As a native Japanese speaker, I feel the same way with the English language. After 5+ years of learning, I know I'm nowhere near at a fluent level. It's a constant struggle.
Thanks for the comment! I just want to dispel the myth that I (or any other polyglot/expert language learner) am an infallible learning machine or a "language genius". Far from that! I struggle like everyone else, but maybe the difference is that I stick to it even when it gets difficult and discouraging. You have to BELIEVE if you want to WIN.
@@LucaLampariello I agree...I'm learning French at the moment and every day I laugh at my pronunciation....When I first started I thought the Reverso app was crap when I first used it...But it was my mouth muscles who were betraying me...
@@kimerswell7643 Yeah, don't give up. I've hit plenty of plateaus throughout my language journey. It took a few years to take the edge off my accent, for example. It's still not perfect, but I'm getting there
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago I have an analogy to language learning. It's like trying to find the sleeves of your jacket in the dark. Suddenly something "clicks " the light comes on and you find the sleeves ! But of course that happens many times , and lots if times you go out with your jacket on inside out, but why worry about it ?
The most horrible part of learning Japanese is when you reach a point in which you can extract a sentence from a, say, magazine, and know all its words, all its grammatical patterns and still don't know what the sentence means. And I discovered it's because in Japanese it's not enough to just memorize words with Anki, you have to study them in context to understand what really mean, because the definitions you find in dictionaries make you think how you would apply the words in your language, but it's not how Japanese people apply them in their language. If a particular word is a set of meanings, the size of that set is very different from your language to the size that it has in Japanese. In Japanese, it tends to be bigger, because Japanese is a very imprecise language, and the context is what selects the meaning the word has in a particular situation, so you have to memorize the word and the meaning derived from the situation, not a single/particular meaning from a dictionary.
Yes...correct. Any course promising you'll be conversational in Japanese in rapid time, is making false claims. It takes a while for the brain to get used to the odd syntax. There is no magical way to learn that. Just a lot of exposure and some time. No gimmicks. It is doable to succeed though. Tons of dedication required.
Very true, esp. the first part. I hated the frustrating feeling of literally knowing every single word in a sentence and still don't get the sentence itself, lol.
THIS. The thing I struggled with the most with Japanese was reading, but not because of kanji. I could literally know every word in a sentence and still not know what they were talking about. Only way to get past it was to buckle up en force myself to read at least ten pages of Japanese everyday for about four months and it’s all good now :)
Thank you for sharing, Luca. I think that people who say that children learn language effortlessly have never really watched a child acquire his/her native language. I met my daughter and her 2-1/2 year-old son at the farmers’ market. He asked what the berries he saw were. I said, “blackberries”. He said, “backberry”. I said, “bLLLackberries”. He said, “bLackberries, bLackberries, bLackberries...Mama, that’s blackberries”. His mom said “yes, those are blackberries.” He repeated, “those are blackberries”. Every person we passed for the next five minutes heard about the blackberries. How many of us put that much effort into learning a word in our target language?
It feels effortless looking back because you don't remember being 2 or 3 when you're 25. Most of us don't remember being much younger than 5 or 6 (other than tiny snippets from before that) and by then you're pretty much fluent.
I started learning mandarin Chinese some seven years ago. Or maybe I should rather say: I attended mandarin classes for one evening a week for half a year... I remember feeling completely overwhelmed, I couldn't read the characters, there was no speaking practice and the textbook was boring, so I stopped (I also started a PhD in astrophysics which took up a lot of my time - haha). Fast forward to two years ago: I was working at an international company and two Chinese colleagues came by and I tried to have a casual chat with them, asking e.g. if this was their first time in Europe, what the weather in Beijing was like etc. And I realised two things: a) that I did in fact remember some small bits, and b) that I was sick of thinking "maybe I could learn mandarin at some point in the future... when I have enough time and the language somehow becomes really easy to learn", and so I decided to just go for it - and I planned a trip to China! Now, two years later, I am halfway through teaching myself the HSK4 course, I read 10 graded reader books this year, I have regular language exchanges and italki classes, and I've fallen in love with the country, language and culture :)
I can tell you're telling the truth, because HSK 4 DOES take you around two years. That's the time it took me as well and that's a lot of hours put into it. I don't know why some people claim they're fluent in less time yet can't pass HSK 6.
@Alfredo Müller Etxeberria I write sentences using new words and read them aloud. I try to use new words in as many sentences I can think of. I'm not sure if that's SRS, but that's how I learned. Daily conversations were easy.
@Alfredo Müller Etxeberria Yes, another thing I used to do was write short stories using both, my new language and native language. Since I had to think of the story, it made remembering new vocabulary easier. It did take longer to write a story, but it was worth it and fun since the stories usually didn't make sense due to my limited vocabulary in the beginning
ive studied korean for a little while now, but now that i recently started Japanese, the realize sentence structure isnt too complicated. infarct, i didnt even have a hard time with Korean sentence structure. Maybe because i had good teachers or something.
Some thoughts... 1. Learning Japanese takes a lot of time - so much time that you´re gonna feel like you´re doing it wrong no matter what you do. According to the FSI an English speaker could learn, say, French, Spanish and German in the same amount of time they´d need to learn only Japanese. I´ve been casually studying Japanese (as one does...) and, ironically enough, I felt like I was doing it wrong and that I should´ve used Luca´s method xD 2. A "silent period" where you only focus on getting comprehensible input might make more sense in Japanese than in other languages. It takes a while until your brain "accepts" stuff like "beautiful is heard because Tokyo to go want is" and you can´t rely on cognates or "international" words from English, French, Greek and so on. I´ve been noticing how Japanese learners seem to talk about input way more than, say, Spanish learners. 3. Due to point 1 and 2 it´s even more important to find a study method that´s enjoyable.
Yes, I found this to be true for Japanese as a native Italian speaker. It has taken so much more time, effort and patience to learn Japanese than any European language. Even Mandarin was relatively easy to acquire compared to Japanese. Every language is a complex system that you have to break down and absorb with time and systematic effort. The journey is always well worth the effort.
When estimating those amounts of time, they have to factor in the writing system. The spoken language shouldn't take longer than those other languages. In fact, Japanese is one of the simplest and easiest languages to learn if you only care about speaking and listening. There are few sounds and all are spoken clearly and understandably by native speakers. There are almost no irregularities and exceptions to rules. There are very few tenses. There's no subject/verb or subject/noun agreement to worry about.
