Enjoy Life, I Suppose

Once you fluently comprehend input, in case you somehow don’t realize it sooner, you’ll find out that you are actually pretty OK at outputting — calling you semi-fluent would almost be an understatement. However, if you want to get a lot better, you are going to need practice. Things you can do that don’t involve moving to Japan and getting tons of Japanese “friends” who are only interested in practicing their English on you are:

• talking to yourself, a lot. not joking;
• starting a podcast. even if it’s shitty — who cares? do it for yourself, don’t even publish it;
• streaming. pretty much the same as podcasting but also a great exercise in multitasking.

I don’t really recommend doing redtube unless you for some reason want to get good at writing — I imagine making video essays might be good for that. Otherwise, making videos is mostly writing scripts and editing. Maybe just stream and edit clips/highlights into videos?

To sum up, the fastest you can become fluent in Japanese (to about a 中の下 native Japanese level*) is about 18-24 months:

• 1-3 months for basics;
• 1-3 months for studying at least a little bit of kanji (therefore, getting at least some vocab) and grammar;
• 3-6 months for reading, vocab and grammar mining;
• 3-6 months for active listening (+ vocab and grammar mining);
• 3-6 months for general hardcore-ish immersion (+ some vocab mining).

*Dealing with Japanese is effortless and you understand pretty much 100% of the normal everyday use of the language. However, you still absolutely hate dealing with large concentrations of kanji (yes, this is absolutely a trait of an average Japanese person), and may even feel completely illiterate at times. However, being illiterate may not bother you at all if you are a narcissistic psychopath like Ken Cannon, MattVsPortland (or even my beloved George Trombley, who will at least be honest about it though, and will call himself out first on his shortcomings, not so different from what I’m always trying to do as an educator). If you don’t live in Japan and ALL you want to do with your life is watch anime — you don’t really need much reading skill. Just watch anime without subtitles for about a year and you’ll be 90-95% fluent. You will have a pretty shitty vocabulary but you will be understanding enough to afford ignoring pretty much everything that you don’t understand and still comprehend sentences. In fact, you will probably even develop an unconscious skill of literally not even noticing the things you don’t know (your brain will be taking them for noise and disregarding without telling you). Just use yomichan every time you need to read something online. And read manga with furigana. And of course you will absolutely be capable of daily conversation with Japanese people. You will feel fluent, and feeling good is all a narcissist needs. If you move to Japan like that though, you will be totally screwed, hence most MattVSPortland type of gurus don’t live in Japan and don’t even have much desire to go there: their kind of Japan exists only on the other side of a PC monitor. Depending on what you plan on doing with your life (therefore, depending on what you need Japanese for) and what level of appreciation you personally want to experience for the Japanese culture and her people, you can either view literacy as a part of fluency (which you are free to argue about, but it is in Japan) or as but an optional skill. I cannot tell you what to think and what your virtues are: I am not your guru.

At least one of those 3-6 months periods is guaranteed to be 6, as well as at least one of the 1-3 periods to be 3. If 18-24 months sounds way too crazy, you should know that the data indicates pretty much exactly that. You are of course free to believe in “traditional” academic study if you like the idea of studying one language your entire life. If you want actual madness, you can listen to some of the “mainstream” celebrity polyglots, preferably on the background, while you are doing something at least moderately productive. They will tell you beautiful stories about how you only need a couple of months at best, but probably even weeks, to become fluent in any language. Their definition of fluency is pretty much just the state in which you have memorized a lot of phrases in the target language and you can kinda mimic how they are supposed to sound with English phonetics while looking like a complete clown. So it’s no wonder when a real polyglot gives their two cents on any language-related topic — no one’s listening. I guess it serves the academic lingo industry well to have the polyglot community represented by borderline insane people. There may even be some sort of conspiracy at play, I dunno.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions (only $420.69 a question).

Good hunting!

Thank you for checking out my insane ramblings.