How I learned my second language by accident

While trying to learn Japanese I struggled most of the time. Looking back, I've spend so much time searching for promising methods, read about them or watched videos from different language learners who claimed that their method would be the most effective — instead of actually learning Japanese. 

Even after knowing so much about language learning, I still didn't know how to use this knowledge to learn Japanese. I knew the theory, the recipe. I tried some methods and combined different parts that seemed useful but I never felt satisfied with the results. Switching so often between different methods wasn't beneficial.

I always asked myself if there's an even better method out there. With the "right" method, I thought, I would be able to learn Japanese the "right" way, like the other language learners I saw on the internet.

Being not able to really make progress with one of these popular methods, I had the impression that I did something wrong along the way. I mean, all these other people seemed to have so much success with these methods — if it doesn't work for me, it has to be my fault, I thought.

In fact, I was able to improve my Japanese. But it could be much better now, if I didn't had wasted so much time with comparing myself to other language learners and feeling so inferior by doing so.

How I started to learn Japanese — and improved my English instead

When I think about it, improving my second language worked pretty well. As you may have noticed, English is not my native language (I'm sure, I make a lot of mistakes XD). I learned the basics at school. You know what that means: vocab lists, grammar rules and exercises, listen to English spoken by non-native speakers (teacher and classmates) and only sometimes by native speakers (CD). My grades were quite good, but my English was very limited at that time.

I had no access to novels, websites or other interesting things in English. And I was fine with that. At that time, English was only a subject in school. I didn't really want to learn it, but I had no choice. XD

After graduating, I became interested in Japanese. I found some online forums in my native language where other learners of Japanese shared their experiences. 

I also bought my first edition of RTK (Remembering the Kanji). I was amazed how well the Heisig method worked in contrast to my first attempts to learn kanji. But in the forum, most of the users were very narrow-minded. There were a few other users who thought that RTK is useful (including me), but the majority of users persisted, that their way of learning kanji (writing them a zillion times and such) is the only "right" way to learn them... They only made fun of RTK users and that’s why I left this forum.

I found a more open-minded forum: Kanji Koohii. It was in English, but I was amazed by the fact, that they shared many different ideas and methods. So I started reading even though I never read "real" English before. I was spending a lot of time with reading the threads of this forum.

Many users mentioned AJATT and so I became curious and started reading the posts on AJATT as well. Khatzumoto’s slangy writing style was hard to get used to in the beginning, but I concentrated so much on the content, that everything else became secondary. 

Then, something else happened: The first season of my favourite TV show ended and I found out, that they would not air the other seasons. But I found the other seasons on YouTube — in English. I wanted to watch them so badly that I started watching them in English even though I had nearly no experience with listening to native speakers. 

I already knew what the show was about so I was able to understand what was going on. I didn't understand every word, of course, but after watching 5 + episodes, I became quite familiar with the words and expressions that were typical for this show. There were still things I couldn't understand, but I didn't care. I was able to watch new episodes of my favourite show quite comfortably which was all I wanted — learning English was not the goal, after all.

English became a part of my life — unintentionally

Without realizing it, English became part of my life. Remember: In school, I didn't choose to learn English. I only learned as much as was expected of me. After graduating, I wanted to learn Japanese, not English. But in order to learn about other people's experiences with learning Japanese, I needed to read forums and websites in English, because the forums in my native language were so damn narrow-minded. I only watched my favourite TV series in English because the other seasons were not available in my native language. 

I used English not because I wanted to learn it but because the content I was interested in wasn't available in my native language.

Today, reading and listening in English feels natural to me. There are words I don’t know and I make mistakes, of course, but I'm fine with that. There is a lot I can do in English. In contrast to Japanese, I never used Anki to learn words, (after graduating) I didn't actively learned vocab or grammar and I never really immersed myself in English. I just occasionally watched or read something in English in order to gain information.

