I'm making this post cause I feel like, for a rather long time, I had a mistaken idea of what "fluency" in Japanese looked like.
So basically, like many people, I kind of had the illusion that being fluent in Japanese means you understand everything that is being said and that you can say anything your mind comes up with. However, I now believe this conception to be misleading and to be an irrealistic goal.
There was a time where, when I was reading something in Japanese, I kind of felt the need to translate it to my native language to make sure I had understood. However, as many of you are aware of, it is extremely difficult to accurately translate Japanese to an Occidental language. Yet, I used to try doing that everytime thinking that if there is something I can say in my native language, there's no reason I shouldn't learn how to say it in my target language if I want to reach 100% fluency.
This misconception comes from the fact that in the West, most of us started by learning a Romance language (French, Italian Spanish, …). While English is not a Romance language, it is still rather close to them and in order to speak any of the languages I just mentioned, you mostly just need to learn a lot of vocab and then directly translate from English (not entirely sure on that one though cause, since my native language is French). The reason for that is that once the "logic" of Romance language is installed in your brain, you can switch from one to another with extreme ease (considering that you learned vocab). I actually even made the experiment of listening to a bit of Spanish native content and, as a speaker of French and Italian, I think I had 90% comprehension of what was being said even though I have never learned that language. Vocab and sentence structure was similar so I had no problem understanding what was being said (even though I certainly could not produce it myself).
Now the problem with Japanese is that it is a totally different process of learning in comparison to the Romance languages we are used to learn at school. As a matter of fact, you simply can't accurately traduce Romance languages to Japanese. You just have to install the Japanese logic in your brain + learn a bunch of vocab.
Thus, fluency in Japanese doesn't mean being able to use it like you use your native language. It means understanding how Japanese functions on its own and being able to use that logic in order to communicate.
This is exactly why reaching a high level of Japanese takes much more time than becoming fluent in any Romance language. Besides, there is also the problem that there will be much more words in Japanese that do not sound at all like those of your native language, meaning there is an unfathomable amount of words you could possibly learn.
And this is where I think it is important to be realistic. Sure, you could learn tens of thousands of words to make sure you have 100% understanding of everything. However, I believe it to be much more realistic to simply accept that you will not know all the existent words in Japanese and that it is okay. As long as you understand the gist of what is being said to you, it doesn't matter if you miss one word cause the context will make up for it.
It is by understanding this that I finally was able to finish my first light novel and to overcome the wall I was feeling I had reached I'm my learning journey. I basically realised all I had to do was to forget about trying to know every word, just enjoy the story and look up only the words that prevent me from understanding what is going on. I have now moved on to reading Japanese literature and I am amazed to notice that while there are still many unknown words, I am still able to follow the story and to picture the scenes in my head.
To conclude this long post, I would say that it is important to go on learning Japanese with the right mentality. Cause no, you will never be able to translate every sentence from your native language to it simply cause they are not the same language. However, you should focus on understanding how Japanese works in itself and learning enough vocab so that you reach 80-90% coverage of conversations. This type of fluency is in my opinion, much more realistically attainable.
by GibonDuGigroin
16 comments
Language and culture go hand in hand. Knowing the mindset of the people who speak a language is half the battle
ばぁか
Just to see that I understand what you mean. So before, you thought that fluency means that you can translate anything from your NL to JP (or any other language)?
I know that people have different understandings of what fluency means, but I thought that at least most people would be on the same page that it does not mean constantly translating something from your NL, but understanding and speaking the language in the language.
At least it feels to me that it is constantly being repeated that translating is neither a good exercise to learn, nor is it something you should strive to get better in (except if you want to be a translator).
I’ve been studying for 3 years and id say I’m N2 right now. Fluency definetly isnt knowing every word and understanding everything in a language as you rightly say.
My native language is English, and if you sat me down in a mechanical engineering PhD lecture I’d be completely lost.
But fluency to me is being able to understand a broad range of advanced subject matter with little to no effort. Even if you don’t know the meaning of every word, you can still follow the conversation perfectly. For instance, you put on a random radio show with no context and can pick it up from the get go. You can understand virtually all music you listen to in real time etc.
Further, you can understand the nuance between complex synonyms e.g. in English, expand, grow, procreate, enlarge, swell, distend etc.
