My Failure with Japanese
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2024
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In this video I reveal why I failed at mastering Japanese, what I learned from my past mistakes, and why I won't give up.
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Filmed and edited by Pierluigi Siena
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@Jesiah Leon hack deez nuts
Instablaster
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.
Your english is great!
@@psychedelicmanicincarnatio2731 Thank you! 😊
What is your weak point in English? Is it that the grammar or is it listening?
@@sabrina3138 My weak point is pronunciation and a bit of grammar. The English language itself is nothing like my native tongue.
I don't know about your pronunciation, but that sentence structure and spelling was perfect.
Liberating for all us language learners, with your honest response....
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.
@@JapanischErfahren lol....yes. I can also relate👍😂
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 :)
@@heathersaxton8118 That's interesting. Did you read them with translations into English?
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 thought only Japanese people can't catch L sound easily. That's interesting.
@@coconutpineapple2489 L's and R's are difficult for a lot of English speaking children. They tend to come out as w's.
Ws or ys some kids say yegs for legs. Or wite for write. I have 5 kids and watching them gives me a way different perspective on language learning.
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 :)
your language learning story is gripping.
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.
This is exactly the motivational comment that I needed to read. Thank you for sharing your story!
@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
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.
First of all, love the screen name! You brought up some good points. Thanks!
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.
Congrats on 100k Luca! :)
Ikenna congrats on your 200k.
Thanks man! Watched a few of your videos, great job =)
Hello There
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.
As a native Korean whose primary language is similar to Japanese structure-wise, I get the same frustration when learning English. ㅠ_ㅠ
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.
I with you agree!
Your grammar is better than a lot of English speakers on the internet
Read more in your target language
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!
How did you manage to move there?
@@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 how those the visa process works? Is it like germany that you get a visa as long as you have a job offer?
@@Vitorruy1 it depends on the visa. For working holiday visa you don't have to have a job lined up but you do have to have money saved.
@@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?
It's always reassuring to watch your videos, Luca. One of the only polyglots I trust
Thanks for the nice words Emil! =)
I second that!
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.
@@LexusFox
Luca even passed the C2 test in Spanish, so he is the real deal.
@@emilstorgaard9642 That makes sense, no wonder it’s so good. I strive to become that good in french.
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 TH-cam 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!
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. 😆
How come your English is so good?
@@ryanstarlight8018 I had a similar impression of Korean regarding that speaking while chewing gum thing.
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.
Thanks luca for giving me motivation 頑張ってね~
Your videos are amazing! Great for getting my head around language strategy and your storytelling style just relaxes and soothes me everytime. Thank you so much Luca! 加油！
Thanks for this video, Luca! Only a real master like you can come up with such a humble confession! 👍
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.
Your content is really top notch. You are on my top 5 for language motivation and appreciation. Thank you so much for sharing. Gracias!
Humble, smart and handsome ! Que mas se puede pedir ? I love your videos. Thank you for being so real and down to earth. Happy new year 🎆
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 :)
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!!!
lucas gomes good hiragana!
I thanked you too!
Congratulation〜 But Genki sucks. おめでとう〜でも、ゲンキはわるい。
@@toma4474 I agree, All the Genki books I've seen are in Japanese only so I don't see how you can even begin to use them to learn.
TOMA what did you use to study Japanese
Congratulations on reaching 100K subscribers, Luca! 🎉🔥🎈❤️🎉
Congratulations Luca for 100 thousands subscribers, keep making videos, that keep us motivated to learn more and more !!
Thanks Michael! Yes, the number of subscribers has been going up, and that keeps me motivated to create more TH-cam videos =)
You're so humble and thank you very much for such an uplifting and encouraging video
his videos are very reassuring
Felicitaciones por los 100.000 subs, Luca!
Gracias Jesús! =)
@@LucaLampariello genial llegar hasta allá
LanguageGirl Cuesta muchísimo llegar allá.
@@Theyoutuberpolyglot lo sé lol
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago Yo llevo media decada con este canal. Lucas, lleva más tiempo en TH-cam que yo.
Congratulations on reaching 100k subscribers Luca! I also failed at learning a language. I was learning Dutch for a short period of time. (maybe 3 months) I eventually gave it up because I wanted to focus on improving my other languages and I found that I wasn’t passionate about learning Dutch.
Thanks Luca for this very interesting video. I am feeling I do not progress in Japanese after 3 years of study (still kind of upper beginner level). I also used Assimil and didn't like it for the exact same reasons (I love all other Assimil books I have) but I still did it to the end to much of my frustration ! Now I have decided to restart from scratch with a new study book and I hope I will finally enjoy it. I love Japan, been there several times and this keeps me going. I will not give up !!!! Thanks also for your tips, you are right, with Japanese we should first get full command of short sentences before moving to more complicated ones.