Methods like AJATT recommend to use as much time as possible to immerse yourself into your target language. Like, listening to audio while walking to work, watching TV for hours or reading lots of books. This may be effective, but in case of English, I never did that to that extend. Far from it. After reading some interesting posts on AJATT or watching two new episodes of my favourite show, for example, I did things in my native language for the rest of the day. And then there were days or even weeks with no activities in English at all.

But somehow I was able to improve my English despite of that. 

The learning mindset is actually a learning barrier

Watching my favourite show or reading texts about interesting topics in English were never learning activities to me. The purpose was to learn something other than English or to simply enjoy the content. The language was only a tool, not a study object. While doing this, I never thought "So many unknown words… I should use Anki to learn them". I just started reading and listening and ignored most of the unknown and unimportant parts. Only when I felt that I really need to know a certain word I looked it up. And that’s it. I never used Anki to learn them. These texts or videos weren’t study objects. After reading/watching them I moved on.

I ignored so many unknown parts, that I wonder, how it was even possible that my English improved. XD But somehow it worked. Unconsciously and without even trying to improve. Back then, I concentrated so much on the content, that I didn't even realized, that my English became better and better. It just ... happened.

In the case of Japanese, I always tried to understand as much as possible, looked up words, put sentences into Anki and things like that, because all these methods recommended that. I thought that otherwise my Japanese won't improve. Ironically, even after so much hard work and after trying out so many methods and techniques my Japanese is by no means as good as my English.

I was stuck in a "learning mindset" which made it difficult to concentrate only on the content as I did with English. I tended to see only the unknown words and phrases.

But my experience made it clear to me, that it's better to shift the focus on gaining information instead of learning new words and phrases. I should even change my goal from "I want to learn Japanese" to "I want to play this game in Japanese, because it's not available in my native language" or "I want to read this book, which is only available in Japanese, to learn something about X".

Learning a language has to become unconscious and nearly unintentionally. You can't really control what your brain will absorb anyway. It's helpful to use things like Anki to increase the likelihood that your brain will memorize certain words or phrases. On the other hand, putting all these information into Anki takes time — time you could better use to read or watch something interesting in your target language. This will also increase the likelihood to absorb new words and phrases, but unconsciously. 

Some of my friends made similar experiences. English became a part of their life and because of that their English improved. Not even one of them ever used Anki.

Combining minimalism with language learning

After worrying so much about language learning, methods and my Japanese, I discovered minimalism and was completely fascinated.

Generally, minimalists don't keep things that make them feel unhappy, that are no longer useful or causing distraction. It depends on the person, how their minimalist lifestyle looks like. And this is also true for language learning.

I began to transfer this mindset to language learning and I use it to improve my French since September 2019. This helped me a lot so far. My learning sessions are much more focused now and I feel that I learn better. It's amazing how easy and relaxing language learning can be, if you start to focus on the essentials and your well-being and leave everything else behind you. It really feels like meditation.

Methods like AJATT and others may be effective, but there's no need to think, that you can't learn a language to fluency if you don't use Anki and Co — in fact, it's absolutely possible and it's by no means more difficult.

By reading about all these methods I developed a learning mindset which prevented me from concentrating on the content and from improving my Japanese the way I improved my English. It's like a curse. I wish I had believed in myself and my own experiences from the start instead of relying so much on other people's methods.

Don't get me wrong: Good advices are useful, of course. But my mistake was to believe that I only had to follow someone else's way of learning from A to Z and I would get the same results in the end. It never worked this way. That's why I encourage everyone to think for themselves and questioning other methods and their creators.

I wrote this post mainly to remind myself that I already managed to learn a foreign language successfully. I realized, that my learning process for English was totally different as for Japanese. And so were the results.

I created this new blog in order to collect and share my experiences with my minimalist way of language learning.

(I'm sorry for typos or other mistakes I made. As long as you were able to understand what I wanted to express, it's fine, I guess. :D)

Update 2021

During the last few months, I focused mainly on extensive reading and read several books in Japanese (e.g. 『ペンギン・ハイウェイ』 and 『天気の子』). This helped me a lot to improve not only my reading speed but also my vocabulary. I had so much fun reading these books that I read between 20 and 40 pages a day (sometimes even a bit more on the weekend).  I’m happy with my progress so far!

