Keep the Water Boiling!

Learning anything, let alone a foreign language, is like boiling water. To boil water, you simply set a pot of cold water on something hot and wait until it begins to bubble rapidly. That’s it. It’s not hard at all, and that boiling water can used for cooking a variety of things once it boils, much like how you can use your language acquisition for any number of things once you have it. There’s only one catch: you can’t turn the heat off at any point in time or the water will grow cold and you’ll have to start all over again regardless of how far along you were in the boiling process.

So, if the water is foreign language, then what is the heat? It’s study material and native material you watch, listen to, or read. I’m not going to focus on the study material, as I’ve reviewed all kinds of that on this website, but rather on native material. By native material I mean anything that’s intended for native audiences. Since this particular blog is about Japanese, it means things like anime, manga, Japanese video games, and J-Dorama. That’s what is going to help keep your water from growing cold, because learning a language and never using it is a recipe for disaster.

For example, my grandfather is a native Italian speaker. His parents moved from Italy to America, and neither one of them ever learned to speak English, probably because they thought it was too hard some other myth I’ll touch on in a later post. My grandfather spoke Italian with my great grandparents and English with everyone else while growing up. Now, my great grandparents died and he stopped using Italian completely. Guess what happened? He forgot the whole language! I mean the entire language, and can’t understand anything more than basic phrases. In order to get the hang of Italian again, he’d have to start from scratch.

So, what’s the best way to keep the water boiling? Try and do something for the language every day, as often as you can. Reserve Sundays for an anime marathon, perhaps? Read some manga or a novel every night before you fall asleep, or maybe try playing some Japanese video games. I don’t expect you to abandon English, but I do believe the best advice I can give you is to not let the language grow stale. If you have no one to speak it with, try and write Lang-8 entries ever day, or every other day.

That’s what the Friday Review is for – to keep giving you ideas on how you can keep in touch with Japanese. Native material is always going to trump whatever study tools you use. Study tools teach you the how and why of a language, but they don’t prepare you to actually use it most of the time.

頑張りましょう！