Road to Fluency

I just celebrated my 27th birthday. A lot of people I work with (who are older than I am) say "O you got plenty of time, you're still young." But when is young not young anymore? Is there a cutoff? A deadline?

"The Road to Fluency is Dark and Full of Verb Conjugations." For the last 2 years or so, I've been trying to learn Japanese from scratch (OK not scratch, I knew Chinese and English, which was a start). Learning a new language is tough, and I can see why it takes years of practice, years of training, and no breaks. Your brain doesn't just simply memorize words, it has to use them. That was my first mistake of learning japanese: I tried to rote-memorize all the words I needed to know in Japanese. NOT SO FAST, my language-learning friend! It doesn't quite work out like that. Language is, like almost anything else, best learned through practical usage. Saying a complete sentence in a foreign language, going through the motions of learning, requires a lot more than memorizing what each word in English means in Japanese. If you only did that, you would have no idea where the words should go in order, where to put the stress on the words, how to connect sentences together, idioms that have no meaning in other languages but are full of culture in their native languages, etc. So many different elements to learning a new language than just "How do you say _____ in (Insert Foreign Language)?"

And you can't just get away with only 1 hour or 2 hours per day, or going on and off once in a while. Learning a language, if one wants to be serious about it, has to be an every-day sort of affair. Always thinking about it, always being immersed in the language, that's the best. It's really an involved affair, and really tough if you're working on other pursuits (like practicing law, for example). It is a full-time job that allows for no moonlighting.

One of the underrated, hidden ways of learning language, I've found, AFTER learning the basics of the language and all the grammatical rules, putting in the work, is to watch a TV show/movie/news in the new language with subtitles IN BOTH YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE. Improved my Japanese in leaps and bounds, plus you will actually want to do it as opposed to dreading language practice and having to take breaks all the time. Your brain is not only visually seeing the words on paper (reading practice) but getting the audio listening practice. But you don't want to watch shows that are high on action (crime drama, for instance) and short (or too basic) on dialogue. You want a comedy or drama that has a lot of speaking and high vocabulary (watch a variety of different shows for diverse sets of words) meant for native speakers so you know you're not just getting flush.

Some great TV shows for Japanese are:
1.) Hanzawa Naoki: The Game of Thrones of Japan, EVERYBODY in Japan in 2013.
2.) Legal High: A legal drama/comedy. Hilarious even for Westerners and has very high-tech vocabulary with idioms, cultural references, and rarely-used words. And the characters talk really fast, but it's not for the faint of heart but absolutely helpful for people wishing to be fluent in Japanese due to
3.) Sailor Zombie - inspired by the hit manga Sailor Moon (almost everything in Japan is inspired by Mangas)


The most difficult thing about learning language for me: the different verb forms and verb conjugations. I come from 2 languages whose verb forms are not that hard, with the verbs not needing to be altered dramatically or in 13 different ways (although English requires "had," "have," and different rules too, just not as many), but it seems like all the other languages in the world have a million ways to conjugate verbs based with potential, causative, past tense, future tense, past perfect (for French), etc., etc., etc. FEAR THE VERB CONJUGATIONS!

Ultimately, language is about hearing and trying over and over and over again. I've gotten depressed and resigned and excited (due to feeling like I'm improving) and everywhere in between, but no one gets worse at language, and hopefully it's like riding a bike: One day I wake up and I just get it, everythign comes to me naturally, and I never forget it again. Be ready to put in some work on the road to fluency, though.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan