about

I'm Cade Bushnell, or Bu-sensei, as I'm known by my students. I'm originally from the United States, but I've been living in Japan for many years, and have been teaching Japanese to foreign students at a Japanese university for many years as well. The Japanese language has been a big part of my daily life since the late 1990s. I can also communicate in Japanese sign language (JSL), and speak Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. I learned (and am still learning) these languages through listening, reading, and watching (in the case of JSL) while living here in Japan. More recently I have been working on Hungarian (on hold for now), Toki Pona, Tagalog (You could say na Tagalog ko ay medyo Taglish talaga, pero okay lang. Gusto ko mag-return sa mag-aral ulit ng Tagalog someday), and now Vietnamese — again all through listening and reading! 

I have been documenting my process of acquiring Vietnamese with my collaborator and co-researcher HERE. 

I'm so excited that you are interested in really learning Japanese! You've come to the right place.

Although a big part of my job is Japanese language education, I actually don't like to say that I "teach" Japanese. Nobody can "teach" you a language. You can be taught ABOUT a language, but that doesn't make you able to understand and use the language. 

Since I don't "teach" Japanese, the instructional goals I have are probably quite different from other educators. Some typical goals for others might be something like: "Memorize X number of vocabulary or Kanji during the semester," or "finish lesson/unit/section Y in textbook Z," etcetera. My instructional goals are as follows:

Help my students

1. Capture a vision of who they are and what they can become

2. Take responsibility for their own learning

3. Learn effectively

4. Get things done

In other words, my goal is not to teach information that will show up on a test, that will never be really usable to the student, and that will most likely be forgotten. My goal is to guide students to become independent learners. If you really want to be able to understand and use a language, you have to make it yours through experience. It's not something that can be taught as information or concepts, like math or biology. I help people learn Japanese naturally by listening to and reading stories. 

Why am I using stories to help people learn Japanese? There are actually a lot of good reasons backed by research on how we learn languages. Below, I'll briefly share two of them. If you are interested in learning more about the research, HERE and HERE are good places to start.

The first reason is that stories have a very strong positive effect on our memory. Simply put, it is much easier for us to remember information that comes to us in the form of a story rather than as a list or some other form. Not only is it easier for us to encode into our memory, but it is also much easier for us to recall, or use the information. I'll bet everyone reading this can remember stories you heard as a child even though it may be many years since you have last heard the story. And, I'll bet that you could even TELL those stories you heard as a child. On the other hand, I'm quite sure that most of us would find it very difficult to remember the items we had on our grocery shopping list from two weeks ago! Stories are powerful ways to learn new information.

The second reason to use stories to learn language is that research suggests that there is an important difference between learning a language through "study" (think grammar textbooks and flashcards) and acquiring a language through meaningful experiences. This is probably why a lot of students have a difficultly actually understanding and using "real" language even though they have studied and done well in classes. Acquiring a language actually is not about learning or memorizing bits of information through study, like grammar points or vocabulary items. It is more about becoming very familiar and friendly with the language through experiences we have in our lives. It is through such lived, multimodal (i.e., sight, sound, smell, taste, emotion, etc.) experience that our brains are stimulated to build the complex and interwoven neural networks that allow us to use language naturally, instantly, and without consciously thinking about it. I like to call this multimodal experience "thick input," a term inspired by the "thick description" of anthropology. The fact that native speakers acquire their language through such thick input may be why they can use the language automatically and naturally. Not because they have practiced using the language, like practicing the piano or something (think about it, did you do that when you learned your first language?), but because the language and the things they have experienced in their lives are bound together inseparably. The language is a part of our lived experience. It is connected to, embedded within, and deeply interpenetrates our experiences. This means that when a native speaker greets someone in Japanese, for example, they are not thinking of vocabulary and grammar and rules for using polite language, but rather they are acting intuitively based on scenes they have experienced and witnessed countless times before. Feel, don't think, as the saying goes. This kind of ability cannot be learned through studying rules or even rehearsing example sentences on flashcards. Check out a compelling example HERE. At the time of the video, the student had been studying French for 3 years using traditional study methods, and Spanish for 2 years using all comprehensible input-based methods. Which way is more effective AND efficient?

Stay with me, I'm still on the second reason. This is where stories come in. The fact is that many of us are not able to experience the language we want to learn as part of our lives in the same way native speakers do. We don't have the opportunity to grow up in an environment where the language is used all around us, and where we can see first hand how people use the language to do things in daily life. In other words, we often cannot obtain thick input through lived experience in our target language. Even if we are fortunate enough to live in an environment where our target language is spoken, adult foreign learners will typically not be given easy access to authentic, native situations; in Japan, at least, foreigners may be perpetually treated as "guests." But, and here is the awesome part, we CAN listen to and read stories that describe all kinds of "experiences," just like is depicted in the painting by the famous American illustrator Norman Rockwell, below. 

While having vicarious experiences through stories is obviously not the same thing as really experiencing for ourselves firsthand, researchers think that, for the most part, our brains do not distinguish between a real experience that we actually have and a vicarious experience that we read, are told about, or imagine (here is one example). What this means is that stories may provide us with a way to vicariously experience life through another language. And that could lead to real ability in the language, like native speakers develop. You wouldn't find yourself trying to translate from your native language into Japanese, because you wouldn’t be thinking in your native language, and you wouldn't worry about vocabulary items and grammar points because you wouldn't even be conscious of them. You would be thinking in Japanese that is bound up and packaged in life experiences. Maybe this second reason is a little hard to grasp, but it is an important one, and in means that using stories to learn Japanese is likely one of the best things you can do if you really want to develop a true ability to understand and use Japanese naturally, and without having to think about it or translate in your head.