5bitcube's Complete "Language Learning" Journey

By Yoel González — June 18, 2024

As it happens with many other topics, Language learning is one of those things that is filled with myths and disinformation. We have thankfully arrived at a point where many of these secrets have been extensively discussed online by internet personalities such as Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann, but I really haven't seen a significant shift in the collective mindset when talking to people in real life. I've also had to painfully witness over and over how some still commit the same mistakes, and yet wonder why they are not good enough at their target language. So, in an attempt to undo some of the damage caused by generations of a failed academic system: this is the story of how I finally tackled the challenge of learning a foreign language.

I was born in Cuba, a Spanish speaking island of the Caribbean not particularly known for having a population with strong language skills. Although Cubans are quite infatuated with American culture, idealizing anything coming from the United States as superior, 95% of the people I met while living there could only speak Spanish, and the ones that could speak English, I really doubt would be proficient enough to function in a full English environment from the get-go.

Growing up, I watched a lot of American movies, always dubbed or with Spanish subtitles. I also had access to video games, but these were quite difficult to play if they weren't translated. Songs, in the other hand were impossible to understand beyond simple phrases and misheard lyrics. And, while all this happened, I was taking English classes as part of the school curriculum, which started for me at the age of 8.

You would think that 6 years of this should end up yielding good results, but I can assure you that by the age of 14 my English absolutely sucked. I couldn't hold a basic conversation, understand movies, video games, songs, etc. And it was at this age that I left Cuba with my parents to go live in Spain at the beginning of 2011.

I got enrolled in a new school, and of course I was required to take English as well. It wasn't really that difficult for me to get decent grades, since I knew a lot of grammar rules already; but as I said, there's a huge difference between pleasing your teachers and actually being able to utilize a language in its natural habitat.

I should definitely point out that it was during this period that I got on the internet for the first time in my life, which came to be the most powerful learning tool I've seen to this day. It might sound silly to say this out loud, but a computer connected to the internet allows you to have this very unique and personal experience, that comes extremely handy for the task of language learning. You can go at your own pace, you can pause and rewind as many times as needed, you can look up words, search for images, translate, take notes, and most importantly you have the biggest content collection at your fingertips. Feels like I'm stating the obvious, but if it was, everyone would use it as such, and they certainly don't.

Although I didn't know it at the time, the actual event that jump-started my English comprehension was the fact that during the summer of 2011, due to some unfortunate family situations, I further withdrew into my own world and decided to fill up my time as much as possible with all kinds of hobbies; which included, watching as many American movies and TV shows as humanly possible just to keep the mind busy. I had turned 15 years old.

Now, I was watching all that content with Spanish subtitles, which isn't really that ideal, but I'm pretty sure I watched hundreds of American movies as well as hundreds of TV show episodes during that period, and I would also play online games which required English to be able to communicate with other players. By the end of 2012, after my 16th birthday, I got told by my parents that we were about to leave to the United States. Our plan was really to take an airplane from Spain to Canada, reach the west side of the U.S border, and simply walk up to a patrol officer and ask for Political Asylum. Really exciting stuff. The interesting part is that to my surprise, I actually had a way easier time than my parents understanding instructions either at the airports or at the border facilities. It was still difficult, but we managed to enter Washington state just in time for Christmas.

Soon enough I got enrolled in "Foster High School" in Tukwila, taking the yellow bus every morning and the whole nine yards. Almost every single day, I'd come home from school with a literal headache from having spent all day listening to what seemed to be unintelligible noise. It was absolutely exhausting. But then after being done with homework and such, I would continue watching American media, now with English subtitles almost exclusively. I'd also use sites like Omegle, to have fun talking with random people online. Somehow I knew intuitively that this was the only way in which I was ever going to learn English once and for all. Now I needed it, and my life depended on it.

I didn't even last a month in that school because surprise surprise... we had to move again. This time, it was Auburn, a city close by. And I had the brilliant idea of asking my school advisor if it was possible for me to get transferred to an online school. Hopefully it was, so he helped me enroll in this program called iGrad at the city of Kent, that allowed me to do my school work from home, having only to visit their facilities one or two times a week in order to take tests and such. After barely six months of this, I acquired fluency at the age of 17.

