When Everyone Says your Study Method is Wrong
There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to study Japanese. The one way you don’t want to study is the “wrong” way. “There is no wrong way!” may be your internal response. For the most part this is true, but there are “bad” methods considered by the majority of people studying Japanese. What happens when the method you choose falls under this category?
What happens when you are insistent on choosing a method that is criticized. You did the research, weighed the pros and cons, and they made the choice to do something. Something that the vast majority of people learning Japanese says is bad, and will hurt you in the long run.
What do you do when you are in a situation like this? What do you do when you see someone else in this situation?
When you are in this situation
You’ve read what other people have said. You don’t believe it, or you think it can be done a better way. You go against what all the common information says.
There are two results that await you:
1. You prove everyone else wrong. You discover a new way to do things that no one was able to figure out before, and you ultimately win.
2. They were right and you were wrong. You admit your mistake, move on, and ultimately win by doing something else.
Number 1 is rare, but it does happen. Concepts like J-J and Immersion used to be a lot less accepted than they are today. The best example though, is when James Heisig first came up with the RTK (Remembering the Kanji) method.
All the way back in 1978, James Heisig introduced his newly created method to the traditional Japanese teachers of a university. He showed how he could actually write all the Japanese kanji, merely by using English keywords. This was considered to take a lifetime for a foreigner to achieve, but he did it in a few months. However, when they found out that he didn’t learn the Japanese vocabulary that goes with the kanji, they pounced:
We’ve discussed your case very carefully, and there’s about seventy years of combined teaching experience in this room, and it’s the opinion of everyone in here that you are doing yourself a big disservice by studying this way and you should come to class.
They claimed it was nothing but short-term memory, and he must have had a photographic memory. He was told to keep his ideas away from other students, as to not cause harm to their studying. What he was told next would make any modern Japanese learner angry today:
Look, we went to great trouble to bring you to Japan. We expect you to be a diligent student of the language. This is not a game. This is a very serious business, it is a difficult language. I hear you refuse to go to class, study on your own and make this outrageous claim that you can write the characters. I’ve been here for sixteen years, I cannot write them, I’ve never met a foreigner anywhere that writes all the characters that the Japanese know, and yet you said you did it within a month.
However, the president of Nanzan University was intrigued. After further discussion with James, the president believed him, and told him to write his method down in a book. The rest is history.
The RTK method is not without its critics, and definitely does not work for everyone. But it has helped hundreds of thousands of learners achieve kanji acquisition that apparently was supposed to take (more than?) 16 years. More importantly, this opened the door for many other methods (including Kanji Kingdom) decades later to come out and do similar things. The idea became mainstream that it is better for foreigners to learn kanji in a non-traditional way.
This is an outlier story. Coming up with a game-changing method is extremely rare, otherwise it wouldn’t be game-changing. But it does happen. When everyone tells you that you are wrong, there is a possibility that you could be right.
When you see someone else in this situation
The veteran learners see someone attempting something considered a “bad” method and want to help. This is important. Passing down your Japanese knowledge and experience is what allows the community of foreign Japanese learners to grow into something better. Please keep doing this.
However, people sometimes need to have the “good” or “bad” experience on their own to comprehend what is best for them or to truly understand what other people are saying. It’s that whole “not listening to your parents despite them usually being right,” because until you try it for yourself, the advice has no meaning to you. Telling someone repeatedly and strongly what not to do, despite it being considered “correct,” can have the opposite effect.
My advice
1. Do thorough research first.
2. Make the best decision you can with the information you have in your current situation.
3. Be aware of the probability of failure.
4. Put in enough effort to try to make it work for you. If it doesn’t, adjust or move on to something better.
5. Always remember that failure is good though. It is moving forward and let’s you discover more about yourself and how you study.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
I’d like to mention that Heisig in 1978 had plenty of backup to his theory and method.
I don’t know if he or the traditional teachers knew, but using mnemonic methods to remember difficult material certainly goes back centuries.
With that being said, I think if you end up in such a case in either position, the first thing you should make sure of is that both parties are using the same (and preferable all available) knowledge to reach their conclusion.
As Aumann’s agreement theorem says: “two people acting rationally (in a certain precise sense) and with common knowledge of each other’s beliefs cannot agree to disagree.”
And never forgot that you could be the one that is on the wrong, just makes discussions harder.
Plus, you don’t have to agree on a binary “Correct/Wrong” level. If a method increases your time to Level 20 by average 5 +- 2 years or decreases the probability of giving up on japanese by a huge margin, it could still be possible.
Those considerations only help when you both want to reach the best solution though. If you just want to be right..Oh well. :D
..That was a lot more text than I wanted to write..but I have a huuge crush on these topics (:
Great points to add.
And yes, I agree about the correct/wrong binary not existing. Anyone can learn a language any way, it just will affect overall efficiency how they decide to do it.
