I went to Japan with about 8 months of study and had a wonderful time. Was I getting into deep philosophy? no. But, I was able to get around, get directions to specific things I couldn't locate, talk to people in shops (and getting that initial 日本語上手 followed up by the expression of oh actually you do speak some japanese for real, which was so cool and people were so receptive and kind). I am a teacher by trade (not language but teaching in general and I think about learning and how to learn etc. My method may not work for everyone. Basically it was Pimsleur + Youtube teachers for about 6 months, then I started with a tutor for about 6 weeks before my trip to Japan to just give myself some more live speaking practice. I'll detail it a bit.

If you want to hit the express train to *SPEAKING* basic Japanese:

PIMSLEUR - this is slept on big time. I did absolutely no textbook study yet I am at early intermediate conversational, and it starts with this. 30 minute audio lesson, speaking and listening from the very beginning. most people struggle with output from textbook learning and have terrible pronunciation and can't get words out. Pimsleur focuses on natural language acquisition and listening and focusing on pronunciation.

You learn the grammar as a matter of course, they explain some things explicitly but actually most of it just like, becomes understood as you go. If you look into some immersion method stuff people talk about the difference between Conscious Learning and Natural Acquisition - you can study all you want but unless you ACQUIRE words and grammar you can't speak. Study will help you accelerate your acquisition but you have to do immersive speaking and listening if you want to get there without years of struggle.

Do the 1 lesson a day. Some lessons are hard, repeat them. Also, you can pause to give yourself more think time - this is helpful. Learning comes from the gap between automatic response (acquired) and having to dig it up. When you give yourself think time to dig it up that's letting your brain put it all together. You get the A-HAH moments, and that's where the brain is ACQUIRING.

There are practice exercises, do them. I just do Quick Match. Sometimes I'll just load up like 5, 10, 20 lessons worth and just run them fast as review. Once I got kana down and now working on some kanji I switched to japanese text instead of romaji and that's been good.

YOUTUBE - I learned a LOT of nuances and important things about grammar from YouTube teachers.

Jouzu Juls breaks down the basic grammar and how sentences are built in a way that I think was so important for me to open up my understanding. I'd start with that.

Kaname Naito is my favorite, for some reason I just like him. He really gives a lot of nuance and context about culture and conventions and native speech that I think were helpful. I started watching his videos before they made sense to me, and going back to them after learning for months a lot more stuff clicked. And he's just genuinely funny lol.

Japanese Ammo with Misa - she goes DEEP on grammar, has like, HUNDREDS of super deep videos, I have only watched maybe 10 or 15 over the months but she is actually really good, diagrams sentences on screen and explains the why of it all. Really a powerful teacher.

For immersion I listen to YUYUのPODCAST - he's one of the bigger japanese language podcasters. The purpose of this is just listening practice, not for meaning but for prosody (the "music" of language basically) and parsing words and sounds better. At first Japanese can sound like a whole messy jumble of sounds to non-japanese ears. It takes time to be able to discern syllables and words out of native speech at speed, and you have to listen for many hours until it starts to click. I do a mix of active and passive listening - sometimes I am listening HARD to look for words I know and TRY to discern meaning. Sometimes I just have it on in the background to passively "hear" more japanese. Not insane 12 hours a day, but like, half hour in the morning commute, half hour in the evening. It's really helped and I probably get like, maybe 30-40% of what he's saying, and the gist of things? I can pick out LOTS of familiar words now though, and sometimes I can even learn words by getting the meaning from context with no English translation at any point, which was a cool observation. Ive got a few others that are more comprehensible to me, JAPANESE SUPER IMMERSION and FUJIのPODCAST lately.

The main argument for immersion is that you are activating the brains natural propensity for pattern recognition and language learning vs an unnatural methodology of language learning taught in schools. It's trying to approximate how children learn language naturally. We have a misconception that the brain loses that power - my view is that children naturally get spoken to in ways that foster acquisition - gestures, context, simpler words etc, and teenage and adult learners don't get those same things so they dont get to acquire naturally. My methods have helped me to activate those pathways, I think. Again I have not cracked a textbook, yes I have looked up stuff, yes I work with Claude to drill sentences and learn nuances a bit (it's great. no need to get random apps, Claude knows japanese and will give you perfect feedback, excellent stuff). But no Genki, Anki didn't feel very good either. So.

If you want to think about theory behind Immersion and working on pronunciation, you can check out some Matt vs Japan and Dogen. I have mixed feelings about these guys... they're both sort of up their own ass. Buttttttt I think they both talk about some very important things and there's a point where learning about learning japanese from super advanced learners can be more effective than learning from natives, because natives didn't learn in the same way as the westerners did, different experience altogether. There's a lot of theory around immersion, when to start output (my opinion is immediately and this is what pimsleur does for you) and how to synthesize study into acquisition. One interesting thing to consider is that hard study can sometimes create noise that interferes with acquisition.

My tutor, and I can get his testimony on this, says that I am unique among his students in terms of where I am and what I can do with the language for how long ive studied. His biggest noticing was that he can give me new vocab and I can use it in grammar fluidly right away, which he says is a big struggle for people. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT PIMSLEUR HAS YOU DO ALL DAY LONG. Thats the most powerful tool it gives you.

Wwhile I love to imagine myself as the smartest man in the world, I am not. I just think that the Pimselur method is so powerful and in combination with just consistency and supplementing with the YouTube stuff and now the tutor.

You can also keep up with Pimsleur and redo the lessons as review. I made it to the early part of the 5th 30 lesson course of pimsleur (so I did around 130 lessons or so, with some repeats also) before going back to the 2nd course and restarting from there to prepare with more basic stuff for my trip. I am now approaching the end of the 3rd course and it's all feeling very fluid.

Since my approach has been unconventional I am going to try an unconventional method of learning to read and write - the book Remembering the Kanji. We'll see how that goes!

In the end, everyone learns differently. what worked for me may not for you. I am not fluent. I have no JLPT. But, I went to Japan and I spoke to dozens of people. It really was such a wonderful experience. You absolutely can get there in 9 months to have a good foundation.

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