A Japanese and American couple teaches you how to start learning new languages
Have you felt like you’ve hit a plateau in your language study? Or do you want to study a new language but don’t know where to start? This post is for you! Yuki is a native Japanese speaker fluent in English and Hannah is a native English speaker fluent in German. We studied both languages and mastered them because we’re passionate about learning new languages and culture.
In this post, we share our thoughts and tips about how to study new languages, and how we learned English and German to very high levels. Yuki responds to the topics below and Hannah gives advice and thoughts based on her personal study of linguistics and her experience. Find out what Yuki’s could have done differently in his study method! You can learn from each of our mistakes and experiences to become fluent in a language as well as advice for how to learn a new language from Hannah, who has done a lot of reading on the subject. (If you’re at the intermediate or advanced level, click here.)
Yuki has been practicing speaking English for almost 4 years and he couldn’t speak English at all when he started. However, now he can write blog posts and communicate with Hannah and her family very well. Hannah went to study abroad while she was in high school and that’s when she began learning German. Her love for the German language has only grown and she will begin her studies in Germanics at the graduate level fall of 2021. She published an article in early 2021 on the subject of translation theory as it intersects with ecocriticism.
Define the reason why you want to study new language (Goal)
Learning a new language requires a lot of patience and consistency. Your brain will get tired especially when you first start learning. This is because you need to think in ways you’ve never thought and try to make sounds which you have never made before. It’s difficult! Therefore, it’s almost impossible to keep studying without knowing why you want to be able to speak a new language. So make sure you have a reason behind your studies or they will eventually be pushed aside.
This reason shouldn’t be just because “I want to speak Language X.” It should be more along the lines of “I want to speak Language X because I want to be able to have conversations with my family, etc.”
Yuki’s experience:
My goal for studying English was to communicate with exchange students at my university in order to help them with their personal and school life. Many students have never studied Japanese before coming to study at my university. I wanted to help them because I could see they were struggling to finish homework. I wanted to be able to teach Japanese and help with their homework or class at school. That’s the first reason I chose to study English. As I kept studying and became comfortable speaking English, my goals shifted. I wanted to study abroad and have cultural experiences outside of Japan like my exchange student buddies. This is the reason why I decided to study and volunteer in the US for a year during my college life.
Hannah’s advice:
Yuki’s goal is great! He has a group of people he has close contact with whom he hopes to be able to communicate with. This kind of relational reason for learning a language is very motivating. It’s normal that as someone’s language skills improve their aims change. For example, I originally wanted to be able to speak German with friends and understand tv. After achieving that my goal had already expanded; I desired to read academic and literary texts in German.
How did you start studying a new language as a beginner?
Yuki’s experience:
Before I started actually using English regularly I only knew basic phrases from my English classes in high school. Anytime someone asked a more in depth question I would reply with a “I don’t know.” I honestly didn’t study English at all for almost two years after I seriously started using English in my daily life. I hated English writing and grammar classes at my university because teachers use textbooks all the time and there’s almost no interaction with other students. So I never prepared for weekly quizzes and sometimes I got bad grades. (I liked speaking classes and some other English classes where there are more activities than writing and grammar classes.)
However, there’s two things I was doing everyday which helped me to get used to speaking and listening to English. First, communicating with my exchange students buddies in English and Japanese. I would go to my university dorm to hang out with them, play games, watch tv shows, drink some beers, or play billiards. It was just fun hanging all together. Second, I was watching some American tv shows everyday. I finished a lot of tv shows which helped me to get used to listening and remembering some slang or casual conversational English. I used them when I talked to my buddies at school or class.
Hannah’s advice:
So you might have read the above and thought “This guy isn’t very motivated to learn English, he doesn’t study.” You are both wrong and right. When one desires to speak a language, they usually try to “learn” it, but really what you want is to acquire it. Speaking a language is not the ability to explain grammar points or know vocab definitions, it’s the ability to use them. How is this developed? Well, according to linguist Stephen Krashen, this is done by listening and reading a lot. So while it might have seemed like entertainment, watching American tv shows is what set the groundwork for Yuki’s acquisition of English. He listened to so much English he started to develop a feel for what was correct, set phrases, and grammar structures, and he did all this without realizing because he was simply enjoying the shows.
How did you watch tv shows to master a new language?
Yuki’s experience:
I watched a lot of tv shows on Netflix. I started watching tv shows or movies which I had already watched in Japanese before because it’s easy for me to understand stories even though I didn’t get the English at all. Popular movies like Harry Potter or Disney movies with English audio and Japanese subtitles were my top choices.
After a half year, I started watching movies and tv shows which I’ve never watched in Japanese with English subtitles because I wanted to step up to the next level. I was watching a variety of genres of tv shows and movies from comedy and action, to romance. Sometimes I fell asleep immediately after I started watching them because my eyes and brain got tired from reading the English subtitles.
After two years of studying English, I put out English subtitles so that I’m not going to read and can focus on listening. I found that this was difficult for me to understand because there’s so much vocabulary that I don’t know and I couldn’t even catch up what I didn’t understand at first. Obviously, it took a long time to get used to listening English in movies. When I didn’t understand, I would pause and restart scenes again and again until I understood decently.
Hannah’s advice:
This is where I’m going to have to critique Yuki’s technique a bit. I think that watching a show with subtitles in your native language is a bit of a waste of time. Our minds tend to block out things we don’t understand, so once we can understand dialogue by reading the subtitles our brain stops attempting to make sense of the foreign language we are hearing. I don’t think this hurt Yuki’s studying, it simply slowed down the process. It’s a better use of time to use subtitles in your target language or no subtitles at all if you’re working on listening. In my experience keeping up with my German, YouTube has been my best friend.
Thank you so much for reading. I hope you learned something from reading this post! Let’s keep studying a little by little together! Have a nice day and let us know if you have any questions about studying English, German, and Japanese. We’d love to help you. Please also check out this article about 30 useful kanji for everyday life in Japan if you’re studying Japanese. Knowledge of these kanji will help you to do everyday tasks, such as check the weather, operate an AC unit, use a television, and fill out forms in Japan!