Interviewing Matt from Matt vs Japan!

hey everyone Duggan here and today I'm joined by Matt from Matt versus Japan Matt is an extremely proficient Japanese speaker and I've seen that many people in the comments of my videos have asked if I'm ever gonna do a collaboration with him or kind of what I what I think of his Japanese his Japanese is spectacular by the way don't walk on any element of this my Bokova this name so no to cook a kadai nihongo by Tommy Lee kichan on the schedule Sony mom Mina Kaneda say they from a psychic oh boy Tony Hong now can a cat guy Tina in this journey psyche quinoa tree walk it is nosotros Saruman Tony Hong Gohan acidic Tiger feel sorry naka Knight cetera so I was liking what I know we are Choctaw Indian a cattleman they had Jimmy Timmy much tougher so today I'm just going to kind of ask him about how he started Japanese his general kind of learning journey and we're gonna try and see how much information we can get from him and I I know this question is gonna be inevitable some people are going to say who's got the better Japanese and I honestly don't know I think Matt probably is more fluent than me in general and certainly his his reading abilities are better than mine but I guess I'll leave that up to the Japanese people his Japanese is extremely extremely good that's that's the first thing I want to clarify because people often ask like what do you think about his Japanese if anything it's better than my Japanese so with that out of the way let's get started yeah well just if I could just like make one remark on nothing like one thing of course I get asked that as well a lot by my viewers like hey you know Dogen it like do you think he's better than you or you better than him and stuff but but from my point of view once you get up to like a really high level of fluency every individual speaker is gonna have a large range of like strengths and weaknesses and it gets to the point where it's really hard to just make a linear comparison like am I better are you better because you know we all have you know we're all of things that we're good at we get different topics that we're comfortable with and stuff yeah so yeah that's an interesting point um I kind of purposely didn't mention this because I didn't want to sound like I was making excuses but a large part of like what I do on YouTube is more like creative writing in Japanese and obviously like with the jokes and everything and I I did feel that before I started doing creative writing in Japanese I was conversationally more fluent in Japanese although Milan vocabulary in general wasn't as as large as it is is now but I did feel that there was like a big shift so the way that yeah you kind of reach a certain level and then after that it's diminishing returns in basically every direction and yeah the more you concentrate on one thing certainly it's gonna affect other things as well so yeah yeah and I think after a certain point it becomes a matter of what do you really want to do with your Japanese and so like in your case you have a specific way that using your Japanese making these comedy videos and stuff and so it makes sense that you would optimize the time you put into practice and things like that to get the best result in that and if there's some aspect of Japanese like speaking super polite with your boss or something that you never do then it makes sense you're not gonna just train that so that you always have it in stock basically yeah yeah yeah I agree with that so why don't you kind of walk us or talk us through your Japanese journey I understand that you initially did like a study abroad and it didn't go so well but yeah I don't know if you studied Japanese before that as well yeah yeah yeah so so well first of all I just want to say yeah thanks so much for having me on been a big fan for awhile so it's crazy that you know I'm having this awesome pleasure man but uh but yeah so I originally got interested in studying Japanese when I was a freshman in high school I grew up in Portland Oregon so pretty I think you grew up in Seattle alright so yeah pretty close yeah and you know I was just watching anime like for them the first time when I was a freshman high school I got into watching jet anime with the actual Japanese audio not the the dubs and stuff like I watched when I was a child and it wasn't that I was the biggest anime fan in the world it was more just like something about the sound of the language just really pulled me in it just sounded really elegant and beautiful and just instantly made me extremely interested in the culture and I wanted to learn more so I just googled like how to learn Japanese and started going through random text books and I transferred into the Japanese class that had at my high school because I was lucky enough to have agile high school that offered Japanese classes and so for the first two years I was pretty much just doing that I in the summer you know because in here in America we have a three month summer break or we have no schoolwork I went to the local community college and took the second year of Japanese classes so that when I was a sophomore in high school I was able to go into the third year Japanese classes and so at that point I felt like I was doing pretty well because all the other kids in the class they were only taking it because there was a language requirement they weren't really into it they weren't studying whereas I was actually into it so I was studying so I was you know doing very well in the class and that made me cocky but then I discovered the all Japanese all the time website and a lot of people watching this would probably at least heard the name but basically this guy caught samoto who was originally he's from Kenya I think and then he went to port like middle school and high school in the UK but anyway he came