第 4 章 On Leaning English (Tim Kawanishi-Young)

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第4章

On Leaning English (TimKawanishi-Young)
Introduction
This situation may be familiar to many of you: you want to be good at English, but struggle to study
and fail to see improvement. It can be diﬃcult to even decide what to study, and it is diﬃcult to keep
motivation. Sometimes you might even feel like there is no hope of actually using English and no pointin trying. If you feel this way, you can be sure that you are not alone. Many people around the world
have this experience when studying any foreign language, even those less complicated and diﬃcult thanEnglish. In this essay, I present my own thoughts on what is needed to study English (or any foreignlanguage) eﬀectively. Put simply, I think that you need a combination of three elements: (1) motive—aclear reason to study and a focus on learning rather than knowing; (2) target—a concrete, easily deﬁned
goal that you want to achieve; and (3) opportunity—the time, resources, and ability not just to study, butto put language into practice. You can certainly make some progress with just one or two of these three,
but consistent, sustained improvement is much more likely when you have all three together.

A quick disclaimer
Before I continue, I feel it is important to make it clear where this advice is coming from. I am a native
English speaker born and raised in the United States of America, so I have never had to struggle to learn
English. I am not a specialist in linguistics, nor have I been intensively trained in the teaching of English
as a foreign language. This essay will not tell you which English study book is the best or what the mosteﬀective way to memorize vocabulary and grammar structures is.
On the other hand, however, I am also a lifelong language learner. I began studying Japanese at age
18 when I started university studies, which means that I have spent over half of my life involved withJapanese language in one way or another. Today, my academic specialty is Japanese literature of the Meiji
period. But even though I read and write in Japanese in my academic research, and although I teach, live,and work in Japan, if you take one of my classes, you will quickly see that my Japanese is by no means
perfect. (Even now, there are still some days when it feels like my ability to communicate in Japanese
is not even particularly good!) In other words, even though I am not a specialized English teacher, I am
familiar with the pains and the never-ending struggle of learning a second language, and that is the place

第 4 章 On Leaning English (Tim Kawanishi-Young)27

from which I am making my advice.
With that out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the three elements that I introduced earlier: motive,target, and opportunity.

1. MotiveHaving a motive to learn English may seem like the most obvious item of these three. There are allkinds of reasons that knowing English is useful, many of which you have probably heard already: it is
one of the most common languages of international communication, whether in business, tourism, or on
the internet. American ﬁlms and TV shows (as well as those from other English speaking countries)
are marketed and available worldwide, and so on. However, if you carefully read the beginning of thisparagraph again, the reason that I stress this point so much may become clear—there is a diﬀerence
between committing to learn English and just wanting to know English.
What exactly is the diﬀerence? Well, on the one hand, practically everyone in the world wants toknow a foreign language—it is natural to want to be able to express yourself clearly, to understand jokes,
to listen and speak and read and write freely. Examples of imaginary tools that make communication
or translation instant and transparent are everywhere. As just a couple of examples, Doraemon has hishonyaku konnyaku, while Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has his Babel ﬁsh.
(In fact, we might even think about the contemporary growth of machine translation tools as anotherexpression of the same fantasy of already knowing all of the languages in the world.)
On the other hand, a commitment to learn English is a commitment to struggling constantly: tomastering vocabulary, grammar, and common phrases, both fundamental and specialized. Even once
those elements grow familiar, understanding the way that English is used—how people communicate
their ideas, what kind of jokes they tell, what people do and do not value—is a process that will never bedone. Staying in contact with a language and a culture takes constant eﬀort and practice.
In other words, to eﬀectively learn another language, your basic attitude must shift away from thenatural focus on knowing the language completely and totally. You can’t let yourself believe that you will
ever be done. Instead, you must be able to appreciate—and commit to—the extended process of learning
the language, understanding that there will always be something that you don’t know yet.

2. Target and 3. OpportunityIt may seem strange for me to talk about targets and goals next, since I just wrote so many words tostress that focusing on completion and being done is something that should be avoided. However, having
concrete, easily deﬁned goals is necessary to balance out the never-ending process of learning. At thesame time, I believe that while your motive can be large and abstract—committing to long-term learningand overall improvement—your targets and goals should be as speciﬁc as possible. Obviously, a goal
like “I want to be able to read English more quickly and easily” is very vague and diﬃcult to tackle.
Something like “I want to be able to read the newspaper” or “I want to read literature” is better, but evenbetter still would be a goal like “I want to be able to understand most of what I read in The New YorkTimes” or “I want to read ‘The Enormous Radio’ by John Cheever.” In the same way, “I want to be able
to talk to people in English” is much less useful of a goal than “I want to be able to explain the menu to第 4 章 On Leaning English (Tim Kawanishi-Young)28

tourists who come to the restaurant where I work part-time.”
That last example also shows how target and opportunity can be connected—when you want to improveyour English, the best thing that you can do is to use it as much as you can. A very common tendency
among language learners is to study too much: to try to master the fundamentals (grammar, vocabulary,common phrases, and so on) as a ﬁrst step before you advance any further. I will admit that fundamentals
are certainly important; without them it is very diﬃcult to accomplish much. So what does it mean to“study too much”?
For one, understanding (and correctly using) the fundamentals of language is not a binary. Just likelanguage learning as a whole, there is never a clear point where you have deﬁnitively mastered the basicsof English. You will always have good days and bad days in a foreign language. If you understandthat you will always be learning, then you can realize that there will always be time to study or review
fundamentals.
At the same time, one of the constants of human existence is that we get better at the things that wedo regularly. My youngest son is just about to turn one, and he is just learning to walk. Watching him
totter around on shaky legs is a ﬁne reminder that no one is born walking. It’s something that we practice
every day of our lives until eventually we don’t even think about it anymore. The same thing is trueof swimming, of eating with a spoon, of putting on makeup... and of course of language too. For thepurposes of motivation and directed language learning, it is probably more important to practice using
English than it is to master the fundamentals.
Developing opportunities to use English is all about ﬁnding opportunities to practice reaching yourgoal. For reading and listening goals, libraries and the internet make it easier than ever to access all kindsof material in English, from newspapers and novels to TV shows and movies to podcasts, Tiktok videos,and livestreams. Whatever you are interested in, it is possible to ﬁnd people writing, speaking, andconversing about it in English on the internet. If you are more interested in conversation, then obviously
opportunity requires ﬁnding willing conversation partners, but luckily, you go to school in Kyoto, one of
the tourist capitals of Japan. There is no lack of volunteer opportunities and part-time jobs in this areathat will regularly put you in contact with tourists whose only available language is English.

In conclusion
I fear that I may have emphasized the challenge and daunting scale of learning a foreign language toomuch. It certainly is a lot of work, and it certainly does require commitment, but I believe that learninga foreign language and using it to communicate with people is not only fun, but also has outstanding
beneﬁts. Like many of the things that we do in college, learning a foreign language is really another wayof gaining perspective on yourself and your own life. When we learn to express ourselves in a foreign
language, we also learn a diﬀerent way of thinking and seeing the world and our place in it. Whileautomated machine translation is obviously improving by leaps and bounds in recent years, I strongly
urge you not to rely on the computer for doing your thinking for you. Studying a foreign language cangive you access to people and places that are impossible to predict.