I share personal impressions from when I used to teach Japanese in Brazil. You should receive it as a paternalistic advice from someone that is interested about the topic but be free to criticize me! No, actually, please tell me any insight you have. I love this topic.

This is the fundamental formula of language level.

\[Level = \alpha Brain\_usage\]

Where $\alpha$ represents all the uncontrolable effects (for instance, your age, your proximity to the target language, your talents). Those affect the speed of your acquisition but are not relevant since you cannot control anyway. Besides one’s objective for learning is never tied to comparison with its peers. One should not give up if it is not the first-placed in its Japanese classroom.

On the other hand, Brain usage is hard. It means that two people could be watching Netflix in their target language and nevertheless one is super focused on decoding the complex structure of spoken language and the other just work on their ability of reading subtitles.

For sure, some passive assimilation is helpful but in much less degree if your mind is not engaged with it. The only thing that matters for learning a language is hard work. You can be very smart about how to do this hard work though. Experimentally, I am not sure if talent exists. I see that people that actually get better faster process things differently or are more interested and are more focused. In some sense, they get better with less time employed, but the mental effort they do can be quite different. Perhaps because they enjoy. The take-away is you should never feel that is unfair someone is better. Most probably this person is doing more than you do.

1. Take classes that are slightly above your level
2. Transmission of the information is always more important than the grammar
3. Learn some grammar structures first and deploy them a lot! It is hugely useful to build confidence with familiar sentence structures that are powerful enough and use them for most of your conversations until you reach greater proficiency
4. Make some commitment. Bets (work really well), having a language rival, having a partner from the target language, schedulling a proficiency exam, being in an environment that speak exclusively your target language are all really good ways to learn a language so that even in auto-pilot mode, you would be studying. I am currently doing all of those things, so I can guarantee their effectiveness.
5. Watch netflix with Chrome’s Language Reactor plugin. It enables 2 subtitles at the same time. However, one can be taking the path of less resistance and always read the subtitle in the target language. A good rule might be: if you are not focusing, put only the target language. If you are focusing, you can have both subtitles and learn new words. Alternatively, if you are with a pen and paper and willing to pause every other sentence, that is commendable as well.

Tips for Japanese

1. Go to https://www.tofugu.com/. The resources are incredible
2. If you happen to be Brazilian and would love to learn Japanese, I reccommend listening to our church’s sermons Igreja Aliança de Brasília. Our sermons have consecutive interpreting, so one can listen to the Japanese sentence and see what it means in Portuguese or vice-versa. Personally, it helped me a lot. One master hack is using it for other languages. If the pastor speaks in Portuguese, than you might translate to the language you are learning (in my case Korean), because you will have the blank time of the translation to form the sentence.
3. Never stop! Out of all languages I know, I believe mastering Japanese is the most difficult in the long-run. It takes a lot of time, so don’t be discouraged! I studied 10 years myself so you are probably not behind.

Tips for Chinese

1. Go to https://www.hackingchinese.com/. The best linguistic resource on learning languages I have ever seen! Try the free material stuff and you can buy his paid material if you are convinced (I never bought it myself)

Tips for Korean

1. I dunno