to America for college and he said that at the age of 21 starting off knowing zero Japanese and having no no background in Asian languages he was able to go from nothing to so fluent in Japanese that he passed a job interview and what got hired by Sony just 18 months later and this was all while going to college in America and assuming assumingly passing his classes and he had a part-time job and things like that so he claimed that through completely immersing himself through the internet through media through you know using an mp3 player and only surrounded himself with Japanese friends in his college and stuff like that he wasn't able to get fluent Japanese extremely quickly and so I read his blog and it immediately clicked with me it made a lot of sense he was basically saying that there there's this common belief in our society that it's impossible to learn a language as an adult the same way that children do but this this belief is bit kind of based on a fallacy because a lot of times how this belief kind of comes about in people is that they try to learn a language using you know a textbook or a class and they do that for a couple years and then they don't really get the results they want and then they conclude oh well I guess I'm bad at learning languages or I guess because I'm an adult I can't learn language anymore but in reality what that adult was doing was completely different than what a child's actually doing when or an infant's actually doing when they're acquiring their first language right the infant is listening for tens of thousands of hours 24/7 completely surrounded by the language whereas the person taking the class maybe for like a couple hours a week they're getting a very minimal amount of exposure to the language and they're doing completely different activities like learning grammar equations and things like that yeah and so he was like the idea if an adult actually replicated the process of an infant then they'd get the same results as the infant and ultimately I don't believe that this is true at this point I think that there are some pretty fundamental differences between second language acquisition and first language acquisition but as a working premise it didn't it it did me a lot of good to just buy into this idea because it got me spending tons of time with Japanese and um and also caught some Oh Toki also uses a and he recommends using an SRS so I used on ki and I was using honkies to learn a lot of new vocabulary and things like that alongside just getting lots of exposure to the language and so it ended up working out pretty well well for me in the long term but so basically how this played out in in in my life or more concretely is that when I was a yeah when I was a junior in high school that was when I just kind of went went from being a sophomore junior that's when I really committed to executing all Japanese all the time and I was really like okay from now on I only watched Japanese movies I only watched happenes TV shows and read Japanese books and hang out with Japanese people and I went very extreme on this because I wanted caught Simotas result and I felt like well to get his result I need to replicate his process and I didn't want to risk deviating a little bit and then you know not not getting the result that I wanted so right I I really just went balls to the wall boss and it was it very healthy probably psychologically I don't recommend people to necessarily do this but so I did that for six months and made a lot of progress in the in those six months but you know there's just a limit of how good you can get a Japanese in six months ran that at that point that was when I studied abroad in Japan and this was almost six months so I had to two years of traditional learning in six months of all Japanese all the time under my belt when I studied abroad and this wasn't through my school it was just this program I found online because I really wanted to have the Japanese high schooler experience that I had seen in anime so many times right and so I found the study abroad program and signed up for it and they sent me to guma Prefecture which isn't necessarily the most interesting Prefecture in Japan when I tell Japanese people that they're like why'd you go to guma ison yep exactly exactly that was that's that's the one thing that I had go for it it's that's where an initial D takes place yeah but I was an industry racing so I couldn't make the most of it then basically what happened was also the school that they sent me to was a school that was very focused on getting the students into a prestigious College okay there was a very high level classes very very strict required a lot of the students and so the they were just very serious students that spent a lot of time studying and not a lot of time just goofing around and hanging out and stuff mhm and I think the reason why they have a foreign exchange student from America come each year was because that school is extra focused on English and they have some of the best English scores in in the pre fixture and maybe even in all of Japan I don't quite remember is that I don't think I think it was called GU GU matul Cole Cole Cole Cole Cole okay because when I was working at I believe that I went to that I probably shouldn't give names anyway yeah sorry go ahead but yeah so anyway so at first everyone was super nice to me super excited to meet me because they never really interacted with a foreigner before let alone a foreigner their age but pretty soon you know they they got used to me and I couldn't speak Japanese very well at that point because six months just isn't enough to take really get conversational influent no matter how much time and effort you're putting in and English high schoolers in particular there's a lot of slang involved yeah yeah like I could really what when