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 ?
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 learned most of my Japanese from a RUclips 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 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.
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 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.
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
"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 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 :)
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!!
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! =)
I have been waiting for this confession, thank u Luca :) Also, your 100 k subscribers RUclips plate is coming straight from google offices !!! Congrats
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 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!
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.
This video is so therapeutic for me, I gave up Japanese exactly one year ago because I reached a wall after making those same mistakes. At some point I was just too overwhelmed with the different structure and the feeling that I will never be able to feel comfortable with it. As a foreign languages enthusiast I hope to be able to approach it again soon and this time stick to it, thank you for motivation!
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.
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!
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 !!!!
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!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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....
I studied Japanese at uni in Italy and I gave up to it after going to Japan and realizing that after 4 years of intensive learning and although I was one of the best students, I just understood about 30% of what was happpening around me. Plus I found Japanes people quite impenatrable, to be honest. Not that I didn't know about cultural differences beforehand but I found it quite overwhelming as a first-person experience. Oh, and one if not the worst obstacle was not the syntax as it happened to you, Luca, but the different readings that each kanji has.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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'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!
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 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.
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!
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.
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
Three years ago I started learning german and japanese at the same time. At that time I didn't know anything about language learning, so I thought it wouldn't be that hard to start from zero with two languages. Apparently, I was wrong. After three years I made a huge progress with german, I just received my B2 certificate. However, my japanese didn't go that well. I also received a certificate(N4) but it is really difficult for me to have an easy conversation and to understand native speakers. I was about to give up, but then you came out with this video, and i feel motivated again. Thanks! I hope we can both get fluent in japanese!!
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'm an italian 16 years old guy and started studying japanese when I was 14. I can perfectly understand that before you get the right mindset , making a sentence quickly Is very difficult. The point that helped me to reach the B2 level Is just listening many many japanese people, in every context. By doing this my mind changed slowly and began thinking in a completely reverse way. If you get used to, It will become more and more natural, and actually it's not as hard as It might look like, because the grammar turns out to be much easier compared to the italian one. Now as I got inspired by watching your videos, I started to study my 4th language, german! Hope I'll be like you someday😁👏👏👏
You started learning Japanese at 14 years old and your mind is still like a sponge. I don't think many adults would learn a language just by listening to it and then start thinking in it the way you did.
@@dappadondadda100 This theory is more or less debunked. The reason why children learn faster is they are less distract as adults, and spend more time learning the language. Actually adults learn faster in the same amount of time. Well, from a certain age on your learning speed is going a bit down. But the main reason is still the amount of time which you are able to dedicate for learning a language.
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.
I’ve lived in Japan for three years. The last year I’ve made a concerted effort to really learn after just dabbling at first. I use the Duolingo app and take Berlitz classes once a week, but it’s still not really enough. I don’t think I’ll ever be pera pera, or fluent, but I hope to one day have just a basic conversation. You really have to learn the kanji while learning to speak, never mind there are three levels of politeness to master. Plus what you learn in the apps and classes is not really how people talk to each other. Some Japanese revel in speaking super fast and in a kind of abbreviated code Japanese. It’s truly daunting but somehow I can’t give up on this. I never planned to live in Japan and I never desired to learn this language but here I am. Life is funny.
It’s nice to see that Luca, the language learning machine, is a human as well. :D I also appreciate your honesty. It’s not always easy to speak about your failures publicly. Personally, I failed to learn Russian. I had a crush on a Russian girl who was an intern in my town. We hit it off and had a few dates, which sparked my interest in the Russian language. I was extremely motivated to learn. I studied Russian first thing in the morning - I listened to songs, read a lot and worked my way through an online course. Since Russian is very close to my mother tongue (Czech), it was quite easy after I had mastered Cyrillic. Suddenly, I was able to understand a lot of content without ever having studied the particular words before. Sadly, it didn’t work out between the two of us. We parted company with each other and my motivation dropped. Now I’m learning Spanish, which I’ve had a burning desire to learn since I was twelve. I hope I’ll stay on track.
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'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.
