by Midday
From September 10th, I will be housing my friend from America at my apartment in Japan for him to learn Japanese from scratch in less than a year.
I have been studying applied linguistics with a focus on cognitive science and education for the past two years, all for the purpose of successfully teaching my friend Japanese. In fact, after this, I really have no intrinsic use for my knowledge on applied linguistics. In addition, I have been saving over 2000000 yen so that I can manage all of his fees while he is here. He, like most students attending an American college, which your supposed to spend your life paying off the loans to, is financially overwhelmed, to the point he works overtime every other day while attending every single class (rather it's only Japanese students that don't) and managing to get passing scores on classes that are many times more difficult than Japanese courses.
The only precursor to this is that he has all hiragana and katakana memorized before he comes here. After that, I believe there is a great chance that he will acquire native Japanese within his less-than-a-year stay. The point is, he will learn like a baby and make mistakes like a baby, without focusing on the act of learning Japanese. He will be strictly prohibited from using English throughout his stay. He will acquire a native sense of grammar through comprehensive input from immersion, and I will be tuning his pronunciation beyond his lack of sound recognition skills. I believe he will need two months to maneuver in-house vocabulary, during which he will be provided an environment where every concrete example item in the house would be labeled with kanji and hiragana accordingly. He will converse using those concrete examples with me as I give him error feedback without any metacognitive explanation of grammar, so that he acquires Japanese as a language and not a set of consciously memorized rules in relation to English. After the critical period of two months, he will expand his vocabulary using a variety of resources he finds entertainment in, such as anime, manga, video games, and travel. This is not simply to have fun, but to avoid becoming conscious of the act of learning Japanese and to avoid the affect filter from blocking acquisition at the unconscious level. He will achieve complete coordinate bilingualism, and perhaps show a post-mature development in Piagetian formal operation.
I will be taking notes in excruciating detail throughout his stay, and he will be keeping a daily Japanese journal that I will have no direct influence on until the end of his stay. Together, we will create another case study that may add to the current research on second language acquisition. I primarily want to prove how much a waste of time the current English curriculum of Japan is, and that second language acquisition is not as difficult as most people think it is. Moreover, I want to stress that "grammar-based syllabuses" (especially as enforced in Japan) are not a short-cut method provided by education, but rather a red-herring procedure that results in inter-interlanguage.
Note, Japanese L1→English L2 acquisition is cognitively very different in nature from English L1→Japanese L2 acquisition. In fact, the latter is much easier than the former, for a variety of reasons ranging from vowel recognition to visual coherence. Nevertheless, I have much to say about the sins of ignorance found not only in the English curriculum, but the Japanese education system as a whole. I hope that our experiment will prove the various inefficiencies of the current system, and I hope you all will become the witnesses of the actuality of second language acquisition.
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