I haven’t made all that much progress. Entirely my fault really, 90% of the fun is in wasting my time watching youtube videos (about learning the language), reading the comments section, and reading reddit posts on the subject.
There are a lot of really bad takes, even (especially) among the experts. Which isn’t surprising, that’s how it tends to be with everything in life. People create mental models and apply them to a subject thinking their model is truth, when really it’s just good enough to work for them.
So I have some hot takes of my own.
1: All language is abstract. Yes, some concepts are of a higher level of abstraction than others and may be more challenging, but that doesn’t mean there is a single truly concrete concept. You learn what a rock is by learning the properties of it, and just as importantly, the properties it doesn’t have. You had to learn that a piece of ice is not a rock, a dirt clod is not a rock, and so on. If you go down this rabbit hole far enough you learn a special language all about rocks spoken by geologists. Geologese might sound like English, but it’s not. Anyway, the point is people psyche themselves out too much with the idea of abstract words, when in reality all words are abstract: They just represent one or more concepts.
2: “Japanese (or language X) isn’t hard! It’s not like geometry!” Yes, it absolutely is like geometry. 100%, and yes it is incredibly hard. Language is skill! More than one skill, and much more than just learning a bunch of words. Math is also a language, it’s just made up of high level abstractions used to describe the state of things. You probably learned to add and subtract something specific, like apples, then you did it without said apples. It’s like speaking entirely in adjectives. “Red blue, purple. Purple redn’t, blue. White blue, light-blue. Light-blue red, lavender. Lavender bluen’t, pink.”
People with this kind of take are just naturally drawn to language, and repelled by math. People that are drawn to math can be just as prone to saying it’s easy, but language is hard.
3: Don’t speak until you’ve listened to 10000000000 hours! Uhh… No. No don’t do that. Language is communication, and it’s a skillset. You don’t learn to perform any skill by passively absorbing it, trust me, I’ve made this folly and several parallels to it many times over. You have to be active, learn how to make the sounds right away, begin using it immediately. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for dedicated listening, just that it should be supplemental.
4: “Babies just passively absorb language so that’s what you should do!” I’ve already gone through my neural prunings, I’m not going to passively map the sounds in my brain anymore. Besides, your baby doesn’t look at you after six months and go “Woah… I know English!” Babies aren’t passive either. If you’ve ever been around babies you know that people actively talk to them, and that babies actively practice making sounds all the time. That’s what baby babel is.
5: “Just focus on grammar! / Just focus on vocabulary!” 20% grammar, 80% vocabulary.
6: “You must master pitch accent and perfect pronunciation before you ever speak, or you will be doomed!” It’s good to be aware of pitch accent and put some effort into using it, but obsessing over it is a complete waste. Speaking absolutely perfectly is not only extremely unlikely, it’s also only valuable to someone obsessed with the idea. For the rest of us, it only hinders progress. Yes, you might develop “bad habits” but that fear destroys dreams. If you think about it, it’s probably destroyed several of your own in the past. Also pronunciation is worth spending much more of your time on than pitch accent.
7: “Anki Anki Anki Anki Anki Anki Anki!” Sigh… I’m going to kill this sacred cow. Anki is not that good, at least not the way it’s used. Spaced repetition is just a somewhat better way of putting or keeping something in long term memory than pure rote repetition. The forgetting curve is a red herring. At best you add to your knowledge, which is still going to be mostly passive at the end of the day. You’ll end up like my friend I met in highschool. He was ignoring our French teacher and reading a book. When she confronted him, in French, he said her lecture was useless because he could understand everything she was saying anyway. She asked him to respond in French, turns out he couldn’t. Because of his childhood he learned to understand a great deal of French, but he could hardly speak it at all.
Now… I do believe Anki has it’s place. As-is, it would be good to use for moments of captured time, like doing a little session while on the toilet instead of scrolling through tiktok. There’s nothing wrong with small 5 minute anki warmups.
But to use it as a core part of learning? You need to invent ways to make it practice, instead of recall. For example you start by trying to recall the word as usual. Succeed or fail, you then use the word in a sentence or two. You can make a game of using the same word in the following sentence as well. On that note, I have seen some people say they use example sentences with their vocabulary. I would only have example sentences specifically for learning grammar, for everything else make up sentences on the fly and speaks them out loud.
8: “Drawing the kana / kanji is a waste of time” Well… Maybe mastering it is, if you have no interest in ever physically writing, but there’s value in writing it. It makes you more actively engage with the script, practice using it instead of just recognising it, and interacting with it in a different way gives you another way to learn. I think it’s pretty useful to practice writing words as well as reading them. Writing by hand is going to do more for you than typing, but typing would be good as well. I’m not advocating for spending hours grinding at mastering the characters, just to spend a little time on them, especially when first learning.
9: “Mnemonics are a waste of time!” I know this is going to be preaching to the choir here, but… That’s a terrible take. Most recently I saw a video of Steve Kaufmann criticising Tim Ferriss’ video on 12 sentences to deconstruct any language, and at some point Tim makes a very good example of a mnemonic. For Vaca, he suggested picturing a cow with a weird shaped head vacuuming up grass into it’s mouth. Steve is perpexed as to why you would ‘spend so much time on that’ and it took me some deep thinking to come up with why he would have that stance. I can only assume that his brain is as good at picking up words as mine is bad at it. I have bitter memories of situations like being handed two printouts of cells, one animal, one plant, and being told to label all the parts. Well, I could have told you the purpose of everything on the page, but not the terminology for most of it. Even worse, most of the words I did know I couldn’t spell correctly and they were marked wrong anyway. In my case at least, mnemonics gets it in my head with relative ease, so I can just practice instead of fighting with the word.
My other assumption is he never actually tried to make the image, and mistakes how long it takes to describe what’s happening for how long it might take to imagine it.
Someone in the comments pointed out that v in Spanish is pronounced more like b, IIRC they implied the mnemonic was useless because of that, but here I am a couple days later knowing a new word entirely by incidentally hearing someone else’s imagery for it, and it’s not hard to go ‘baca’ instead of ‘vaca’.
I have some (hopefully) useful things to say later, but for now this semi-rant is more than long enough.