How many people got the reference behind why I used the Pokemon clips??? First person to properly explain the reference gets a high five. NOTE: Something I should have mentioned in the video is that not all persistent puzzles are caused by a word or structure having an underlying "core concept" that unifies all usages. Although this is often the case, there are also cases where a persistent puzzle is caused by a word or structure actually having multiple unrelated meanings. In these cases, the key to solving the puzzle is learning to use context to determine which meaning is being used (which will happen over time through immersion).
Ohh it's a reference to HM moves which gym leaders give you when you get their badge, those structures likes tress and rocks can be broken afterwards opening a new path on places you already visited before. Very clever, Matt
Most of the clips seem to use HMs to expose locations which initially are unreachable but may be seen early on in the game. It's only until you push further in the game and acquire the specific HMs are you able to go back and access these locations. The HM-only areas resemble persistent puzzles and acquiring the HMs later in the pokemon journey is analogous to filling in the rest of "puzzle". (??)
Yeah 😂, I usually just understand the meaning of the phrase the word takes part in. Or the individual meanings or words and how the grammar structure effects it when learning structures it isn’t that hard for Romance languages.
Fun fact: while Japanese "kakeru" has couple of dozen of meanings, English "run" has couple of... HUNDREDS. The highest number I've found is 645 meanings but this number varies based on sources. The next word "set" has more than a hundred as well
Even just stuff like "from" or "well" can really have tons too, maybe not stuff you'd find in a dictionary, but they can really change the meaning of a sentence, give it a sarcastic tone etc. Sometimes think English needs kanji for words like "well" or "set" to differentiate its many meanings 😂
Not exactly true, they have to be followed or be prior to it in order to make out the different morphological meanings as in: run away, run down, run up, run off, run over (something), run amok, … and so on, As for the initial word run, I could think of just seven meanings without other words: (Physically go fast) (To lead/take charge of (some group most likely)) (A round/match of a game (probably in some dungeon game most likely) (To turn on (a computer or a car most likely)) (a race) (an act of running (like some do in the morning) (A test (referring to test runs))
Native Japanese here. Hmmm, as always very interesting video, Matt! Here's my two cents. One such persistent puzzle in English might me the word "put." I mean it's such a simple word, but so versatile, like the Japanese かける. Put something on, put something off, put up with something, put something on the table, put something into words etc. etc. I mean, the struggling English learner can go insane! And indeed for any language learner this type of word might appear like puzzles, especially at the beginning, but I suspect these aren't really puzzles at all. At least not in the common sense of the word. I think all one needs to do--and which comes with time, with countless hours of studying and immersion and spending time with the target language--is just to memorise each and every use of the word, one by one. That's it, really. Because in the end there is no logic behind it, no magic key which solves these "puzzles." Even Japanese people use the word かける correctly, not because they have solved any puzzle or possess some secret key, but because they have internalised each and every use of this word from childhood.... At least that's what I think. Keep up the good work! 👍
English is particularly bad about having verbs with countless meanings since it has phrasal verbs. For example, "to give" and "to give up" are entirely unrelated words/phrase, so as you said you just have to memorize that when you add "up" after "give" you don't get a new saying involving give, you get a new word that you need to learn.
@@bobboberson8297 You're right. But in the case of English, it's not just phrasal verbs. Take, for example, the word "to run." To run an errand, to run late, to run a campaign, to run a tight ship, to run a temperature, to run a debt etc. etc. The original meaning of run (to move on foot at a fast rate) has often been completely lost. This is, in many ways, exactly like the Japanese かける. One simply has to learn all of these phrases, one by one... And yeah, Japanese has TONS of them, too!
Definitely the 了 particle in Chinese. Every time I think I have a grasp of it, it’ll come up in a situation where I never would have thought to use it.
That's interesting. As a native speaker, ＇了＇is extremely common and we don't really think about when using it, but it really doesn't have a English replacement for it huh.
Never in my language learning life have I encountered someone who can so accurately and succinctly articulate the realizations that have been bubbling under the surface of my awareness, in my case, while reaching fluency in mandarin. I truly believe that Matt's baseline level of intelligence and insight have been a big boost in his own language learning, as I've found that while immersion is indeed necessary, that doesn't preclude analytical/higher level conceptual breakthroughs from serving as speed boosters on the path to mastery.
"Doch", "mal", "wohl" and other modal particles in German, that are used to reflect the mood or the attitude of the speaker and to highlight the sentence's focus.
I have trouble with this as well. I also have trouble with particles like im, am, um, zu, and ab, and the existence of separable verbs don't make it any easier either. I still have no clue why "Bist du noch im Bett am liegen" is correct whereas "Bist du noch im Bett liegen?" isn't. What purpose "am" has in the sentence is a puzzle to me in of itself.
@@CassieCollision I'm fluent in German too. "Bist du noch im Bett am liegen" is not grammatically incorrect, but it sounds very unnatural. A German would say, "Liegst du noch immer im Bett?" But yes, "Bist du noch im Bett liegen" not only sounds very unnatural, it's also grammatically incorrect.
@@CassieCollision I think "am" here symbolizes that you're "doing" lying. Like how you're playing piano, but with lying. Lying is a thing we're doing, while piano is an instrument we're playing. So it's something like "Are you still (doing) lying on the bed?", where "am" means "doing". I hope this makes sense and helps you to understand better the function of "am" here
@@CassieCollision Even though im German, I don't really know why "am" is an essential part of this sentence but I know that it must be there. In these situations I always remember the german saying "Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache" ("German language, difficult language")
I never realized that persistent puzzles were that until now, I just thought certain verbs were confusing and I focused way too hard on them haha thanks Matt
I remember the first language puzzle I solved. It was the Japanese word こと, which means "the matter". I looked at the sentences containing it and wondered why it was there. What's the matter with the matter they are discussing here? Isn't every sentence about at least one matter anyway. The word seemed to pop in and out seemingly at random. I remember one sentence in Bakemonogatari that had 3 こと in it, I thought I was going crazy. Then it finally clicked why I wasn't able to solve it, no matter how much I focused on trying to understand that one sentence/Anki card. こと meant "the matter we discussed/are discussing", which means it is a callback to something said one or two sentences earlier, I couldn't understand it by just focusing in on one sentence alone.
@@jamm6_514 Sure, 'matter' and 'thing' are kinda synonyms in English. "Remember that thing/matter that happened yesterday?" But this isn't about vocab, it's more about grammar. To understand what kind of sentences uses that word to express what kind of relation. The words 物/事/様 all work pretty much identical when referring to some generic thing/event/topic. They can even be used interchangeable or totally omitted when it's clear from context what the thing is you are talking about. ⽩い物は、かわいい。& ⽩いのは、かわいい。 both mean "That white thing is cute". There's nothing wrong if you want to translate koto as "thing" in your head. As long as you understand what kind of things it usually refers to. I'll give you an example: Look up 贅沢 [luxury, extravagance] in a Japanese-to-Japanese dictionary and you get the definition 物事 に 金銭 や 物 など を 使う こと。 That thing¹ where you use money or things² etc. on things³. Here 物事 are all the things³/products/service that it is possible to get. 物 are all the things²/valuables/favors you can use instead of money to get something. こと is the thing¹ the sentence is talking about, the word/ definition/the concept of luxury.
Hi. I studied linguistics with a focus on second language acquisition at uni. The immersion-based advice is great for some. But if this way of phrasing it doesn't work out for you, don't worry. There are lots and lots of ways to get over this in a way that works for your learning style. One way is treating words and concepts you don't quite understand as chunks. Instead of getting hung up on the 1000 English translations, learn how to say the thing you want to say as a chunk. That you use 掛ける when talking about putting you glasses on. That's one chunk. The next time you come across something with it, that's another chunk. Memorise them separately. Put the entire phrase into anki, write it down, make an exercise out of it where you make as many sentences with that word/concept as you can, whatever works for you. The goal is just to trick your brain into not getting overwhelmed by tackling it one chunk, phrase, word, or concept at a time. How you do that is entirely up to you.
I think in Korean, something akin to your kakeru is 내다 - it has 31 English definitions, but most of them can be abstractly boiled down to ‘making something come out from something else’. But even viewing the word through that lens, in a lot of sentences, you have to abstract it down really really far in order to apply that meaning. It’s easy when coming across a persistent puzzle like 내다 at the beginning of your studies to think “ugh, 31 definitions for one word?? Why does Korean have to make things so complicated?” but one eye-opening thing I realised a while ago is that actually, the better question would be: “why does English need 31 definitions for something that’s able to be communicated and understood as one singular concept in Korean?”. Makes you think.
@@thorbergson not really. every human is born with the same capabilities for language, what you call as language is just traditions. you can choose any language and use words in any way you like. sometimes you see there are exact equivalents in different languages and sometimes there is none. if every language was fundamentally different, there would be no exact equivalents. please read more about language and don't think youtube is the place.
I'm not really learning Spanish (since I'm a native speaker), but the only Spanish persistent puzzle I can think of is that all inanimate objects and nouns, in general, have to be referred to by gender. So you have to use male or female pronouns depending on the noun, we native speakers don't think much about it, but when asking some of my family members they didn't know why we do that. Kind of funny how a month into studying my third language I start to notice interesting things about my native one.
Estoy aprendiendo español, y no pienso que el género de las palabras es un persistent puzzle, porque ya puedo entenderlo. Una palabra que me da problemas es "quedar". No sé cómo usarlo y que significa en muchos casos.
Como nativo es prácticamente imposible adivinar cuáles son los puzzles persistentes (jaj) de tu propio idioma. También dependen mucho del idioma nativo del estudiante. Mi madre es eslovaca, y en los idiomas eslavos el uso de los artículos (LA mesa, EL cuchillo) es muy diferente a su uso en el español. A pesar de hablar español muy bien, y por más de 20 años, esto es algo que sigue sin ser 100% capaz de usar correctamente. El uso del subjuntivo es otro persistent puzzle muy común. La palabra "poner" puede serlo también.
The japanese word 心 (kokoro) is actually similar to this, it's usually translated as "heart" but it can also mean "mind" and "spirit". It's not the physical heart either which is 心臓 (Shinzoo). The thing is that kokoro is more like the core of a person or their essence in a way but in translation in english for example we would never say it like that because "you speak from your heart" is something many english-speaking people can understand, but speaking from the essence or inner core is a very foreign concept.
I can't really think of a great example in Swedish but one that trips up English native speakers for ages is all the words for "before". To a Swede, it's weird that we express so many different concepts with just one word. Off the top of my head I can think of 5 Swedish words that we'd replace with "before", so a lot of English speakers who don't immerse enough end up just picking one at random for the rest of their life.
Your way of presenting an abstract concept so clearly and concisely is truly impressive! Japanese learners of the English language struggle with lots of those persistent puzzles as well.
Have you read about the lexical approach? I've been thinking about it lately, & I think it helps explain both the problem described in this video, and your ideas about language being 'not like math' & 'highly specific in arbitrary ways.' The basic idea (as I understand it) is that whereas second language learners tend to learn grammar by rules, natives have actually just acquired hundreds of thousands of individual phrases & sentences (aka lexemes), which they recombine & swap out words to say what they want to say. (Obviously natives acquire rules/patterns too, at last to some extent, but lexemes are primary in their actual use of the language.) Thus, the reason it takes so long to acquire these "persistent puzzles," is that you actually have to acquire individual examples of all the multiple use cases. For a concept that exists in your native language, you've already done that work once, & your brain can more or less map the new word/concept to the old one. But for concepts that don't exist in your native language, all that work has to be done from scratch. (Perhaps the conscious sense of there being a "core meaning" at all, is just an emergent phenomenon, with the "real" underlying unconscious representation being all these individual instantiations?) This would also explain why thousands of hours of immersion is the only way to reach near-native fluency - unless you're going to make anki cards for hundreds of thousands of sentences, with cloze deletions for every single word, how else are you going to acquire all those lexemes?
