The Yellow Experiment - Intro & Rationale

Hey there! :)

Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Maya. I'm 17 years old (going on 18!), and I'm about the same as everyone else; I like watching movies, procrastinating, and eating ;)

I also enjoy learning about foreign languages and cultures. I come from what you can call a multi-lingual background; I was raised with English and Russian (although English has become my stronger language, as it's the language in which I've been educated). Throughout the years I have also learned French to fluency and learned enough Spanish to be able to understand it quite well. Last but not least, I have been fascinated by Japanese culture (Shinto, geisha, chopsticks, kanji, etc) since around the age of 10. I began "learning" the Japanese language at the age of 12, however, there have been two problems:

Firstly, my methods have not been very good ones. I've wasted too much time trying to analyze the language grammatically and sticking to romaji (Japanese words sounded out with English letters), while ignoring kanji (characters/ideographs imported to Japan from China - the backbone of the Japanese language). Not enough time was spent interacting with the real language via anime, doramas, J-pop, manga, etc.

Secondly, my learning has been extremely fragmented. I have made very long (several-year-long) pauses various times to study French, Spanish, and to flirt with various other languages (German, Hebrew). This means that even when I was studying the language (again, with innefficient methods), a lot of time was wasted reviewing things that I had already learned.

Recently, I decided to take up the language again, because anything worth starting is worth finishing, and because Japan still fascinates me just as much as it did way back when :) But what was I to do? I sucked (still do suck) at Japanese and a part of me knew that this was due to crappy learning methods, but it didn't occur to me how to fix the problem. Until AJATT came along and saved me.

AJATT is a website/blog written by a certain Khatzumoto - a young man who, at the age of 23, well past the age of alleged linguistic prime, learned Japanese to full fluency without ever taking any classes or learning any grammar. How did he do it? By exposing himself to the language for thousands of hours - movies, music, books, you name it. Immersion, in short - I knew this guy was at least partially right in his rationale because his method in learning Japanese was almost identical to how I learned French (yet somehow it never occured to me to do what I did in French with Japanese? maybe I'm just slow :) ).

Whence, the Yellow Experiment. This experiment is based on my experiences in learning French combined with advice and reasoning from AJATT. The details are described below:

• Everyday I am going to watch 2-5 hours of anime, dorama, random Japanese TV - anything that's in Japanese and has a context.


• I am not going to write anything down. Everything will be learned orally and kept in my head.


• I am not going to learn any grammar.


• I am only going to use a monolingual (Japanese-Japanese) dictionary, and even then only occasionally.


• I am not going to repeat or re-watch anything, unless I find a series that I love so much that I feel the need to re-watch it.


• No subtitles ;) that would be cheating.

What, you might ask, is the point of all of this? To "figure out" the Japanese language the natural way - the same way that babies do it. With this experiment I am hoping to prove that teens/adults are capable of "figuring out" language just like children - that children do not have any special, magical abilities that are lost as they grow older. My goal is to eventually be able to speak Japanese so well that it is 100% indistinguishable from the Japanese of a native speaker who has lived in Japan their entire life.

Currently, I understand about a third of spoken Japanese - so I am not starting entirely from scratch. But no one can deny that I still have a long way to go... long enough to learn and observe many things about the process of language acquisition. This blog will keep track of my thoughts, experiences, and findings as I go along.

Wish me luck :)