I must say the bit about “experiment with tadoku for three months . . . it won’t kill you” was priceless.

That’s just what I’ll do, but first (I hate to say it), I have to finish inputting my current book of Japanese grammar into Anki. But once that project’s done, I really am going to stop all of my current methods and focus on giving this a full-on 3 month trial, to see how far I can get. I live pretty close to a Japanese library, so it should be a piece of cake.

Thanks for a great post.

Thirty years, wow, you must have a lot of wonderful suggestions! I looked up the Rakudoku group on Goodreads, but I couldn’t find anything. Is it a private group? I’d love to check it out. There’s also a tadoku group on there already, if you haven’t seen that.

Haha, I think your answer is better than mine ^^;;

This is such a good question, I’ve been thinking about it since I saw it ^^

It seems to me there are two questions here:
1) How useful would tadoku be as one’s primary method of learning at the beginning of the language-learning process, given that a focus on visual learning may interfere with pronunciation and intonation?
2) Theoretically, which would be better for a beginning learner: massive comprehensible input through extensive reading or massive comprehensible input through extensive listening?

Before I try to answer those, there are a couple of things that inform how and why I write this blog and how I study that I should mention.

First, I assume that most people who come across this blog and the idea of tadoku won’t be interested, some might be mildly interested but don’t ever really quite get around to giving it a shot, a small number will actually try it out and of those, some may actually stick with it — and of that number, the ones who do it exactly the same way I do it is probably going to be pretty darn low! So I assume that if someone wants to try out tadoku, they’ll add it to whatever they already do, or take the ideas from it that work for them, and I assume that their own studies will probably include some form of speaking / listening practice.

Second, I personally concentrate on doing tadoku and writing about it for two reasons:
1) I’m really motivated by the idea of learning to read and write, but learning to speak and listen feels more like a chore for me; this is mostly because of my personality and goals. That is to say, I’m extremely introverted, and I don’t have plans at the moment to do something like move to Japan. Many other people interested in tadoku are also proponents of 多聴 (extensive listening) and shadowing (http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing) so in the larger tadoku culture that I’m aware of, I don’t think listening and speaking are ignored as much as they are on this blog.

2) I’m such a visual learner that learning through listening is nothing but misery for me! The reason I don’t mention things like shadowing and extensive listening is basically because I myself am learning in a totally lopsided, lazy way and don’t do them, and so I don’t know very much about them. I do actually do some speaking and listening, but it’s nothing so great and novel I feel the need to write about it. I’m proud of what I’m doing with spreading the word about tadoku, but probably every Japanese learner I know could give me pointers about speaking and listening practice.

First question first…

I know exactly the problem you’re thinking of, because I encountered it in my first language! I learned to read when I was extremely young and read constantly, and since I didn’t consistently hear or use many of the words I ran into, I applied whatever internal logic I had to their pronunciation. “Beethoven” became “Bee-thee-hoh-ven,” for example, and I didn’t pronounce “conspiracy” and “burial” correctly until I was a teenager. Later in life I met other people who had learned to read around the same time I did, and it turned out they’d done the same thing.

Of course, the problem mostly corrected itself while I was young, because I was immersed in English, got my pronunciation corrected by people around me and so on – generally my guesses at pronunciation just had to catch up to what the rest of the world was using.

In terms of studying second languages, I had three years of formal instruction in Japanese and so I got an idea of how to deal with pronunciation (and it certainly helps that it’s so regular compared to English). I’ve flirted with the idea of learning Chinese in the past, and about a week’s worth of taking a stab at it convinced me that I’d need to take a class or find a tutor if I was serious, because my best efforts at following along with the CD voices were just not cutting it. So absolutely, I think that someone starting to learn a language who only read and hardly got any aural input would have some serious problems with speaking and listening, later on.

Even I wouldn’t have wanted to do nothing but tadoku from the beginning! When I say I wish I had done extensive reading from the beginning, I am thinking from the context of what my beginning was actually like — that is, formal classes — and I mean something more like, I wish I had been able to add extensive reading to what I was already doing. I doubt there would be too many formal classes that focused only on reading; that was the case for Sakai-san’s tadoku courses, but those students had already been studying English to some degree since middle school, so that’s rather different. In a situation where someone was doing self-study and focusing on tadoku, I would think that person would be well advised to pay attention to introducing at least a little balance in the form of podcasts, conversation partners, TV or whatever other resources he or she had access to, because getting acquainted with the various patterns of pronunciation, intonation, etc. earlier on would help you get them right from the start and not come up with your own ways of dealing with them.

I’m curious about this now, and I’m going to ask my friend Tsubasa who teaches English through tadoku to kids. I’ve got more thoughts about the subject, but I feel like all I really have is my own experience and an ability to make educated, but still extremely speculative guesses, which I generally don’t like doing, so I will hold off for now and think about it a little more.

