How to overcome the existential dread of learning Japanese?

It may seem harsh but I doubt it was said in mean manner, obviously only yourself know what a proper goal is but in same time doing something for the sake of doing and not setting yourself any reasonable, achievable target yield very little to almost no result

but why is that “proper”?
I do agree that’s a good idea, it’s the “proper” part that’s got me confused.

I agree. I don’t think they were trying to be mean, nothing that they said sounds mean to me. :blush:

Learning a language is a lifelong process. Try to take joy in the progress you can see, and keep going.

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First, I totally understand the feeling. I often contemplate about my Japanese studying and sometimes also have the feeling of “wow I really don’t know much, huh.”

HOWEVER, to echo a lot of the thoughts here, having a goal can really ease that worry. I also want to add, having a goal and having easy methods to track that goal can ease the worry. Just having a goal, for me at least, doesn’t work. WaniKani makes it pretty easy to track progress, but you can extend some of it’s methods to your studying in other places. For example, since I’m a very visual and physical person, when I track the kanji I can read AND write, I literally write them out on a piece of paper.

Also, you could try teaching what you know to someone else, or at least telling someone else what you know. A friend, your parents, anyone who would be willing to listen. I find that if you can explain what you know to someone else or try and teach them what you know, that’s when you know you know it. If you can’t, you go back, figure out exactly what you don’t know, and try again. At least for me, I feel much better about my progress or how much I do know afterwards.

Hope any of that helps! Good luck and I hope you find some advice in this thread that speaks to you :slight_smile:

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Am 24 now and started at 22. Keep all of your old notebooks. Write lines and lines and lines of example sentences until the grammar is drilled into your head. Then put that filled up notebook in a drawer and look at it a year later. Then two years later. If you ever feel like you haven’t made any progress, you will be stunned.

The second big thing is just immersing yourself in Japanese for as many hours of the day as possible. I’m biased because I live here, but the more you listen to Japanese, the better you can pick up flow and sentence structures that you wont find in a textbook. Memorize the lyrics to songs that you like, stick labels on random objects around your house until you can remember them. I did these things when I first moved here (I knew absolutely no Japanese) and now I’ll be doing the N3 in July with the eventual goal of achieving N2 by 2021. I thought I was inherently stupid and incapable of doing this, but if you just grind and slug through it, you’ll make progress, guaranteed. Not as fast as you’d like to, but progress nonetheless.

Don’t know if you’re just playing coy or not but I’ll bite.

The less arbitrary your objective is the more clear-cut success or failure is. If you have a vague goal like ‘get good at Japanese’ then there’s never a point where you can feel like you succeeded or failed. There’s only a point where you can arbitrarily say, “Okay, I guess that’s good enough.” A ‘real’ goal has a concrete starting point and ending point. Setting a time limit tells you whether or not your day to day activities are sufficient for reaching your goal. Setting a measurable goal gives you an indicator as to whether or not your goal is realistic given the methods your using.

As to what’s ‘proper,’ that’s entirely semantics. I would consider a proper goal one that can be reached, and one which you would know whether or not you reached. “Get good at Japanese” is not a ‘proper’ goal because ‘good’ doesn’t necessarily mean anything - are you good now? will you be good after you pass JLPT N5? ‘Finish the core 6k and read a book by Haruki Murakami’ is a proper goal because it has beginning and an end. There are only two possible results, success or failure. You either accomplished those two items or you didn’t.

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Only one of those is a problem.

I started learning Japanese last year, the first language I’ve ever tried to learn, - at the age of fifty one.

I’m not a natural language learner, very little sticks to this old shrivelled brain of mine, but with WK, lots of reading (Yotsuba mostly!) and plenty of hard work, I’m making progress.

Your age, @NervousJ, is one of your main advantages, all you need do is find the motivation to study really hard.

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Once you get over the mental hurdles of knowing that the language shares little in common with the logic of your native one (provided it’s English), and that you’ll mess up a lot, it’s smooth sailing. I mean it’s smooth sailing in terms of being able to study and improve. You’ll still mess up a lot.

Learning language is shit-hard and yet people of all ages do it out of either interest or necessity all the time. It’s just a race to make the most mistakes, and to learn from them the best you can. Comprehension and communication will be hard-earned, but that’s what makes them satisfying.

Thank you for your answer. I had just been thinking about some stuff, so that comment drew my attention.

@Raionus explained it better than I could, but a proper goal should have a start and an end, and when you finish it you make a new one. Goals are the means by which you can fulfil your dreams and aspirations.

As an example, maybe once a week or so I’ll meet a Japanese person who tells me that their lifelong dream is to ‘speak English’ and they’ve been trying to learn for 5, 10, 25 (in one case 65) years but it’s too hard and they can’t do it. What I usually do is ask them to do a self introduction in English. After they do that, I’ll say something like “Great, you did it!” and they’ll object and say what it is they really want to do (like visit Canada or read a Beatrix Potter book), and at that point we can start thinking about what they should do for that.

A dream without goals is unachievable, and you probably won’t achieve your goals unless you think about how you’re going to do it.

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You didn’t start too late. You can learn every language at any age if you are motivated. You can even learn a native pronunciation if you want. You do not learn it as naturally as a child but it’s always possible if you try hard.

