when you speak the language of a country you have a different understanding of the country of the people of the culture uh you get closer to it why do you think are the reasons why it's so difficult for english speakers to learn japanese or japanese speakers to learn english so well that's where the should be that's right so yeah there's a separation that's true [Music] today i actually have a very very special guest on this video thank you so much i'd like to welcome steve thank you so much for this occasion today this is a great honor i've seen so many of your videos oh is it fast of course you've i've probably did a lot of collaboration videos with a lot of japanese people too haven't you in the past yes i've seen you speaking so many languages and such and i've just been so inspired by your videos and your work so very kind of this is an amazing occasion thank you so much would it be okay if you could give us um a short self introduction to my viewers i'm pretty sure most people know about you already well you know i'm you know 76 year old grandpa i live here in vancouver british columbia most of my career i was in the wood business but i do enjoy languages i did learn some languages while working for a variety of reasons and for the last 15 years or so i've spent a lot of time at learning languages and have developed a website for language learning with my son mark and of course i have a youtube channel called lingo steve so that's been a kind of my my third career let's say i used to work for the canadian government i was in hong kong my first assignment was to go there and learn chinese and then in 1971 my family we moved to tokyo i worked in the embassy there and of course i learned japanese in japan which is easier than doing it at home thank you so much and by the way i actually used to live in the us i'm fully japanese but i grew up in michigan for six years so i was very lucky to um basically i didn't learn it i just grew up in the environment so well yeah i wasn't sure whether you were american or or japanese uh i'm 100 i thought you were american but uh oh thank you launched into japanese and then i thought that's pretty authentic so thank you so much then i would love to jump into today's main topic right away so recently i've made a video talking about japanese people are not very good at english and one of the reasons is because the combinations of for english speakers trying to learn japanese and vice versa are one of the most difficult language combinations there's some studies that are done about that um i think it was a u.s department that sent out these results saying that it takes more than 2 200 hours to get to business proficiency why do you think are the reasons why it's so difficult for english speakers to learn japanese where japanese speakers learn english okay i haven't read these studies so i don't know what their reasoning was what the methodology was uh but i think that the difficulty of any language depends on how different the vocabulary is so i can't imagine and and also the writing system but if a japanese person is trying to learn english russian portuguese it should be about the same i don't see it as different and similarly an english speaker learning japanese because there's hardly any common vocabulary the writing system is different it's going to be difficult but it'll be different difficult for a speaker of any other language as well right off the bat i can't think of any reason why that particular combination would make it difficult i think it's more a matter of there's very little common vocabulary at least if a japanese person goes to learn chinese a lot of the vocabulary is already recognizable at least in written form the vocabulary and the writing system are different but it's not just between japanese and english it's between any languages two languages where the writing system is different and there's very little common vocabulary i actually understand that that is a good thing because a lot of my fellow english speakers were discouraged to study japanese because they saw the study yeah so i think that's actually a good thing if you say it that way i mean to me the inherent difficulty of any language i mean there is a if if you are a speaker of english you've never learned any other language chinese japanese arabic all these languages with very little common vocabulary and the different writing system are going to be very difficult so but it all comes down to motivation if you're not motivated to learn a language it doesn't matter how easy it is so the big thing is motivation and not the inherent difficulty so then the motivation part i'd like to dig in a little bit more what would be the advice would give to um people who are studying japanese right now what kind of hints for example your own experience or people you see today studying japanese what kind of advice would you give them i mean obviously i had a big advantage i was living in japan so i had an opportunity to use the language every day if i walked into a grocery store if i you know wherever i was whatever few words of the language i had i could use them but if you're away from where the language is spoken you can't find tutors all the time online or so you do have to spend more time listening and reading and therefore you've got to find something that's interesting and i for example was very interested in history so i found materials of things from nhk and others that i listen to a lot i know that a lot of young people today are into anime for example so if you can find something of interest so that you can can maintain your interest while you listen and read but it requires a lot of listening and reading the brain has to get used to the new language it requires a lot of repeated listening and then eventually finding things that are of interest ultimately to to reach a very good level you kind of have to go to the country where the language is spoken but if you arrive with a poor level it's going to be difficult for you to take advantage of being there and you may kind of fall back to living in english whereas if you can build yourself up to where you have some skills in the language some comprehension then when you get to japan you can actually take advantage and you'll see your language skills improve quite quickly when you for example listening to for example nhk or it could be a movie or anything do you shadow the language or do you just listen to it when you study no i i never shadow i've i've tried it it just interferes i want to listen if i'm listening to something of interest or if i'm watching a movie i don't want to do anything that interferes with my enjoyment i just watch and listen so i don't i'm not a big shadower no but it's a good thing to do particularly with easy content all right so the enjoying part is definitely important big keeps you going and by the way do you think there are some common mistakes that japanese learners tend to make when they study japanese i think people shouldn't be overly concerned about you know keigo or polite language because no japanese person is going to be offended unless you are speaking very rough language but if you speak sort of a neutral japanese and you don't hit the absolute correct kegel no japanese person is going to be offended and i think sometimes that builds up sort of a an obstacle you know gee is all this polite language what if i get it wrong i might offend someone you won't offend anyone so i think the strategy there is to speak somewhat neutral japanese don't speak sort of a rough japanese and gradually you'll start to get a sense of the different level of levels of politeness because you'll be with people and you'll see how people around you are using the language then i was a little bit curious about this