Starting the snowball

When I lived in Japan, I knew lots of English-speaking people who had been there for years but didn't speak Japanese.  My roommates, an Australian couple who had lived in Japan 2-3 years longer than me, were one such example.  They got by with the odd Japanese word or phrase, speaking English to whoever could understand it and getting friends to help out when no English speakers could be found.  How, living for years immersed in a foreign language environment, could they not be fluent?

I remember the point where my Japanese learning started to snowball.  It was a few weeks after moving to the country.  I had been to a couple of free classes at the ward office where one of the volunteer teachers drilled me on simple words and on the writing system.  I had reviewed the phonetic hiragana and katakana characters before, but wasn't quite there yet in terms of being able to read them.  Wanting to do better the next time, I spent 2-3 hours over the weekend making flashcards for myself and drilling them until I could basically remember the sound of most of the characters.

Here's where it happened.  After spending those couple hours to focus on the characters and drill them, I started to be able to read some of the signs on the streets and shops around my neighborhood.  Suddenly I was reading Japanese wherever I went, getting more and more practice with remembering the pronunciations of the characters and learning new words in the process.  I started doing the same thing with the kanji, the much larger set of pictographic characters, and started seeing them all over the place as well.

The point of all this is that if I had never focused my efforts on learning that small subset of information, I would have been surrounded by a sea of Japanese language information, but unable to access it.  Which is precisely what had happened to my roommates. 

This is why I am a little skeptical of the school of language learning that proposes learning through total immersion. It's the difference between trying to cut something with your hand vs. a knife.  You're applying the same amount of force, but in the case of the hand (immersion), that force is being applied over a greater surface area.  With the knife, the force is concentrated along the edge of the blade, so you are able to cut along that point of contact.

Immersion is great once you have laid some of the groundwork to be able to benefit from it.  I've found that the fastest way to learn is to concentrate on an aspect of language, learn it out of context, and then put yourself in an environment where that aspect can be reinforced and given some context.  When you're living in a foreign country, you can get by with being somewhat scattershot.  I used to memorize lists of kanji characters, words, grammar structures, etc. with the expectation that I'd come across examples of them in use within a couple weeks.  But now, living back in the U.S., I find that I have to limit what I study to a smaller scope and be more careful to review what I've previously encountered.