When you come right down to it, efficiency is they key to success in so many endeavors. When studying Japanese, it’s a key factor in the difference between success and failure. Whether it’s a pro athlete who moves with little wasted movement, and thus can go faster and longer than his opponent, or whether it’s a factory owner who has learned to eliminate wasteful steps along his production line to arrive at a lower cost per unit, the elimination of wasted time and energy has a direct correlation to success.

 

It’s no less true of those trying to learning a second language. If you want to succeed, you need to approach it as efficiently as possible. You need to eliminate all wasteful steps. A few examples? Have you ever tried to memorize a list of new words, independent of context? That’s wasteful. Have you ever tried to memorize a grammar rule – or worse, a set of grammar rules – without having first noted the underlying pattern itself which generated the rule? Very wasteful. Have you ever learned a new phrase, without first having broken it down into its most literal parts? You guessed it: Very, very wasteful. As you master a new phrase, how often do you apply the principle of construction branching? (If your answer is anything less than, “Always”, then it’s another case of less-than-optimal efficiency.) Even the way you use your flashcards in your practice sessions can have varying degrees of efficiency. (For example, do you make an ‘x’ next to each phrase every time you get it wrong, to produce a running tally of how you’re doing with each one?)

 

You’re reading this because you care about learning Japanese. You’d love to one day become conversational, and perhaps even watch movies (or at least anime) in Japanese. To become a proficient speaker of Japanese is a great goal, and easily achievable, but learning any language is such a huge undertaking, you can’t waste any time. So, as mentioned above, here are the steps you should be taking as you learn the language:

 

1. Do not learn the meaning and pronunciation of new words at the same time. Learn only the pronunciation. Ignore meaning at first.

 

2. Pronunciation mastered, now try to learn the meaning. In an ideal world, you will be given the chance to deduce the meaning of the new word by seeing it in context. If you’re a beginner, that means in the context of an English sentence. If you’re more advanced in Japanese, that means getting it from an all-Japanese sentence.

 

3. Any new grammar point should be learned by identifying the pattern, not by memorizing its abstracted rule.

 

4. Always seek out the most literal breakdown of a word or phrase, no matter how awkward. And especially for beginners, always “translate” from the normal English version of a phrase into the literal version, before trying to say it in Japanese.

 

5. With each new phrase you learn, immediately turn it into a construction. (If you’ve learned how to say, “I like chocolate,” then immediately replace ‘chocolate’ with as many nouns you can which fit: “I like beer,” “I like sushi,” and so on.

 

Each of these steps requires more explanation than I can give in this short article. But this site has more information on most of them. And feel free to write me, and I can point you in the right direction. And in the meantime, always strive for efficiency in your studies.

 

 

 

Here is an answer related to the topic that you may find interesting. Japanese Mastery Method review and notes on efficiency.