# 03

It might be good to first write some ideas in these journal notes. Yesterday I mentioned I was going to add a section about speaking to my Japanese page, but when I was writing about reading, I could see it came out rough. I needed a first pass that I would edit. So I'm doing a first pass here for speaking.

First of all, I think speaking practice is not important. I'm pretty sold on input-first immersion, and while speaking practice can help you speak, it doesn't help you know more of the language.

Actually, I think what to do when learning a language really depends on your goals. Let me give my thoughts on that and on what kinds of goals people might have.

Also, as I was writing I realized there's some idea about posts like these - how to structure them, should I include this part about goals in general when I was going to talk about just speaking, and so on. This merits its own post. I wish there was some kind of (TODO) marker I could put to return back to. I will try to check out the local files of OtterWiki (it's all markdown). If they're convenient to work with, I could maybe just work with them instead of this web UI, and it will let me use TODO markers and do some other nice things, like saving what I'm writing without worrying about losing it.

Okay, back to goals.

- Perfect mastery
  - Going for the native level at everything. Can't be done without immersion, and here you should pay attention to phonetics, consume a mountain of content, and practice speaking and writing a lot. I still think this might be easier with focusing on input first and output second, but it's easy to learn something incorrectly, which makes it harder to fix in the future, and perfect mastery is the case where you really don't want to learn something incorrectly.
- Very good level
  - This is what I'm aiming for I guess. I learn as if I'm aiming for the next level - "good understanding'. But if I'm going to Japan and planning to interact with people, I should realize my goal is not just understanding.
  - The main difference is not worrying about incorrect learning and slightly incorrect pronunciation. If you understand everything, and speak like "a foreigner making effort to sound well" instead of "a foreigned who's not even trying to sound well", that's enough. This is my English level - I have a noticeable accent, but I'm trying to use the sounds of the English language and not Russian.
  - Oh, also Perfect mastery should ideally include handwriting, while this one should include some basic handwriting.
- Good understanding
  - This is basically "consume native media easily". For this you don't need any output, though of course you'll learn some. This is JLPT N1 stuff, input-immersion stuff, where you just consume consume consume, learn learn learn, read read read. You might not be able to speak well enough, but that should be fixable with some practice. Though maybe not as easily compared to if you were practicing from the start.
  - This may further split into "with reading", "without reading" - if you only want to watch anime, you might not need reading that much.
- Casual conversation
  - I almost said reading was necessary for good understanding and then I realized this level existed. This is often what people end up with if they just watch videos, hang out in a Japanese speaking environment (maybe live in Japan for a while) and not spend time actively learning kanji and reading.
  - This might be the main level where speaking practice shines (except perfect mastery where everything is necessary). You listen, you speak, you get used to speech patterns and you end up being able to hold a conversation, while lacking some reading skills.
  - I've seen posts on language learning discussion pages where people said "learn kanji, read, it's super important, everyone neglects it". I followed this advice and didn't get it at first. But now I kinda get it - it really is the part of learning the language where passive assimilation is hardest, so you have to learn it a lot. If your goal is just casual conversation, you don't need that part of the language and you can just assimilate.

There are others, of course. For years my goal was "well, it's better to learn some Japanese than do nothing".

There's another key point of language learning I keep thinking is true. It's also related to inout-output, and I might need to add a graph for that. Not right now though, I have to go soon, so no time to draw it (TODO). Basicaly, the X axis is time or effort. The Y axis is mastery. One line is "input" - how well you understand the language. As you practice more, it steadily goes up. The second line is "output" - if you practice input, it goes up a tiny bit, lagging behind the input line. Which makes sense - you can understand more complex sentences than the ones you can produce by speaking or writing. If you practive output, the second line goes up. My pet theory is:

1. The output speed of learning is much higher than input
2. The output mastery is capped by input mastery

The corollary is that you can easily catch up in output when you need it.

With all that said, my speaking practice is to not practice much at all. I'm focusing on input, on understanding, on increasing my vocabulary. And once I need to speak, I can focus on practicing that, and (hopefully) catch up.