Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Matrix ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register
The Offical Matrix Groupchat is online! >>CLICK HERE<<

Patreon Q&A - April 24th, 2021 (Patreon)

Published:
2021-04-24 20:25:06
Imported:
2021-07

Content

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Intro
0:36 - In Japanese, is it important to practice reading tategaki (vertical text)?
5:15 - How can I make my brain perceive my immersion content to be "important"?
7:15 - I have a long and convoluted past with Japanese. Should I still study grammar or can I skip it?
9:54 - How meticulous should I be when tracking my immersion?
13:41 - I need to take French classes for school; how can I best take advantage of them?
15:12 - What are some thoughts you have on the Chinese language in general?
19:18 - Has studying Chinese improved your Japanese in any way?
19:57 - What is the subjective experience of level 5 comprehension?
27:47 - Do you know of any good meditation resources in Japanese?
28:44 - What are your tips for staying alert and not getting drowsy during immersion?
30:13 - I'm forced to take Japanese classes and output early. How can I mitigate the damage?
33:25 - Convoluted question about reviewing the JP1K
38:45 - In Chinese, my reading ability is way better than my listening ability. Should I keep improving my reading or should I focus on listening for a while?

Files

Patreon Q&A - April 24th, 2021

TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Intro0:36 - In Japanese, is it important to practice reading tategaki (vertical text)?5:15 - How can I make my brain perceive my immersion ...

Comments

Anonymous

What's the worst thing you have ever done?

Anonymous

On a more serious note, which do you think is more valuable: 2 sessions of 4 hours, or 1 session of 8 hours? In other words, all else being equal, do you think it is more valuable to have a lump chunk of time, or is there something lost by splitting up in to chunks? Obviously, I am just asking your intuition here.

Anonymous

I’m really struggling with my immersion. It’s not that I’m not motivated enough or that the content I’m watching isn’t interesting to me, but at the stage that I’m currently at, my immersion feels so fruitless. Japanese is still so foreign to me; I can barely understand anything that I watch. I can pick out a word that I know here or there, but it doesn’t exactly feel like seeing it in context helped me acquire it when the context that surrounds it doesn’t make any sense to me. Even if I look up every single word that pops up, it still feels like I’m not actually grasping the sentence as a whole. It’s incredibly frustrating. I usually focus intensely on looking for patterns or words that I recognize, but this is mentally exhausting, sometimes even giving me a headache, and free-flow immersion just makes me frustrated with how little I understand. I still feel like immersion is benefiting me because I DO glean things from it, and like Khatzumoto said “You don't learn a language, you get used to it.” but it’s just that the process is so immensely difficult for me regardless of how into the show I am. I tend to do several hours of Anki every day instead because Anki gives me a much more tangible sense of progress. I know this time would be better spent immersing, but it’s so hard for me. What can I do to make immersion less painful?

Katie Woodhams

Do you have any tips for those of us listening to content that doesn't have TL subtitles? For reference my comprehension is usually around level 4. Some specific struggles: 1. I can usually hear and look up words I don't know, but idk how to make flashcards from my immersion because transcribing sentences for a sentence card I think would be dangerous (and time consuming). 2. I often have the experience of understanding all the words but not taking in the meaning... Feels like by the time the sentence is finished I've forgotten what the start of the sentence was. Because there's no subtitles I can't go back and work it out easily.

Anonymous

(My Name is difficult to pronounce, so you can call me Massi) According to Stephen Krashen, "We acquire language in only one way, when we understand it". Does it mean that 1 hour of easy content, is more beneficial than 1 hour of more difficult Immersion material, or not necessarily ?

Ian

I know this is a dumb question but I’m turning 17 this year and do you think I could be fluent by college or a little bit after if I up my input and exposure to Japanese

Anonymous

decently sized question ahead: So, when I first started Japanese and went on to do kanji, I used the previously promoted RRTK method and it's respective deck. I repped through the entire deck, however, the reviews were inconsistent, lackluster, and I wasn't giving undivided attention to it. I did manage to complete the entire deck with decent acquisition of the kanji but not until recently did I realize it was weak acquisition (not being able to recall kanji meanings from a given word that I can read). I'm not sure now whether to go back and possibly tackle the JP1K deck or continue with being able to acquire meanings of words but not recognize the meanings of individual kanji. Thank you in advance!

Anonymous

What is your meditation routine?

Anonymous

I have adopted the immersion approach, for Japanese, for around 2 months, however, I don't do any reading at the moment as I struggle to find reading material that I am able to comprehend/get through without feeling frustrated. Is it vital to add reading to your immersion in the early stages of immersion? Thanks

Anonymous

Matt, what is your current Intensive Immersion routine like for Mandarin?

Anonymous

I got this question after the last question of the last video, but, how might I prevent myself from being overly reading dominant in my target language like I am in my native language. To clarify, in my NL (English), probably due to learning to read and write before learning to speak, I find it extremely difficult to hold conversations compared to most people, and I'd like to avoid this problem in my TL (Japanese).

Josh
>>58467065

I am interested in this also, I remember he had a video on the mind illuminated a few years ago, but I am not sure what happened to that.

Anonymous

My TL is Italian, I am curious if you find it more beneficial to read aloud or subvocalize in your head when reading. I want to work on my reading comprehension but sometimes have to be around people and can’t be loud.

Anonymous

Hi Matt, this is a question about saving compelling input for later. I'm at a very early stage in the process; I still don't know what's happening in shows without looking things up. Because of this I've been avoiding some shows that I'm pretty sure I would find compelling for when I'm at stage 2B or even 2C. I can watch compelling shows that I've previously seen or read the manga of and there is also semi-compelling shows. But, still, do you think avoiding this top-tier of content will be in any way detrimental to my language learning.