@1. learning to read japanese (a key skill) is very time consuming, but extremely rewarding once you overcome a certain threshold of words/kanji. After that it is hands down the best way to acquire vocabulary. @2 To me the silent period is key. I'm self-studying japanese for a year now, and haven't really started speaking yet. (I'm reading aloud quite a bit though, and focus on correct pitch accent while doing it). After a year of lots of input, japanese sentence structure has become very familiar and I usually do not translate what I am hearing, I rather "just try to understand" it and look up words/expressions I do not know (recently started using mainly monolingual dictionaries). As a side note, I doubt that the bidirectional translation method is very effective when learning japanese. While you can surely learn to translate simple sentences to japanese, you'll very often find, that the result might be gramatically correct, but no japanese person would ever write/say it the way you did. Translation really becomes "how do you express concept A in japanese". So, I focus on acquiring vocabulary and then learning how to express a certain concept using that vocabulary. I'm working my way through the Harry Potter books which have (I've been told by japanese people) been translated very well into japanese, and it's really fascinating to see how the original english was translated. There is absolutely no way to do this yourself competently, unless your japanese is excellent. Also, I try to use as little english as possible when studying japanese (never used rōmaji either) and I'm phasing out english more and more. This approach has been working very well, and I am having a great time watching japanese movies/series/anime on netflix with and whithout japanese subtitles and can already understand quite a bit. it's going to be a long journey to fluency, but the first year has been a blast.
@@wardm4 Don't make ignorant statements like that if you haven't reached a high level of spoken Japanese yourself. Pronunciation is not all that makes up a spoken language. Japanese grammar, vocabulary, and cultural concepts, are so wildly different from all those other languages that yes, it does in fact take way longer to learn than any of them, even if you ignore writing.
Honestly, knowing that a superskilled polyglot like you has failed at learning a language gives me such a confidence boost. It means nobody has it easy and we all have to work hard and find the right path to success. Thank you for this video Luca.
I've tried to learn Japanese several times in my life from the age of 14 and failed. Now I'm 30 and actually have lived in Japan and the language is finally starting to stick. The first few months were so hard, but now I can have basic conversations and my confidence is growing. Being able to read is amazing!
@@1mashpop I got a working holiday visa which means you can work and travel for 6 months to a year depending on your country. Got a job at the end of it but Covid delayed my visa renewal and then the company closed because it was in tourism :( so now I'm in the UK
@@RuRaynor seems pretty achivable, after looking through the absolute nightmare that is the US immigration system everything seems to easy. How much cash they ask for?
I feel the same way, when I hear other Polyglots speaking Spanish their Spanish is at best a B1, but they claim to be “fluent”. That makes me suspicious of them immediately. This guy on the other hand, his Spanish is definitely at least a C1 with such perfect pronunciation, and now with this video I respect him even more.
Casi fallé en aprender inglés, hasta que empecé a leer todos los días noticias de deportes en inglés, luego de vez en cuando artículos en inglés y así pude alcanzar un nivel alto, aunque todavía tengo mucho por aprender. Aún así, ahora puedo ver películas, series, sin subtítulos. Aprendí de esa experiencia y de ver videos de políglotas como tú, que en lo que había acertado era en estar "expuesto" a al lenguaje deseado todos los días aunque sea brevemente. Ahora estoy aprendiendo Italiano y creo ir bien.
Russian and Spanish...I did learn basics in both language, so I was able to ask "where is the railway station" Haha! Now learning French and it goes better and more structured way to learn it.
I feel like this with my German , I grew up with speaking it in middle school and just stopped speaking it in high school and now I’m so rusty that it’s discouraging
I think when learning a foreign language its proximity to your native language or at least to languages that you already know is undeniably one of the most important things. I am Korean. And Japanese syntax is almost 95% identical to Korean I should say.. So it took me just a few months to learn Japanese grammar and didn't need to look back on it ever since. (It's just so surprising how the two languages are so similar when linguists still haven't found out exact relationships between Japanese and Korean languages) All of the Kanji words in Japanese is almost identical to Korean words as well. All I needed to do was learning Japanese pronunciation for every kanji words. My main focus on language learning has been Spanish and Mandarin Chinese for the last few years and Japanese has never even been my focus language. I would put all of my time and effort into learning Mandarin and Spanish and when I get bored and needed some break I would look into some Japanese books to refresh my brain. And funny thing is that I would always end up absorbing much more Japanese in those 20 minutes than I would do with Chinese or Spanish in hours! Haha. And for that reason Japanese actually would make me feel bad about my language learning lol Also flying to Japan from Korea is pretty cheap. About $200 for a round trip. So I've always visited Japan at least once every year. And recently I started learning Russian... and wow it's just whole another level!! Case system is driving me nuts.😂 But at the end of the day such huge difference is what makes language learning fun and interesting I guess. We would already have gotten bored if all the languages were similar.
I've learned Japanese as a kid because I'm half Japanese. I watched a K-drama a while ago and I was really surprised. I thought that these languages were completely different, but it sounded as if Korean people were speaking Japanese while chewing a gum. Now I want to learn Korean to know how similar these languages are. 😆
As a Spanish speaker, I have the same relationship with Portuguese. When I get bored, I watch some content in Portuguese and I can learn many words and expressions very quickly. Almost the same thing with Italian too. However, when I tried to learn German, case systems and word order killed me. I could barely remember how to form simple sentences. English only helped me with my German because of similar vocabulary. Now I'm learning Dutch and it's almost the same thing, except there aren't grammatical cases. I remember that it took me months to get a high level in Portuguese. Portuguese people can say the same thing about learning Spanish.
I had the same experience with Japanese: - I started with Assimil - I got stuck with complicated and unfamiliar structures - I never went to Japan to get a motivation boost The other reason is that I told everyone too soon that I was learning Japanese, and practically everybody was hailing me as some kind of genius and patting me on the back. That's just terrible and it basically drained most of my motivation since I already received a lot of validation for simply trying. Now I mostly try to do my work in silence, unless I have no choice, and in that case I only tell those who need to know, and only tell them the minimum possible. But I'm not giving up on Japanese, and at least I managed to keep some of my knowledge by watching anime with sub, and occasionally trying to read Japanese sentences when I encounter them.