My Mom went to Japan not speaking the language for work. She cried when she got lost in the subway and nobody could help her for hours. But when she finally found her bearings, it was probably the happiest time of her life. She worked in the farms in Gunma. She had to deal with bears in the mountains but she loved the farms, especially the flower farms. It took her less than a year to be fluent. (Or at least she can navigate through conversations for all her needs - shopping, dealing with the farmers, etc.) I think she stayed there for more than ten years.
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.
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.
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.
Hello Luca, since beginning to learn your beautiful language I have filled three large spiral bound books with Italian phrases, snippets and grammar points. Now I will sit down for a big meal and digest them all. This is the way I learn. ( it's a personal thing, I don't enjoy small talk ) i.e. after introducing myself, getting a drink and saying the sun is shining, then what else...frustration !... But I feel I am getting there little by little. Many thanks for your great videos !
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've been studying Japanese since March, so...eight months. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress, but wow, there is so much to it. Not only the usual tasks associated with learning a new language, such as vocabulary acquisition, learning grammar, etc., but also learning three writing systems, differing levels of politeness, words that are used in writing but are not used in speech, loan words as opposed to native Japanese words, being indirect rather than direct, etc. I could go on! Why I ever picked this as my first attempt at learning a foreign language, well...I don't know, but I've always been attracted to Japanese and dabbled in it on and off through the years, and finally decided to get serious about it last spring and signed on with an iTalki teacher, who is wonderful. It's actually so reassuring to hear other people's struggles with Japanese in particular, as it makes me realize maybe I'm not doing so badly after all. The weird thing about Japanese is that it's mostly very logical. It's just remembering which version/stem of the verb you're using, where to stick the tense in the sentence, whether you're being formal or casual...well, you get the idea! lol
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'm an Italian native as well. For my first one and a half years, I ended up grinding vocabulary Anki decks and trying to study grammar. I felt like I wasn't going anywhere, even simple text like NHK Easy was too hard to read. Unhappy with my results, I found out about AJATT and the input hypothesis: for the past year and a half I've tried a method similar to it (but in a very lighter capacity to what is recommended since I'm a grown adult with life obligations) and I'm blown away by the progress. I'm starting to be able to read simple novels and follow some heavy text videogames, and I've gotten to the point where I can enjoy a 50 minutes TV series episode each evening without it being a chore from pausing and looking up words too much. I can even look up grammar videos in Japanese! Considering so much more of my input is getting comprehensible, I feel like in one to two years' time I will have reached basic fluency and be able to pick up new words and grammar without having to look them up.
You wouldn't have reached that level - if it's true - without the 1.5 years of studying grammar before though. It might have felt frustrating, but it's the core fundament.
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 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
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)
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.
Parabens pela honestidade. Je suis brésilien et j'apprends le français par moi-même. I choose this one between romance languages but i have had a hard time last 6 months. It's great to see you face challenges.
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...
Hi, Luca, I had the same feeling of Chinese Assimil, the book begins using many questions. Instead of using a simple and descriptive language. To move on to more complex structure. I am using Assimil (French) for Persian. It is precisely a good example of simple beginning. I have felt very identified with your words.
When I was a lower intermediate I loved learning with できる日本語。the illustrations are cute, it builds the syntax into your head extremely efficiently in an easy an fun way, and the audio recordings are cute and there’s clearly been efford made to make the actors sound natural when speaking, unless a lot of other Japanese textbooks.
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 :)
My language failure was French. I study it for many years and just got frustrated. I found I could pronounce the words easily and was getting the grammar correct, but the failure was in remembering to spell the words correctly by including the parts I didn´t have to say out loud. I have learned more Spanish (and German) in 3 years than any French I learned in nearly 20 years. Now, that being said, there is a new coworker I have that is bilingual and he said he would have no problem helping me with French if I decided I have enough time to try again. Thanks for the video. Your videos are always informative!
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: ruclips.net/video/Rj8bxm0fERw/видео.html
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 RUclips 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?
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.
Interesting explanation of the so-called left-branching structure of Japanese (in contrast to the right-branching structure of English) - which in turn explains why Japanese people struggle with English so much: For them, it must be the same experience, just in the opposite direction.
