Five ways to keep your fluency up.

How to improve your Japanese outside of Japan

I thought I’d write about this because I’ve just moved away from Japan and I’ve been looking at ways at making sure I don’t lose everything that I’ve picked up during my three years there.

While in Japan I perfected learning method as close to osmosis as possible. That is, immerse yourself in a Japanese-rich environment and hope to hell that you learn before you starve, because you can’t read anything. The main reason for this was, of course, laziness: I don’t enjoy spending huge chunks of my day flipping through dull as ditch-water textbooks, and I don’t think I ever will. However, the other reason was that I found that by involving myself in Japanese in this way I was able to improve my language skills while still enjoying the learning process and this was really important to me.

So, here are some resources that I’ve found useful for maintaining my level of Japanese whist outside of the country. I hope some of you will find them useful.

1. Skype (http://www.skype.com)

   You can listen to examples, read textbooks and flick through flash cards all you want but nothing is going to focus your abilities as much as a real conversation with a real live Japanese speaker. Skype is a godsend in this regard because it’s easy to use and install, is cross platform, and doesn’t cost you a cent.

   If you have friends in Japan then hector them to install Skype so you can chat. If you’re both running on a decent connection you can also enable webcams and finally live the video conferencing dream. Hello information superhighway.

   If you don’t know anyone in Japan with Skype, don’t worry, Skype has a huge directory of users who at any one time will be willing to chat it up in Japanese.

   Just click on “Search for Skype Users” then select Japan in the Country/Region pull down and finally tick the box labeled “Search for people who are in ‘Skype Me’ mode.” Bing, you suddenly have a list of hundreds and hundreds of Japanese speakers that are keen to learn to English, chat in Japanese and generally participate in Language exchange. Even better, you can do this at any time of the day, at your convenience, and it won’t cost you a cent.

   
   

2. Mixi (http://mixi.jp)

   This is the Japanese version of Friendster and Myspace and it is huge. It’s also managed to slip by pretty much under the radar outside of Japan. So, why is it a good resource for learning Japanese?

   For one, all of your Japanese friends living in Japan, and even those overseas probably already have an account and are already linked in with all the relevant Japanese social groups in their areas. Make friends with someone in your town via Mixi and suddenly a whole world of Japanese flash-mobs will be revealed to you.

   Secondly, you can write blogs and recommendations and they automatically show up in a list on any of your Mixi friends’ homepages and, likewise, theirs show up on yours. This is a huge incentive to read Japanese because you’re reading about day-to-day stuff that your friends did, with people you probably know.

   Then, if you’re really keen you can start blogging in reviewing stuff in Japanese, but that’s a little proactive for me, I just like reading about what other people have done. If you’re not in on Mixi, send me a mail and I’ll pass you an invite.

   

3. Podcasts

   They’re automatically updated, they slip into iTunes, and they jump straight onto your iPod when you’re not looking. They’re the best way you can keep a fresh, interesting, current selection of listening material close at hand. Here’s three that I dig:

   • Nihongo Juku has full Japanese text on the site, so after you’ve listened to it a couple of times you can grab out the dictionary and read through and double-check the meanings of words you missed. Superb resource.
   • Osaka dialect 大阪弁 Japanese lesson in English is a bit of a mouthful but Mayumi’s podcasts are great. Everything is in Japanese and English and she tells some great stories. Probably my most listened to podcast.
   • Japanese Pod 101 is a pretty professional outfit with a mix of video and audio stuff. They’ve got some good basic stuff and a lot of pretty amusing rambling. Check their latest date video, it’s great.

   

4. TV & Video

   Check your local listings for Japanese language news. It’ll often come on sometime after your local bulletin which is great because you already know roughly what they’re going to talk about. If you have time to watch both programs, then sit down and really focus for the duration.

   In Japan, when you’re overrun with terrible game shows, mediocre hosts and the endless, endless shit they make you suffer through (finding the great stuff amongst the hours and hours of wankery is a mission we’ll leave for the TV in Japan blog) it’s easy to get overwhelmed and give up on TV altogether. However, when it’s just 20 minutes a day in isolation, it’s surprising how easy it is to really focus and walk away feeling you’ve actually learnt something.

   In Australia, if you’ve got a set-top box, SBS shows the NHK news three times a day starting in the morning from 5:25 – 6:00, at midday: 12:30 – 13:30 and at night: 22:15-22:45. There’s no excuse to miss it. Check the SBS digital schedule for more information.

   Then there’s videos. How frustrating was it being in Japan and looking at the rows and rows and rows of awesome movies that you couldn’t watch because they didn’t have any English subtitles. Now you’re back on home soil, it’s payback time. Head to any cult or specialist video store and you’ll be staggered at how many Japanese movies they stock these days, all with English subtitles. If you’re feeling more adventurous, find your local Asian restaurant area and go hunting for back-alley video-stores which ususally offer an insane selection of pirated Asian TV series on VCD and DVD, often with English subtitles as well. If you’re stuck, find a University in your area, call the student guild and ask if they have a Manga/Anime club, then get the number of the president. If anyone in your town knows where to find Japanese material, it’s these guys and nine times out of ten they’ll be more than happy to help.

5. Nintendo DS

   I’m planning to write a full length article about using the DS as a learning resource a little later, but here’s the Cliff notes version. These little bastards are 100% region free. This means you can get your friends in Japan to post you all those crazy role-playing, kanji-practice and brain training games that are so much fun you don’t even realise you’re studying. While I’m bitterly disappointed that the DS doesn’t have Wipeout Pure, I’ll grudgingly accept that if you don’t have DS, you’re missing out.

So there we have it, five way you can improve your Japanese even when you’re not in the country. If you’ve any more hot tips, leave them in the comments and if you found this article useful, then please digg it so more people can share the love.

Posted in Japan on Monday October 2, 2006.