Japanese Masters – The Ultimate Level

How you doing?

Long time no post.
One thing i started doing lately in order to bet­ter serve this site is
to return to that feel­ing again of lov­ing to study japan­ese in it of itself, so
I have been study­ing again like a mad man and try­ing to take my skills to the next level.

If you really want to become good at some­thing it takes time and ded­i­ca­tion
(up to a cer­tain point of course)

At first when you start with a lan­guage for exam­ple, you learn a word here and there and just by remem­ber­ing it, it’s fun and excit­ing.
How­ever, the more and more you study, the harder it becomes to feel the same
plea­sure you did the first time, if your meth­ods are wrong and hard.
You start need­ing more and more study to be able to have the same kind of inten­sity as the first time you tried.

I’ve been study­ing japan­ese for over 11 years now and can speak fairly well,
how­ever, just because i can speak does not mean my stud­ies are over.
Every­day is full of study and new expe­ri­ences.
So, I want to intro­duce to you a way of study­ing that has been giv­ing me really good results lately.
I call it the 「MBLS」 method, mean­ing Move Your Body Lis­ten and Speak.

You basi­cally walk or jog slightly and lis­ten to an audio book, and while doing this you SHADOW it’s contents.

What is SHADOWING?

In shad­ow­ing what you do is lis­ten to some­thing that a native speaker is say­ing
and repeat it in the same way. How is it dif­fer­ent from just repeat­ing things in an old time fash­ion par­rot like method.
You basi­cally repeat what that per­son is say­ing , inmedi­ately about .5 sec­onds after they said it. So you don’t repeat it after the per­son fin­ishes, you are repeat­ing right along with that per­son.
It is really a very intense and dif­fi­cult task.
If you can’t under­stand some­thing that per­son said, it can take you off rhythm,
or just by not speak­ing at the same speed its some­times because very dif­fi­cult to catch up. It really requires a level of skill sim­i­lar to a native.

(Taken from the fol­low­ing site — All in japan­ese)
http://www.h4.dion.ne.jp/~maimai66/study06.html

SHADOWING and MLBS

Okay, so why is this method effec­tive? The brain is designed in a way that
mem­ory is eas­i­est acquired by using all of our 5 senses(touch, sight, smell,
hear­ing, taste) at the same time.
It is said that each of our senses has it’s own sep­a­rate mem­ory, so the more
senses we use while we learn some­thing the eas­ier it is to
input and remem­ber information.

By using this MBLS (move your body lis­ten and speak), you are using your HEARING (say­ing and lis­ten­ing to what you say) and your sense of TOUCH (walk, run, talk, say­ing — because your words are felt as waves as well)。

I’ve been using this MLBS method for an hour a day of walk­ing lately.
It’s good for you because you get to excer­cise plus you learn at the same time.
The point of this method is to use as many of your senses as pos­si­ble,
if walk­ing and talk­ing at the same time is too hard for you,
try decreas­ing its inten­sity so that it fits your needs
You can try low­er­ing the speed of your walk or jog and such,
just make sure your focus is as on the shad­ow­ing as much as possible.

By doing this for about 1 hour, you’ll be men­tally exhausted and par­tially phys­i­cally exhausted. You might want to start with even 30 min­utes.
It’s going to be very good for your “pro­nun­ci­a­tion”,
“get­ting used to the japan­ese lan­guage rhythm”, “infor­ma­tion mem­o­riza­tion”,
and even “act­ing skills”.
Try it a cou­ple of times and see if it suits you.

What mate­ri­als are recommended?

I rec­om­mend using some­thing that fits your cur­rent level.
If it’s some­thing that you already feel very com­fort­able with,  by prac­tic­ing it with MLBS you’ll drive it fur­ther into your mus­cle mem­ory as well as your
long term mem­ory.
If it’s some­thing that your going to start learn­ing for the first time it might be more dif­fi­cult, but chal­leng­ing if you are up to it.
By keep­ing it up and being able to say things lit­tle by lit­tle,
you might start get­ting addicted to the feel­ing of accom­plish­ment you get
after repeat­ing it a cou­ple of times.

