“As I see it, language is not an act, nor is it a skill; it cannot be possessed. Language is a habit. You don’t ‘learn’ a language as such, you live it. You don’t need to get ‘good’ at a language, you get used to it. You don’t become fluent at a language, you become it.”

There’s this cat on the internet (literally, he goes by Khatzumoto) who wanted to learn to speak another language and did it. This feat in and of itself isn’t particularly remarkable, but how he went about it is a story I was so blown away by, it warrants retelling right here, right now. Khatzumoto, like so many of us trying to speak in a nonnative tongue, got so sick of being told your brain hardens at age 12, of classes and classwork that didn’t get you any closer to fluent, of foreign language speakers that couldn’t hold a conversation in their purported language of mastery, of outdated textbooks that make you speak like a news anchor, ex-pats of several years who still can’t speak the native language, in short of all the hogwash out there that makes even the most spirited of language students feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle. So instead of buying into the idea that he couldn’t do it, Khatzumoto staunchly believed he could, and when the traditional means of lecture and memorise, of writing tables and making flashcards didn’t work, he came up with a method that did.

He calls this All Japanese All the Time, essentially a total immersion experience that does not require selling all your possessions and moving to a foreign country before you can speak the language passably. In fact, in just 18 months Khatzumoto went from knowing no Japanese to being able to hold business discussions, have casual conversations, find a job in Tokyo, and navigate the tricky and at times unfriendly world of moving to Japan. How did he do it? By watching TV. Okay, not just by watching TV. Khatzumoto also watched movies, and anime, and read books, and found Japanese friends, and pretty much anything else he could get his hands on. His reasoning? Learn like a child learns: through context.

The seed makes more than perfect logic to me. In my own experiences growing up with Spanish spoken around me, I heard certain phrases like “Quieres ir afuera?” when it was time to take the dog for a walk, or “Awwww, mi pobrecita hija, lo siento.” I just learned these patterns, and when I began to learn Spanish academically, suddenly the meanings of these phrases were more clear. “(Do) you want + to go + outside?” was easy enough, but the equivalent of “sorry” literally translates to “I feel it.” Unlike my classmates, I had the upper hand because I intuitively knew how to use these phrases in the proper context. Instead of trying to formulate how to ask if you wanted to go outside by first thinking of the verb I needed to use, then conjugating it, then picking out the vocabulary, then ordering it correctly and checking for errors, the phrase came naturally to my mind in a single chunk. I had associated the meaning of the phrase with the actuality of it, while my colleagues were still grappling with making the individual words make sense.

Of course even now it’s been several years since I’ve been halfway decent at the language, it’s now fairly safe to say tengo muy olvidado el Español, to the point where I’m once again inept. Why is this? Because I’m not using it. Spanish isn’t being spoken around me, I have no reason to ever break into the language, and I’m not trying to expose myself to it in the day to day. If I wanted to improve my Spanish, I’d have to start using it again, immersing myself around people who spoke it and finding opportunities to practice. It stands to reason then, that to learn a language with proficiency, the same method must be employed.

“It’s a cause and effect; it’s not ‘I learn this so I can do this,’ but instead ‘I do this, therefore I learn that.’ I made it like a game: how much more can I Japan-ise my life, and then suddenly, snap I can read Japanese, someone would hand me something in Japanese and I’d think oh snap I can read all of this.”

Khatzumoto seems to despise the classroom, and while I understand his point, I don’t think it’s a terrible place to start. But the classroom alone is not enough. In 2008 I began learning Korean essentially on my own (with some help from the good ol’ internet) but found there were just too many snags that held me up. So I broke down and signed up for a class. Having done it both ways, I can see why academic learning is inadequate, yet for those of us who don’t have a lot of opportunities to speak a foreign language (say, Russian in the US or Svenska in China) a class is an excellent place to work on speaking comprehension, the only skill of Khatzumoto’s four — reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehensions — that cannot be done alone in your room. If you lack confidence to talk to strangers yet, a class is a great opportunity to test the waters in a fairly safe environment. Everyone knows you’re a student. Best of all, classrooms offer feedback, the most important point often overlooked by those self-taught. You might only be a hair off on how to say X or how to pronounce Y, but you’ll probably never know until it’s been ingrained in your neuro-pathways unless you find someone (a teacher, a language partner, a native speaker buddy, a homeless vet, your 3rd grade teacher, anyone) to correct you. Sometimes the letters themselves are pretty confusing to figure out; I know that while I could associate a symbol with a sound pretty well on my own, I could not for the life of me figure out how and when to break up syllables in Korean, so having a teacher explain it to me enabled me to pursue more learning on my own that I could not have before.