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago That's true as well, though my impression is that Japanese people don't expect you to master those writing systems unless you want some language proficiency certificate.
@Aisha Samiha Indeed it's a real struggle for them, according to Education First which administers English proficiency tests all over the world, Japan is categorized as a 'low proficiency' country. They are lower than China, South Korea and Vietnam.
Hey Luca it’s Joey we met in Monte verde some years ago. This exact problem happened to me and put a brick wall in front of my polyglot game. But since then I’ve gone back and I’ve found that if you start by studying the hell out of kanji breaking down radicals and understanding all the little symbols within each character (for example flower plus fire equals fireworks etc) then you take a patient approach to it and then after you get a super solid foundation then you can start worrying about manipulating the language.
The Study System that Will Unlock Your Potential to Master Any Language: www.lucalampariello.com/free-3-video-training/
@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 ?
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.
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?
Congrats on 100k Luca! :)
Ikenna congrats on your 200k.
Thanks man! Watched a few of your videos, great job =)
Hello There
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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 learned most of my Japanese from a RUclips 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!
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 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.
You're so humble and thank you very much for such an uplifting and encouraging video
his videos are very reassuring
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
Thanks for this video, Luca! Only a real master like you can come up with such a humble confession! 👍
"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~
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 RUclips videos =)
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 RUclips que yo.
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 :)
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😂
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 have been waiting for this confession, thank u Luca :)
Also, your 100 k subscribers RUclips plate is coming straight from google offices !!! Congrats
Ehehe, I am not sure if the RUclips plate is coming automatically, someone told me I have to make a specific request for it.
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 🎆
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
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!
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
This video is so therapeutic for me, I gave up Japanese exactly one year ago because I reached a wall after making those same mistakes. At some point I was just too overwhelmed with the different structure and the feeling that I will never be able to feel comfortable with it. As a foreign languages enthusiast I hope to be able to approach it again soon and this time stick to it, thank you for motivation!
@@jazmine9570 good point, that may have also been a factor: a teacher that made it sound difficult ;)
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.
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!
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 !!!!
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!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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....
I studied Japanese at uni in Italy and I gave up to it after going to Japan and realizing that after 4 years of intensive learning and although I was one of the best students, I just understood about 30% of what was happpening around me. Plus I found Japanes people quite impenatrable, to be honest. Not that I didn't know about cultural differences beforehand but I found it quite overwhelming as a first-person experience. Oh, and one if not the worst obstacle was not the syntax as it happened to you, Luca, but the different readings that each kanji has.
Should of spent all the 4 years watching TV shows and playing games would have made more progress
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 ^^
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.
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.
It was uplifting ... seeing a great polyglot talking about his failure in one language gives me more courage to try and to not be afraid of failing.
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!
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.
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 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?
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!
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.
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
Three years ago I started learning german and japanese at the same time. At that time I didn't know anything about language learning, so I thought it wouldn't be that hard to start from zero with two languages. Apparently, I was wrong.
After three years I made a huge progress with german, I just received my B2 certificate. However, my japanese didn't go that well. I also received a certificate(N4) but it is really difficult for me to have an easy conversation and to understand native speakers. I was about to give up, but then you came out with this video, and i feel motivated again.
Thanks!
I hope we can both get fluent in japanese!!
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'm an italian 16 years old guy and started studying japanese when I was 14. I can perfectly understand that before you get the right mindset , making a sentence quickly Is very difficult. The point that helped me to reach the B2 level Is just listening many many japanese people, in every context. By doing this my mind changed slowly and began thinking in a completely reverse way. If you get used to, It will become more and more natural, and actually it's not as hard as It might look like, because the grammar turns out to be much easier compared to the italian one. Now as I got inspired by watching your videos, I started to study my 4th language, german! Hope I'll be like you someday😁👏👏👏
You started learning Japanese at 14 years old and your mind is still like a sponge. I don't think many adults would learn a language just by listening to it and then start thinking in it the way you did.