I think that makes sense, at least on a quick glance. I found Matt's explanations of the tricky grammar points made perfect sense and they were very easy to understand. On the other hand, the 25 jisho search results are daunting and feel clear as mud. Something must be going on here.
Imho you simoly shouldn't try to map Japanese to English. Sure you can do that for concrete nouns and scientific norms, but for stuff like 掛ける it just doesn't work that well. Sure it means to hang up/put on to, but it also has like 40 different definitions in Japanese dictionaries. My personal experience is that immersion solved all doubts and questions on it's own. Although knowing a single core meaning (to be able to challenge your input against it) is helping a lot.
Korean also has an infamous, super similar は/が curse in its particles itself. 은/는 are taught as the topic particles, while 이/가 are taught as the subject particles. A lot of learners don’t know when to use which. Beginner learners cry over this just like how Japanese learners cry over は/が. Unfortunately, as a Korean-American, I am unable to empathize with their suffering. ;)
*Watches a lot of Anime* Subconcious-kun: I solved the puzzle for you. Me: Huh? when the fuck did you do that? Subconcious-kun: 4 months ago. Me: Why didn’t you tell me? Subconcious-kun: Because I’m busy solving puzzles.
I’m learning Yemenite Arabic and I’ve experienced so many phrases that simply don’t translate into English For example: ما عليك وانا (ma A’laik wana) which literally means “what’s on you, and I am….” It makes no sense word wise so I just remember it means “don’t worry I can take care of myself. Another phrase is ايك ساعك (ayak s’Ak) which until today I don’t know what the two words mean. I just know the phrase means leave room for the meal or like don’t stuff yourself there’s still more food
This is exactly what I needed, I've done dedicated grammar study before immersion learning but recently thought I was an idiot for still not understanding it all and was contemplating redoing the grammar study again, now I will put more trust in immersion. Also, the editing is brilliant :)
Yeah, I think grammar is useful, but only after doing a considerable time of immersion. Kids don't learn grammar until they've had like 6 years of immersion in their native language. Doing grammar without knowing the language didn't work for me, it made no sense until after I got more familiar with my target language.
This video is a great illustration of one of the biggest problems faced when learning a language by comprehensible input! The answer to any problem is almost always more comprehensible input. However, weirdly as humans we don’t like this answer, despite it being the easier option to learning something new to overcome a problem. I also think it’s one of the reasons it’s hard to persuade people to learn through comprehensible input, as they almost always want specific answers to specific problems and don’t just want to hear “‘more comprehensible input!”
my target language is Japanese then Russian. How difficult is Russian? I’m worried I have start start all the way from 0 just how I did with Japanese because of how much I forget
Same, I learn Finnish (and used to learn Japanese, but sadly stopped), but a lot of what he's talking about is touching upon universal struggles of language learners. Even topics like pitch accent are found in many other languages, too, e.g. Swedish, and the tips for learning and conditioning oneself to hear it are applicable when learning those other languages as well.
@@ht1ps555 did you end studying it? what is your native language? what's difficult about Russian for one person might be natural for another. In general it's the cases and aspects that people find hard. There's also the changing stress patterns, verbs of motion and verbal prefixes, and nuances in word order that can be a hurdle. To give you an idea, my first language is French and at university, our Russian grammar teacher started his first lecture by telling us "as everyone knows, Russian grammar is the most difficult in the world". It has this reputation among some people, but I think that's nonsense. From my perspective and in my opinion, Russian is "only" moderately difficult.
Matt's analogies are so good and accurate for language learning and honestly in my opinion the best in the language learning community. Not only is it easy to understand but it also directly explains the topic to a perfect level.
Thank you for explaining this very important concept beautifully. I never would have thought to word it like this, but it’s extremely well done. For Spanish: - the use of the reflexive pronoun “se” - the appropriate use of dual reflexive pronouns. - knowing when to use the preterite ve imperfect past tense forms - knowing when to use the subjunctive. All of these took many months for me to comprehend fully and intuitively, and I still get them wrong sometimes.
Not gonna lie, I’m a native spanish speaker and while i can use all of those correctly i couldn’t tell you how. Hell i even had to look some up to see what they were referring to
I'd add to your list of Spanish persistant puzzles - - Generaly knowing the appropriate situations to use each specific past present or future tense (as opposed to specifically just past preterite vs. past imperfect) - Knowing how to use the indirect pronouns intuitively and correctly (god, that was so hard and strange when I first encountered it, but I think I'm starting to get it) - Ser vs. Estar (even though that one takes less time to grasp intuitively, it still is quite challenging for quite some time) My native language is Hebrew, so both the indirect pronouns and the different tenses within past, present and future are quite challenging for me!
Great video with amazing points!! I've been learning Korean for 5 years, and I got a good understanding of how to use 이/가, 을/를, and 은/는 after about a year and a half. But then about 3 years later, I started to get confused about it again because I noticed how natives would use it. They would sometimes take out 이/가 (similar to わ in Japanese, correct?), and I beat myself up for not understanding that for a week or so. But afterwards I took the approach of just immersing and seeing how they use it, and over time I just naturally figured out how they used it like the native Koreans. Again, love the video!! I like that you did it in your style too. 😇
Completely agree with how you described it. I also like to think of it as the "image" that people of that language have in their head when describing reality. This is another reason why I find it valuable to listen to how speakers of your target language (i.e. Japanese) speak in your native language (i.e. English). In the example of 掛ける at 4:36 , I could imagine a situation where a Japanese person *might* possibly say "The issue was placed on (or put on) the meeting." It would sound strange to us, but not because the words or grammar are wrong. The concept isn't even incorrect, not if you think about it. It's just because that's not the precise "image" English speakers have in their heads when talking about discussing something in a meeting (at least Americans in the 21st century). I feel like this is probably a big reason why I love languages. Like the blind man example you used, different languages describe reality from different "angles", and it's really cool to notice your own "angle" in your native language. Just my thoughts on the matter, sorry for the rant 😅
An intermediate persistent puzzle in German is the use of the dative case in various everyday phrases that don't seem to make sense in English. A very advanced one is particles such as "schon". I've been learning German for three years and I don't really understand the use of schon.
This was one of the best videos I have watched, the HMs being displayed and used as well as some of the *meanings* behind the word 掛ける were very carefully thought out and its awesome. Great video.
I found that the most difficult persistent puzzle is に. It's a very subtle trap - it seems like you can just think of it as "in" or "for", and it will work in 90% of the sentences, but it sometimes means something like "by" and it's practically impossible for a beginner to tell the meanings apart: "私は日本語をあなたに教えたい" -> I want to teach you Japanese, "私は日本語をあなたに教えて欲しい" -> I want you to teach me Japanese. It seems like just random things flip the meaning of に. EDIT: I can't even find any grammar guides\explanations that emphasize this case. A lot of them call に the "target particle", which very well can throw off a lot of people in cases like this.
掛ける is really difficult, but I realized that this problem would eventually be solved because I’ve been through a learning process with English already. You native English speakers have no idea how hard it is to grasp the meaning of phrasal verbs like ‘get’, ‘take’, ‘put’, ‘set’, ‘hold’… These videos are just unbelievably amazing. Gets me excited every time I watch a new one.
This helps understand a fundamental flaw in learning any language. Nobody is asked to define hello, ... until they reflect on their native language when they learn konnichiwa literally means "today" from the full original greeting "kon nichi wa ogenki desu ka?" Which means "how how you today." In fact, a good way of looking at it is how native English speakers don't learn english the same way they learn a foreign language in school. And despite the abysmal grammar and lackluster academics of understanding word meaning, most will demonstrate fluency in English conversations. It's an interesting contrast to the studious high school / college student who still struggles with a foreign language years into beginning it.
Matt you are a huge inspiration to me! I have been watching your videos and have been a subscriber for around 3-4 years now and I have a lot of my success in learning Japanese is a result of finding your channel. I have had countless amazing memories because of what you do. I have never commented before, but I wanted to let you know the impact you have had on my life. Keep going strong!
In Tagalog, an early persistent puzzle is understanding when to use ang, ng, and sa pronouns. The general grammar of sentences is distinct from any non-Filipino language, so it takes a long time for the structure to really click. A later persistent puzzle is when to use which affixes. I would say "nag-uusap sina Andrea at Sam", but "nakikipag-usap tayo," if I'm referring to myself and the listener. These cases pop up everywhere, when you'd think a simple verb will be appropriate but actually there are several common affixed forms and you still need to learn when each one is used. These pop up constantly, even after two years of speaking Tagalog every day.
Congrats on 100k!! And also, you instantly gave me a confidence in myself that I have never had since the beginning when it comes to these persistent puzzles so now I can enjoy my immersion more! You really are a genius Matt, thanks for everything.
Its easy if you try to think in the language youre learning, Ive struggled for many time with english because I was always translating to my native language, when I start to conversate with myself and think in english my fluency level steps further beyond a new level. This also applied when I was learning spanish, german and russian
A good example of a persistent puzzle in English is the word "the". It took me hundreds of hours of immersion to get when you use it and when not to even though I've seen explanations of how to use it many times and it seems simple. Very few non-native speakers can use it correctly if you pay attention to it. I've gotten a pretty good intuition for it now, but can still be unsure whether I should use it in some cases
This is the most helpful language learning video I have found. I’ve tried learning Japanese 3 times in the past but gave up every time out of frustration and feeling I was too stupid. I’m currently learning Mandarin and I’m doing a lot better after following the Refold method and watching Matt’s videos. I wish someone had told me these things years ago, I may have become fluent in Japanese by now. If I am successful in my Mandarin studies, maybe I’ll return to Japanese one day.
@千本桜 I’ve gotten farther in Mandarin than I have in Japanese that’s for sure. I can understand most of A1 & A2 grammar, some from B1. I can comfortably read 400 characters. I have no idea how many words I know but I can kind of follow along with kids shows if I pause and relisten. It’s a slow process because of the tones complicating things though. I haven’t studied at all for the past month because I had other hobbies I wanted to do and didn’t have time for both but I’m getting back into it.
This is fantastic. I have some advice for others that is quite similar to the message of this video. For learners still struggling with understanding sentences, do your best to increase your verb vocabulary. It will help you identify structure of sentences when you hear them, and knowing verbs helps a whole lot in getting a sense of what the sentence is trying to say. It helped me a lot!
When I started learning Japanese at university we were introduced to the は、が particles and after a while it drove me nuts so I kept talking to my teacher about them and the difference between 思う、考える and they explained how the feeling of each word was different. 思う being more grounded in the heart while 考える was more from the brain. は、が we’re explained as topic and subject markers and I didn’t really understand. After some time I realized that the particles themselves had different feelings and emphasis on the sentence as well. As I have immersed in mainly audio recordings I have definitely picked up more and more on the nuance with the help of voice acting that you do not get in textbook recordings. If anyone else has too much empathy like I do, try to feel the words and meaning with emotions and heart, shut off your brain a bit and things will click easier. No idea on how to deal with the ambiguity being too high when reading though. In listening high ambiguity is easier to deal with in my opinion as you can tell when emotions are there and fill in the gaps but. Anyways. Great video and I hope everyone is doing well!
It's like the verb "faire" in french which it's probably used in more than 100 expressions. Like "Fais voir" literally meaning "go make see" which actually means "let me see" and a lot of other examples as well.