These are some of the mate­ri­als  that i like to use.

Keigo no keiko(Keiko’s keigo train­ing): Join keiko chan in her endeav­ors as a “shakai­jin — per­son of soci­ety”, as she starts to work in a japan­ese busi­ness envi­ron­ment and start to need to use keigo. If you are think­ing of work­ing in japan even­tu­ally this will be a great intro­duc­tion to keigo。

Utsukushii keigo wo mi ni tsukeru hon (how to acquire beau­ti­ful keigo):

As the title says, the pur­pose of this book is to acquire beau­ti­ful keigo, so
it might be a lit­tle bit harder than most keigo books. When i first worked
in a full japan­ese envi­ron­ment i started answer­ing calls in japan­ese, so i couldn’t really apply lots of what i heard here (like greet­ing cus­tomers at the front desk), how­ever it was very infor­ma­tive and useful.

JLPT Gram­mar 1kyu (x2 CD)
JLPT Lis­ten­ing Com­pre­hen­sion (x4 CD)
Gram­mar and lis­ten­ing skills are some of the basic build­ing blocks required
for great pro­fi­ciency. By repeat­ing out loud what you hear, you start
to acquire the lan­guage, so don’t for­get to prac­tice often with a sim­i­lar book to these (2kyu books are also great).
Just remem­ber, “Under­stand­ing” and “Being able to use it ” are 2 dif­fer­ent skills,
and the gap is very big. No mat­ter how good you get don’t for­get to keep prac­tic­ing the basics.

Kiite oboeru kan­sai ben (lis­ten and learn kan­sai ben) 1xCD:
Kan­saiben mec­cha suki yanen! (I love kan­sai ben!).
I recently just bought this book and started to prac­tice with it.
Accent and rhythm is super impor­tant in kan­sai ben so you cant really learn it
the right way just by read­ing a book or web­site. You have to grasp the feel­ing for it.
That’s where prac­tic­ing by say­ing comes really in handy.
Just by hear­ing and repeat­ing this cd a cou­ple of times i’ve accom­plished more
than 2 years of me hav­ing lived in the kan­sai area.
Now i am hav­ing fun watch­ing dra­mas and com­edy shows that use a lot of
kan­sai ben.

Audio­book — Atama no ii hito, warui hito no hanashikata.
How do smart peo­ple and dumb peo­ple speak.
（5 hour audio­book, bought at the japan­ese itunes store)
As the title says, youll learn about the dif­fer­ences in how smart peo­ple
and dumb peo­ple talk in japan. The con­tents are fairly okay,
how­ever the voice of the nar­ra­tor is per­fect for shadowing.

I also rec­om­mend you try the fol­low­ing type of mate­ri­als for your shadowing。

• Dra­mas
  http://moviemaga.blog20.fc2.com/
• Vari­ety Showsバラエティ番組
  http://veohdownload.blog37.fc2.com/
• NHK and ASAHI TV news
  http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/
  http://www.asahi.com/

Keep prac­tic­ing until you get the feel­ing for this. It might take some time, but even if you make mis­takes, don’t under­stand or feel funny, just keep prac­tic­ing and imi­tat­ing your tar­get con­tent.  In the end, if you really don’t know whats going on try look­ing for sub­ti­tles, or read up on the topic a bit and try again.

Keep try­ing and don’t stop!!

Catch you later.

Hey, how are you doing?

I just fin­ished inter­view­ing Dan Bernard,which is a very
highly esteemed friend of mind that’s really good at japan­ese!
Espe­cially at kanji.
So Dan, our lovely guest Kaori and me wooped out our
Iphone and started a “radio style” inter­view
pick­ing at dan’s brain to see what makes him tick.

Enjoy!