This is why for people who hate Anki, they shouldn’t use Anki (https://japaneselevelup.com/hate-studying-japanese-with-anki-now-what/)
If everyone says you are doing wrong they are most likely correct especially if you are new and talking to experienced people, so you better be dam sure you know what you’re doing before ignore people who know better than you.
Just remember though that people try new methods all the time, that may seem completely “bad” at first. Also going against what everyone else says, and that making the discovery for yourself can have some value.
I guess what I mostly don’t like about the article are the last two points:
> 3. Be aware of the high probability of failure.
> 4. If it doesn’t work out, don’t be stubborn, and make sure you admit defeat.
Hmpf, now one problem I have with this in this context is… it’s based on other people telling you, your study methods are bad. On reddit you basically see “here is my study plan what do you guys think” posts pop up around once a week or so. And after lurking for a while I just noticed, that the answers people get can vary wildly even on similar plans. In an ideal world, whenever someone asks for opinions about let’s say RtK, you’ll get arguments for both sides and then you can form your own decision based on that. But half the time this doesn’t happen and you see people majorly arguing for only one side.
Now all the people that answered suddenly told you RtK doesn’t bring you any closer to learning Japanese. It’s just a neat trick to write Kanji from English keywords and has nothing to do with Japanese and is a huge waste of time and you might just burn out from it anyway.
But based on what you read before you still want to give it a try, but are aware of “the high probability of failure”. So you do give it a try, you start learning. You might like it at the start, but somewhere around the middle it gets a bit tough… now what? “don’t be stubborn, and make sure you admit defeat”? People told you you would fail from the start and you were unsure yourself, so now you do just what they said and give up? I think there was an article on here before about how you shouldn’t read negative feedback about your study methods if you are currently in a low or something. Isn’t this similar?
I mean, depending on the person, maybe switching study methods is actually a good idea. Maybe it isn’t. But going in from the start thinking “I’ll probably fail and then I’ll just do what everyone said” (though people usually actually don’t agree on good study methods either… So you might start something else feeling pretty unsure and just give it a try halfheartedly again) that just seems like you are already setting yourself up for failure before even starting.
But I guess in the end with the basic sentiment of the article I do agree: Listen to different opinions and especially listen to the reasons they give for their opinions! Research a bit beforehand. Weigh your options. Decide for yourself! Give whatever you decide on an earnest(!) try! And if you feel like it’s not working out, try to figure out why it’s not working for YOU and consider your new options again carefully!
I just think the overall sentiment of the article seemed a little bit too negative. :S Or maybe I’m justo to hung up about those two sentences I don’t know :) (I mean the whole RtK bit does mention you just miiiight be right)
I’m really sorry. I meant this to a positive article and for some reason it came out negative. I wanted to empower people who try their own thing, make their own discoveries, and adjust themselves based on what results they discover.
I removed the comment that sparked this topic (as I felt it was unfair to single out someone), and tried to soften some of the language, because I don’t want people to misread what I wrote here. It’s a sensitive topic, and I didn’t tread carefully enough.
Yes, if you ask someone what you think of your method, on a forum like Reddit, expect heavy criticism, regardless of what it is. Ask someone about using something on Jalup, and there are plenty of people that will say “don’t do Jalup X, that’s no good!”
Yes, RTK is highly criticized till this day.
I didn’t mean to go in with a failure mindset, where you should give up at the first setback. And it’s often best to try to adjust a method, before completely giving it up (https://japaneselevelup.com/before-giving-up-a-method-just-change-it-a-little/) Yes, there is also an article about not reading negative feedback as you are trying to do a method. I still agree with this. This is more about that beginning time, where you are first deciding whether you should do a method.
I changed the offending sentences :P
Sorry, I might have been a bit harsh there myself. I think there were a lot of positive points in the article even before the change and I just got a bit hung up about some details so don’t worry too much!! (It was mostly just the end really anyway, I guess it just seemed like “this is the takeaway” and that didn’t seem too positive even if the overall tone article in the article was positive)
Though thanks for incorporating the feedback ;) I really didn’t want it to seem that harsh either
Yeah. I studied with the genki text book and lingo deer for about a year to refresh my 2 years of beginer japanese class in preperation for the n5.
After I passed I tried to get back into it 6 months later. And I couldn’t figure out how to pick up where I left off. So I did some research and tried out lots of different things.
Kanshudo – not enough structure and so many different ‘minigames’ I wasn’t confident I was learning the grammer and not the game.
Wanikani – on the tofugu site they mention using kanjidamage is equvilent- and kanjidamage is free so I used that one insted.
Bunpro is pretty good – but the settings had so many tempting hints.
The Jalup imersion deck is a big draw. And Jalup is grammer, vocab and kanji. Kanshudo, Wanikani and Kanjidamage are better at vocab and kanji. Bunpro is grammer. Jalup was the only one that did everything. Now I also recomend https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/jp1k-anki-deck.html but his anki deck doesn’t work in browser or on iOS.