Things I learned: (1) think about what kind of job you will do in Japan and (2) start making a lot of Japanese friends. When I was visiting Japan as a tourist, I talked to a lot of foreigners living there. Some of them had pretty bad jobs, low salary and therefore lack of free time and freedom of movement, and also no friends. They dreamt of Japan, but not THAT Japan, where you spend 12 hours in the workplace, 3 hours in commute and then you have no one to speak to. It's so sad. People spend YEARS grinding those squiggles, learning words that sound totally alien to find that there is a lot more to living abroad than knowing the language.
This is a really good point. I think Japan would be a wonderful place to study abroad as a student, but living and working here is much more complicated, and it requires a lot of consideration...
I'm studying Japanese with little intention to live in Japan or even go there. However, if someone from the US for example wants to move to Japan, I think exploiting the US economy, saving up one or two million USD, then investing and living off dividends and long-term capital gains is probably your best bet.
Exactly. The main job will be English teaching or IT (but that latter should change big time due to more Japanese candidates and AI) so you gotta really ask yourself if this is what I want
Feels like an actual, very real experience rather than a “I got fluent in Japanese form zero after living in Japan for a year” kind of video. thanks for sharing :)
I was frustrated with my progress in Japanese so i moved to Japan. I lived in Tochigi for 6 months as an 英会話 ESL teacher until I realized that the Japanese language disappeared from every environment I walked into. Your commentary is so much realer than the input hypothesis or other abstract ways that don’t hold up to experience. I am fluent in Spanish and did not have a similar experience because the culture was more permeable.
Thanks for sharing. What do you mean by Spanish being more permeable exactly? If you don't mind, I'm interesting to hear more about the differences you experienced learning Japanese compared with Spanish.
The Spanish speakers I encountered were very patient with limited proficiency speakers, and it was somehow okay to be less than perfect. I have close friends who are Japanese and yet I feel ashamed to struggle with the language in their presence. I also taught kindergarten to mostly Spanish-speaking children and even though they had their own baby vocabulary it was comprehensible input. Also, many American-born Latinos speak poor Spanish, so my ignorance didn't make me an outsider. Also, mixing the languages in Spanglish was a thing, and people often laughed at each other's mistakes and double entendres. Every day working as a bilingual teacher I learned new phrases from people. In my seventh year, I realized I went for a week without hearing anything I couldn't understand. It was almost a feeling of disappointment. You mean I've finished learning Spanish? The structure of Japanese makes it almost impossible to intermingle with the structure of English. Even katakana English words sound alien to me. Somehow, I feel needy if I ask a Japanese for language help. I always asked my Mexican friends for help just knowing it was okay. Also, my Mexican friends would carry on in Spanish even if I had a blank look. My Japanese friends don't want me to feel embarrassed, so they immediately switch to English to spare my feelings. This is what I meant by "permeable." French is an impermeable language also. Some language speakers are delighted to help create new practitioners. Some, often for very different reasons, are impermeable. Some are too proud of their language, and some are to humble about their language. I feel that English is fairly permeable. Am I projecting my own experiences? Of course. But I think it's a valid criterion, one of many, that measures the availability of comprehensible input.
@@johngodbey2365 Ah okay, I've had a lot of the same experiences in Japan that you mentioned. That's interesting how different it is in Spanish speaking cultures. Thanks for the detailed response!
Hey I'm also someone who lives in Japan, my last job I worked at japanese company that kind of treated me like crap. Most people just flat out ignored my existence, however my one cool japanese teammate and I would shoot the shit constantly in Japanese. I would go from speaking Japanese pretty well, to immediately clamming up when the 社長 walks over. I switched jobs to a 外資系 company, and even though the vast majority of employees do not speak even 2 words of Japanese, I randomly find myself speaking MORE Japanese and way more comfortably than my previous job. Since I'm one of the few employees who speaks Japanese, most of the Japanese speakers come to me to shoot the shit. Point is, it's kind of wild how much a good work environment plays into my confidence and self-perception of my japanese.
