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Patreon Q&A - February 27th, 2021 (Patreon)

Published:
2021-02-27 19:31:50
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Do you have any plans to travel to Japan and film IRL videos speaking Japanese?
3:14 - What are your thoughts on continuing grammar study past "basic grammar"
6:59 - How do I avoid misunderstanding what things mean and creating bad habits around those misunderstandings?
14:09 - How long should it take to finish an episode when doing intensive immersion? Is it bad if I go too slow?
17:41 - I learned French entirely through reading without doing any listening. How do I reverse all the bad pronunciation habits I created?
19:17 - How should I go about making cards for words that are written identically but pronounced differently?
21:29 - How would you go about creating an audio-only SRS system?
27:44 - What tips do you have for advanced learners?
30:05 - Is writing kanji important for reaching fluency in Japanese?
31:12 - What do you think of the Core 6K deck? Is it a good replacement for the Tango decks?
32:13 - How should I go about learning Japanese onomatopoeia?

Files

Previews only

Patreon Q&A - February 27th, 2021

Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - Do you have any plans to travel to Japan and film IRL videos speaking Japanese? 3:14 - What are your thoughts on continuing grammar study past "basic grammar" 6:59 - How do I avoid misunderstanding what things mean and creating bad habits around those misunderstandings? 14:09 - How long should it take to finish an episode when doing intensive immersion? Is it bad if I go too slow? 17:41 - I learned French entirely through reading without doing any listening. How do I reverse all the bad pronunciation habits I created? 19:17 - How should I go about making cards for words that are written identically but pronounced differently? 21:29 - How would you go about creating an audio-only SRS system? 27:44 - What tips do you have for advanced learners? 30:05 - Is writing kanji important for reaching fluency in Japanese? 31:12 - What do you think of the Core 6K deck? Is it a good replacement for the Tango decks? 32:13 - How should I go about learning Japanese onomatopoeia?

Comments

Anonymous

A few years ago in your podcast with Yoga, you mentioned that you still found it harder to talk about abstract concepts in Japanese compared with English, and you attributed that to having read significantly more fiction rather than non-fiction works. Have you been reading more non-fiction in recent years, and if so, have you found any improvement in your ability to talk about abstract concepts in Japanese? Should one try to intentionally balance the amount of fiction with the amount of non-fiction that they read?

Suleyth

Hey Matt, if you're feeling very low on motivation, and even with mnemonics you struggle to grade like a quarter of your cards correctly, do you think it's fine to go at a lower pace and have days where you only review cards and not learn new ones?

Anonymous

At the beginning of JP1K (around 200 cards), how much reading do you recommend? Kind of stupid question, but is there a “correct” way to read at my level?

questtoelysium

Hey there! I'm a native 20y/o German speaker and a few months ago I decided to get into studying Japanese (I'm currently doing the JP1K deck). While doing some research I came across the basic idea of immersion learning (MIA, AJATT, etc. and now Refold). And the general notion of it immediately made sense to me because I realized that this is basically how I have been learning English, not using any SRS though. While obviously having traditional English classes at school I was always immersing myself in tons of English content during my time in high school. By now, I feel like I'm at a pretty good level of English, albeit with some areas that still need some work. Now to get to my question: Tackling a third language (especially one so vastly different) also comes with a few concerns and I know you're in the same boat with Chinese. Obviously, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my current level of English for Japanese. How do I manage to juggle both moving forward? Especially when it comes to immersion and active study.

Anonymous

To reply to your answer to my question: Actually I hadn't thought of asking a native speaker to record them but that's a great idea, and it's not expensive for me because I have heaps of money in iTalki that can only be used within iTalki... so I can afford at least a few hours of that. I have a few other "secrets" about this method (because I have tried it briefly) that I am keeping close to my chest until I know how well it works but yeah basically they cover some of the other problems you mentioned, and now I am really motivated to get this happening regularly. The only small problem at the moment is that I've sprained my ankle so I can't exercise. :-/ Thanks for the answer dude!

