He Got NATIVE in Japanese FROM HOME?

Matt vs Japan's Immersion Dojo - www.skool.com/...
I was happy to interview Matt VS Japan and to find out about his secrets to getting native in Japanese without leaving your home!
Watch the whole 2-hour interview. You can also find it as a podcast on KZbin Music!
#mattvsjapan #victortalking #japanese #input #howtolearn

[@VictorTalking]

Find this podcast on the KZbin Music app and listen to it!

[@JacobPikulski]

I liked the way you asked specific questions about his way of watching content that he doesn’t fully understand, I feel like that’s something that people who interviewed him didn’t really go deep into. Learning that he had a logical way of looking up words every 2 minutes to avoid over translating content was very helpful for exemple. Good video for sure.

[@Suedeash]

I'm maybe not the biggest fan of Matt as a person (due to his shady dealings in the past) but I recognise his insane level of talent and dedication when it comes to learning Japanese, and he is very good at explaining things clearly. I totally agree with everything you guys talked about with regards to eliminating distractions (from English sources primarily) and learning to 'gamify' the process of learning. And like Matt said, it might ostracize you from people around you a little bit, but as long as you're enjoying the act of learning then it's a fair trade in my opinion. I experienced the same thing when I set my devices to Japanese, when all my recommendations and social media content was from Japanese sources, etc. and I was able to massively improve my speaking and achieve things like JLPT N2 without living in Japan or going through formal education. Very good interview to be honest! If nothing else I'm glad to hear him speaking about Japanese learning in a long-form video again.

[@harpie9022]

Glad to see Matt on KZbin again! Everything that Matt said is so insightful - truly a legend in Language Acquisition!

[@nostalgicsheep47]

LAOSHU50500 was the goat RIP

[@bkcalvine]

Sweet guy. But Victor's language skills (pronunciation, cadence, vocabulary, etc.) is miles ahead of LaoShu.

[@nostalgicsheep47]

@bkcalvine LAOSHU50500 was a polyglot 😆 that spoke over 10 languages. Victor is a one trick white dude who speaks Korean 😆

[@capronvictor1567]

​@@nostalgicsheep47not to defend him but he speaks Chinese and Korean perfectly + learning Japanese

[@connerisawsome]

lol laoshu is essentially who they are complaining about for the entire second half of the video

[@MeestahBinks]

@@nostalgicsheep47he has the best mandarin ive ever heard from a non native speaker. He is also very fluent in Korean and English despite being Russian.

[@pohlpiano]

I watched almost all Matt's content before and apart from controversies mentioned elsewhere I found another little problem with him... that is apart from Krashen, he seems to ignore any research which might question his own personal methodology, like Paul Nation's books, for example. I remember in one of early Refold's videos he straight refuted mnemonics (aka keyword technique) as absolutely inefficient, while research clearly proves it has a significant effect on the speed and strenght of vocabulary aquisition if used properly and regularly. Mikel Telleria is a bit hype on himself, but he has some good points regarding this subject, too. Academic linguists interviewed by Lois Talagrand provide many interesting points as well. Shadowing/Chorusing/Mirroring is really a game changer, especially if you really dig it hard. Recently I lectured in Chinese and I trained for my lecture with several different TTS voices with different styles, and the results were so strong, that I still remember many parts of my lecture three months after. For chorusing I set up a custom action in Reaper. Good thing about Reaper is that you watch the video along with audio, too, so you can chorus parts from TV shows easily and even mirror them (act them out) at the same time. I believe shadowing is more for overall flow and connection between longer phrases, while chorusing more for single words and tiny phrases. To the topic of learning more languages - different people do different things for different reasons. People who do vocal coaching as part of their job like me, for example, just need to have access to several languages for a specific purpose. Some people wants to open windows to more cultures, more perspectives, more relationships, etc. Some people move to another country and wants to connect with locals, improve their daily life there, etc. Just like that. I personally think it is a topic only for people, who spend most of their life in the digital world. Nobody is perfect anyway, and native speaker is still a native speaker.

[@eutukhiosdrakon]

The only textbooks I've found thus far that do teach like how Matt describes the ideal textbook at 27 mins is Assimil, they teach the most common thousand+ words alongside foundational grammar explanations in context with audio. No other textbooks are comparable, you can be out of the beginner stage in half a month if you study for multiple hours every day (at least for some languages). Most other textbooks have a little dialogue section at the end of the grammar rules and vocab lists; if you actually want to learn properly, discard those parts and just repeat the dialogues over and over again

[@VictorTalking]

I saw a lot of textbooks for Chinese that 100% represent street language to the point that you hear it on the streets as soon as you learn it - Spoken Chinese by Beijing University Press.

