I never really understood why these all-by-input people advise to get the structure only by input, but at the same time, authorize themselves to use a JP-ENG dictionary to look up unknown words, or use a totally abstract method such as Heisig to learn kanji. So far, I found that looking up a grammar point after having encountered it a couple of times during my immersion was the most efficient and pleasant way to go about it.
"I never really understood why these all-by-input people advise to get the structure only by input" They generally don't. 2 places they tend to advise to go through is tae kim and/or the dictionary of basic japanese grammar before delving too deep. I'm even seeing more mention of dolly these days. They're pretty consistent in you not making it your main area of focus though. Its only after some variable level of comfort do you then go into all input. Even so you look up what you need to. The idea is comprehensible input.
@@BobbyJ529 yes, for me it was something like that. Reading over grammar once and not trying to hammer in the tae kim points worked for me because i could see a bit through it and see japanese grammar for what it really is. Also cure dolly helped a lot. Now if i need to look up grammar every now and then, i just watch a vid once, that's it. Not my main area of focus at all.
I remember that sometimes I hit a plateau in Latin and reading didn't help anymore, but after reviewing the grammar again I left this plateau very quickly. Also after a single ga and wa explanation video from you, a lot of nonsensical sentences became trivial to understand. I guess everything in the brain is connected.
In many cases people who are diagnosed on the autism spectrum also show language disabilities which can cause problems in these areas of the brain, causing a different formation to occur before birth. In these cases it's not a clear connection but rather they have to work around this particular issue, in my case of autism the psychiatrist didn't notice any language disability though I did have certain problems in learning nonetheless. I cannot generalize how it's like for everyone with my kind of neurological wiring. But I can say for certain based on scientific research at least for the other cases unrelated to mine, for those their lexicon is rather short; less vocabulary meaning they cannot express their thoughts in full detail, having troubles understanding complex language or both depending on the person. A disabled learner needs certain types of help in order to work around the problems they'll be facing.
Excellent Video as always, this one made an insanely large amount of sense and echoes what I was discussing with a young friend of mine who is Studying Japanese at a American college, I myself am pushing on 40 and have taken it up as self studying. I was talking to him about this very train of thought, not as well put or structured, but the sentiment was the same. This lets me know that the conclusions I've been drawning are the right ones. Keep up the work
My biggest hurdle is forgetfulness, or just getting things mixed up. To my ear, certain helper verbs sound similar enough that I overthink, and then I get confused. Your lessons are so clear and understandable, but once I walk away all bets are off. Anki has been helping, though I need to do more. Sometimes the act of writing them into cards is enough. I remember the answer side just because I wrote it. Finding how to work with my memorization is a task.
For those who happen upon this video and are interest in comprehensible japanese content, I recommend the UA-cam channel Comprehensible Japanese. ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleJapanese Yuki-san creates short, narrative videos speaking natural Japanese about a range of topics from daily life to cultural objects, and in a range of levels of comprehension-from complete beginner to intermediate. She speaks clearly with visual aids and illustrations. It can be a real confidence booster to watch and video and realize you understand exactly what she is saying.
What people seem to miss is that no one acquires their first language through massive immersion in novels, TED talks, or adult dramas. Content for children is very different. Children pick up basic structure via a massive number of examples carefully selected for their reading level. They spend years on content like "This is Spot. See Spot run. Can you point to Spot?" before they ever touch a proper novel. They're usually surrounded by adults constantly engaging them with active conversation on that level as well. Any sensible program that tries to teach language by immersion alone is going to need to make a serious effort at replicating those conditions, and I don't think any of them do. And understanding basic structure logically rather than by that kind of massive input is probably faster anyway.
My personal experience as somebody who is really on the cusp of being fluent in a second language. I started learning farsi when i was 28 and im now 31. I got a point where i could read 80 percent of anything i found on the interenet, maybe even 85 percent, but when listening to the language i would conpletely fall apart. For about 3 months i spent about 4 hours a day listening to the language and after this, this more than anythinf rapidly improved my ability to understand, i very quixklt found myself in a position of being able to understand far more. You have to spend a lot of time just listening, even when you cant understand. Search up words and watch videos on grammar also this will make it easier for your brain to unravel the language, but without an enourmous amount of expsure you will never be fluent. I know of peeople with doctrates in language that admitted they cannot understand shit when people speak, they understood grammar and knew the word for everythinf but the brain wasnt able to understand when in real life situations. Exposure is a fucking must, this is the reason people travel to the country of the language and come back far better, they just get a mountain of exposure when they are there.
It seems to me that, in order to be successful learning a language, there is a threshold of 'drivenness' that has to be met by a combination of the need to learn and the desire to learn. If you have a strong enough need, then, you need not really have desire at all, hence why so many learn English despite probably not all of them really enjoying it much (although one might argue that the need to learn English is, for the most part, backed by the desire to do things in English). Conversely, a strong enough desire to learn, from enjoyment, passion or love of culture and so on, can be enough to reach that threshold without any real need of the language. The walling off of certain areas of one's life (mentioned in other videos) is likely so effective because it combines both need and want; you create a situation where you NEED to learn Japanese in order to do the things you WANT. If one can't meet that 'drivenness' threshold via need or desire or whatever means, then they are liable to just give up at some point. For many I suspect that need is indeed a stronger driving force than want, especially for high-effort tasks like language learning, so it fascinates me that such a scholar as Krashen could dismiss it so.
The way I put it in other videos is "to learn Japanese you have to either love it or need it", and I think this goes for any language. Closely related ones are somewhat less of a hurdle - but in the end the language you are most likely to succeed in is the one you love or need and the one you are least likely to succeed in is the one you don't. Of course this isn't saying that either love or need _in themselves_ "teach" you anything. But they set up the conditions where you will acquire the language.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Oh, yes that was a particularly blatant strawman, it surprised me that it managed to fly under the radar for some people.