“The real problem lies in ideas and attitudes…Someone who thinks they can’t do something, can’t. and someone who thinks they can, can…change the philosophy, and you change the behavior; change the behavior, and you change the results. It’s not touchy-feely; it’s simple cause-effect.”

Classes will only take you as far as you want to go though, and often textbook teaching is fairly wide of the mark. I’ve heard horror stories from friends with Mandarin majors only to discover they could only talk in a formal mode and were ridiculed when they arrived in China. I’ve heard of Japanese students who are fluent speakers but essentially illiterate, of Korean students that only use the -yo form. You cant just write down a bunch of declensions, memorise a bunch of new vocabulary words, and only speak when spoken to and expect anything close to proficiency. This is why you need the immersion experience. Enter All Japanese All The Time, where Khatzumoto urges you to consume all the Japanese media you can, to think in Japanese and create situations for yourself where it’s sink or swim, the same way it would be if you were a child learning language for the first time. You’ll start to recognise patterns and to pull out the few words you know, and before you know it you’ll start to pulling out the few words you don’t instead. It’s a more useful lexicon to pull from anyway because, unlike a textbook, Japanese products are organically Japanese and not some crazy construction of a bilingual speaker.

Khatzumoto’s methods are more common sense than anything else, but the fact that his ideas surprise me is further proof that we’ve got some serious societal barriers to gaining fluency that could do with a revisit. Why shouldn’t we try to learn not just a language, but anything by doing? As children that’s how we try on new hats and pick up new skills, we observe, we imitate, and we adopt. It’s aligned with many other principles I’ve spoken of before: stop distracting yourself or falling prey to your fears and distractions and just do. Khatzumoto makes a wonderful point, “On the one hand it’s so magical, but it’s also so predictable. If you put in the time, it will happen.” I think perhaps the greatest barrier to people learning foreign languages is not that they lack the resources, or the time, or the means, but that they don’t put in the time. You expect it to take you several years, it takes you several years. When it gets hard we don’t have anything but the necessity of a credit or the need for a good mark to pull us through, and in the meantime are being constantly reminded of how inadequate we are and how far off our ideal is.

“The whole process is one of sucking, you’re sucking the whole time and you’re trying to suck less each day, to phrase it negatively…so basically the time you spend inputting [the language] is directly proportional to speed at which you’re going to reduce your sucking. This is just what children do; if you think about the incredible amount of time even just a four-year-old has heard the language before they get to the point of speaking, it’s really pretty mind boggling.”

If it makes you feel so rubbish, why bother? It’s maddeningly frustrating to feel inept and to be unable to communicate, and even moving to a land where no one understands you doesn’t guarantee you’ll pick up the language quickly, though most do out of necessity. That’s because trying to remember how to say “the plane took off of the runway” from a book is pretty dry, and most “practice conversations” are painfully dull. I fully agree with what Khatzumoto suggests, which is that you have to make learning fun or you won’t do it. I know from my own experiences that you have to treat yourself like a small child and learn songs, watch movies, and reward yourself with marshmallows and lemon drops (or whatever your Kindergarten teacher fed you when you got a math problem right). For a long time I’ve thought traditional academia has been sucking the life out of learning that we forget to take joy in as we once did in childhood. If you’re having fun, not only does it stick better, but you have more learning stamina, it’s easier to do, and use it more.

Ideas
Listen to music, like Cornelius or Pizzicato 5 or even J-Pop like Heartsdales and Full of Harmony. Watch movies of any variety (without subtitles) like Hiyao Miyazaki movies or cult classics like Ringu. Watch anime that you like; I learned how to say “good day” and “are you okay?” from Maria-sama ga Miteru, and various types of bread from Yakikate! Japan. Take advantage of free resources like JapanesePod101.com or language tapes at your library. Watch Japanese youtube videos whether they’re video blogs or Hard Gay episodes. Read all the manga you can find in Japanese and childrens books if you can get your hands on them. Find a language buddy or language exchange online to practice your speaking skills, usually for free. Take up a Japanese pen pal. Attend the Japanese service at a local temple or church if you’re town has one. Make friends with Japanese mates, or enroll in a big-brother style programme for Japanese new to the US. There are tons of ways to immerse yourself complete in a language, and these are just some to get you started.