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An interesting thing happened to me along the way to mastering Japanese: I went insane. Not quite Taxi Driver insane. But not that far off either. Going insane was actually a pretty amazing experience at the time. However it left me with a big emotional hangover that took years to recover from. Thankfully I made it back to the world of the sane in the end, and now I’ve been invited to write a little bit about the experience. Maybe somebody will find it helpful.
It all started back in 2010 when I discovered AJATT.com. As you may already know, AJATT stands for All Japanese All the Time, which pretty much sums up the approach which Khatzumoto, the author of this language learning blog, used in order to master Japanese in a short amount of time (he claimed to have done so in 18 months). A few of the key tenants espoused by Khatzumoto were:
1. You don’t learn a language, you get used to it.
2. Getting used to a language takes a lot of time. Far more time than most people realize. Not hundreds of hours, but thousands.
3. If you wish to succeed, you need to make basic changes to your micro-environment, to what comes in your ears and eyes, in order to make sure that as much of that as possible is in your L2 (2nd language).
4. In order to achieve this you have to squeeze in your L2 everywhere, replacing L1 with L2 as much as humanly possible, even if it is just “in the background” filling up any gaps that may emerge in your day.
5. As early as possible, focus on material made by natives, for natives. It’s OK if you don’t understand everything, so long as it is enjoyable. Prioritize having fun.
6. Use spaced repetition software to mine sentences from what you are reading and listening to (the study part).
Now there’s a bit more to it than that, but these are some of the main ideas. Instead of studying for an hour here, an hour there, reading textbooks, analyzing grammar and writing out kanji endlessly by hand, you think of yourself as a logistics officer for your eyes and ears. The part of you which makes active decisions, which exercises will-power, should be put to use securing and maintaining an environment where you are surrounded by native media in vast quantities. Books. Radio. TV. This sets up a foundation, a habit, of hearing the language before listening, seeing before reading, so that your natural curiosity is set free to zoom in on what draws you, pulling you towards words and phrases which you can then learn with enthusiasm as necessary. The L2 environment is like the first domino. If your L2 is always there, all the time, it ensures that you will never forget your task, never slack off, and never fail to get enough raw exposure.
When I found this blog one day in early February I read an article. Then another. And another. I read the whole site within a couple of days. Each piece of the writing brought me new realizations, made sense to me in light of my own past experiences. It had been seven (!) whole years since I first picked up an Introduction to Japanese textbook and sat down in a class. I’d worked hard. Been on exchange. Got decent grades. But I still couldn’t really read comfortably. I couldn’t properly understand radio. I couldn’t follow what was going on in a TV program. I didn’t have the ability to understand much regular conversation, or make myself understood comprehensively. My only consolation was that neither could anybody else who I had taken classes with. With the exception of a musically talented guy with a good ear, we all had pretty much failed to really become fluent and literate. Japanese is, as they say, a hard language… Only, what if it wasn’t? What if my whole approach had been backwards? When I was on exchange I’d never watched TV because I “wouldn’t understand it anyway”. I preferred to focus on my foreign language learning material (leisure time was mostly in English of course). This time, I’d put all my learning materials to one side, and focus on making my whole life revolve around getting used to the language. I’d hear it so much, see it so much, that it would leave an indelible mark on me. Mastery would be a foregone conclusion, an inescapable result of how I was living day-to-day.
Two things were really important in allowing me try out this program of near total immersion. One was motivation. I had a concrete goal: attending a famous graduate school in Japan for a master’s degree. The Japanese ministry of education offered scholarships and knowing good Japanese would help me get the scholarship and attend the school I wanted. I was going to get paid to live in Japan, where I would take an entrance exam in Japanese, conduct my course work in Japanese, and write my graduate thesis in Japanese. It was a pretty big goal and it demanded a big commitment. Become the King of Japanese, as soon as bloody possible. I had exactly one year. There was just no time for playing around. The second thing I needed was time day-to-day. Fortunately I had a nice job lined up that paid enough to allow me to only work part-time and still pay the bills. I was also single and had no intention of changing that. Why start a relationship, I thought, if I was going to be leaving the country for several years at least?
