Bad News and Good News

Folks, I have some bad news to share: I haven’t been working on Shining Tomorrow Volume 2 as hard as I should have. Make no mistake — I’ll still complete it, it’s just that I’ve been taking longer than I wanted.

The good news is why it’s taking so long: because finally, at long last, I have made real progress in my study of the Japanese language.

I’ve studied Japanese since I was 13 years old. A (non-Japanese) cousin of mine showed me a Japanese video game, and I wanted to find out what it said, so I asked my parents to buy me a Japanese-English dictionary, as well as a language-learning course.

Over time, I studied the language on and off, learning about grammar as much as I could. Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide (PDF) really came in handy here, since it cleared up a lot of points that I had trouble with. And not once have I ever taken a Japanese class. Not. Once.

However, I would always hit a wall in my studies. There was just too much tricky grammar to figure out; many times, I gave up on ever comprehending it, preferring to only be satisfied with learning the occasional vocabulary word.

Then I came across Antimoon. Though that site is aimed at English learners, it was trivial to adapt its methods to Japanese. Antimoon focuses heavily on maximizing input using native sources in the target language so that you recognize all the recurring patterns. Output, such as speaking and writing, is ignored because it can lead to bad habits and repeated mistakes.

It took some trial and error over several months, but I finally found a method that worked for me:

(1) Acquire some Japanese text with an English translation, or some English text with a Japanese translation. Because of Japanese pop culture’s global popularity, this is easy to do.

(2) Read the English first so that you know what the passage is about.

(3) Put the English aside and read the same passage in Japanese; since you know what it’s about, you will be able to see how the Japanese grammar structures create meaning.

(4) Repeatedly read until you understand every word of the passage. If you don’t know a word, look it up; the point is to understand the passage as Japanese.

Now, to be clear, the above method isn’t suitable for beginners; for that, get yourself a good textbook and learn some fundamentals first. But once you have the basic rules and some vocabulary, my method should help you greatly.

This past week, I was obsessively studying because I actually felt like my knowledge was increasing. On top of that, I finally got over a roadblock in my learning that hampered me for years. I’ve never felt more confident in myself.

Let’s keep this going.