It honestly felt like magic, I woke up one day feeling like Neo in that "I know Kung-fu" scene from The Matrix. It's like I had reached some critical mass in the language learning process in which I had finally grasped the thinking patterns of English and everything clicked. All of a sudden, I noticed that even if I didn't know every word or phrase I was encountering I could guess the meaning that was being conveyed with extreme accuracy, and I could read up definitions in English and understand them way more clearly than if I was just using the Spanish translator. In fact, I started seeing the translator as an inferior tool that could never really capture the small nuances and the essence of the English language. From that point forward my English skyrocketed to a point that it's actually difficult for me to imagine that it wasn't always like this. It became the new norm.

It took me a total of 3 years to go from sucking at English to fluency. For the majority of that time, I didn't feel like I was making much progress. If anything I was only concerned with watching my favorite movies and TV shows, looking up tutorials to solve the problems I had, playing video games, finding someone to connect with online, and such. English was always a means to an end for me, a tool that we are all required to have in this day and age. So at the end of the day, it never really felt like a huge achievement to be able to speak it. But make no mistake, there are immigrants that even after spending more than ten years in their new country never get to fully speak the language, and to me that's just laziness.

Now, at almost ten years from that day in which I realized I had become fluent in English, I can say with certainty that there hasn't been a single day in which I haven't used it somehow. I also realized that acquiring a new language is not only about learning a new way to say things, it is also about becoming familiar with the culture that surrounds it. And just to wrap things up over here, according to some internet test I took the other day, it turns out I know about 20k English words, and funny enough recently while I was re-watching "The Lord of The Rings" the other day, I just became aware of the word "boulder". That's language learning for you.

It came as a big surprise to me when I finally arrived in Barcelona on 2011 with my family and realized that the advertisement signs weren't actually written in Spanish. All of a sudden, I had to start attending school in a foreign language I didn't even know existed until probably a month prior. Of course, Spanish and Catalan are quite similar since they're both Romance languages, but make no mistake, to the untrained ear it sounds no different than Chinese. I honestly did the best I could: I took regular classes like Math and Chemistry with the other kids of my same year, but when it came to Catalan I had to go to this room called "aula d'acollida", where I would receive special attention along with some other foreign kids.

But I honestly couldn't be bothered to dive in it any further than what was required of me at school due to the location I was living in. And aside from the occasional meme, I never really found a piece of media originally made in Catalan that would capture my attention long enough. So after two years or so of simply going to school and hearing other people speak it on a daily basis, I became quite comfortable with it. Sadly, I had to leave Spain just when my Catalan was starting to get actually good, and I didn't come back to this region after about 12 years from that.

Nowadays I've realized that it is somewhat important to speak Catalan if you reaally want to be accepted by the locals and build some kind of rapport with them. You will definitely need it if you're working on a job that deals with clients here, because some people will actually get offended if they speak to you in Catalan and you speak Spanish back to them. But if you're kind of just doing your own thing and you don't really socialize that much, then you would be fine with just Spanish.

So at the end of the day, my understanding of Catalan is way higher than my speaking abilities and I've been just fine. Funny enough, I made a trip to Galicia on December of 2024 to spend some time with family. And as you may know, people there speak Galego as well as Spanish. Galego of course is a Romance language, not actually that different from Catalan but just enough to throw you off track if you aren't adept in it. Anyway, I had never felt this before but I actually missed Catalan while being there and I find that hilarious. I guess we inevitably end up loving the languages we're comfortable with.

I'm pretty sure that at some point I might check out a few books in Catalan, just to see if there's something good in there, but right I've been focused on other things. I just find it interesting how I ended up learning this language without having much choice in the matter, you don't simply choose Catalan, Catalan will choose you if you are worthy.

If I remember correctly, the very first time I became aware of the existence of the Japanese language was around the year 2002 at the age of 6, when my dad took me to see a group of kids doing Karate. Living in Cuba I also came across a few anime series that would be aired on TV from time to time, such as: Voltus 5, Ulysses 31, Mikan Enikki, Cardcaptor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Heidi and Marco. But these were always dubbed to Spanish and I didn't even know about the word "Anime" back then, everyone would just call them "Manga Cartoons".

During the Christmas break of 2011, while living in Spain, someone at school recommended me to watch Death Note. This was the first proper anime I watched in Japanese with Spanish subtitles, and it marked the start of my Japanese journey. By the time I was done with it I was in love with this language. I find it to be such an interesting phenomenon how so many teenagers go through this same path, and now that I can reflect on the flaws of Japanese culture and see everything more clearly, it has definitely lost some of its magic, but I do my best to keep the good memories alive.