Yoshida-ryo dormitory
I was all set for my trip to insanity. I had a method, time, and motivation. I found my dusty iPod that had been sitting around neglected for three years and switched iTunes over to Japan. I grabbed a bunch of podcasts that sounded good, downloaded hundreds of hours of listening material, and put my earphones in. Then I simply didn’t take them out. Japanese was here now. In my ears. This hour. The next hour. Tonight. Tomorrow morning. The day after that. Next week. Next month. On the bus. Walking to work. In the kitchen. On the toilet. It wasn’t something in my schedule. It was here and now, constantly. One exception was when watching TV. In Japanese. I’d bought a nice bean bag, set up a big TV in front of it, and found a site with access to all the famous TV dramas. I watched maybe 20 different shows. Old stuff. New stuff. Comedies. Historical dramas. Some because it was well-known. Some just because I liked the actors. Most of what I had was subtitled, so I stuck thick folder paper over the bottom of the screen to hide it.
It was a bit weird at first. Listening to a “foreign” language. It “felt” foreign for a few weeks. Then I stopped noticing. A few weeks after that I caught myself laughing at a joke on a show; Tiger and Dragon. Then I caught myself catching myself. I realized that I had forgotten that I was watching something “foreign”. I was just watching a show. It had become almost entirely normal. And I understood. Not everything, but far more than I expected. It was as though once my mind had finally accepted this new normal it had begun to adjust at speeds exponentially faster than the sum of the time I had put in. I understood not just TV now, but radio too. After a couple of months of listening for 14+ hours a day I was no longer “catching” this part or that part, I was understanding most of what I heard. When I didn’t understand, often as not, it was due to a lack of context, not a lack of vocabulary. As each month went by I could feel my comprehension becoming notably stronger. I was also able to speak in a more relaxed manner with the Japanese friends I’d made about town. Phrases would come out fully formed, without any “translation” going on inside my head. Just listening so much all the time seemed to make talking so much easier too. It was finally happening. Holy shit, I was bloody becoming bilingual.
The final piece of the puzzle was coming to know the world, the reality, conveyed through the language. Language can of course be potentially culturally neutral when it comes to any particular piece of content, but you can hardly really know a language without knowing a good deal about the world it relates to. While I wasn’t living in Japan, my media and the internet was providing me with a window on that world, its history. It struck me as being like a constellation of interrelated points. The famous individuals, shows, movies, books, manga, these formed individual references that I could then connect together. If a Japanese person would simply know somebody, the same way that I simply “knew” certain Hollywood stars or famous singers, I would also know them. I liked a TV show, so I got to know the faces of the people appearing in it. Then I’d look them up in (Japanese) Wikipedia and see what else they were in and watch that. Then maybe I’d see what else the director had done, and watch that. And maybe I liked the sound track, so I’d see who the artist is and watch more of their stuff on YouTube. And so on. A whole nation’s mass culture unfolding in front of my eyes at hyper-speed. Decades old classic shows, songs and comedy skits available in an instance on YouTube. As an adult, and with the internet, I could go right for what had already been decided by the Japanese internet collective as representing some of the best of the best. And it was glorious. Not just the raw enjoyment, but the secondary sense of being “in on it”, to be “getting it” at last. People gossiping on a radio program were talking about Angela Aki, and I knew who that was. A member of a comedy duo makes an unfavorable comparison of the other member to Nezumi Otoko, a character from a well-known manga. And I knew who that character was because I had read the bloody manga. And that person -did- look like that character. “What a horrible and funny thing to say.” I thought. And then I thought, “…and I am having this reaction. The intent of the comedy is getting through to me. I’m enjoying this niche joke just like any Japanese person would, thanks to how hard I’ve been pushing this immersion.” And each and every time it was like a pat on the back. Positive reinforcement that I was making it. I had this not only with cultural references, but with expressions and terms. So many times I learned a word, only to have it jump out at me later that day in a show or radio program. Sometimes within minutes. Just once, it happened only seconds later, as I was studying while listening to radio, and this was with a pretty rare word. Mind. Blown. To say that all this was stimulating would be a massive understatement. I’d never focused so exclusively on something like this before, never felt so engaged, so powerful, as this before. And all the years of hard slogging before with little to show for it only made what was happening now so much more exciting, so much more of a relief.
Yoshida-ryo dormitory
Maybe it’s already obvious to a lot of you that by this point I was already quite firmly insane.
