Learning Japanese Isn't Actually That Hard

okay so if you clicked on this video you're probably interested in or currently studying Japanese cool so we know that you're either a A weeb or B yeah okay you're a weeb if you look basically anywhere on the internet for advice on how to learn Japanese you're basically just how should I say this politely given the most god- awful advice possible like seriously how does this have 21 million views million Yes you heard correctly like what okay so I might be being just a little bit hyperbolic but seriously if you look for advice on YouTube

Reddit Tik Tok Twitter Myspace LinkedIn I don't know basically anywhere on the internet where you're going to find advice on how to learn Japanese it's mostly just going to be extremely unhelpful stuff I often get asked how did you learn Japanese or how did you get good at Japanese so fast and I usually just say something along the lines of oh I watched a lot of anime or yeah I listen to Japanese talk shows all day or something like that when I'm genuinely asked for advice I wish I just had an all-encompassing video detailing exactly

what to do to learn Japanese so that I didn't have to sit down and explain every little detail over and over and over again to people who let's be honest are probably going to quit after 3 days and then I thought to myself hold on wait a minute why don't I just make that video and that's basically why I'm here so to give a brief introduction to who I am hi I'm Trenton I'm a random white guy from America who for some reason thought huh I bet learning Chinese would be fun and then I discovered

anime when I was 16 years old and yeah the rest is kind of History honestly you guys are probably the same as me so I'm sure you understand I learned a Japanese with what is called an immersion method which is basically exactly how it sounds yep I went to Japan and immersed myself in the Japanese culture I went to akih Habra I went to maid cafes I went to okay no I didn't actually go to Japan to learn Japanese but that's what most people think when you tell them the word immersion actually I learned Japanese

entirely in America yeeha brother now you might be thinking wait wait wait hold on how can you immerse in Japanese without being in Japan that's crazy now let me tell you about this crazy invention that they made like 20 years ago it's called the internet okay so now things are starting to click right okay so that's the entire point of this method is essentially that you just pretend that you're in Japan by constantly listening to watching and reading Japanese for multiple hours a day this method has gotten relatively popular in certain communities over the past

few years but compared to people still struggling in a gkey one textbook and beating their head against the wall trying to remember verb conjugation tables I would say it's still pretty unknown so if you've spent any time in Japanese learning spheres on the internet then you've probably at least heard of this guy named Matt versus Japan you could probably say that he's the most influential person in making this method popular to people on YouTube YouTube and a lot of what I'm going to talk about in this video involves principles which I first learned through his

channel okay so first there's some Basics that we need to discuss if you're going to take anything away from this video it should just be what I'm going to talk about here okay so number one if your goal is to learn some basic phrases for your trip to Japan in a few months and you don't really care about being fluent in the long run then just click off this video now if you really just want to learn a few phrases you can just go to dualingo and they'll teach you how to say some stuff like

ah tanakaan tank and then the Japanese will be like oh my God God you're so good at Japanese what and then you can feel good about yourself nothing wrong with that just to be clear now because they're literally everywhere on YouTube I'm sure you've seen them literally every language learning YouTuber says I'll learn a language in one week one month 6 months even a year and to be completely honest those people are just lying straight to your face specifically learning Japanese to any decent level will take you multiple years and thousands of hours of effort

and there's just literally no way around it you're not going to get good at Japanese in a matter of 1 or two years assuming you're a native English speaker and even if you make it your entire life you're still looking at a very very long time so basically I'm just saying understand that you're here for the long run okay so the second thing we need to talk about is the distinction between acquisition and learning a lot of people think of language acquisition as being this black and white thing where children acquire a language naturally and

adults have to learn it consciously and this is why so many people spend so much time studying syntactic rules and treating a language as if it's a math problem problem have you ever stopped to think wait a minute if someone did the exact same thing that an infant does to acquire a language would they achieve the same results now I'm not advocating for literally doing the exact same thing as a child because you can leverage your adult knowledge as a catalyst for acquisition but a child literally spends zero time thinking consciously about grammatical forms and

just lets their brain pattern recognize through tens of thousands of hours of input so basically what I'm trying to say is input is the single most important thing in language learning now this isn't to say that you shouldn't study vocabulary or look up grammar sometimes when you feel like you need to but by far the most deciding factor of if you're going to be comfortable and if you're going to get fluent in the long run is just the amount of input that you have there's this linguist named Steven crashing who's pretty popular among people doing

