Who am I ? (Long Version) (Patreon)

Life on Hardmode With Max Luck Stat

  My name is Lucas and I am a 30 year old fatty who grew up in poverty in Brazil. Shortly before turning 9 though, and perhaps because of my absurdly high luck stat, I moved to the United States. My reason for moving was somewhat atypical. I actually moved to the States because my siblings and I were adopted by an American family. To add to these already quite unique circumstances, my adopted parents were monolingual and actually only spoke English. It was a sink or swim immersion environment, and I soon chose to take a shot at swimming. 

Only a few months after arriving in America I was already resolute in my desire to understand the world around me. A funny memory I have of that time is of telling my siblings in English that I would only speak English with them, much to their amusement. Within just a few short years, I reached native level in English and was indistinguishable from my peers. This was a really satisfying experience, and little did I know that it would later influence my dark and perilous descent into the world of language learning. For me, learning English was a highly conscious activity. I could have chose to speak Portuguese with my siblings, I could’ve broken my immersion from time to time, but perhaps to a fault, I chose not to. I chose immersion from my earliest days.

After a probably pretty normal childhood considering the circumstances, I would go on to graduate high school and enter university in 2007. I forget exactly what the trigger was, but around this time, I happened to start thinking about how I used to speak Portuguese as a native language. It seemed like a distant dream, and save the ability to say “hello” and a few random words I had 0 Portuguese ability. One could say that I had fallen below trash tier into the "I can’t speak a single sentence in my “native language”, and literally don't understand anything" tier. 

The Journey Begins

I always knew that something had to be done about this and I had put it off for long enough. I was in a crisis, my bilingual status had to be restored. Since my native language was originally Portuguese, I naturally and without hesitation, decided that the only logical choice was to begin learning Japanese as soon as possible. I had also considered Arabic at first, but Japanese won out in the end. I began to look into Japanese and after some blundering and stumbling around with the HIRAGANERS and KATAKINIS, I quickly remembered that I had done this before with English. I realized that conventional language learning wisdom was wrong at best, and possibly damaging at worst.  

I then researched language learning for 6 months or something. I wish I could say I remembered exactly how long I did it, but I am a 30 year old lard at this point and my thin モテ期(google it) 20s when this took place are far behind me now. To get back on topic, I soon started reading about Krashen's input HYPEpothesis, and realized that he was pretty damn on point in many regards. Though I, unlike Krashen, feel that immersing in incomprehensible input also plays a major role in the language learning process, I do largely agree with what he has to say. I later found AJATT when searching for input hypothesis content that related to Japanese. I also discovered other successful language learners, such as Steve Kaufman and Luca Lampariello and took what I could from them as well.

With a combination of these resources and the trusty SRS “Anki”, I was ready, my descent into language learning nerdom lay before me. I “knew” native level was achievable and I knew I could learn languages because of my experience with English. Naturally at this point, I felt so confident that I decided to forego learning Japanese, in favor of learning Japanese and Chinese. I quickly used the Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Hanzi series to acquire “absolute mastery” of the fabled oriental characters. This left me far from satisfied however. I knew that in order to truly achieve the immersion environment I craved, I needed to get up and move, and so, I moved to Shanghai. 

CHINA AND BEYOND!

WTF! Shanghai in 2009 was a shock to the senses to say the least! From the pleasant smell of the chamber pots being haphazardly dumped into drains on the streets, to the glory of the downtown high-rises. Shanghai was the place to be in 2009. Knowing all of the endless adventure that awaited me right outside the doors of my humble abode, I preceded to immediately hole myself inside and begin immersing; for fluency awaited. The grind was real but so was the progress. Eventually, and perhaps admittedly later than it would take one with greater intellect. I realized that focusing on one language first was probably best. Since I was in China, the choice was really easy. There was really only one logical choice and that was Japanese. 

I was in China for a bit over a year, spending the last 3 months there in Hong Kong; my absolute favorite city in the world to this very day.  Then I moved back to the States for a year and continued University. After a year in the states, I was off to Japan to finish my Japanese learning journey in the land of the rising sun.

JAPAN AND FLUENCY AT LAST!