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.
Sph H Did you focus more on grammar ?
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
@@sph6908 Very true. Grammar study is the best you can do early on, input is for slightly intermediate+.
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
Have you ever "failed" to learn a foreign language? And if so, why? Let me know in the comments! =)
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.
I failed in learning Hebrew and Turkish because i didn't find compelling input
Japanese as well
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 I truly understand what you are conveying Luca, but truth be told regarding a language as exotic as Japanese, I may as well consider your "failure" a success if I were to ever tackle Japanese. Giving up and building momentum to do it all over again takes serious mental strength.
You are very demanding with yourself. That is precisely what sets you well apart from me. I can only look up to you and congratulate you, once again. Every single one of your video is spurring me on. Chin up my friend, I believe there isn't a single language that you cannot get a hold of with perfection. You are a beacon! thank you!
"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~
muchas felicidades por los 100, 000 suscriptores .. saludos desde Peru
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!!
Que idioma es este? Lo pude entender. Gracias. Yo puedo hablar Espanol.
@@lindavel43 Italiano😂
You're such a wonderful person Luca! 😊 👍
Luca, sei una vera e propria ispirazione. Parlare delle difficoltà e dei 'fallimenti' alla quale si và incontro quando si impara una lingua, non solo aiuta agli altri nel non cadere negli stessi errori, ma è anche qualcosa che in pochi avrebbero il coraggio di condividere in pubblico.
Grazie!
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 !!!!
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! =)
Hi I know it’s been a year, but do you have any japanese drama recommendations? Cause I’ve been struggling to find something I like
I’m determined to succeed and this video just gave me the kick I needed today, good luck my dude.
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.
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.
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!
What did you do to help understand input? Thanks!
Sure why not =)
Sure that'd be great!
@@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.
@@MigakuOfficial LET'S GO IM TRYNA SEE THIS
Very helpful, thanks!!!
This is really, really helpful. I've been thinking of learning Spanish, and I think the idea of going to the place makes a big difference. (After this corona thing, of course) Thank you for being humble, honest, and open.
FYI, Luca, you're a language rock star!
I have been waiting for this confession, thank u Luca :)
Also, your 100 k subscribers TH-cam plate is coming straight from google offices !!! Congrats
Ehehe, I am not sure if the TH-cam plate is coming automatically, someone told me I have to make a specific request for it.
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.
Inglés sin barreras ich spreche Deutsch. Ich kann dir helfen,
@@Theyoutuberpolyglot Vielen Dank!
@@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
Hello Luca.
I staretd watching your videos about learning languages. I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge with other people. It's amazing how many things people can learn watching your videos. In the past I learnt french and failed. I didn't give up I took a break and started learning french again. I believe that I master this language in the future. Your tips about learning of languages are amazing. I agree with you that simplicity is the best way to start using and learning any language.
Greetings from Poland.
Thanks for this video
I have just started learing Japanese and I got some interesting points from that video.
❤️
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!
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 actually found it to be very motivating, hearing you talk about your problems with Japanese, because it shows that nobody is perfect.
I find your methodical approach to learning very inspiring and even though I am not as organized as you I am working hard to reach fluency in french this year :)
Greetings from Germany,
Paul
Wszystkiego najlepszego w Nowym Roku! 😊
Dziś pierwszy raz trafiłam na Twój kanał. Podziwiam Twoje umiejętności i mam nadzieję, że pomogą mi w nauce języka angielskiego. 😊
Nice content! I'm studying Japanese as well, I'm gonna keep these things in mind.
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'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.
I speakfluent Swahili what is ur native language?
@@thementor9764 English.
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....
Congrats for the 100k
The failure is the best teacher... I am learning Mandarin now - your experience and conclusions acquired from learning Japanese are priceless. Thanks a lot Luca for sharing.
Great video!! I failed mandarin due to poor strategy. This time I’m learning in a different way!
Sou brasileiro e faz 2 anos tentei aprender francês e falhei tbm, mas vou esse 2020 tentar novamente e conseguir. Esse ano estive aprendendo espanhol
I love this content, this was how I felt as an English native with Korean. I feel like I speak eloquently in English so I didn't want to sound uneducated in Korean. But I had to take a step back and use simple words and sentences, which has made an enormous difference. I'm still learning but changing my method and way of learning gave me the strength that I needed to continue learning the language.
Thank you Luca, very useful ! Would be interesting to hear about your experience in learning Hungarian as well.
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.
Please, would mind to tell me which method or material have you used to achieve your goals?
