Jitensha Language Learning

By Brian Inglis | August 15, 2024

If you’re like me, you can think back nostalgically on riding a bike around your hometown when you were a kid. You didn’t have anywhere to go, or anything to do – you just wanted to explore. You found hidden trails that led to neighbourhoods you’d never been to, you rode through places that really should have had a fence to keep you out and found all sorts of strange and interesting things, and you got to know your town like the back of your hand.

And, if you’re like me in another way, you can think back to a time when you had to get to know how a place looked on a map, but spent little or no time there actually exploring it. You knew all the major cross streets and intersections, and could talk about how close two points are and what kind of logistics you might need to think about to get things from one to the other – but you felt distant, disconnected from the place, and if you were dropped in the middle of it you’d never even know you were there.

Language learning is a lot like this. If you had the time and freedom of your childhood to soak in a language the way you explored your hometown, the knowledge of it would practically be a part of you now. You’d know it without even having to think about it. If, on the other hand, you’ve spent countless hours poring over textbooks, dictionaries, dialogues, and conjugation charts of your target language, you might feel like you know certain things but that they don’t quite feel real to you and you can’t actually use them when called upon to.

Now, imagine yourself in a new place. You’re looking out on a trail going off in one direction to a lush natural area, a sidewalk going another direction towards a street lined with houses and small shops, and the skyscrapers of a distant city in the background. You’re sitting on a bike, and you have a map. You know where you are, both in terms of the conceptual understanding you get from your map and from having your feet on the ground, the smell of the grass and the sound of a stream and passing cars in your ears.

If you didn’t have the map, you could have a lot of fun exploring, but it would take you a very long time to actually understand this place well – you’re busy, and you don’t have your whole childhood to figure it out. If you weren’t actually here, you’d just be looking at a map without actually experiencing the place in reality. But you’re here, and you have a map. You can explore, and you can quickly understand what you’re exploring and how it relates to the rest of the area.

Scholars have argued, often convincingly, that learning a language is only about experiencing it, and that studying it uses a different part, or a different mode, of your brain, and that the two are incompatible. But, to my knowledge, they don’t prove this; they just argue it well. And I reject it.

The experiencing and exploring mode, representing immersion and communication, is certainly essential, but there is no convincing reason to think it’s incompatible with the studying mode. It’s just like exploring a neighbourhood with a map; the two are mutually reinforcing, your experiences of the place allowing the map to make more sense and have a richer meaning for you, and your knowledge of the map informing how you explore and giving you a clearer picture of how the place is laid out.

Maybe if you had all the time in the world, you’d do nothing but explore in your new language, and maybe (but not necessarily) you’d get the hang of it. But if you use well-considered study methods and effective techniques for exploration together as part of an integrated program, you give yourself the best chance to succeed – not to mention a much more enjoyable and less frustrating experience, as raw language immersion is a little less joyful than riding your bike around as a kid.

Click on the program in the header above and get started taking your journey into your own hands today.