My natives are Filipino and English, and so little to no similarity with Korean (my target). Here are two examples of persistent puzzles in Korean, or at least two which used to be unsolvable for me specifically. These are 내다 (Hiragana approximate: ねだ) and the very common grammar form ~서 (approx: そ). The first one, 내다, is a simple word, used all the time, but just like kakeru it has many English equivalents, 31 if you consult Naver's dictionary. But after I understood the basic meaning of "send forth" (still an inadequate equivalent), it became very easy to understand its usage without that feeling of vagueness. Plus, there's a similar word called 보내다 (approx: ぼねだ) that also has the same core meaning but is used in mostly the same way English uses "send" unlike 내다. 내다 also happens to be a verbal grammar form, and this basic meaning also applies there. The other one, ~서, was taught to me as having the meaning of "therefore," so understanding its usage in a sentence like 저는 늦어서 죄송합니다. (I'm sorry for being late.) was a no-brainer. But in another sentence like 조심해서 외출하세요 (Be careful therefore go outside...?) it made zero sense. This time, however, it was a website called HowtostudyKorean that saved my confused ass and explained this other usage of ~서. I totally agreee with Matt in this video. Edit: Someone else in the comments already mentioned the situation with 내다.
Being brought up bilingual then studying English and now studying Japanese, I've been thinking for a while about this. How even native speakers of your L2 fluent in your L1 can fail to explain some concept in the target language to you. Your metaphor, "The specific way that the world is divided up into concepts is fundamentally different for each language" is really on point. It's like a huge continent with a great variety of features and a lot of cities and smaller settlements being divided into counties. Sometimes the division is evident, like when you have a great river of mountain range, and most languages will do that concept similarly. And sometimes it's all arbitrary and fascinating how different the approaches are. And not a continent even, but some 3D thing like stars or constellations. From the perspective of your native language, you see, oh, twenty stars just randomly scattered through space. And then your L2 gives you a hyperspace kick in the butt to some planet from where you see they form a perfect design of a flower, and say "ah, now I see".
I kind of already realized this. There are certain verb forms in Spanish that, although they don't exist in any language I know, were immediately quite obvious to me in their function, while others are more confusing. I figured that, well, I'll just let them be a bit confusing and opaque, but just notice when they come up, and it'll sort itself out. The same phenomenon exists with kakeru-like words, where they seem to have tons of fairly unrelated and confusing meanings, but in reality are just a single concept I'm not yet grasping. And logically, for a word to be like that, it has to be pretty common. I just learn a couple of the meanings, enough to get in the ballpark of what the word is sort of about, and then just use context to understand and slowly start to comprehend it.
Spanish native speaker here. Back in the day it took me around ten years to "grasp" English. Now I'm studying Chinese through materials destined for English speakers. My mind is filled with grammar (which I love) in three languages, if you don't count my approaches to Korean before getting into Chinese. I don't know. I just enjoy the ride and listen to very good Taiwanese hip hop all the time. 😁 Some day it'll click and I'll be immensely happy.
I am a Brazilian native. Even though I speak fluent english and I still sometimes struggle with the prepositions at, in and on, specially in the context of locations. It is easier for me now, but I remember that it was very hard to grasp their differences.
Thank you Matt for being so intelligent and dedicated to helping us self-learners with your explanations. I'm learning German but get so much from your videos.
Linguistics is so fascinating. Untranslatable words with hundreds of near-miss translations. This is why it's a good rule of thumb to just accept the ambiguity and immerse more. I've changed my approach in Anki to now not fully understand words, and to at best, understand the single context I found a given word from immersion. This way I'm not spending 3,000 hours searching up definitions and racking my brain to figure out wtf I'm reading. A while ago, I tried making anki cards with only pictures as my definition, but I realized it took me way longer to remember anything. Now I latch onto an english definition, and accept the inaccuracies so I can finish the cards faster. That way I can get the truer meaning from more immersion, and less straining in Anki. Sometimes it takes trying and failing a seemingly good theory to realize the first method was fine. Translating Japanese into Mentalese seemed like a better way to learn cards, but my lack of experience with new words made it get in the way of being able to quickly assess whether I was right or wrong, thus hindering deliberate practice, thus taking time away from immersion. Immersion is so incredibly powerful, it's really hard to accept that it's often just better than most forms of study. Like, we want to study, but we end up digging a hole and wasting time.
It reminds me of the verb "have". I'm a native Spanish speaker, and it made kinda sense to me after years. In spanish we have "tener" (used in situations like "I have two dogs") and "haber" (an example is "I've been playing for a long time") I mean, I could easily understand "be", but "have" was like SOMETHING really weird for a long time. I'm happy I'm here now. I have a lot to learn yet, but I never thought it would be possible for me to even write a comment like this. And yeah, it probably has a lot of grammar mistakes, but at least I feel a little bit more confident with my English
You example of 掛ける made me think of the word 'read'. We can read between the lines, read the stars, a book, or even 'read' someone. A simple word, many distinct meanings.
This cheat sheet is excellent. As an intermediate learner, I was pretty lost on some of this (like かける), and it’s nice to have it finally properly introduced. The video is A+ too. This is why Refold is one of only two Patreons to which I’m subscribed.
This is exactly what I needed to hear. When I encounter one of these puzzles and can't understand them through immersion, I default to reading a grammar article about them and end up being more confused. I will try to put more faith in my immersion this time and hope for the best. Thanks as always Matt!
I’m learning Korean and I noticed early on that 는/가 had a larger concept beyond the grammar or syntax. I’m super curious so I tried to understand that. The way we organize ideas in English/Spanish is from this subject/object view of the world and that has implications beyond language while most Asian languages organize the world from a topic/comment perspective. Understanding information at that level really helped me. I also check the dictionary a lot, and when I notice a word with 20+ meanings I write it down, not to learn all the meanings but to remember I eventually need to figure out their core concept, 하다 is one of those. When we “enter” a language that has a completely different way to organize concepts is like entering a new dimension.
For English, one of those is hands down phrasal verbs (at least for a French), all those "give in", "give up", "give away", "come across", "come up". They are everywhere and they don't make sense. Why the hell does "throw up" means puke ? In French there's basically one verb for each of those meanings, most of the time with completely different roots. Not only that, but it's one of the area where the language is shifting the most, and a lot of linguistic innovation is related to a verb+particle. At some point you build an intuition for what a given verb+particle might mean, and even get the jokes that play with those meanings, but it takes some time.
Yeah, I can see that being a nightmare to learn haha! I guess with any of these words ,that seem to make no sense by themselves, learning them as a set phrase is the way to go. For a person, like me, who can't accept that and needs to know why something is the way it is all the time, I could see my self getting very frustrated to learn them sort of phrases, if I was learning English. The same thing happened with me and some parts of Japanese and what I found is it's just better to get familiar with the certain situations that these phrases are used in and then eventually over time you get a better sense of when to use them.
One time at a family dinner I brought up when is the right time to say "come down", "come up." I always thought it was random, as a native speaker. But some people actually factor in the geographical location, or they think that they do. "When's your friend coming up?" versus "When's your friend coming down?" (to visit). For me, I never thought about it. But for some, they actually factor in whether the friend is coming from a place that is north or south of the place. I then mentioned what happens if they're not north or south of you, and that got them annoyed lol.
@@cryan9137 this one is funny because not everyone uses "come up" and "come down" like that! this sometimes leads to confusion since when i hear "my friend is coming up to visit" i assume that the friend is coming from the south. so if i know the friend actually lives up north i might ask if they recently moved! also if the place isn't north or south then they might be "coming over"
I think Matt is completely correct here. For the last 7 months just on immersion using Refold and stuff from Olly Richards I’ve found that the stuff I couldn’t understand in the past I’ve begun to understand bit by bit. At first I couldn’t understand the simplest of Japanese and now I can be able to watch anime and tv shows without relying on subtitles and I’m picking up a lot of grammar that I just couldn’t before. And like Matt has mentioned it feels like you’re in the dark in the beginning, building everything together piece by piece like a jigsaw. Best I can say is to dump whatever you think you know about your previous language and start to build your understanding from the language itself, every language relies on its own rules that are completely different from the others. It feels like trying to build your own Operating System from scratch, it has the same functions as others but how you code it will be different, there will be some similarities but you cannot inject code from another OS and expect it to function the same way.
As someone fitting the description of being constantly worried about making so-called "basic" mistakes - this video was a godsend. It really puts things into perspective. The idea that contextual inference is the key to bridging conceptual gaps between languages, and to know that all we need to do is simply be aware of this, and be okay with the ambiguity we may encounter along the way is reassuring. Great video as always Matt!
5:11 I think a similar word in English is “get” in the most basic terms it obviously means “to receive” but it can be used to mean a lot of different things
Before immersion I actually kept in mind about how animism is heavily ingrained into the Japanese language and culture, the language is completely away from the ego 9 times out of 10 while English on the other hand basically has an egocentric view of the world which causes major differences.
Thanks indeed for the cheat sheet. It really crystallizes all the vague understandings I've been slowly developing over the years. I agree completely with the explanation in the video. As other people have commented, English has lots of these one-word-with-a-million-"definitions" -- think about "get" or "have".
Wow. Matt that was really good. I've been studying languages for all my life (42y/o now 🤟) and I have never listened to such a clear explanation for such a common problem for lunguage learners. Amazing job. Btw....for Chinese Mandarin learners I guess the biggest persistent puzzle is probably ”了“.
I'd say for those learning English, based on my experience as a teacher, phrasal verbs that use "get" are among the persistent puzzles. Having acquired Spanish, reflexive verbs and use of the verb "poner," which is sometimes used to express similar concepts as phrasal verbs using "get" in English, might qualify.
Lately one of my favorite immersion activities for reading are the 4k Tokyo walking videos all over youtube. I'm finally starting to make some sense of all the signs and advertisements. It's fun, engaging, and it's useful immersion since I'm trying to learn as much as I can before a trip.
Been binge watching Matt's videos. Just picked up japanese after 10 years of letting go. Love the whole immersion idea. Learned english this exact same way when I was a kid: mom used to watch everything with subs (in our native language, but 90% of people I know used to watch the dubbed version), english songs, then MMORPGs (ever got scammed by someone on Tibia or MU? lol). And when me and my sister were like 4-5 we used to watch over and over the same 3 Disney VHS tapes that taught english using songs. I still don't know all the technical stuff about grammar and I still have a pretty strong accent, but it was all natural. I never sat down to actually study english. Gonna try to replicate this with japanese (but with way more intent and effort). Thank you for all the videos!
Thanks for the video and cheat sheet Matt. I think people tend to misunderstand the meaning of "basic" with "easy", basic meaning "of fundamental importance", it just happens to be easy sometimes. The way you teach is similar to the way my teacher does in trying to introduce core concepts and/or simply a single meaning for a word and move on with the journey, while also deeply valuing immersion and not depending on translations too much. The only difference being that my teacher is a native portuguese speaker like me, so the teaching can be a bit more modeled and better understood with the nuances and basic concepts we have in our language. I still do learn a lot of japanese through english, as there is a plethora of english material compared to portuguese material. Funny enough, even though I am very fluent in english, now that I started learning japanese through english is the time that I mostly go through english-portuguese dictionaries, even more than when I was learning english.
I am relatively new to your channel and as I have never studied Japanese I just knew about your existence passively. I needed to know why your reputation was so good and oh boy are you crystal clear and accurate when explaining these processes. This is partly talent but it is also evident that you have spent so much time studying and caring for languages. Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge, man. Subscribing has been an excellent idea.
Sometimes there are core meanings which are useful to identify, and may seem somewhat abstract if they have no one-to-one translation. But there are also times when a word is simply polysemous (has multiple separate meanings), and you shouldn't go into mental contortions trying to figure out a single 'core meaning'.
Russian has some of these too, and my mindset has generally been, "oh, I just haven't acquired all 20+ meanings of that word yet" -- but obviously the reality is there's no actual 1:1 equivalent at all. This realization takes so much 'pressure' off the process. Another great vid; thanks, Matt!