In relation to the notion that comprehensible input is what drives the acquisition of language, I often struggle to reconcile the idea of to what degree of comprehensibility is acceptable to meet the definition of comprehensible input. If I'm listening to something I can usually pick out phrases or individual words but often I still have much difficulty putting it all together into a crystalized idea in real time, even if I know all or most of the words in the sentence. I also tend to look up words relatively frequently while watching anime but sometimes I feel like I'm overdoing it and perhaps looking things up too often thus breaking the flow of immersion and relying too heavily on dictionaries. Is there such a thing as too much in this regard? I do worry that because sometimes I feel like I understand so little that I might be wasting my time with input that isn't of much benefit due to its overall lack of comprehensibility but on the other hand I know that with passive immersion there is a degree of trust in the process that is required and that over time such input will become comprehensible. Can you provide some insight on this subject?
I wouldn't put too much faith in passive immersion if it is not broadly comprehensible. People seem to vary a great deal in how much good it does them. A lot may have to do with tolerance of ambiguity. It is generally a good idea to look up words as much as you can tolerate. Expanding your vocabulary is one of the best ways of making immersion comprehensible. In another video (I'll link it below) I talked about top-down vs bottom up learning. Anime with J-subs I regard as fundamentally bottom up, which means we should be going for as near 100% comprehensibility as possible. And listening to the audio passively while on the go. Top down immersion is important too, though until you have done enough bottom up work to make it reasonably comprehensible I am not sure that it does a lot of good. Once you feel ok with it one should mix top down and bottom up. One can also throw in full-speed watching with J-subs (no stops for looking up etc). But this is fundamentally top down. Bottom up work is your university - that's where you learn vocabulary, kanji etc. because we aren't using sentence decks, kanji decks or anything else. Just the One Deck. Top down vs bottom up: ua-cam.com/video/lzENBWvgfFA/v-deo.html One-deck strategy: ua-cam.com/video/Pz4ElgxgsoI/v-deo.html
When you know 98% of the words it is comprehensible, according to Dr. Krashen. He says empirical studies show close to zero comprehensibility when students know 90% of words. For language learning he himself prefers to read texts with 95% known words. A good start, even for beginners, is "Tadoku Stories". It's built on the idea of comprehensible input and uses pictures so you can understand from context.
A few points on this video. I agree completely on the comprehensible input... the fact japanese uses a non western writing system vs french and Italian makes it tough. I also wonder, do you think that western languages have words closer on the meaning spectrum to each other? I think your newer focus on trouble words is great and is almost as helpful as the structure because once you get into the wild all you are left with for tough words is a string of often unrelated definitions and a puzzled look. Second I think there is another HUGE part of learning that you haven't covered (and maybe you shouldn't) around the motivation for people to learn in general. A colleague of mine mentioned a book he read about motivation and described me as "obligation" motivated. This one is quite common and means people are motivated by commitments and less by their own aspirations. It is why you could be motivated at work and make absurd deadlines but struggle with self improvement in other areas. I told him of my japaness struggles and it being sometimes hard to self motivate and he suggested finding a way to turn japanese into an obligation. Still trying to figure that out but in my personal experience the motivation and drive is the hardest part, not the structure and grammar.
I think European languages do tend to have more words that occupy much the same area of the meaning spectrum - of course they "drift" over time and there are a lot of false friends but because they started out more similar they often remain so - and also often cross-influence each other again even when they have drifted. Japanese much more often has wholly different expression strategies. An example of a few points is the Italian word "stampa" meaning "printing/press" in the sense of newspapers etc. While we don't know this word if we know no Italian it is very easy to understand that "press" originally meant pressing type on paper and "stamp" in English has much the same meaning. So the word is half-known already. Not only that, but it has a very similar range of extended meaning. So if we know "freedom of the press" in English we know "libertà di stampa" in Italian. "Libertà" is one of thousands of free gifts. But also this concept expressed with exactly this metaphor (the freedom of stamping or pressing ideas on paper) is not going to exist in unrelated languages (unless as a direct loan-idea). The equivalent word 印刷 (いんさつ) in Japanese does not have this extended meaning. Obligation I think is a pretty bad form of motivation for most people. In fact I think this is very much why the failure rate in Japanese is so high vs the equally high success rate of foreigners in English. The latter are seriously motivated by all the things they want to do in English - if they aren't they don't do any better than any other group - but they very commonly are. I have made videos about trying to reproduce this kind of motivation for Japanese (in fact the lead video on my channel page is about that). It doesn't (in most cases) happen naturally the way it does for English. But we can take steps to increase it.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I claim obligation is the only way to really learn something, as having fun is much easier if one avoid the hard work of studying. Obligation means to accept responsibility for the obligation, as in it is one's ability to respond to the desire of wanting to learn japanese and all it's consequences. This is also a problem with the language learning theories that emphasize the importance of comprehension, comprehension is the effect of exposing oneself to things one do not comprehend, as in everything one learn is because one try to go beyond what one already know, one fail, and this failure creates retroactively the awareness of what one failed at, so one can fail better next time. Of course one can also take shortcuts by trusting in the information of people that already learned by failure, but that becomes a question of who one can trust.