I learned most of my Japanese from a RU-vid channel called Learn Japanese From Zero! George (the creator of the channel) already had published 5 textbooks and he already made a video series until the first 3 books, so you can learn from those without spending any money. His videos are always entertaining, and he can explain stuff really well. I wish you luck on your journey with Japanese!
Stop doing my Japanese exercise to watch this. Edit: First 2 months of Japanese I learned so much. These past 3 months I have been stuck. Not giving up, but damn lol.
I've been studying it for about 4 years now. The first 2 years were on a language school (waste of time), then the other 2 years as a self taught learner (where I learned a lot more) and I'm only at around a N3 level in the JLPT format. I also feel stuck, but it's maybe just a mental barrier, we are definitely doing progress but its unnoticeable. Won't give up either. Good luck.
@@ba8898 Yeah, don't give up. I've hit plenty of plateaus throughout my language journey. It took a few years to take the edge off my accent, for example. It's still not perfect, but I'm getting there
I fought with japanese as my first 2nd language for many years and learned a lot about what not to do, and how to learn languages in general. I would say I 'failed' many many times until I found a method/process that worked and succeeded. Some of my thoughts and learnings thru the journey 1. You can learn the characters using any traditional learning methods. Any resources will do. Just review/flash cards etc over and over, and actually this will be the easiest part of the journey, although it seems the hardest in the beginning 2. Most of the lang learning resources were not very helpful for me. genki, assimil, jlpt etc I would throw in the trash. Most are focused around 'tests' and school related topics (international student etc). 3. The #1 resource/style I found was a shadowing let's speak japanese (beginner and intermediate versions). Use the bilingual text to understand and listen to the cd 100's and 1000's, 100000's of times over and over and over. Very interesting conversations and dialogues by the way. Eventually you will be able to just blast out the sentences without thinking about it and mix and match at will. What this taught me is your ear is key. If you have understandable input and let it go into your ear over and over so you effectively memorize it like a commercial jingle that you sometimes can't get out of your head. You will be come fluent at those words/sentences (without having to translate back to your native). Now just repeat that process over and over with similar resources. (interesting audio with bilingual text) 4. As you said, friends and traveling to the country is a big help too! Now I'm fighting with Mandarin chinese using the same method :)
Main Takeaway : If Luca (one of the best polyglots in the world) can fail, I feel relieved if I'm still struggling with German! 😂 I've failed in learning German. I mean, I've a basic knowledge of it but every time I start trying to improve I'm stuck.
@@tuinglessinmiedo4732 Te invito a que te pases por mi canal. A ver si yo te motivo aprender alemán y otros idiomas. Me encantan los idiomas, y los animales. Ya di un vistazo a tu canal. Me llamo José, y soy portugués.
I recommend DW.com and German GrammarPod. The former has resources for all levels, and the lady who does the latter gears what she says towards all levels.
I understand you, I have this same feeling with German. I've been studying German in the University for 4 years, but I still feel stuck. Maybe I just don't feel so close to German culture. I'm more latin languages fan
Hi Luca, I’m a European who learned Korean and I now work as an interpreter in the language. I have to say I agree with you 100% on the need for simpler sentences at the beginning. The sentence structure in Japanese and Korean is just too different from most European languages. I started with super simple short sentences until my brain got used to it. I believe it was thanks to this that I had no problems getting used to the unfamiliar sentence structures. After that, I got to the stage where I could easily make very complicated sentences through extensive reading practice. I believe anyone can learn these languages. But like you say, I also had to tweak my language learning methods a bit.
Jalen Nelson Yes, but not in the “noun+verb+object” kind of way. I started from very short sentences showing the same grammar point and learned grammar from that. Kind of like “getting used” to the sentence than “studying” it. But personally I love grammar, every new grammar pattern is like a new tool in my toolbox
JapanischErfahren - einfach online Japanisch lernen Actually I learn grammar but from input. Grammar books are just a side tool. It must be very easy sentences though. Only with languages that are very different, such as Korean, I browsed through grammar first to get a general feel of the grammar but you still really learn it from input... So with very different languages I do 1) browse through grammar books to get an overall idea 2) continue with simple input and learn grammar from there But this is just a method that works well for me. I’m sure other people have their favorite way to go about learning grammar
When you say reading practice do you mean just reading books at whatever level you are at? I started using natively and am reading Japanese kids books lol
Japanese: I am the hardest language in the world. Even the great polyglot Luca Lampariello failed to learn me. Greenlandic: Hold my 318 different verb forms...
@4 Fs Chinese is easy as hell tbh. At least compared to Japanese. I half-assed Chinese and am more or less fluent. Wouldn't have made it as far in Japanese with the same laziness.
@4 Fs Phew, tough question, becauswe it differs so much from person to person, learning method, and so on. Tbh, it took me way longer than it should have, for several reasons. First of all, Iwas an 'on and off' learner for years, which is very dumb. After starting again, I would have to spend at least 1 month just to come back to the old level, and that adds up to a lot of wasted time. Second, I learned the theory very well due to studying it at university, but I totally missed the right time to 'jump into' the sea that is language. I should have stopped reading about the most uncommon or ancient Japanese grammar structures, and should have just watched more stupid drama shows or whatever, it would literally have done ten times more for my Japanese at that point. tl;dr: Depends very much, but it's safe to say that it will take you at least 2-3 times the effort and time than learning a 'normal' (English, Spanish, French, Italien, German, ...) language does. And: Yup, I get exposure daily. My gf is Japanese, but even without that, I read Japanese news every day, Japanese books here and there, watch Japanese TV if I can stand it (don't really like much of that), and so on. That part is really fun enough.
Good luck with your language exchange. I really hope you keep up with your Japanese and get right back into it Luca. You're a true inspiration as a language learner and polyglot. I really like this video. I have been watching and following you on RU-vid for a number of years now and really respect your accomplishments and attitude. Of course you will do very well with Japanese if you keep at it. I have been learning Japanese for years and actually took it at university. Ciao.
I need one badly mine stopped trying a while ago and I lost interest to do it solo. We used to contact eachother each morning with an exercise about today’s date. Then it became less & less and barely any at all. Unless I asked a question translating something say a song or what was being said in a video etc. Makes me sad. I really want to fill out my notebook completely and just be able to at the very least carry a simple conversation. Even with my native language (Greek) I don’t feel such confidence to speak anymore on very rare occasion on the phone with my parents thats kind of it. Very sad 😔.
