Make your life Japanese

The “all the time” in All Japanese All The Time means letting Japanese slowly take over your world. Slowly is the important word. Three months into Japanese, I switched my iPhone to Japanese because, well, it’s AJATT. Everything I look at has to be Japanese, right? I was working at a restaurant at the time and tried to add my manager as a contact, tapped the wrong option in a menu I couldn’t read, and accidentally shared my location with him forever. Work was awkward the next day. My devices are all in Japanese now and I love it. But I can read them now. Until you can, switch things over bit by bit as you learn the words for them. Here’s roughly the order I went in:

Do your hobbies in Japanese

At some point you stop feeling progress from one day to the next. That’s when I think the best move is to take the stuff you already love doing and do it in Japanese. I cook from Japanese recipes and follow workout plans in Japanese, and when I have some weird question about why a word works the way it does, I Google it in Japanese and end up reading blog posts by native speakers. Little by little, your life converts. You stop needing English for much besides work and friends, the hours pile up without you trying, and Japanese starts feeling less like homework and more like part of you. It also helps to enjoy the same story across the visual novel, manga, anime and sometimes the unfortunate live-action, since each version gets easier.

Following Japanese accounts about your hobbies is also how you keep up with slang. The language moves faster than any textbook, and most new slang starts on social media. A big one lately is the suffix 〜界隈 (kaiwai), which turns any tiny habit into a “community,” like 風呂キャンセル界隈 for the people skipping their bath tonight. I go through the trend rankings every year, and it’s a fun way to pick up words your textbook will never have.

Finding the hours

Between a full-time job and the channel, I don’t have “study time.” What I have is gaps, and I fill them. On my lunch break I drive five minutes to a Costco near work, pull out my laptop, put on headphones and watch Japanese YouTube with Migaku for an hour. On the commute it’s a podcast, or audio from an anime I’ve already seen. During downtime at work I’ll read an NHK article or a few pages of a book on my phone, and at the gym I have Japanese in my ears between sets. Then at home I put on one or two episodes of something easy, maybe read ten pages of a novel, and mine five to ten words from whatever I watched.

Look for the moments you’d otherwise spend doomscrolling. Thirty minutes a day turns into almost two hundred hours a year. And protect the rest of your life, your health, your sleep, your friends. You don’t want Japanese to be the reason your life feels hard. Try this tomorrow: pick one gap, your commute or your lunch, and make it Japanese.

▢ Screenshot neededA week of immersion hours in Toggl (or whatever tracker you use)images/guide/toggl-week.png

You don’t need to live in Japan

A lot of people think you have to live in Japan to get good. Maybe that was true once. But Japanese media has never been easier to get, and as a pretty introverted guy, I’d rather have a mountain of input at home than get dropped in Japan with zero speaking experience.

That said, going is the best reward there is. On my most recent trips, speaking felt so much easier than the year before, mostly because all the reading had grown my vocabulary, and I barely fell back on English. Every hour at the desk shows up in those conversations. One trick if you go and can’t read the menu: look at the server and ask おすすめは何ですか？ (what do you recommend?). You get a real conversation out of it, they pick something great, and you never had to read a single kanji.

◎ Photo neededA photo from a recent Japan trip (Hokkaido road trip, Nagoya, chatting with locals)images/guide/japan-trip.jpg