Anonymous

Howdy my dude, So I was curious about your thoughts on reading along while listening to an audiobook. I remember being a kid in middle school my english teacher would tell us that reading along in our heads while someone read the text aloud would improve our reading levels. To be more specific i mean reading novels that you already have level 4 comprehension in at least, and actually reading along not just listening to the audio book while skimming the text. Does this also apply to languages you aren't currently fluent in? Do you think this is better or worse than reading raw with only a pop-up dictionary?

Anonymous

Hey Matt just wanted to say I really enjoy these videos, but I was wondering if you and the Refold crew were ever going to come out with a monolingual transition deck. I'm actually currently doing the monolingual transition and it's actually really fun, but it also takes some time. Anyways I was just wondering and hope everything goes well for you and Refold.

Anonymous

Hi Matt, really appreciate your work. I've started becomming intererested in japanese 7 years ago, but due to busuu and other nonsense methods that I worked through I am still at the beginning of acquiring japanese (lvl 2 comprehension). But ever since I follow you I finally feel like I am actually getting somewhere <3 Q: I studied French and Spanish in highschool (8 and 4 years respectively), and my french is somewhere near my english when it comes to comprehension, yet my spanish is not that great. Do you think I can just ignore those two languages for now until I'm comfortable with my japanese level, or do you have ideas on how to include french (but more importantly my spanish) into the Refold-Method Study? I fear that until I reach a certain level in Japanese I'll have forgotten most of my spanish, but I also don't want to harm my japanese journey by dragging spanish along with me. tl;dr: How can I acquire two languages at a time through refold, where one is from scratch and the other one already somewhat familiar to me? Sorry for the long paragraphs and thanks in advance! Appreciate ya!

Anonymous

Howdy Matt, Thanks for the Q&A videos! I started MIA/Refold last April, worked my way through the RTK & Tango decks and then got absolutely crushed at work last Fall and my progress got reduced to sporadic youtube immersions and SRS. I delayed getting into sentence mining till I could get out from under work. It's March next year already, and I want to restart this as I think I can get two or three hours per day devoted to immersion and SRS. [oops - didn't realize Enter meant submit not new-line]. Would there be any chance you could add a step-by-step example to the Roadmap (or some annex to it) for building say a text sentence card from a web page source to a simple Anki Note/Card type? Some visible pattern that goes through selecting the sentence, staging the raw sentence for matching to dictionary entry then transferring it into the Card type. The matrix of content types to note/card types with all the variations of ever-changing technologies and resources seems pretty daunting starting out sentence mining. Wow that was pretty wordy. My apologies. Thanks, again!

Anonymous

What VPN do you use for accessing Japanese content? i.e Netflix.

Levi Kaplan

Hi Matt, I was wondering about your current thoughts on using Morphman as a substitute for sentence mining. I believe the Refold website presents it as an alternative but doesn’t get into the details on whether it’s recommended or who should use it over traditional mining. Personally I’ve found that Morphman saves me a massive amount of time creating cards that I can put into more immersion, and as a full time college student this is a really big deal. I’ve also found that the cards are really high quality if downloaded from a subs2srs deck catalog. Do you recommend using Morphman for people who don’t have a ton of time to immerse as a way of saving time? What does the use of Morphman sacrifice? For context I’m around 10 months into Refold and toward the beginning of stage 2B. I have around 3000 BSC.

Anton de la Fuente

Is there a "bare minimum" amount of Anki that you would recommend for someone who really hates doing Anki? For more details: Whenever I do Anki, I feel like that time would be better spent doing more immersion. I love immersing and lately, I've been skipping Anki altogether and just immersing 4-5 hours a day. I'm late stage 2 / early stage 3 and I'm making a lot of progress doing this. However, I'm feeling a little guilty and am wondering if perhaps even just a little bit of Anki could go a long way. If so, how small can that "little bit" be?

Diogo Lameiro
>>54648085

I use surfshark, it had the best price out of those I searched for, works pretty well

Anonymous

How to approach a TL novel that is way above your level but you really want to read? When I look up every word, I don't remember anything. When I don't look up every word, I don't know what is going on.