Incidentally, I’ve seen the opposite problem in a handful of the TOEFL essays I’ve scored: people who seem to be learning English without any sort of exposure to the written language. In these cases, there may be a basic idea behind the essay and the underlying grammar may even be about a low 2-level, but the spelling is so consistently warped that even with the most charitable reading it is so impossible to understand that it can’t get anything beyond a 1 (the lowest score). It’s really rare, of course; I couldn’t say I’ve run into more than a dozen essays like this, and I’ve been scoring for some time.

2) Theoretically, which would be better for a beginning learner: massive comprehensible input through extensive reading or massive comprehensible input through extensive listening?

Ideally, I’d say “both” but that’s a cop-out, so assuming it has to be one or the other, I think it would depend entirely on the listener’s personality and learning style. I’ve certainly read advice something like “Immerse yourself entirely in the spoken language for a month before you even start trying to learn a language” (not even comprehensible language, but normal spoken language, songs, etc.) and it’s an intriguing idea but personally, it would drive me around the bend because, again, I’m such a visual learner. I like listening to podcasts about Japanese sometimes, and it’s useful for listening comprehension practice, reinforcing words, hearing the language used and cultural tidbits, but as far as new vocabulary or grammar goes, I absolutely can’t learn things like that without seeing them written out. (That holds for English, too.) So I can say that my listening ability has risen naturally as I’ve learned words from tadoku, but it may be just the opposite for other people. I don’t feel like I have enough experience or data to say anything more definitive than that.

I often think that my ideal learning situation, given the level of knowledge I have right now, would be living in Japan in a little apartment next door to a big library for a year. For someone else at the same level, perhaps their ideal learning situation would be a sink-or-swim situation, something like a year at a job where they’d have to learn to communicate verbally to get along and get a lot of immediate feedback. That kind of setup would send me home every night in tears!

Of course, I think it would be rare for a learner to start out with just one or the other – or even to start out with both and nothing else. (I can’t help but think that starting out with both would be rather fun…)

I can’t really say “I hope that answers your question” because it’s just my opinion. But I do hope it’s been interesting for you to read. I, too, am curious about Sakai-san’s opinion, and I hope other language learners will add theirs, too.

This could be a great idea, e_dub_kendo. Could I re-post this to the BBS at tadoku.org? Or I wonder if you have the time to post this yourself. Either in Japanese or in English.

Thanks for your question, e_dub_kendo.

First, two disclaimers:One I’m not a learner of Japanese, so I’m not really a good judge of alljapaneseallthetime.com; Two, I can only answer on the basis of what I have seen in Japanese learners of English.

The disclaimers notwithstanding, I am fairly certain by now that sentence cards may not be as effective as they are expected to be, expecially if you live in an environment where Japanese does not abound around you. The reason is that the Japanese have had books of English sentence collections for decades, yet I don’t think they have had much impact on how much they acquire English.

I have had a glance at the other site, antimoon.com, and it seemed like a dejavue to me, I’m afraid. The site looks like a collection of conventional learning methods, which have had very little effect on actual acquisition of English language in Japan.

Re sentence cards, the problem seems to come from the same lack of situation and/or story as word flash cards. If your Japanese is so good that you can tell what the situation is behind those sentences, you may not need sentence cards in the first place. If you can’t imagine when or where to use those sentences or clauses, wouldn’t it be very hard to memorize them? It would be another matter if you lived in an evironment where you hear or use sentences like 時間です all the time and be constantly reminded of what you have stashed in your memory. (時間です may not be exactly the same as ’It’s time.’, you see. The problem is roughly the same as 頭 not being the same thing as ‘head’. So there may be another complex issue of understanding a foreign language through your mother tongue.)

Which brings me to my suggestions. There are two.

One, how would you like to collect sentences and clauses from books or manga you like so much that you know you will enjoy them time and again. That way, you will know the situation and the story behind each of the sentences you record on your flash card, right? You might feel like relying on a collection some expert has selected for you, but my bet is on sentence cards you make from your own reading pleasure.

Two, you could also experiment with tadoku for, say, three months, during which time you stick to the three golden rules strictly and rely on nothing else (so the effect or non-effect of tadoku may be apparent). It will take a leap of faith but it won’t kill you. See if you like what you gain and how you gain it.

I have always thought learners of Japanese are at an advantage because there are manga, anime, and video games, which should make tadoku a lot of fun.

Liana, I will answer your questions as soon as possible but not before around this time tomorrow. So please be patient a little longer!

e_dub_kendo, that’s awesome that you thought to contact them! I’ve been aware of that site for ages and never thought to do that. What a lazy site user I am ^^;; I wonder what they’re looking for in terms of content? That is, would they accept books that are out of copyright, if they were all scanned and whatever necessary metadata was provided? I can’t translate anything into Japanese (properly ^^;;) but I can keep an eye out for books that might be old enough…

Sakai-san, I bet a Skype conference about extensive reading in Japanese would be a lot of fun — I wonder who else would be into it?