Hi, I'm JapaneseGaryBen I have been learning Japanese through immersion for near two years, and would like to enourage others to do so while sharing my thoughts on common misconceptions of not just immersion but also language learning in general Please look forward to it

Be so consistent that people say "Well of course you're going to get good if you put in THAT much time".

I have a vendetta against Na-Adjectives If you've ever taken my classes you will know I make a point of never calling them that. I call so-called i-Adjectives just "Adjectives", and I call Na-Adjectives "Adjectival Nouns". Because they conjugate like Nouns (だ, だった), can be used as Nouns in a lot of situations, and because Nouns are the ONLY part of Japanese that DON'T conjugate. The only difference is their use of Na to connect them to other words. And this categorization works way better, because in Japanese thought, breaking up the language into words that Do Conjugate and words that Don't Conjugate is really natural. Na-Adjectives makes it feel like Adjectives have some sort of confusing categories. Whereas in reality, Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives are all normal, and the Na-Adjectives are the odd ones out. That's why I call them "Adjectival Nouns"

Why are you using English sources to consume Japanese? Go see what the Japanese are doing.

There's an interesting sub-topic occuring around the rioting in France where some people are cosplaying as anime characters and taking video when they do it. So Japanese people ask them why don't they use their own characters, instead of associating other countries' creations with this. I think the Revealed Preference here so to speak is that the people rioting don't feel a strong connection to French culture, and that (as in the replies below) are against the idea of any person "owning" a character. Which I feel just extends to this sort of revolution-worship, where they feel the highest honour for something is for it to be associated with their own interests. I honestly just don't think the kind of people dressing as anime characters to "get it on the fun" care about France or Japan.

"I'm just so bad at languages" Dude, you consume language all day. You literally doomscroll language. I'm just telling you to change the language.

People think it's impossible to learn without grammar. But I guarantee the average learner has no idea the grammar that goes into ありがとうございます And even if they did, it would not deepen their understanding of the word. You learn what it means through its function. How it's used. And sometimes, that's more important than the literal grammar.

Do not learn Kanji readings by themselves. You get almost nothing out of guessing the reading of a new word. Because you're going to have to look up the word anyway. Adding an extra step as a beginner doesn't help you, it gives you unnecessary context. You gain nothing by saying "But 人 can also be read as り!" Because only two words in the whole language do that, and it'd be far easier to learn them as the exception, instead of the rule. It'd be far easier to just accept that you don't know the word either way, even if you do successfully guess its reading. And if you don't know it, you're still going to have to look it up. At which point you are taught how to Read it, from Reading the Word. A Kanji reading itself is practically useless, because most of them are not a word by themselves. They are a fraction of a bigger word. Like an English learner trying to learn all the different "ough" sounds outside the context of the individual words. It's an exercise that seemingly exists purely to make "X language is so hard" posts, rather than something designed to help you. Noticing the same concept being used in different words with the same sounds can be useful when you already know enough words to gain an intuition for what a word might mean just from hearing it. But there is no reward from seeing a new word on a page that you want to learn and adding a quiz step of guessing the reading. If you don't understand the patterns for how a particular reading is used, knowing it exists is just a burden. It's like being given too many forks at a fancy dinner, but you've only ever used one.

「きえふせろ にんげんの里」

It is important to know your methodology you've chosen for the language and to stick to it. In practicality there can be many paths to your goal, especially with how you need to fit it around your own life and freetime. But if you end up constantly switching between different methodologies or picking out different parts of them like a buffet, you often get the worst of both worlds, because you damage the consistency and intents of your method. If someone wants to learn Japanese just from listening, sure, they probably don't care about Kanji right now. And therefore don't really care about Heisig vs Wanikani. However, if you develop a method that ends up being a compromise of multiple methods, the progress is stunted for all goals. "I want to learn just from listening ...But also I want to make flashcards for Kanji as I find them." This now compromises the progress you make on your main goal. Meaning some of your Listening time is now held back by Kanji time, a thing you decided you wouldn't tackle until way later. This is of course a choice you can make, especially if your goal is moment to moment fun on your own terms. But the reason you ask an expert to setup a system for you is because they know what works to achieve a specific goal. And if the trajectory on that keeps changing (likely on a whim), then we not only stop making progress for our original goal, but the very logic of how the expert may have broken up the task to you now makes no sense. The reason I recommend Heisig to people is because I believe that's the best course of action for a method focusing on Mass Input. Because you can get to reading anything as fast as possible. If you don't focus on that, and instead add "Kanji as you please", you might not even achieve the goal of being able to read. If it's not a systematic choice, it won't account for the whole task of 2000+ Letters. And if you're only learning Kanji with a Word attached, you slow down the process in the long run by turning it into Vocabulary. By making yourself learn a bunch of Vocab just to be able to read all symbols on a page. In this way, we can end up picking everything, or doing things too dynamically, that affect our long-term progress, and is likely to badly affect the trajectory of both our goals and our motivation for them in the future. We must know our methodology and why we're using it. And often this methodology comes from a teacher that should be someone who has accomplished your goals. There is little point in hiring a teacher if you start fighting against them by "agreeing" with what they say, and then doing too much of your own thing. You might just be creating more work for yourself later because you can't see the bigger picture.

Kanji is not your Enemy. Kanji is your Friend. You just have to get to know them.

I wouldn't need to teach a Polyglot how to learn Japanese. Polyglots already know how to learn languages. The rules don't change. There's no magic different formula for Japanese. (Except maybe how to tackle Kanji if you've never had to deal with that before) And that's why it works. That's why Immersion works. It's not "How to learn Japanese". It's "How we learn languages".

Someone could schedule lessons with me every week. But that would only be 50-something times a year. How are you supposed to learn something you only interact with 50 times in a year? You should be interacting with Japanese Every Day. Why are you expecting to get more out of a relationship than you put in?

You need the context of the language to teach you how words work. Take 食べる and 飲む. If you have learned these you have learned how to say "Eat" and "Drink" in Japanese, right? Except they don't work the same way as in English. In Japanese you "Drink soup" (飲む), not "Eat" it (食べる). Because the division depends on whether you're consuming a solid or a liquid. You could argue this makes more sense, and that English is the weird one here. But that doesn't change the fact that if you didn't learn that you wouldn't know. Translation is not enough.

The ideal use of a dictionary or a grammar guide is to look things up that you have seen, not to learn new things from zero. The ideal use of Anki is to remember things you have seen, not to learn new things from zero.