I had the exact same feeling with Turkish, which has a more or less similar structure when comparing to Japanese. Having to think and create sentences backwards really makes your brain burn, even for simple ones.
Olá Fabricio! Δαρια μου είπε ότι έχεις πάρει μαθήματα μαζί της και μιλάς Ελληνικά καλά . Πόσες γλώσσες μιλάς και ποιες γλώσσες μάθεις τώρα; Και.. θα βρεθείς στο συνέδριο τον Μάιο 2020 (Polyglot Gathering)?
@@LucaLampariello oops. I thought that was directed at me. I didn't see the name was the same, I just thought it was me because of the Greek. Welp, I'm an idiot. P.s. your name is beautiful 💗
It's such a shame that English-speakers are so reluctant to learn other languages - I am one of four students at my school doing a foreign kanguage in my year/grade of around 100 people minimum. Even the closely-related German provides amusing insights into how things work, and forces me to question how English works, and I can't understand why one *wouldn't* want to learn something else, but I guess even I once thought that other languages were just 'the same, but with the words in different places'. As it is, I'm also learning Danish a little on Duolingo, mostly as a time-killer, and also because of family reasons, and if the word isn't German-looking, it's usually English-looking, and occasionally Scottish-slang-looking.
Japanese is a damn nightmare, but... I guess I love a good challenge! 😂 It's been two years on and off and I've realized improvement comes in bursts... It's like your brain needs time to settle. Also, with structures really similar, you use the same "neural paths" and create few new connections through grammatical rules, with Japanese you have to create the whole network and it takes time. It's almost like learning physics or math for the first time.
1)I think my big mistake is that learning some wrong materials which my friends recommended . Because they are not interesting to me then my motivation decrised very quickly. I decided to analyse many materials and methods then I choosed interesting and effective ones. After learning these materials and methods you really feel its great benefits.
During my learning process my method and materials change gradually. 1. I really like to reading.I find a book interesting and easy. This is the first thing I do for my target language. I always read the books which have good translation in my mother tongue. I read first translation in mother tongue some pages and then I read in my target language. 2. During reading a book I realise some grammar rules and I make notes and read some about it in grammar book. 3.I find the audios this book. listening the best thing After reading this is really cool. Listening while reading also very effective. 4 I collect words which is important and repeated or some words I think useful for me in future using. Repeating words is very important. At the beginning I try to listen and read a lot to collect words for my speaking. If you are not big reader you can watch videos, listen podcast other things. And always try to find material have audios and text.
Yeah, Chinese & Japanese are 10,000 times more difficult than Italian or Spanish: nobody in the polyglot game wants to frankly admit that learning language from a different FAMILY (repeat: language family) is vastly more work than anything within the Indo-European family.
Hi Luca. I find this really interesting. I have a similar experience with Arabic. I haven't yet reached a level to not forget when I come back to that language. I started learning Arabic over 20 years ago but ... This year I've been learning Mandarin and have reached a more proficient level in that language and I feel that I can't forget most of what I've learned. It's interesting how you refer to the portfolio of languages as the arsenal.
I'm working on Swahili, in a way, my second foreign language. I'm finding it tough, a little. The mindset is completely different from English. To say someone "leaves from" or someone "is from" somewhere, is, in the infinitive, and conjugated, one word. To say something "is/exists" uses a completely different word from something "is located"; and "happy" is a verb in Swahili, sometimes. "Nawakula" means "I eat them," but it must be an animal, not vegetable or milk.
Every language has it own concepts. That's just a fact. In Japanese the word 'is' distinguishes between animate and inanimate, ie. a person / animal is... or an object is... Some languages have verbs that change all the time, others have a strange word order, as Luca pointed out, etc. I guess that makes languages interesting and unique. You learn to think In a totally different way. Pictorial characters as in Chinese make a huge difference....
This video is very inspirational for me because I’m learning Japanese and have been for 4 years but I am still at the base level. I always thought it was because I’m not studying hard enough. But now that I think about it, I don’t really understand my material and I never took into consideration entente structure to the point of understanding long sentences. I will now think about how I can change my studying method to take these into consideration. Thank you.
Hi Luca, I lived for 30 years in Japan and I struggled 24/7 all the time. Don't think you failed, it's the language and even the culture, the way Japanese people think too difficult, different from us.
Excelente video Luka como siempre te sigo desde hace mucho tiempo y por ahí leí un comentario el unico poliglota en el que confío y es cierto saludos desde Costa Rica!
Ciao Luca. Mi trovo in Giappone ora e sto cercando di imparare il giappponese. Grazie per il tuo video perché sto provando questo 'sentimento' riguardo al giapponese, ancora non riesco a trovare un modo per impararlo bene. È una sfida!
Impararlo sul posto potrebbe essere una buona esperienza, anche se ci siano delle difficoltà. All'inizio questa lingua potrebbe romperti le scatole però, pazienza e un po' di discliplina ti porteranno degli ottimi risultati!!! Ci sono delle app che possono aiutarti, puoi cercarle. Un dizionario, sia fisico sia eletronico è indispensabile. In boca al lupo con i tuoi studi!!
日本語はシャッフルしても意味が変わらなかったりもするし、 ニュアンスが変わったりもしますね… > 私は行きたいです、東京に。なぜならそれは大きな都市だからです。 > I want to go to Tokyo because that's a big city. This Japanese sentence is also completely correct...
Alan Ferreira Costa From my point of view, he is a bit ignorant. Saying” you are cute, this t-shirt or jack looks good on you doesn’t necessary mean that specific person is gay. It was just a compliment. Some men told me I was handsome. I took it as a compliment. I didn’t think straight away he might be gay. If a gay man or a lesbian woman 👩 tells me “ you are adorable” it is fine to me. I will never think 💭 “ he or she is trying to hit on me”. His comment was a bit funny in a negative way. Yeah, Luca is smart. Attractive, for some people, not for me.
@@Theyoutuberpolyglot Exactly!! Just a compliment. I was being ironic. But this could be a comment from a gay guy, though and so what? What's the matter!? The dude is being so judgemental over a random comment. It seems like he's always tracking signs of "gayness" in people.
Never ever use a translation method of language acquisition for Japanese. Major aspects of the language do not translate well into European languages (honorific forms, sentence-ending particles, etc.). It is a language isolate, so many approaches that work for closely related languages will not work for it. I suggest consuming a lot of Japanese media and really increasing your input to build a strong "intuition" about the language. Also, try learning Japanese grammar with an open mind, i.e. without comparing it to other grammars that you know.
