JLPT: Total Immersion or Else!

In the recent past, I mentioned a blog/website called All Japanese All The Time (AJATT for short) that proposes studying language through a combination of total immersion (even if you don’t live in Japan), and willingness to fail and try again ad infinitum. I found the idea intriguing, but still resisted a bit, until I saw another blog written by someone else who did the same trick to learn Chinese, and regretted not doing it sooner.

I tend to be skeptical of people’s advice until I hear a second person say it, so that was enough for me. I decided to start trying a more total immersion approach to Japanese, so I did a few things:

• Switched my iPhone to display Japanese, not English. Most of the apps work, a few still show English, oh well.
• Switched my computer at home (a Mac mini) to be all Japanese. Same results.
• I deleted my old Japanese-English dictionary from my bookmarks, and use a good online Japanese dictionary.¹
• Per AJATT’s advice, I wiped out my existing Anki deck full of vocab words, and started populating it with sentences I encounter instead. This is a bit more time consuming than I first thought, but is helping.

It took a few days to get used to all this. On the first few days, I struggled to send email, or find the settings, but I started to pickup words I saw frequently. Interestingly, many of these words were vocabulary words for the JLPT N2 and I memorized previously, but forgot most of them. Why? Because I learned Japanese in isolation. As AJATT points out, it’s not enough to learn words, and learn grammar. You also have to learn usage, which is often vague and hard to explain. Words + grammar + usage = correct senteces.

Clearly, memorization and flashcards have limitations if you don’t get enough practical exposure. It really surprised me how poorly I understood the vocabulary I had spent months studying for the JLPT N2, and how hard it was to read simple things.

Coincidentally, I set my computer at work to also use Japanese only, and this led to an interesting situation. Readers will recall I work in the Big Ol’ IT Company (BOITC for short) and I work as a computer engineer in some critical parts of Infrastructure. It keeps me busy, but I like my job. Anyhow, recently I was trying to solve a problem at work, and I looked up some information on Google, but since my computer and browser both default to Japanese, the Google search results were in Japanese. Thus, I had to lookup the answer to my technical problem in Japanese. But it worked! I struggled a bit at first, but I was able to find the answer I was looking for, and keep going.

Separately, I am also currently exploring AJATT’s advice about the “Laddering method” of learning a 3rd language. I want to keep pursuing my Korean studies at the same time as my Japanese. I don’t want to neglect either one, and luckily I found a book in my wife’s shelf on learning Korean, written in Japanese. So, I am trying to use that book to learn Korean (i.e. in Japanese). In a way it helps improve both languages as the same time. 一石二鳥 (isseki nichō), as Japanese say “One stone, two birds.”

Anyhow, the JLPT is officially 3 weeks away, and I do feel more confident about it than I did at the beginning of the year. But I don’t want to take any risks, and I definitely don’t want to retake the test again next year. I wish I had started the total immersion method a lot sooner, but I am glad I started now at least.

P.S. Another 5-post week again. Hold on to your hats!

¹ If you’re looking for a good online Korean dictionary, by the way, I highly recommend this one.