February 15 – I discovered a fantastic new way to study a foreign language

15 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment

by thebaboose in Japan - Language Tags: learning a foreign language, learning japanese, studying Japanese, using google to study

About two weeks ago, I discovered a fantastic new way to study a foreign language. What is this new earth-shattering method you may ask? Google! You take a phrase that you don’t have much confidence with and you search for it on Google, and Presto! Instant grammar clarification on aisle three! If no sites turn up with the same phrase, you can be quite certain that the phrase you entered is wrong. It is really as simple as that, no more stalking the hot German exchange student or bugging teachers to confirm if what you said is grammatically correct.

In my case, I used the Japanese phrase たくさんをたべる（takusan wo taberu）a lot. Using the strange looks I received from my girlfriend as a rise to action, I plugged into Google the phrase “takusan wo taberu,” and “takusan wo suru.” To my dismay, there was nothing, nadarino. Knowing something was wrong, I fiddled with the phrase – erasing the particle “wo” – and searched for “takusan taberu.”

The result was 180-degree turn in the right direction: tons of sites popped up. Using this as evidence, I felt it was safe to confirm that the phrase I have been using for the past several years was incorrect – an injustice of epic proportions on the thousands of helpless Japanese brethren I was spitting my poison to. Thanks to Google – and the millions of Japanese Google users – I was able to fix not only the example given above, but the many other cracks on my Japanese language exoskeleton.

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