@@sunu4735 The "hard work of studying" will never on its own cause you to acquire a language. It is just preparation for getting into it and living it. And you do that best if you are enjoying it (or need it).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I agree one have to live with japanese, but enjoyment cannot by itself motivate one to accept all the consequences of dedicating the time and work needed to live with another language, one also need the greater desire to sacrifice simpler enjoyments for the more enduring goal of living with a language that at first is much harder to navigate than the language one grew up with. As in while it might seem to be just enjoyment for someone already fully committed to learning a language or that have already learned it, for a new learner that commitment is not there to begin with. Also the trap of enjoyment is also the fear of failure, as in it is painful to fail so one can easily fall into the trap of trying to avoid situations or challenges where one have a risk of failing in order to enjoy what one already know, one's comfort zone. But the nuance with enjoyment in this case seems to be that learning a language have to have a meaning. I don't agree with learning have to have a meaning, I agree that a greater need can make one learn something, but just because one don't have a need does not mean one need a clear reason or motivation to learn something, as in my point is to seperate enjoyment from love. Love does not mean one have to enjoy it, it means that one desire it even if it hurts or one don't comprehend it.
@@sunu4735 But then what is the point of having a sense of obligation over something you don't need and don't enjoy? In practice, if there is no external force keeping it in place the sense of obligation will probably fade away as the learner gets bored anyway. There is this "no pain no gain" school that seems to like pain, but I often wonder how far most of them really get.
There is just one problem with this. Finding material where input is exactly i+1 for you is extremely difficult. The only places you'll find that is in your textbooks but those are boring
Exactly. Professor Krashen's work is all based on classroom teaching. He says "there are no bad students, only bad teachers". I take that to mean that if the teacher calculates i+1 correctly for the student, the student will acquire the language. But whether this is true or not it is pretty much irrelevant to non-classroom learners.
The trick is to consume material that isn't waaaay too difficult or waaaay too easy and to simply ignore the parts that are you're not ready to acquire. Even the toughest material will have i+1 sentences ready to consume, but if you can find something that isn't _so_ hard whereby you are actually engaged too... That's the ideal. So long as you don't get bogged down in the details that you don't understand.
Maybe someone can help clarify this for me, i've watched basically half of CureDollys from scratch playlist, and started reading stuff like yotsuba& but i don't feel like i really learn anything. Perhaps i am, but i feel like im always using yomichan to look up words and then just peice togther the meaning. a couple sentences here and there i'll get intuitively but it never feels like im learning it just by immersion. im I not reading enough, i'd say im pretty incosistant like maybe 2 chapters of yotsuba a week then none the next and then maybe 1 chapter. if you've got any wisdom id love to hear it. :)
If we truly want to learn Japanese, we need BOTH (not just one of them) structure and comprehensible input Structure is a tool for acquiring Japanese; it will only start working for you when you take it out to the river
Another excellent video! May humbly request that a future video be based on ordinal numbers in Japanese, particularly 第、目、番、番目? I'm just having a terrible time differentiating them, especially 目 and 番目. いつもお世話になっております。ありがとうございます！
I have a question. I've seen that a lot of people get trapped into only being able to read, but unable to get any meaning out of spoken language. What can be done to prevent this, and is there any resources that help with this?
Essentially, build up your listening at a reasonable pace alongside your reading. You don't learn listening from reading (even though it gives you a foundation it doesn't get you there). That is exactly what this video is about - making sure you mix top-down (listening-type) immersion with bottom-up (reading-type) immersion.
What happen with the particle にand で in this grammar 上に and 上で。上 what does it mean? And How can i become your student? Do you live in japan? I think i need take course form you it better than i go to 日本語学校。
From my limited knowledge, 上 means up, but unlike in european languages, it is a noun in japanese. So 上に is just a combination of up as a noun and the particle に. Same with 上で. You could put 家 (house) in there instead of 上 to mean things like 家に行く(going to the house) or 家で遊ぶ (playing in the house). Other than that you just need to understand the particles and for that there are enough vids out there, cure dolly should have some as well?
@@haygamtheocachcuaban Depends on the context. It could very well be て形 of だ, or just で particle. Particle で sets the limit of action. Cure Dolly made a video about how で actually works. For example: 木の上で休んだ We took a rest on top of a tree. 木の上 is the boundry of how the 休み happened.
@@nootics Grammar is not like logic or matematic. in logic i can say "A とB" and i always mean "A and B". In grammar i can say A とB どちらが, so とnow means between, change of contest. Grammar is not independent from the meaning of words. So New York で means "at New York", but "naifuで" means with a knife and "with" is not companionship is "by means of". so, you can see in english too, is the same thing.
@@glicogeno4550 that is exactly why i didn't go into explaining the particles because they are so context dependent, i can't put the uses in one comment. A video by someone like cure dolly is much much better at that. I was just explaining how 上 is treated in japanese.
There should be an effort sometime to build a Dolly Styled Grammar Deck. Ik you aren't a fan of hard loading with anki, but for some people the initial cram sets the needed non ambiguity base to learn deeply. I can see the community coming together to help engineer the project.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Even late stages I think hard loading is the key. The risk the that comes with this method however is it is inhumane and leads to burnout. I am just finishing a 600 card grammar deck and although the explanations suck, it allows me to spot grammar more when I immerse.
@@岩77 I don't think my explanations would work as back-of-card synopses. They are based on getting a broader picture of the structure no on the "grammar point" model of conventional "Japanese grammar".
I'm gobsmacked that from I've now seen and read, the good professor doesn't even take learner types into account. Yes, there are learner who are fortunate enough to just acquire *any* knowledge by mere information input without use. Others, like myself, utterly lack that ability. I can read, watch, devour information, but it will either not "stick" or meld into some jumble in my brain where it remains useless - until I use it. The sooner and quicker, the better. Monkey see, monkey do, as I've said elsewhere.
