Japanese Radio

[BooJaka]

I've been told that the easiest way to pick up a language is to fully immerse yourself in it. That makes sense, right? People who go to a country learn to think in the different language as opposed to translate like we all did in school.

I desperately want to learn Japanese (I got Rosetta Stone! It works wonderfully but it's just not enough!) and one of the things that occurred to me that might be good is to listen to Japanese radio. Like, talk radio. I don't think listening to the music is going to do me much good. But all I really want are some mp3s that I can put on my player and zone out from when I'm at the gym or something, letting it all trickle slowly into my mysterious subconscious.

Anyone know of such a thing?

[Roderick]

As an adult, that's a lot harder (if not all but impossible) to do than when you were a child. Learning a language just by listening to it is by far not effective (otherwise, the millions of weeaboos watching anime would be masters of Japanese by now). If used in conjunction with hard work and education, then it might be a helpful extra. But don't put your hopes in this plan; the effects will be negligible.

[Ben]

You're right about immersing yourself in it; everyone I know who's learned comprehensively has said that living in the country has speeded up and improved their learning. Whether you can learn just through listerning alone is another matter entirely. I can't say definitively (after all every individual learns slightly differently) but really, like most things, learning a language requires a balance and combination of approaches covering all the core elements: listening, writing, reading, and speaking. Dedication and commitment should be a given, but aside from that I'd suggest lessons with a tutor to provide structure, focus, guidance and feedback.

Regardless of how many lessons you have the onus remains on you however, so again, immersion is key - practice as much as you can every day (i'm including weekends), with a mimimum (or average) of 2 hours study a day if you hope to become fluent. Listening won't be enough IMHO but will help you understand speech pattens/structures in conversational speech once you've learned some common words; but for practical understanding/fluency and the ability to actually speak and apply what you've listened to and learned you will need an extensive knowledge of vocab, which can be practiced with someone (again this is where having a tutor comes in handy).

Anyway, to hear pretty straight/formal Japanese try out the Yomiuri podcasts - it covers current news and affairs in Japan (it's the site for The Daily Yomiuri, one of Japan's biggest papers).

[Nachimir]

Yeah, I have friends who've learned Japanese and Dutch, both by moving to the countries. One said Rosetta Stone is good, though people who learn with just that apparently tend to forget fairly fast without practice.

As an adult, that's a lot harder (if not all but impossible) to do than when you were a child.

I used to read a lot on feral children. Beyond a certain (very young) age, if a human hasn't learned language they basically won't, so a lot of feral kids (either isolated in basements, raised by wolves, etc.) can only growl and learn a few words in their whole lifetime.

[BooJaka]

Yeah, I remember doing about feral children in psychology. It's something like by the age of 14 the speech centre of your brain stops growing. If you learn a language before then, you can adapt other languages on top of it (like learning English from birth then French at school). If it fully grows without you learning a language then you can't work with grammar or syntax or anything like that.

But anyway, thanks for the podcasts. Haven't checked them out yet but will do soon

[DanJW]

Ooh, I did a talk once centred on feral children, entitled The Biological Basis of Cuteness. You see all mammals have the same few set of criteria to help identify "babies" (which is why we find puppies and kittens etc cute). Creatures like wolves will often recognise even a human child as being "baby" and in need of looking after, which is why they adopt them.

There is a very well documented case of a lioness who liked to adopt baby gazelles. Eventually other lions would eat the gazelle and she would adopt another one.

This was completely off topic. Japanese, I have found, is releatively easy to speak (for an english speaker). Reading and writing it is a whole other matter.

[ThunderPeel2001]

But all I really want are some mp3s that I can put on my player and zone out from when I'm at the gym or something, letting it all trickle slowly into my mysterious subconscious.

Anyone know of such a thing?

Just listening passively won't help at all as it's not engaging your brain in the same way Rosetta Stone does. You need to be confronted by someone or something you don't understand and then your brain will kick-in trying to comprehend them.

Although, if you partially understand Japanese, rather than have no idea what they're saying, it might help re-enforce what you already know?

There's always the old fashioned, listen and repeat, methods that might supplement Rosetta Stone?