they would speak to me and they purposely speak slowly and clearly I can mostly get what they're saying but when they would talk amongst themselves I was completely lost most of the time right right yeah and they couldn't speak English because all of their English was you know just like studying for tests and for TOEIC and stuff and so they had no listening ability they couldn't really speak at all and so I kind of ended up being really isolated because I couldn't make any true friends and my host brother he was really nice to me I was staying with a host family and so he'd let me sit next to him and his friends during lunch but they would just be having their own conversation and I wouldn't know what they're saying so I was just basically sitting there alone and so I got kind of really kind of seen isolated and and yeah and also like my didn't get along with my host family very well and a lot of that was just my fault because I had this idea that I wanted to get perfect in Japanese in 18 months and so on the weekends instead of going out and seeing Japan with my host family I said that I wanted to stay home and make Anki flashcards and just like doze all day and in hindsight this was a really bad decision I if I could go back I would have not done that I would have put Japanese to the side a little bit and just enjoyed my study abroad experience knowing that I haven't rest my life to get good at Japanese but um you know when your teenager you can be very short-sighted and so right my only goal was I want to be fluent in Japanese 18 months from from the point I started mm-hm and so because I was I was just so reclusive and stuff my host family was kind of like wait so we're just making meals for you and driving you to school so you can sit in your room alone and like ignore us basically there all right okay yeah there are understandably a little bit upset and I I were like couldn't read that Monsieur as I say okay yeah yeah I think they wanted me to help out around the house more and stuff but I didn't pick up on that and they didn't actually say it straight out to me like please participate in our family more mm-hm and so so anyway I did make a lot of Japanese progress while I was in Japan because I was really gung-ho about continuing to study continuing to only do Japanese I would go days without speaking or hearing any English but I also just got really depressed and miserable and so I eventually left early it was supposed to be a ten month study abroad but I can home after six months and and then at that point it was kind of like well what do I do I didn't really have the best experience in Japan but I've just dedicated a year of my life studying Japanese and it made so much progress but I'm just not quite there and I just decided that I want to see this through the end and just continue to study very intensely while I was in America and I went to Community College to finish high school because I wasn't getting credits when I was in Japan so if I went back to my actual high school I would have had to be a great behind and that's not kind of fun and so yeah I continued to study from that point a very focused on input so I was just listening and reading Japanese many hours every day making honky flashcards for words that would come up in the books and shows that I was consuming that I didn't know and by the time I was I was about three years out from the initial point that I started all Japanese all the time so I guess about two years after coming back from Japan I was at the point where I could understand Japanese very well and I couldn't read novels pretty much no problem and I could watch movies and stuff no problem but I hadn't really spoken Japanese that much yet but a a little bit after that point I transferred to a four-year university from the community college that I was going to and my community at Mike at the four-year college I went to there's a lot of Japanese exchange students so okay so yeah there was this community of Japanese people out my college they would all hang out too with each other and they all knew each other and so I was able to kind of slide into that community and make friends with them and hang out with Japanese people and actually get to start speaking Japanese so at that point it was mostly just 99% input 1% output but because I had such a strong foundation and input as soon as I started speaking I started to get pretty fluent very quickly because my brain had seen all the pattern so many times that only took a little bit of practice to kind of activate all the kind of passive knowledge that I had right right and and so yeah I spent another two years going to that school and continuing to really study Japanese really hardcore and by the time that I was about five years out I was at pretty much a similar level to where I am now and so now for these past three years I've been you know running my youtube channel and helping other people learn Japanese and things like that and maybe making small improvements but now I spend some time in Japanese almost every day but also a lot of time in English and thing and stuff like that so right like I'm not necessarily improving but but I think I achieved a pretty good level in five years especially considering that almost all of that was outside of Japan yeah that's yeah that's very very interesting I'll just say a few things here some things that kind of echo what you said and also I I don't think that we mentioned this at the beginning but Matt will also be doing an insert a video where he interviews me on his channel so this video will go on my channel and another video will go on his channel and then there will be a third channel that will go on both of our patreon but I just want to say that before I forget but um a couple things that you've mentioned that I've also also went through ie and