@@TokyoXtreme Perhaps, but from a quick search it seems that the issue isn't that clear cut: one paper replaced the model with their pet model, another pointed out that there is an inflation (71?!) of models that needed pruning. Yet another pointed out the difficulty of studying it scientifically, as it's unethical to use learning children as guinea pigs and potentially stymieing their development if they fall into a control group. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that people learn better in a variation of ways (I simply can NOT learn straight out of books and memorisation exams are torture for me as I retain nothing). How to qualify and quantify that... not my area.
@@michaelhoffmann2891 Ideally a human would learn material in a manner that engages all the senses (audio, visual, kinesthetic) without relying on one single source. That’s one reason why writing kanji on paper while reviewing Anki cards helps with memory, as it combines two or more parts of the brain at once. Using audio and images with vocab cards helps memory much more than just doing one thing alone, which unfortunately is what many Anki users do “ねこ > cat”, and other uninteresting methods.
@@TokyoXtreme I would completely agree. But isn't it just in our nature that we want to attach labels to what to call that "type" of learning? Again, that's outside of my expertise! Thanks for you response!
I've watched about 100 hours of Japanese Grammar lessons, and I remember essentially none of it, yet I still remember every micron of that 100% in-German German lesson that Stephen Krashen gave from when I watched it 3 months ago. Acquired language simply is not housed in the conscious mind. If it was, people could choose not to understand their language, but this is essentially completely impossible without blocking-out the sound altogether. The only humans who do not become supremely fluent in their native language are those with severe mental impairment from birth, yet how many native English speakers with 100% fluency even so much as know any amount of basic English grammar?
I need a little help with a sentence formulation. Every time I get close to making a sentence longer, the harder it gets to knowing what particles to use. So far I got: "何がアニメは本大好きですか?" I'm trying to ask what anime books the other person likes but I have no idea where 本 fits in or where a particle precedes it.
Your comment in this video is very interesting and also convincing. But the problem I have is this. I know about 1,000 Japanese words and the Kanjis in your book. I also have worked through the first 20 of your videos. So I have a basic understanding of structure. But when I watch an anime or try to read a story, I cannot succeed. So, my question is, "How can I find comprehensible input that brings me to the next level, which then hopefully enables me to understand stories and anime?"
First it is a good idea to start with something as simple as possible, and then we need to understand that we _will_ need to learn vocabulary from the story itself. There will be dozens of unknowns in any story and learning them is part of the exercise (you don't need to put every one in your Anki but you do need to put a fair number in and look up enough that you can understand what is going on. Up to Lesson 20 is a bare minimum of structure (not saying it's too early to start but be aware that you're taking a big bite). Learning more vocabulary in the abstract isn't all that helpful because it mostly won't overlap with what you encounter anyway, which is why it is best to learn the vocabulary from the encounters themselves. But this means we are working slowly. There's no real way around that. Here are lessons where we walk through some simple material: ua-cam.com/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/Bpm9ygCuuXo/v-deo.html Here is one about acquiring vocabulary through the material: ua-cam.com/video/3rT1zaHSmog/v-deo.html
I don't think Professor Chomsky himself did. In its pure form it is certainly controversial, but I use it here really just as a glyph for the phenomenon of unconscious acquisition, which certainly happens. Of course it was very active when Professor Krashen was developing his theories, and I don't think it harmed them (although it may have contributed to his absolutism).
Why don't u use a normal voice , this voice becomes hard to understand at times , I have to always use subtitles or see it like 5 times before I understand some videos of yours.
Ah, poor Dolly. You are always getting grief for voice. There was this female radio host of a classical music program I listened to. I was fascinated by her voice, and I thought she has to be British. When I got to meet her, I was suprised to find out that she was native to Denver, Colorado where I am also from. She was just speaking English with proper diction and grammer without any accent at all. I find your voice endearing, though I need to listen carefully.
Its partially what sounds like slamming two audio clips together, resulting in often very disjointed speech. Its made even more noticeable because the weird vtuber thing means you can see it constantly jolt. But eh, the actual lessons still better than I see elsewhere so eh
@@fearedjames Well I don't know about constantly but in fact I do not speak nearly as fluently as I seem to, so a lot of editing is needed to give the impression of reasonably unbroken speech.
I never really understood why these all-by-input people advise to get the structure only by input, but at the same time, authorize themselves to use a JP-ENG dictionary to look up unknown words, or use a totally abstract method such as Heisig to learn kanji.
So far, I found that looking up a grammar point after having encountered it a couple of times during my immersion was the most efficient and pleasant way to go about it.
"I never really understood why these all-by-input people advise to get the structure only by input" They generally don't. 2 places they tend to advise to go through is tae kim and/or the dictionary of basic japanese grammar before delving too deep. I'm even seeing more mention of dolly these days. They're pretty consistent in you not making it your main area of focus though. Its only after some variable level of comfort do you then go into all input. Even so you look up what you need to. The idea is comprehensible input.
@@BobbyJ529 yes, for me it was something like that. Reading over grammar once and not trying to hammer in the tae kim points worked for me because i could see a bit through it and see japanese grammar for what it really is. Also cure dolly helped a lot. Now if i need to look up grammar every now and then, i just watch a vid once, that's it. Not my main area of focus at all.
You are truly amazing, Cure Dolly Sensei! I feel privileged to have the opportunity to learn Japanese from you. Love from India❤️
Thank you! and love back to you!
Hello!!! I'm a fellow Indian as well♡
~Binod.
@@vanessameow1902 Happy to have many subscribers from beautiful India!
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Happy to have stumbled upon your amazing channel🙏🙏
Curiously, Matt vs Japan just uploaded a video interviewing the Man himself!