@@donpax8959 I can give you a couple of examples of persistent puzzles in Russian (I'm a Russian learner). The first is the choice of verbal aspect (perfective/imperfective), especially in the infinitive. I'll give a short explanation of what this is about. Most Russian verbs (e.g., 'to buy', 'to speak', 'to help' ..,) come in pairs, with one verb of the pair having perfective aspect and the other imperfective aspect. Losely speaking the imperfective verb describes an ongoing process ('I was buying', 'I was helping'....) or an action that happens regularly ('I always buy a packet of crisps on Sundays'), while the perfective one is used for instantenous actions or actions which produce some sort of result ('the bomb went off'; 'I bought an apple'). In practice, it's very complicated an ASAIK non-Slavic languages such as English don't really have a concept of aspect for verbs in the infinitive. For example, in English I could say 'I want to eat a sandwich', but in Russian to express 'to eat' you have to chose the aspect (yest' or s"yest'). When you say you want to eat, do you mean you want to be eating the sandwich (ongoing process) or you rather mean you want to be in the state of having eaten it up (and not being hungry anymore)? For an English speaker (or Italian speaker like myself, for that matter) this is impossible to answer, or he could answer he wants both things, because has never had to think in this way. But Russians would rather use perfective aspect in this case (ya khochu s"yest' buterbrod). There is a zillion of situations where an English speaker just has no intuition. Another example: I want to buy a new bag / I don't want to buy a new bag. In English 'to buy' stays the same in the two sentences, and it is inconceivable that it shouldn't stay the same, but in Russian the perfective verb is required in the first sentence (ya khochu kupit' novuyu sumku) but imperfective in the second (ya nye khochu pokupat' novuyu sumku).
two other very difficult points of Russian grammar (IMO), which might be called 'persistent puzzles', are 1. proper use of short forms of adjectives (eg krasivyy/krasiv, novaya/nova etc) and 2. choice between genitive and accusative after negated verbs.
@@luckyluckydog123 I think the things you named are not persistent puzzles. It's easy to understand them when you're doing input (so they're not persistent puzzles), it's just not so easy to use them in output (like "a/an" and "the" in English for Russian speakers, for example) Btw, don't forget there's also (poyest') that means pretty much the same as (s"yest') and you choose one or another depending on the context, hehe. German also has a similar thing, so it's easy to me to understand this concept in German, but it seems like Italian doesn't have verb prefixes like these
I started year 8 high school after moving to Australia with my family. It took me a few years after finishing high school until I was able to use all the grammar correctly and naturally. A lot of it came from media consuming and looking at how people use them. I am learning Japanese now. I find that Japanese’s grammar makes English’s grammar looks easy.
I'm deffo guilty of this common error. Thinking stuff I see all the time is simple, so when I see it used in a different way, or to mean something different; it really throws me.
Since you requested puzzles, here's coming from a 13-year Yiddishist and a 6-year Yiddish teacher (I will use transliteration for the ease of the majority): Like in English, many words have a bevy of meanings that highly depend on context. Verbs can also be radically different if you change one element. "Az" -> not "as" in English in the strictest sense, "Vos" -> can mean "what" but also "whatever" in some cases as well as a relative pronoun in some instances (velkhe, meaning "which", can also function as a relative pronoun in some instances). "Epes" -> Something, somewhat, a bit, "Nisht...keyn" -> not...any, not having...any. I can tell how experienced someone is at Yiddish based on how correctly they use this. "Aleyn" -> literally meaning "alone", but can also mean -self in an emphatic form. Got Aleyn - God Himself. fun zikh - of oneself. Fun zikh aleyn - of oneself (more emphatic). "Abi" -> Don't get me started with this one. "Azsh" -> "as much as", "all the way to..." or similar, but also used for emphasis in reaching a pivotal point. General patterns on how to correctly pronounce Hebrew and Aramaic origin words in Yiddish make for a puzzle in themselves. Not also to mention the differences they have in meaning between these languages. (Hebrew word for vehicle, "agala", is rendered in Yiddish as "agole", meaning "a hearse at a Jewish funeral"). And there are also cultural puzzles as well (perhaps a topic for another time?) Speaking too directly about something like death, illness or tragedy isn't wise, and if you do, you can buttress it with "may this not happen to you". Including various phrases to ward off the evil eye if you mention someone getting old or winning an accolade is a good habit to get into, even if you're with secular speakers.
This is actually really helpful, I’m learning spanish and I keep seeing “que”, along with some other words, being used in situations other than ‘what’ and ‘that’; and in situations where it doesn’t seem to mean anything but it’s there anyways, so I have no clue when to add “que” in my output. I’ve been frustrated that I still don’t understand what it means even though I feel like I should by now. This helped me understand that it’s not me, but it’s just a completely different concept than what I know in english, and it’ll come in time as long as I keep immersing
Learning Spanish too by the way and it is generally understood to mean "like this/like that" or "this way/that way". It could also translate to "so" in English and is even accompanied by "que". Of course, it can mean other things as well depending on how it's used. But hey, I don't wanna spoil since you will learn them in your immersion anyways. Good luck!
Nice, I like this style of video too. Your talking in the background with images and videos to illustrate your points. Good explanation of Japanese grammar and unusual word usage too. Great work Matt!
Honesly, as a Korean Native, Japanese is very intuitive and easy to learn. However, European languages including English were just way too hard. That's because East Asian languages and European languages are fundamentally different. For example, the concept and meaning of the most basic English words, such as "take", "get", "have", "put", "for", "on", "to" were very confusing and difficult to understand when I had to learn this language at elementary school. (we do not have any vocabularies that directly match to these words in Korean) However, the biggest challenge is not the part of vocabulary nor grammar in my opinion. It's the fact that the way we view the world is very different. (Imagine there's no cristianity in Europe. It'd be so difficult to draw how your culture would look like.) When you speak a language, there's always a culture involved, making certain expressions more proper and natural to be spoken in specific situations. Even though you say their language perfectly correctly in terms of grammar, not only will it feel awkward for native speakers but also they sometimes won't get you, unless you change the way you think as them. Of course these gap in perspective can be narrowed if you have interest in the culture of the language and hence take an effort to get much indirective experience, but if you are typical Koreans or Japanese who just have to learn English from public education, it's literally just hell.
I'm so glad Matt made this video! I know watching Darling in the Franxxx, there is some dialog that is so confusing, and then I'll look at the English sub translation (which I don't do often) and I'll wonder to myself why I couldn't figure that out. So this is important to remind us that language learning is a process, and not getting certain sentences doesn't mean we're idiots.
The Spanish "ya" is one of those words that seems to have a bunch different meanings in English, but is mostly just a single concept - it took me a while to figure that out. The funny thing is, that knowledge helped me get a sense of 了 in Chinese much more quickly than I would have otherwise, because it conveys a similar concept - all I had to do was make the connection.
Bro awesome vid, thanks! I've been trying to get my head around this for years so you just cut through all the confusion and gave me a lot of clarity on these never ending persistent puzzles. Please keep making videos! They're so informative and helpful - Azuss : )
Thank you Matt. I've struggled with how to reconcile the concept of a word with the handful of different English definitions given in a dictionary, such as Jisho. Your explanation gave me clear and lucid insight. Please consider writing a book on language acquisition theory with a focus on Japanese.
When I first started learning German, I always had difficulty with "wann", "wenn", "als", and "ob". "Wann", "wenn", and "als" can all mean "when", but are used in different ways than the English "when". And "wenn" and "ob" can both mean "if", but are also used in different ways. It took me a while to get it right.
Right now I feel like in Korean it is the use of the verb 되다. I have seen it in many sentences and I have written multiple to read but it seems to be so versatile and I just don't understand its wide use yet. I will get it eventually.
yet another great video, i was obsessing a little too much over some jp1k definitions and now i'll just chill out a bit and just get a general idea of the definition (even if it's a bit wrong) because immersion will teach me the proper "definition"
I am finishing my Psychology Ph.D. dissertation on second language acquisition based on the Comprehensible Input Theory Framework. I discovered your channel and your advice and methodology are really spot on. I'd love to send it to you when I'm done but great work on your content on language acquisition A+. (The study target language is Japanese)
I'm always amazed at how you can break down and then sum up so clearly the psychological issues of language learning. People who are learning a language (I assume most people watching) can't help but nod their head and say "mm" to themselves. (That looks weird now that I type that but whatever) Another great video, Matt.
It took me about 9 months to get to the thinking that “は” is for the subject and “が” is for the object so my thinking goes like “えっと、僕の日本語がちょっと下手と思ってけどまだこれから、流暢に喋られだろう“ (uh, I see my Japanese as a bit bad, but I’m still learning it, I may be able to fluently speak it eventually) now obviously I don’t think I typed what I wanted to type perfectly but I did try my best here, my only struggle when it comes to words is nouns and adjectives and verbs are easier for me to remember because I use them way more in small talk and I usually prefer to be alone though I socialize pretty well but I don’t go into full on 10-20 minute conversations with people, I usually have a quick chat and move on unless if it’s someone I’m interested in then I’ll try to be friends with that person. Anyway what I’m trying to say is I’m good with verbs, but nouns and adjectives are a struggle in learning vocabulary to me, the only time I use them is when I ask why like “なんで(名詞)？“ English: why (noun)? A situation I can use it in is like I see someone in a game build something dumb or unnecessary and I’m like ”なんでこの建物？ 要らないよ！“ English: why did you make this building? We don’t need it!”
Great video, using refold has helped me realize that understanding something in the language its supposed to be in makes it make so much more sense and easier. plus, congrats on 100k 🎉
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
How many people got the reference behind why I used the Pokemon clips??? First person to properly explain the reference gets a high five.
NOTE:
Something I should have mentioned in the video is that not all persistent puzzles are caused by a word or structure having an underlying "core concept" that unifies all usages. Although this is often the case, there are also cases where a persistent puzzle is caused by a word or structure actually having multiple unrelated meanings. In these cases, the key to solving the puzzle is learning to use context to determine which meaning is being used (which will happen over time through immersion).
A game that you are working on to help beginners to learn Japanese by some "compelling" content.
@@MrSuwaidiSama No, there is a very specific reference which you can get if you pay attention to the specific Pokemon clips I choose.
Ohh it's a reference to HM moves which gym leaders give you when you get their badge, those structures likes tress and rocks can be broken afterwards opening a new path on places you already visited before. Very clever, Matt
@@GuestExtreme YES! High five haha
Most of the clips seem to use HMs to expose locations which initially are unreachable but may be seen early on in the game. It's only until you push further in the game and acquire the specific HMs are you able to go back and access these locations. The HM-only areas resemble persistent puzzles and acquiring the HMs later in the pokemon journey is analogous to filling in the rest of "puzzle". (??)
This is such an old-school mattvsjapan video essay. Love it
Even the old school music too. It was almost nostalgic in a way
I love those kind of videos the most!
Ikr
Truuuu
These are my favorite MVJ videos, nice to see another!
"can't learn this one part of the language? learn it with this one easy tip!"
the tip: LEARN THE WHOLE REST OF LANGUAGE FIRST
😂😂. There's no magic formula
Yeah 😂, I usually just understand the meaning of the phrase the word takes part in. Or the individual meanings or words and how the grammar structure effects it when learning structures it isn’t that hard for Romance languages.
yeah thats pretty much all i got from this video to lol 🤣
You literally just have to roll with it until it “clicks”
Fun fact: while Japanese "kakeru" has couple of dozen of meanings, English "run" has couple of... HUNDREDS. The highest number I've found is 645 meanings but this number varies based on sources. The next word "set" has more than a hundred as well
I never thought of that, and so does “Up”
Most of those meanings are created by phrasal verbs, the word alone doesn't have too many (as far as I can think of)
Even just stuff like "from" or "well" can really have tons too, maybe not stuff you'd find in a dictionary, but they can really change the meaning of a sentence, give it a sarcastic tone etc.