an immersion method and he has this awesome video from like the 80s where he explains the concept of comprehensible input and I would highly recommend watching it but for the 99% of you who are too lazy and I understand he BAS basically just says that humans acquire Language by understanding things through contexts which include ambiguous Words which by themselves would not be understood it's like if I said this robot is orange and you didn't know the word for robot but just from seeing the context of this image you could inference that robot means robot without

having to open a dictionary crashion says that contrary to the way most people learn languages through memorizing grammar rules and trying to treat a language like a math problem that humans are equipped with a biological ability to acquire language when exposed to it for long enough and that this ability is not limited to Children this is to say that language learning consists of consciously studying rules in ways that are commonly taught in classrooms and language acquisition consists of naturally picking up things through Mass exposure and letting the brain's pattern recognition ability do what it was

biologically meant to do this idea is basically the Crux of what I'm going to be talking about today and I've met so many people who like myself had had very successful results doing methods which are based in ideas that crash and put forward okay so now that that's out of the way how do we actually put these ideas into practice you might be asking well actually that's the easy part you literally just go to YouTube search anything you want in Japanese and then watch that and then do that for 12 hours a day for multiple

years and cut off all social interaction with literally everybody done now you speak Japanese all right thanks for watching catch you guys in my next video which will be shocking natives with a [Music] taser dude I'm trying to record a video can you just wait a second dude you're forgetting so much what about the SRS what about output what about learning how to read you can't just okay so maybe I should elaborate a little bit more about what I'm talking about so we're going to start from the beginning applying the principles that I just talked

about how should you go about learning Japanese well to start you need to learn the alphabet or both alphabets these are called hiragana and Katakana and essentially hiragana is just used for writing Japanese grammar and a lot of Japanese words which aren't written in Chinese characters and Katakana is used to write foreign words words or give a flavoring or kind of emphasis to Words which usually would be written in kanji or hiragana these are very easy to learn and you can Master them in just a few days if you really want and there are literally

countless resources for learning these and it doesn't really matter what you use just learn how to read them somehow now like I mentioned earlier the core of an immersion method is getting Mass amounts of input and essentially learning through the same mechanism that a child does which is through comprehensible input if you were to just listen to and watch content in Japanese 24/7 without any study or any lookup you would eventually become able to understand Japanese but doing so would take a lot longer than it realistically needs to remember earlier in this video when I

said you can leverage your adult knowledge as a catalyst for acquisition this is where explicit learning comes in you're going to want to build yourself a very fundamental and basic knowledge of Japanese grammar just like learning Ka it doesn't really matter what you use to do it just learn basic particle uses sentence structure and how pieces of Japanese interact with each other on a fundamental level many people in the immersion Learning Community have a lot of good things to say about t Kim's guide to Japanese grammar so if you're unsure what to use then it

might be worth looking into you can just look up T Kim's guide to Japanese grammar PDF and you'll find it this is going to take a lot more time and effort than learning kna but honestly don't think about it too hard at all it's really important that you don't feel pressured to master everything or to understand it perfectly by only reading a few explanations as long as you have a surface level understanding that's good enough and any confusion will be cleared up later through getting input you can spend as long or as little on this

step as you want because it's not really that important in the grand scheme of things and you can always look things up later down the line if you're confused the main mechanism for which you're actually going to learn these things is through hearing them hundreds and thousands of times through actual natural conversation and trying to learn them through studying rules and brute forcing grammar drills is just so inefficient and not going to be good in the long run for you okay so I keep yapping about learning things through exposure input immersing yourself in the language

but I haven't actually really talked about how you should properly do that so just to be clear there isn't really any correct way to do this and you can honestly just do whatever feels the most enjoyable or comfortable to you the important thing here is that you just start to have real contact with Japanese and when I say this I don't mean doing 5 minutes a day of some language learning app or watching anime with English subtitles I'm talking about committing a significant amount of time to authentic language that's spoken by native speakers this can

range anywhere from YouTube videos anime podcasts if it's in Japanese then for the most part it really doesn't matter earlier I mentioned just how long and difficult learning Japanese to a level actually is and for that reason I should make it very clear that when I say significant amount of time I don't just mean watching one or two episodes of anime a day I mean actually going out of your way to get exposure on the level of multiple hours a day this is the most important part of this entire process by far and it's pretty

safe to say that your success is going to vary depending on how much time you actually are able to put in now you might be thinking well I'm really busy I don't really know how to sit down and watch things for hours a day in Japanese I just don't have that much time on my hands and there's actually a solution for that it's called passive listening and it's basically exactly how it sounds essentially you just put in earbuds while you're doing something else that doesn't really require a lot of attention and you can get a

