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Learning Japanese through input

There are two key milestones on the path to acquiring a second language:

  • Comprehension: you are able to consume interesting content (text, audio, video, etc.) in the language with a reasonable degree of understanding and fluidity.
  • Speaking: you have sufficient listening skills and vocabulary to attempt non-trivial spoken communication.

The speaking miletone comes second because speaking rests upon a foundation of listening comprehension.

How long it takes to reach these milestones depends upon the distance between your own language and the target language. For a Spanish speaker learning Italian or vice versa, this might be as short as a few months. For an English speaker learning Japanese or vice versa, this usually takes multiple years.

NOTE: For the special case of living in country with daily immersion, you can reach basic functional spoken Japanese in several months, but there will be large holes in your skills, especially with the written language. In any case, this pathway is not really relevant to the discussion because it’s an unrealistic life circumstance for the vast majority of learners.

Once you reach these two milestones, the path forward is clear: consume tons of content and do lots of speaking practice. The hard question, though, is how to reach these milestones in the first place, especially for languages like Japanese that take a long time to acquire.

How to reach the critical milestones

I have two key prescriptions about consuming audio, video, and text content:

  1. Consume content from a mix of levels. Ideally, you could just consume material that is strictly ‘at your level’ sprinkled with a non-obtrusive handful of new words, kanji, and grammatical patterns. Unfortunately, this is impracticable, so instead you should deliberately embrace mixing in both content that is comfortably within your level and content that is significantly above your level.
  2. Consume content both extensively and intensively. “Extensive” here means that you focus on the content rather than the language, while “intensive” means that you focus on the language rather than the content. For content to be consumed extensively, you must understand enough of it to stay engaged with the content. Consuming content intensively, on the other hand, is generally appropriate for content above your level: you either scan the content for bits and pieces that you can understand while ignoring the rest, or you use dictionaries, grammar analysis, and AI translation to try understanding every word, phrase, clause, and sentence.

Levels of input content

For different levels of content, you should have different expectations of how much you understand: for some content that’s well within your level, maybe you can understand 100%, but for content above your level, maybe you can only understand 70%, 40%, or even just 10%. Getting a mix of content across the spectrum has great value as long as you get the right mix:

  • Concentrating on content you can’t understand is mentally taxing and frustrating, so you generally should only do so for 10-15 minutes a day. On the upside, this practice gives you broad exposure to new language and the sounds of native-level speaking, even if most of it passes you by.
  • Content that you understand easily helps reinforce what you already know and develops the fluidity with which you can process it.
  • Most of your input practice time, though, should focus on content in which you can understand most of the full sentences (though with concentrated effort and perhaps without understanding all the nuance). This is the core practice that expands your ability to understand complete sentences.

Sources of content

Podcasts and Youtube videos

When listening to podcasts or watching videos, it’s a different form of practice if you read along with Japanese subtitles or a transcript. Both forms of practice are valuable, so I do my pure listening to podcasts at the gym, but at home I mostly watch Youtube videos and read along with the subtitles.

Note

Keep in mind that fluent reading relies upon engaging the listening comprehension pathways in your brain. This implies:

  1. Your reading fluency cannot exceed your listening comprehension.
  2. When listening to something you struggle to understand, reading along with a transcript is an unnatural act.

So it’s critical to practice pure listening without text because the mental overhead of reading will distract your focus from the spoken language. Without listening-only practice, your listening comprehension development may be hindered or even stalled.

Some notable sources:

TV and movies

In theory, TV shows and movies are a very appealing way to learn a language, but in practice, most TV and movies are inhospitable for beginner and intermediate learners due to several factors:

  • Use of expansive vocabulary
  • Use of advanced grammar
  • Use of slang and colloquial speech
  • Accents and speech quirks
  • Archaic and formal speech
  • Shouting, whispering, murmuring, mumbling
  • Crosstalk
  • Loud music and sound effects over dialogue

Watching with subtitles isn’t really a solution:

  • Japanese subtitles are often not available
  • An N3 or below learner wouldn’t know enough words or kanji for the subtitles to help much
  • Concentrating on Japanese audio while reading English subtitles is very difficult, even if you’ve already mastered both languages. Furthermore, to the extent that parts of a Japanese and English sentence correspond, they tend to do so in reverse order, so for longer sentences, the part of the English translation currently displayed on screen will often not match what is currently being said in the Japanese audio. On top of this, translators often take large liberties, such that the English subtitltes do not accurately convey the original meaning or the way in which the original meaning was expressed.

Sadly then, learners at or below the N3 level generally can’t get much language value from just watching TV and movies.

Reading content

The most obvious, readily available source of Japanese reading material is the light novel collection syosetu, but the large majority of the material there is too difficult for learners at N3-level or below.

The NHK Easy Web news, in contrast, is tractable even for N4 level learners (though getting through each short article will likely take an N4-learner some time and effort).

