An Introduction to Language Exchange

There can be no doubt that language exchange is an invaluable way to rapidly improve your communication skills in a foreign language. In recent years, the increased movement of nationals between countries, the ever increasing popularity of the Internet and the growing interest in foreign language media such as video games and movies, have seen the focus of foreign language learning shift from grammatical perfection, to what has been termed 'intercultural communicative competence' (a term first used by a linguist called Byram in an article published in 1997).  That is, being able to understand not just the words, but also the mindset of those you communicate with, in order to fully understand their colloquialisms and social norms. Intercultural communicative competence cannot however, be developed with a textbook or necessarily from an academic course. This magic ingredient, that will take you from sounding like a robot, to sounding like a natural, social human being, that native speakers want to hang out with and know better, can only be developed through interaction with native speakers. There are different ways in which we can exchange with others in Japanese, and which you prefer will be determined by a number of different factors, which I will discuss in detail in future articles. In this article, I want to present you with the reasons why I feel that language exchange is not just preferable, but essential, for those of us studying Japanese.

The Japanese Organism: 

The Importance of Communication Over Accuracy

Language is first and foremost all about communication. From the moment we are born, our survival and ability to have our basic needs met, is dependent on our ability to communicate our needs to other human beings.  There is a popular theory that human language evolved as a way to create social bonds and establish hierarchy; something our primate cousins do through grooming. As our social groups became larger, it was no longer possible to form relationships through physical interaction alone, so we began to communicate our social relationships with others verbally. The larger groups became, the more information we needed to store in our memories, and this created a need for greater and greater intelligence, the knock on effect being that our verbal communication was able to become more and more complex and allow even the most abstract of detail to be communicated. We owe much of our success as a species, to our ability to speak. 

Students and often even teachers can fall into the trap of focusing on the mechanical aspects of a language such as its vocabulary, grammar and writing. These are of course important, but it is perfectly possible to communicate fluently even if your grammar isn't perfect, or your vocabulary is low, so long as you also cultivate good strategies and non-verbal communication skills.

Allow me to offer you a metaphor, to illustrate why grammar and vocabulary alone are not enough to make you able to hold down a conversation in Japanese. 

I like to imagine language is an organism. Languages evolve, migrate develop and die out, just as animals do, so it's not as crazy a leap as you might first think. I think of the rigid parts of language: the words and grammar.. those dry textbook 'rules' we all have to sit down and digest, as the bones of the Japanese organism.  A skeleton is an important part of an animal, but it is not the only part, or even the most vital, just ask a jellyfish! It is the soft tissues that allow the animal to 'come to life' and move its bones around freely.  Just as an animal can survive with large parts of its skeleton broken or missing, so too can a student communicate effectively with broken or missing grammar, so long as he or she has developed the more intuitive skills. 

You are probably wondering what makes up the flesh of the Japanese organism. This is the aspects of communication that are harder to learn, yet just as important as the 'bones'. It is the way you can infer the speaker's feelings from their tone of voice, the way you understand that they're just being polite the first time they turn down an offer, it's understanding the different nuances that can't easily be put into words, but you just somehow feel are there. It is also about gaining a feeling for not just what words mean as a dictionary would state, but also how they are used appropriately in conversation by natives. It's about knowing to say, 'I'll get the next round' and not 'I shall be the one who will purchase the drinks when our current beverages have been consumed'. The Germans call this Sprachgefühl, and the Japanese have a similar term 語感 （gokan）. It also includes the strategies we use, such as using the words we do know creatively, rather than struggle because we don't know the words we originally wanted to say. These are all things your human mind is very much able to develop without your conscious awareness, but it will do so only when you start using the language to communicate.

Activating the Appropriate Areas of the Brain

If this wasn't enough, there is another reason it is important to use the language we study. We also need to in order for our brain to understand that these 'facts' we memorise from our textbooks, are actually parts of a language. Your mind will not automatically store and process this information in the way it does your mother tongue, but rather has no way of knowing that grammar rules are any different to the rules you learnt in school for handling maths problems, or that 子供 (kodomo）isn't just an obscure English term like 'polarity'.  As such, you will store this information along with any regular 'fact' or 'trivia'. This kind of information is accessible, but not instantly. You need to pause to recall it, just as you did in your science exams at school.. chewing the end of your pen while you called forth a chemical equation.  This is the key reason why those of us who start speaking late in our studies, can have such depth of theoretical language knowledge and decent vocabularies, and yet can't apply rules or recall words quickly enough to speak smoothly, or process what we hear quickly enough to follow movies and so on.  

