I've been studying Japanese for quite a while now. It's been several months and I've gone through a load of grammar, vocabulary and Kanji. I've often wondered what the best way would be to go about learning a new language, especially one that is as distinct and different as Japanese. As a moderately advanced human in the 21st century, I've of course taken it upon myself to research on the subject, so that I could do as little as possible and still be able to actually learn. I've read many blog entries and articles about studying Japanese and the individual pieces of advice they give could be almost as different from each other as Japanese is from my own native one.
Regardless, there's been something I've noticed popping up in an awful lot of these articles, and it's not even limited to Japanese. Needless to say, it bugged me and I didn't like what it said, which is why I'm writing what you're reading right here. Ho, we've come full circle! Now, the thing is about the way people learn languages. Or rather, about their ability to do so. These articles always contain the following in one way or another: “As adults, we don't have the advantage that children have. We don't learn as quickly as they do.”
That's true. We do not have the ability to learn like a sponge. But is it really an advantage? The first thing that speaks against it is that children do not know how to filter meaningful content. They will pick up whatever they can, without actually knwoing if it's really useful or not. You actually spend most of your life trying to reduce the huge amount of useless information, to tidy your brain up again and make it more efficient. Adults already do know pretty well what's useful and what isn't, so they can pick what they need and learn that.
imgbox(right,:maxwidth 30){http://www.clker.com/cliparts/b/7/6/f/1194984951996747973kanji_love_peterm_01.svg.hi.png}Children also don't know any complex concepts or patterns. They don't know logic, they can't do abstract calculations or really anything useful until very late. If you do have these tools at your disposal, you can analyze a language, sentence or whatever it may be and chop it down into meaningful pieces, so you can actually figure out how it works, compare it to already existing knowledge and build connections more effectively. Children cannot. They do everything by Trial and Error, which is one of the least efficient methods ever devised by nature that still leads to a result sooner or later.
Actually, the whole idea of children learning a language quickly is a lie. It takes them 9 entire years until they can actually properly utilize it. Before that it is still based all on Trial and Error and the grammatical rules are only half there. And it takes even longer until one actually masters a language. 9 years is god damn long and I am damn sure that an adult can learn a language better and faster than that, if they actually set their mind to it and practice at least a bit every day. If an adult actually had the same exposure to the language as a child, they'd learn it even faster. Now, you're probably thinking that children can speak way sooner than 9 years. They can. But they do not have a large vocabulary, still make plenty of grammatical errors and can't write very well at all. These are all very important aspects of language that we glance over very quickly when talking.
At this point I'd like to get to another thing, which is the issue many people seem to have with learning a language: “I don't have the time to do it”. This is yet another bollocks excuse, because it's just plain wrong. You do have time. In fact, you have all the time in the world. BUT, you also only have the time that you choose to have available. If you say you don't have time for something, it means you priorize everything else above whatever it is you cannot do. Which means you don't really want to do it. If you actually want to learn a language, you need to make it a top priority and strike other things out. It's easily possible even. There's many hours of your time that you waste with doing something of very minor significance, if not none at all. If you can scrape away some of that time and use it to study some vocabulary, repeat some grammar rules, write a sentence or whatever, you can easily learn a language at the side. 5-15 minutes every day is a very good measure.
Written by shinmera