I've talked about this before my channel a little bit but I started studying Japanese kind of by myself in my room when I was around 13 years old I got really into just like martial arts and anime and kind of like all things Japan there was something about it that just I thought was like so interesting so different and I I did that for about a year or maybe a year and a half I basically finished this small take off in Japanese Oxford series and I I felt like I made pretty decent progress with that it's about one book and but then I my parents didn't want me to stop taking Spanish classes that I was taking in high school so they were like so you can't take Japanese even though there was Japanese classes at the high school so I continued to be interested in Japanese and I just listened to a lot of Japanese music and I watched like there was like an international TV channel that would show like Japanese TV shows once a week for like four hours and I would always watch that and then there was also this like a vex like TV online kind of like radio but it was it was TV online back in the day and I basically continued to watch that even though I wasn't actively studying Japanese and more so I studied for that single year then I kept myself kind of immersed in Japanese for a very long time but then I actively started studying again during my second year at university and the main reason I did that is because I was going for business originally and I hated him as soon as I started taking business classes I was like this is not for me and I really realized well I did really enjoy studying Japanese maybe I'll switch back to that so sort of taking Japanese and then at the same time I took a class on linguistics in general and sorry I should probably be looking at this camera during my speaking bits during this linguistics class the professor said something that kind of stuck with me and that's that there's a whole there's thousands of languages in the world that don't have a writing system and so this kind of made me think of languages in a different way like kind of the main the main the meat and bones of a language is really it's it's spoken element so I try to start focusing more on speaking more than anything else and you briefly touched on this as well but there are there do seem to be differences in first language acquisition and second language acquisition and my professor talked about this a little bit as well and then we after those kind of initial few lessons he started talking about the different parts of linguistics so like sociolinguistics morphology and phonetics and phonetics was like this whole new thing for me was like yeah the phonetics is like the study of the sounds of a language and he was talking about things like you know tones and Chinese and stress accent in like English and German and I think Spanish as well and then how like in some Scandinavian languages and in Japanese there was pitch accent and I was like hold on a second no one I've never heard the term pitch accent ever before in my life and so I was getting kind of these like conflicting messages where people were telling me like Japanese pronunciation is like really be easy but then there was like this whole other aspect of Japanese that wasn't being discussed in my Japanese language courses so I there was a book in the library called I think Japanese phonetics I can't remember who the author was I thought it was this one author that I put in my phonetics videos along like the first couple lessons but it turned out to be a different book so I can't remember the exact author and the exact name of that book but it was a good book on Japanese phonetics and it kind of opened my eyes to this whole different world of like you know devoicing and pitch accent and all the paychecks and patterns and all these you know vowel deletion verses vowel verses devoicing just so many things that I had never heard about and again because my teacher had mentioned that first language acquisition is often different from second language acquisition I kind of went through a similar thing where I started thinking is it productive for me to be learning Japanese in this classroom where the majority of the Japanese that I hear is other foreigner speaking Japanese and so I continue taking the classes but then I immediately applied for a study abroad program and during that entire and I got it and the entire time that I was studying abroad I tried to limit myself I took as little classes as I possibly could and just tried to hang out with as many native speakers as I could and I did some more than to you where like I would just listen to Japanese movies on repeat and like listen to like audiobooks and stuff like that and I I did find that in terms of speaking certainly I felt my my pronunciation was improving much quicker than many of my classmates though they were definitely making strides in like grammar and ecology and stuff like that and it was just kind of you know the different approaches that we took but I figured that later on I could probably make that up later yeah with like unki and stuff like that and I basically my best to do that later on but I do feel like that concentrating on surrounding myself with native speech early on as you mentioned and I do think that that initial year that I spent in my room alone with native Japanese rather than foreigners trying to learn Japanese no we're not foreigners but Americans trying to learn Japanese I think that was a pretty big thing for me so I definitely agree that when it comes to second language acquisition the more native input that you can that you get the better yeah yeah totally that's like the biggest thing that I always say on my channel mm-hmm and like about the phonetics that they're listening you say oh that there's so many things that that I thought that uh that