Dogen's secret to Japanese fluency

For our 100th episode, we're joined by one of Japan's most recognizable foreign creators—pitch accent specialist and writer @Dogen! In this long-awaited interview, Dogen talks about his creative process, inspirations, and the challenges he's faced throughout his journey in Japanese language, writing, and content creation.

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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:53 Meet Dogen
1:27 Dogen's introduction to Japan
6:37 First time in Japan
8:32 Deciding moment for staying in Japan
10:27 JET Program experience
14:42 The most challenging part of learning Japanese
18:54 Discovering pitch accent
23:56 Defining pitch accent
29:58 Why is pitch accent ignored in Japanese language learning
38:33 Being mistaken as Japanese because of fluency
42:59 Discovering talents and passions
53:11 Taking ideas to YouTube
56:48 Work process for creating skits
1:01:38 Emojis are bad for articulating emotions
1:03:26 How much work goes into YouTube Skits
1:06:29 Dogen's target audience
1:12:32 Deciding to do YouTube full-time
1:21:18 How being a full-time content creator changed things
1:24:28 Audience expectations and creative freedom
1:28:49 Accidently losing focus on storytelling
1:31:09 Hospitalized and being re-inspired by Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
1:37:31 Dogen's future plans

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[Xmadish]

Extreme Martial Arts tricking mentioned and now I just realized!
Back in the days around 2008 I saw a tutorial for Titanium ankles by DOGEN - how to strengthen ankles for tricking and gymnastics and later I thought it was just a coincidence that Dogen, who makes videos about Japanese language has the same nickname. BUT it was the same person all along. Nice to see your journey <3

[Tariq_games]

The Interviewer listens carefully to his guest and asks the right questions

[randxalthor]

Great to hear another perspective on building a creative business in unfamiliar territory. The guts it must take to quit your salary job to pursue your passion professionally right when you have baby twins is unfathomable to me. It sounds like Dogen really believed in himself. And credit to his wife for supporting such an endeavor. It's so heartening to see someone be rewarded for their hard work and belief in themselves.

[_nihongo_jouzu_]

Love the punk band story!! Dogen made a really great impression when he messaged the band

[chris]

When I first started looking on YouTube to learning japanese it seemed everyone was pointing to Dogen as being the best, it awesome to see how humble he is pointing to others that he says are better. Great guy

[ilmarinen]

You're definitely one of the best interviewers. Great work.

[Jotun]

I've been watching Dogen's skits for a long time and loved his intro to pitch accent on Patreon, but had no idea about all of these interesting personal stories he has. Super interesting, great interview!

[AylienYu]

My Japanese language teacher showed us Dogen videos, and told us to look into pitch accent ourselves! I am oddly happy to hear his introduction to J-pop was the same as mine, I was obsessed with Utada and Ayumi in elementary school.

[MATTierial]

Dogen, if you're listening, I would pay to listen to you describe your comedy sketches, how you came up with them, etc. The stuff here is golden, and I want more!

[calmontes]

Such an interesting interview. It’s the same for me with English. When I studied more than 20 years ago, phonology or phonetics was never part of my classes. I never heard of stress until a few years ago because I no longer study English, and I wasn’t taught IPA. I now know how critical is to understand both stress in words and how it works in sentences. It took me a while to grasp what people meant by stress and how that was different from a prosodic accent in Spanish. It’s fantastic that we now have so many resources. My English pronunciation mistakes are fossilized but explicit knowledge of stress in sentences has continued to improve my listening skills and at least I can self correct sometimes.

[TimParker]

Fantastic interview! I love some long-form Dogen!

[dj.blackstar]

It's the same in English, people here just don't really think about the weight of every word here. The nuances and different ways a word can be interpreted.

[MunksTT]

If there’s anything I’ve learned from learning a second language it’s that studying a language is just a tool in the effort to understand one’s own mind and how it works. Every aspect is a puzzle and it’s all about finding the key to making it all stick.

[twohundo]

I've barely scratched trying to learn Japanese, but Dogen alone has been the one person who really emphasized the importance of pitch accent that no one hardly ever brings up and he should be appreciated and applauded for that. 🙏

[mibber]

Awesome to see that Dogen thinks about humour in the same way as me. He's so right that every word matters!!! Most conversations for me are like a quicktime event of finding the right comedic idea and the best words to articulate it before the conversation moves on.

[yotrader]

Fortunately or unfortunately, one's native tongue may impact the difficulty of mastering Japanese pitch accent and pronunciation. If you listen to Japanese spoken by native Latin/Romance-language speakers, Mongolian speakers, or Russian/Slavic speakers...they will often have crisp pronunciation due to phonetic overlap, which makes it easier for natives to understand them, as well as for them to pick up the language faster. In contrast, some people from Asian countries may struggle with certain pronunciation because the sound simply doesn't exist in their native tongue. (And for reasons I don't really understand, those who've studied Japanese language in British and former Eastern Bloc/Soviet universities tend to speak better than those who've studied Japanese in American universities.)

[kanhhakim]

Thank you for talking about khmer language in your video..!! I'm Cambodia and now living in Japan

[sterlingwilson]

Personally I wish pitch accent was taught early on in Japanese classes. I took a Japanese phonology and pronunciation class last semester and it's frustrating to me that if I want to get good at pronunciation I basically have to re-study all of the vocabulary I've learned so far. I feel like it would've been a lot more efficient to learn pitch accent together with vocabulary rather than have to study it separately as a discreet subject. I agree that there's nothing inherently wrong with having a foreign accent in another language, but having too thick of an accent can be detrimental so I think knowing pitch accent is still somewhat important even if you don't care about sounding native or not.

[helloiamarfy]

i was very lucky when i took japanese in community college bcuz my instructor specialized in audio so we were able to take a prosody class with her towards the end of the first year

[nhondude]

Long story short, pitch accents are just side quests