Thanks in advance
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.
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.
good for you. I wish I kept on learning arabic
Don't give up!
@@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
@@koutta-idiomas8118 私のレベルもN3ぐらいです！でも２年間勉強しました。文法的にだいたい全部習ったから現在4つの言語を学んでドイツ語です ^^
I appreciate your honest confession. I'm learning from it. What stops me is the reality that I would soon forget what I learn. I'd rather start developing my 'retaining strategy' than going forward in a fast manner. I'm taking it SLOWLY BUT SURELY.
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!
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!!
Otro excelente video Luca, felicitaciones!
Gracias Ernesto! =)
Eres genial, una inspiración para quienes nos gusta aprenser idiomas. Felicidades por tus primeros 100,000 suscriptores!!
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!
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!
We can learn from success stories, but we can learn way much more from failure stories.
I'm currently learning Japanese and I find your advice to be very useful and accurate. Thanks!
I'd love to watch more videos of this kind in your channel, videos about what not to do and why.
Congrats on 100k subs!
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 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!
Congrats on 100k!!
Your honesty is refreshing and puts you at highest level of credibility as a polyglot in my view. Thank you
I'm in the early stage of learning Japanese, and it's so interesting reading all these comments with sometimes very differerent pieces of advice regarding the best method to learn. I'm going to start with one method, but if intuitively it seems ineffective for me, I have no problem exploring alternatives. The point is to continue on the path, and learn not only about the language, but also ourselves, as we go. Time is a limited resource, so though I know that the ajatt method would be effective, it's going to have to be modified to amjap, "as much Japanese as possible"😄 Luca, thank you so much for your advice and for sort of commiserating with us💕 Congratulations on the success of your channel!
Amjap - that's what I'm doing, too! I turn on Netflix, use subadub to get selectable Japanese captions, and use a popup dictionary to reference the words. And I make just a few Anki cards, cutting audio with Audacity. Plus, going through Remembering the Kanji (even though I'm only halfway through) has been an incredible boon to feeling comfortable and being able to parse out the components of compound words. Good luck!
If you're on a relatively low level, focus more on theory. Listening to stuff while you're a beginner is mainly a waste of time.
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.
How about get started with Korean that is simpler than Japanese?
Thank you for your experience)
Grazie Luca per i tuoi video! I had a similar experience with Japanese, starting with assimil a method that served me well for other languages but that it wasn't what I expected in Japanese. Then I had more luck with Pimsleur, but it's still a long way...Buon viaggio a tutti gli entusiasti delle lingue!
Would really like to hear Luca talk with Matt Vs Japan about AJATT.
Most anticipated crossover on youtube ;)
up for this.
@Alfredo Müller Etxeberria It was nice to see Steve get owned
It happened!
@@soyokou.2810 When?
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.
Try glossika
Thanks for the inspiration
Great video! Well, let's see..I learned French in high school, was very fluent, lost it... college gained some back lost it...been chasing French for some time...I am I mean basic conversation in the language..but want my level back... fluency is still there even at lower level...also..I lost a lot of my American sign language..but it's interesting, because when you start to study again, some of it comes back ..more with the asl.. because your hands and brain are involved.... taught myself Spanish...and now learning German and french again... ALWAYS learning!!!
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.
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.
Hi Luka, first of all, I really apprecite you a lot. Your videos are very useful for me. I started learning English a few years ago. Unfortunately I still intermediate level. I don't know , probably you right , maybe I couldn't found good resources. But, the most important thing is I don't have any native or good speaker for English in real life or online. I try learning alone. I watch lot of your video. Thank you very much again.
Really like your videos, wish you did the recordings in podcast form too!
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.
I kinda wanna try Turkish, but I'd rather learn Greek. Turkish for family reasons or Greek from sheer interest? Hmm.
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 I know neither yet lmao. I can only just about read that phonetically. Vielleicht könnte ich Deutsch verstehen 😅
@@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.
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.
That's a really shitty and useless language, why the hell would you want to learn it
This is super interesting topic Luca. I failed Spanish, French and Japanese once in my life, but my Japanese is close to fluent now as I spent the last 1.5 year to study more about how to learn a language and contemplate my failures. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese and English at a high level already. Learning from my past failures and recent success in Japanese also help me to make a strong start in Norwegian recently!! Luca, here also want to take the chance to thank you for your great tips on an Actual Fluency podcast episode. I took your advise to do italki lessons for about three months and it helped me a lot. Now I don’t use that method anymore, but at that point it was amazing.