I wanted to touch on oh go ahead and so so like probably the biggest thing and one of the most interesting topics that the two of us specifically can talk about is the pitch accent thing because right I also just like you was not told about pitch accent I was actually specifically told that you don't need to worry about pitch accent you'll just pick it up naturally if you listened to enough Japanese and I really believed that so I I never looked into pitch accent at all and I was about four years into learning Japanese it was when I was had already been at college for a year and when I say four years I'm not even counting the first two where I was just doing classes that in my mind those were so insignificant compared to the time after that where iCard lee count them but so when i was four years into intensively learning japanese i felt like i was pretty good actually funny it funnily enough you just posted a video like last week where it was kind of poking fun at people who certain tire better than they actually are yeah Yokohama motor song ego pink ghost engine ego day how much Masuka yoni home for the Eagle the Hamas no quietly so what Carter and Oh game on conga II gotta there yeah yeah basically people who are falling into the the dunning-kruger effect where they've gotten better than their peers they've started to get a little bit more comfortable in the language and so they get really cocky and they can't see how far they still have to go so I was probably at a similar face to that where I could express myself pretty freely I could understand what was going on I was miles ahead of all the other Japanese may at my school and so I got really cocky and I was thinking like man I pretty much have this Japanese thing down and I asked my Japanese friends so if you listen to my Japanese on the phone for example and you didn't know I was a foreigner would you be able to tell that I was not a native speaker and they were like yeah we could tell and I was like what no how could that be I sound so good though and it was just like so funny that I I was surprised about that at the time but then I asked him what was it at what is it about my speech that gives it away and they all said intonation because Japanese people are not taught anything about pitch accent in schools and so I said anime they don't know the difference between pitch accent and intonation so they just call it all intonation hmm and so for a while I had no idea what they're talking about because I thought they literally meant intonation like when you ask a question you raise the pitch right right of the statement and stuff and so it's like if I was getting that wrong how am I even supposed to go about fixing that you know it's such a nebulous thing but eventually I realized that they're talking about pitch accent actually the funny thing the whole thing that started started me down the pitch accent path was that I had this Die GT an app on my phone I'm DJ Dean is a Japanese - Japanese dictionary that's pretty popular and it actually lists pitch accent mmm and in the form of a number that lets you know where the the pitch drop is and I had seen these numbers forever I had no idea what they meant yeah he's just ignoring them and if you click on the number it takes you to this page where it shows you all the different pitch graphs and I accidentally clicked it one day and then my mind was just blown it was like what this is a thing like this was there the whole time and I was completely oblivious to this and yes and then at that point I was like oh this is what's wrong with my Japanese I'm completely missing this and I just started studying it everything like learning everything I could about it and like especially when I learned about like the old akka pattern I was like there's no way I'm getting this right right yeah yeah just by the trouble with that pattern all the time yeah it's tricky for sure and so at that point I I started studying pH accent I started training myself to perceive pitch accent because right for it was just not part of my perception so yes hoardings of myself and I would sound perfect to myself even though kay there are mistakes so I had to start training myself to notice what was going on into the pitch accent thing and because I had such a strong foundation and listening it was relatively easy for me to do this and pretty quickly I started picking up on what the pattern the accent patterns are for the most common words so I don't be able to hear it and over the course of a few months I got to the point where I was really noticing this and it started to become get to the point where it was like how was I not hearing this before it is such a huge feature of Japanese yeah that went through a similar thing where I had become aware of pitch accent and I had started to studying I had started to study it by myself just before I transferred to the Japanese university that I went to during my study abroad time and because I just started that I wanted to learn more about it so I kind of like bullied my Japanese professors into creating like this Japanese like phonetics course on the side it was like a first of its kind of still going at camera university but I was just like insist I constantly asked like every time there was a new word I was like what's the pitch accent and they're like can you stop keep teaching so they made this other class but then in that class they were like okay can you try and say the word sight goal and I was like okay cycle and they're like no no no no it's a sight goal and I was like no no that's what I said sight goal and then I was taking this class with my friend this guy from Ecuador and he was like site goal and he said it the correct way and they were like great and I was like hold up no no no no because I studied Japanese like harder than this guy but he was