The last part is very true. You can translate everything into a different language though, just not word for word. (for example, you can 'translate' a sentence-finite particle yo with simply a "!")
I started to learn Russian in January 2019. It was tough to learn a different language: different alphabet, new sounds The written system isn't as easy as I thought.
When I started learn japanese I used a textbook called "genki". It's a great textbook for absolute begginers. I agree with everything you said, the right method and the motivation are very important! ありがとうございました!!!
I've never "failed" at a language. I've just given it up for lack of proper motivation. An example of this is Romanian, which would be very easy for me as I already speak Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, but I gave it up afer a few weeks, because I was just not interested. I also spoke very good German, which I learned at an early age, but as I had not used the language in many years, I got to a point where I forgot most everything that I knew. I had to relearn German for work purposes, as I was coming into contact with many German speaking people. An interesting phenomenon occurred, in that I would come across a word, recognize the word, know that I used the word previously-- but I had no idea what the word meant!
Hey Luca! I am a co-founder of the Mass Immersion Approach and was a fan of some of your techniques in my own learning, but applied it mostly to helping me understand input. I feel that you on the other hand, like to pursue output from a much earlier stage in the learning process. It would be really interesting for either Matt or I and you to have a discussion about our approaches to and feelings about language learning!
@@LucaLampariello Great! I think the best way to reach out is to reach us would be to email me at lucasmiapproach@gmail.com, and we can set something up.
Sono quasi 4 anni che sto imparando il giapponese ma ho lo stesso problema tuo, soprattutto nel parlato. Sarà che non ho mai occasione di parlarlo sul serio ma è veramente frustrante... Però vedere che anche persone come te possono avere difficoltà mi fa capire che non devo ambire alla perfezione nell'apprendimento di una lingua. Grazie per l'onestà! Forza e coraggio!!
I failed to learn much Japanese after living there for over 2 years. I could only speak very very basic forms. Now, almost 20 years later (away from japan) I feel I’m making progress rapidly. I’m concentrating on learning to read.
I've studied a lot of languages, but when I started learning Japanese, the syntax differences hit me like a ton of bricks. However, I've found that with a lot of practice and exposure, it becomes intuitive.
Even Luca's admission of lower level Japanese is impressive; see 5:24 when he arranges the sentence, it's such a profound understanding of languages in general as well as a fluency of grammatical terms. I like this language you're using of "creating a Japanese reality", I'm hoping to create a Swedish reality in Sydney at the start of the summer season 2020 (October). I sort of "failed" at Swedish in that in 3 years, I've really only been actively learning for about 12-14 months of that time. This failure is simple: I had no idea how to motivate myself or how to set goals and go after them. I was just doing it because I was interested, and after a few months I stopped being interested, so every few months I would get a boost of discipline, but it's not enough. These days I structure a lot more of my life around making things compelling for myself and not needing 'discipline', so everything, not just language learning, it working much better. Thanks for another great video Luca!
"Simple does not mean simplistic." Such a beautiful truth! Thank you very much for sharing your insights in this video. I had similar struggles when I started learning Korean, too~
I think Assimil Japanese is good, so long as you completely ignore the ‘natural translation’. If you instead only focus on the word by word translation, then everything you read in the book (bar the grammar notes), will be in the Japanese sentence order.
私は、自分で方法を考えて、英語を学びました。日本語は、教える方法がいくつもあって、選び方を間違えると難しく感じます。次のチャンスに、頑張ってください。 I taught myself English using a method I invented myself. As a matter fact there are many different ways to teach/learn Japanese and if you pick up the wrong one you feel the language is difficult. But it is not. I hope You give it an another chance.
That's what happened to me with German. I also spent 10 years learning that language, and I've never really felt comfortable using it. I thought it was because of my inability and lack of experience learning languages, but over time I've come to think that it is just not my cup of tea. German, in spite of its complexity, precision, elegance and history, does not appeal to me. And that realization came too late. The number one rule to learn a language is to love it, and I did not love it at all. Whenever a new word appeared, I'd feel chagrined and annoyed instead of curious and delighted. Thankfully, I've gone through some introspection and I've chosen the languages I feel genuinely interested in (Italian and Greek). Thank you for sharing your story and letting us know that sometimes failure happens. Buona giornata, Luca!
Ok! Luchino tvb, ma! imparare 13 lingue europee è un conto... non dico che sia semplice e che ti stimi di meno. Ma non è un caso che tu abbia avuto dell'hard time con giapponese e cinese e che poi tu li abbia "accantonati". Sono insegnante di cinese e ti posso assicurare che se non ci si dedica con assiduità e dedizione per ANNI...non vai da nessunissima parte, e appena lo lasci va a finire nel dimenticatoio. Consiglio caldamente a chi non abbia intenzione di profondere massiccio e duraturo impegno di mollare: 1) il cinese 2) il giapponese...buttatevi su qualcos'altro
Hi Luca, like yourself, Assimil is one of my favourite self-teaching courses. BUT, the Japanese Assimil is by far one of the worst I’ve ever tried and I now have dozens of these books. One of the most annoying aspects of this book is the overly long lessons, particularly volume 2, which as you’ve mentioned is packed with very long and complicated sentences. I understand that at some point we’d need to deal with complex and longer sentences, but boy, is the learning curve steep and not helped by the poor course structure with grammatical notes incoherently scattered throughout the book and worst of all, most often crammed into the revision lessons. This is compounded by the author’s inability to explain grammar concisely. It takes her a couple of pages to explain one or two key points and frequently digresses. I agree with you that her rather academic approach is ill-suited to Assimil’s format. I mean, the claim that you can go through these lessons in 20-30 minutes is absurd, especially volume 2 or the second wave, when you have to do TWO very long lessons. I often end up spending well over an hour and a half. The audio is also underwhelming. They need to recruit actors with livelier voices to enthuse learners. By the way, Thanks for this refreshingly honest and paradoxically, encouraging and inspiring video.
