language at the time. It was "learn to understand or quit the game" and ""quit" wasn't an option for me

[onlycasual]

Learning Japanese is just a series of barriers to entry and people eventually get filtered out by one of them. First barrier to entry is kanji and people not realizing that in some ways it makes it easier to learn vocabulary. They start, see they have to learn thousands of seemingly overly-complex symbols and when they face adversity in doing that in the first stages give up. Then if they push through that they face the barrier of actual input where in the first few months you can't tell where words are ending in a sentence let alone understand it. Then if you get passed that you have even more months of having to look up 2-4 words per sentence which sucks out any enjoyment you might have had. At this point people realize that when others said it takes multiple years of 2-4 hours of reading/watching/listening per day to actually get decent and that they weren't just full of shit or dumber than you they might just make peace with the fact that they don't really want it that bad and give up. Or they end up like the people on /r/learnjapanese who spend years spinning their wheels with genki and tobira and never touch any native material cause it's too daunting.


This is especially the case for people that aren't learning the language with watching/reading stuff raw being one of their primary goals. If you're learning to understand content you have the additional motivation to push through because you have the dual satisfaction of feeling like you're making progress in terms of your ability as well as being able to derive enjoyment from the content itself as opposed to just caring about the former. Just my 2 cents and observations from my limited experience.

[Dr_Lucozade]

"Understanding is the raw basis of communication."

[ericg]

Rest in peace Dolly 🕊️. Know that your memory still lives on through your work✌🏽💯.

[amarug]

I could not agree more. "You need to either love it or need it." The robotic wisdom oozing out of you is always impressive. I have been in love with Japan, Japanese people, Japanese culture as long as I csn remember. Everytime I visit Japan I feel this incredible vibe of happiness though me. I find the language beautiful, its structure, the Kanji and and... With all of this combined indeed, learning Japanese has became effortless to me, for the simple fact that it's so enjoyable. I have zero interest (for now) in pitch accent and picking the exact natural word ever time. I want to be able to speak with Japanese people in Japan to find out things about them...

[grovercostello]

An absolutely brilliant video highlighting a point that has crossed my mind many times whilst scouring the many people who make up the Japanese learning community. I recently listened to an interview between Matt Vs Japan and Dogen, two guys I find really interesting and who both are obviously passionate about the Japanese language.

In the talk Matt talks about his desire to get his Japanese as near native sounding as possible and how many people over the phone or online have thought he was Japanese and my initial thought was that if you ever meet that person the novelty value will be incredibly short lived and at the end of the day of what use is it that a Japanese person thought you were Japanese but you turned out not to be?

I have many friends from all over the world who speak English. Some better than others but as a native English person I can hear that none of them are English natives and I actually like it that way. It's a point of interest about them as soon as they start talking and the most important thing about their English is that we can communicate with each other. If all of them learnt how to speak English like a native it wouldn't add anything of any value to our friendship or make them any better understood. Sure there's always room for improvement but for me learning Japanese I would rather learn a new aspect of grammar or vocabulary over trying to sound like a native.

[seventhsheaven]

I think what also really doesn’t help is those website where people say they became fluent in 3 months, or they learned all the jouyou kanji in 3 months (no you didn’t you liar, you may have added them to an srs deck and given them stories, but you haven’t committed them to long term memory in three months!!). Other learners see that and think “oh crap, I’m really behind/stupid/not dedicated enough” and give up. It’s taken me about a year and a half to learn all the jouyou kanji and I still wouldn’t say I know them all. I’m still having to do flash cards everyday, because you WILL forget them if you don’t. I’m struggling through yotsubato (it’s fun though so I don’t mind) and adding words from there into a vocabulary deck. Reading Japanese is absolutely exhausting, I can maybe manage four-five pages of manga before my eyes start to protest. So when people say they did X in a stupid amount of time and that they’re fluent now, always ask yourself: “what is it this person is trying to sell to me?”

[en]

Dolly-sensei I realise you’re not around anymore but thank you so much for both getting me motivated to return to Japanese and also helping me not feel like a lazy failure for not vibing with the perfectionist AJATT and similar approaches.

[nigelcarruthers]

Thank you, Cure Dolly. I think this is also an important message for that group of Japanese learning perfectionists that constantly chant "No Output Until Perfect."

[HyperLuigi]

Playing Japanese games before they came out in English is a great way to force needing Japanese. I did it with Persona 5 The Royal and I’m constantly doing it with mobile games with a delayed global/English release.

[redcloud]

Thank you for making this. I didn't know I needed this but I'm glad I watched it

[johncameron]

This is something I can agree with you on. A lot of times people focus on useless concepts and mislead everyone into thinking they need to learn "pitch" a few useful "vocab words" or it is possible to watch anime with subtitles in English and still know what is going on. The hard part is basically getting over the mindset that English and Japanese are different and not the same. Also that trying to learn by thinking of it in English to Japanese or Japanese into English will only slow things down.

You also can not learn another language without dedication of learning vocab, grammar(how you use the vocab and make it into a sentence) through SRS and wholly through immersion in it's own world of language. It's not perfect at first and there will be mistakes, there will be doubt but if you accept it as it is and not try to use English or translate it will make sense eventually. Much like how kids had to learn their own native language before learning another one.

What is weird is that AJATT makes sense but it only does when you keep learning words(much like how school taught you words and sentences while you were immersed with TV and various forms of media) it helps you learn much quicker especially when acknowledging there will be words you do not understand or even sentences but in time you will get it if you accept what is in front of you as it is and the more you practice it the quicker you will be to getting there.

This was a good video especially because a lot of people I notice keep thinking of inserting English into Japanese or want shortcuts instead of doing the work to know the language and Kanji etc.

Thanks for the video Kawajappa!