better than me so that's when it kind of like clicked for me as well I was like oh god this like I really got to take this thing seriously and that kind of moment I find that in language acquisition there's often times like when when you get like embarrassed or when you get angry and stuff like that that's when you really memorize things there's there's that memory attached to the to the knowledge and that's when I that was the exact time when I started to be able to hear the hey bomb pattern versus like the accent patterns that exist in English where there's always an accident somewhere essentially and yeah one thing that you you've touched on real briefly is that you weren't able to hear the own mistakes in your Japanese and I want to kind of expand on this real real quickly I have this theory I think it's probably fairly accurate that if you have like a scale of one to ten in terms of pronunciation let's just say general pronunciation including pitch accent whatever it might be that you can't hear the mistakes of anyone above the level that you're at oh yeah so like if you're at a five you assume that someone at a six has perfect Japanese because you can't hear the mistakes that they're making oh yeah yeah I I actually have talked about a similar idea on my channel that kind of just just to zoom out even further on the same idea I basically I have this concept that I came up with called the fluency illusion which is where if you don't speak a language at all and you listen to someone else speak it you have no idea whether they're good at all they could they could be completely garbage right but to you to you they sound completely fluent right because yeah you don't know any of it so there's this thing where like polyglots you know make these videos where they do a self introduction in 18 languages or something and to the uninitiated that's really impressive but in reality they could be sounding like really awful like maybe not even comprehensible in some of those languages but you just can't tell so you have to remind yourself that like that's just the the same concept but it's like if you're at zero then anything above zero you can't judge it at all you cannot perceive what's going on yeah exactly I am that's actually one of the primary that was one of the primary uh I don't know motivations for me making that recent video about like the self the self directed Japanese expert is because I think that my Japanese in terms of pronunciation is on that scale of one to ten probably between an eight point five and like a low below 9.5 there are still certain there are definitely things still in my Japanese that uh I can pick up on so that's definitely something but other things that natives can pick up pick up on that I can't pick up on but because there are there's this I don't know a misconception that Japanese is very very easy there are so many people that are at like a like a level six or like a seven and they assume that they're Japanese this is perfect when it's it's far from and I was kind of trying to say that I don't like to make like accusations so I tried to do that through comedy basically try to make that point like we all study a little bit more and we can all get a little bit better so don't break your arm try it out yourself on the back well I think one of the reasons why this issue is particularly bad with Japanese this cuz Japanese people will compliment you so much for the littlest amount of Japanese ability and of course this has kind of become a meme within your channel than the whole Golgo zoo but so but but it's not just that it's like you can if you can do a basic self introduction you're gonna get like nihongo jozu which just in case anyone is new to this video or to this channel through this it's like oh yeah your Japanese is really really good mm-hm and if you're actually good then they're gonna say wow your Japanese is perfect you're even better than Japanese people and I get this all the time like I Japanese people will swear to me like oh if I talked to you on the phone I would think that you're Japanese like you literally sound 100% Japanese but I know it's not true not even close so that's just their way of being polite but it takes a while until you can get to the point where you understand like oh they didn't they don't actually mean that like you really have to take that with a grain of salt yeah I had to you know I don't know the correct way to there's like a term for this in English I can't remember what it is but I you you eat a big bite of humble pie I think is the right way to say it but I was kind of similar experience to you where I was under the impression that my my spoken Japanese was perfect and that's because the the Japanese people that were telling me this were my friends and then I would post like a video on YouTube and as soon as you bring strangers into the equation and you're talking about how your Japanese is perfect then there's going to be someone among among those strangers that says actually no so I'm at a point now where I'm I'm not at all embarrassed to say that I know that my Japanese isn't perfect but I the the point that I like to bring up at the same time is that I don't know really any non-native Japanese speakers that speak Japanese perfectly yeah totally and I mean if you think about the reverse situation right like assuming that you're a native English speaker have you ever met anyone in your life who learned English as an adult and actually sounds 100% like they were born and raised in an english-speaking country I mean right I know people that are really good like Luka the polyglot right his English is phenomenal in some ways it's way better than my English but you can still tell there's still little remnants that let you know that it's not his first language and so really it's I'm not gonna say it's