After many months of using anime as a tool to learn Japanese, I thought I’d share some tips that have been useful for seeing real improvements in my Japanese. Here’s my Eightfold Path to Japanese Enlightenment through Anime:

1) Right Mindset. If you like watching anime for fun, it could be a good tool for you to learn Japanese. Unfortunately, you will not absorb the language through osmosis — you have to put in the effort. That means being active, not sitting on your butt. More on this below.

2) Right Anime. Be aware that depending on the anime characters you try to imitate, you could end up speaking like a 17th century samurai, a yakuza enforcer, or worse — a shinigami. There’s lots of ‘slice of life anime’ where the characters don’t call each other temai or slur their words like yakuza. Bakuman, Kino’s Journey, and Working are good places to start. Also Death Note, despite its Shinigami theme, has characters that speak relatively normal Japanese.

3) Right Subs. Meaning, No Subs. Once you’re past a certain point in your Japanese level (say you’re around N4 – maybe earlier), you need to axe the subtitles. When you read English subtitles, you’re effectively telling your brain: hey brain, you know, you can stop thinking now, it doesn’t really matter if I understand the Japanese dialogue.  So turn off the subs and exercise your brain. For watching online, where everything is subtitled in English, I put a 2” wide black piece of cardboard against the screen where the subs would be – think of it as watching anime in widescreen. For show links, I recommend animecrazy.net.

4) Right Repetition. Some of my Japanese friends have noticed an improvement in my pronunciation recently. I attribute this directly to the way I watch anime. While watching, I try to repeat whatever was just said by a male character (there’s a big difference between male and female Japanese – I prefer not to sound like a girl). I usually end up only repeating the first and last parts of the sentence, but it has definitely helped. Warning: if you do this while watching anime with a friend, you may notice your friends start to distance themselves from you.

5) Right Dick. Dictionary, that is. If you’re passively watching, you’re not learning – you’re just wasting time. You need to be actively picking out new words, pressing pause, looking them up, reviewing them, and trying to use them in your conversations with friends. If you’re skipping any of these steps, you may as well be watching Glee on FOX.

6) Right Study. Anime shouldn’t be your only method of studying. I’ve seen my biggest improvements when I’ve been able to confirm my understanding using a grammar book or dictionary examples. Recently I’ve been using Tae Kim’s Guide to Learning Japanese for sentence patterns (free and highly recommended) and iKanji to learn new Kanji (a few bucks, but worth it) – I enjoy being able to read, too.

7) Right Practice. I know it might sound a little wacky, but you need to actually practice the language with other people. Preferably live, native speakers, though other L2 learners will do in a pinch. Some people suggest Skype chat. I suggest get out of your house and meet people in real life.

8) Right Blog. My blog. Okay, just kidding. I couldn’t think of an eighth.

Have experience learning Japanese through anime? I’d love to hear it. Otakus of the world, unite!

(Click here for the original post with explanations of each goal)

Three months into 2011, here are some updates on my goals.

1) Accumulate $22,000 in savings. On payday this coming Friday (and after paying my bills and withdrawing food money for the month) I will be up to almost $8000 in savings. Getting there. Slow and steady. I’ve also picked up a few private lessons on the hush-hush, for about $40 an hour. This should help, but makes my week pretty busy.

2) Write and record a 5-song EP. Pretty much on track with this one. See #4.

3) Revive my blog, Project Hitchhiker. I had mentioned adding a post every Sunday, and so far I’m on track. To be honest though, I’m not really impressed with what I’ve been writing. The last post about stress, for instance, felt like a cop-out because I didn’t feel like writing. Working on a few bigger posts at the moment that should make up for it.

4) Write and record rough demos of at least 2 songs per month. In March I finished writing 2 songs, but haven’t recorded them yet. I’m waiting on buying some new music gear – a new travel guitar w/ pickup (the intonation on the Martin backpacker is driving me crazy — looking at a new Baby Taylor or similar), a new microphone (I’m currently using the built-in mic on my Zoom H4N), and a new Audio Interface for my laptop (as I write this, I’m thinking “Ouch, that’s really going to hurt my bankbook…”)

5) Exercise regularly. I’ve slacklined a few times, and my diet has gotten much healthier since I’ve last written (I’ve cut out added sugar and processed foods almost completely), but as far as exercise goes, I’ve been falling behind. My new apartment location, however, has forced me to bicycle to work and back every day (about 15-20mins each way) which is good.

6) Become a better teacher. A lot of my classes have just ended and I have some time to look at using new textbooks, which will be good for the new semester. I’ve been focusing on giving my students more fluency exercises rather than grammar.

7) Start a songwriting lodge in Hamamatsu. I arranged two songwriters meetings with two other guitar players here in Hamamatsu, but for various reasons they canceled. I’m finding it easy to sell the idea of a songwriter’s lodge, but in practice, people don’t want to spend a whole 12 hours on a songwriting session. I’ll go it alone if I have to…

8) Learn Live Looping with Ableton Live. Have to say I’ve only opened this program 3 times since I wrote about this goal. Fail.

9) Do a long walking trip during my summer vacation. No ideas yet. I’m thinking I might hitchhike instead and camp along the way. Would be good for my Japanese.

10) Write and publish an ebook or self-publish a book in print. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I’m contemplating something along the lines of Tynan’s Life Nomadic book, about independent travel. Still in the brainstorming stage.

Overall, I give myself a 7 out of 10. Meaning, at this rate, I won’t achieve everything, but I’m pretty happy with my results.

New Goal:

Improve my Japanese. Since coming to Japan, I haven’t really spent a lot of time on Japanese study. It’s so easy as an English teacher to just live in an English Bubble that I neglected it.

After the recent earthquake and tsunami, it occurred me that my Japanese really sucked. I could only understand about 60% of the news on TV and 40% of the news on the radio. Not so useful for an emergency. After that experience I read a book on language learning (Language Learning Hacks – some good info, however overall not recommended) and decided to at the very least try for 2-kyu (level 2) on the Japanese Proficiency Test by next December. Right now my Kanji reading is about 3-ku, so I need to crank it up a bit. This means I’ll be using free time on the train, between classes, etc. to study Kanji and grammar.

At my friend Derek’s suggestion (thanks Derek!), I’ve been watching a lot of anime (Bakuman is pretty great and inspiring, despite being aimed at teens; Kino no Tabi was a great story – it helped that it was about motorcycles and travel) and Japanese soap operas (Orange Days isn’t too bad) to improve my listening. I’ll also be trying to speak to the office staff more in Japanese – they’ve been very helpful with correcting my Japanese in the last week. Pretty excited about this goal.

Thanks for reading and keeping me accountable! Cheers.

Some great things I’ve found recently:

-This inspirational post on Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/are-you-making-something.html

-New episode of Radiolab talks about extreme ways of quitting smoking and more: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/

February is my month of French in the Power of Less Challenge. I committed to studying French at least 30 mins per day for the month. This goal in particular, is really important to me, as I want to come away from this job with a working ability in French.

But first, a quick thought about the language learning tools I’ve chosen. I recently had a discussion with a friend about why I gave up using Rosetta Stone for learning languages. My reasons for stopping have to do with effeciency and adherance.

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My friend Josh recently wrote a blog post about learning Spanish — what has been working, and what hasn’t — and asked for strategies from his readers. When I sat down to write a comment, I realized I had too much to say for just a short paragraph, so here it is. These are strategies that have helped me (and people who I have recognized as effective second language learners) pick up a new language quicker than average — not because we are smarter, but simply because we focus on time-efficient and effective strategies.

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