Japanese podcasts: an exercise in inundation
There are a lot of ways you could go about learning Japanese and maintaining proficiency. You could read textbooks and take tests. You could go to classes once or twice a week. Maybe you could meet up with some Japanese speakers to practice listening and speaking once or twice a month. All of these are excellent ways to keep sharp. But there’s one big problem: it’s not nearly enough time spent on the language to be optimally effective.
Think about it: you study your text books for about 2 hours a day (maybe more, but on average) and memorize pointless abstractions of grammatical concepts which, although incredibly interesting, aren’t really all that helpful toward achieving fluency. You go to your classes once, maybe twice a week for an hour at a time and reinforce these grammar principles with listening and speaking exercises. You then meet with your Japanese friends once, maybe twice a month for dinner and drinks and spend a good 2-3 hours each time engaged in real-life listening and speaking practice that may actually help you in the long run. Let’s take the max values here and do a quick calculation based on a full month of study…
- 2 hours text book study x 30 days = 60 hours
- 1 hour class study x 8 days (twice per week) = 8 hours
- 3 hours social study x 2 days (twice per month) = 6 hours
Total = 74 hours per month of study. If we extend this over a year we get 888 hours of study in a year. And that’s with text book study as the highest percentage of total hours (about 81%).
Now, let’s compare that with the amount of study a person living in Japan gets, again on a monthly basis…
- 16 hours daily using, hearing, experiencing language and culture in context x 30 days = 480 hours
If we extend this over a year we get 5760 hours of study in a year. And that’s with practical listening/speaking/engaging study as 100% of the total hours. This is also assuming 8 hours every night for sleep. This is why people learn faster and more efficiently when they live in Japan.
The fact is, the best way to truly learn a language is by immersing yourself in that language. I could go on about why text book grammar study isn’t as important as people think and may actually hinder rapid fluency acquisition, but the scope of this article is slightly different. I want to talk about a good way to inundate and immerse yourself with a language even though you don’t live in the country of origin. I mean, we can’t all just up and fly to Japan, land a job, get an apartment and start living a Japanese life immediately (actually it *is* certainly possible, just not that feasible for all of us, myself included). But, we know that the best way to learn a language is to hear it daily over and over. So how do we pull it off if we don’t live in the relevant country? It’s simple: podcasts.
We live in a world of technological wonder where everyone has an iPod (yuck) or a Zune or some other portable mp3 player. An mp3 player can be purchased for as little as $20. Why not have a couple of news or entertainment podcasts on loop constantly on your mp3 player inundating you with Japanese language at all times? There are literally thousands of podcasts in Japanese regarding every subject imaginable. Get some. Put them on your iThing. Put it on repeat. Listen all day. Each time you hear it, you may recognize another word or two then eventually full sentences until finally you can remember and repeat whole passages. It’s so simple it’s stupid. Just listen to Japanese all the fucking time.
So let’s re-assess our original study schedule this time including some podcast listening study as well (NOTE: for reasons beyond this article, I’m replacing text book study with kanji study because I think it’s the better way to go)…
- 2 hours kanji study x 30 days = 60 hours
- 1 hour class study x 8 days (twice per week) = 8 hours
- 3 hours social study x 2 days (twice per month) = 6 hours
- 10 hours podcast listening study x 30 days = 300 hours
This brings our yearly total to almost 4500 hours. And this is just at 10 hours a day. Realistically, you could increase the amount of time you spend listening to Japanese to as high as 18-24 hours a day (why not sleep with headphones on playing Japanese podcasts/music?).
It may seem obsessive and even insane to some, but hey, this is how you learn. If you don’t want to become fluent in Japanese as quickly as possible, well that’s fine. But, if you do the answer is simple. Listen to the Japanese language all the fucking time. It’s so simple it’s stupid. So, how about a few examples of available podcasts to get you started:
- Yomiuri Shinbun (読売新聞) – excellent daily news podcast
- Nihongo Juku – bad ass site full of nothing but podcasts WITH complete transcriptions of the audio; covers a variety of topics; one of my top picks
- H!P Radio Shows – for those of you out there who share my love of Hello!Project, there are a shit ton of radio shows hosted by various members throughout the ages that are perfect listening material; if you’re interested in this one you’ll no doubt know where to find them
- iTunes – if you’re an iPod user you have it easiest as you can simply hit up the iTunes store and select Japanese as the language and take your pic from hundreds of excellent podcasts
It should be noted that I am in no way fluent in Japanese. I have a long way to go, I know that. But, I also know what has worked best for me throughout my learning experience and that is constant inundation. In fact, the only times I ever feel like I’m just not progressing is when I stop immersing myself fully for any period of time. So, don’t be like me. Don’t fall off the bandwagon and then have to pick up the slack again later. Keep yourself immersed and the language will come to you. It’s working for me and it works for Japanese people. Hell, it worked for you when you learned to speak as a child.
So get cracking and get listening. There’s no excuse. Put in the time, listen to Japanese, and become fluent, you sorry SOBs.
For more on the subject of immersion technique (and to read it as written by someone much more eloquent than I) visit AJATT. Great site, great guy.
Okay, I’m done. Until next time…