That sounds pretty rough... lucky you found somewhere better. Where I worked, the people were okay (most of them at least), it was just the work itself that I didn't like.
Environment and mood are indeed huge. I’m almost into my 5th year of study and find that I have a sort of mental battery or bandwidth which, when stretched to its limit, results in my skill deserting me.
Is that Shinjuku-gyoen? Edit: Yup, 100%. Saw the famous building in the back around the 5:13 mark. :) I've been binging your videos recently and really like your advice. I hope to follow the same path - trying to up my reading by a lot, now that I've passed the N2. Hope to catch you around and buy you a well-deserved beer when I move to Tokyo from Fukuoka sometime next year, though you might have become a big time RU-vidr by then. All well-deserved. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, I really appreciate it. Congrats on passing N2. I don't know if I'll still be in Tokyo next year yet, but yeah hit me up just in case when you move.
If you do decide that you want to make more effort to force output, it might be worth hiring a tutor just for conversation. Or maybe see if you could find someone who is willing to do language exchange, tho that might be more complicated. I can relate to your experience, I spent a year in Tokyo when I was younger, and my listening fluency was very high, but I never got comfortable with output (probably due to anxiety). Now planning to move back to Japan, and trying to get my output practice before I go this time to help with the nerves! Best of luck with whatever you do next.
Thanks, that's a good idea, but I have much more fun talking with friends in a casual setting. Although there are many people who could benefit from a tutor, but it's not for me personally.
Not sure if you do this or have thought about this, but a great solution to the lack of speaking opportunities, which at the same time increases the fluency that one is able to achieve overall, is to think in the target language. At least I know it worked wonders for me when solidifying my English fluency.
I think that would be great for some people, but for me that would make speaking feel like a chore... I really enjoy speaking casually with people in a social setting for fun, so I think turning it into a lesson or a transaction would sap the fun out of it for me personally.
@@theimmersionguy I'm not sure I follow what you mean. What I meant is that output doesn't necessarily have to be speaking, you can also switch to thinking in Japanese and you'll be outputting all day long. Then conversation will just be like thinking out loud in Japanese.
@@camtugueder Ah sorry, I read your comment right before I read a different comment about hiring a tutor, and I accidentally replied to the wrong comment haha Yeah I think thinking in the language is a good idea! I was starting to do that a bit naturally when I was working in the Japanese job actually.
@@theimmersionguy Thai has the most CI contents (in addition to Spanish)! Any other language would be hard to do this. Looking forward to seeing your Thai update!
@@SimplyChinese True! I'm lucky that it just happened to be the language I wanted to learn too. By the way, I really like that you're contributing to making more comprehensible input material. Do you plan to make any more videos in the future?
Could I ask, what is necessary to have in one’s Japanese toolbox to properly begin immersion. I know some basic sentence structures, a little kanji, maybe 100 words? I can pretty comfortably listen to any of those JLPT N5 videos and never find myself challenged. However if I try watching Japanese news programs, TV shows, or attempt to read anything other than the most basic of children’s books I find myself at a steep learning curve and I struggle to the point that I am not enjoying myself any longer. If I am not having a good time well I just lose motivation. Maybe I am just lazy or not passionate enough? Well in any case thanks for the videos thus far.
I would say doing Remembering the Kanji and then just learning new words as you come across them in immersion should be fine. Starting with native material from the start works eventually, but it can be slow and painful, so I think it's better to use easier content that's comprehensible as a beginner. As long it's only in the target language and doesn't use translations or unnecessary explanations.
Pretty good. Proof that immersion works. The problem with many foreigners is that they are attempting to apply the logic system of their N1 to Japanese （例：お風呂を取るｗ）
Why don’t you just become an ALT? You can chat to 中学生 and the other teachers in Japanese all day (apart from the 1 or 2 English lessons you have to do a day)
I considered it, but you don't get control over where you get sent off to, so you could easily get stuck in some backwater in the middle of nowhere. Not to mention the salary is pretty low. Then again, beggars can't be choosers, I guess...