[@PeterViet]

That’s a big one. Matt is 100% legit 💯

[@chadbailey7038]

Yes! I’ve followed Matt’s videos for years. So glad you discovered him. Very happy for the conversation 🙌🏾 ⚡️ спасибо за контент. Мне очень рад за разговор)))

[@glaakee]

Realistically, I think most people can maintain about 3~4 languages families at a high level. Sure, if you devote your life to language learning and have 20+ years of experience, then you might be able to reach like 6 at a high level. However, my gripe is the so-called polyglots that inflate their numbers by learning like 4 romance languages and sprinkle in some memorized sentences from other languages. If that language family is your passion, I think that's great, but it should not be used just to inflate your numbers. Maybe someone wants a basic level in dozens of languages. Just give people a realistic outlook. You can basically get 3 romance languages in the time it takes to get really good at Japanese or Korean. All the shared history, vocabulary and grammatical structures means less time investment to learn and less time investment to maintain them. I'm not saying isn't cool nor hard work, but good luck maintaining 5 unrelated languages where you need to learn 5 distinct grammar systems and getting comfortable with 10000+ lexemes (word families) in each of them. After that you add in idioms, dialects, slang, cultural references, etc...

[@VictorTalking]

I literally haven't seen ANY out of those 10+ languages polyglots who would speak good Chinese, Russian, or Korean when having those languages on their list. Every name people tell me, I open their video and can't see anything except for beginner levels in ALL and EVERY ONE of those. Yes, it's because they learn languages from the same group and try to "compete" and clickbait by saying "14 languages" after adding a few phrases from other languages. Videos with 100 cuts and 2-minutes segments where they say 5 Russian sentences and people give them props for that just because they look humble in the video. They don't look humble to me because they write that they "properly" studied 14 languages 🤡🤡🤡

[@glaakee]

@ I agree. Parroting a few phases is not actually speaking a language. 😂 It is much more impressive that you succeeded in three very different languages. Keep up the good work. Japanese should be a joy now that you are familiar with the Chinese vocabulary and Korean grammar!

[@TheFiestyhick]

Wow, Matt has physically changed so much he's almost unrecognizable.

[@pohlpiano]

Oh, a really good point about distractions. Actually, are there any recommended Chinese channels with matching soft subtitles on KZbin for mining or just watching with Migaku on? Like actual shows? I found that Chinese videos with soft subtitles in Chinese are really rare.

[@VictorTalking]

I think you can still figure out the words quite easily when hearing the pronunciation and typing the pinyin in the dictionary to find a word, that's what I did, but maybe it's not very convenient.

[@pohlpiano]

@@VictorTalking Yeah, I just like that feeling of having Migaku on with tone colours, I tried it watching videos from Zoe中文频道，not even looking anything up, as I understand practically everything... it just kind of feels nicer, this immersive setting, and helps reinforcing the tone character connection. Also, looks like Migaku can create really nice flashcards, and though I have not use that feature much yet (but I use it for reading news and other articles online), I still would like to test some sentence mining with that on, using TV show, getting the sound and picture out automatically for review (similar with Yomitan).

[@Sean-398]

Wasn’t expecting this. Legendary interview. Two different approaches but interesting to hear you guys discuss respectfully

[@ReleaseTheKraken25]

Great video, love Matt

[@everythingtorah]

Excellent questions! And it's good to see how Matt is doing nowadays. I hope to reach advanced fluency one day in Nihongo too

[@MarkMuiler]

Витя вообще молодец, говорит на стольких языках. Но мне все же кажется что твой китайский намного лучше твоего Английского

[@gijsgrottendieck8081]

This is probably one of the most important video’s on language learning on KZbin

[@子皇帝]

51:12 the blatant misspelling of chorusing 😭 matt in japanese too deep

[@子皇帝]

(all love, great interview)

[@ВладШкуренко-ц2ф]

Я видел канал японца который отлично говорил на русском. И у меня возник вопрос. Виктор, а вы с такими людьми общаетесь и как это ввглядит. Можно одновреенно говорить сразу на двух языках с теми людьми которые их понимают?

[@VictorTalking]

А есть видео, где он отлично говорит на русском? Я просто видел только пару повторяющихся фраз. Или мы говорим о разных людях.

