My language learning journey
Hi! I'm Anja, a language learner and manga artist from Germany. This is my first post here, so I think I should start with some information about myself:
I speak: German (native), English
I'm currently learning: Japanese
Paused languages: French, Russian
Other hobbies and interests:
creating manga (you can find my artist accounts here)
reading manga (mainly shonen)
nature
video games (e.g. Assassin‘s Creed Origins / Valhalla, Ghost of Tsushima, Cyberpunk 2077, Control)
reading different kinds of books
history & archaeology (especially ancient egypt)
For those who are interested, here is a summary of my ups and downs as a language learner:
How I improved my English unintentionally
English is not my native language (I'm sure I make mistakes ^^;). I learned the basics at school which means: vocab lists, grammar rules and exercises, listen to English spoken by non-native speakers (teacher and classmates) and only sometimes by native speakers (audio CD). 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.
After graduating, I became interested in Japanese. I found some german online forums where other learners of Japanese shared their experiences. Unfortunately, most of the users were very narrow-minded. They persisted, that their way of learning is the only "right" way. I never liked black-or-white-thinking and so I left these forums.
I've found a more open-minded forum and some blogs. These were in English, but I came across many different ideas and methods. It was a bit difficult at first because I never read "real" English before. But I concentrated so much on the content, that everything else became secondary.
At this time, the new episodes of my favorite TV show weren't available in German. So I watched them in English even though I had nearly no experience with listening to native speakers. There were things I couldn't understand, but I didn't care. I was able to watch this show quite comfortably which was all I wanted — reaching a high level in English was not my goal, after all.
Watching my favourite show, reading articles about interesting topics or reading novels 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". After learning the basics at school, 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. These texts or videos weren’t study objects. After reading/watching them I moved on. Without realizing it, English became part of my life.
Today, reading and listening to content 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.
The learning mindset is actually a learning barrier
In the case of Japanese, I always tried to understand as much as possible, looked up many words, put sentences into Anki and things like that, because many 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 was by no means as good as my English.
I was stuck in a "learning mindset" which made it difficult to just enjoy the content as I did with English. I wasn't able to focus on the content. All I saw were unknown words and phrases. It was like a curse.
Don't get me wrong: Good advice is useful, of course! When I come across an interesting approach or tip I try it out to see if it works for me. 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 not to follow blindly other methods and their creators. There is no right or wrong. Combine whatever works best for you and trust your own intuition. The most important thing is that you enjoy what you are doing.
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.
This mindset was a great inspiration for my current way of language learning. I only use Anki to review kanji, for example, because this works best for me. But whenever I use it for vocabulary/sentences, it feels so meaningless to me compared to reading a good book. I can't use Anki for vocabulary longer than a few weeks, but I feel always relaxed when I read a book in Japanese.
That's why I decided to just look up certain words, write them down and move on. Maybe other methods are more efficient, but I prefer learning words in their natural context. This is what I enjoy the most.
How my Japanese improved (finally)
For a long time, I felt like I hit a wall. My Japanese didn’t seem to improve. Then I focused on extensive reading and read several books in Japanese that were not too difficult at my current level (e.g. volume 1 - 4 of 『ハリー・ポッター』 and 『天気の子』 and other manga and light novels).
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). My listening comprehension stagnated for a long time but thanks to reading it now improves slowly but steady.
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.
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 roughly follow the story of some audio books, for example. Even small improvements like this give me a big motivation boost!
Switching to extensive reading had also 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 accordingly. I will read more and more difficult books to increase my vocabulary and to get used to more complex writing styles. It should be a bit challenging but not overwhelming.
Up to this point, I've read 78 books in Japanese so far. 27 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 around 18.242 pages in total.
Now
It took me a long time but today I don't care so much about efficiency and speed anymore. I just want to enjoy what I'm doing. I have still a long way to go, of course. But even though I don't understand everything I enjoy reading in Japanese so much! And I hope to further improve my listening comprehension so that I can comfortably understand audio books and podcasts.
My main activity is still reading books and other content but I also do light grammar study now. In my experience, you don't need to memorize grammar rules but a good foundation is important to understand more complex content and to build correct sentences yourself. That's why I think that grammar is not your enemy but a useful tool.
Lots of text, sorry. ^^; I hope it was interesting to some of you.
Please note that I write about what works for me and share advice based on my own experiences. If you have a different opinion or if you use other methods, that's absolutely fine. Do whatever works for you.
From time to time, I'll write posts about my recent language learning activities and thoughts.