Fluent In Japanese FAST. How I Did it. 100% Self Taught.

for let's make the music for this video so as I lay down the soundtrack really quick I want to say right away this is not a learn effortlessly method yes this is fast it's very fast but it's not easy I want you to know that up front so you know what you're getting into but I believe in you so let's get started the main Concepts that you should keep in mind when you're learning a language are these three things number one through repetition language learning becomes subconscious number two your brain is more efficient in language

learning than you will ever understand and number three discomfort during practice equals Comfort when using the language and comfort during practice equals discomfort Comfort when using the language now you guys know I'm not a grind set mindset guy I don't believe in that but the third one I really want you to pay attention to that just moving forward in general okay the steps of learning a language here's the Prelude learn the very basics of grammar this should take you like one day max I know that sounds kind of crazy but grammar is something that you

really want to learn in context I believe in isolation grammar is kind of useless unless you're just trying to understand how the language works which is what this day is for this time is for you just want to understand how it works but as far as practical use it's way better to learn that when you learn sentences because our goal is to make the language work without really having to think about it just like in your native language you don't really think about conjugations and all these rules you kind of just think of the idea

and the thought or sentence comes out that's all you want to do in your target language so leveraging the basics of grammar actually gives you an advantage but again we're not doing a deep dive here so what to look up as far as grammar I would personally recommend using chat GPT because it gets a lot of The Upfront work out of the way and you can simply ask it what are the rules and grammar of Japanese or whatever language you're trying to study things you want to focus on learning are things like sentence structure formal

and informal speech basic conjugations and other things like that also another prompt you can put in is as a English speaker what are some things I should know about whatever language or you can change the languages around to fit you but if you're watching this for Japanese you could say as an English speaker what are some things I should know about Japanese I would highly recommend leveraging AI because this stuff used to take me days or weeks to do but you can do it in just a few prompts so why only the basics I kind

of went over this already but grammar is something you want to learn in context I just really want to make that clear I know we can get caught up in grammar rules and conjugations and trying to say everything right but your brain is going to pick that up whether you want it to or not it's just going to happen I realized this in Japan when I was at work and my co-workers used to ask me sentences in English or things in English none of them spoke English but they would ask me things and I wasn't

able to explain it and on the inverse I would ask them Japanese questions that I had and they weren't able to explain it so we were both kind of lost on grammar yet we knew how to make the thoughts come out in a sentence format this is something that's going to be uncomfortable for a while but but you have to trust the process because again we want to make the language work without really having to think about it I'm probably going to put up a black screen every time I say that because I really want

you to know that okay that was the Prelude so Step One is learn 2,000 to 4,000 of the most common vocabulary words now again before you think I'm crazy I'm going to tell you why you should do this upfront honestly it's because you save years of study time right away unfortunately traditional methods that are pushed they have you kind of take taking a slow route where you're gradually increasing difficulty of things that's fine and it works but the problem is it takes forever to learn enough vocabulary to be comfortable enough to use it in a

real sense I believe the word on the Internet is comprehensible input or something like that I'm not really sure I don't know who made it but that method it works like I said but it's just slow it takes a long time and maybe you're like me and you have other stuff you like to do you like to play guitar piano go to the gym whatever you don't have all day to be sitting there trying to learn 20 vocab words in a month when you can just do it in one day along with that once you

do this everything you ever watch or listen to becomes somewhat comprehensible and that really opens up any kind of content you want to watch which leads me into reason two vocabulary and isolation takes you very far so even if you had no grammar no idea how to formulate a sentence nothing all you had was vocabulary words and you could just pick and choose at random you could still get your point of across in a lot of ways I did this a lot when I was living in Japan and it worked extremely well and even when

