Ever notice how when you read a lot in your native language your spelling and grammar tend to improve and every time you make a mistake and correct it you less frequently make that mistake again you've basically told your subconscious
mind that this is correct and how it should be even without actively trying. Most of the time you don't even need to actively find and correct your mistakes as they will correct themselves the more you see them written correctly in context.
Well the exact same thing will happen in the language your learning if your like me and sometimes misspell a word or miss pronounce it reading and speaking a lot will correct these little niggling issues even if you don't understand the word your mind will process this in the background on how it should look and feel another great advantage to the
sentence method so when you do eventually learn the words meaning there will be much less chance of getting it wrong. So read / listen as much as you can even if you understand very little an article over at
alljapaneseallthetime.com explains it in more detail.
Also make sure you crave criticism I know people tend not to like being criticised especially when they are learning something new but its often the only way to quickly correct your mistakes being told what your mistakes are even if its just a simple spelling mistake or miss pronunciation as long as its constructive it can only help so don't fear criticism crave it!
Recently I've been thinking back to before I really started learning Japanese to a time when I thought that to learn a language you needed to be really smart or have it forced down your throat from a young age and also that other huge myth that a large amount of people (maybe the majority) still believe that you need to live in the country of the target language to reach any sort of fluency which i now know to be completly false and so does a growing number of language learners just checkout some more of the blogs on my blog list for some good examples.
Why you 'DON'T' need to live in the country of your target language to be fluent you have so much more resources at your disposal these day if you think the advantage to another country is that you will be surrounded by people talking in L2 then just get some headphones and audio and have this playing in your ear its exactly the same if you think "oh well there is newspapers and tv etc" erm well you can find all these on the internet for free so in this day and age there is no excuse for the 'you have to be living in the country' tiss a complete myth.
The old teachers and classes myth another potential if not possible harmfull waste of time is taking a course in the language some people may argue that you need somebody to explain things to you or that they learn better when somebody is telling them directly what to do. The only issue is that half the time the teacher wants you to feel good about yourself so they will only teach you how to say things whether you can understand the response is another story also if your learning something like Japanese you probably wont even start learning the Kanji for atleast a year and even then only a few as there is a misconception that the Kanji are extremly difficulty which is false really if you want to obtain fluency you need to be learning the Kanji from day one I recommend like so many others that you get a hold of
Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig and you can learn all the 2046 jouyou Kanji in a
few months.
Also in a lot of cases people who take classes will tend to go slower at learning the language unless they learn a lot in there own time put it this way the person who self studys everyday of the week x amount of time will be much further ahead than somebody who only does 1-2 days a week of classes and for the people that say they learn better when somebody is telling them are you sure that its not just a motivational thing? As when in a class your forced to listen/learn but at home its easy to be distracted by the next show on TV unless you keep
motivated
So really there is no excuse anymore for not learning a language you have a great interest in as long as your motivated don't get me wrong it will still take time but thats only down to how much time you can spend learning each day if you fit something from the language into your day to day life each and every day and still keep up your interest and thirst for more knowledge you will learn in no time. You have all the tools you need on the 'internet' get yourself an SRS (I use
anki) so you never forget anything again and will speed up the process immensley even if you stop studying new things for weeks you won't forget anything you've learned so far as long as you keep up with your daily reps.
Well after doing Japanese 'properly' for almost 2 months now I finally see what other people were talking about that languages are not hard to learn I think there are 3 key ingredients to learning any language nothing to do with intelligence or being in the country of the language your trying to learn. It's more down to time spent, effort and motivation if your missing any of those you will not learn the language at any sort of reasonable pase even if your surrounded by the language and nobody speaks your native language you will still not obtaine any sort of fluency unless you put those 3 things into practice.
This can be proven easily by the amount of foreigners that live in Japan for many years and can hardly read 平仮名 and can barely say anything past こんにちは / お元気ですか etc they are missing atleast 1 of those things, if they have no motivation/interest they will not try to learn so there mind will just class what they see/hear as useless information no matter how much they are exposed to it.
Time spent is obviouse you can have all the motivation and effort in the world but if you only spend 1-2 hours a week its going to be a long time before you notice any improvement, you can pretty much gaurantee the person that spends 3-4 hours a day doing there chosen language will be much further ahead than the person doing 1-2 hours a week, this is often why classes dont work as some students will only do the language when they are in class (maybe a few hours a week) and don't spend time studying in there own time.
Last but not least 'effort' if you don't put the effort in e.g. keeping up with reviews, maintaining a language environment basicaly doing anything in your target language your not going to see much if any results, there's no excuse for "oh i fancy a brake from Japanese it'll be ok till tomorrow" that one day can easily turn into 2 days, 2 week, months and so on, you need to keep it up no matter what even if you just do your daily SRS reps even if your tired just do something in your target language keep putting the effort in.
Since i put these 3 things into action my Japanese has improved leaps and bounds compared to the years before when trying to learn, usually down to not putting in the effort daily (always taking that one little brake...), now that i put in daily effort I'm seeing huge improvements in less than 2 months.
So basically がんばって (do your best)
Stats update.
Deck created: 1.7 months ago
Total number of cards: 643
Card counts
Mature cards: 64 (9.95%)
Young cards: 579 (90.05%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)
Correct answers
Mature cards: 100.0% (3 of 3)
Young cards: 79.1% (3067 of 3879)
First-seen cards: 80.7% (601 of 745)
The 643 seen cards in this deck contain:
- 466 total unique kanji.
- Jouyou: 457 of 1945 (23.5%).
- Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).
- 7 non-jouyou kanji.