lot of listening hours in by doing that and that's actually How I Learned Japanese for the most part I'm someone who doesn't really have that gr of an attention span and so sitting down and just intently watching stuff in Japanese for hours a day was not going to work for me and just listening to Japanese in my ear all day while I was doing other stuff actually worked a lot better in my situation this is why I recommend podcasts so much and I think podcasts are the single best way to grow your listening ability really

fast one of the most essential things that anyone doing an immersion-based method needs to understand is the importance of what's called tolerating ambiguity and this is basically just saying you're not going to understand like anything when you first start and that's okay if you asked most people learning Japanese hey do you still watch anime with English subtitles most of them are going to say yes if you ask them why do you still watch with English subtitles if you're learning Japanese they're going to tell you oh because I can't understand it you ask them okay when

are you going to take the subtitles off and they're going to say when I'm able to understand it now this might sound logical at first but if you really think about it how are you supposed to become able to understand anime without subtitles if you don't put a significant amount of time into trying to understand anime without subtitles now this is where tolerating ambiguity comes in you're going to have to spend a lot of time listening to things that you can't really understand yet and and that's okay because by trying to listen to those things

for thousands of hours you'll become able to understand it this happened to me this happened to everyone else I know that's done an immersion method and it's pretty much the core staple principle of doing immersion is that you just keep listening keep reading keep consuming the language and eventually you will understand now while I did say that it doesn't really matter what content you're using for this if you want to make the most progress possible you should probably stick to things that are at least a little bit comprehensible to you this is just because there's

more context available for you when you understand things and drawing connections between the things that you do know and the things that you don't know is a lot easier if you already have a solid base of understanding okay so now it's time to get to the fun part you're probably still thinking okay I understand the theory but are you really just saying to just listen to things until you understand them that doesn't really seem efficient at all and you're actually correct in thinking that and to remedy that we're going to use something called an SRS

now a lot of you probably already know what an SRS is the most popular of which being anky because it's used by a ton of people already for language learning so SRS stands for spaced repetition system and essentially it's just a flash card program that lets you grade yourself on getting cards correct and it uses an algorithm to calculate when you should see that card again so at the time of recording this video at about an average of 10 to 15 words a day I've memorized about 15,000 Japanese words using Ani if you use Ani

consistently for a few years you can really easily grow your vocabulary to a point where it's pretty difficult to find new words the problem with the way that most people use Anki is that they treat it as their main way of learning and don't actually spend any time contacting their target language Anki is actually a really powerful tool if used correctly and when I say this I don't just mean using it as a way to memorize words and phrases so that you can say them later in conversation but rather so that you can actually just

understand your input better being able to very quickly remember the rough definition of a word through Ani then grasp the more nuanced concept through reading or hearing it in real Japanese is what makes the SRS such a good tool so it's really important not to treat as the core mechanism for making progress there are tons of pre-made Japanese Decks that you can download on Ani web which will give you the most common few thousand words and you can use one of those to get started once you feel like you've got a pretty solid base down

you can start doing what most people call mining which is essentially just taking words or sentences from content you've been listening to or reading and making an ankey card to remember that specific word there are lots of tools out there that make this easier and I won't go into detail on all of them but I encourage you to search around because many people in the community have made a ton of Awesome stuff that even I'm not up to date on I personally use an add-on called eny connect which allows you to connect a pop-up dictionary

to Anki and make a vocabulary card within the click of a button there's two main card types that people talk about which are sentence cards and vocab cards and in my experience it doesn't really matter which one you choose and both are going to work for the purpose that we're using them for which again is just to remember the rough definition of a word so that you can understand it in your input I would recommend sticking to around 10 new cards a day and if you feel like that's easy enough for you you can bump

it up to 15 or even 20 but but I wouldn't recommend going above 20 because it's not really sustainable to do more than that all right so next we're going to talk about reading and pronunciation you might be thinking how the hell are reading and pronunciation related to each other so I guess I'll start with that reading is by far one of the best ways to increase your competence in a foreign language and if your main goal is just to get as technically good at Japanese as fast as possible then you probably should just spend

the majority of your time reading and making SRS cards while I could go on about the benefits of reading forever honestly there's a few reasons why I would actually recommend against doing so for the first long while when you first start learning a foreign language there's going to be sounds in that language that you're just unable to hear or produce meaning that when you try to speak you're going to be approximating those sounds into the closest ones in your native language and this is why Foreign Accents exist constantly attempting to reproduce sounds that you're unable

