Hey guys.
In my last video, I said the difference between people with purpose
and people without purpose learning a language can be huge.
For learners, motivation is one of the most important elements
because learning another language takes a long time.
There are lots of people learning English in Japan, and with classes in school,
most of us study English for about 6 years.
They recently started teaching English in elementary school as well.
Our government seems to put a lot of effort into this [Globalization project].
But, even though you hear the word "globalization" all the time recently,
as long as you're in Japan, most people can live just fine without knowing English.
There aren't that many people who really need to have English skills in Japan yet.
Actually, people who don't need to know English but learn it anyway because they think it's fun tend to learn the language quicker.
So for those of you (especially students), who think, "I don't need to study English. I don't need it"
I think it'd be better to try to be interested in money instead of English.
Money is the most important thing in our lives in a way, and you have to deal with it until you die,
but they don't teach you about it in school.
Unlike Japanese people who study English hard for 6 years and never use it,
knowledge about money won't be a waste.
So, you, who're worried about being bad at English (I mean, Y-kun who sent me a message on Facebook),
forget about English. Work hard and make money.
Pay taxes and contribute to society. Now you're a full-fledged adult!
Become a CEO and hire a secretary who's fluent in English if you need it.
Do something else that you want to do.
Improve another skill. You'll be just fine. Good luck!
But if you are interested in learning English, you may want to continue watching.
After I figured out my purpose, I started preparing to learn.
Everyone has a different purpose, but the methods for studying are the same.
Try not to do something that makes you hate English.
We Japanese are aware we're bad at English.
I found these books when I went to a book store the other day.
English Nobles and English Refugees
How to break the wall of English.
I think these books represent how hard we think the language is.
Most bookstores in Japan have shelves only for English learners, and there're thousands of books about English.
So just finding a book for you is hard.
Just going to near those shelves made me sick,
so I always went to manga shelves and got some manga like DEATH NOTE and went home.
I'm sure many of you have similar experiences.
BUT, let's just face it and accept that we're bad at English.
It's shouganai (can't be helped).
Shouganai is our standard Japanese attitude.
"Let's accept it and keep progressing." "The sun will rise."
So what I did is, as the title says, I decided not to "benkyou (study)" English.
The origin of benkyou is, as the kanji says, "Do something you don't want to do."
After the Meiji period, people started using it as "learning,"
but this is why we feel uncomfortable every time we see this word (勉強 / force yourself to make an effort ).
Anyway, we Japanese "benkyou" English very hard in school.
So I stopped forcing myself to study English.
I mean for someone like me who got "aoten", it was impossible to just sit and study English for hours.
I immediately put my pencil down whenever I got tired of English even just a little bit.
I ignored all the uncommon rules and usages of English in my textbook.
I took breaks all the time and made myself comfortable while continuing to learn English.
As I said earlier, learning another language take a while.
So many Japanese often give up because they keep forcing themselves to study English.
You can study hard but it means nothing if you give up because of it.
So I tried not to study (benkyou) English.
Another thing I did was look for a language partner online.
I stopped benkyou to keep my motivation from going down, and this was a way to make my motivation go up.
It's really easy to find a partner these days.
It was super hard back then, though.
Rachel actually recommended this for Japanese learners before.
It's so useful that it made me angry when I found out about it.
It focuses primarily on individual people providing personal-language lessons online.
And you can use "language partner" and "Notebook" function for free.
There are many other functions, but this one especially is useful because you can find partners
who're learning Japanese.
The most important point of having a language partner is that you can teach each other.
It keeps you motivated by communicating with them.
I found my first partner when I was a high school senior.
Unlike school classes, learning from him was so much funner and more interesting.
The main reason why it was so much fun was, in school you just keep gaining knowledge (inputting),
but by communicating with him, I was actively outputting.
Even if you gain a lot of knowledge, you won't be able to use it unless you... use it.
So for those of you who want to improve speaking skills,
it's important to have an environment where you actually output your input.
Talking with someone from different country will broaden your horizon.
You can take lessons from professional or informal teachers.
Professional teachers teach as a job, or possess a degree or certificate in education.
And compared to English schools, it's very reasonable.
It normally costs from $50 - $80 per lesson in school in Japan,
and for italki, it costs from $15 - $30 per lesson.
Also, most teachers have 30 minutes trial lessons, so you can easily try and see if you like the teacher first.
If you're debating going to an English conversation school in Japan, I recommend trying italki first.
And like with Rachel's video, we have a promotion where if you buy one lesson you get a second lesson free.
So I'll put the link below and you can check it out if you want.
Having a language partner or a teacher will really be helpful with pronunciation.
Japanese people think little of pronunciation practice,
but it's actually one of the most important things when learning English.
There are three important elements in learning English.
1. Vocabulary (you can't do anything without this)
2. Grammar (you can't make/read/understand sentences without this)
3. Pronunciation
The reason pronunciation is so important is that,
even if you can put together sentences with grammar and vocabulary,
if you pronounce something even a little bit incorrectly, they're not going to understand you.
So, pronunciation is really important.
Since there're lots of foreign people watching, let me tell you this.
It's really difficult for us to pronounce words in English.
But on the other hand, it's not that difficult for foreigners to pronounce Japanese words.
So when foreigners give really basic greetings or introductions, we think "Woah they're amazing!"
Of course we're able to do really basic greetings or introductions in English
thanks to what we learned in school,
but we're not sure if our pronunciation is good enough for foreigners to understand.
Sometimes my foreign friends ask me,
"Why is that when I greet a Japanese person in simple Japanese, they praise my language abilities so much?"
This is why.
We Japanese have the image of English and other foreign languages being so difficult to pronounce
so when we see them pronounce our language so clearly,
we automatically think they must be really skilled.
I'll talk about pronunciation and speaking some other time.
By the way, my first language partner was American
and when I first talked to him, the conversation just flowed out of us.
When I was a kid, the shows I watched like Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh, Sailor Moon, Pokemon
and so on, were also the same shows my partner watched.
I didn't know America was playing those same shows at the same time as us,
and it made me realize how incredible Japan's soft power is.
Goku, Kamehameha, Usagi's "In the name of the moon, I will punish you!"
Seto Kaiba and the Blue Eyes White Dragon, he knew all of it.
Something I found interesting was that Satoshi, the main character in Pokemon,
is called Ash in America.
It was interesting how even the names were different,
so instead of talking about English, we mostly talked about anime.
But those discoveries were a lot of fun.
This time and last time, I mainly talked about my mindset and preparation I did to learn English.
Know your purpose, and be relaxed and have fun.
I think it'll be easier to achieve your goal if you learn and use English instead of benkyo (studying) it.
I don't know if I can answer all of the questions,
but I'll be checking them, so please feel free to leave a comment if you want.
Thank you for watching.