This needs a bit of clarification now. In what manner was I insane? Actually, it would have been pretty clear if you had met me. The walls of my giant 25 square meter bedroom were covered from floor to ceiling in thousands of Chinese characters I’d printed out for visual stimulation. I barely ever left that room in one year, apart from work, shopping for food, or to socialize with Japanese friends (I’d pretty much stopped hanging out with my English-speaking friends). Everywhere I went I had my earphones in, or a book in my face. If I had even ten minutes free, at any time, I’d automatically start doing something in Japanese. There is no way that I would accidentally be standing in a line somewhere, or waiting for a train, and not have something ready for just such an occasion. I’d set it up that way intentionally and now it was simply auto-pilot. This was the cost of success as I saw it. Absolute dedication. Constant vigilance against sliding back into an English based life. And so, when I did talk to people in English there was a good chance that I had nothing really to talk to them about. My whole world was taken up by my language learning, so much so that I didn’t really have anything else left over. We sometimes say of madness that it entails having a tenuous grip on reality. That somebody “isn’t all there”, or is “on another planet”. They see things that others do not. Or do not see what we can. The “reality” in question is understood typically as the day-to-day world of tasks and concerns that we all share, the one that we live in together. You could argue that it is through living in this world we are “sane”. It’s not a quality you have or do not have in an objective sense, yes, or no, but a spectrum, and a sign of integration with others and with yourself as a person. This is what makes us who we are. You cannot point to something isolated from the world and people and say “this is who I truly am”. You only need to look at what happens when you people put in solitary confinement, or on a desert island.
The dangerous thing for me was that I didn’t -feel- isolated. I was growing. I was learning. I was on the way to something. Becoming something. Only, none of what I was doing really involved -me-. And so in a way, I was nobody at all. A giant sponge perhaps. Like eating cereal full of flavored sugar but with no nutrients, I was getting heaps of social stimuli mostly via technology, without the dynamic, living human dimension. Because however much I saw and heard, nobody was seeing me. Perceiving me. Addressing me. Pushing back against me. Turning away from me. Or in turn responding to me. Listening to me. Working together with me. And not only was I missing this social grounding, but I also lacked the peace and quiet of introspection. As I was constantly occupied with the language assaulting my senses I didn’t need to think. To ask myself questions. To wonder about life in general, or mine in particular. As if that wasn’t bad enough, finally, I was mostly without access to the linguistic depth that helps make reflection possible. For the most part, Japanese was the only language I had. Yet I was working with a remedial level of understanding. Yes I was getting most of what I read and heard, and growing better all the time. But my bread and butter immersion was mass culture. Relatively easy to comprehend because it is for the most part quite shallow. It wasn’t that I had given up one language for another language. I had given up one linguistic world with which I was deeply familiar from birth, for one in which I was stuck for the most part near the shallow end.
Yoshida-ryo dormitory
The fallout from all of this was not pretty. A full year of hard-core immersion did wonders for my language skills. I got the scholarship, and was accepted at the university of my choosing. When I first arrived people would keep asking me how the heck I was so good at Japanese. I had jaws literally drop when people heard I’d been in the country for only a couple of weeks. In fact, I believe my accent was probably better than when I had freshly arrived after listening non-stop for a year then it was at any point after that during my years in Japan. Even though my vocabulary expanded massively afterwards, at that particular point for all intents and purposes I believed I was Japanese, I empathized with being Japanese, and it showed.
It didn’t take very long for me to sense that something wasn’t right though. Here I was, having attained my goal. Everything had been building up to this, and I had made it. I had bloody done it. But wait. Now it was actual human beings I had to deal with, not actors reading lines in front of a camera, or radio personalities behind a microphone. And dealing with human beings involved -me- as a person. And who the heck was I again? I realized that I didn’t know. I hadn’t given it much thought in a very long time. At the same time that my projected ideals of the country faded away and were replaced by a more mundane and problematic everydayness, my inner sense of self was revealed to have taken a trip somewhere and was nowhere to be seen. I was hit by the deepest feeling of depression and confusion in my life. It didn’t come all at once, but week by week, relentlessly growing. Most other foreign students didn’t have this problem. They weren’t in “Japan” per se much at all, linguistically or otherwise. They took a few language classes each day, but researched in English, and socialized in English, Chinese and Russian. They seemed happier for it. They felt like outsiders, and were treated like outsiders. Inner and outer perception were pretty much in alignment and they got on with what they had to do. They had goals that didn’t involve knowing that much about Japan, still less “fitting in”. I meanwhile felt though like I should belong, but plainly didn’t. I felt like I should be enjoying where I was, but that actually it was disappointing.