to even perceive correctly means that you're almost certainly going to come across sounding very foreign and have a strong accent even if your technical level in the language is very high this is basically what happens when you try to read as sub ization in your head is essentially just mental output if you don't already have a really strong fundamental understanding of the Rhythm and sound of Japanese then trying to read is just going to enforce incorrect perceptions on how Japanese is supposed to sound while there are things that you can and should do to sharpen

your understanding of the sounds of Japanese by consciously studying things such as phonetic rules or pitch accents by far the most beneficial thing to do is just spend as much time listening to spoken speech as possible it is important to note that while to many people minimizing your accent is really important important and this type of approach is probably the best option it really depends on what your goals are if your goal is to sound as close to a native speaker as possible it's probably worth it to be extreme and to become fluent entirely through

the spoken language before even learning to read on the other hand if you don't really care about having a foreign accent at all and you just want to get competent as fast as possible then honestly you can just ignore this section entirely and just read a ton from the beginning ultimately this is up to you and you can decide how you want to learn but my recommendation would be to postpone read until you feel like you have a pretty decent understanding of how spoken Japanese is supposed to sound if I had to put a number

on it I would probably say around 6 months to a year is okay if you're trying to get the benefits of waiting to read but you also want to get into reading relatively quickly while I'm still on the topic of pronunciation I want to quickly touch up on Pitch accent there's a lot of discussion about Pitch accent and whether it's worth studying or not and I plan on making a more in-depth video about this eventually but my recommendation would be to at the very least become fundamentally aware of what pitch accent is and train yourself

to be able to hear it many people are pretty daunted by pitch accent at first and admittedly I was as well but it's actually not that difficult to understand the basics and you'll definitely be glad that you put the effort in later down the line I'll link to some helpful resources in the description so look there now something I haven't talked much about yet is speaking the inherent premise of an input method doesn't really place a lot of emphasis on speaking because there isn't really much of a point in trying to improve your speaking ability

if you can't even understand what people are saying to you there are a lot of opinions out there about when you should start trying to speak but the common sentiment among people doing an immersion method is that at best it's usually not productive to speak as a beginner or intermediate learner and at worst it's damaging to your long-term goals I'm not really going to dive deep into the alleged drawbacks of trying to speak early just noting that it's probably wiser to wait until you're pretty comfortable in understanding most things you hear in Japanese to attempt

speaking also this isn't a Dogma so honestly just do whatever you feel like is the most helpful or enjoyable to you you'll be fine okay so when you're ready to attempt speaking Japanese how should you go about it personally I found a lot of success building up Comforts by writing and no I don't mean writing kanji by hand because that's practically useless nowadays I mean just start typing some things in Japanese open a Google doc and just talk about whatever you want text Japanese people literally anything will work I even wrote all of my notes

for college in Japanese as practice I found a lot of success on hello talk it's a language exchange app and alternatively you could also use Discord or line or any other social media platform to just connect to Japanese people and make some friends now if you're looking to like actually speak to people with your voice then that's a little bit more tricky but the internet exists so it's not really that difficult honestly I found the most success just going on VR chat and going to random Japanese worlds and just starting talking to people and honestly

it's been so great for my Japanese and my speaking ability has gotten miles better just by doing that for a few years [Music] [Laughter] for there's not necessarily a secret trick to getting super good at output just input a lot and mimic what you hear and do that over and over again and eventually you're going to sound pretty good there are other things that people recommend such as shadowing or adopting a language parent which are essentially just taking a Japanese speaker and trying to mimic them until you feel like you've replicated it pretty well these

are all things that I think are worth trying but honestly at the end of the day it's just get a lot of input and speak a lot and eventually you'll get pretty good okay so that's basically it this video ended up being way longer than I originally planned and it's still as concise as I possibly could make it my point with this video is that well yeah it's a lot of effort and dedication to learn Japanese it actually isn't as difficult as some people make it seem and if you do things right you can actually

get to a pretty impressive level relatively quickly too many people over complicate learning Japanese when all they really need to do is tone down the kanji and grammar studying and just spend a lot of time with actual Japanese I can promise you that if you do the things in this video that I outlined you're going to see a drastic difference in just how easy it is to understand Japanese and your comprehension is going to rise a lot if you're interested in learning more about immersion learning and actually getting into it I would recommend doing more

research search about it yourself and maybe joining some Discord servers or watching people on YouTube who are talking about it I'll put a bunch of resources and helpful stuff in the description so you can just go there and you should be able to find what you're looking for anyways this video took me so long to make so I really hope you found it helpful I plan on making more in-depth videos on singular topics regarding learning Japanese so if you want to see those then stick around I also make videos in Japanese so you can watch

those too if you want also if you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments and I'll try to answer them the best I can anyways that's all bye for now