@@dappadondadda100 This theory is more or less debunked. The reason why children learn faster is they are less distract as adults, and spend more time learning the language. Actually adults learn faster in the same amount of time. Well, from a certain age on your learning speed is going a bit down. But the main reason is still the amount of time which you are able to dedicate for learning a language.
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.
I’ve lived in Japan for three years. The last year I’ve made a concerted effort to really learn after just dabbling at first. I use the Duolingo app and take Berlitz classes once a week, but it’s still not really enough. I don’t think I’ll ever be pera pera, or fluent, but I hope to one day have just a basic conversation. You really have to learn the kanji while learning to speak, never mind there are three levels of politeness to master. Plus what you learn in the apps and classes is not really how people talk to each other. Some Japanese revel in speaking super fast and in a kind of abbreviated code Japanese. It’s truly daunting but somehow I can’t give up on this. I never planned to live in Japan and I never desired to learn this language but here I am. Life is funny.
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
It’s nice to see that Luca, the language learning machine, is a human as well. :D I also appreciate your honesty. It’s not always easy to speak about your failures publicly.
Personally, I failed to learn Russian. I had a crush on a Russian girl who was an intern in my town. We hit it off and had a few dates, which sparked my interest in the Russian language. I was extremely motivated to learn. I studied Russian first thing in the morning - I listened to songs, read a lot and worked my way through an online course.
Since Russian is very close to my mother tongue (Czech), it was quite easy after I had mastered Cyrillic. Suddenly, I was able to understand a lot of content without ever having studied the particular words before.
Sadly, it didn’t work out between the two of us. We parted company with each other and my motivation dropped.
Now I’m learning Spanish, which I’ve had a burning desire to learn since I was twelve. I hope I’ll stay on track.
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'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.
Repetition is especially important in getting Japanese to remain in your brain. Kudos to you for studying it.日本語の勉強を頑張ってください。
Great video!! I failed mandarin due to poor strategy. This time I’m learning in a different way!
My Mom went to Japan not speaking the language for work. She cried when she got lost in the subway and nobody could help her for hours. But when she finally found her bearings, it was probably the happiest time of her life. She worked in the farms in Gunma. She had to deal with bears in the mountains but she loved the farms, especially the flower farms. It took her less than a year to be fluent. (Or at least she can navigate through conversations for all her needs - shopping, dealing with the farmers, etc.) I think she stayed there for more than ten years.
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.
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.
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.
Hello Luca, since beginning to learn your beautiful language I have filled three large spiral bound books with Italian phrases, snippets and grammar points. Now I will sit down for a big meal and digest them all. This is the way I learn. ( it's a personal thing, I don't enjoy small talk ) i.e. after introducing myself, getting a drink and saying the sun is shining, then what else...frustration !... But I feel I am getting there little by little. Many thanks for your great videos !
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
I've been studying Japanese since March, so...eight months. I feel like I'm making a lot of progress, but wow, there is so much to it. Not only the usual tasks associated with learning a new language, such as vocabulary acquisition, learning grammar, etc., but also learning three writing systems, differing levels of politeness, words that are used in writing but are not used in speech, loan words as opposed to native Japanese words, being indirect rather than direct, etc. I could go on! Why I ever picked this as my first attempt at learning a foreign language, well...I don't know, but I've always been attracted to Japanese and dabbled in it on and off through the years, and finally decided to get serious about it last spring and signed on with an iTalki teacher, who is wonderful. It's actually so reassuring to hear other people's struggles with Japanese in particular, as it makes me realize maybe I'm not doing so badly after all. The weird thing about Japanese is that it's mostly very logical. It's just remembering which version/stem of the verb you're using, where to stick the tense in the sentence, whether you're being formal or casual...well, you get the idea! lol
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
I'm an Italian native as well. For my first one and a half years, I ended up grinding vocabulary Anki decks and trying to study grammar. I felt like I wasn't going anywhere, even simple text like NHK Easy was too hard to read.