Its a high standard of fluency for sure, but that’s what fluent means to me. Effectively native like understanding. However, most people understand fluency to be – being able to understand and integrate into every day conversation with (apparent) ease.
On my trip to Japan I came back from this week, I gave a presentation on antibodies in Japanese to my works office in Japan. Some people consider that a very high level of fluency, I feel that because it was hard, it’s the opposite, I’m still no where near fluent. Japanese people would be shocked at my Japanese which was very flattering, but again I don’t consider myself fluent.
The same thing can happen in your native language too! In my case, it’s English. I’ve read books or more complex articles/research papers where I obviously couldn’t understand every single word or sentence, but I was still able to grasp the main and important points from what I could understand and further information/context.
“Fluency” is a meaningless word that doesn’t mean anything because no one two people can talk about it at the same time and have the same idea of what it actually means. I personally find any kind of discourse around the idea of “fluency” to be completely pointless. You should instead worry about what you can and cannot do at a practical level in the language, and phrase it in a way that matches what you **want** to do with said language.
Imagine you are morbidly obese (that is you not knowing any Japanese at all.) Imagine your goal is to have the super skinny body of a super model (that is you speaking, reading, comprehending and writing as fluently as a native speaker.) It’s like, even as you lose a lot of weight and become healthier, when you look in the mirror, you can’t help thinking you’re “still fat”.
Personally I’ve had to accept that feeling of “I’m never going to get there” will probably never go away. I’m with you on aiming for what’s realistically attainable, without getting discouraged by some preconceived notion of “fluency”.
One thing i always think about is english class in america where we read books as a class and how many kids dont know simple words that i thought everyone should know in high school. When you are reading a foreign language you end up second guessing yourself as to how much you should or shouldnt know.
>So basically, like many people, I kind of had the illusion that being fluent in Japanese means you understand everything that is being said and that you can say anything your mind comes up with. However, I now believe this conception to be misleading and to be an irrealistic goal.
That is what fluency means to me and it has always meant that regardless of which language I am talking about. It’s not an “illusion”, it’s just that “fluency” is a really bad word because it means different things depending on who you ask.
Fluency to me is being able to understand input and produce output with ease without needing to translate it all into another language in your head.
Well my first language is an Asian language and I can assure you its grammar system is not remotely similar to Japanese. In fact there aren’t too many languages similar to Japanese grammatically, maybe Korean or so I have heard. However, there’s still a lot more than being different from the languages you’ve been familiar with.
Let’s put Japanese aside and think of your own first language. Do you as a native speaker, actually know EVERYTHING that is said by everyone in your hometown? I’d say, most people would be confident to say “most everything” but not “everything” everything, if you know what I mean.
Sometimes not understanding a speaker, apart from linguistic reasons, is caused by context. Regional usage? Industrial jargons? Recent internet slang or memes? If you get a suburban grandma who’s natively Japanese to watch a teenage Japanese streamer, chances are that she wouldn’t be able to understand a significant portion of the stream (I would say, most of it actually). If it happens to native speakers then it will surely happen to you too. So no, by that definition no one is going to reach that level of “flawless” fluency. Cultural exposure is important too, if you’re to aim for a native-like proficiency.
“Fluent” in the most literal sense just means that it flows freely, like a fluid. I don’t think it’s always the most useful concept in language learning because it can get in the way of progress.
You don’t need to be anywhere near fluent for a language to be useful or for it to give you joy. You don’t need fluency to understand jokes or make a connection with someone.
I think the advantage of learning a European language first is that it’s a much shorter path to the point where you can just use the language directly, without your brain giving a constant commentary on every little thing in English. Which just ends up with you thinking about everything in English and then trying to translate as you go. That’s slow and cumbersome and tedious. Also you get a much better perspective on all the things that make English extremely peculiar.
If you’re having to unpack all of those things for the very first time with a language as foreign as Japanese then god help you.
>However, I believe it to be much more realistic to simply accept that you will not know all the existent words in Japanese and that it is okay.
Actually this is true even for one’s native language.
Stupid question, but what’s an Occidental language?
You have a great point, and do you have suggestions on how to work on development of that Japanese logic as you call it?
OK but you’re describing “proficiency” and not “fluency.” “Fluency” is a native-like command of the language where you can indeed express any idea you care to, just like you could in your native language, even if it’s a little odd or unconventional, not just ape what other people say convincingly.