I guess it had to do with the fact that I was feeling quite lonely at the time and seeing characters such as Light, Kamina, or Yukiteru doing their thing, gave me the confidence to keep pushing at the game of life without becoming depressed. But in all honesty, the Japanese language is indeed very beautiful. The combination of simple sounds, the basic structures, the phonetic syllabaries and the Kanji system, make it a work of art.

So I did what I thought to be the most sensible thing at the time: look up Japanese lessons on YouTube. I quickly found a channel called "NihongoKyoukai" and this was the very first Japanese lesson that I ever watched. I devoured these lessons one after the other and was feeling quite good about myself because I had memorized the whole Hiragana and it seemed like I was making some progress. But he didn't have that many videos and so I kept looking for a more complete course, that's when I found Kira Sensei.

I would watch these lessons a few times a week, always taking notes and doing my best to practice afterwards. But after doing this for about two or three years, my Japanese was still at a painfully basic level. I knew a bunch of grammar rules, some basic conversation patterns, could read Hiragana and Katakana somewhat slowly, and I could only identify a few dozen Kanji.

It was the year 2015 and I was now living in Miami. I was of course fluent in English by this point and since I had other projects in mind, my Japanese practice started to drift away. Eventually, somewhere around 2016 I came across the Kanjidamage method for learning Kanji. I thought it was absolutely brilliant and started to use their anki deck on a daily basis, although years later I would find out that this too wasn't the optimal way to learn Kanji. I quit after about 300 kanjis in because I realized that I was already forgetting some of the easier ones, and it felt like a waste of time.

Then around the end of 2019 I went back to watching the occasional Japanese lesson here and there from Japanese from Zero and eventually I found Cure Dolly as well. The fact that there had already been 7 years since the first Japanese lesson I watched, at a time where I couldn't even understand English, and now I was watching Japanese lessons IN ENGLISH, was extremely ironic to me. Something was definitely not okay.

I remember I was watching one of those videos and I saw this comment ranting about how we were all wasting our time watching those lessons, he said something about Ajatt being the superior method for learning Japanese and I went to check it out. I quickly discovered the website alljapaneseallthetime.com and after reading some of the blog posts and seeing Khatzumoto himself displaying his Japanese skillz I was absolutely sold.

Everything made perfect sense, I had used Ajatt already for learning English without even being aware of it. Of course Japanese lessons were never going to work! It's impossible to learn a language through lessons. You only learn languages seeing things IN CONTEXT over and over. It's not a matter of being smart or having great memory, it's simply a matter of getting used to it. So I just went for it and decided to create a new YouTube account, so that it would only recommend me Japanese stuff. I began watching Japanese gameplays such as 弟者の「バイオハザード RE:2」 and I was hooked instantly.

At first, I couldn't even understand the beginning or the end of a word, everything felt like a complete blur. But I shit you not, after a single month in, I could already feel something happening: I was starting to remember new words. Some of them I knew what they meant, others I had no idea, but at last, I knew I was starting to make real progress at Japanese. I think one of the moments that it hit me was upon seeing the word 「地球」, and saying to myself "...Earth"; after a quick Google search I realized that I had learned a Kanji compound word without having ever studied it. So that's how I discovered the true way of learning Kanji, you only need to consume enough Japanese content until you become familiar with the words you need.

Was it always fun and engaging? Of course not. There were times where it felt like a chore, and although Khatzumoto talks about how you should do your best to keep immersion fun instead of treating it like a job, I managed to stay consistent for about a year even if I had to grind away sometimes. After that, I had to move out alone for the first time in my life and I couldn't keep up with Ajatt demands with the same level of intensity. But I do must say that after a year of Ajatt, it was enough to impress the owner of a Japanese restaurant in Miami, and land me a job in there with just 5 minutes of conversation.

I was excited at first to hang out with Japanese colleagues every single day, but I found out quickly that I was making much more progress at home than in person. In reality, people don't really have the time to slow down their Japanese for you unless you're paying them. And the truth is that the Japanese I acquired was nowhere near enough to have interesting conversations at that moment. On top of that, I ended up having big differences with the boss and decided to quit after just three months.

For the next 3 years I pretty much stopped consuming Japanese stuff regularly. And surprisingly, now in the year 2024, it didn't take me long to pick it up back where I left it. If anything, I'd say that there has to be some kind of unconscious mechanism that kept working behind the scenes even if I haven't been getting that much practice. Anyhow, I truly feel that my Japanese comprehension level is at its best right now compared to any point in the past 12 years, and although I wouldn't call myself fluent yet, I'm steadily approaching that critical mass moment.