Job Discussion Forums

[fat_chris]

[kdynamic]

[furiousmilksheikali]

[johanne]

Most children who enter English medium schools at the elementary school level with little or no English require 2 years to become conversationally fluent in the language and 5 years to acquire the academic literacy necessary to succeed in school. This is after spending 6 hours a day in school surrounded by English.
My daughter needed a year to become fluent in Japanese after entering a Japanese kindergarten at the age of 4. She had been exposed to Japanese from birth from her Dad, so there was some background knowledge, but until she went to the kindergarten she wasn't doing much more than saying the occasional Japanese word. Also, getting to the fluency of a 5 year old is not as difficult as getting to the fluency and literacy of an 8 year old, for example.
Of course adult language learning is quite different, but I doubt anyone but a language genuis would be able to be truly fluent and literate in Japanese, or any language, in six months if they were truly starting from stratch.

[gaijinalways]

Definately impossible. Even a translator I know who has lived in Japan over 20 years doesn't consider himself fully fluent. How would you know all the vocabulary and kanji in such a short time? You wouldn't.

[Zzonkmiles]

I'd say 1 year is a good goal for being able to pass 3-kyu of the JLPT with about 1 hour of study a day. Then add another 1-2 years for passing 2-kyu. The fact is, even though 1-2 hours a day of studying is ideal, we are often so distracted by our jobs, our friends, social engagements, dating, traveling, etc., that we may not study as often as we should. So I say 3 years is a good goal for 2-kyu, which is actually how long it took me.

[seanmcginty]

It depends a lot on the amount of time you spend studying. I passed level 2 about 4 years after I arrived in Japan. But I had spent that time working full time in Eikaiwa speaking English all day long so I could only devote an hour or two to studying a day.

If you were studying full time and completely immersed I could see reasonably proficient within a year. Not "fluent" but proficient enough to pass level 2 and maybe even have a go at level 1. 6 months would be out of the question.

There was an interesting documentary on TV I saw last year about an autistic man from the UK. Unlike most autistic people he didn't have any problems functioning in society (ie he wasn't like Rain man, if you talked to him you wouldn't realize he was autistic). But he had this amazing mental capacity. They performed an experiment of sorts with him. They challenged him to learn a language he had never spoken before in 1 week. They chose Icelandic, which is apparently a difficult language to learn. The test they gave him at the end of the week was that he had to be interviewed on Icelandic TV and carry on the conversation without trouble. He spent one week studying in Iceland with a tutor and at the end he went on and got through the interview without trouble. It was quite amazing, he wasn't just answering 'yes' and 'no', but making full sentences and completely interacting with the interviewers in Icelandic. There is an article about him here:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/11/from_the_other_side_of_autism/

So, if you are like that guy you could probably learn Japanese fluently in 6 months. Otherwise I don't think it would be possible.

[shuize]

[kdynamic]

seanmcginty, the guy you're talking about is named Daniel Tammet, and I linked to information about him above.

His kind of fluency bring up some interesting questions. Daniel is like a computer with a ton of RAM. He can memorize and process tons of information. But human communication is an organic thing. We aren't computers. I think fluency is so much more than just knowing vocabulary and grammar. It's even more than subtleties like pronunciation and intonation. In order to sound natural speaking a language, you need a lot of cultural and contextual knowledge.

Especially with a language like Japanese, which is inextricably linked to an extremely high-context culture, you need a LOT of background information to make the right word choices between various options that all mean the same thing, to catch references and nuances, to be able to construct metaphors that people can actually relate to, etc. Without background and history, you will never sound natural.

For instance, there are tons of little phrases that suddenly gain huge popularity and everyone starts saying them. Yesterday I saw a 5 year old smack his 3 year old brother in the head and yell "欧米か～！" hahaha. My point is that it just takes time to be exposed to all those little things to a level where you stop sounding like a textbook when you speak.

[southofreality]

Conversational fluency is pretty easy to gauge. For the most part, if you pause one or two times to think about appropriate grammar usage, words, etc.. for every one or two sentences spoken, you aren't really fluent yet, even if you are good at using stalling language (i.e.: 何というのかなぁ, 何と説明したらいいかわからないけど...) to avoid periods of silence. Conversational fluency comes with lots of experience. Immersion is the key. It's hard to see how anyone can become conversationally fluent in one year, let alone 6 months, without it.

Rather than focusing on being fluent or not fluent, one should focus on lucid communication. If you don't know, or have forgotten an appropriate word to use, explain that to the listener. Use circumlocution to get your point across. Even using English once in a while can be quite effective since many Japanese people have decent-sized English vocabularies. If you can keep the people you talk to interested in the conversations you have, that's a good thing. Of course, fluency is the goal. But, you can be a decent conversationalist without being totally fluent. Indeed, fluency doesn't necessarily make you a skilled conversationalist. We all know plenty of native English speakers who make us want to open up our wrists every time they trap us into conversations.

[gaijinalways]

[southofreality]

[mspxlation]

I'm a foreign language teacher by training, and "fluency" technically refers to the ability to talk fast without stumbling. That's it.

The more correct term is "proficiency," and you have to define it further by adding "proficiency in speaking/reading/writing/listening." Generally, you have to ask yourself:

1) Can this person fumble around in Japan as a tourist?

2) Can this person also make small talk and deal with everyday life, such as explaining to the plumber exactly what is wrong with your sink?

3) Can this person also hold down a job in a Japanese-speaking environment and otherwise function as an adult in Japanese society? This level is called "professional competence."

4) Can this person function at the level of an educated native speaker, even if he or she is clearly not native?

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute trains diplomats in dozens of languages using courses that run six to eight hours per day, five days a week. It takes 6 months to bring the average learner to professional competence in Spanish, French, or Italian. In other words, after 6 months of Foreign Service Institute instruction, a person could live in Spain, France, or Italy as a fully functioning adult with a job.

However, if the language in question is Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic, it takes two years of full-time study for the average person to reach professional competence.

I believe that a person who works hard can achieve tourist-level Japanese in six months and the daily life level in a year.

However, people at that level often drastically over-estimate their own ability. They're convinced that they're completely "fluent," because, for example, they've mastered the language needed by high school exchange students. Put them in the kuyakusho to go over some bureaucratic matter, however, and they're lost.

By the way, I don't care how many kanji a person has memorized. "Kanji macho" ("I know 1,000 kanji!" "Well, I know 2,000!") is beside the point. You don't really "know" them until you can pronounce them correctly in context and figure out how the words indicated by the kanji fit together within a sentence. Without that kind of knowledge, people are tempted to skip from kanji to kanji and invent their own meaning in a process I like to call "creative translation."[/b][/i]