Unhappy with my results, I found out about AJATT and the input hypothesis: for the past year and a half I've tried a method similar to it (but in a very lighter capacity to what is recommended since I'm a grown adult with life obligations) and I'm blown away by the progress. I'm starting to be able to read simple novels and follow some heavy text videogames, and I've gotten to the point where I can enjoy a 50 minutes TV series episode each evening without it being a chore from pausing and looking up words too much. I can even look up grammar videos in Japanese!
Considering so much more of my input is getting comprehensible, I feel like in one to two years' time I will have reached basic fluency and be able to pick up new words and grammar without having to look them up.
You wouldn't have reached that level - if it's true - without the 1.5 years of studying grammar before though. It might have felt frustrating, but it's the core fundament.
muchas felicidades por los 100, 000 suscriptores .. saludos desde Peru
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.
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!
@@soyoltoi When?
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
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?
I failed at Japanese, but then, after ten years, started again, this time from another angle. Now I am doing well. Try the Genki series.
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.
Parabens pela honestidade.
Je suis brésilien et j'apprends le français par moi-même.
I choose this one between romance languages but i have had a hard time last 6 months. It's great to see you face challenges.
”行きたいの、東京。美しいって。"
すごい！
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...
@@mochikkochiizu Way too long. Shouldn't the predicate be at the end of the sentence?
Hi, Luca, I had the same feeling of Chinese Assimil, the book begins using many questions. Instead of using a simple and descriptive language. To move on to more complex structure. I am using Assimil (French) for Persian. It is precisely a good example of simple beginning. I have felt very identified with your words.
Japanese grammar is the most underrated aspect of the language in terms of difficulty.
kanji is tougher for some people tbh.the same character reads differently when paired with another character..and there's onyomi and kunyomi too
When I was a lower intermediate I loved learning with できる日本語。the illustrations are cute, it builds the syntax into your head extremely efficiently in an easy an fun way, and the audio recordings are cute and there’s clearly been efford made to make the actors sound natural when speaking, unless a lot of other Japanese textbooks.
*unlike a lot of other Japanese textbooks.
Also there’s a lot of speaking activities
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 :)
My language failure was French. I study it for many years and just got frustrated. I found I could pronounce the words easily and was getting the grammar correct, but the failure was in remembering to spell the words correctly by including the parts I didn´t have to say out loud. I have learned more Spanish (and German) in 3 years than any French I learned in nearly 20 years. Now, that being said, there is a new coworker I have that is bilingual and he said he would have no problem helping me with French if I decided I have enough time to try again. Thanks for the video. Your videos are always informative!
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:
ruclips.net/video/Rj8bxm0fERw/видео.html
Totally agree with your points. Those are the same hurdles I hit and lessons I learned through my experience.
Glad you agree =)
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 RUclips 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?
esotericpig ipo o o o o
esotericpig o o o op lo o por lo o
oooo
I’m determined to succeed and this video just gave me the kick I needed today, good luck my dude.
Luca Lampariello you are so smart and cute :-)
Vincenzo Filacaro yeah 😎 he is Smart Vincenzo.
Sounds like a gay comment.
What's the big deal about it?
Gay people are in internet as well.
Did you know?
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.
Congrats for the 100k
Interesting explanation of the so-called left-branching structure of Japanese (in contrast to the right-branching structure of English) - which in turn explains why Japanese people struggle with English so much: For them, it must be the same experience, just in the opposite direction.
that's true. English doesn't have three alphabets tho lol
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago That's true as well, though my impression is that Japanese people don't expect you to master those writing systems unless you want some language proficiency certificate.
@@aishasamiha1747 I guess you are right then
@Aisha Samiha Indeed it's a real struggle for them, according to Education First which administers English proficiency tests all over the world, Japan is categorized as a 'low proficiency' country. They are lower than China, South Korea and Vietnam.
@@noseboop4354 wow really. That's interesting
Hey Luca it’s Joey we met in Monte verde some years ago. This exact problem happened to me and put a brick wall in front of my polyglot game. But since then I’ve gone back and I’ve found that if you start by studying the hell out of kanji breaking down radicals and understanding all the little symbols within each character (for example flower plus fire equals fireworks etc) then you take a patient approach to it and then after you get a super solid foundation then you can start worrying about manipulating the language.