I was using the wrong versions of some words my point was still across in the same way so I really cannot stress how important it is to just have a large array of vocabulary words to choose from and it works for understanding too so say if you're watching jiujitsu kaisen and the part where nanami is talking toor about goo and he's saying or something like that maybe you only know or or which is trust and you know rely on and respect and you can look at the tone of voice in anami and see that he's

angry at the last part you may know oh he trusts and relies on him but he does not respect him this is something that's going to go on subconsciously but it's a process you'll really have to trust but I promise you if you do this with vocabulary up front so many sentences and so many things are going to make sense and you're not even going to realize how good you are at the language over time for this reason alone I believe it's important to just get a lot of vocabulary words done but I will say

this is probably the hardest part of learning a language so yes it's uncomfortable it kind of sucks but if you can get the very hard part out of the way initially I believe the rest it's not easy per se but it does open you up up to just having a lot more experience and a lot more flexibility with the language because again our goal is to make the language work without really having to think about it when doing this by the way just get the base word down don't worry about the different forms and the

negative form and all that it's okay to have an idea but just study the base word and again a lot of this stuff will just come when you learn sentences now how do you remember all of these words without forgetting them something I do and I've been doing for years is I use pneumonic associations there's another YouTuber who does this as well and I'll point to him later he has a really good channel on language learning in general but pneumonic associations are basically taking what you have and attaching it to something you can already remember

or see in your head so for example the word chasu in Japanese means to scatter around now if I say that means the wind was strong and scattered around all the papers cheetah aasu the word the way I remember that as I literally think about cheetah in a castle and the cheetah are running around they're you know knocking stuff off the counter jumping on the walls all this other stuff it's a Goofy image but it really sticks in my head I only did this once and this was maybe seven years ago and I've never forgotten

that word another example is like in Turkish if I said Sending g into that means I love your smile or I like your smile sending I think of that as sending a message I send someone a message and now it's your message so my brain thinks s yours this is a dumb example but I think of that as a sound that I make when I pet a cat and the Cat smiles so g means smile again you want to think in Vivid images whatever comes up in your head you just want to run with that

sorum I think sounds like save your room so in my mind you save your room for someone that you love or someone that you like so sending Gish into Vim I love your smile another simple one is Buu in Turkish means this so I think of Buu the ghost like from Super Mario 64 or whatever Super Mario and he's pointing at something saying this maybe there's a Turkish flag behind his head again the more Vivid the better that being said this is a skill and you're not going to be able to do it for all

of them that's fine if you find yourself stuck on one just come back to it another day or skip it in general especially if it's a common word that you know is going to come up often maybe you don't have to create a nemonic device for it you can just understand that it'll be memorized anyways some words even in Japanese I could never think of one but I've used them so much they've really just been internalized and I don't have to think of one anymore there's going to be several like this so just try not

to get too frustrated and to add on to that only you are going to be reading these so you can get as crazy as you want as wild as you want whatever helps you remember it just go with that no one's going to be opening up your notion or Google documents and trying to see what you have written down just get as crazy as you want to get okay potential fear of pneumonic associations you may ask well what if I remember the wrong thing like cheetah kasu what if you remember cheetah instead of scattering around

well in my experience I've never had a problem where I remember the wrong thing I think our brains are pretty good at sorting out what's correct especially because when you learn it in a sentence the whole sentence has a meaning so what did I say earlier K I think that's what I said I'm not going to think about cheetah because I just said the wind is strong so wind is strong and papers you know you can kind of get the rest from there but in my experience I never really had a problem remembering the correct

thing these days I believe you can find full Excel sheets of vocabulary lists online and then maybe you'll just have to add a column and add a Association on the end so if there's like four columns just add a fifth one and add whatever helps you remember it I may make some or find some and put it on my patreon or Discord but try to do it on your own a lot of this is going to be a deliberate effort but again the time it takes you to do this it may seem like a lot

but it's going to save you months if not years of total practice so it's worth really doing your homework on and take your time with it you may only get through like 20 or 30 a day not even that you may only get through 10 and you're mentally exhausted that's fine again this is kind of a hyperbolic Time Chamber in a sense where everything you do really accounts for months of work that someone else would do so there's an idea I call an intervalic idea and basically what this means is that the time between the