In answering your question in the video. I failed my language learnings in 3 occasions, because:
Spanish: I had no clue about Spanish culture and wasn’t interested at that point. I took it in uni when it was for free
Japanese: I did it the traditional way to attend classes and used only textbook. It was an era without much internet materials, so it wasn’t interesting even though I was madly in love with Japanese culture
French: I did better to learn and I was passionate about learning the language. But overall I am not greatly passionate about the culture. It was a chance given by my company. Guess passion was the problem.
This time round in Japanese, all issues such as passion, motivation, materials and methods weren’t issues at all. I guess that’s why a better outcome.
Hope this is interesting for you and everybody here.
What a great video, Luca! I really appreciate the fact that you are talking very openly about something that could be perceived as some kind of 'failure' :) It is not a real failure, though. As long as you have learnt something along the way - and it's pretty clear to me that you indeed have - then your Japanese adventure was certainly worth it!
Now a few words about my 'failures': I considered myself to be a member of the polyglot community (a few years ago I even attended one of the polyglot workshops when you were in Poland!), but despite my fascination with languages I just couldn't develop that effortless fluency in any language apart from English. As one of my biggest failures I considered Turkish, as after 5 years of study and reaching a very 'tentative' B1+ level, I felt I couldn't get any better at it. I imagine it's because its syntax is similar to Japanese, with words in a completely "reversed" order, at least comparing to Polish and other Indo-European languages I know :) Recently I have started studying Korean and after a few weeks a group mate (because I'm learning Korean at a language school) asked me, bewildered: "Don't you watch any Korean series? Don't you listen to any Korean pop music?!". For a moment, I felt as if I had no right to learn the language, just because I'm not a fan of Korean culture and apparently for many people it's a must to fall in love with a country's culture first before even attempting to learn the language. But soon I realised that my motivation is simply different.
Over the years of learning (or trying to learn) many foreign languages I have actually learnt the following lessons:
1) There is no right or wrong motivation for learning a language. Or rather, it's wrong to assume that you *should* do certain things (enjoy watching series, travel to a given country or make friends of a given nationality) just because it works for other people. If you enjoy learning languages just because you fancy reading books, learning grammatical structures that don't exist in your mother tongue or you want to wrap your head around how people speaking other languages see the world through the lens of their language - *IT'S PERFECTLY FINE* ! Your motivation is valid, too!
2) A poor teacher/language instructor of a given language should not put you off learning the language. It should be obvious, but it is not always so. I've been discouraged from learning German by my German teachers, who unfortunately did a really poor job of teaching that language :) But the language is beautiful nonetheless.
3) Poor quality textbooks, language materials etc should not discourage you either. Again, I have had a really horrible textbook for Arabic once and it did stop me from learning the language, as I thought "Do I really have to learn how to say such boring things?". Well, there are plenty of textbooks out there and I'm pretty sure that if you are motivated enough and can afford it, you could even have tailor-made lessons with a teacher who could teach you to say and understand things you are really interested in.
4) Learning a language is a never-ending process. You often say it yourself, but it is a simple truth that many do not want to hear ;) I've been studying English for 20 years now, sometimes I prefer speaking English to Polish ;) but I *STILL* keep learning new words and phrases, I *STILL* identify interesting grammatical features of the language and I know I will forever be learning English. Every language is a long-term commitment and it's also okay to take breaks from the language if you'd rather focus on something else. You can always come back with a different attitude.
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 :)
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!
Can you block a user?
Luca is very talented. But 5:24 is just a very basic understanding of parts of speech in Japanese.
Merci beaucoup Luca, toujours si motivant. Tu es une inspiration et une fonte inépuisable de ressources et astuces pour les simples mortels comme moi que même au despit de l'âge, les circonstances compliquées ou tout simplement les difficultés quotidiennes de la vie on essaye toujours à nous faire plaisir en mettant à preuve nos capacités et notre amour pour l'apprentissage de langues. Merci infiniment.
Honestly it's always so helpful when a pro speaks about their failures because you can see what's going on in their minds and how they overcome problems. Thank you so much!
On a side note, I've always been mesmerized by how good looking you are 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...
Finnish is pretty intense too
@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 中文的发音真挺难的。当然比日文的难地多。汉字也比日文多，但是我觉得不太难... 日文，每个汉字都有很多的读法，中文一般只有一个。
再说，中文的语法真容易...
@4 Fs Regarding Japanese it totally depends on what level you're at atm ofc. What would that be?
@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.
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)
What's mia? mass immersion approach?
Thank you for this video Luca! I've been studying Japanese for a few years and really struggled this past year. At times it's hard to keep going and to stop yourself thinking I must be stupid etc. It's very reassuring to know you have also struggled with it for similar reasons. Also the language I "failed" with was Russian.
You got this Luca!