Anonymous

In the March Q&amp;A, you talked about how you prefer reading and listening to be separate activities, and that you found it inefficient to listen to audiobooks and read them at the same time in comparison to doing one or the other. Does this also apply to watching shows in your TL with TL subtitles? I am asking because I've heard you say multiple times in the past that watching with TL subtitles can be a good way to improve your reading ability, and I'm wondering if you've changed your mind on this, or if there is something fundamentally different between audiobooks and shows in which you are listening and reading at the same time.

Anonymous

In your video on Vocab vs Sentence cards, you recommended using vocab cards for concrete nouns rather than sentence cards. Given this, is it still necessary that we first encounter the word for a concrete noun in our immersion and 'sentence' mine it before we make a card for it? Or could it now make more sense to just find a long list of the most common concrete nouns in our TL and make a card for each of them before we even encounter them in our immersion?

Anonymous

Hey Matt, should I play video games in my target language and would it be a good source for immersion?

jack

Do you think filler words are really worth incorporating into your speech? In my native language fillers are something I try to actively remove from my habits of talking so it seems counterproductive to try to learn a bad habit in another language. I get that if you are speaking Japanese it would be better to say eto than um, but wouldn't it be best to say neither?

Anonymous

What are your thoughts on creating a stockpile of new cards vs only creating what you'll need for the next day? I prefer to sentence mine a couple times a week rather than daily, but I'm concerned I'm missing out on some aspect of the initial learning stage.

Anonymous

Hypothetically, if you suddenly forgot literally all of your Japanese today, but you still kept all of your knowledge about how to reach fluency in a language, would you try to push your Japanese to the same level again? Or maybe just focus on Chinese? I got this question while watching your Wouter interview where he asked you if you would sell your Japanese, and thought how interesting it would be to see you start from scratch in this language again.

Nick

Hey Matt, I've been reading in Japanese for a month or so now, but have been having difficulty with looking up too many words. If I don't know how a word is pronounced, I'll often find myself glazing over it, and not remembering that I've seen it before when it comes up again. So what usually ends up happening is I look up almost every new word, so that I can recognize whether I've seen them based on remembering their pronunciation. (Though, usually once I've looked up a word a few times, it stops being difficult to recognize) Is this something that gets better with time or is there something I should be doing differently?

Andy

Do you learn the component parts of a 四字熟語 before learning it as a whole (for example, making a card for 質実 and 剛健 before learning 質実剛健)?

Anonymous

Besides pitch accent/pronunciation, what aspects of learning Japanese did you feel required a lot of conscious study?

Anonymous

Hi, I'm a Japanese learner at stage 2B with 2300 sentence cards. My question is about using frequency lists to pick words to make cards for. In the beginning I was very strict about only mining words that were as low as possible (sub 3-4000) on the anime and jdrama frequency list you recommend, but this became pretty difficult to find 12 per day in 1T sentences. I have extended this limit to 10k and completely disregard words above this "limit". Is it more optimal to scour your content for the most frequent words possible? Also isn't adding appropriately frequent words make card retirement intervals work? If you add a rare word early on and retire it after 3-6 months that seems like it would be a waste. Thanks!

Ian
>>58447041

You can skip this unless you have time

Anonymous

My question is: Some people, like me, have problems to review cards like "~wake". it doesn't really have an English equivalent so the definition just tries to explain what it means. But I don't know how to "review" it - especially as a beginner, when I haven't consciously encountered that word yet very often. After looking up how it is used, my feeling is it does not really work as a vocab card. Actually, I am not sure if I completely get how it is used at this point. So my question is, how should we handle this card? Especially, when we are not familiar with how this word is being used yet? Pass it anyway, so we stay aware of it? It came up in the discord channel several times so I figured it would be a good question for the Q&amp;A. Thank you!

Anonymous

So, I am mining i + 1 sentences and am curious to know if you have to completely understand the i + 1 sentences in order to effectively mine them or is there room for ambiguity or just understanding the gist.

Andy

Have you learned to read 漢文?

Licia Li

I'm curious about your thought on a combined version of Continuous Shadowing and Perfect Sentence Shadowing. You play a sentence and pause, and then you repeat that sentence without looking at the scripts. What are the pros and cons compared with continuous shadowing？Thank you!

Calvin Leads

Hey Matt, so I’ve been going through the jp1k deck and I’ve been really proud of my commitment, but I made a mistake. When I started the deck I only memorized the meanings of each card and disregarded the reading. For now I’ve stopped new cards everyday to try to catch up, but it’s hard. I have about 150 reviews a day, but it’s hard to go through them all. Since I am now trying to memorize the readings it feels like I have 100 new cards a day. The only thing I can think to do is start over, but I really don’t want to. All this extra review is making it hard for me to focus on getting my reviews done. Should I stop focusing on learning those readings for the old cards and just do it for any new cards I get, or is that a bad idea? Any input you have would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Hayden

Hey Matt, what do you think are the best occupations for language learners in general? I think most of here need a job and can’t get around 8 hours of immersion, so I was wondering what kind of jobs would be optimal for language learners who want to immerse during work? Putting aside other variables, my guess is being a translator or a teacher? Not really expecting advice or anything serious but would like to hear your thoughts on this. In another way of asking, before you became a successful YouTuber did you ever think “In order to improve my Japanese I’m going to select X occupation”?