He must be "in the air" at the moment. A great man I think. His flamboyance and occasional overstatement are part of his creative energy.
I remember that sometimes I hit a plateau in Latin and reading didn't help anymore, but after reviewing the grammar again I left this plateau very quickly. Also after a single ga and wa explanation video from you, a lot of nonsensical sentences became trivial to understand. I guess everything in the brain is connected.
Yes exactly. I don't think there are isolated parts that work completely independently (except for involuntary functions like blood circulation).
In many cases people who are diagnosed on the autism spectrum also show language disabilities which can cause problems in these areas of the brain, causing a different formation to occur before birth.
In these cases it's not a clear connection but rather they have to work around this particular issue, in my case of autism the psychiatrist didn't notice any language disability though I did have certain problems in learning nonetheless. I cannot generalize how it's like for everyone with my kind of neurological wiring.
But I can say for certain based on scientific research at least for the other cases unrelated to mine, for those their lexicon is rather short; less vocabulary meaning they cannot express their thoughts in full detail, having troubles understanding complex language or both depending on the person.
A disabled learner needs certain types of help in order to work around the problems they'll be facing.
Excellent Video as always, this one made an insanely large amount of sense and echoes what I was discussing with a young friend of mine who is Studying Japanese at a American college, I myself am pushing on 40 and have taken it up as self studying. I was talking to him about this very train of thought, not as well put or structured, but the sentiment was the same. This lets me know that the conclusions I've been drawning are the right ones. Keep up the work
My biggest hurdle is forgetfulness, or just getting things mixed up. To my ear, certain helper verbs sound similar enough that I overthink, and then I get confused. Your lessons are so clear and understandable, but once I walk away all bets are off. Anki has been helping, though I need to do more. Sometimes the act of writing them into cards is enough. I remember the answer side just because I wrote it. Finding how to work with my memorization is a task.
do you use anki? im sure you could utilize that in some way to help remember grammar
You gotta practice what you learned as what Cure Dolly has been saying in this and other videos.
For those who happen upon this video and are interest in comprehensible japanese content, I recommend the UA-cam channel Comprehensible Japanese. ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleJapanese
Yuki-san creates short, narrative videos speaking natural Japanese about a range of topics from daily life to cultural objects, and in a range of levels of comprehension-from complete beginner to intermediate. She speaks clearly with visual aids and illustrations. It can be a real confidence booster to watch and video and realize you understand exactly what she is saying.
Thank you very much for this recommendation. I just watched several videos from the channel, and they are absolutely great.
leave it to dolly sensei to correct all the professors
What people seem to miss is that no one acquires their first language through massive immersion in novels, TED talks, or adult dramas. Content for children is very different. Children pick up basic structure via a massive number of examples carefully selected for their reading level. They spend years on content like "This is Spot. See Spot run. Can you point to Spot?" before they ever touch a proper novel. They're usually surrounded by adults constantly engaging them with active conversation on that level as well. Any sensible program that tries to teach language by immersion alone is going to need to make a serious effort at replicating those conditions, and I don't think any of them do. And understanding basic structure logically rather than by that kind of massive input is probably faster anyway.
Children also don't have the capabilities for abstraction that adults do. It's not an either/or type situation.
Really good video! Well thought out.
CURE DOLLY FAN! I SUPPORT YOU 100%
I needed to hear this. Thank you
I can feel that this is right from my own experience
My personal experience as somebody who is really on the cusp of being fluent in a second language. I started learning farsi when i was 28 and im now 31. I got a point where i could read 80 percent of anything i found on the interenet, maybe even 85 percent, but when listening to the language i would conpletely fall apart. For about 3 months i spent about 4 hours a day listening to the language and after this, this more than anythinf rapidly improved my ability to understand, i very quixklt found myself in a position of being able to understand far more. You have to spend a lot of time just listening, even when you cant understand. Search up words and watch videos on grammar also this will make it easier for your brain to unravel the language, but without an enourmous amount of expsure you will never be fluent. I know of peeople with doctrates in language that admitted they cannot understand shit when people speak, they understood grammar and knew the word for everythinf but the brain wasnt able to understand when in real life situations. Exposure is a fucking must, this is the reason people travel to the country of the language and come back far better, they just get a mountain of exposure when they are there.
It seems to me that, in order to be successful learning a language, there is a threshold of 'drivenness' that has to be met by a combination of the need to learn and the desire to learn. If you have a strong enough need, then, you need not really have desire at all, hence why so many learn English despite probably not all of them really enjoying it much (although one might argue that the need to learn English is, for the most part, backed by the desire to do things in English). Conversely, a strong enough desire to learn, from enjoyment, passion or love of culture and so on, can be enough to reach that threshold without any real need of the language. The walling off of certain areas of one's life (mentioned in other videos) is likely so effective because it combines both need and want; you create a situation where you NEED to learn Japanese in order to do the things you WANT. If one can't meet that 'drivenness' threshold via need or desire or whatever means, then they are liable to just give up at some point. For many I suspect that need is indeed a stronger driving force than want, especially for high-effort tasks like language learning, so it fascinates me that such a scholar as Krashen could dismiss it so.
The way I put it in other videos is "to learn Japanese you have to either love it or need it", and I think this goes for any language. Closely related ones are somewhat less of a hurdle - but in the end the language you are most likely to succeed in is the one you love or need and the one you are least likely to succeed in is the one you don't. Of course this isn't saying that either love or need _in themselves_ "teach" you anything. But they set up the conditions where you will acquire the language.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Oh, yes that was a particularly blatant strawman, it surprised me that it managed to fly under the radar for some people.