Sometimes think English needs kanji for words like "well" or "set" to differentiate its many meanings 😂
It's like the verb "Faire" in french.
Or phrases in English with up and down.
Not exactly true, they have to be followed or be prior to it in order to make out the different morphological meanings as in:
run away, run down, run up, run off, run over (something), run amok, … and so on,
As for the initial word run, I could think of just seven meanings without other words:
(Physically go fast)
(To lead/take charge of (some group most likely))
(A round/match of a game (probably in some dungeon game most likely)
(To turn on (a computer or a car most likely))
(a race)
(an act of running (like some do in the morning)
(A test (referring to test runs))
Native Japanese here. Hmmm, as always very interesting video, Matt! Here's my two cents. One such persistent puzzle in English might me the word "put." I mean it's such a simple word, but so versatile, like the Japanese かける. Put something on, put something off, put up with something, put something on the table, put something into words etc. etc. I mean, the struggling English learner can go insane! And indeed for any language learner this type of word might appear like puzzles, especially at the beginning, but I suspect these aren't really puzzles at all. At least not in the common sense of the word. I think all one needs to do--and which comes with time, with countless hours of studying and immersion and spending time with the target language--is just to memorise each and every use of the word, one by one. That's it, really. Because in the end there is no logic behind it, no magic key which solves these "puzzles." Even Japanese people use the word かける correctly, not because they have solved any puzzle or possess some secret key, but because they have internalised each and every use of this word from childhood.... At least that's what I think. Keep up the good work! 👍
English is particularly bad about having verbs with countless meanings since it has phrasal verbs. For example, "to give" and "to give up" are entirely unrelated words/phrase, so as you said you just have to memorize that when you add "up" after "give" you don't get a new saying involving give, you get a new word that you need to learn.
@@bobboberson8297 You're right. But in the case of English, it's not just phrasal verbs. Take, for example, the word "to run." To run an errand, to run late, to run a campaign, to run a tight ship, to run a temperature, to run a debt etc. etc. The original meaning of run (to move on foot at a fast rate) has often been completely lost. This is, in many ways, exactly like the Japanese かける. One simply has to learn all of these phrases, one by one... And yeah, Japanese has TONS of them, too!
I can see why that would be so frustrating, one of them things that you never think of when you are native. Flawless English btw!
I was curious which English words/phrases would be persistent puzzles
@ElectronicWasteland very well put! (Another context for the word 'put' haha)
Definitely the 了 particle in Chinese. Every time I think I have a grasp of it, it’ll come up in a situation where I never would have thought to use it.
是的。我也觉得词“打”有点难了解。
for me, it's also anything related to past tense/completion - 了，过 etc.
i have absolutely 0 knowledge of chinese, but i think it's funny how my brain automatically just reads that as りょう
That's interesting. As a native speaker, ＇了＇is extremely common and we don't really think about when using it, but it really doesn't have a English replacement for it huh.
@@koray3774 りょう 료 了
Never in my language learning life have I encountered someone who can so accurately and succinctly articulate the realizations that have been bubbling under the surface of my awareness, in my case, while reaching fluency in mandarin. I truly believe that Matt's baseline level of intelligence and insight have been a big boost in his own language learning, as I've found that while immersion is indeed necessary, that doesn't preclude analytical/higher level conceptual breakthroughs from serving as speed boosters on the path to mastery.
I can't be the only one that gets a smile on my face when I see a new matt vs japan video when I open the youtube app.
Dude I missed this style; I was literally watching some of your old videos yesterday. GZ on the 100k man, you deserve it.
"Doch", "mal", "wohl" and other modal particles in German, that are used to reflect the mood or the attitude of the speaker and to highlight the sentence's focus.
I have trouble with this as well. I also have trouble with particles like im, am, um, zu, and ab, and the existence of separable verbs don't make it any easier either. I still have no clue why "Bist du noch im Bett am liegen" is correct whereas "Bist du noch im Bett liegen?" isn't. What purpose "am" has in the sentence is a puzzle to me in of itself.
@@CassieCollision I'm fluent in German too. "Bist du noch im Bett am liegen" is not grammatically incorrect, but it sounds very unnatural. A German would say, "Liegst du noch immer im Bett?"
But yes, "Bist du noch im Bett liegen" not only sounds very unnatural, it's also grammatically incorrect.
@@CassieCollision I think "am" here symbolizes that you're "doing" lying. Like how you're playing piano, but with lying. Lying is a thing we're doing, while piano is an instrument we're playing. So it's something like "Are you still (doing) lying on the bed?", where "am" means "doing".
I hope this makes sense and helps you to understand better the function of "am" here
@@CassieCollision Even though im German, I don't really know why "am" is an essential part of this sentence but I know that it must be there. In these situations I always remember the german saying "Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache" ("German language, difficult language")
Auf, auf is the other big one for me
I never realized that persistent puzzles were that until now, I just thought certain verbs were confusing and I focused way too hard on them haha thanks Matt
I remember the first language puzzle I solved. It was the Japanese word こと, which means "the matter". I looked at the sentences containing it and wondered why it was there. What's the matter with the matter they are discussing here? Isn't every sentence about at least one matter anyway. The word seemed to pop in and out seemingly at random. I remember one sentence in Bakemonogatari that had 3 こと in it, I thought I was going crazy.
Then it finally clicked why I wasn't able to solve it, no matter how much I focused on trying to understand that one sentence/Anki card. こと meant "the matter we discussed/are discussing", which means it is a callback to something said one or two sentences earlier, I couldn't understand it by just focusing in on one sentence alone.
You just saved me a headache. 😁 こと just came up today and I had the same initial thought.
あ、なる−（hikakin_mania）
isn't koto just "thing"
@@jamm6_514 Sure, 'matter' and 'thing' are kinda synonyms in English. "Remember that thing/matter that happened yesterday?" But this isn't about vocab, it's more about grammar. To understand what kind of sentences uses that word to express what kind of relation.
The words 物/事/様 all work pretty much identical when referring to some generic thing/event/topic. They can even be used interchangeable or totally omitted when it's clear from context what the thing is you are talking about. ⽩い物は、かわいい。& ⽩いのは、かわいい。 both mean "That white thing is cute".
There's nothing wrong if you want to translate koto as "thing" in your head. As long as you understand what kind of things it usually refers to. I'll give you an example:
Look up 贅沢 [luxury, extravagance] in a Japanese-to-Japanese dictionary and you get the definition
物事 に 金銭 や 物 など を 使う こと。
That thing¹ where you use money or things² etc. on things³.
Here 物事 are all the things³/products/service that it is possible to get.
物 are all the things²/valuables/favors you can use instead of money to get something.
こと is the thing¹ the sentence is talking about, the word/ definition/the concept of luxury.
Hi. I studied linguistics with a focus on second language acquisition at uni.
The immersion-based advice is great for some. But if this way of phrasing it doesn't work out for you, don't worry. There are lots and lots of ways to get over this in a way that works for your learning style.
One way is treating words and concepts you don't quite understand as chunks. Instead of getting hung up on the 1000 English translations, learn how to say the thing you want to say as a chunk. That you use 掛ける when talking about putting you glasses on. That's one chunk. The next time you come across something with it, that's another chunk. Memorise them separately. Put the entire phrase into anki, write it down, make an exercise out of it where you make as many sentences with that word/concept as you can, whatever works for you. The goal is just to trick your brain into not getting overwhelmed by tackling it one chunk, phrase, word, or concept at a time. How you do that is entirely up to you.
I think in Korean, something akin to your kakeru is 내다 - it has 31 English definitions, but most of them can be abstractly boiled down to ‘making something come out from something else’. But even viewing the word through that lens, in a lot of sentences, you have to abstract it down really really far in order to apply that meaning. It’s easy when coming across a persistent puzzle like 내다 at the beginning of your studies to think “ugh, 31 definitions for one word?? Why does Korean have to make things so complicated?” but one eye-opening thing I realised a while ago is that actually, the better question would be: “why does English need 31 definitions for something that’s able to be communicated and understood as one singular concept in Korean?”. Makes you think.
Yeah, Matt really put this well: "The specific way that the world is divided up into concepts is fundamentally different for each language".
@Michael Kemeter oh my god don't even mention that word in front of me hahah. i pray we both figure out 어쩌다 once and for all one day 😭 화이팅!
@@thorbergson not really. every human is born with the same capabilities for language, what you call as language is just traditions. you can choose any language and use words in any way you like. sometimes you see there are exact equivalents in different languages and sometimes there is none.
if every language was fundamentally different, there would be no exact equivalents. please read more about language and don't think youtube is the place.
@@深夜-l9f thanks, Captain Obvious
I'm not really learning Spanish (since I'm a native speaker), but the only Spanish persistent puzzle I can think of is that all inanimate objects and nouns, in general, have to be referred to by gender. So you have to use male or female pronouns depending on the noun, we native speakers don't think much about it, but when asking some of my family members they didn't know why we do that.
Kind of funny how a month into studying my third language I start to notice interesting things about my native one.
Estoy aprendiendo español, y no pienso que el género de las palabras es un persistent puzzle, porque ya puedo entenderlo. Una palabra que me da problemas es "quedar". No sé cómo usarlo y que significa en muchos casos.
Como nativo es prácticamente imposible adivinar cuáles son los puzzles persistentes (jaj) de tu propio idioma.
También dependen mucho del idioma nativo del estudiante. Mi madre es eslovaca, y en los idiomas eslavos el uso de los artículos (LA mesa, EL cuchillo) es muy diferente a su uso en el español. A pesar de hablar español muy bien, y por más de 20 años, esto es algo que sigue sin ser 100% capaz de usar correctamente.
El uso del subjuntivo es otro persistent puzzle muy común.
La palabra "poner" puede serlo también.
The japanese word 心 (kokoro) is actually similar to this, it's usually translated as "heart" but it can also mean "mind" and "spirit". It's not the physical heart either which is 心臓 (Shinzoo). The thing is that kokoro is more like the core of a person or their essence in a way but in translation in english for example we would never say it like that because "you speak from your heart" is something many english-speaking people can understand, but speaking from the essence or inner core is a very foreign concept.
I can't really think of a great example in Swedish but one that trips up English native speakers for ages is all the words for "before". To a Swede, it's weird that we express so many different concepts with just one word. Off the top of my head I can think of 5 Swedish words that we'd replace with "before", so a lot of English speakers who don't immerse enough end up just picking one at random for the rest of their life.
Är det 'före' och 'innan' du pratar om? Jag håller med om att det är svårt för de allra flesta som lär sig svenska. Vet du varför det är så?
Your way of presenting an abstract concept so clearly and concisely is truly impressive! Japanese learners of the English language struggle with lots of those persistent puzzles as well.
Have you read about the lexical approach? I've been thinking about it lately, & I think it helps explain both the problem described in this video, and your ideas about language being 'not like math' & 'highly specific in arbitrary ways.'
The basic idea (as I understand it) is that whereas second language learners tend to learn grammar by rules, natives have actually just acquired hundreds of thousands of individual phrases & sentences (aka lexemes), which they recombine & swap out words to say what they want to say. (Obviously natives acquire rules/patterns too, at last to some extent, but lexemes are primary in their actual use of the language.)
Thus, the reason it takes so long to acquire these "persistent puzzles," is that you actually have to acquire individual examples of all the multiple use cases. For a concept that exists in your native language, you've already done that work once, & your brain can more or less map the new word/concept to the old one. But for concepts that don't exist in your native language, all that work has to be done from scratch. (Perhaps the conscious sense of there being a "core meaning" at all, is just an emergent phenomenon, with the "real" underlying unconscious representation being all these individual instantiations?)
This would also explain why thousands of hours of immersion is the only way to reach near-native fluency - unless you're going to make anki cards for hundreds of thousands of sentences, with cloze deletions for every single word, how else are you going to acquire all those lexemes?
