How I Improved My Japanese Language ProficiencyAfter Initial Setbacks

And how you can do so too.

I love learning new words in different languages. I am a suckler for foreign language phrases in Japanese, Korean, French, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. Yet, like many others, I face difficulty in remembering the new vocabularies and grammar structures of these exotic-sounding (at least to my Anglicized ear) languages.

Moreover, people around me thought I was too much of a language nerd to try to discourage me from learning foreign languages. Some of them reasoned (not very scientifically) that the more languages I pick up, the fewer “brain space” I would have for other things.

Growing up in multi-lingual Singapore, learning a language other than my own native English was not an alien concept. In fact, many Singaporeans like myself had to (or still have to) learn a second language in school (Mandarin Chinese, Tamil, Malay, etc) as a gradable subject.

When I got older and studied how language could be best learned and retained, I realized why many of my peers and juniors struggled with blood, sweat, and tears to pick up Mandarin Chinese as a second language (as Mandarin Chinese has been the most popular choice of a second language due to the ancestry of a large proportion of the Singapore populace).

That was because we simply learned a second language of our choice as a school subject, period. That meant that beyond the classroom and beyond the all-terrifying, sleep-robbing and stress-inducing ritual of passage called the school examinations, our second language proficiency remained mediocre for many of us.

Also, many students simply had to read a second language not based on their interest but based on their ethnic heritage or ancestry. For example, because I have Chinese ancestry, I was “automatically” allocated to the Mandarin Chinese language class during second language period.

As a student, I was not interested to pick up the pictographic writing system that Chinese entails and preferred to remain defiantly loyal to the romanized languages such as French and my native English.

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