In relation to the notion that comprehensible input is what drives the acquisition of language, I often struggle to reconcile the idea of to what degree of comprehensibility is acceptable to meet the definition of comprehensible input. If I'm listening to something I can usually pick out phrases or individual words but often I still have much difficulty putting it all together into a crystalized idea in real time, even if I know all or most of the words in the sentence. I also tend to look up words relatively frequently while watching anime but sometimes I feel like I'm overdoing it and perhaps looking things up too often thus breaking the flow of immersion and relying too heavily on dictionaries. Is there such a thing as too much in this regard?
I do worry that because sometimes I feel like I understand so little that I might be wasting my time with input that isn't of much benefit due to its overall lack of comprehensibility but on the other hand I know that with passive immersion there is a degree of trust in the process that is required and that over time such input will become comprehensible. Can you provide some insight on this subject?
I wouldn't put too much faith in passive immersion if it is not broadly comprehensible. People seem to vary a great deal in how much good it does them. A lot may have to do with tolerance of ambiguity. It is generally a good idea to look up words as much as you can tolerate. Expanding your vocabulary is one of the best ways of making immersion comprehensible.
In another video (I'll link it below) I talked about top-down vs bottom up learning. Anime with J-subs I regard as fundamentally bottom up, which means we should be going for as near 100% comprehensibility as possible. And listening to the audio passively while on the go.
Top down immersion is important too, though until you have done enough bottom up work to make it reasonably comprehensible I am not sure that it does a lot of good. Once you feel ok with it one should mix top down and bottom up. One can also throw in full-speed watching with J-subs (no stops for looking up etc). But this is fundamentally top down.
Bottom up work is your university - that's where you learn vocabulary, kanji etc. because we aren't using sentence decks, kanji decks or anything else. Just the One Deck.
Top down vs bottom up: ua-cam.com/video/lzENBWvgfFA/v-deo.html
One-deck strategy: ua-cam.com/video/Pz4ElgxgsoI/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Appreciate the insight. I'll be sure to give those videos a watch.
When you know 98% of the words it is comprehensible, according to Dr. Krashen. He says empirical studies show close to zero comprehensibility when students know 90% of words. For language learning he himself prefers to read texts with 95% known words.
A good start, even for beginners, is "Tadoku Stories". It's built on the idea of comprehensible input and uses pictures so you can understand from context.
A few points on this video. I agree completely on the comprehensible input... the fact japanese uses a non western writing system vs french and Italian makes it tough. I also wonder, do you think that western languages have words closer on the meaning spectrum to each other? I think your newer focus on trouble words is great and is almost as helpful as the structure because once you get into the wild all you are left with for tough words is a string of often unrelated definitions and a puzzled look.
Second I think there is another HUGE part of learning that you haven't covered (and maybe you shouldn't) around the motivation for people to learn in general. A colleague of mine mentioned a book he read about motivation and described me as "obligation" motivated. This one is quite common and means people are motivated by commitments and less by their own aspirations. It is why you could be motivated at work and make absurd deadlines but struggle with self improvement in other areas. I told him of my japaness struggles and it being sometimes hard to self motivate and he suggested finding a way to turn japanese into an obligation. Still trying to figure that out but in my personal experience the motivation and drive is the hardest part, not the structure and grammar.
I think European languages do tend to have more words that occupy much the same area of the meaning spectrum - of course they "drift" over time and there are a lot of false friends but because they started out more similar they often remain so - and also often cross-influence each other again even when they have drifted. Japanese much more often has wholly different expression strategies.
An example of a few points is the Italian word "stampa" meaning "printing/press" in the sense of newspapers etc. While we don't know this word if we know no Italian it is very easy to understand that "press" originally meant pressing type on paper and "stamp" in English has much the same meaning. So the word is half-known already.
Not only that, but it has a very similar range of extended meaning. So if we know "freedom of the press" in English we know "libertà di stampa" in Italian. "Libertà" is one of thousands of free gifts. But also this concept expressed with exactly this metaphor (the freedom of stamping or pressing ideas on paper) is not going to exist in unrelated languages (unless as a direct loan-idea). The equivalent word 印刷 (いんさつ) in Japanese does not have this extended meaning.
Obligation I think is a pretty bad form of motivation for most people. In fact I think this is very much why the failure rate in Japanese is so high vs the equally high success rate of foreigners in English. The latter are seriously motivated by all the things they want to do in English - if they aren't they don't do any better than any other group - but they very commonly are.
I have made videos about trying to reproduce this kind of motivation for Japanese (in fact the lead video on my channel page is about that). It doesn't (in most cases) happen naturally the way it does for English. But we can take steps to increase it.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I claim obligation is the only way to really learn something, as having fun is much easier if one avoid the hard work of studying. Obligation means to accept responsibility for the obligation, as in it is one's ability to respond to the desire of wanting to learn japanese and all it's consequences. This is also a problem with the language learning theories that emphasize the importance of comprehension, comprehension is the effect of exposing oneself to things one do not comprehend, as in everything one learn is because one try to go beyond what one already know, one fail, and this failure creates retroactively the awareness of what one failed at, so one can fail better next time.
Of course one can also take shortcuts by trusting in the information of people that already learned by failure, but that becomes a question of who one can trust.
@@sunu4735 The "hard work of studying" will never on its own cause you to acquire a language. It is just preparation for getting into it and living it. And you do that best if you are enjoying it (or need it).
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 I agree one have to live with japanese, but enjoyment cannot by itself motivate one to accept all the consequences of dedicating the time and work needed to live with another language, one also need the greater desire to sacrifice simpler enjoyments for the more enduring goal of living with a language that at first is much harder to navigate than the language one grew up with. As in while it might seem to be just enjoyment for someone already fully committed to learning a language or that have already learned it, for a new learner that commitment is not there to begin with. Also the trap of enjoyment is also the fear of failure, as in it is painful to fail so one can easily fall into the trap of trying to avoid situations or challenges where one have a risk of failing in order to enjoy what one already know, one's comfort zone.