Yoshida-ryo dormitory
I kept studying through it all, pushing on, this time using Japanese to study academic topics. I sat an entrance exam for the school of letters, writing about Hegel and the history of philosophy in Japanese. I passed, and at the beginning of 2012 I attended the opening ceremony. Maybe one of the only people there out of thousands who wasn’t wearing a proper black suit. I somehow managed a smile for the camera, but I don’t know if I had ever felt like life was more pointless than at that moment. The feeling of alienation from myself and my environment was near total. During the cold winter nights I shivered away in my tiny little shared room in a hundred year old wooden dormitory. The scholarship wasn’t as much as I had expected, and I’d spent so much time language studying that I hadn’t worked enough to build up a decent amount of savings to bring with me. There was also no easy work here like back home. People wanted to know why my resume didn’t state which primary school I’d been too. Or why I was so old for a graduate student. I did a bit of translating for a pittance, and ended up being talked down to and abused after making a small mistake. Then, along with my mind, my physical condition kept deteriorating from the cold and heavy study regime. I started to often feel light-headed and severely fatigued. Each day I’d walk along the cluttered hallway of my dormitory, down the end to the dirty unisex squat toilets. Inside the stall with the working door somebody had written a line of Robert Frost’s poem:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I’d look at those words each day, and wonder what the hell I was doing. I’d go out and cycle the beautiful streets of the town I lived in, and feel gravity pulling on me so strongly I barely had the will to resist, so depressed I could hardly even push on the pedals. And on it went for months more. Just clinging on thanks to some friendships, as all these waves of alienation, depression and culture shock threatened to sink me entirely.
All this pain steered me back on course in the end. It was reality hitting me over the head until I finally gave up on caring anymore. That is, I stopped wanting for reality in Japan to confirm to my old ideals, and stopped wanting for myself to live up to my old ideals of a language and culture master. This place was far from perfect. And I would never be good enough to magically make it so. It wasn’t a question of skill. It was a question of acceptance and getting on with things. It was a question of learning how to be a human being again. How to be sane and see what was in front of my face without anxiety. Everything could just be how it was. I was tired. Enough. And that was when I met a nice girl, and, very slowly, things mended themselves. We talked a lot. Had lots of fights. And both graduated safely and got nice exploitative jobs in Tokyo for a while living in a tiny apartment. Now, all our naivety long since gone, we are in the middle of moving our lives back to my home country. I have enough ambition left to learn Chinese for her, but really I’m happy enough either way. Languages are fun things to learn, but terrible prisons. I’d never again want to go back to being unable to take a moment in silence and have a cup of tea. To read something in my own native language. To talk with old friends and people I grew up with.
Will a program of near total immersion “work”? Already this question misses the point. It’s not about if it “works” or not. This is not a question of method. It more foundational. What is the meaning of what you are trying to do? How does this goal relate to you, a living human being? This is not a technical question and does not have a technical answer. Khatzumoto used to write that we can do or be anything, but we can’t do or be everything. If you want to be really, really good at something you need to make some hard choices about your priorities. Some things need to be cut off so that there is room for your number one priority. This is very true. And yes, I also believe immersion can be extremely effective and a great way to have fun and acquire a foreign language. But cutting yourself off nearly entirely from social reality and from your own language for extensive lengths of time is a dangerous thing to do. You might come out of it with your sanity regained at the other end and with more skills and experiences as a result. But you may also have needlessly caused yourself a lot of grief and pain in the process. You may live to get what you wanted, and to wonder why it was that this was the thing you wanted to get.
(Editor’s note: More pictures of Danchan’s dormitory can be found here)
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17 Comments…
A soundtrack for this post: https://youtu.be/4lpM4mXJlxc
Damn, that’s a sad song. Here’s a soundcloud link for peeps who can’t view the video in their country: https://soundcloud.com/dceased/pearl-kyoudai-youkoso-hitori
So the quintessence is: Immerse yourself in the language, but don’t overdo it.
I think that’s what I’m doing. I listen a lot, I read a lot, I do my SRS, I watch a lot of movies, but I also live my German life. I read articles in German, watch videos in German, talk and hang around with my friends/family. So I balance my immersion in a “foreign language” (It isn’t that foreign anymore) and my life I’ve lived for 18 years now. I also think it’s more important to get heavenly immersed in the beginning, but it isn’t that important anymore later on. As soon as your language skills are developped and trained, they will last for a certain time. And over the years they will get more and more fixed in your brain. Hence, in the first year of your journey a lack of one week immersion could result in a immense weakening of your skills, but after being exposed to the language for 5 years +, I don’t think that one week will do any harm. Well, that’s just a cheap theory, but I think you’ll get the point ^^
Hence I think that after some years a language can be maintained just by listening to it maybe 1-2 hours a day and speaking 1-2 hours a day. Because at the end you just have to maintain the language. You improve much slower than in the beginning and often it’s jsut acquiring more vocabulary or trendy words.
