This was really uplifting to read! I’m also really scared of failure and usually want to reach a certain level of competence or confidence in my skills before using them, but reading what you wrote helped me realize again how failure is a crucial part of the learning process. It’s even better if you recognize your own mistakes, because it’s also a great sign of growth!
Also, I just wanted to say that you write beautifully and very encouragingly, and I’d never have thought English was your second language if you hadn’t said so yourself. Honestly, your sentence structures are really masterful and your language use is so descriptive, it feels like it belongs in a classical novel or something!! If you ever write a book just let me know, I’ll buy a hundred copies and give them as presents to people I really like so they can enjoy reading them as much as I did this.
This gets me thinking: are there limits to gamification? The whole deal with, say, the Duolingo approach, is that you progress through short, simple levels doing different things with all the green checkmarks, sound effects, and CSS confetti that gives instant gratification, but what happens when that starts to wear off? I know from personal experience that Duolingo specifically hasn’t kept me engaged for more than a few weeks at a time. Heck, I’ve only been doing Wanikani for a week now; there’s still a chance that things don’t work out (although I hope that motivation continues).
Re: online language learning, what would be other ways to systematically address motivation issues in the long term?
Disclaimer: I’m typing this in the middle of my Microeconomics class so this might not be articulated exactly the way I want it
I’d say…celebrating the little improvements. Couple days ago I was watching some anime (Yakusoku no Neverland, I think) and I recognized few words that I had learn here and that gave me a feeling of “heck yhe, it’s working”.
I think I’ve only ever managed to stick with Duolingo for about 2 weeks, but with WK I had a streak of 455 days before I broke it a few months ago. And I will admit that I’m struggling to get through WK right now (I even reset 10 levels back), but I’ve kept studying Japanese on a daily basis thanks to resources and habits that branched out from using WK.
So replying to your question about gamification, yes, it’s had a limit for me, but it has been key to incorporating Japanese into my routine, so I consider that as an achievement. In the beginning I found motivation in being able to recognize in the wild words that I had just learned, now I find it in being able to read sentences or even whole manga volumes with little dictionary help.
But I knew from the beginning that learning Japanese would be a life-long hobby. After all, I’ve been learning English for almost 20 years now and every day I still discover something I didn’t know.
I know that I’m gonna get flak for this but the notion that Japanese is “nonsensical” and “doesn’t make sense” is just plain racism, positing English as the norm and as “a language that makes sense” (it REALLY DOESN’T if you stop to think about it for a couple of seconds) and assuming that any language concept that doesn’t exist in English is nonsense.
Pretty much this. I’ve been in contact with the English language since I was around 4 years old. Many of the things people complain about I don’t usually notice. But recently I started reflecting on how bad the English language is as a point of reference. A lot of it doesn’t make sense and is simply assumed.
I can’t say whether there is a defeatist approach to learning Japanese or not. Many of my friends think it’s cool (as in, かっこいい kind of cool), but also that it’s too hard and the only phrases they ever picked up are obviously from anime. I started with anime in my teens (Slayers, Yaiba, etc.) and made several meek attempts to learn Japanese until roughly last year when I took a N5 course and kept on going daily since then. My friends support me even though it’s probably annoying hearing about it so often ^^".
I’m still at roughly N5 now and it’s a long way up, but I think it’s a beautiful language so I really want to make it to the top
Language being hard because of age is complete nonsense. These things depend on your lifestyle waaay more than your age. Running regularly or smoking a pack of cigarettes daily for years will be more of a factor than being 40 or 30 for someone who wants to run several kilometers. If your body stops working out it loses shape. Same for the brain. If you stop learning you start losing your ability to learn. And then it takes time to get it back just like your physical shape. I’m currently almost 35 and started learning kanji half a year ago. I have spent quite some tome learning foreign languages since I finished uni, and I can tell you that now my head works better than ever before.
super accurate description. and yet i think the language community really needs those “not like other girls” learners. because otherwise it would be swarmed with the duolingo types, and almost no one would know how to seriously get good at the language.
This was the one I kind of identified with. I hope I’m typically not that blunt about it, but I do admit that I get that gut feeling and I think it’s mostly for this reason:
I myself overestimated how little I’d have to study in order to get to a point where I could just comfortably expose myself to Japanese.
But as for your other points I’ve always really enjoyed learning it and never felt it an annoyance or a burden. The great differences in how the grammar works is probably what I find most cool about it and that’s a big part of what makes it such a fun language to study.
Seems a bit hypocritical to come from English and claim Japanese grammar makes no sense TBH
