INTERVIEW/ Ananya Donapati: How to absorb language like a baby and speak like a native

Asahi Shimbun

15 hours ago

U.S. influencer Ananya Donapati shares useful tips on learning English and Japanese with her 700,000 followers on social media.
Some of the headlines she has used include 'English words that you could use to beat native speakers hollow,' and 'five essential Japanese words you should know.'
Donapati, 25, was self-taught and had never studied in Japan before she passed the most difficult N1 level in the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test.
In a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Donapati shared her top tips for learning Japanese, which could also be useful for learners of other languages.
Excerpts of the interview follow:
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Question: Your Japanese is easy to follow and sounds very natural. Could you introduce yourself briefly?
Donapati: I was born in India and I moved to the United States shortly afterward for my parents' jobs.
I grew up in Silicon Valley in California. After I graduated from university, I worked in marketing at Amazon for a year and a half. I moved to Japan in 2023 and worked for an investment startup before I launched my own Japanese language learning support website in June last year.
MANGA BORROWED FROM A FRIEND
Q: When did you first encounter Japanese culture?
A: It all started with 'Alice in the Country of Hearts,' a romance adventure manga, which a friend loaned me to read in the fifth grade, describing it as fun.
I loved drawing at the time. The art style, which was so different from American comics, and the heavy use of screentone shading felt really novel to me.
I wanted to read other Japanese manga, so I read the English translations of girls' manga that were available at my local libraries.
I went around to about five libraries and borrowed volume after volume. I probably read around 100 manga in my teenage years.
In Japanese manga, the stories are full of scenes where, for example, cicadas sing, a school bell rings or the interior of a house is shown.
I started wanting to see cicadas and see this heater table called a 'kotatsu' someday.
I particularly admired the Japanese high school girls who appeared in manga.
As you read manga, you get to understand Japanese culture. I came to think: 'Japan looks so fun. I want to learn Japanese.'
I was 12 or 13 when I started studying the language in earnest. I began by downloading every smartphone app for learning Japanese that was available and reading English-language blogs about Japanese.
Q: The English alphabet contains only 26 letters, but Japanese has the hiragana and katakana writing systems alongside kanji, of which native Japanese speakers are said to use around 2,000 characters. Did you find it difficult to study the language?
A: I certainly thought there was a lot to learn, but studying the language was so much fun that it was no burden at all for me.
You could begin with learning at least just hiragana and katakana. The world looks different when you can read the characters to a certain extent.
Hiragana and katakana look lovely, don't they?
When I first saw them, I said to myself: 'Oh, these cute letters are used even by scary people in Japan.'
I wrote hiragana, katakana and various Japanese words on commercially available flash cards to memorize them.
I also often read English-language blogs that explained with illustrations how you can memorize Japanese characters.
I was 14 and had no money at the time, so all the learning methods I have just described are free.
PRACTICAL TRAINING ON LIVE BROADCAST
Q: I think Japanese grammar is no less difficult. How did you study it?
A: I grasped the rough structure of grammar by reading blogs that explain it in English for free. And I composed sentence after practical sentence to consolidate what I had learned. Niconico Live (an online service that allows anyone to set up his or her own channel and livestream imagery) proved useful.
I sometimes found myself the only viewer in a channel where an ordinary person was livestreaming his or her daily life. In these cases, I had to reply promptly to the host who talked to me via chat.
I had to reply fast enough to establish a conversation, so that was good training to make many practical sentences.
I also used a social media service that allows would-be language learners to sign up and make video calls to people of any country free of charge. I used the platform to talk to Japanese people in both English and Japanese and asked them to correct my Japanese text.
In addition, I also watched Japanese dramas online and orally repeated the same words that characters in the dramas were saying. That's what you call 'shadowing' these days.
ABSORBING LANGUAGE LIKE A BABY
Q: So, you mastered Japanese by continually being exposed to it and having fun, right?
A: Yes. I wanted to absorb things, like a baby, from what people around me were saying, rather than using teaching materials to study. I longed to be like Japanese high school girls and wanted to be able to talk the way they do.
Studying with textbooks alone was not enough to learn to speak naturally.
Q: How do you keep yourself motivated to continue studying?
A: I used to keep telling myself, even when I was, for example, taking a shower: 'I love Japan. I will achieve something in Japan. I will master Japanese.'
I was in my junior year of high school when I first visited Japan and stayed in the home of a local family. That also provided a support for me to keep myself motivated.
Q: You graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, before you landed a job with Amazon, but you made the bold decision to quit the job after a year and a half and move to Japan. Could you elaborate?
A: I aspired, even before I entered university, to do business related to both Japan and the United States.
I joined Amazon to learn the basics of business. At Amazon, I worked on making online ads, but I found it unlikely for me to be transferred to its Japanese arm, partly because I was new at the company.
I came to feel I was not living my own life, and I developed this desire to be connected with Japan in my work. I took the plunge to quit the company and moved to Japan in the spring of 2023.
My eventual dream is to start my own business. I hope I will someday be doing business that will connect Japan with the United States.
I want to help boost Japan's economy, which is my own way for repaying the favor that Japan has done for me. I am saying this because Japan has been the 'north star' for my life, which means the country has shown me the way I should be going.
Q: What does studying a foreign language mean to you?
A: I wouldn't have come to Japan as I did, and wouldn't have met so many people in Japan, if I hadn't studied Japanese.
Studying a language has the potential to change your life. If you study a language, the culture of the country (where it is spoken) could get into you, which could prompt your character to change. I would recommend it to people who want to change and grow as a person.
(This article is based on an interview by Tatsuya Sato.)