Well, Davide, if I wanted to learn Dutch or Italian right now, I wouldn’t need any warm-up approaches because these languages share the basic ideas of the Germanic / Romance language families.
For Asian languages such as Japanese, it’s a different ball game:
- The communication style is completely different
That is: There´s a tendency in Indo-European cultures to attribute a behavior to an actor, whereas Asian cultures tend to highlight contextual factors (situational constraints, etc.) - see the “fundamental attribution error” in social psychology:
“It has been suggested cultural differences occur in attribution error:[28] people from individualistic (Western) cultures are reportedly more prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures are less prone.[29] Based on cartoon-figure presentations to Japanese and American subjects, it has been suggested that collectivist subjects may be more influenced by information from context (for instance being influenced more by surrounding faces in judging facial expressions[30]). Alternatively, individualist subjects may favor processing of focal objects, rather than contexts.[31] Others suggest Western individualism is associated with viewing both oneself and others as independent agents, therefore focusing more on individuals rather than contextual details.” (Fundamental attribution error - Wikipedia)
My thesis based on various intercultural / communicative research is therefore:
In Japanese communication processes, actors tend to “invisibilize themselves” and highlight the social harmony of the social relationship, instead.
In contrast, European / Western communication processes tend to highlight the role of the individual actor(s).
- This basic communication pattern also affects the Japanese language / grammar itself:
Japanese follows a non-egocentric perspective in contrast to English (and other Indo-European languages), which follows an egocentric perspective.
For some background info, see these highly instructive videos by “Cure Dolly”:
If Indo-European learners don´t understand such basic distinctions right from the start, they´re likely to create a complete Indo-European / Japanese “mess” for themselves because they remain prisoners of their Indo-European coordinate system (dito for grammars / textbooks that project the Indo-European “logic” onto Japanese).
In short, simply reading more in Japanese isn’t sufficient…
Note:
Mutatis mutandis, there will be similar problems when Indo-Europeans want to learn other Asian languages such as Vietnamese, Mandarin, etc.
- Besides
I find a “syntactic pattern variation” approach à la Michel Thomas (i.e.: explain some basic grammar structures using short sentences and make those sentences more complex) very helpful in this context.
As a stand-alone approach, Michel Thomas would be insufficient, but the “Thomas - Assimil” combo is quite powerful!
In contrast, many learners who don’t use such warm-up approaches for their distant L2 and start directly with audio readers à la ReadLang or LingQ will probably fail - esp. if they’re inexperienced.
