So in my oft-mentioned Japan trip,, I’ve often become frustrated at how much of its pop culture I like (or at least various parts of it that the Japanese like that Americans generally don’t, like fair play mysteries) that I can’t partake of because I don’t know Japanese.
Knowing it could do a lot for me both personally and professionally. However, I’m past 30, and the time for easily learning a language has LONG since passed. I’m trying to figure out just how much time/effort it would take to read the manga and watch the unsubbed shows I’d enjoy watching at some middlingly reasonable capacity to determine whether it’s worth it at this point in my life. Anyone have any opinions?
I found Japanese to be really difficult to learn, compared to Spanish and even Chinese. To get to the level you are talking about you would have to not only learn Japanese to a nearly fluent level, but you would have to immerse yourself in Japanese culture. So we are talking years.
It would depend a lot on the person (IME, the more languages you already know, the easier it becomes to learn other languages; there’s also the issue of inborn ability) and on how narrow your definition of “consume pop culture” is.
Being able to read manga does not involve the ability to pronounce what you’re reading, or to produce coherent sentences by yourself; it can also be extremely specialized language - depending on which mangas you read, you’d be able to recognize the words for “Drunken Crane Technique” much earlier than the word for “bakery”. The vocabulary needed is different than the vocabulary needed for general usage; the narrower your field of interest, the less general vocabulary you need. On the other hand, there are many references, cultural injokes if you wish, which come from outside the specific field and which will be missed by anybody whose knowledge is limited to that field; this isn’t a problem if the field of interest is “patent law” but it is a problem when the field is “pop culture”.
How long will it take? Well, it will never be perfect (what, you’re telling me you never miss a reference in English? You must be the only EFL person in the world with that amount of knowledge! - do not make the frequent mistake of wanting to be better in your second language than you are in your first), but the sooner you start, the better. It wasn’t my teachers who taught me that “because = cause = cos = 'cos = 'cause”, it was Freddie Mercury and Brian May - but learning that involved not waiting to be told “ok, now you know enough English to read Queen lyrics”.
Because of the nature of what I want to consume, and my experience with similar stuff, ignore the cultural aspects; I don’t think it’ll be a problem for me. It’s the language I want to concentrate on.
Then again it varies with the focus. If you just want to read, you can learn which “little stick houses” mean what without being able to speak a word of Japanese beyond arigato; since you want to also be able to watch shows, that means both reading and listening skills. Reading is easier to self-teach, but in the case of Japanese has the problem of not being an Indo-European language.
And as for exact information, I’m reminded of the joke of the couple whose car broke down at the side of a field. They get off the car, decide it’s not going to move any time soon, and ask a farmer who’s plowing the field “how long does it take to walk to the nearest village?”
The farmer stares at them.
“I say, good man, how long does it take to walk to the nearest village?”
Shrug. Stare.
The couple look at each other and start walking. And the farmer says “at that speed, you’ll be there after lunch.”
Well, actually watching what you want to watch (with Japanese subtitles) will help a lot. I think the most productive learning phase for my Spanish was when watching a Brazilian (dubbed into Spanish, with Spanish closed captions) comedy soap opera over the course of several months.
I lived in Bulgaria for two years in a small town where no one spoke English. Prior to that I lived in a village in Bulgaria for 3 months with a host family where I took Bulgarian for 5 hours a day. Before this, I didn’t speak a word of Bulgarian, or any other Slavic language.
After all this, I could speak fluent Bulgarian, although more at the conversational than professional level. Watching TV was kind of mezzo mezzo, however. My level of understanding depended on the program I was watching: soap operas were easier to understand than cartoons, which were easier to understand than the news. It’s hard to explain, but simply being a viewer takes more effort than the interactivity of ordinary conversation, at which I rarely had problems after about a year. Watching TV in Bulgarian was not a particularly pleasurable experience, because it just took too much effort to follow. Given the choice, I would always watch something in English, although I did make the effort to watch the news so I could keep up with current events. I also looked at it as a language exercise, and kept my dictionary handy so I could look up words I didn’t know. Besides being in a full immersion environment, I worked pretty hard on my language skills. (Living in a small town in the rural Balkans is not exactly overwhelmingly exciting and I had a LOT of spare time to sit around with my flashcards.)
FWIW, Bulgarian was the fourth language I studied (excluding English) and I was in my late 20s.
I think Japanese would be harder. I’ve studied two non-Indo-European languages, and really struggled with them, whereas I found Indo-European languages to be much more intuitive.
Do you know katakana hiragana and kanji? Kanji will take a long time, starting from scratch. How much time are you willing/able to put in daily for language study? What’s your previous language learning experience?
Apparently it doesn’t take much English to partake of American pop culture. Take a look at the degree to which American culture has permeated the entire global population.