I think that makes sense, at least on a quick glance. I found Matt's explanations of the tricky grammar points made perfect sense and they were very easy to understand.
On the other hand, the 25 jisho search results are daunting and feel clear as mud. Something must be going on here.
Imho you simoly shouldn't try to map Japanese to English. Sure you can do that for concrete nouns and scientific norms, but for stuff like 掛ける it just doesn't work that well. Sure it means to hang up/put on to, but it also has like 40 different definitions in Japanese dictionaries.
My personal experience is that immersion solved all doubts and questions on it's own. Although knowing a single core meaning (to be able to challenge your input against it) is helping a lot.
Korean also has an infamous, super similar は/が curse in its particles itself. 은/는 are taught as the topic particles, while 이/가 are taught as the subject particles. A lot of learners don’t know when to use which. Beginner learners cry over this just like how Japanese learners cry over は/が. Unfortunately, as a Korean-American, I am unable to empathize with their suffering. ;)
*Watches a lot of Anime*
Subconcious-kun: I solved the puzzle for you.
Me: Huh? when the fuck did you do that?
Subconcious-kun: 4 months ago.
Me: Why didn’t you tell me?
Subconcious-kun: Because I’m busy solving puzzles.
Yes yes yes. This is the comment of the day right here.
this happened to me with 気 at some point my brain just understood it given the context without thinking about it
Oh my God this is so gold and true! I haven't experienced it too much yet, but I feel like I'm surprised with how much I've grown in Japanese.
@@sp3ctum cringe
@@twoblocksdown5464 holy shit i see you everywhere and you're always writing the same dumbass comments
Your teaching has been really influential for my Japanese learning journey,
Congratulation for 100K Subs,
Cheers from Indonesia.
I’m learning Yemenite Arabic and I’ve experienced so many phrases that simply don’t translate into English
For example: ما عليك وانا (ma A’laik wana) which literally means “what’s on you, and I am….” It makes no sense word wise so I just remember it means “don’t worry I can take care of myself.
Another phrase is ايك ساعك (ayak s’Ak) which until today I don’t know what the two words mean. I just know the phrase means leave room for the meal or like don’t stuff yourself there’s still more food
This is exactly what I needed, I've done dedicated grammar study before immersion learning but recently thought I was an idiot for still not understanding it all and was contemplating redoing the grammar study again, now I will put more trust in immersion. Also, the editing is brilliant :)
Yeah, I think grammar is useful, but only after doing a considerable time of immersion. Kids don't learn grammar until they've had like 6 years of immersion in their native language. Doing grammar without knowing the language didn't work for me, it made no sense until after I got more familiar with my target language.
Have/has/'ve/'s is a persistent problem for many English learners. 💯 % agree with the persistent puzzle angle.
This video is a great illustration of one of the biggest problems faced when learning a language by comprehensible input! The answer to any problem is almost always more comprehensible input. However, weirdly as humans we don’t like this answer, despite it being the easier option to learning something new to overcome a problem. I also think it’s one of the reasons it’s hard to persuade people to learn through comprehensible input, as they almost always want specific answers to specific problems and don’t just want to hear “‘more comprehensible input!”
Make more videos like this. These are my favorites! You are extremely talented in doing this style. EXTREMELY talented
While my target language is Russian, Matt gives me the most motivation above all the polyglot channels. Matt, your brain is huge, much love.
my target language is Japanese then Russian. How difficult is Russian? I’m worried I have start start all the way from 0 just how I did with Japanese because of how much I forget
hmu about anything you want
Same, I learn Finnish (and used to learn Japanese, but sadly stopped), but a lot of what he's talking about is touching upon universal struggles of language learners. Even topics like pitch accent are found in many other languages, too, e.g. Swedish, and the tips for learning and conditioning oneself to hear it are applicable when learning those other languages as well.
Удачи тебе с ним :D
@@ht1ps555 did you end studying it? what is your native language? what's difficult about Russian for one person might be natural for another. In general it's the cases and aspects that people find hard. There's also the changing stress patterns, verbs of motion and verbal prefixes, and nuances in word order that can be a hurdle.
To give you an idea, my first language is French and at university, our Russian grammar teacher started his first lecture by telling us "as everyone knows, Russian grammar is the most difficult in the world". It has this reputation among some people, but I think that's nonsense. From my perspective and in my opinion, Russian is "only" moderately difficult.
Matt's analogies are so good and accurate for language learning and honestly in my opinion the best in the language learning community. Not only is it easy to understand but it also directly explains the topic to a perfect level.
Thank you for explaining this very important concept beautifully. I never would have thought to word it like this, but it’s extremely well done.
For Spanish:
- the use of the reflexive pronoun “se”
- the appropriate use of dual reflexive pronouns.
- knowing when to use the preterite ve imperfect past tense forms
- knowing when to use the subjunctive.
All of these took many months for me to comprehend fully and intuitively, and I still get them wrong sometimes.
Not gonna lie, I’m a native spanish speaker and while i can use all of those correctly i couldn’t tell you how. Hell i even had to look some up to see what they were referring to
I'd add to your list of Spanish persistant puzzles -
- Generaly knowing the appropriate situations to use each specific past present or future tense (as opposed to specifically just past preterite vs. past imperfect)
- Knowing how to use the indirect pronouns intuitively and correctly (god, that was so hard and strange when I first encountered it, but I think I'm starting to get it)
- Ser vs. Estar (even though that one takes less time to grasp intuitively, it still is quite challenging for quite some time)
My native language is Hebrew, so both the indirect pronouns and the different tenses within past, present and future are quite challenging for me!
Great video with amazing points!! I've been learning Korean for 5 years, and I got a good understanding of how to use 이/가, 을/를, and 은/는 after about a year and a half. But then about 3 years later, I started to get confused about it again because I noticed how natives would use it. They would sometimes take out 이/가 (similar to わ in Japanese, correct?), and I beat myself up for not understanding that for a week or so. But afterwards I took the approach of just immersing and seeing how they use it, and over time I just naturally figured out how they used it like the native Koreans. Again, love the video!! I like that you did it in your style too. 😇
Completely agree with how you described it. I also like to think of it as the "image" that people of that language have in their head when describing reality. This is another reason why I find it valuable to listen to how speakers of your target language (i.e. Japanese) speak in your native language (i.e. English).
In the example of 掛ける at 4:36 , I could imagine a situation where a Japanese person *might* possibly say "The issue was placed on (or put on) the meeting." It would sound strange to us, but not because the words or grammar are wrong. The concept isn't even incorrect, not if you think about it. It's just because that's not the precise "image" English speakers have in their heads when talking about discussing something in a meeting (at least Americans in the 21st century).
I feel like this is probably a big reason why I love languages. Like the blind man example you used, different languages describe reality from different "angles", and it's really cool to notice your own "angle" in your native language.
Just my thoughts on the matter, sorry for the rant 😅
The best use of my time in a long time was watching this video. You are exceptionally bright is an understatement.
An intermediate persistent puzzle in German is the use of the dative case in various everyday phrases that don't seem to make sense in English. A very advanced one is particles such as "schon". I've been learning German for three years and I don't really understand the use of schon.
This was one of the best videos I have watched, the HMs being displayed and used as well as some of the *meanings* behind the word 掛ける were very carefully thought out and its awesome. Great video.
I found that the most difficult persistent puzzle is に. It's a very subtle trap - it seems like you can just think of it as "in" or "for", and it will work in 90% of the sentences, but it sometimes means something like "by" and it's practically impossible for a beginner to tell the meanings apart: "私は日本語をあなたに教えたい" -> I want to teach you Japanese, "私は日本語をあなたに教えて欲しい" -> I want you to teach me Japanese. It seems like just random things flip the meaning of に.
EDIT: I can't even find any grammar guides\explanations that emphasize this case. A lot of them call に the "target particle", which very well can throw off a lot of people in cases like this.
掛ける is really difficult, but I realized that this problem would eventually be solved because I’ve been through a learning process with English already. You native English speakers have no idea how hard it is to grasp the meaning of phrasal verbs like ‘get’, ‘take’, ‘put’, ‘set’, ‘hold’…
These videos are just unbelievably amazing. Gets me excited every time I watch a new one.
This helps understand a fundamental flaw in learning any language. Nobody is asked to define hello, ... until they reflect on their native language when they learn konnichiwa literally means "today" from the full original greeting "kon nichi wa ogenki desu ka?" Which means "how how you today."
In fact, a good way of looking at it is how native English speakers don't learn english the same way they learn a foreign language in school. And despite the abysmal grammar and lackluster academics of understanding word meaning, most will demonstrate fluency in English conversations.
It's an interesting contrast to the studious high school / college student who still struggles with a foreign language years into beginning it.
Matt you are a huge inspiration to me! I have been watching your videos and have been a subscriber for around 3-4 years now and I have a lot of my success in learning Japanese is a result of finding your channel. I have had countless amazing memories because of what you do. I have never commented before, but I wanted to let you know the impact you have had on my life. Keep going strong!
In Tagalog, an early persistent puzzle is understanding when to use ang, ng, and sa pronouns. The general grammar of sentences is distinct from any non-Filipino language, so it takes a long time for the structure to really click.
A later persistent puzzle is when to use which affixes.
I would say "nag-uusap sina Andrea at Sam", but "nakikipag-usap tayo," if I'm referring to myself and the listener. These cases pop up everywhere, when you'd think a simple verb will be appropriate but actually there are several common affixed forms and you still need to learn when each one is used. These pop up constantly, even after two years of speaking Tagalog every day.
Congrats on 100k!! And also, you instantly gave me a confidence in myself that I have never had since the beginning when it comes to these persistent puzzles so now I can enjoy my immersion more! You really are a genius Matt, thanks for everything.
Its easy if you try to think in the language youre learning, Ive struggled for many time with english because I was always translating to my native language, when I start to conversate with myself and think in english my fluency level steps further beyond a new level. This also applied when I was learning spanish, german and russian
A good example of a persistent puzzle in English is the word "the". It took me hundreds of hours of immersion to get when you use it and when not to even though I've seen explanations of how to use it many times and it seems simple.
Very few non-native speakers can use it correctly if you pay attention to it. I've gotten a pretty good intuition for it now, but can still be unsure whether I should use it in some cases
This is the most helpful language learning video I have found. I’ve tried learning Japanese 3 times in the past but gave up every time out of frustration and feeling I was too stupid. I’m currently learning Mandarin and I’m doing a lot better after following the Refold method and watching Matt’s videos. I wish someone had told me these things years ago, I may have become fluent in Japanese by now. If I am successful in my Mandarin studies, maybe I’ll return to Japanese one day.
@千本桜 I’ve gotten farther in Mandarin than I have in Japanese that’s for sure. I can understand most of A1 & A2 grammar, some from B1. I can comfortably read 400 characters. I have no idea how many words I know but I can kind of follow along with kids shows if I pause and relisten. It’s a slow process because of the tones complicating things though. I haven’t studied at all for the past month because I had other hobbies I wanted to do and didn’t have time for both but I’m getting back into it.
This is fantastic. I have some advice for others that is quite similar to the message of this video. For learners still struggling with understanding sentences, do your best to increase your verb vocabulary. It will help you identify structure of sentences when you hear them, and knowing verbs helps a whole lot in getting a sense of what the sentence is trying to say. It helped me a lot!
When I started learning Japanese at university we were introduced to the は、が particles and after a while it drove me nuts so I kept talking to my teacher about them and the difference between 思う、考える and they explained how the feeling of each word was different. 思う being more grounded in the heart while 考える was more from the brain. は、が we’re explained as topic and subject markers and I didn’t really understand. After some time I realized that the particles themselves had different feelings and emphasis on the sentence as well. As I have immersed in mainly audio recordings I have definitely picked up more and more on the nuance with the help of voice acting that you do not get in textbook recordings. If anyone else has too much empathy like I do, try to feel the words and meaning with emotions and heart, shut off your brain a bit and things will click easier. No idea on how to deal with the ambiguity being too high when reading though. In listening high ambiguity is easier to deal with in my opinion as you can tell when emotions are there and fill in the gaps but. Anyways. Great video and I hope everyone is doing well!
