Kurt's Japanese lesson reveals Kurt as a hoarder aspiring to Youtuber burnout. ‘Hi Guys’, please like and subscribe, please drive me, direct me to my patreon. Many professional Japan-based Youtubers no longer edit their own weekly material (they discuss this in an episode of Trash Taste, ).
This is Kurt's way of showing off some earnest language learning: the shadowing technique, use of popular cultural sources. Dip into the Youtube language learning offer and you'll feel like you've been flipped into a churning stream of animé obsessives, polyglot vaudevilles, orientalist pranksters, grammar obsessives, and pitch-accent geeks. This Kanagawa wave is eternally crashing, spreading and rebuilding so we find ourselves on it for hours. We are bingeing on everything in the pandemic and this Youtube language feast could be the closest most of us will get to a jet-leg busting in-flight zone-out.
I have told Kurt to set himself the challenge of taking a Japanese Language Proficiency Test in July 2021, to see if his methods are effective. I also recorded him speaking Japanese. Kurt performs the language, invests in it, speaks more loudly than I would have done in my French classes in school. He translated an anime film without the aid of the Japanese subtitles and sent recordings of himself speaking script from a scene to Japanese subscribers of the HelloTalk App. This is a community used to invite corrections to speech and writing. We could evaluate the ‘performance’ of his accent if he signs up with Dogen.
I have noticed a rapid increase in his fluency with Japanese over 3 months. This is a process of (re)teaching using an N2 a grammar based course, by Tomomatsu Etsuko, Fukushima Sachi, Nakamura Kaori Kanzen Master Bunpoo N2 (2011). Grammar exercises are not the most productive approach as drills, according to many experts (Stephen Kaufmann and Eric Bodnar, for instance). But these efforts are supported by nightly/early morning exposure to podcasts: NHK News, Nihongo That’s Dan, Nihongo Con Teppei, and Cozy Up with Ida Koji, a Nippon Housou news magazine programme with presenter Ida Koji, and many more.
MattvJapan is not based in Japan, although he has developed native fluency. There is no need to be in Japan to experience Japan. There is no need to aim for fluency to experience the enrichment of language learning. And if language is always changing as David Crystal points out, there is no need arguably to find 'authentic' speakers in order to converse in Japanese. italki lessons with community tutors and Hellotalk offer global and immediate support for any scale of linguistic devising.
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