I was raised up bilingually. My dominant language needn’t any maintenance, because I was always immersed. My second language was much weaker and my vocabulary wasn’t that big. I wanted to change that and immersed myself more in my second language. I just split up the time for both languages and my skills improved quite a lot. After some years my second language was almost on the same level like my first language. I reduced the amount of immersion for the second language again and my skills didn’t decrease at all. So I think it’s impoertant to be heavenly immersend in the first years, later on often 1-2 are enough to maintain the level and some years later maybe even half an hour is enough.
It could somehow like this:
new language > heavy immersion until you get very good or even native-like > you reduce immersion gradually to a level it doesn’t hurt your skills > you reduce it even more until to the most possible deep point (Zero immersion isn’t possible, since you need to be in touch with the language”.
new language becomes l2
Now you make the same thing again with another new language. Since your L2 is quite fixed in your head, it doesn’t need so much immersion and the new gained time can be used for the next language and so on.
That’s just an idea ^^ But that’s my plan. However, I’d be already very glad if I could speak 3 languages on a very high (native) level.
Wow, what a deep post! What do we take away from this, I wonder? Not to go too deep into the immersion environment? I’ve been learning Mandarin for a few years now and I definitely saw the strong results that an AJATT environment can bring, especially in the beginning months. However, I never felt like I immersed quite enough to get the full benefits, to reach complete fluency. Maybe that was for the best? I know I keep improving, but sometimes I think I should’ve “gotten there” already.
Now I’m learning Spanish, too, but it’s going much slower because I’m married and work at a job that doesn’t let me play any outside music. I know it’s probably healthier to have relationships in English/Chinese going on, but it’s frustrating to have a slower progress for Spanish when I’ve seen how quickly I’ve progressed with Mandarin in the past.
How does one know the right balance of keeping a healthy, social self with language learning, I wonder? I guess that’s part of the fun of the journey that we’re on.
I learned Spanish using the methods simmilar to Katz which I leaned from SpanishOnly.com
I started my journey as a father and a husband – not 100% immersion (but it was to a point where people around you , especially my wife would question my dedication) – even saying to me “what will Spanish ever do to you and this familly?!!” – which I remind to her when I am now earning double of my previous salary because of a language premium because of being hired as a Spanish Technical Helpdesk Annalyst.
So yeah I think its possible to learn without “total” immersion. Its all about the “fun” in it but its still sad since NO ONE can relate to what you are doing
Awesome article. I found this article very motivating since I’m learning Spanish. The word balance does come to mind. I’m going to give this suggestions a try…..shouldn’t be too hard since I’m currently in Costa Rica!
Kenny
Danchan, I remember your posts from AJATT+ back in the day. I believe that was back when you had first moved to Japan. Your long and insightful posts were a huge inspiration to me back then. I’m so glad you shared your story.
I went through a much less extreme version of this after discovering AJATT. I never left America and I had a girlfriend (now my wife) who kept me from staying plugged in 100% of the time, but I pretty much dropped my friends and all my hobbies that I couldn’t make Japanese. There was a period while I lived with my wife in an apartment on campus during her senior year of college when she’d be super busy and only home, awake, and not studying for maybe an hour a day and I wasn’t completely alone. I don’t want to say I was depressed, but I was miserable. I started eating a lot, drinking too much, and just generally stopped taking care of myself. As a result, our relationship started to fall apart and we came pretty close to ending it.
Once we moved back home after she graduated, I got back in contact with my old friends, started spending more time with my family, picked up new non-language learning based hobbies that got me out of the house and helped me make new friends, and started reading in English again.
I love that I “got used to” Japanese and I love AJATT and Khatz for teaching me that I was capable of doing something like that. I was a classic underachiever who gave up on everything that didn’t come easy before I read his blog and my whole worldview has been changed by my experience in putting in the work and actually doing something I could be proud of. But there’s definitely a point when it comes to immersion where building your L2 bubble just ends up isolating you.