word being shown and the Demonic Association and the meaning is going to be long for a while it may take you a few seconds but after you keep doing this what's going to happen is that it's going to be instant it's going to instantly go from the word to the meaning and you won't think about anything else in between it's just going to be very quick just like it is in English or whatever your native language is so cheetah kasu you won't think about cheetah in a castle or any of that like me iar CH

and I just think something was scattered around that's it I don't think about anything else anymore this goes with vocab words and full sentences by the way you'll hear someone say something in an anime maybe the entire sentence or the whole dialogue and maybe you've heard that before or several times and it's going to get to the point where you're not really thinking about it you just understand what is being said okay something to help this process is to listen to and repeat the words for good practice I actually use used to use the little

Google translate text to speech box because nothing else was really out back then but you can find text to speech websites these days I believe natural reader is one maybe I'll link some in the description or my Discord but find something to help you hear it as you study it that way you can kind of get the input and the output at the same time when I say repeat the words by the way I do mean out loud I know some people will argue that you should not speak from day one I think you should

speak immediately as soon as you hear it try to speak it try to say it just get it in your brain and get it working because this is really going to help you in the long run this may require you copying and pasting words one by one but again this is going to save you months if not years of practice in general so it's just something that's you're going to have to do but an alternative these days are Ani decks and I believe these days there's full maybe 5,000 words already laid out and it has

the sounds it has sentences has everything pretty much there so you can just download that and get to using it right away I'll say this again by the way learning vocabulary is the hardest part of the language in my opinion so if you can really get through this part it unlocks the rest of the fretboard I said fretboard I'm sorry the rest of the language I'm thinking about guitar cuz I got to practice after this but it unlocks the rest of the language and you can really get your ideas flowing and you can get the

input that you want to get and start to listen and repeat after native speakers which leads me right into step two there's two parts to this but the first part is listen and repeat after native speakers I really want to emphasize native speakers because I speak Japanese in several shorts and just different content on my channel but I don't have the best accent I say things wrong and all that you really want to prioritize native speakers take their sentences and what they say and say it like them because they have a lot of the things

things that I don't so really prioritize native speakers so the importance of listening right away after the vocab is because sentences tend to blend together in Japanese and most languages really and it's a very fast language so you want to just start getting the repetitions in this is going to be very difficult when you start and you may have to listen to the same sentences 20 30 40 times but that's a part of the process movies are fine anime is fine YouTube is fine I would recommend finding something with made transcripts if it's YouTube things

like the easy Japanese Channel or Ted Talks or Street interviews regardless of whatever method you use understand that the fundamentals of the language are the same so you can learn from anime you can learn from YouTube you can learn from TED talks but a lot of the fundamentals are going to be the same now if you only learn from anime there will be an adjustment phase but it's not that bad believe me you'll be fine just use discernment just like you would in English you wouldn't say fight scene things at the restaurant and vice versa

it'll be the same in Japanese and it's not that hard to decipher you'll be fine but understand that the fundamentals will carry over this is optional but use documents titled after the video you watching to fill in vocabulary knowledge gaps this is something I used to do for some things say I watch a TED talk in Japanese and there's a lot of words that they use I'll have a sheet named after that with the link and and I would have the vocabulary words there create a neonic Association and so on this was just if I

didn't know the word already okay step 2B which is more important in my opinion is to make or find several hundred sentences in every category around your life and drill those this means basic interrogatives small talk things around work school where you're from all that uh Hobbies interests anything like that that evolves evolves anything that involves the same things that you would talk about in English these are the things you want to do in the target language too a note about translators and chat GPT I know people talk bad about it but in my experience