[@shimewaza]

@@VictorTalking Are you talking about Kazu Languages? He seems pretty legit.

[@VictorTalking]

Legit in terms of fluency?

[@shimewaza]

@@VictorTalking Yeah, that's my impression. To me he seems like one of the few YT polyglots who is actually legit. If you haven't seen him check out his channel. I don't speak Russian but it's one of the languages he claims to be strong in so I'd be curious to hear your opinion. And he's pretty honest about the languages he hasn't yet put much time in and so isn't yet very good. But he spends all his free time studying languages so seems to get good fast. At least I'm impressed 🙂

[@VictorTalking]

Russian - Beginner Look, I might sound very radical, but to me, having a beginner level in a bunch of languages is good for a first impression and asking "where are you from" or saying "i'm learning X language", but with this level of speaking, I wouldn't add the language to my list. But that's just my take. If a person can't speak freely on different topics for 20 or 30 minutes straight without stopping or making too many mistakes (intermediate level), I wouldn't add this language and say that I "speak" it. Speaking "a little bit" is great for the first time communication and this should be truly celebrated, but my channel and language learning is more about depth (at least I hope so), then breadth. That's why this channel started from interviews in Chinese and talks mostly about how to learn the language on a fluent level, not on a beginner level. P.S. I taught Russian and it's an extremely complex language. I know about levels in this language very clearly from the perspective of a teacher of this language. Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced levels are VERY different and I often times see people giving a lot of respect to beginner level which is great, but the problem is that too many people regard it as "strong" or even fluent. If you focus on Russian for 3-5 years straight you can get there, but if you focus on 14 languages and learn Russian alongside them, people will still give you props (we Russians love when people learn our language), but in terms of actual proficiency, writing, grammar, reading, talking about different topics), beginner level is just beginner level and can't get as much respect as reaching an actual fluent level.

[@dawsonsan]

This is fantastic

[@poof117]

360p, but doesn't matter too much

[@VictorTalking]

Yeah, my bad 😅

[@ВикторСазонов-м9г]

❤

[@VictorLeemma]

Hello from Brazil. Please start learning Portuguese, it's easier for Russians.

[@Zuy0k]

TV program about Hrbin is now airing on

[@luckytima2315]

Я ничего не понял, но лайк по дефолту поставил

[@KirkKiyosadaTome]

As a Japanese American who knows exactly how controversial Matt is, and with how much I respect you as a translator/language learner, I urge you to take down this vid and dissociate yourself from this awful person. Please collab with more sincere polyglots such as Dogen.

[@VictorTalking]

As a public person myself, I have a lot of hate on my profile as well. It's a personal choice what to think of me or anyone out there.

[@KirkKiyosadaTome]

@@VictorTalking While I can see your point, when it's verifiable negative discussion, it's very difficult to justify. I love your content and method. Again, I implore you, please don't taint your channel with this drivel. The choice, of course, is yours to make, and what you choose to do will result in how the public responds. Thanks for your reply.

[@VictorTalking]

@@KirkKiyosadaTome Putting all the emotions aside, I truly believe this 2-hour podcast has a ton of value for language learners.

[@VictorTalking]

KZbin these days is just full of fake polyglots claiming to speak 14 languages and being celebrated by millions of people having no idea about the fact that all those people don't even have a beginner level in most of the languages on the list. People try to disprove me and tell that so-and-so guy ACTUALLY speaks the languages and when I reach out to them to shoot a video to ACTUALLY speak and see, they don't respond (guess WHY). I open their video and see that they say 3 sentences in Russian and have subpar levels in all 4 languages I test their videos for. On this channel, I will interview people who actually mastered the languages on the highest level. I understand that these days there are certain controversies, but I want the listener to benefit from the method of different schools of thought from people who actually learned the language. Everyone on the internet who claims to speak 10+ languages and adds Korean or Chinese to their list, you'll never see those people on my channel and me on their channel. Same with some Asian people claiming to speak 10+ languages and having subpar levels in Russian, Chinese and even English. They say "I Speak 10 languages", well, "why don't you hop on and speak 4 languages I'm fluent in if they are on your list?" They would NEVER do that. And people still love them. It's the biggest scam in language learning I've ever seen.

[@KirkKiyosadaTome]

@VictorTalking Fair. I hope that you realize that there are so many more KZbinrs with whom you are worthy of a collaboration.