For a long time, I felt like I hit a wall. My Japanese didn’t seem to improve. Or just unnoticeably. But after reading several books that were just right for my current level I learned a lot of words through context. 

Learning words from context doesn’t work well if the text is too difficult, though. Before, I mainly read articles about history or science, for example. Texts like these are very interesting to me, but also very difficult at my level. I usually had to look up several words per sentence. Plus, the vocabulary of texts like these is quite special (means, words that don’t come up that often in other contexts). I think this could be the reason, why I felt that my vocabulary has barely improved for a long time. That’s why I tried to read something easier and switched to extensive reading.

One thing I do is to read at least one chapter of a new book. The first pages of a new book are always the hardest. If I can enjoy the story after the first chapter (or two), I continue reading. If the chapter is too difficult, I put the book aside for now and choose something easier. I read texts at different levels of difficulty, but I won’t force myself to read something that is so difficult that I can’t understand what’s going on.  I want to increase the difficulty gradually by carefully choosing my reading material.

I started to read 『ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石』recently. I was not used to the writing style and the used vocabulary, so the beginning was difficult. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to enjoy the book. But I followed my strategy and read the first chapter. And the second. Now I’m at chapter 8 and although I don’t understand everything, I enjoy the story very much. Overall, I can follow the story well. 

Same goes with listening. Instead of watching (interesting but) complicated anime or other series for which I need a strong and broad vocabulary, I added some much less complicated series to my watch list on Netflix. For example series like 『ドリームホーム』or 『世界の摩訶不思議な家』. They talk mostly about the same things in every episode, which is great because the used vocabulary is rather limited compared to other series. Plus, you can often see what they are talking about. Like, you hear だんろ (暖炉) and you see a fireplace that need to be fixed. 

After watching a bunch of episodes, I noticed that I understand a bit more than before. Sometimes I even understand whole sentences. This don’t sound impressive, but for someone who’s listening comprehension stagnated for a long time, this experience is very exciting!

Switching to extensive reading had a positive effect on my self-confidence as a language learner. I’m more aware about what kind of content I need at my current level and choose my reading and listening material more carefully than before. Thanks to my above mentioned strategy, I'm more relaxed when it comes to difficult books. I won't stress myself when I can't read this one book, yet. I just choose an easier one and move on. 

Update Oktober 2021

Up to this point, I've read 52 books in Japanese so far. 22 of these were novels, light novels or non-fiction books; the rest were manga. According to 読書メーター, I've read 11.665 pages in total. 

The novel versions of the 『名探偵コナン』movies were my favorites! The stories are interesting, the writing style is easy to understand and there are many interesting words & expressions to learn. I really love this series but now that my Japanese improved I feel that these novels are a bit too easy if I want to improve my level even further. It's okay to read them for fun, of course, but I also need to challenge myself with more difficult books.

For this reason I started to read a more advanced book: 『オルタネート』.  I need to read more carefully and look up a bit more words than usual but I understand enough to follow the story. I'm at chapter 6 now and it is interesting so far. I will read more and more difficult books to increase my vocabulary and to get used to more complex writing styles.

I'm currently reading 『ハリー・ポッターとアズカバンの囚人』. Reading the Harry Potter books is so much fun! I don't understand every detail but I can follow the story comfortably. I also listen to the audio book of the previous Harry Potter volume. Compared to the first audio book, I understand much more. I can follow the story so much better which makes listening enjoyable.

My listening comprehension improved noticeably. I not only understand the Harry Potter audio book better than before but also series like 『ロック&キー』on Netflix. 

It feels strange sometimes. For a long time, it was normal to me that I understand not more than single words or very common phrases. Listening felt like a waste of time. Now I can follow the story. The more I understand the more I enjoy listening. Lots of reading helped me to increase my vocabulary and to get to the point at where I can process spoken Japanese much faster than before. 

I have still a long way to go, but I'm optimistic!