they're actually really accurate the problem people have is they don't know how to use them and so they give it a bad rap but if you use it correctly in context that's all you have to do just use it in context it's actually pretty good most of the Japanese I learned when I was at work in Japan was right from Google Translate and I would say those sentences at work just fine and everyone understood me I still got paid a lot of money and so on but if you put in isolation words or just some

random thought that doesn't have a context it may give you the wrong meaning chat GPT is even better in my opinion because you can prompt it to say hey give me 30 sentences about Jiu-Jitsu in Japanese and it can just spit them out right away and now you have practice for the next couple days right there and a comforting note again whatever you study the fundamentals will carry over especially certain things like Combat Sports you'll have to learn how to say if something happens then do this that fundamental is very useful in just normal language

in general my opinion of sentences is that they're Frameworks and the more Frameworks you learn the better and the more you drill these all you have to do is change out the subjects and the vocabulary words whenever you need to so me in my brain when I'm speaking Japanese these I basically say the skeleton of a sentence and then I just pick a vocab word to put in place that's in my opinion that's how a language kind of works without you really having to think about it and another comforting note here we're not trying to

be perfect okay I'm going to tell you from firsthand experience no one cares in Japan if your accent's off or you say a couple things wrong no one really cares even at work where I was getting paid to speak correct Japanese no one cared I still got a lot of money I still had a lot of clients everything was fine and honestly I would say America is the only place where people get upset that you don't speak the local language like if you listen to me talk I don't have the best pitch accent sometimes the

consonants are not sustained like they should be and so on there's a lot of mistakes I can make but it doesn't really matter and it's never mattered we do not care plus I'm not Japanese I am 0% Japanese so to me it really doesn't matter if you're Japanese well if you're Japanese learning from me that's crazy but if you're Japanese maybe it matters but even then just say hey I didn't learn it growing up I learned it from some black guy on the internet but if you're not Japanese really just don't stress it I know

some people they hesitate to get the speaking practice in or they hesitate to actually go use the language because they're too afraid of how they're going to sound they're too afraid of the input that they're going to get or the feedback that they're going to get but I promise you it's okay okay some other Concepts to keep in mind is I said this a little bit earlier but use chat G PT /ai do not have a conversation with chat GPT because again that's not going to translate to real life you want to just get materials

that will translate to real life so ask it to give you sentences ask it to create conversations that you can practice out loud ask it to explain grammar to you ask it to explain the ways that it's used take a word put it in there and tell it to give you several sentences with that word just get really creative with it but you can leverage a I in such a good way that you can get a week's worth of work done and just a few minutes of typing and now you have an action plan for

the entire week so really leverage that you know it used to take me a long time to do this stuff from scratch notebooks Google Docs all that now you can just type it in and you got everything of course this is still really hard work because you have to do a lot of deliberate practice listening and speaking out loud and all that kind of thing but you get a lot of The Upfront work out of the way okay I'm going to talk about making the process fun so as you can tell everything I've said so

far it's not really that fun studying a bunch of vocab words drilling the same sentences it's not really a fun process so I would say on some days if you need a break or you feel like you're a little bit burnt out then you can opt for the more passive options or you can just take a day off but I would also add that maybe you should see the end result as fun you know watching Juju kaon or JoJo's bizar Adventure or something with no subtitles see that as fun take a break when you need

to and like I said use passive methods when you want that break but really try to push yourself a bit and see how much discomfort you can deal with and try to get to that goal because that is way more fun than trying to watch kids shows in Japanese and all this other stuff because you know what you actually want to watch the quicker you can get there the faster you can actually enjoy it okay the next one is space repetition and my experience space repetition is a natural process that's just going to happen you

don't have to schedule days you don't have to schedule times it can be 10 minutes it can be a day it can be a week it's just going to happen naturally in general when you're learning once you kind of have it down just move on to the next thing if you know I'm going to use the same word chasu if you can say it out loud and you understand the meaning move on to the next thing by the time that word comes up again see if you remember it that is a space repetition you don't

have to really calculate this okay now I'm going to talk about why I really believe in this method and why I believe it's the absolute best way to learn a language with my experience and this is something I call the Hinata realization so to make a long story short I was working out at a gym in Japan and the manager I used to talk to all the time wanted to hire me so we kind of did the interview while I was resting between sets and I asked him a lot of questions and that was it

