/jp/ - Otaku Culture

The most important benchmark in learning Japanese is being able to look at short sentences and commit to memory the words and grammar patterns being used without reading the characters or words one by one.

This is the point where "functional literacy" starts being a thing and the true nature of input starts to be visible. I don't mean being able to identify where word boundaries are and having no difficulty remembering which words are which, I mean just looking at it and having your brain automatically see the shapes of the words and organize them into the information it would get if it were spoken at you.

That's where it all really begins. Until that, your brain really doesn't understand what Japanese actually is, you just have a bunch of cultural markers and personal experiences that point in its general direction.

Any intentional study you do before this point is going to be misguided and you're going to learn more bad habits the more time you spend not consuming input, no matter how careful the methods you use are. This is by far the biggest reason why people are bad at giving advice to each other.

Everyone did very different things before reaching this point, and their experiences are completely unique.

A lot of people switched to different methods of learning intellectual knowledge after they started developing functional literacy, and of course, the new methods they switched to seemed much more efficient.

Some people started out doing pure input, stopped right before they hit functional literacy, and spent months doing things like mining sentences or memorizing frequency lists, and when they came back to input, everything had fallen into place subconsciously because they were already so close.

The most important basic idea - that you want to get to being able to read simple stuff as soon as possible - seems to be accepted pretty much everywhere that people are even close to sane, so why do people pollute the scene with garbage advice that then didn't even do the way they're saying to do it?

It's not ego or attention whoring. They just want to socialize. Their experiences are profound and unique to them, no matter how badly they understand themselves, and they want to bond with like-minded people. This is completely fine, but the way that society works now means that this extends far beyond a close-knit group. Arbitrary ideas spread far, and charlatans who aren't just trying to socialize, they pick up on anything that has a good ring to it.

Of course, the instincts we have to protect us from misinformation aren't developed enough to protect us from stuff like this, so if we go somewhere and see a lot of people with the same ideas, we're going to look for bad markers - prestige and authority - to see how much we trust the ideas these groups of people are sharing. Is this right? What can you do to stop it? How much does it matter? You don't even know who's a charlatan and who's just socializing until you get to know them. It takes a long time, and each individual person has to do it on their own.

What can you take away from this? Learning Japanese takes a long time, and nobody's good at outlining exact steps on how to do it. The core problem is that people expect exactly that: outlined steps. The least you can do is give them the exact outline inside which everything else fits, where you prepare to read as fast as possible, then start reading, with everything else being supplemental with varying levels of personal importance.

But we don't even do that. We can't change anything in the OP because it's not maintained anymore, and whenever beginners ask for advice, they get two kinds of responses: "read more", which they ignore, or "do X arbitrary thing", which they might listen to. Not to mention that, the longer DJT exists, the more people come here that used meme methods and repeat them.

People don't even emphasize how important it is to reach the level where you can automatically parse simple manga panels like picture related without trying. It's ridiculous. If I didn't know better, and didn't recognize enough posting styles to know that there are still a few oldfags around, I'd think that everyone here was at most lower intermediate, just telling other people to do what they did themselves. Heck, for all I know, the oldfags that stuck around never got anywhere, and that's why they're so defensive about how they learned the little they know.

It's been a nice ride. I think I started studying Japanese linguistics three or four years ago, Japanese a year and a half ago. Please remember what I had to say about the main benchmark here. You want to be able to read something like this without trying. Without sounding it out in your head, or intentionally finding word boundaries. Anyone who can't do that, or doesn't think about it, doesn't have the right to tell you how to learn Japanese. They don't have a conscious knowledge of what learning Japanese is like. Take it easy, and don't stop reading.