Hola Luca, Muchas gracias por tus vídeos. Me gustaría preguntarte acerca del método Assimil. Estoy intentando iniciarme en el Ruso casi exclusivamente con éste método (a veces un poco de Duolingo como "calentamiento" y algún vídeo de RU-vid), especialmente por falta de tiempo. Me decidí a dedicarle media hora cada día, first in the morning, teóricamente el tiempo necesario para completar una lección, pero a medida que avanzo necesito, por regla general, al menos tres sesiones de estudio para completar una lección y sentir que la he "estrujado" más o menos. ¿Cómo ha sido tu experiencia con Assimil?, ¿Aconsejarías hacer, por ejemplo, una primera pasada rápida, dedicándole esa media hora a cada lección, y luego volver y rehacerlo con más detenimiento?, ¿Aplicas tu método de traducción bidireccional desde el principio, antes de leer la traducción propuesta por el libro? Muchas gracias por adelantado
Hi Luca, I enjoyed a lot your today's video. I think I have kind of the same problem concerning German, because of the grammar. I still don't get it properly. Sometimes I just think the grammar in German is upside down (I am a Spanish native speaker, so go figure) and I will just not gonna make it. Any advice? Thanks and greetings from Colombia. And Felices pascuas🎄
German people also struggle with German grammar 😂 honestly Germans don't expect foreigners do have perfect grammar, especially with all the genders etc. Just get out there and speak, read and listen to German as much as you can :)
Luca, so I'm 100% italiano. I have been using duolingo as a base. Then I got on TANDEM and got a few numbers of native speakers in Italy and exchanged numbers , and we speak almost everyday using WHATSAPP. What else would you suggest. Big fan bro!!! BTW, you ENGLISH is sooo good, you sound like a Native USA speaker of English!! It's actually quite remarkable. BRAVO LUCA! P.S. I've also turn my television in Italiano as my 1st option. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Ciao fratello.
Yeah, don't give up. I've hit plenty of plateaus throughout my language journey. It took a few years to take the edge off my accent, for example. It's still not perfect, but I'm getting there
Awww! You have been putting in your best Luca... don't talk about it as a failure... maybe you have not made significant progress... but failure definitely not. Thanks for inspiring people. I'm a polyglot myself... I speak English Hindi Marathi Gujarati French... dabbling in Spanish Italian Russian and Japanese... and a few Indian regional languages like Bengali Konkani... even trying Nepali. On duo I did esperanto too. I have a good grasp of grammar... I lack spoken and listening practice... wish to meet you some day ... maybe in a conference or otherwise. God bless you Luca!
Learning to speak a foreign language, which does not have the same sentence structure as your mother tongue, you have to have a very strong motivation and a lot of time. From SVO language to SOV language switching is very difficult and sometimes impossible. I think to be able to succeed you need to be immersed only in SOV for at least some time.
I think that it helps if you know the structure from the beginning. (Arabic is mostly VSO, though it can be SVO, and there are grammatical differences in each word order. Russian word order is more flexible, bc function is expressed through declension and endings. Thus, word order can be changed to modify the emphasis.)
I wonder how this applies to my native language Finnish that has a standard sentence structure but it is not a rule. It would be grammatically correct to structure the sentence how ever you please and the freedom is used in something like poems a lot.
Dear Luca, first of all, let me say that I found all your videos bloody interesting and inspiring. Having said that, I would like to share my personal experience with Hungarian. I bought the Assimil book "Le hongrois sans peine" a year ago but I regret to say that this method has not been of much help until now. Despite I do try to learn the language every day, I still have difficulties when it comes to communicating with native speakers. It takes "ages" for me to build a sentence from beginning to end. I do not intend to criticise Assimil though: this method has been extremely helpful to me with other languages such as English and French but with Hungarian I feel that I'm getting nowhere fast. I don't want to quit, that's for sure but I realised that I must be going about it the wrong way. Shame! :( G.
I failed to advance much in Icelandic because of the lack of resources. I found a structured course that was alright, but I need a lot of examples to truly progress in a language. I can't process some grammar rule I only see explained a few times in a textbook with a few textbook dialogues. If I were to go back to Icelandic, I would use subs2srs and clozemaster like in other languages. I found some movies with Icelandic subtitle files on reddit that might work. Right now I'm too busy with other languages to take any steps to go back to Icelandic. I'll probably return if I truly feel interested and I make sure I don't have too many languages that are only at a beginner level. It's hard work trying to get out of the beginner stage.
I recommend Kanji Garden App. It teaches Kanji in groups according to same readings or radicals. You can learn much faster this way as your brain makes connections. I also recommend reading a bilingual Bible. The Bible has a massive amount of grammar and literature forms as well as immense amount of vocabulary. For the price, it is the best bilingual resource. My kids are bilingual in Japanese English. They spoke both languages at the same time around 2-3 years old. Development was similar, so I don’t believe Japanese to be that much more complicated than English, just more different.
I’m from Slavic language family, so any Romanian/Germanic languages always was all Greek to me. When I’ve started learning Japanese one and a half year ago (now on B1) I was so fascinated that Japanese doesn’t care what your native language is (except for Korean/Chinese people). It’s just so wonderful! I mean I was feeling devastated when a European learns French or English in 6 months and I... well, let’s not talk on sad matters. Even Me and English is just some kind of sm relationship. And Japanese in that way is perfect. I’m in love with it and other Asian languages.
I successfully learned Hungarian. At least I think so. Within 2 years I was nearly fluent ( but didn't practice in 10 years ). It's a hard language, but once you get passed the "weird" grammar points ( suffix variations, double tense... ), syntax itself is not that hard. I am now learning Japanese, I still can't say "I want to go to Tokyo because I've heard it's a great city" without double checking everything and having a headache. After nearly 2 years. Ouch. Beyond "exotic" syntax, ressources have been a problem for me too. For Hungarian, it was quite simple : I tried Assimil, pure garbage in my opinion, then I quickly found a textbook that worked for me and I sticked to it because... well, there wasn't much more available. For Japanese... lot more ppl want to learn it, so it's actually a market with quite a lot of money at stake. In my case too many cooks spoiled the broth. My efforts were scattered, and kind of pointless. MIA ( or AJATT ) has been a waste of time so far. And the writing system of course. Let's face it, it's time consuming. The hours I spent on grammar for Hungarian, I had to spend on kanjis for Japanese, and well, I don't have more time to invest on Japanese. Also, learning vocabulary is quite challenging. I've had a hard time remembering the words derived from Chinese. A single syllable means so many things and full words themselves have many homophones. And they're also context dependent, more than any language I know. I am not giving up, but it really feels like a marathon. I knew it from the start, but I didn't know I would have to run in Dubaï in a summer day.