impossible because I don't I don't want to you know just you never know right you never know so maybe maybe it's possible but it's extremely difficult and I think it's kind of unrealistic as a goal but my mindset is more just to always be striving to get better yeah yeah and I'm not really thinking about trying to get some final point where I'll be done you know mm-hmm yeah yeah yeah I agree with that completely and it's interesting one of the things that I always encourage people to do on my channel you know on my patreon series is to record themselves speaking Japanese and one of the reasons for this is because it gives you something to look back on so I there's again so many times in the past I was like okay now my Japanese is fine now it's perfect and then like I wait a year I'm gonna go back and watch that video where I was thinking that and I was like oh now I can hear things in that video that I wasn't saying correct that I didn't notice so I know that when I'm speaking Japanese now there are things in my Japanese that I can't hear but if I keep studying I'll be able to hear a little bit more in the future so that's yeah I agree with the idea that it's always good to keep working on improving your Japanese and I also agree that it's you know probably impossible to get to that completely native level and that only people who are brought up in a completely bilingual environment speaking both languages from a very very young age can achieve that perfect pronunciation but at the same time a lot of people it's I don't think it's particularly healthy to think of I'm only going to study if I can get perfect you know yeah totally and I'd be willing as my mindset yeah yeah yeah oh sorry that was my mindset for for a while was because actually if you read the AJ site he claims that you know he's at the point where he gets confused for native as a phone and confused for native on the phone and that's realistic that's what your goal should be in fact if you don't achieve that then you're a chump it's basically what he said and internalizing this as a teenager actually had really negative consequences on how I felt about my own Japanese because for for the longest time I felt that I should be perfect and the fact that I'm not means that I'm somehow a failure yeah and I felt really bad about my Japanese for for the longest time until I kind of realized that oh that expectation is completely unrealistic yeah yeah yeah yeah I agree with that and one thing that I also would like to mention is that there are times certainly when a person like myself who again if my level is between an eight and a low nine like sorry there was a sound there are times even though my Japanese isn't perfect where I will pass as a native but it's really intermittent so like if I'm speaking on someone to the phone with someone on the phone for a few minutes or you know I'm having a conversation that I've had dozens and dozens of times before but it's really I feel like you realize that someone is not a native kind of a longer they speak and the more difficult the conversation becomes so I can we can both probably pass as a native you know if we're just giving like a kind of good Nichols or something like that yeah but language isn't just gqo so guys so keep in mind an actual for this particular video is there anything else you would like to talk about before we end yeah let's see I mean well I mean I'm like there's so many things coming out I feel like it would we definitely go over the time limit but yeah I mean one kind of just kind of concluding on the pitch accent and phonetics thing that I found is that yeah it's definitely a combination of studying the the phonetics and having some actual conscious knowledge about it with the mass exposure to the real thing in combination that I think gets you the best results and if you only have one or the other like if you only have exposure you get a lot of exposure you're gonna sound pretty good mm-hmm and if you only study you're probably not gonna sound that good because if you have to train yourself to actually perceive it but when you have both that's when I think you're gonna get the closest to well just sound sound as good as you could sound yeah I agree with that sentiment I one of the key things as you know that I preach it's basically the same ideas all Japanese all the time in general is that you know I teach the various like pitch accent patterns and rules on my website or on my patreon but they're useless if you just watch those lessons in isolation you have to surround yourself constantly in Japanese it's only after you have that foundation that you were speaking about earlier when you can leverage the knowledge from the lessons so I always try and encourage people these lessons are good but if you want to get the most out of the series you have to surround yourself with Japanese as much as possible yeah yeah totally totally so yeah well yeah thanks so much for having me on I mean sure I'm sure we could go on talking all day about this stuff yeah probably we'll probably do a teacher maybe a once we get some more feedback but for now it's probably a good place to cut so we'll end the video here thanks again for Matt from Matt versus Japan for taking part in this interview and after this we'll be shooting the interview when he interviews me so if you want to see that I'll leave a link below thanks for watching and I'll talk to all of you guys again soon sly Oh nut up see you guys

Channel: Dogen

Views: 262,814

Keywords: Dogen, Japan, Japanese, 日本, 日本語, Comedy, お笑い, Foreigner, 外国人, Japanese language, MattvsJapan, Interviewing Matt from MattvsJapan!, 日本語の勉強, 日本語の発音, 日本語のアクセント

Id: TTPt2DwLsD0

Length: 40min 42sec (2442 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/autoditactics]

Matt interviews Dogen.

[u/Samhydethefirst]

B-but mia man bad