[TheCandyNana]

Your channel is just amazing. It's a very good complement to my Japanese classes as it is my major in University ~ I'm very glad I discovered your videos, the content is always so helpful and interesting ♥️ learning Japanese for my favorite J-pop idols was the best decision of my life ❤️

[benjiirokagashima]

I remember the time i started learning english around 7 years ago, i had the formation i had received at school but as you might guess language formation at school is never enough to be actually even decent at any language really, i've never had any special interest on english, but i went on twitter and created a fan acc for my favorite singer at that time and soon enough i realized the english community was way larger than the spanish one, so i started tweeting in english, and in about 2 years my english had become decent enough for me to do long conversations; i started japanese around 2 years already, althought last year i didn't do much progress due to lack of time from university studying, but i just recently started using some parts of my life exclusively in japanese, and actually took the whole month of february to read a manga in japanese for the first time, i read about 6 volumes completely in japanese and found myself actually feeling like i had learned a huge lot, and ever since i've tried to read my manga only in japanese, it takes a while but i learn a lot every time, and now i feel all the more needy of learning japanese, as well as loving it much more as a language itself, i've always been a huge believer of having an external motivation to learn a language, to learn it to do something thats actually your goal than actually learning the language be your goal, cause ive seen how many people have dropped their studies thinking like that, even i have left a language like that. Also i truly think the progress ive been able to do all this time has been greatly because of your channel, i truly believe your lessons are genius, and when times are rough i watch some of your videos and realize japanese has a lot of logic, and i calm down an keep pushing through, so thanks a lot for that too♡

[Cyanice]

wow this is really insightful, and very well-spoken, thanks!

[MessedUpBrainspike]

"English is not about English. English is about what they're doing in English."

I have legit never thought about it in that way. But this is so true. Even for me; I'm a non-native English speaker, and I'm even sort of a perfectionist, but sometimes I bungle my words without knowing it - it's fine, because I'm not writing this for people to admire my English skills, I'm writing this so people will understand what I'm talking about. And it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect to meet that requirement.

[canaldomira]

Thank you so much, this really really inspired me to go forward and carry on with my studies of Japanese, this made me change the way I view the art of learning languages as a whole.

[nickyromanov]

I have to say, watching your Japanese from scratch lessons, I really appreciate how you actively teach that instead of trying to convert one's English into Japanese, you have to learn it separately and understand that the concepts and functions of English are completely unrelated to those of Japanese. This is something rare but incredibly useful, as for some reason languages are often taught as "x word in (language1) = y word in (language2)".
Most language courses and programs that I've found seem to prefer to do that instead of actually building a learner's knowledge from the ground up, with a stable foundation of logic which allows them to understand new words and what to do with them intrinsically, and not forcing them to memorize different rulesets that may not even be completely correct in the first place!
This mindset of installing "language drivers" into your brain, in the same way you install drivers on your computer when you get a new piece of hardware, is something that I believe is incredibly helpful with enabling a learner to manage the new language without having to stop and think about what word goes where, which ~insert grammatical feature~ agrees with ~insert grammatical feature~, etc. After all, what makes speech fluent isn't knowing vast amounts of vocabulary or being grammatically correct 100% of the time, it's being able to talk without even having to think about if what you're saying is correct.

I remember failing to learn French by using the common methods of textbooks, duolingo, and flashcards, and how absolutely frustrating it was to not have a feeling for how the language actually fit together, and only being able to say things that I'd prepared, never being able to form sentences naturally. It was like trying to speak a language with only phrasebooks. But recently I've had the realization that language doesn't have to be difficult at all when you prioritize gaining an understanding of how a language works instead of trying to memorize it like a party trick. With this I've managed to reach a conversational level in Spanish in less than a year!

Are you familiar with Mihalis Eleftheriou's "Thinking Method"? I've recently been enjoying a book by him on the topic of teaching language, and a lot of what he writes about is present with your style of teaching, I think. It was his work that gave me this realization that it isn't that language is hard to learn, but that I had been thinking about language wrong the whole time.

In your very first lesson, you said:
"Japanese is the simplest, the most logical, the most easily understandable language I have ever encountered, much easier than Western languages. But you wouldn't know that if you try to learn it from western textbooks or Japanese learning websites. Why not? Because they don't teach Japanese structure. They teach English structure and then try to force Japanese into it. And it doesn't fit, and it doesn't work very well."

This is what gave me the confidence that you know what you're doing. I'm not sure if I buy the train thing and the android is a bit uncanny, but I'm confident that your videos can really help me and so many others.

Thank you so much for all the work you've done.

[Circle_of_Inevitability]

I tell you all, listen to cure dolly. She's spot on, not one thing wrong here.

Immersion + not giving a fuck about things I was currently unable to understand/misunderstanding things and not giving a fuck about pronunciation(now I don't recommend this at all. I just didn't care at the time. At least learn how to say the sounds half decently just so you can think in them half-decently). So how did I do it? There was a manhwa I really wanted to read, no matter what, but translations in my NL were unavailable. So I did the only thing I could do: I followed the manga along in english, while looking up every word. Now, I don't recommend doing this with novels in the beginning, because the content has to be somewhat comprehensive and content with visual aids are the best kind of content for beginners. Sometimes I would understand 100% after looking everything up, sometimes 70%, sometimes 30%, it was mostly close to the 100 and at times I'm sure I got things wrong, but did it matter in the end? All mistakes will be erased in the face of massive exposure to REAL English and this isn't different with japanese.

And it is hella fun to study the language this way with manhwa/manga. Trust me. It is not as dry as it looks. If it was dry I wouldn't be here today(I was 14 yo at the time I guess)

Doing the same shit with JP now, starting with ruri dragon and it's great so far. I can understand close to everything and I'm having lots of fun. So really, TRUST cure dolly; she's goddam right