I’ll give a more in depth breakdown soon but for now, I’d probably take a similar approach that I took to learning to read Japanese : learn basic sentence structure, learn top 150ish vocabulary words, avoid books written in non-romaji. Practice hearing spoken word by listening to speeches and following their transcriptions. My exception protocol for unrecognized words was to look them up. And for irregular sentence structure, to guess based on context. It worked for watching movies and reading, mostly but as you can tell, yoi kakikomu koto ga dekimasen*. I’d have to do some thinking on the writing part, it would most likely involve sticking to simple sentences.
*thats terrible Japanese for “I cannot write well”. I think. I hope.
Well of course they do. Because these things are necessary to learning a language. This is the 20% that’s most efficient. By definition someone who puts in 100% of the effort will be doing what I did.
The efficiency of this approach revolves around what you don’t do. You’re excising the 80%. I didn’t spend long hours learning katakana, hiragana and kanji. I didn’t learn the more complex tenses and conjugations. I didn’t spend time on vocabulary words that are highly situational. Contrast this to a typical Japanese textbook.
There seem to be two major approaches to learning language.
One is to go a language school / course where the teachers, in my experience, teach it like an academic discipline + the usual guess-my-password bullshit, so you get tested and graded on things like grammar, like a test where you need to fill in conjugations / declinations into holes in a text. (Obviously I am talking about languages that have those kinds of things, like Germanic or Romance ones). Case in point: part of my B2 level German exam at the University of Vienna was exactly that kind of hole-filling and it felt really wrong as it has not much to do with commuication, it is a more academic approach.
The other approach is to do something like this for a while, but when you get to that basic point where you can say “Jack would have ordered a beer yesterday if he had money on him” ditch it and pretty much learn from immersion. Screw grammar, just read a lot of books, figure out words from the context, and conduct imaginary or real conversations no matter how bad the grammar is. Real people prefer to communicate with people who talk fast, not correct. Talking with someone saying at a normal speed who is talking like “me no want buy house, me want rent house now” is far better than someone who is like “I no… (long pause) do not? want … (long pause) want to? buy a house, rather… (long pause)… instead? I want to rent it… (long pause) rent one”. I used to be that second guy in 2 languages and it sucked.
(Now of course you may think “but everybody knows immersion is better it is not even new” yeah apparently that everybody does not include the huge European language school chains like Berlitz and their who knows how many students… )
I’ll give a more in depth breakdown soon but for now, I’d probably take a similar approach that I took to learning to read Japanese : learn basic sentence structure, learn top 150ish vocabulary words, avoid books written in non-romaji. Practice hearing spoken word by listening to speeches and following their transcriptions. My exception protocol for unrecognized words was to look them up. And for irregular sentence structure, to guess based on context. It worked for watching movies and reading, mostly but as you can tell, yoi kakikomu koto ga dekimasen*. I’d have to do some thinking on the writing part, it would most likely involve sticking to simple sentences.
*thats terrible Japanese for “I cannot write well”. I think. I hope.
But these are the things pretty much everybody does while learning languages.
Well of course they do. Because these things are necessary to learning a language. This is the 20% that’s most efficient. By definition someone who puts in 100% of the effort will be doing what I did.
The efficiency of this approach revolves around what you don’t do. You’re excising the 80%. I didn’t spend long hours learning katakana, hiragana and kanji. I didn’t learn the more complex tenses and conjugations. I didn’t spend time on vocabulary words that are highly situational. Contrast this to a typical Japanese textbook.
There seem to be two major approaches to learning language.
One is to go a language school / course where the teachers, in my experience, teach it like an academic discipline + the usual guess-my-password bullshit, so you get tested and graded on things like grammar, like a test where you need to fill in conjugations / declinations into holes in a text. (Obviously I am talking about languages that have those kinds of things, like Germanic or Romance ones). Case in point: part of my B2 level German exam at the University of Vienna was exactly that kind of hole-filling and it felt really wrong as it has not much to do with commuication, it is a more academic approach.
The other approach is to do something like this for a while, but when you get to that basic point where you can say “Jack would have ordered a beer yesterday if he had money on him” ditch it and pretty much learn from immersion. Screw grammar, just read a lot of books, figure out words from the context, and conduct imaginary or real conversations no matter how bad the grammar is. Real people prefer to communicate with people who talk fast, not correct. Talking with someone saying at a normal speed who is talking like “me no want buy house, me want rent house now” is far better than someone who is like “I no… (long pause) do not? want … (long pause) want to? buy a house, rather… (long pause)… instead? I want to rent it… (long pause) rent one”. I used to be that second guy in 2 languages and it sucked.
(Now of course you may think “but everybody knows immersion is better it is not even new” yeah apparently that everybody does not include the huge European language school chains like Berlitz and their who knows how many students… )