Great response Jeremy, glad to hear you escaped the immersion trap. Congrats on getting married!
Thanks Jeremy. Yeah those were some mega long posts I used to write on AJATT+. I probably should have just blogged it all somewhere separately so it wasn’t behind a pay wall. I can understand what you mean in being proud of putting in the work and getting real results. It feels good to be abnormally good at something, doesn’t it. 😉 I guess that can be what makes it more risky for people like us, who are maybe a bit keen to prove something to ourselves or others. Glad to know it worked out for you too with your wife. It’s a truism, but in the end it has to be about the journey. That’s something Khatz would say though too isn’t it.
First of all, great fucking post. Second of all, happy to see you got your Japanese up to the level you got it to.
I came across your site because my friend told me he posted a LINE conversation I had with him regarding Khatz on the rememberingthekanji forum. Then I noticed the whole 20 page post was mostly about how people are pissed off at Khatz in some way. Of course there was more to your post then stating that, but the way I summarized it was:
“Khatz’s advertised methods are really extreme! It made me depressed! It might make YOU too!”
Obviously there was more to it, but I thought I would just state my opinion here after reading your whole post. Most the people I noticed complaining about Khatz on that forum “sound” (not confirmed) young. Like, really young. Mostly teenagers, or again, “college” students. Ya know, people who generally don’t know who they are or what they want in life (don’t get butthurt guys, plenty of older adults fit into this category too). But when I read your post I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person were you before you started doing AJATT? For me, I was a college graduate, still a virgin, shitty (still shitty) Youtuber, and had been living in Japan for 6 months being an ALT with no luck on learning Japanese.
Up until meeting Khatz I was a fat (still fat), non-confident, confused young dude with only one goal: To be in Japan.
Once I read Khatz’s website I tried it for a month and I was so impressed I wrote an email to him to thank him for helping me so much. Luckily for me it turned out Khatz not only lived in the same city as me, but only 10 minute drive from my house. The first time meeting him I quized him for an hour. We went to a sushi restaurant and I made him read all the kanji, we went to bookoff and made him read me books on history, science, and electronic manuals. Dude was fluent as fuck and a riot to be around. Every minute you were with him you felt like you were with somebody who not only got the “bigger picture” we all seem to be missing walking around our drone lives, but he spoke with his own self made confidence that he gained….
….by being immersed in his chosen environment. In America, his room was Japanese. In Japan, his room was Chinese. Dude just kept updating his language lexicon and kept copy/pasting his study method from previous to new languages. But, even through all that he still hung out with friends, he still thought of ways to get out there and use his L2/3/4.
Your post was very interesting to read, but to me it felt like some young dude who was complaining about himself as person, versus talking about a study method that made him “insane.” Kind of reminded me about a viewer of mine from New York city that moved to Yamaguchi prefecture then after a year moved back to NYC because he thought “Japan was boring.” When, really, all he needed to do was to come and hang out with me in Tokyo for a week or two.
I really wish all you guys who had done AJATT had a chance to just sit down and interact with Khatz because the issues of “no interaction” could have simply been filled with “lang-8″ and “skype language exchanges” lol. No need to write a long blog post about this hahahaha.
But I do agree and understand where you are coming from somewhat. I’ve been in Japan for almost 10 years now (9 since meeting Khatz). I went from knowing no Japanese, to learning enough to work at a Japanese company, to not remembering enough Japanese to remember how to read 柴田さん。 It’s a growing process and a muscle, if we don’t use our muscles they get weaker. Now after being back in English teaching and quitting at the end of this week for another Japanese immersed job. Despite getting particles wrong in speech, I rarely don’t understand what is being said or shown to me, but still I need to constantly improving my Japanese on a daily basis.
Apologies on this reply being so rant-y. I hope Danさん is happy where he is and I wish him and all the other AJATT people there in the world good luck and hopefully I’ll get to meet some of you in Japan some day.
Stay black,
Sam
Hi Tokyo-sam.
Regarding that original thread on the koohii forums which you mentioned, if you take a scroll back through it you’ll notice a number of posts I made which make some of the same points you just mentioned. About how much of a positive influence Khatz’s ideas had on me. It’s a loong thread by now, so a think a lot of them got buried, but I’ve been pretty consistent with sticking to that point on those forums over the years.
The above is a story of some of my own personal experiences, with AJATT as a focal point. So you are right, in that it is about me and not just a story of a method which alone somehow made me depressed. I also tried to show that it was in many ways a really awesome experience. I still look back on it really fondly. But I know my negative experiences aren’t that unusual. Regarding my age, actually at the time I was already (an immature) 27 years old.
As an aside, the above story didn’t really talk that much about the worst part, but glossed it over. I ended up spending six years in total in Japan, five of those post-AJATT, meaning I started out my time there already capable of understanding linguistically what was going on around me. Thing is though, I found my experiences matched pretty closely with Ken’s from RO7. Ignorance is bliss. You don’t really want to know what’s inside those sausages. Now I find I’ve just seen too much, and I can’t even begin to relate to my younger self who was so curious, enthusiastic, eager and optimistic about Japan. I have some friends over there still, and some fond memories, but a lot of bitterness and resentment too. Some of this was from my own negative experiences of which I could fill pages, but most was from watching how my Chinese partner has been treated, watching the hell she has gone through job hunting here, ending up in a company that exploited her, working her at one point so much that I feared she would die. The constant disrespect and abuse. I can’t begin to describe the contempt I have as a result for Japanese ruling establishment, who don’t give a shit about protecting workers by enforcing the laws of the country, and their corporate culture. At the same time the contempt I have for the ideology of Japanese-ness, the absolute pressure to conform, the general intolerance of difference. The difference between the popular conception of the country as a friendly, polite, neat and cute place, and my experience of it as brutal, ruthless, arrogant and two-faced was just too stark. So thing is, stacked up against the above very strong negative impressions there just isn’t enough in the plus column to make me at least ambivalent. I strongly dislike Japan. And not all the people necessarily, but a lot of them. I have gone, in many ways, “full debito”. Thankfully though I’m good. Great actually. Every day I wake up and I’m not in Japan, so I’m happy. So there’s that to be thankful of. The challenge now is to find out how to move on and to just let it go. It’s hard because my partner is still there even now, still getting abused each day, still getting disrespected. A few more months of that to go. Maybe one day, five or ten years from now, I’ll get over all those negative experiences. That would be nice. But for now I’ll just try and accommodate them, try not to harbor ill will towards random Japanese I happen to meet in my own country, and attempt to also be thankful for the good things I was able to experience and learn.
You stay black too, Sam
Good post. I remember you from the AJATT forums / comment pages etc. I have a couple of questions.
– Now that you’ve gone back home, do you continue to use Japanese language any more, or will you allow it to decay?
– I haven’t gone to Japan yet. Do you think it’s possible for a person to live and work over there and to have a nice life? Or are we all doomed to have a miserable time and be a slave to a company? Because it’s a scary thing when people talk about their difficult working lives in Japan. It’s as if one can only be happy after they become independent/freelance somehow and are more in control of their time.
Hi, thanks. Lemme give some quick answers to that.
– It would be a major shame to let it degrade, but I find it tough to prevent. I do some translating for side money which keeps me reading most days, but I only speak for less than half an hour or so a week on skype with a friend. When your natural macro environment is all English you need to go out of your way to make your micro environment Japanese. And in order to do that you need motivation, which living for years in Japan kind of killed big time. So I guess my active speaking will keep on degrading to a point, but I’ll try and work in enough radio and TV to keep the passive side of things from dying off.
– Sure. If you work hard and hussle like crazy. But you’ll need an education and more than bit of that hungry migrant attitude. A nice life has to be fought for pretty hard. That’s what was hardest for me, because where I’m from a pretty nice life is the default setting for most. We might not see it that way, because we are so used to it of course… If you are from the Ukraine or somewhere though, Japan can be a major step up. So I guess its all relative.
Dan,
Great post. I studied German in college and after a 22 year break from the language, I decided I wanted to become “fluent” and began my task 2 years ago (June, 1 2014). So far, I have managed to listen to at least 3 hours of German per day (1000 hours per year). Having had a strong interest in second language acquisition back in college, I had knowledge in some of the various techniques. I’ve calculated that an exchange student gets 3000-5000 hours of contact in the language per year, so I’ve been curious to see what it would be like to study in one’s own country for 14 hours per day for a year (ie 5000 hours). You’ve certainly answered that question. I am mostly convinced that the 10,000 hour “rule” is a pretty good gauge of time needed to m
“master” something.