It's like the verb "faire" in french which it's probably used in more than 100 expressions. Like "Fais voir" literally meaning "go make see" which actually means "let me see" and a lot of other examples as well.
「掛ける」という単語に、25の異なる英語表現があることを、今日、初めて知りました！Thank you very much for your information 😮
oh man - super pumped.
Pre-watch guess - "Immerse more bro!" :D
Seriously tho that works.
Always go back to my immersion after a Matt video feeling pumped though!
My natives are Filipino and English, and so little to no similarity with Korean (my target).
Here are two examples of persistent puzzles in Korean, or at least two which used to be unsolvable for me specifically. These are 내다 (Hiragana approximate: ねだ) and the very common grammar form ~서 (approx: そ).
The first one, 내다, is a simple word, used all the time, but just like kakeru it has many English equivalents, 31 if you consult Naver's dictionary. But after I understood the basic meaning of "send forth" (still an inadequate equivalent), it became very easy to understand its usage without that feeling of vagueness. Plus, there's a similar word called 보내다 (approx: ぼねだ) that also has the same core meaning but is used in mostly the same way English uses "send" unlike 내다. 내다 also happens to be a verbal grammar form, and this basic meaning also applies there.
The other one, ~서, was taught to me as having the meaning of "therefore," so understanding its usage in a sentence like 저는 늦어서 죄송합니다. (I'm sorry for being late.) was a no-brainer. But in another sentence like 조심해서 외출하세요 (Be careful therefore go outside...?) it made zero sense. This time, however, it was a website called HowtostudyKorean that saved my confused ass and explained this other usage of ~서.
I totally agreee with Matt in this video.
Edit: Someone else in the comments already mentioned the situation with 내다.
Being brought up bilingual then studying English and now studying Japanese, I've been thinking for a while about this. How even native speakers of your L2 fluent in your L1 can fail to explain some concept in the target language to you.
Your metaphor, "The specific way that the world is divided up into concepts is fundamentally different for each language" is really on point. It's like a huge continent with a great variety of features and a lot of cities and smaller settlements being divided into counties. Sometimes the division is evident, like when you have a great river of mountain range, and most languages will do that concept similarly. And sometimes it's all arbitrary and fascinating how different the approaches are.
And not a continent even, but some 3D thing like stars or constellations. From the perspective of your native language, you see, oh, twenty stars just randomly scattered through space. And then your L2 gives you a hyperspace kick in the butt to some planet from where you see they form a perfect design of a flower, and say "ah, now I see".
I kind of already realized this. There are certain verb forms in Spanish that, although they don't exist in any language I know, were immediately quite obvious to me in their function, while others are more confusing. I figured that, well, I'll just let them be a bit confusing and opaque, but just notice when they come up, and it'll sort itself out. The same phenomenon exists with kakeru-like words, where they seem to have tons of fairly unrelated and confusing meanings, but in reality are just a single concept I'm not yet grasping. And logically, for a word to be like that, it has to be pretty common. I just learn a couple of the meanings, enough to get in the ballpark of what the word is sort of about, and then just use context to understand and slowly start to comprehend it.
Spanish native speaker here. Back in the day it took me around ten years to "grasp" English. Now I'm studying Chinese through materials destined for English speakers. My mind is filled with grammar (which I love) in three languages, if you don't count my approaches to Korean before getting into Chinese.
I don't know. I just enjoy the ride and listen to very good Taiwanese hip hop all the time. 😁 Some day it'll click and I'll be immensely happy.
I am a Brazilian native. Even though I speak fluent english and I still sometimes struggle with the prepositions at, in and on, specially in the context of locations. It is easier for me now, but I remember that it was very hard to grasp their differences.
Thank you Matt for being so intelligent and dedicated to helping us self-learners with your explanations. I'm learning German but get so much from your videos.
Any tips for german? What did you use to study?
Linguistics is so fascinating. Untranslatable words with hundreds of near-miss translations.
This is why it's a good rule of thumb to just accept the ambiguity and immerse more.
I've changed my approach in Anki to now not fully understand words, and to at best, understand the single context I found a given word from immersion. This way I'm not spending 3,000 hours searching up definitions and racking my brain to figure out wtf I'm reading.
A while ago, I tried making anki cards with only pictures as my definition, but I realized it took me way longer to remember anything. Now I latch onto an english definition, and accept the inaccuracies so I can finish the cards faster. That way I can get the truer meaning from more immersion, and less straining in Anki.
Sometimes it takes trying and failing a seemingly good theory to realize the first method was fine. Translating Japanese into Mentalese seemed like a better way to learn cards, but my lack of experience with new words made it get in the way of being able to quickly assess whether I was right or wrong, thus hindering deliberate practice, thus taking time away from immersion.
Immersion is so incredibly powerful, it's really hard to accept that it's often just better than most forms of study. Like, we want to study, but we end up digging a hole and wasting time.
It reminds me of the verb "have". I'm a native Spanish speaker, and it made kinda sense to me after years. In spanish we have "tener" (used in situations like "I have two dogs") and "haber" (an example is "I've been playing for a long time")
I mean, I could easily understand "be", but "have" was like SOMETHING really weird for a long time. I'm happy I'm here now.
I have a lot to learn yet, but I never thought it would be possible for me to even write a comment like this.
And yeah, it probably has a lot of grammar mistakes, but at least I feel a little bit more confident with my English
You example of 掛ける made me think of the word 'read'. We can read between the lines, read the stars, a book, or even 'read' someone. A simple word, many distinct meanings.
This cheat sheet is excellent. As an intermediate learner, I was pretty lost on some of this (like かける), and it’s nice to have it finally properly introduced. The video is A+ too. This is why Refold is one of only two Patreons to which I’m subscribed.
This is exactly what I needed to hear. When I encounter one of these puzzles and can't understand them through immersion, I default to reading a grammar article about them and end up being more confused. I will try to put more faith in my immersion this time and hope for the best. Thanks as always Matt!
I read your cheatsheet. It was helpful. And a fun way of getting it.
I’m learning Korean and I noticed early on that 는/가 had a larger concept beyond the grammar or syntax. I’m super curious so I tried to understand that. The way we organize ideas in English/Spanish is from this subject/object view of the world and that has implications beyond language while most Asian languages organize the world from a topic/comment perspective. Understanding information at that level really helped me. I also check the dictionary a lot, and when I notice a word with 20+ meanings I write it down, not to learn all the meanings but to remember I eventually need to figure out their core concept, 하다 is one of those. When we “enter” a language that has a completely different way to organize concepts is like entering a new dimension.
For English, one of those is hands down phrasal verbs (at least for a French), all those "give in", "give up", "give away", "come across", "come up". They are everywhere and they don't make sense. Why the hell does "throw up" means puke ? In French there's basically one verb for each of those meanings, most of the time with completely different roots. Not only that, but it's one of the area where the language is shifting the most, and a lot of linguistic innovation is related to a verb+particle.
At some point you build an intuition for what a given verb+particle might mean, and even get the jokes that play with those meanings, but it takes some time.
Yeah, I can see that being a nightmare to learn haha! I guess with any of these words ,that seem to make no sense by themselves, learning them as a set phrase is the way to go. For a person, like me, who can't accept that and needs to know why something is the way it is all the time, I could see my self getting very frustrated to learn them sort of phrases, if I was learning English. The same thing happened with me and some parts of Japanese and what I found is it's just better to get familiar with the certain situations that these phrases are used in and then eventually over time you get a better sense of when to use them.
One time at a family dinner I brought up when is the right time to say "come down", "come up." I always thought it was random, as a native speaker. But some people actually factor in the geographical location, or they think that they do. "When's your friend coming up?" versus "When's your friend coming down?" (to visit). For me, I never thought about it. But for some, they actually factor in whether the friend is coming from a place that is north or south of the place. I then mentioned what happens if they're not north or south of you, and that got them annoyed lol.
@@cryan9137 this one is funny because not everyone uses "come up" and "come down" like that! this sometimes leads to confusion since when i hear "my friend is coming up to visit" i assume that the friend is coming from the south. so if i know the friend actually lives up north i might ask if they recently moved!
also if the place isn't north or south then they might be "coming over"
I think Matt is completely correct here. For the last 7 months just on immersion using Refold and stuff from Olly Richards I’ve found that the stuff I couldn’t understand in the past I’ve begun to understand bit by bit. At first I couldn’t understand the simplest of Japanese and now I can be able to watch anime and tv shows without relying on subtitles and I’m picking up a lot of grammar that I just couldn’t before.
And like Matt has mentioned it feels like you’re in the dark in the beginning, building everything together piece by piece like a jigsaw. Best I can say is to dump whatever you think you know about your previous language and start to build your understanding from the language itself, every language relies on its own rules that are completely different from the others. It feels like trying to build your own Operating System from scratch, it has the same functions as others but how you code it will be different, there will be some similarities but you cannot inject code from another OS and expect it to function the same way.
As someone fitting the description of being constantly worried about making so-called "basic" mistakes - this video was a godsend. It really puts things into perspective. The idea that contextual inference is the key to bridging conceptual gaps between languages, and to know that all we need to do is simply be aware of this, and be okay with the ambiguity we may encounter along the way is reassuring. Great video as always Matt!
5:11 I think a similar word in English is “get” in the most basic terms it obviously means “to receive” but it can be used to mean a lot of different things
Before immersion I actually kept in mind about how animism is heavily ingrained into the Japanese language and culture, the language is completely away from the ego 9 times out of 10 while English on the other hand basically has an egocentric view of the world which causes major differences.
Thanks indeed for the cheat sheet. It really crystallizes all the vague understandings I've been slowly developing over the years. I agree completely with the explanation in the video. As other people have commented, English has lots of these one-word-with-a-million-"definitions" -- think about "get" or "have".
Wow.
Matt that was really good.
I've been studying languages for all my life (42y/o now 🤟) and I have never listened to such a clear explanation for such a common problem for lunguage learners.
Amazing job.
Btw....for Chinese Mandarin learners I guess the biggest persistent puzzle is probably ”了“.
I'd say for those learning English, based on my experience as a teacher, phrasal verbs that use "get" are among the persistent puzzles. Having acquired Spanish, reflexive verbs and use of the verb "poner," which is sometimes used to express similar concepts as phrasal verbs using "get" in English, might qualify.
Lately one of my favorite immersion activities for reading are the 4k Tokyo walking videos all over youtube. I'm finally starting to make some sense of all the signs and advertisements. It's fun, engaging, and it's useful immersion since I'm trying to learn as much as I can before a trip.
Been binge watching Matt's videos. Just picked up japanese after 10 years of letting go. Love the whole immersion idea. Learned english this exact same way when I was a kid: mom used to watch everything with subs (in our native language, but 90% of people I know used to watch the dubbed version), english songs, then MMORPGs (ever got scammed by someone on Tibia or MU? lol). And when me and my sister were like 4-5 we used to watch over and over the same 3 Disney VHS tapes that taught english using songs.
I still don't know all the technical stuff about grammar and I still have a pretty strong accent, but it was all natural. I never sat down to actually study english. Gonna try to replicate this with japanese (but with way more intent and effort). Thank you for all the videos!
Thanks for the video and cheat sheet Matt. I think people tend to misunderstand the meaning of "basic" with "easy", basic meaning "of fundamental importance", it just happens to be easy sometimes. The way you teach is similar to the way my teacher does in trying to introduce core concepts and/or simply a single meaning for a word and move on with the journey, while also deeply valuing immersion and not depending on translations too much.
