I got an email from reader Joshua who has stumbled upon a bit of a hurdle in his Japanese studies, and I thought maybe you might be facing the same thing, so I’ll copy our exchange here for you to read. I hope he doesn’t mind!
Hi Alex,
Thanks for maintaining your website! Your articles have really helped me in my study of Japanese.
Just one question: sometimes when I do Japanese, I find myself inadvertently trying to guess the meaning of an unknown word in English. At other times, I find myself translating a sentence into English (even though I ‘feel’ like I understand the sentence already).
Do you have any advice on how to block out all these “English thoughts” so that my understanding of Japanese doesn’t become contaminated with English-isms?
Thanks!
Joshua
Here’s my reply
Hey Joshua,
Thanks for reading victorymanual.com. I’m glad you’ve found it helpful.
Regarding your quandary, I was in the same situation as you when I first started studying Japanese. Having moved on to Korean as my third language, I’m not facing the same problem, but I haven’t really thought about it that deeply, so I’m glad you brought it up!
I’m sure you’ve already read the article I wrote about on exposure. When you’re exposed to enough target-language (and attentive to the process), you should start to think in the language itself as you repeat it in your head.
But there’s another side to this that I haven’t written about on victorymanual.com yet – You can jump-start your brain to think in Japanese by shadowing audio of native speakers. A lot of people might think that shadowing is to help your pronunciation, but I find that it actually helps me more with building listening skills as well as causing the language to “echo in my head” like a song you’ve heard over and over. I’m way beyond the shadowing level in Japanese, but I apply it to my Korean studies now, and it has an incredible effect on my language acquisition and cognitive processing.
If you aren’t familiar with shadowing, you can check a few of the youtube videos that Alexander Arguelles produced outlining the strategy. I use a slightly different approach than he does, and you should definitely consider altering it to fit your own studies. Try it for at least a month, and I’m sure you’ll notice a huge difference.
I’ll probably write about what I do with Korean on victorymanual in the near future, but as it stands now I’m swamped with a few major deadlines and projects. What I can tell you briefly is that, after just a week of shadowing Korean, I noticed a huge difference in my command of the language, and it keeps improving. Ideally you should have a parallel text to work from when you do this.
I hope that helps you out for the time being. Keep on top of Japanese! You’ll do great!
- Alex
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Alex and Joshua,
I’m Rieko from lang-8.
Joshua, don’t worry, I was there, too, though my case was the opposite. I always translated English sentences into Japanese, and when I wrote essays, I wrote them in Japanese first and then translated them. It changed suddenly when I had to write a graduate thesis in English. Maybe I had no time to think in Japanese then, but I guess I already got to a certain level because of my effort.
As Alex says, so much exposure will definitely help you. In my case, I live in Japan and never studied abroad, so I tried to make my environment only with English, from TV, music, books, and so on. Of course I was working in a Japanese hospital, exposure to Japanese was far more than English. But whenever I watched TV news, dramas, or movies, I was shadowing English. Sometimes I was talking like Julia Roberts, sometimes I was talking like Johnny Depp, etc!
Also… I always tell my students (I’m an English teacher) that learning a foreign language is just like climbing up a very gentle slope in roller skating shoes. So if you stop at some point, you go down. But if you keep waking, and sometimes running up, you’ll find yourself at a higher level than before. Then… one day, you’ll find that you always think in Japanese, and when you write in Japanese, you make sentences without any help from your mother tongue. The more you study, the more you get the images and the words matched.
Now I feel much better writing in English than Japanese, though I still make lots of mistakes.
Oh, I also add that chatting with your Japanese friends will help you get quick response, even if it is just text chatting.
Anyway, good luck!
Hi Rieko!
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I noticed on your lang-8 profile that you’re also studying French now. Do you notice it being a lot easier than when you started studying English?
I like the way you phrase your explanation to your students. The imagery has an immediate impact.
Hope to see more comments from you again in the future!
Hi Alex,
Oh no, French is really hard!! I’m sure I have no talent in learning French. My French friend will stay my home for a year from July, so I have a chance to learn French from him, but I’m not sure if I can speak it in the future. English is really easy!
Well, actually I have stopped at some point on the slope now, so I may be so much behind with my own English study.
I’m looking forward to your new posts and of course, I’ll be back! (Terminater?
)