But the nuance with enjoyment in this case seems to be that learning a language have to have a meaning.
I don't agree with learning have to have a meaning, I agree that a greater need can make one learn something, but just because one don't have a need does not mean one need a clear reason or motivation to learn something, as in my point is to seperate enjoyment from love.
Love does not mean one have to enjoy it, it means that one desire it even if it hurts or one don't comprehend it.
@@sunu4735 But then what is the point of having a sense of obligation over something you don't need and don't enjoy? In practice, if there is no external force keeping it in place the sense of obligation will probably fade away as the learner gets bored anyway. There is this "no pain no gain" school that seems to like pain, but I often wonder how far most of them really get.
There is just one problem with this. Finding material where input is exactly i+1 for you is extremely difficult. The only places you'll find that is in your textbooks but those are boring
Exactly. Professor Krashen's work is all based on classroom teaching. He says "there are no bad students, only bad teachers". I take that to mean that if the teacher calculates i+1 correctly for the student, the student will acquire the language. But whether this is true or not it is pretty much irrelevant to non-classroom learners.
The trick is to consume material that isn't waaaay too difficult or waaaay too easy and to simply ignore the parts that are you're not ready to acquire. Even the toughest material will have i+1 sentences ready to consume, but if you can find something that isn't _so_ hard whereby you are actually engaged too... That's the ideal. So long as you don't get bogged down in the details that you don't understand.
Maybe someone can help clarify this for me, i've watched basically half of CureDollys from scratch playlist, and started reading stuff like yotsuba& but i don't feel like i really learn anything. Perhaps i am, but i feel like im always using yomichan to look up words and then just peice togther the meaning. a couple sentences here and there i'll get intuitively but it never feels like im learning it just by immersion. im I not reading enough, i'd say im pretty incosistant like maybe 2 chapters of yotsuba a week then none the next and then maybe 1 chapter. if you've got any wisdom id love to hear it. :)
Hello pretty peoples!
You remembered!
こんにちはドリー先生。久しぶりです。
It’s been awhile. Right? 😅
If we truly want to learn Japanese, we need BOTH (not just one of them) structure and comprehensible input
Structure is a tool for acquiring Japanese; it will only start working for you when you take it out to the river
Another excellent video!
May humbly request that a future video be based on ordinal numbers in Japanese, particularly 第、目、番、番目? I'm just having a terrible time differentiating them, especially 目 and 番目.
いつもお世話になっております。ありがとうございます！
I have a question. I've seen that a lot of people get trapped into only being able to read, but unable to get any meaning out of spoken language. What can be done to prevent this, and is there any resources that help with this?
Essentially, build up your listening at a reasonable pace alongside your reading. You don't learn listening from reading (even though it gives you a foundation it doesn't get you there). That is exactly what this video is about - making sure you mix top-down (listening-type) immersion with bottom-up (reading-type) immersion.
What happen with the particle にand で in this grammar 上に and 上で。上 what does it mean? And How can i become your student? Do you live in japan? I think i need take course form you it better than i go to 日本語学校。
From my limited knowledge, 上 means up, but unlike in european languages, it is a noun in japanese. So 上に is just a combination of up as a noun and the particle に. Same with 上で. You could put 家 (house) in there instead of 上 to mean things like 家に行く(going to the house) or 家で遊ぶ (playing in the house). Other than that you just need to understand the particles and for that there are enough vids out there, cure dolly should have some as well?
@@nootics its logical with 上に but how about 上で、で is the て form of だ。or something like by mean of ?
@@haygamtheocachcuaban
Depends on the context. It could very well be て形 of だ, or just で particle. Particle で sets the limit of action. Cure Dolly made a video about how で actually works.
For example:
木の上で休んだ
We took a rest on top of a tree.
木の上 is the boundry of how the 休み happened.
@@nootics Grammar is not like logic or matematic. in logic i can say "A とB" and i always mean "A and B". In grammar i can say A とB どちらが, so とnow means between, change of contest. Grammar is not independent from the meaning of words. So New York で means "at New York", but "naifuで" means with a knife and "with" is not companionship is "by means of". so, you can see in english too, is the same thing.
@@glicogeno4550 that is exactly why i didn't go into explaining the particles because they are so context dependent, i can't put the uses in one comment. A video by someone like cure dolly is much much better at that. I was just explaining how 上 is treated in japanese.
There should be an effort sometime to build a Dolly Styled Grammar Deck.
Ik you aren't a fan of hard loading with anki, but for some people the initial cram sets the needed non ambiguity base to learn deeply.
I can see the community coming together to help engineer the project.
I'm not closed to any ideas where it comes to getting people over the early hurdles and into immersion.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Even late stages I think hard loading is the key. The risk the that comes with this method however is it is inhumane and leads to burnout. I am just finishing a 600 card grammar deck and although the explanations suck, it allows me to spot grammar more when I immerse.
The perfect world would be if there was a hard load grammar deck but with big brain dolly explanations. The video series in a sense is this.
@@岩77 I don't think my explanations would work as back-of-card synopses. They are based on getting a broader picture of the structure no on the "grammar point" model of conventional "Japanese grammar".
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Haha very true :3
I'm gobsmacked that from I've now seen and read, the good professor doesn't even take learner types into account. Yes, there are learner who are fortunate enough to just acquire *any* knowledge by mere information input without use. Others, like myself, utterly lack that ability. I can read, watch, devour information, but it will either not "stick" or meld into some jumble in my brain where it remains useless - until I use it. The sooner and quicker, the better. Monkey see, monkey do, as I've said elsewhere.