I got the job however the only problem was I was conversationally fluent but I couldn't would talk about anything a personal trainer would do or I didn't have a certification or any of that I had two weeks to do this so I had to learn about how to say all these Fitness movements Breathe In and Out certain posture certain positions hydration diet nutrition all this other stuff keep your knees outside of your toes when you squat you know all the trainer type stuff I had two weeks to learn this stuff and so basically what I

did is exactly what I'm telling you here I got all the vocab words I needed and I started making a whole lot of sentences with Google translate on just gym talk I would just create sentences I thought of every possible gym scenario that I could so I could fill in as much gaps as possible in that two weeks the result of this is that a lot of the vocabulary words and sentences that I had trained at home with no one else it actually came out pretty natural when I had to use it with clients they

all understood me just fine I could understand the things that they were asking me and it was a really big realization for me at the time how however I was still having to process it this is where the Hinata part comes in my client Hinata at the time this was the day where everything felt subconscious and I had realized it about halfway through the session that the entire time I was not thinking everything she was saying I was just processing it and everything I was saying back to her it was just coming out just one

thought the sentence came out and she understood me this is why I call it the Hinata realization because that day when I was training Hinata it really clicked for me that this method is probably the best thing ever as far as language learning I remember going home that day and just being really excited because that had never really happened to me before as far as finding something that was extremely useful to work in that short amount of time now with all of this it is difficult again I think I said that before but this is

a difficult process this is not an easy effortless process but it's fast it's faster than you think it's extremely fast the problem with the fast part though is that you're cramming a lot of the pain into a small amount of time but I truly believe it's worth it because by the time someone else is just now learning how to say oh I want to go to the store in the morning you can be watching anime and you only have to look up a few words okay I want to talk about immersion real quick and why

it does not work for most people so immersion in general requires a lot of deliberate practice okay when most people people say immersion they think put on a podcast listen to Japanese all day and passively do things I'm going to tell you now passive efforts don't really give you results as an adult I think our brains we just have too much to think about and these passive efforts don't really do anything for us immersion requires a lot of deliberate practice many people I hear will say oh you know move to the country and acquire the

language and you know you're around it and you become fluent that's not how it works I can promise you now you will never learn a language like that immersion is a deliberate practice that you have to do on your own and then you use it when you can I lived in Japan for about a decade and I can tell you now most of the foreigners I met did not know Japanese because ironically Japan does have subtitles I know that sounds weird to say but everything you need to do has some sort of an English translation

if it's that important now your life is going to be extremely Limited in Japan if you go there and you don't learn Japanese but if you're just looking to get around or only hang out with your other American friends or people who speak English you can actually get by just not knowing much Japanese so I say all that to say if your version of immersion is active and it's a lot of deliberate work then yes immersion is very useful but if it's passive or you think putting on Japanese audio while you go to the gym

and all that is going to make you fluent it's not going to do anything your brain is just going to tune it out and not much is going to happen I also want to say this in a friendly way not like uh an attacking way so if you have been doing the passive way I would just invite you to come on over to the active side okay let's talk about the writing system now because I haven't addressed this yet in my opinion this is what you should do learn hiana and Katakana these only take maybe

two weeks to learn completely to the point where you can read Japanese they're not that hard kanji however I would say do not touch it until until you can speak and understand the language with confidence to add to that all Kani can be read with hiana and Katakana there's this thing called fuana where the kanji is written and there's hiana on top of it so it actually allows you to read kanji when you need it you can also use the computer to read kanji you know it can put it in romaji which is the characterized

