Japanese Stage 0: Choosing a Path

Hello everyone,

This blog is a way for me to document my progress following the Mass Immersion Approach by Matt vs Japan in order to become fluent in multiple languages.

(Disclaimer: Any links found in this blog are not affiliated or sponsored in any way. I am including links so that you can check out my sources for yourself. Any opinions found in this blog may not be reflected by the sources I link to.)

Choosing a Path: 

Beginning MIA, we find ourselves at the table of contents. 

There are five stages of MIA, some tools, and some extras to look at here. 

At the time of writing this, Stages 2-5 have no content. So that means within the designated paths any references to reading articles past Stage 1 have no purpose yet. Hopefully before I move on to Stage 2 Matt will update with some new content. Otherwise, I am supporting him on Patreon, so I have access to his videos and can glean any necessary information from there. 

Hopping into Stage 0, there is an overview for a Balanced Path and a Perfectionist Path for learning languages and an article on Customization and Adaptation.  

Reading through Customization and Adaptation, it seems like the goal of the Perfectionist Path is to get to a native language like level by focusing on listening first, rather than relying on reading ability. The Balanced Path focuses on total progress equally. 

Balanced Path vs. Perfectionist Path: 

Here is a spreadsheet I've made to try and compare the two paths at the different stages. 

Some of these terms may be hard to understand for new users, and I'm not sure how a lot of this is done. From what I know about these methods, I want to blend the paths a bit and see what I can come up with. This way I won't be going hard core perfectionist, but still leaning a bit towards perfectionist.
This may change for different languages, since so far quite a few of these only apply to Japanese and sometimes Chinese.


My Path:

For my path, I've blended the perfectionist and balanced approaches to a mix that makes sense to me. I tried to keep the integrity of both by having both audio and text cards in the first two stages and mediating the time frame.

So this is the path I will be attempting to follow for my MIA journey. If I ever move on to other languages, this will probably look a little bit different.



What's Next?
Upcoming will be the things that I'm doing to get ready to start with Stage 1. I'm hoping by putting this part out there others may not feel as lost when just starting out. I'll be combing through Matt's videos, the Patreon discord and videos (without revealing anything that should be paid for content), and setting things up to begin my journey.

Japanese Stage 0: Personal History

Hello everyone,

This blog is a way for me to document my progress following the Mass Immersion Approach by Matt vs Japan in order to become fluent in multiple languages.

(Disclaimer: Any links found in this blog are not affiliated or sponsored in any way. I am including links so that you can check out my sources for yourself. Any opinions found in this blog may not be reflected by the sources I link to.)


My language history so far:

I'm currently a sign language interpreter and studied American Sign Language for a total of 6 years in high school and college. I consider myself to be at an advance level but nowhere near native. I'm currently on a path to switch careers.
I studied Spanish in high school for 4 years. I have a very minimal understanding of Spanish. I still understand some of the grammar and minimal vocabulary.
I took the first course of French in both high school and college. I have even less of an understanding of French.

Within the last year, I started learning Japanese. I think it was sort of a New Years thing at some point. I researched a bit and found some different methods to try. I found a timeline to follow on Reddit and bought all of the books I needed. I attempted to implement it but didn't make it very far. I've probably spent at least $500 over the last year on different learning methods (books, online courses, apps, etc).
I made it to level 4 on WaniKani, so I can recognize those Kanji and may know some pronunciations. I started and restarted up to chapter 1 in Genki I probably 3 times. I can recognize about 80-90% of the Hiragana and probably 30% of the Katakana. That is about all the progress I've made in Japanese so far.


The Mass Immersion Approach:

Somewhere along my Japanese research, I found the All Japanese All The Time method for learning Japanese. I didn't like it. I found it very difficult to follow the table of contents and didn't find anything that stuck out to me as important to learn. This is just my personal opinion. A lot of people  found great success with AJATT.
An expert voice in the AJATT world is Matt vs Japan. I became familiar with some of his videos, including his massive 3 hour long timeline video. 
I passively followed his work and watched some of the update a Q&A videos along the way. When he put out the Mass Immersion Approach content, I became highly interested but not motivated.
Now, I have the motivation and will make my attempt to follow Matt's method and see where it takes me.

In the next post I'll be talking about specific things I'm doing to get ready for Stage 1 of MIA. After that the plan is to make a weekly post about my progress and any resources I find.

After I take on Japanese for a while, I would like to branch out and do more languages with this approach. I'm considering either 2 weeks on Japanese and 1 week on another language.