Some of the podcasts targeting N5-N3 learners provide transcripts, which also makes for good starter reading material. For example, Japanese with Noriko (free transcripts for seasons 1 and 2 only).

Otherwise, the best source these days for reading material is to make your own with AI, either by:

  • translating English content into simplified Japanese
  • or translating Japanese content into simplified Japanese and English

Another trick is to have AI produce abridged translations or short summaries of things you read in English. Whereas reading a complete Japanese translation would be daunting and time consuming, a short, simple summary is much more approchable.

Using AI to produce simplified Japanese helps a great deal because it allows you to select content based on your personal interests rather than difficulty level, and if necessary, you can read the original English or English translation to get the full context, but then you can cover the same ground with the simplified Japanese. In particular, it becomes much easier to understand and stay engaged with a Japanese text when you have the context loaded in your brain having just read the English equivalent: your memory of the content will often fill in the gaps of understanding without having to stop and look up words or translate sentences.

Note

When you ask an AI to simplify Japanese, it’s most effective to specify either N3 or N4 level, and you should also specify that longer sentences should be broken up into shorter sentences. Because not all material can be expressed using just N3 or N4 vocabulary, the simplified Japanese will often still contain a number of other words, but generally many fewer than the original native-level text.

Note

AI translation quality now reliably produces grammatically valid English and Japanese, though it may not always preserve stylistic nuances or capture subtext. For the purposes of an N3 or below learner, this shouldn’t matter: the learner just needs grammatically correct, simple, short Japanese sentences.

Note

Given the difficulty of the Japanese writing system, even simplified translations may be a slog to read and so require a real time investment. I find, though, that after strugggling through a text the first time, re-reading it shortly thereafter is particlarly effective and goes much faster, and this is when unfamiliar words spelt with kanji start to click.

Tutors

Language tutors, of course, provide critical speaking practice, but having someone speak directly to you also provides the most effective form of input. Because a tutor can pick up signals of your incomprehension, they can respond and adjust by:

  • repeating what they said
  • slowing down
  • rephrasing
  • elaborating
  • explaining
  • answer questioning

…all of which naturally triggers repetition and reinforces the ideas being communicated in a quick, responsive loop. The sum effect is that a real, speaking person can keep you engaged with the meaning behind the words better than any recording or piece of text.

AI

AI translation

AI translation is obviously useful to help you understand any incomprehensible text or figure out how to express something. Less obviously, AI translation can be used to produce reading content aimed at your level: instead of trying to find Japanese material that’s suitably easy, you can ask AI to translate English material into easy Japanese. The result won’t always be the most natural or elegant Japanese, but it will virtually always be grammatically valid and thus sufficiently useful for a learner at or below JLPT N2 or N3.

AI grammar analysis

AI is also remarkably good at explaining the grammar in specific sentences. Purists might complain that the information it provides is unreliable, but I find the recent AIs’ hit rates actually much higher than the vast majority of sources about grammar. Best of all, you can ask them clarifying follow-up questions, such as, ‘How would the meaning change if you modified this phrase or removed this word?’

AI translation exercises

Another simple way to practice with AI is to prompt it to play a translation game: the bot gives you Enlgish sentences to translate into Japanese (or vice versa) and then critiques your answers.

Note

Frustratingly, the smarter chatbots can be disappointingly uncreative, so you may need to specially coax them to keep the sentences interesting. One technique is to separately generate a list of topics and model sentences, then direct the bot to construct new sentences based on topics and model sentences randomly selected from the lists.

Summary of advice

  • Limit vocabulary drills to words you have recently encountered in listening and reading, and limit lifetime drills of any individual word to 10-20 repetitions.
  • If you repeat a piece of content, do so no more than a handful of times, even if you don’t fully “master” it by the last repetition.
  • For a long time, you wont understand most of what you encounter, and that which you do understand will often require conscious effort. “Natural”, automatic understanding comes only with massive consumption of the language, and still only then slowly and in pieces.
  • As long as the language itself distracts you from focusing on the content of what you read and hear, your input consumption will be intensive rather than extensive. This is not a matter of learning style or choice: the beginner simply cannot understand what they read or hear without looking up many words and consciously pondering how the words fit together, a slow process which consumes much mental energy and greatly limits how much language content can be encountered per day.
  • Comfort with a particular topic and style of content doesn’t necessarily translate to comfort with other topics or styles. This can make it seem like your comprehension level has suddenly regressed when you’ve actually just stumbled out of your zone.
  • Accept that it will typically require many exposures before a word or kanji is fully memorized. Instead of consciously trying to force memorization, you should lean heavily on tools that make it quick and easy to look up words and kanji. Depend upon reminders, not memorization.
  • A single aspect of a language cannot be truly mastered in isolation, and attempting to do so is generally inefficient. Don’t try to master one aspect or ‘level’ of the language before moving on.