The only difference being that my teacher is a native portuguese speaker like me, so the teaching can be a bit more modeled and better understood with the nuances and basic concepts we have in our language. I still do learn a lot of japanese through english, as there is a plethora of english material compared to portuguese material. Funny enough, even though I am very fluent in english, now that I started learning japanese through english is the time that I mostly go through english-portuguese dictionaries, even more than when I was learning english.
I am relatively new to your channel and as I have never studied Japanese I just knew about your existence passively. I needed to know why your reputation was so good and oh boy are you crystal clear and accurate when explaining these processes. This is partly talent but it is also evident that you have spent so much time studying and caring for languages. Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge, man. Subscribing has been an excellent idea.
Sometimes there are core meanings which are useful to identify, and may seem somewhat abstract if they have no one-to-one translation. But there are also times when a word is simply polysemous (has multiple separate meanings), and you shouldn't go into mental contortions trying to figure out a single 'core meaning'.
I am so thankful for your effort and help! この動画, ありがとう。
Russian has some of these too, and my mindset has generally been, "oh, I just haven't acquired all 20+ meanings of that word yet" -- but obviously the reality is there's no actual 1:1 equivalent at all. This realization takes so much 'pressure' off the process. Another great vid; thanks, Matt!
Now I'm interested in what persistent puzzles Russian has (I'm Russian). Could you please give some examples?
@@donpax8959 I can give you a couple of examples of persistent puzzles in Russian (I'm a Russian learner). The first is the choice of verbal aspect (perfective/imperfective), especially in the infinitive. I'll give a short explanation of what this is about. Most Russian verbs (e.g., 'to buy', 'to speak', 'to help' ..,) come in pairs, with one verb of the pair having perfective aspect and the other imperfective aspect. Losely speaking the imperfective verb describes an ongoing process ('I was buying', 'I was helping'....) or an action that happens regularly ('I always buy a packet of crisps on Sundays'), while the perfective one is used for instantenous actions or actions which produce some sort of result ('the bomb went off'; 'I bought an apple'). In practice, it's very complicated an ASAIK non-Slavic languages such as English don't really have a concept of aspect for verbs in the infinitive. For example, in English I could say 'I want to eat a sandwich', but in Russian to express 'to eat' you have to chose the aspect (yest' or s"yest'). When you say you want to eat, do you mean you want to be eating the sandwich (ongoing process) or you rather mean you want to be in the state of having eaten it up (and not being hungry anymore)? For an English speaker (or Italian speaker like myself, for that matter) this is impossible to answer, or he could answer he wants both things, because has never had to think in this way. But Russians would rather use perfective aspect in this case (ya khochu s"yest' buterbrod). There is a zillion of situations where an English speaker just has no intuition. Another example: I want to buy a new bag / I don't want to buy a new bag. In English 'to buy' stays the same in the two sentences, and it is inconceivable that it shouldn't stay the same, but in Russian the perfective verb is required in the first sentence (ya khochu kupit' novuyu sumku) but imperfective in the second (ya nye khochu pokupat' novuyu sumku).
two other very difficult points of Russian grammar (IMO), which might be called 'persistent puzzles', are 1. proper use of short forms of adjectives (eg krasivyy/krasiv, novaya/nova etc) and 2. choice between genitive and accusative after negated verbs.
@@luckyluckydog123 I think the things you named are not persistent puzzles. It's easy to understand them when you're doing input (so they're not persistent puzzles), it's just not so easy to use them in output (like "a/an" and "the" in English for Russian speakers, for example)
Btw, don't forget there's also (poyest') that means pretty much the same as (s"yest') and you choose one or another depending on the context, hehe. German also has a similar thing, so it's easy to me to understand this concept in German, but it seems like Italian doesn't have verb prefixes like these
@@donpax8959 mmm what makes you think that verbal aspect is 'easy to understand when doing input' ?
I started year 8 high school after moving to Australia with my family. It took me a few years after finishing high school until I was able to use all the grammar correctly and naturally. A lot of it came from media consuming and looking at how people use them.
I am learning Japanese now. I find that Japanese’s grammar makes English’s grammar looks easy.
I'm deffo guilty of this common error. Thinking stuff I see all the time is simple, so when I see it used in a different way, or to mean something different; it really throws me.
Since you requested puzzles, here's coming from a 13-year Yiddishist and a 6-year Yiddish teacher (I will use transliteration for the ease of the majority):
Like in English, many words have a bevy of meanings that highly depend on context. Verbs can also be radically different if you change one element.
"Az" -> not "as" in English in the strictest sense,
"Vos" -> can mean "what" but also "whatever" in some cases as well as a relative pronoun in some instances (velkhe, meaning "which", can also function as a relative pronoun in some instances).
"Epes" -> Something, somewhat, a bit,
"Nisht...keyn" -> not...any, not having...any. I can tell how experienced someone is at Yiddish based on how correctly they use this.
"Aleyn" -> literally meaning "alone", but can also mean -self in an emphatic form. Got Aleyn - God Himself. fun zikh - of oneself. Fun zikh aleyn - of oneself (more emphatic).
"Abi" -> Don't get me started with this one.
"Azsh" -> "as much as", "all the way to..." or similar, but also used for emphasis in reaching a pivotal point.
General patterns on how to correctly pronounce Hebrew and Aramaic origin words in Yiddish make for a puzzle in themselves. Not also to mention the differences they have in meaning between these languages. (Hebrew word for vehicle, "agala", is rendered in Yiddish as "agole", meaning "a hearse at a Jewish funeral").
And there are also cultural puzzles as well (perhaps a topic for another time?) Speaking too directly about something like death, illness or tragedy isn't wise, and if you do, you can buttress it with "may this not happen to you". Including various phrases to ward off the evil eye if you mention someone getting old or winning an accolade is a good habit to get into, even if you're with secular speakers.
I'm learning Norwegian and it's so satisfying to find sentences containing "jo" that actually change how the sentence translates into English
This is actually really helpful, I’m learning spanish and I keep seeing “que”, along with some other words, being used in situations other than ‘what’ and ‘that’; and in situations where it doesn’t seem to mean anything but it’s there anyways, so I have no clue when to add “que” in my output. I’ve been frustrated that I still don’t understand what it means even though I feel like I should by now. This helped me understand that it’s not me, but it’s just a completely different concept than what I know in english, and it’ll come in time as long as I keep immersing
It's a direect translation for "so", "like th(is,at,ose)" and similar. It refferest to an X thing as X
Learning Spanish too by the way and it is generally understood to mean "like this/like that" or "this way/that way". It could also translate to "so" in English and is even accompanied by "que". Of course, it can mean other things as well depending on how it's used. But hey, I don't wanna spoil since you will learn them in your immersion anyways. Good luck!
THANK YOU FINALLY SOMEONE EXPLAINED THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN は AND が THIS HAS BEEN FRUSTRATING ME SINCE I STARTED THANK YOU MAT :)
k, I'm kinda relieved that I'm not the only one still struggling with は and が despite being almost at an intermediate level.
Nice, I like this style of video too. Your talking in the background with images and videos to illustrate your points. Good explanation of Japanese grammar and unusual word usage too. Great work Matt!
Honesly, as a Korean Native, Japanese is very intuitive and easy to learn. However, European languages including English were just way too hard.
That's because East Asian languages and European languages are fundamentally different.
For example, the concept and meaning of the most basic English words, such as "take", "get", "have", "put", "for", "on", "to" were very confusing and difficult to understand when I had to learn this language at elementary school. (we do not have any vocabularies that directly match to these words in Korean)
However, the biggest challenge is not the part of vocabulary nor grammar in my opinion. It's the fact that the way we view the world is very different. (Imagine there's no cristianity in Europe. It'd be so difficult to draw how your culture would look like.)
When you speak a language, there's always a culture involved, making certain expressions more proper and natural to be spoken in specific situations.
Even though you say their language perfectly correctly in terms of grammar, not only will it feel awkward for native speakers but also they sometimes won't get you, unless you change the way you think as them.
Of course these gap in perspective can be narrowed if you have interest in the culture of the language and hence take an effort to get much indirective experience, but if you are typical Koreans or Japanese who just have to learn English from public education, it's literally just hell.
Don't worry, Enough can be learned through thorough thought though.
I did not expect this quality of a video after filling in the form
I'm so glad Matt made this video! I know watching Darling in the Franxxx, there is some dialog that is so confusing, and then I'll look at the English sub translation (which I don't do often) and I'll wonder to myself why I couldn't figure that out. So this is important to remind us that language learning is a process, and not getting certain sentences doesn't mean we're idiots.
The Spanish "ya" is one of those words that seems to have a bunch different meanings in English, but is mostly just a single concept - it took me a while to figure that out. The funny thing is, that knowledge helped me get a sense of 了 in Chinese much more quickly than I would have otherwise, because it conveys a similar concept - all I had to do was make the connection.
Bro awesome vid, thanks! I've been trying to get my head around this for years so you just cut through all the confusion and gave me a lot of clarity on these never ending persistent puzzles.
Please keep making videos! They're so informative and helpful - Azuss : )
This style of video is so aesthetically pleasing to watch. How long does it usually take to edit a video like this?
Too long lol
Thank you Matt. I've struggled with how to reconcile the concept of a word with the handful of different English definitions given in a dictionary, such as Jisho. Your explanation gave me clear and lucid insight. Please consider writing a book on language acquisition theory with a focus on Japanese.
When I first started learning German, I always had difficulty with "wann", "wenn", "als", and "ob". "Wann", "wenn", and "als" can all mean "when", but are used in different ways than the English "when". And "wenn" and "ob" can both mean "if", but are also used in different ways. It took me a while to get it right.
CHRIS BROAD COLAB WHEN! Dogen is your only common link, please 🙏😢
Right now I feel like in Korean it is the use of the verb 되다. I have seen it in many sentences and I have written multiple to read but it seems to be so versatile and I just don't understand its wide use yet. I will get it eventually.
yet another great video, i was obsessing a little too much over some jp1k definitions and now i'll just chill out a bit and just get a general idea of the definition (even if it's a bit wrong) because immersion will teach me the proper "definition"
I am finishing my Psychology Ph.D. dissertation on second language acquisition based on the Comprehensible Input Theory Framework. I discovered your channel and your advice and methodology are really spot on. I'd love to send it to you when I'm done but great work on your content on language acquisition A+. (The study target language is Japanese)
I'm always amazed at how you can break down and then sum up so clearly the psychological issues of language learning. People who are learning a language (I assume most people watching) can't help but nod their head and say "mm" to themselves. (That looks weird now that I type that but whatever)
Another great video, Matt.
It took me about 9 months to get to the thinking that “は” is for the subject and “が” is for the object so my thinking goes like “えっと、僕の日本語がちょっと下手と思ってけどまだこれから、流暢に喋られだろう“ (uh, I see my Japanese as a bit bad, but I’m still learning it, I may be able to fluently speak it eventually) now obviously I don’t think I typed what I wanted to type perfectly but I did try my best here, my only struggle when it comes to words is nouns and adjectives and verbs are easier for me to remember because I use them way more in small talk and I usually prefer to be alone though I socialize pretty well but I don’t go into full on 10-20 minute conversations with people, I usually have a quick chat and move on unless if it’s someone I’m interested in then I’ll try to be friends with that person. Anyway what I’m trying to say is I’m good with verbs, but nouns and adjectives are a struggle in learning vocabulary to me, the only time I use them is when I ask why like “なんで(名詞)？“ English: why (noun)? A situation I can use it in is like I see someone in a game build something dumb or unnecessary and I’m like ”なんでこの建物？ 要らないよ！“
English: why did you make this building? We don’t need it!”
Great video, using refold has helped me realize that understanding something in the language its supposed to be in makes it make so much more sense and easier. plus, congrats on 100k 🎉