Philosophy

Througt my life I have studied and worked in different countries, so Japanese is by far not the first foreign language I have been trying to acquire. Every single time I tried to attend some language courses, I was met with the same problems every time - utter incompetence of teachers and huge misconception of how the language acquisition works in the first place.

isgraceful, cowardly, or dishonorable that they are a shame to their profession or group

Oftentimes these places do not want you to learn the language, but to be able to pass certain exams or be good at specific grammar exercises. After certain amount of years you will try to use the language, maybe read a book or watch a series and you will be met with harsh reality of you not being to do anything in the language besides cancerous grammar exercises. This will inevitebly make you think about two things.

First that you are uncapable person that does not have "talent" for tha languge. And the second of course you will despise linguisitics in general and never pick up other languages.

For full disclousure, I attended 4 years of German courses in high school (8h per week) and then 1 year of German in university and achieved fluency of B1 at best and the only things I was good at was writing correct endings of nouns and adjektives. This happened in all other languages where I bothered with courses as well later and the same is happening with all government courses for foreigners in US, Germany and other countries where people complain about ineffectivness of intergration courses.

From language kind of point, the problem is focusing on minute details that act only as a nice final polish on your existing language abilities. If you take even an ending-heavy language like Ukrainian with 7 cases, you will be fluent and well understood ignoring the entire system in the first place, because communication is very context dependent. Not even mentioning that you don't need that at all for reading and listening since only knowledge about existance of these cases and the very basic intuition is enough for full comprehension.

Why institutional teachers and a lot of courses focus on trying to map language into some analytical exercise? There are three main reasons. First is complete lack of love and respect to the language or trade of linguisitics in general. Second is laziness since teaching dry grammar is much much easier. Think about the effort it takes to present students with multiple tables, telling them to memorize them and then giving them tens of exercises on this. 0 preperation efforts, 0 adjustments to students, 0 engagement. Third is related to the fact the courses are oftentimes graded and grammar exercises probide a nice, measurable, non-disputable way of grading your achievements. Remember that real language learning progress is non-linear and very hard to quantify over the course of short time especially the more advanced you get.

Let's quickly touch why this is happening. Languages are not formulatic. Languages develop naturally over thousands and thousands of year reflecting its cultural cues and society development. That means a lot of things in each language does not make any sense from "pattern" kind of point. That's why every so called "rule" has tens if not hundreeds of expections. Approaching a language from analytical kind of point is fundamentally wrong. You should let the language flow and absorb it naturally. You build up an intuition of what feels "right" and can produce natural sounding pieces of language.

As many other people on youtube I utterly believe in natural language acquisition. I will argue that it is impossible to acquire the language any other way. People that say that traditional exercise or textbook-based learning works used it as a supplement to others ways of studying or eventually made their way to conversations or media where they actually acquired the language. Textbooks provide an illusion, a copium that you progress while massively wasting your time and delaying the enivetable fact that you have to be comfortable with uncertainty.

It is not math, language is humane.