Yes, learning styles vary enormously by individual, and you can't easily change them.
I tend to believe that “learning types” is junk science.
@@TokyoXtreme Perhaps, but from a quick search it seems that the issue isn't that clear cut: one paper replaced the model with their pet model, another pointed out that there is an inflation (71?!) of models that needed pruning. Yet another pointed out the difficulty of studying it scientifically, as it's unethical to use learning children as guinea pigs and potentially stymieing their development if they fall into a control group. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that people learn better in a variation of ways (I simply can NOT learn straight out of books and memorisation exams are torture for me as I retain nothing). How to qualify and quantify that... not my area.
@@michaelhoffmann2891 Ideally a human would learn material in a manner that engages all the senses (audio, visual, kinesthetic) without relying on one single source. That’s one reason why writing kanji on paper while reviewing Anki cards helps with memory, as it combines two or more parts of the brain at once. Using audio and images with vocab cards helps memory much more than just doing one thing alone, which unfortunately is what many Anki users do “ねこ > cat”, and other uninteresting methods.
@@TokyoXtreme I would completely agree. But isn't it just in our nature that we want to attach labels to what to call that "type" of learning? Again, that's outside of my expertise! Thanks for you response!
I've watched about 100 hours of Japanese Grammar lessons, and I remember essentially none of it, yet I still remember every micron of that 100% in-German German lesson that Stephen Krashen gave from when I watched it 3 months ago.
Acquired language simply is not housed in the conscious mind. If it was, people could choose not to understand their language, but this is essentially completely impossible without blocking-out the sound altogether. The only humans who do not become supremely fluent in their native language are those with severe mental impairment from birth, yet how many native English speakers with 100% fluency even so much as know any amount of basic English grammar?
Do you have a list of comprehensible materials for a beginner? I struggle reading easy news articles.
you can try the site life.ou.edu/stories. Or watch anime like Shirokuma Cafe on animelon
Thank you!
I need a little help with a sentence formulation. Every time I get close to making a sentence longer, the harder it gets to knowing what particles to use. So far I got: "何がアニメは本大好きですか?" I'm trying to ask what anime books the other person likes but I have no idea where 本 fits in or where a particle precedes it.
Books about アニメ? アニメについての本. Or you can say アニメの本 if the context is such that the other person will know what you mean.
So 何のアニメについての本が好きですか
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 ありがとうございます ドリー先生
@@synthium4742どういたしまして。
Your comment in this video is very interesting and also convincing.
But the problem I have is this. I know about 1,000 Japanese words and the Kanjis in your book.
I also have worked through the first 20 of your videos. So I have a basic understanding of structure.
But when I watch an anime or try to read a story, I cannot succeed. So, my question is, "How can
I find comprehensible input that brings me to the next level, which then hopefully enables me to
understand stories and anime?"
First it is a good idea to start with something as simple as possible, and then we need to understand that we _will_ need to learn vocabulary from the story itself. There will be dozens of unknowns in any story and learning them is part of the exercise (you don't need to put every one in your Anki but you do need to put a fair number in and look up enough that you can understand what is going on.
Up to Lesson 20 is a bare minimum of structure (not saying it's too early to start but be aware that you're taking a big bite). Learning more vocabulary in the abstract isn't all that helpful because it mostly won't overlap with what you encounter anyway, which is why it is best to learn the vocabulary from the encounters themselves. But this means we are working slowly. There's no real way around that.
Here are lessons where we walk through some simple material:
ua-cam.com/video/g5uyGx5OnuE/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/Bpm9ygCuuXo/v-deo.html
Here is one about acquiring vocabulary through the material:
ua-cam.com/video/3rT1zaHSmog/v-deo.html
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Thank you very much. All your pointers were very helpful.
初めましてよろしくお願いします。私の滑尾をジョセフです。キュアドリーさんのいい先生。ありがとうございます！！
こちらこそありがとうございます。
I though Chomsky (and the rest of the mainstream academics) dumped the LAD theory quite a while ago.
I don't think Professor Chomsky himself did. In its pure form it is certainly controversial, but I use it here really just as a glyph for the phenomenon of unconscious acquisition, which certainly happens. Of course it was very active when Professor Krashen was developing his theories, and I don't think it harmed them (although it may have contributed to his absolutism).
I love your Avatar 🥰
Thank you.
@@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 my pleasure... how have you made your Avatar?
偉いでございます
どうもありがとうございます。
Why don't u use a normal voice , this voice becomes hard to understand at times , I have to always use subtitles or see it like 5 times before I understand some videos of yours.
I am very sorry about that. I am not sure where to buy a normal voice. I use the only one I have.
Ah, poor Dolly. You are always getting grief for voice. There was this female radio host of a classical music program I listened to. I was fascinated by her voice, and I thought she has to be British. When I got to meet her, I was suprised to find out that she was native to Denver, Colorado where I am also from. She was just speaking English with proper diction and grammer without any accent at all. I find your voice endearing, though I need to listen carefully.
@@stanleykparker Thank you! I am sorry people find it difficult though.
Its partially what sounds like slamming two audio clips together, resulting in often very disjointed speech. Its made even more noticeable because the weird vtuber thing means you can see it constantly jolt.
But eh, the actual lessons still better than I see elsewhere so eh
@@fearedjames Well I don't know about constantly but in fact I do not speak nearly as fluently as I seem to, so a lot of editing is needed to give the impression of reasonably unbroken speech.
Japanese is a complex mess with 30 words with similar meanings
midwit filtered