Question for SK (and anyone else who'd like to chime in)
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LL#2 has decided that he very much would like to learn Japanese. He has one year left of college and needs to take an already-set schedule to graduate, so there's no room to add it as an elective there. He's been doing Duolingo on and off for years to improve his German skills (the language he took in high school) but he's not a huge fan of the way their lessons are structured and so doesn't want to start Japanese there.
Do you have any suggestions for the best way for him to get started? He's a bit concerned that he's past the age where his brain is good at learning a new language and that he'll never get fluent in it, so any inspirational stories of English-speaking people who picked Japanese up as adults and became fluent in it would also be most welcome!
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Well, I can share a success story.
Our friends' son took Japanese in college (U of Chicago). After he got his PhD in math from MIT, he ended up working for a Japanese company and lived in Japan for a few years, then came back here for at least 15 years. I just heard from my friend that he is moving back to Japan, probably permanently!
All in all, I think he managed to learn Japanese pretty well despite not starting his studies until he was an adult.
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Another bit of encouragement...one of the people who works in the ESL department at my town's library is ethnically Japanese, but was born in the US and didn't speak any Japanese in his youth. He also took up the language in college and eventually moved to Japan and taught English there for nearly 20 years. He's back in the US now and teaches ESL at several community colleges besides working at our library.
Oh, and he's in the process of learning Ukrainian. Talk about someone who takes on challenging languages!
@shirokuro is clearly the expert on how we learn languages in adulthood. Can't wait to hear what she has to say.
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LL#2 has decided that he very much would like to learn Japanese. He has one year left of college and needs to take an already-set schedule to graduate, so there's no room to add it as an elective there. He's been doing Duolingo on and off for years to improve his German skills (the language he took in high school) but he's not a huge fan of the way their lessons are structured and so doesn't want to start Japanese there.
Do you have any suggestions for the best way for him to get started? He's a bit concerned that he's past the age where his brain is good at learning a new language and that he'll never get fluent in it, so any inspirational stories of English-speaking people who picked Japanese up as adults and became fluent in it would also be most welcome!
@lisa It's definitely not too late! But having some structure is important, especially for beginners.
I haven't used Duolingo myself, so I'm not certain, but I suspect some of the key problems with it are a degree of incoherence in content (e.g., it's not part of a coherent curriculum) and insufficient opportunities for the learner to actually use the language in meaningful interactions with others.
Is he certain he can't enroll in a class? Perhaps pass/fail? Or maybe a summer intensive program? If not, another option might be to try to find a tutor. But if he does that, I recommend working through a textbook. Not because there's some perfect textbook (there isn't) but because it's a good way to ensure you're not missing important learning tasks.
I will try to come back this weekend and write more, but I will say that I am a "success" story, in that I didn't start studying Japanese until I was 24. I started in a summer intensive program (where you do a year's worth of college-level Japanese credits in 10 weeks), then did an academic year of college Japanese classes, then another intensive summer program (10 weeks), and one more academic year of Japanese classes. Then (after completing four years worth of major credits in two calendar years) I graduated and went immediately to Japan.
In my case, I think something about those intensive programs was important, and the second summer especially mimicked in-country immersion (because we had to live in the dormitory, our teachers lived with us in the dorm, and we were only allowed to use Japanese 24 hours a day for the whole summer).
Anyway, I'll come back on the weekend and try to give some more actual advice. but it's definitely never too late!