@@theimmersionguy Salary is bad and you can’t get sent to where you like but it’s enough to live fairly comfortably and if you don’t care where you live but you want to practice Japanese a lot then it’s a good option. Getting sent to the countryside is great for Japanese immersion tbh
@@Retog Yeah, that's true, but I do care where I live, and I have other things I'm trying to do right now besides just Japanese. But that's definitely a great option for some who want more opportunity to use Japanese.
If you really want to improve your speaking ability either take conversation lessons on iTalki or use AI. Sad but true that you are not in Japan to massively improve your speaking ability you are in Japan to experience daily life and maybe some tourism.
It's hard to even begin to attempt to put a number to it considering it's been part of my daily life for so many years and so much of my immersion has been "passive," but I'd probably have at least 5,000 hours immersion in which I'm actively concentrating, and possibly upwards of 10,000 hours if you include background listening. But those numbers could be way off too.
Before I started immersion 6 years ago, I'd already spent the last year or more before that memorising words with Anki and doing reading practice (I mentioned this in my 5 year update video). During my first few days after deciding to learn Japanese, I also read through a short grammar guide. I also spent a lot of study time to remember the kanji. After I started immersion, the only read "study" I did was look up words sometimes. If you total the amount of studying I've done, it doesn't even come close to the amount of immersion I've done, and almost all the study I did was looking up words and kanji study.
@@theimmersionguy I see thank you. So did you track your immersion during that time? How many approximate hours were you immersing every day to get to the level you’re currently at. ( if not, an approximate?)
@@chaseleckFor a little over 6 months during 2020 was my most intense period, and I probably averaged around 5 hours a day of listening in which I was actively paying attention. That was the only time I tried tracking. Up until then, and after then, I was probably getting 2-3 hours per day, except for a brief few months at the start of 2022 when I was immersing during work (probably averaging 4-5 hours a day). I've been taking a mostly relaxed approach since 2021, and especially since about 2 years I've just really immersed for fun -- watching movies and listening to interesting podcasts -- so that makes it a bit hard to track because I didn't really consider it "immersion" necessarily (for example, if I asked you how much English immersion you've done over the past few years, it would probably be hard to answer, right?) The fact that so much of my listening was "passive" also makes it hard to count, because a lot of those "passive" hours were active incidentally. When I was working in Japanese retail 4 days a week from August 2023 to March 2024, on the days I worked, I would be exposed to Japanese pretty much 8 hours a day too, even if I was not actively paying attention the whole time. I should also mention that most of my active immersion came from wearing headphones while walking, doing chores etc. rather than sitting down and watching something (though I used to try and do that at least 2 hours a day during my intense period.) I've rambled a bit too much, but I'd say one could easily achieve a good fluency with 4-5 listening hours a day over 2 years or so, probably a lot quicker if one were to extensively use comprehensible input materials at the start and focus on daily conversation rather than more formal/difficult language and books etc. Though that's just a rough estimate, and I could be off the mark.
@@theimmersionguy there's literally no reason to learn japanese unless you're planning to work for a japanese company. most dweebs learn japanese either to watch anime or talk to japanese women. okay humor me, why are you learning japanese? reasons?
@@wiohrwqihr1329 I'd always wanted to learn a foreign language and I liked the sound of Japanese and thought the writing system looked cool. Also there was a student exchange programme at my university with a Japanese university which made it easy to go there. Those were the main reasons when I started I guess.
@@theimmersionguy that's cool brother, I'm just playfully ribbing you. Respect for learning a hard language, it takes fortitude. Now you get to enjoy all the cool Japanese movies without sub titles and browse "Japan internet", that is great. Japanese RU-vidrs are cool too