I can have conversations very comfortably in Japanese for hours, but having what you described at the beginning still eludes me. I'm not comfortable in every situation, like the post office or ordering a medium-rare steak. It's still also hard for me to understand native RU-vid videos and movies and TV. I'm wondering how you reached those levels in your other languages? Especially if you can only study 1 hour a day, like in my case. Also, in Japanese and Chinese, I still can't say certain phonics, like 绿色 and 鱼 in Chinese sound off according to my friends. It seems difficult to control my mouth and tongue in a way to sound native, even after practicing phonics for a long time. Will some of us never be able to say phonics correctly?
A very practical video. I like it. But I would not use the term "failure" as it implies complete and irrevocable defeat. If I love the language, I will try again, after a few years if need be. I am learning Japanese since a year. If I were to point out a mishap of mine, it would be that I have not been to Japan. Which means that I know absolutely nothing about Japanese culture. I have a perfect postcard image of Japan. Going there in person would reveal to me if I truly love the culture, with its pros and cons. The wise decision would have been to visit Japan first, then start learning Japanese. That way, I would have started with the true impression of Japan in my mind.
Il giapponese è una lingua bella per quanto riguarda la scrittura, ma è un po' complicato, anzi confuso, nella struttura delle frasi. Oltre a questo ci sono delle particelle che non esistono in altre lingue, con cui aggiungi il senso alle espressioni ... L'ho studiato a levello principiante dieci anni fa però, anch'io voglio studiarlo di nuovo: non voglio che tutto il mio tempo che ci ho messo non serva a niente! Pratico il shodo, ma questo solo mi ha aiutato nella buona scrittura ovviamente ... non parlo niente di giapponese ancora!!! Il proposito di Anno Nuovo ce l'ho già! Saluti dall'El Salvador!!!
Alex Calderon ti ammiro! La scrittura giapponese è molto bella ma per me è impossibile! Però amo L’ascoltare e leggere la giapponese. Adesso sto imparando l’italiano. Forse un giorno imparerò anche lo spagnolo. Buon nuovo anno!
@@christinam6430 Grazie mille!!! Anche per te, felice Anno Nuovo!!! Credo mi piaccia la scrittura giapponese per due motivi: uno, sono una persona che quasi sempre sta zitta, quindi preferisco scrivere che parlare (mi è succeso quando iniziavo con l'italiano e poi col portoghese e mi succede totalmente con l'inglese, che non riesco a parlarlo, soltanto posso scrivere cualche frase in questa lingua). Il secondo motivo: mi piace disegnare, faccio ritratti per venderli, anche disegni nello stile Anime giapponese, e sento i kanji proprio come disegnini (vedere la storia di questi simboli aiuta in questo caso) e si può dire che posso passare molte ore in pratica ... comunque è un problema perché quando un giapponese mi vede, pensa subito che io parlo la sua lingua, e resta deluso quando nota che io guardo il cielo nella ricerca del vocabolario XXD In bocca al lupo con lo studio dell'italiano, è anche una bellissima lingua!!! la prima lingua straniera che ho studiato tanti anni fa!!!! E spero anche che ce la faccia con lo spagnolo e il giapponese!!! Lo spagnolo è la mia madrelingua, e credo di essere fortunato nel parlarla da sempre Col giapponese, ti può aiutare l'uso di app, guardare dei dorama, un dizionario elettronico, e poi, video di youtube. Questo oltre ai libri con audio con delle spiegazioni grammaticali. Di nuovo, Felice Anno Nuovo!
I loved this/your video so much. I love learning languages so much. I am currently learning over 20. I am an American so American English is my mother tongue. My first foreign language I learned is Japanese which I now call my second language as I now have conversation fluency in Japanese. Besides Japanese, my next best languages are Korean, Mandarin, German, Dutch, and French. With Korean, It's not so much that I speak much korean, it's that since Korean grammar is basically the same as Japanese grammar, it makes it way smoother to learn. For me, Mandarin is kinda hard, the reason being with it being a tonal language and having to have to learn the simplified chinese characters to write. German is by far one of my favorite European languages. For me, German is easy compared to, say, Spanish or Russian. I also like learning Dutch as it feels like it is in between German and English. With French, I like the sound and spelling, but dang. Why French gotta be so wordy. Besides these languages, I tend to do better with Asian languages than with European ones.
You faíled cuz u wanted to learn like you learned other languages. Through using italian, which is bad. Japanese you learn by itself. Listen a lot, read a lot. Etc. Even thou u dont get it it will come to you in a while...
I failed Japanese too. I was too busy to put enough effort into it plus I found the book and the teacher a bit boring. I wonder if you have ever thought about becoming a school teacher. Kids would love you.
Thank you so much Luca !!! You encourage me to take back my Japanese learning. I have done one year at the university - I had such a wonderful sensei. We had (traditional method) of course grammar, syntax, vocabulary to study. One hour of course was this grammatical etc stuff . The second hour, the teacher was telling us about Japan and the language; she was making links between the culture and the language. Very helping ! The last hour was conversation. She frequently invited japanese people and we were invited to talk with them. As you say : very simple sentences. (example : anatano shumi wa nan desuka - what is your hobby) Simple but funny, we had to answer - It takes time and effort, but ONE thing is easy with Japanese language : the accent ! More easy than the Italian (singing) accent. So thank you many many times. I heard one polyglot who was saying that Japanese learning was soooooo easy. I must say that it had made me a bit mad, because it is not true. Your humility and honesty helps me greatly. Grazie mille !!!!
Turkish grammer is very similar to Japanese, and as you progress it is getting more and more similar to the point it is ridicilous. But the words are totally different, and of course the writing system. The problem is there is no material in Turkish for intermediate Japanese online, so I learn it through English, so I need to retranslate everything in Turkish to make a better connection.
I tried to learn Japanese for about a year with traditional methods, and it was so terrible: I was improving so slowly and my level (reading and oral comprehension) was poor, and it was very hard to learn the vocabulary and grammar. I thought that Japanese was a really hard language but now I still reconsider it since I started the mia method (now it will be just 2 weeks that I started it). I never improved in that way , I'm literally amazed. Seriously, if anyone is really struggling with Japanese or any other language, I really recommend to at least try the mia method. This method is based on a lot of immersion. (Sorry if my English is bad, I never really took the time to learn it properly. I just learnt it through ytb videos, American movies, webtoons, but actually never in a conscious way with books, teachers, and all this stuff)
According to FSI, Japanese is in the hardest language category, with an asterisk - meaning it’s the hardest of the hardest languages for native English speakers, taking ~3x as long to learn as Romance languages. I’m sure you didn’t “fail” - it just takes longer than you expected!
