You can only ever learn what you’ve been exposed to, and the only thing that matters is how quickly it sticks in your head. If you’re extremely bored and unattentive, you won’t be retaining much of anything. If you’re enthusiastic and determined, it’s just the opposite. (I notice you like watching dramas to improve your Japanese – You’re learning words in context, and the situations/scenes are tagged in your brain for quick information recall. That’s a method!) Having a clear goal in mind is a great motivational tool, also. It gives you something to aim at instead of just meandering about the wide-open-field of “fluency” looking for an open spot on the grass to sit down at.

External motivation is also an important pshyco-linguistic tool, and it’s the primary drive in language acquisition in young children. If we didn’t have to speak a language, we typically wouldn’t try. But when we’re facing possible hardship or embarassment because our language-skills are lacking, we find ourselves externally motivated to compensate through determined study.

Method is as important as time. Neither should be sacrificed for the serious student.

I do think people need a balance between the fun and not so fun. I’m definitely an introverted person, so getting out there and communicating with Japanese people would definitely not be fun for me, but it is probably something I need to do in order to become more fluent in Japanese. So sometimes we do need to push ourselves to do “non fun” things. And fun things themselves can be a slow way to learn a language. I also think that you have to make unfun things fun, like making a game out of learning grammar. etc etc etc.

I think perhaps “suck it up” is almost right. But not quite. It’s more like “just do it”, or “if it’s not working for you, do something else. But do something!”. I think the problem is, it’s going to get tough at some stage for some reason, and people give up. So don’t give up!

Anyway, to both Khalid and アカン, thanks for the awesome comments!

I think the original poster seemed to be implying that, whatever method you use, as long as you invest the time, you’ll reap the benefits. Some of the respondents took that to mean, just hang around a language and you’ll figure it all out.

Perhaps he was reacting to some of the method forum wars out there where the focus is on finding the one method to rule them all. Some people buy that and go hardcore with whatever technique.

And then they burnout.

And to me, that’s the only problem I have with any method. If it burns you out and makes you want to learn the language *less*, something is wrong. The reactions from the defenders of the different methods is usually, “Suck it up, you lack the discipline to learn a language”.

So, to spending “time”, i.e. reading, watching etc. for fun – part of why that’s valuable is that it generates questions. What does that mean? Why say it that way? I keep seeing/hearing that pattern, what does it communicate?

The “method”, then, is how you go about answering those questions.

Figure out what works for you and enjoy yourself.

I certainly stress more on method over time. After all, your method can either be
a)Too boring
b)Too ineffective
(or both)

Which eats away your time which you could otherwise be spending doing something
more worthwhile.

And of course, you need to devote a substantial amount of time to Japanese everyday. I believe in understandable input and then putting the really interesting sentences in the SRS. Which is why I prefer FNN or TBS news (since they have almost exact transcripts that go with the audio). There’s also Miki’s Audio Blog from JapanesePod101.com (the exact transcript is available).

As to the ‘method’ itself,
“To find the right one, you will have to discover how you learn best and seek out these methods. ”
That line says it all!