question too though but um anime japanese could be a little bit different from what we actually speak in daily life right so what kind of content do would you recommend to listen to for to study the language itself when i was in japan my content was my business meetings with people so that was my listening content if i had a business meeting i spoke some other people spoke that was my listening content right plus the series this one series by nhk called show no kiroku which i loved listening to and i listened to the radio but the biggest was when i would be meeting i can remember for example we might be i was in the lumber business going down to the tokyo terminal and if the traffic was bad we'd be sitting there for two hours and i'd just be talking for two hours uh and mostly i'd be listening and so and so then you start to get the rhythm the rhythm of how people express themselves and the words they use and so you start using those words i'm not into anime i think in any language you want to be careful about picking up on slangy language because if you don't use it correctly it can sound strange whereas if you speak a more neutral form of the language such as the english we're now using you're not going to sound strange it's not slangy it's not overly polite it's just neutral and that was the kind of japanese that i like to use that i picked up on when i was with people and even if you know you sometimes people who speak more roughly i wouldn't use that rough language so then do you recommend those applications that are um recently quite used for learning languages i think a lot of japanese learners who give me dms asking me how to study japanese ask me about applications if they work or not and so what was that would your opinion about them well the only thing i use is link i have it on my cell phone i can read to save words i can go through my vocabulary i can do flash cards so i just use link that's the only one i use i know that when my son went to learn japanese characters he used heisig so i think for learning the characters i think some of these systems for learning characters can be good you know ultimately it boils down to just a lot of listening and reading and things of interest so that's what i do but i guess for people then who can't come to japan to actually have conversations with japanese people the best way would be your recommendations for them well i mean it's what i say uh at my youtube channel um lots of listening and reading working on building up your vocabulary and your comprehension uh at some point you want to start speaking uh you can find tutors online twice a week three times a week whatever your budget is yeah that's that's basically what i do uh listen read use link that's what i've done for the last uh you know seven eight nine languages even when i was learning mandarin or japanese overwhelmingly it was listening and reading so if i were to rely just on going to a store and asking a question that's not a lot of high value exchange i had the advantage that i was in business in japan i had customers we would meet we'd have a business meeting in japanese we may go out for dinner in japanese so i was like with japanese people for two three four hours so you pick up a lot that way you pick up a lot you pick up on how people express themselves which is is the language and also how they put their thoughts together and all of that you get from spending a lot of time with people then a little bit different question i wanted to ask you you can speak a lot of languages right more than 20 i believe is that correct well very varying degrees yeah so what do you think were the benefits for you to be able to speak japanese um like for example for me um being able to speak english mandarin chinese really did open up my world to a lot of different values around the world and such what do you think have changed ever since you've been able to um use japanese the big thing is that from a career point of view it was extremely important because i spoke japanese working at the embassy i developed contacts within the japanese wood trade as a result of that i was offered a job i set up a company of my own in 1987 targeting the japanese market because i knew people there and because of my language i could read the newspaper i read the trade paper i knew what was going on i talked to people i could pick up the phone and talk to people what's happening in the market whatever so from a business point of view it was tremendously powerful if i had to rely just on those japanese people who spoke english i wouldn't have the same access but beyond that when you speak the language of a country you have a different understanding of the country of the people of the culture you get closer to it you become part of it whereas if you just rely again on english then you're kind of apart from it so that was a tremendous personal benefit and one that i always enjoy if i go to a japanese restaurant in vancouver and the server is japanese or the chef is japanese and i can engage with them and i kind of remember with pleasant nostalgia you know when i lived in japan so there's a lot there's a lot of benefit there sort of a personal enjoyment personal interaction social cultural all those things so earlier the question about the benefits of learning japanese someone someone actually asked me um is it really worth it you know there's so much hard work and the question was is it really worth studying such a difficult language for them especially for english speakers you know if you are studying a language you better believe it's worth it because it's a lot of work right it doesn't matter whether it's spanish if we're talking from the perspective of an english speaker whether it's spanish russian japanese chinese german doesn't matter it's it's work so you should you should sort of have a mindset that you're glad you're doing it try to find a way to enjoy it whether it's objectively worth it for someone depends entirely on them you know what they want to achieve what would they rather be doing so i can't tell you whether it's worth it it was worth it to me every language i learned is worth it of course of course yeah okay thank you so much steve lastly is it okay if i can ask you a favor before we go [Music] that's it for today thank you very much for watching as i said when i was talking with steve was a great occasion an opportunity to be able to talk with him like this and right after we um stopped filming we were speaking just a little bit more and we're saying that it's really important that it's okay to make mistakes it's absolutely okay to make mistakes i think it would be the same for if someone's learning your language if someone came up to you you know try desperately trying to learn your language you would be nice to them right because they respect your culture and your language so although i do make a lot of videos talking about japanese people or cold-hearted or you know they might be xenophobic or stuff like that i don't want you to be afraid at all if that person is willing to help you with your language that person respects you as much as you respect them so i really want to add that it's completely fine actually go and make the mistakes because you need to do that when you are going to be studying a language i personally would think so so even though japanese is difficult i would want to also say that it's definitely worth it and i'm really looking forward to that i'll be able to speak with you in japanese too okay then everyone thank you so much for watching this video our goal is to achieve 2 million subscribers by january 2023 so be great if you could help us out by subscribing also liking and leaving comments in this video and i'll see you in the next video thank you so much [Music] you