I was also compelled to post a comment because I taught English in Japan a few years after college. My japanese was pretty good after just one year, but I realized that the japanese environment for a westerner has its challenges. By this, I mean, no matter how japanese we become, we are always the outsider. It would take paragraghs to clarify further, but I am sure you know exactly what I mean. It is not a slam on the culture but the way it currently is. It is a club, and being born in Japan doesn’t always make you a member.
In any case, I wanted to thank you for your article as it connected with me on so many levels.
Great post! I tried out AJATT when I was about 18 years old and didn’t really know what I was gonna do. I never went as deep into immersion as you did, but for a couple of months it was pretty bad. I mostly did it for the challenge and to get to know a different view of the world, I didn’t have any plans for going to Japan. I didn’t have a strong idea about what Japan should be like either, but I was strongly convinced that it was far from what Swedish people in general thought it was like, and even more distant from what typical anime/manga/dorama/etc. fans thought. In fact, all the anime I’d watched growing up made me all the more convinced there were lots of nasty aspects about Japanese culture – especially how sexism and degradation of women was so widespread in manga. But it was enjoyable for me to really push my learning to the limit, and it did help me develop study techniques. Unfortunately I got too caught up in it, and it became a kind of safety blanket to pull over my head when I started worrying about what I should do with myself and my life. With Japanese, the answer was simple – studying was the correct thing to do, and the feedback was near instant.
Thankfully, over time I let Japanese drift into the background, as I moved and started to study at a university, made new friends, and directed my attention to more social activities and finding a career where I help other people. Even now I read books in Japanese and listen to podcasts sometimes, since I still think it gives me interesting perspectives, but I don’t prioritise it as much as I used to.
I still feel though that AJATT would have been a much better site if it wasn’t all unbridled passion and instead asked the reader at least once – “have you considered, REALLY, what the method asks you to give up?”. The rhetoric used on the site often implies -however coated in irony and self-depreciating humor it may be – that people who say they don’t have the time aren’t determined enough, or haven’t considered every time window available, and so on. Essentially, the articles are downplaying the importance of everyday moments, especially alone time. You’re just sitting at the toilet anyway! Why not listen to a Japanese podcast, you got anything better to do? As your story proves, these moments ARE important, it’s just that we are so “immersed” in an environment where they are an integral part that we usually never reflect on their worth. The way movies, ads, and almost everything else in mass media tries to make life all about spectacular events, trips, concerts, fantastic sex, you know, the usual, doesn’t help either. It’s an issue about impossible ideals (cool people, especially cool ladies, don’t go to the bathroom to take a shit and ponder life) that’s infinitely bigger than AJATT I’d say. Also, I’ve met many people who have sacrificed way too much for languages they have no use of, even though they never read AJATT or anything similar. And of course, Khatzumoto can say whatever he wants, the net is free. Even so, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to offer a more balanced view to save some people a lot of time and pain, and I tried suggesting that to him a couple times through comments as well as e-mail, but he didn’t respond. I saw comments on AJATT with similar suggestions as mine, so I know I wasn’t alone. Actually, I think sometime he raised the issue but simply ridiculed the criticism as non-relevant, using his usual “strawman argument embedded in irony” method. I guess he was too caught up in his ideas and didn’t want to acknowledge what he’s sacrificed himself, or he simply never cared about his readers’ well-being (seems unlikely), or he figured it would be bad for his business model. Or maybe it’s something else. No matter what the reason, I can’t really respect Khatzumoto and I would never recommend his site to anyone. I do understand that you and I probably don’t agree on this point though, Dan-chan. Antimoon has long seemed to me like a much better format for conveying the essential message, but I guess its more mellow tone is also an important reason it hasn’t enjoyed the same attention as AJATT from Japanese learners.
Anyway, again, very well written post! I have to admit that I’ve had some lingering doubts about not devoting more attention to learning Japanese, but reading your article helped me take another step back and now I feel like it really, really isn’t that important. I’m very sorry to hear your girlfriend is being treated so badly, and I hope everything works out for you two. Of what I’ve seen of corporate Japan, it seems just as horrible as you describe it. Hang in there!
Thanks for that comment. I enjoyed reading it. That’s exactly right, what you say about the value of time alone to oneself, time spent doing nothing in particular. Sitting on the toilet. Waiting for a bus. There’s glory in the hard fight, in extreme effort, in achievement. But it’s just one part of life, and it needs to be grounded within a larger context, of our lives, of other peoples lives.
Then again, we are all on smartphones now. In 2016 is it All Internet, All of the Time? ;-()