The #1 most effective way to start speaking

Hey KoreKara Squad, 

I’ve still been thinking a lot about these bilingual podcasts and their utility early on. I talked about this last week, but the real magic of consuming bilingual content is constantly staying engaged. But what if bilingual podcasts are just a substitute for something more?

💡 Tip of the week

Back when Krashen was popularizing his input hypothesis another academic came along and challenged his theory suggesting that it was incomplete. Merrill Swain proposed the output hypothesis and claimed that output, speaking in particular, allowed students to:

1. Notice gaps in their abilities

2. Test their language hypotheses

3. Further language reflection to better internalize structures

What this means for us language learners is that while input is necessary to build your foundation, we need output to grow.

So we know we need output practice to reach new heights in Japanese, but how can we output when we’re so uncomfortable with speaking?

Bilingual Conversations.

What does that look like?

You speak English, they speak in Japanese. You both get to speak your native languages and practice output. As you get more comfortable, you can start with a few sentences here and there in Japanese and eventually switch fully into Japanese.

This is what I did at around the 6 month mark, and by the 9 month mark, I could fully understand most daily conversation and have natural conversations.

This guarantees that you will pretty much always be receiving comprehensible and compelling input. The input you are receiving in a conversation is the most engaging and rewarding content you could possibly consume.

With this conversation style, you get all the benefits bilingual immersion offers plus your brain hyper-focuses on deciphering the messages being spoken to you. It’s optimized input.

And when you’re ready, you can start speaking Japanese.

One mistake I made early on was thinking that watching content and looking for words to learn was active immersion. But it took me a long time to learn that that was really an illusion.

The only way to get truly active immersion is to participate in a real conversation. Everything else is passive immersion - that includes watching content or reviewing flashcards.

The reason that is the only true form of active immersion is because you cannot zone out or skip over words you don’t know, you must ask about it and then you will hear the explanation in Japanese. There are plenty of examples of people who just watched content all day without subtitles but still didn’t become fluent.

📺 Immersion of the week 

You might not always be able to find a conversation partner who is willing to speak in this way with you but that’s alright because I’ve got you covered.

In this video I talked with Yumely on a range of topics from how she learned English, how she feels about dating foreigners when it comes to language learning, and if reaching a native level in a second language is even possible.

Do you think I should make more of these?

✍️ Kanji of the week

This verb is made of the kanji 組 meaning association, braid, assemble, and unite. It also uses 合 meaning to fit, to suit, or to join. They unite and join with one another to mean “to put together, to combine…”  Bilingual conversations are the braiding together of languages. Languages flow back and forth to ultimately combine into a coherent and engaging back-and-forth.

🗣️ Q&A 

I’m planning on making a video sharing a full guide on how to learn Japanese in the next few weeks. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer there let me know.

See you next week!

Eric