Christoph Märkl

Sorry for the passive Immersion Question, I am new and saw the faq backlog now :D will watch those, thank you

Anonymous

What do you think would happen to your level of Japanese if you avoided any interaction with the language for many years? Would you forget everything? I know that in the past, you have said you spend three hours or so a day in Japanese to prevent your ability from getting worse. I've heard that "reacquiring" language is extremely quick, so does this mean that one could get back virtually all of their ability in a mere few weeks of immersion after not touching the language for years? Something that has been moderately demotivating is the prospect that I would reach a solid C1 level in my TL, French, but either have to spent copious amounts of time each day reading books or watching YouTube or let it attrite. Similarly, if I learned multiple languages, the problem would only get worse. What are your thoughts about this?

Andy

For someone who somewhat knows classical Japanese, what book do you recommend for learning 学校文法 for modern Japanese?

Anonymous

Tips for paying more attention to / getting more out of passive listening?

Christoph Märkl

Hi Matt, a Question about grammar: I did 2 years of japanese university classes (after which I did basically not understand a thing of real japanese, but thats another story) and i assume i learned the basic japanese grammar, which is always refered to in the immersion learning system. We used Minna no nihongo and i learned thoroughly for the 2 years. I started MIA 5 months ago and followed all your advices, but skipped the grammar part. Do you think the grammar tought in classes is fine for the required basic level or should i do tae kim? Thanks for your videos, already helped me alot.

Ian

Is there an amount of words that I would need to know before I move on to stage 3

Anonymous

Hey matt. I'm learning spanish, and I recently just made a friend from mexico through italki. After the first formal lesson we instead agreed to start doing a more casual language exchange thing instead, where we casually talk in spanish half the time and in english the other half of the time (therefore saving us both money in english and spanish lessons respectively). I initially reached out to him because I thought i was ready, but the more I talk to him the more shitty I feel about my level in spanish. Like I can hold a conversation more or less but it's very clunky and I know I still sound pretty awkward and that I make big grammar mistakes in my speech quite often. I'm afraid I might have started to output too soon. While we only talk like once or twice a week for an hour, I'm wondering if I should basically tell him that I can't talk anymore because I'm not good enough, and then just go back to immersing and do more extensive shadowing before trying to talk and establish a relationship with a native again. Do you think it's harmless to just keep talking with him like once or twice a week in my broken spanish or should I stop talking to him altogether and just take more time going through stage 3 for a while?

Anonymous
>>55494011

You could change your arrangement to one in which you only speak to him in English, and if he feels the same way as you do about his English output, he could only speak to you in Spanish. That way you're both getting input from a native speaker, but you aren't forcing output when you're not ready for it. You could try outputting with him again when you've deepened your ability in Spanish.

refold
>>55102714

I used a random book I found at my college library. It wasn't even that good of a book. So, unfortunately I don't really know any I can recommend.

Hayden

Hey Matt are you still dabbling in Chinese? If so, what kind of Chinese/Taiwanese shows do you watch and what is your general opinion of Chinese/Taiwanese dramas? I am looking to dabble in Chinese as well. Thanks!

Dylan Robertson

I think you mentioned in one of your previous Q&As (or maybe it was an interview with someone) that you would have chosen not to learn Japanese if you could have gone back (it was something along the lines of you would trade all of your Japanese ability for skill in Chinese). Could you explain your thoughts on the time you spent learning Japanese (was it better used doing something else?), and your current plans for the language going forward?

Geniusssmit

Do you think practicing reading tategaki is important? I thought about "naturalness" of reading in that way. Humans have two eyes, situated on the left and the right of the face, so horizontal vision should be better therefore it should be more natural to read from side to side + ofc years of practicing reading left to right. Do you think always reading left to right is better in the long term? Thoughts?

Zach Nicolella

How much of the methodology changes do you personally agree with since switching to a brand, and how much do you just accept but not necessarily agree with for wider applicability to everyone?

refold
>>56292872

I'm not sure I fully understand your question. I came up with all of the methodology changes, so of course I personally agree with all of them. -Matt

Chiefs15

Do you think Covid-19 and the resulting travel bans has had or will have any effect on the Japanese language?