In this weeks episode of the KoreKara Podcast, we chat with JapaneseGaryBen, a well-known AJATTer in the Japanese learning community. You may have seen his lengthy videos on YouTube documenting his progress learning Japanese each year, or his twitter account where he tweets daily about immersion and learning Japanese. It’s been about 3 years since he’s started learning Japanese, and in this episode we catch up with him to see where he’s at in his journey and how far he still wants to take it. We talk about his Japanese progress, acquiring pitch accent, meeting Japanese people, learning programming, and his plans to move to Japan. If you enjoyed the podcast we would really appreciate it if you could like and subscribe, as it would really motivate us to put our more content! If you want to support the podcast and get access to bonus clips and episodes with all our guests, get access to our exclusive discord channel, and get early access to our episodes please consider subscribing to us on Patreon! In the meantime go checkout JapaneseGary Ben on social media!

JapaneseGaryBen’s Links:

► Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWY6R8lFFCk724E9mN_HtGw

► Twitter: https://twitter.com/JapaneseGaryBen

About JapaneseGaryBen:

JapaneseGaryBen started learning Japanese around 3 years ago, using the All Japanese All The Time method, where he tried to immerse himself with Japanese as close to 24 hours a day as possible. This included some unconventional workarounds, such as taping headphones to his ear so that he could continue to listen to Japanese as he slept. He’s made yearly update videos documenting his progress, but since he hasn’t made an update video this year, we decided to catch up with him to see how far he’s come since then.

Although JapaneseGaryBen has become considerably more comfortable in Japanese since his 2 year mark, he felt that he was still mostly doing the same things, so he decided not to make a 3 year update video. Nevertheless, he’s made a lot of progress studying pitch accent and becoming better at output. One aspect of the AJATT method is that output is not encouraged in the earlier stages, due to fear of making bad habits. Perhaps in fear of that, JapaneseGaryBen has noted that he has yet to start “outputting at full force”, but has made efforts regularly writing down thoughts in Japanese. Although having studied for 3 years, he feels that he isn’t comfortable speaking due to the fact that pitch accent is constantly on his mind, and his goal is to sound as close to a native person as possible.

After 3 years of studying Japanese, JapaneseGaryBen still resides in the United Kingdom and has yet to travel to Japan. We talk about some of his expectations for Japan and whether or not there’s a possibility that he might find that Japan isn’t what he thought it would be. However, JapaneseGaryBen has very realistic expectations for what Japan will be when he arrives there, so he isn’t that worried about moving there. Although he’s talked in previous videos about possibly doing JET, he’s since changed his mind on that, wanting to pursue a full career instead in Japan before the age of 30. Before starting to study Japanese, he initially went to university studying games, and even went on to pursue a masters in the same field before dropping out. Nowadays, he’s studying programming, in Japanese of course, with the goals of becoming a digital nomad where he will be able to work for himself anywhere in the world. As of now though, JapaneseGaryBen is working away at a corner store, still working on perfecting his Japanese.