version and that's what you really should be using but kanji is something again you just want to wait it's so much time have to put into it for no benefit so just be aware of that something else to note is the double consonants and the extended sounds and all that pay attention to that cuz that is a big part of speech but as long as you have that down in the heagan upart you'll be fine you really don't need Kani at all that's my experience at least and I believe this is just the most practical

approach when I was living in Japan what I saw was a lot of people who didn't speak Japanese or understand it on the inverse they knew how to write it they knew how to read some of it they knew the grammar rules and all that but when it came to actually talking to people there was a blank that was drawn there was really no skill there and unfortunately this is the traditional way that people think you should learn a language when actually it's the opposite you should learn to listen and understand and speak it and

leverage those little things like grammar and all that to just speak and understand better I read a lot of Japanese now but this is a result of sheer exposure and just years of being around the kanji that I needed I'm going to talk about this later as far as how I learned kanji on accident but for now just learn to understand and speak the language so that's about it as far as this part this is part one of the series I'm probably going to make another video and get into more detail but this video alone

is like almost years of work so please don't neglect that come back as much as you need to and revisit the parts that you need to as often as you can you can also ask me questions on patreon or Discord or in the comments there's a lot to unpack here there's a lot that's going on there's a lot of rules that you kind of need to overwrite in your head maybe because this is a strange method but it works it's really the reason why I can speak Japanese the way I do and understand it the

way I do and not to sound like that guy but I believe this is why other people don't have results it's because the deliver practice is key here so just keep all this in mind and really stick with this process and I'm going to put out more about this so you should subscribe also or I'm going to send sco out to come get you but I'm going to put out more information about this later and really help you guys out because some people see language as this thing where it's impossible especially Japanese they see it

as impossible or they see it as you had to do it when you were younger or your brain's not efficient and all this other stuff but none of that's true the key is just deliberate practice and if you do enough deliberate practice like I said earlier it just becomes second nature but at first yes it's extremely difficult you have to think about everything in detail the sounds every little thing you you're going to sound like you're translating in your head but that's totally okay that's the point the point is to get all the repetitions in

and if you can keep that in mind when you're practicing by the time it comes to use the language like watch content and talk to people it becomes easier and easier over time because you're getting a lot of that stress out in your room basically you know I remember when I first started learning I was learning in my late 20s intently but I remember all the limiting beliefs that I heard other people say but then I thought about it and I said well you know maybe they actually don't work hard you know and I'm not

trying to say that in a rude way but many people people are confused about what they're actually doing or if they're doing things correctly and so when I really just blocked all that out and I took my own method into account it gave me so much results and so much Clarity that I want that for other people you know even to this day I'll watch anime or I'll watch content or I'll scroll real a lot of my Instagram is Japanese algorithm based because that's what I watch and I'll watch that stuff and I can understand

it and it still surprises me to this day and I've been doing this for years but I always think about how impossible I thought this was or how I thought it would always be this I have to translate and read sentences out of my head and I can't make it stick but that's not true just really take the deliberate practice into account and you're going to get the same results that I have or even better really but if you made it this far into the video towards the end then I really believe you have it

you have what it takes to become fluent I'm not some special superum I'm not any of that I just understand the basics of deliberate repetition and how that leads to subconscious Mastery and leveraging that is the absolute best thing I've ever done for language learning and if you do this and really take the time to do it one month of language study for you is really I I don't know a exact number or anything but it's going to be like 6 months of someone else doing the more drawn out method so come back to this

video whenever you need to click through it take some notes all that ask me questions whatever you have to do just take these ideas in mind and try to get those results that you're looking for and as a note Japanese was the first language that I learned I didn't speak anything before that and I remember people telling me that I was crazy for learning Japanese first because it's so difficult for an English speaker but again just keep all this in mind so I believe in you you got it I'm going to play piano Channel now

so I love you guys and I'll see you in the next one peace [Music]