Until reaching Japan I had largely avoided outputting, but the move to Japan signaled the start of the age of output. Arriving at Narita Airport near Tokyo I was almost immediately stopped by a security guard for both being foreign and decently brown. The security guard looked at me and spoke Japanese, I understood him perfectly and replied in what I could only assume was impeccable Japanese. This pleased him so he proceeded to ask me some questions about my luggage and the purpose of my visit. I again replied in probably the most fluent Japanese ever spoken to date, at this point he asked me “So how much time have you spent in Japan” and I replied again, in PERFECT Japanese “Like 10 minutes bro...”, the look on his face said it all, my hard work had paid off, I was fluent. It felt absolutely great and I recalled some previous breakthroughs I had had when learning English. At the same time though, I felt the fangs of the the language learning succubus sink deeper into my veins.

I spent the next year in Japan, and greatly improved my Japanese. Towards the end of my stay I was beginning to read some of the late 19th century reformation literature that had at least partially influenced my choice in learning Japanese from the beginning. It was a truly grand age and I probably could have enjoyed it for many years to come, but almost as if the succubus was teasing me, she presented an opportunity to go work in China. The terms were almost too sweet, decent pay, a free apartment, and only 3 days of work per week. One might say they were the perfect conditions for hardcore language learning.  The succubus’s magic was too strong, and I could not resist it. The choice was clear, I needed to go to China, there was unfinished business to attend to.

China, Brazil and Where I Am Now

And so, I went back to China and ended up spending 2 and a half years there, and achieved fluency in Chinese. I also spent a considerable amount of time playing around in half a dozen different languages, learning the basics of each. I taught myself to read Korean, German, Arabic, Latvian and several other languages to a basic level. This was all just out of my sheer curiosity about how different languages are structured. Again, almost as if I was incapable of just learning to enjoy my hard work, shortly after gaining fluency in Chinese I decided to move to Brazil. 

I went to Brazil for quite a few reasons. I wanted to reconnect with family, experience the country as an adult, and start my own immersion-based language learning school. I studied Portuguese hardcore for a month before leaving China and for another two months after arriving in Brazil. Within just those 3 months I achieved a level of fluency comparable with close to 2 years of study in an Asian language. This experience with Portuguese really helped me understand the power of immersion when applied to a language with similar vocabulary to a language one already knows. I was able to learn vocabulary easily through immersion alone. Which seems to be due to how similar the vocabulary and its usage is to that of English’s. 

After those three months, I stopped studying Portuguese with an SRS and only studied through limited immersion and through interaction with the locals and  with my family. I found that I could continue to improve even with that modest regiment. I spent the rest of my free time studying Chinese because I knew there was still a lot of progress that could be made. Life was going really well on the language learning front but financially, conditions soon deteriorated.  My school had at first found great success, and the future had looked really bright. However, due to mass corruption, both in the region and the country as a whole, the local economy collapsed. The exchange rate tripled within a matter of months, and many of the companies where my students worked shutdown. In fact, over 80% of my students lost their jobs within a 2 month period. It was time to move on, and after preparing for some time I headed back to the States.

Going Home to Code

I had always been fascinated by code and originally had plans to go into the field. In fact, on several occasion I actually began teaching myself code at the same time as studying languages. Unfortunately this always led to conflict and due to my unnatural obsession, language learning always won out. It was in Brazil in 2015 though that I finally realized language learning was really great and I was really interested in it, but with it alone I could never really do a lot of the things that I wanted to do. I had toiled learning languages with ineffective tools for years and I had compromised on my school’s structure and curriculum all due to my inability to build my own tools.  My obsession for one passion kept me from following a new path in another. 

I eventually “red pilled” myself on this fact and kicked the language learning demons aside. Enough was enough. I decided to go all in on code and used my language learning strategies to learn code. Long story short (I will cover my code learning journey in future YouTube videos) it went really well in general and was a really refreshing and new experience. Today although I am probably still far from native level in code I am comfortably fluent. I feel I have the capabilities now to really begin to contribute to the immersion learning community and help popularize this learning approach. Thanks for reading this far, I hope you will consider supporting me. Sincere thanks!