dads friend steve posted:

So as a data point, my wife and I are halfway thru our trip right now. She’s studied Japanese for 2 years. I’ve studied for 10 months, about an hour every day, and we both feel quite far from being able to hold anything resembling a real conversation with a native speaker.

Not trying to be negative about plans to learn and immerse yourself, but I’d agree with what folks are saying r.e. managing your expectations

I'm about 15 years in on and off with Korean and am just now reaching the point where I'd say I understand almost all of the stuff on TV and in novels intended for adults. I didn't really feel comfortable to engage in prolonged conversations with native speakers until finishing my immersion program, which I did after 3 years of casual study, so that put me about 3.5 years into Korean at the time. My expectations are fully managed, don't worry.

harperdc posted:

English and Japanese are about the farthest away linguistically as is possible. When training diplomats for the Foreign Service, the U.S. state department does language training; Japanese is the one that has the longest intensive study period, from memory.

Korean enjoys pretty much the same distinction. This post is really funny to me (no offense), because I've written it a few times over the years, except towards people studying Korean as a hobby.

Language learning is a lifelong hobby. And to the people saying I'm "overthinking it," I'd respectfully disagree. If you're going to spend hundreds, thousands of aggregate hours doing something you'd better be able to reason about the why and how of it.

So for me: the how of Korean was "I'm living here, I need to communicate with the people around me," and after that, "I need to be able to talk with the in-laws when they visit," and now since I've moved back we've evolved to, "I want to engage meaningfully and deeply with the culture and individuals around me, including my in-laws and Korean friends."

The how is more interesting to other people. My progression was:

1. Completely clueless but surrounded by native speakers and script. Work (English teaching) involved a contractual obligation to engage in English 8 hours a day. 1-3 hours of leeway every day to hit the books. month 0-1.
2. Able to read slowly, "having an ear for the language" - being able to pick out learned words and phrases from speech if I concentrate. Have absorbed the entirety of the "baby grammar" - the equivalent of "tourist English" that you speak if you want to be understood abroad. months 1-3.
3. Finding out what I don't know. Getting a reference for more idiomatic grammar (e.g. the "-거든요" ending, "you probably know this, but let me remind you...), picking out words in daily activities that, by not knowing, cause interruptions to my flow. month 3-12.
4. Chill out on this plateau, years 1-3. I wasn't good enough to have prolonged conversation, so my language skills were only useful to help me navigate practical situations. I was an English teacher without savings and means. I couldn't afford to take time off to study, so I made the best of my situation.
5. Lay down the time and money for an immersion course - 4 hours a day in-class, 4 hours a day of homework, taking time off of work to be a full-time student. This involved having conversation time with a captive audience - other students who also wanted to learn - for a few hours a day and really helped my level of comfort. I was able to skip levels 1A-2B of my course, which is actually the equivalent of 6 months, I misremembered earlier. So that's what a year of casual study bought me - the equivalent of 6 months in an immersion program would've.
6. Graduate school, surrounded by bright native speakers who sometimes wanted to talk in English but were always conversing amongst themselves in Korean, and with me when I wanted to. The perfect environment to push my limits. This is when I really took off.

So on to Japanese.

Why?

Language learning later in life has different motivations and prospects compared to earlier in life. Learning Korean actually had tangible benefits for me. Any language I start to learn at 40 is unlikely to. So my answer to the question of "why should I learn any language, despite the huge time investment?" is "Why not? I can afford to travel easily now, I'm really loving bored with life in a lot of ways, I find it interesting and engaging, and I have a full-remote job. Means, motive, and opportunity."

What better way does your average 40-something have to spend their time? Some have kids, and I appreciate that that takes a ton of time. Hell, that's kind of the thing that's put me in this situation. A lot of my lifelong friends don't have much time to hang out anymore because they're too busy with being a parent. So here I am trying to find engaging ways to occupy my time. And I guess I could.. take up knitting? Collecting vacuum cleaners?

Why Japanese specifically?

Contrary to the expectation some people have, I'm very much the opposite of a weeb. I have settled semi long-term in Asia for practical reasons - my wife's career and my flexible working hours - not because I was drawn in by the pop culture. I think I might be kind of a "language weeb" as the above wall of text betrays, but I don't have particular interest in Asian pop culture. I didn't know a thing about Korea before I came here, and my exposure to Japanese pop culture begins and ends with Mario and Final Fantasy. I find most K-Dramas and J-Dramas cringe-inducing. It's actually a real problem for Korean learning. I'd like to be able to engage with the pop culture here but the intersection of what I find interesting and what's out there is relatively small.

What I like about Japan is similar to what I like about Korea: society is organized very well here, and things tend to work really well, so it's very comfortable and people treat each other well. Also.. I feel motivated for some reason. I don't know exactly why, but I've learned to trust this feeling. I'm ready to engage with it, and therefore I'll put the time in and not slack off.

Another one of my motivations is linguistic. One theory I'll be testing is that, Korean and Japanese having similar phonetics, grammar and a ton of cognates will at least make it less of a slog for me. I had several examples during my travels where somebody spoke a complex sentence in Japanese and I knew exactly what they were saying because I picked up on a couple cognates. My earlier trip got me clear from stage 1 above - I can now read Hiragana, Katakana, and I've found that my Korean "ear" seems to apply to Japanese due to the phonetic similarity. I'm self-studying and plan to have absorbed all of the baby grammar by the time I depart for my trip, as well as a modest vocabulary. So hopefully when I land I'll be at 3 and ready to take advantage of my time.

And all it costs me is the price of lodging and airfare, which is a pittance compared to what I'm making. The price or renting a whole AirBnB in Fukuoka is like 50-60 percent the price of renting a similar space on a long-term contract even with a 40 minute commute to my employer's home office in Palo Alto, relative to which my salary is adjusted. Some digital nomads spend their time and freedom getting a sunburn. I have a slightly different set of interests.

I'm sensitive to how annoying this could be to locals. My #1 priority when abroad is to minimize my impact on people who don't have the time to deal with foreigners. I'm pretty good at reducing the burden I place on people around me to pretty close to the background level.

The Gay Bean fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Oct 13, 2023

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Zettace fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Oct 14, 2023