Thanks for taking us with you on your language journey, Maya.
I have studied four foreign languages and handle three fairly well — one of which is English. I also taught English and ran a chain of language schools at the start of my career in the 1980s and 1990s.
One trick that I have used as a learner, and taught as a teacher and school director, was to not look up every single word you don’t know.
Try to infer the meaning from context. It is no problem if you get some wrong at first — eventually you get it right.
If you regularly encounter the same word and still can’t figure out the meaning with some level of confidence, go and look up that darn rebel.
It is also OK to look up the words that you can’t guess at all, but which are clearly key to the meaning of the passage.
This strategy effectively limits you to looking only up the words with high frequency, and the words that are key to understanding the passage at hand. You won’t waste your time on words that you may never, or rarely, encounter again, or that at this point in your study don’t really make much of a difference to your understanding and fluency.
It means accepting a level of vagueness at the start of the journey that you would probably not accept in your native language, but I have found that it lowers the frustration quite a bit, while simultaneously speeding up the learning process.
I had to laugh at the kinjo meiwaku comment, I think this is the complaint people living in Japan fear the most!
I am going to plague you with questions about your method, I hope you are ready! I am so fed up with looking up these irritating frequently used but “empty” words and expressions, like “ni yoru” and “ni ōjite.” They’re shapeshifters. Argh
While I try to lower the level of frustration while reading, I use frustration as a tool while practicing new vocabulary and grammar.
I use fast paced repetition at a very loud voice for many minutes over consecutive days — usually about one to three weeks — to make myself remember things. I really push myself to the limit here, trying to do it as fast and loudly as humanly possible.
If I feel any amount of frustration during this repetition it tells me that I need more of this intensive practice and continue doing it. I force myself to overcome that frustration during the session itself. I never stop a session if I still feel even a bit of frustration.
By turning frustration into a helpful tool I experience it as something very positive, something I actually search out, instead of as something I naturally want to avoid.
Practicing in this manner trains both the brain and muscle memory. Most importantly, it delivers a continuous stream of small victories that offer confidence and encouragement.
At my school we used this method with many thousands of students. Although it perplexed some of the language learners at first, it worked significantly better than any other method we explored and tested.
The only drawback is that the noise resulting from practicing with a loud voice is kinjo meiwaku (近所迷惑), a nuisance to the neighborhood…
Maya! This is so relevant for me today. For one thing, I need to resume.my own language study (French, in my case--much more approachable than Japanese); but more importantly, I've recently undertaken similar hard work, reading and really STUDYING some hard books, 100 year old nonfiction written in a dense, prolix style that simply requires sentence by sentence parsing, lots of notes, reading the footnotes, etc. It's been incredibly rewarding! But yes, it took an act of will to get to and stick with.
Hi Anne!!! Congrats on those hard books, I keep wondering why I’m doing this when I don’t really “have” to, but there really is a payoff, just not NOW and it’s so hard to do things where it seems there is no immediate benefit! But I think 100 year old nonfiction sounds amazing. Do re-start the French, that’s on my “someday” list…
You think and feel so deeply - and it’s obvious how much your writing & Japanese mean to you.
Thank you so much for sharing. Taking the time that you have to do what you can do is AMAZING. ✨
Thanks for taking us with you on your language journey, Maya.
I have studied four foreign languages and handle three fairly well — one of which is English. I also taught English and ran a chain of language schools at the start of my career in the 1980s and 1990s.
One trick that I have used as a learner, and taught as a teacher and school director, was to not look up every single word you don’t know.
Try to infer the meaning from context. It is no problem if you get some wrong at first — eventually you get it right.
If you regularly encounter the same word and still can’t figure out the meaning with some level of confidence, go and look up that darn rebel.
It is also OK to look up the words that you can’t guess at all, but which are clearly key to the meaning of the passage.
This strategy effectively limits you to looking only up the words with high frequency, and the words that are key to understanding the passage at hand. You won’t waste your time on words that you may never, or rarely, encounter again, or that at this point in your study don’t really make much of a difference to your understanding and fluency.
It means accepting a level of vagueness at the start of the journey that you would probably not accept in your native language, but I have found that it lowers the frustration quite a bit, while simultaneously speeding up the learning process.
I had to laugh at the kinjo meiwaku comment, I think this is the complaint people living in Japan fear the most!
I am going to plague you with questions about your method, I hope you are ready! I am so fed up with looking up these irritating frequently used but “empty” words and expressions, like “ni yoru” and “ni ōjite.” They’re shapeshifters. Argh
While I try to lower the level of frustration while reading, I use frustration as a tool while practicing new vocabulary and grammar.
I use fast paced repetition at a very loud voice for many minutes over consecutive days — usually about one to three weeks — to make myself remember things. I really push myself to the limit here, trying to do it as fast and loudly as humanly possible.
If I feel any amount of frustration during this repetition it tells me that I need more of this intensive practice and continue doing it. I force myself to overcome that frustration during the session itself. I never stop a session if I still feel even a bit of frustration.
By turning frustration into a helpful tool I experience it as something very positive, something I actually search out, instead of as something I naturally want to avoid.
Practicing in this manner trains both the brain and muscle memory. Most importantly, it delivers a continuous stream of small victories that offer confidence and encouragement.
At my school we used this method with many thousands of students. Although it perplexed some of the language learners at first, it worked significantly better than any other method we explored and tested.
The only drawback is that the noise resulting from practicing with a loud voice is kinjo meiwaku (近所迷惑), a nuisance to the neighborhood…
Maya! This is so relevant for me today. For one thing, I need to resume.my own language study (French, in my case--much more approachable than Japanese); but more importantly, I've recently undertaken similar hard work, reading and really STUDYING some hard books, 100 year old nonfiction written in a dense, prolix style that simply requires sentence by sentence parsing, lots of notes, reading the footnotes, etc. It's been incredibly rewarding! But yes, it took an act of will to get to and stick with.
Hi Anne!!! Congrats on those hard books, I keep wondering why I’m doing this when I don’t really “have” to, but there really is a payoff, just not NOW and it’s so hard to do things where it seems there is no immediate benefit! But I think 100 year old nonfiction sounds amazing. Do re-start the French, that’s on my “someday” list…