You Wanna Learn Japanese Like a Baby?
A lot of people think that Japanese babies have magical powers that allow them to learn language instantly. While you probably won’t be able to steal these alleged powers (or won’t need them if you are a Japanese baby reading this blog), you can experience learning Japanese as a Japanese baby for yourself. While the Japanese haven’t perfected a device that turns you into a Japanese baby just yet, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that will let you take a look into a Japanese baby’s life.
Parents should know better before posting videos of their little ones on YouTube for the world to see. But I think they would be happy to know that their little babies are helping you on your path to Japanese fluency.
Now you may ask why would watching Japanese parents play with their babies be helpful in anyway to you? Think about it. Japanese parents are explaining the world to their babies using only Japanese. By watching, you learn as they learn. And parents love to playfully tease their children as they are struggling through the language, correcting their mistakes.
Try this as a bit of a change of pace from your normal studies, as you may find this a new interesting studying technique. Even if you are higher level, I bet you didn’t know some of the vocabulary and phrases you hear. C’mon, how many of you really knew what でんぐり返し (somersault) or ごしごし (scrub-a-dub/scrape-scrape sound) actually meant.
An interesting sample to warm you up:
These types of videos will probably be eventually be taken down by their parents, so if all you see is a blank video box above, blame the parents. I only did a short search for these type of videos, but I’m sure there are 1000s on You Tube. I found 2 users who post a lot of them:
http://www.youtube.com/user/1108bluesky
http://www.youtube.com/user/guldfisk0703#p/u/9/GO7LZ_MGf_8
If you find other interesting baby videos, please post them in the comments section!
Make sure to avoid videos where parents don’t talk to their kids and just video tape them making fools out of themselves. Don’t forget that babies and children are noisy, so watching too many of these videos in a row is not advised. Oh, and if you don’t like children, then this method is not for you!
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Well, that gave me a laugh! Cute kids.
Noisy at times, but definitely cute.
Brilliant! I’ve finally found material appropriate to my level. This site is a gold mine. :)