However, thanks to evolution, our brains are hot-wired to process linguistic information. This means that while progress is often laborious to begin with, due to various factors I'll explain in later articles, once we begin to have conversations, our brains very quickly move all these dormant 'facts' to the active language centers of the brain.  There are several areas of the brain responsible for speech and language including those responsible for motor skills, that is, the physical act of speaking.  Just as with learning any motor skill, you cannot develop the necessary muscle memory, to make automatic responses without actually physically training yourself to do so. Thinking in Japanese, is not enough, just as studying guitar chords from a book won't make you be able to play the guitar the first time you hold one. You have to allow your vocal chords and mouth to be involved in the process.  

The Four Stages of Mastery

When we learn a skill, any skill, we go through what are known as the four stages of mastery. These are also known as 'the four stages of competence' and initially called 'The four stages of learning any new skill' by its first developer, Noel Burch.  These stages are outlined below;

Unconscious Incompetence: At this stage, we don't know what we don't know. This is usually the reason why people brand new to the language, have such overconfidence and think that they can master Japanese in a year, or that knowing the bare bones of the language makes them near masters of it. We see it all the time and many of us were there ourselves. This is because you have no idea how vast the road ahead actually is, or that those basic sentence patterns you've mastered from your textbook, bear little resemblance to the Japanese you'll be studying 2 or 3 years down the line.

Conscious Incompetence: For us as learners, this often hits us as we're approaching intermediate study.  This is the overwhelming stage where you see the mountain ahead of you for the first time. You now KNOW how much you don't know. When people quit language learning, this is the point when they usually do so. I think Paul McKenna explains this stage best in his book 'I Can Make You Smarter';

You are regularly making mistakes and frustration and confusion are your regular companions.

He also goes on to give this one line of advice for getting through this, which I think every learner should keep in the back of his or her mind;

What will keep you going through this stage, is both the recognition that it is simply a necessary step in the learning process, and the cultivation of a state of sincere determination.

A pitfall of conscious incompetence, is that a lot of people mistake it for an inability to learn the skill in question. Those who've known me a while, will surely remember my anguished cries of 'I think I am incapable of learning languages... I'll never get any better'.  I even understood these stages, and yet still allowed myself to fall into this obvious trap. When I realised what was really happening to me, I began to accept that I'd simply reached a stage and that what felt like a lack of progress, was actually evidence that my learning was moving forward. 

Conscious Competence: This is when you know how to correctly do something but can only do so with conscious effort.  This stage has added complications when it comes to verbal skills, because it is characterised by knowing the correct way, but needing time to think about it first, which often isn't available while we speak. This is why we make more mistakes when we speak than we do when we write, and why we say things that later make us question why our brains let us say that.  

Unconscious Competence: This is the stage we all hope to reach. At this stage, we no longer think about grammar rules when we speak. We just instinctively reach for the correct constructions because it is natural to us.  It is said that most students of a second language never reach this stage. When I was a teacher, this was definitely my experience. Our advanced level had 3 tiers; level 3, level 2 and then the 'better than some native speakers' level 1. I was lucky if I taught one level 2 student per week and never met a level 1, yet there were hundreds of level 3s, many of which had been there for well over a year.  It is of course possible to move beyond conscious competence, but only by speaking regularly. 

By having regular conversations in Japanese, you can not only gauge where you are within these stages, but will also move through them much faster.  If you never communicate in Japanese, you may well find that you are unable to move beyond conscious competence, and thus holding down a conversation will forever be a struggle for you. 

In Conclusion

Kanji are fascinating, movies are entertaining, passing a JLPT exam is a rewarding accomplishment, but it is important not to let these facets of Japanese study distract us from the fact that true mastery of Japanese is in having the ability to successfully communicate our needs, feelings and opinions with other speakers of the language. Successful communication can be achieved without grammatical perfection, and with relatively low vocabulary, but only when other, more subtle communication skills are present. This of course includes written communication, especially in the modern world, where written communication can be almost as instant an exchange as verbal communication thanks to instant messaging and text chat. Hopefully this article has convinced you that conversation practice is crucial to your Japanese and now you can't wait to get started. Over my next 3 articles, we shall be exploring 3 key methods of using Japanese communicatively; face-to-face meetings. online, and studying with other learners. These articles will present tips for finding study partners, advice on how you can get the most out of your exchanges, and attempt to trouble-shoot the most common difficulties you may encounter.