@@gopherlee9427 Cantonese is more difficult phonetically due to tones, but it has the same sentence structure as English (subject-verb-object). Japanese grammar is way more confusing, the writing system is more confusing (characters have many possible readings depending on context), it has a tons of homonyms, and it's the fastest spoken language in the world.
Thank you for sharing this story. I went through years of just ‘studying’ words here and there, using flash cards etc but when I became hooked on Japanese dramas, I started to really learn. I now understand what the natural approach is all about and I’m learning Italian and having so much fun!
Yes, I think that we start learning for real when we start using the language in real life for a specific purpose - be it to watch dramas or to interact with people or else. Thanks for the comment! =)
Bonjour Luca, J'ai eu beaucoup de chance dans mon apprentissage, j'ai commencé le japonais sans utiliser la méthode Assimil. J'ai commencé avec un manuel beaucoup plus facile puis, ensuite, je suis passé à Assimil. Si j'avais commencé directement par Assimil, je crois que j'aurais abandonné rapidement...car c'est vrai que le niveau est plutôt élevé pour un débutant total ! Je me suis retrouvé dans ce que tu dis : mon voyage au Japon m'a motivé comme jamais pour apprendre la langue ! Donc, dis-toi que ça vaut le coup de persévérer avec le japonais : la langue et le pays sont absolument magnifiques ! Et si je peux me permettre de citer Marcel Proust : "Il n'y a pas de réussite facile ni d'échecs définitifs" :) (le smiley n'est pas de Proust)
Pure io avevo fatto il giapponese (e ho fallito ben 2 VOLTE) e le uniche parole che mi ricordavo erano shitteru (per la parola shit),ciao e grazie. Ovviamente non ho imparato niente sulla scrittura kanji,quindi non sei l'unico. Comunque sono anch'io un poliglotta e ho appena comprato un libro di arabo e sto imparando altre lingue
I love your videos. I’ve got about 8 years of experience studying Japanese and even lived there for two years and it’s at about B2 level according to their JLPT. I’ve also studied German to about a B2 level and Spanish and French to an A2 or B1. The frustration with Japanese was so intense. I had it with every language I tried but my determination saw me through yet for Japanese it went on for years. When I finally got to japan and tried speaking all I could think of was how much better my Spanish was with a fraction of the time spent on it. I don’t know the details of your bidirectional translation method but I suspect it’s very similar to how I learned Japanese. I had a wonderful Japanese teacher at my local community college and he had us doing hard core translation from Japanese into English to learn Japanese. I found it very helpful. Yes, I had a huge barrier in that I couldn’t think in Japanese except for the snippets that you mentioned. Really small snippets. I can think in more complex sentences more naturally now but the only sure thing that helped me was lots and lots of time spent with Japanese. I would suggest a lot of listening and reading with the text in front of you like an audio book or good text to speech. I found that helpful since the writing system is atrocious if beautiful. When you find language partners in Japanese you’ll want someone that doesn’t grade their language down to a baby’s level or below. This is hard. For whatever reason Japanese people have a huge tendency to severely grade their language when speaking to foreigners. Anyway, I don’t think your method was to blame so much as the difficulty of the language but if you come up with a better method then that’s great.
My biggest language failure was with Macedonian which I was trying to learn while I was in the country. I had some language lessons but never got past very basic sentences. The main reasons I think were that I was working in an English dominated environment and had no pressure to learn. At the same time I was preparing for a French exam later that year, so my motivation was very limited.
I think the main reason of your failure is that you are too accustomed to SVO right-branching Indo-European languages. You rely on this same familiar syntax too much and lack of knowing other various types of syntax, e.g. SOV right-branching: Persian, Indo-Aryan; SOV left-branching: Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic, Quechua; VSO right-branching: Modern Standard Arabic, etc. And the construction of embedded clauses (or so called 'complex sentences' e.g "I think that ...", "the book which I bought at the store...") within these types of languages also greatly varies one from another. This is why I'm not a big fan of learning most of the major well-known European languages, as they don't vary too much from each other syntax-wise, which is kind of boring in my opinion. You gotta step out of your comfort zone of language learning and get to know other types of syntax by learning more and more non-European languages. The more types of languages you learn, the more flexible your brain could get, and the less tiring it would be when you come across a different type of syntax next time.
I'm glad i wasn't the only one struggling with japanese syntax in a long sentence, manga and anime is easier because it's usually one liner sentence, but good luck if you wanna read a novel or newspaper, the sentence is all backwards and long and subjectless so you don't know who's doing what to who, i believe korean language has similar structure but with more complicated grammar and pronunciation than japanese, but at least you don't have to learn 2000 chinese characters on top of that lol, now i understand why FSI rated japanese as the hardest language on the planet for english speakers
Yes, everything you said is true! Japanese is a challenging language for most Europeans. Having said that, if your native language is, say, Tamil or Turkish, then forming sentences in Japanese is surprisingly easier. Our very own Christine - a polyglot who speaks 12 languages, Japanese included) talks about it in her video and explains how one of her native languages (Tamil) really helped her to acquire Japanese and Korean faster: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Rj8bxm0fERw.html
Great video Luca! You're right, the hard part about learning Japanese coming from English or other European languages is you must learn a completely different way of thinking and its not just learning the vocab. I've been studying Japanese for over 5 years and I still can't speak like how I want to speak.
I happen to realize that my Japanese learning has been a battle agaisnt myself. I've been learning that Language for years, I haven't got a good level tho. There have been a lot of moments of stress and discourage because of the amount of time I've spent on it, I've stopped learning that language many times, and I have started again and again and again. Something that I have inside doesn't let me quit as much as I want to. Japanese is definitely the language I love the most. So, now that I have a seen your video, I realize that it could happen, that failure is not permanent, and that learning from our past experiences could allow us to do better. So thanks for you video I'm 100% starting again, with a different method and with a big boost of motivation!
Hey Luca, nice video! Failure I would say is trying to learn different scripts, I find it slowing down the learning process tremendously. It’s like before you can even try to learn you got to uncover a character before making sense of the word. Any efficient ways to go about this learning curve ?