I’m 46 (the oldest here?!:smile:). I started learning Japanese last summer for a Haiku art project. WaniKani a bit later about November because it was clear very soon that you cannot make a decent progress without reading properly. Because of WK I can suddenly read and understand a lot of words I have never seen before although I’m only level 18. It motivates me a lot! I was really surprised, WK works! So don’t give up even it’s sometimes hard to keep on going.

There was an age poll a while back if anyone is interested:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/poll-how-old-is-everyone/21600

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I won’t read all the answers, sorry for if someone said that.
But quality of practice is the most important thing. If you do what you always do you get what you always get. You always need to position yourself a little out of comfort zone, and do something slightly harder.

And you always need to find a balance between theory and practice. You can’t learn by just theory, you can’t learn a language by just doing textbooks. You need to immerse yourself, read, listen, understand. But you need that theory to guide your practice.

Basically is this:
1 - Try to learn a new concept.
2 - Practice that concept until you are feeling concept.
3 - Repeat.

A practical example: Learn some basic grammar and vocabulary (with something like Genki or Lingodeer), then try to read a basic manga, make sentence cards for the words that you don’t know by heart and put them on anki.

Keep doing this until you can read basic mangas, after that, step up to a harder thing.

Languages take a long time, especially when it’s one that’s so drastically different than your own. They take dedication, but setbacks shouldn’t stop you either-- just like any other hobby. If you get sick or injured and have to pause for a few months, then you’d just start again when you can.

Japanese is (going to be) my third language. The second I learned through an intense language course through my job. But what helped me out a lot was finding TV shows that I could stand, which eventually got me good enough to understand songs, and then radio shows. It helped in Korean that a lot of shows have something like captions on the screen, showing me what the words looked like, in case I misheard. I think Japanese shows do a similar thing. The problem I’m having now is that I’m not interested in anime (not that I’ve tried many), and I don’t know how to find good Japanese shows (i.e. not cheesy dramas). Anyway, this method might not be the best for you, but I would try it. I gave this advice to a lot of my co-workers learning Korean, and none of them ever took it, but I ended up with consistently good scores each year, while a lot of them struggled.

And finally, why would you think 24 is too late? Do you really think every bi-/multi-lingual person in the world knew their second language before 24? Even 60 is not too late. It’d just be much slower at that age, but still worth it, I think.

A lot of this anxiety comes from not having a specific goal and a even more specific plan. What helped me was shooting for the JLPT. With a very clear goal to aim for, the pestering uncertainties of how I’ll manage to achieve my goals went away, because now I have a real structure in my studies (rather than something too broad and unspecific like “I want to be able to read Japanese”). So for now, only worry about passing the n5.

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Probably you should make sure you are having fun learning right now, and enjoying learning japanese. The journey is long you know.

I’m sure the end goal that brought you into japanese in the first place its the most fun you can think of, but the whole process it’s fill with little milestones that you can enjoy as well. First of all try to immerse yourself as soon as possible , so every effort you make when studying has a valuable meaning when exposed to actual japanese content.

Watch a show… take the english out from time to time… oh… you catch a phrase, maybe a couple… maybe english its not that necessary after all. Too dificcult?, change the show… an easier one. Too hard still? Read a book… a manga perhaps, よつばと! maybe… Not quite there yet?.. a graded reader perhaps (I can tell from experience that with 500 vocab and the grammar contained in the first half of Genki one you’ll be able to read the Level 0 of those).

Anyway I hope you catch the idea, seek for these little pleasurable activities you unlock after some studying. Make yourself those material perhaps. You can pick the very first 5’ of your favorite show, maybe look for it in animelon… and work your way (assisted with the website in this case) too understanding, even if only 5’… it will be highly rewarding.

Fun with the language won’t come as a package in the mail one day, so don’t expect sudden change in your state of mind.
Reaching level 60 in WK or JLPT 1 it’s not any measure of enjoyment or guarantee you’ll enjoy japanese any bit more, so don’t expect that to happen for trying to have some fun.

And if you can’t find enjoyment with any activity now, or after being done with the very basics (I mean like 500 words, 5-6 chapters of any given grammar book)… then I’m sorry to tell you… It should be fun… you should maybe reconsider why you would wan’t to learn a language like japanese (that is hardly needed by anyone living outside of Japan).

ANyway, my 2 cents on that.

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At 24, car insurance companies still see you as a kid…just saying.

I know someone who is around 5 years older than me (I am 25) who took around 10 years from learning simple phrases such as お元気ですか to passing the N1 level exam. He studied it at university, including a year in Japan, and even lived in Japan working as a JET teacher for two years. He now studies a masters in linguistics with a research focus on how native English speakers remember kanji.
The point is, it takes times, a lot of time.
But it helps if you set yourself up small goals, with a bigger target in mind. Goal by goal you will build up. I have been learning for roughly one year (as I have taken lots of breaks), and even though I am not magically fluent yet, I still appreciate how far I have come.
It also really helps to find Japanese speakers online and converse with them, it forces you to read, think and write in Japanese.
And heaven knows there is no better teacher than experience and practice.

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