Did anyone ever tell you that Japanese homes lack a central heating system?
Standing in my appartment on a cold Chrsitmas morning is like standing in the freezer isle of a supermarket. Although Japan has nothing on Canada’s bitter winters that drop well below freezing, my appartment’s complete lack of insulation makes the rather mild zero degree weather feel a lot colder. To combat the cold I wrap a fleece blanket around myself before calling my parents who were still 12 hours behind enjoying Christmas Eve celebrations.
Nothing in particular stands out from the two hour conversation we have. They are at some friends house enjoying their night while I open some gifts they sent me from Amazon. But afterwards, there is a bit of a lingering thought in the back of my mind.
Why did I come to Japan?
Perhaps it was the fact that I was away from the usual festivities I had become accustomed to, but I suddenly felt a great need to justify my decision to move to Japan outside of “because I wanted to”. There had to be some reason why I went through all this trouble, right? Being away from my family and friends, basically resetting my post-university adult life. There had to be a purpose to all of this. Otherwise, this is just a big working holiday that eventually ends with me being right back where I started.
Then I remembered: Japanese fluencey.
I had gone down a pretty big rabbit hole of Japanese language learners back in October, leading me into the world of AJATT. Basically, a bunch of people really into anime decided they would do nothing but live and breath it for a few years and hope that they would get something out of it. By their accounts, what they ended up getting out of it was a grasp of the language better than most who study through traditional means.
I convinced myself right there and then that this was the goal while working in Japan. All these other people relied entirely on anime and YouTubers to immerse in the language, I had the benefit of living surrounded by it.
I had already started by buying James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, a book dedicated to learning how to write kanji and remembering what they represent. I didn’t quite get how this would help me read kanji (it doesn’t teach you anything about the Japanese readings), but all the other people who I had watched and wanted to follow started off with this book. Who am I to question the method? If it gets me to where I want to be, I’ll do it.
Being almost 1000 kanji in I could see why some people (including those whose advice I was following) don’t really suggest going through this whole book. If you don’t space it out well enough it becomes a complete slog, eating up 2 hours a day easily. I had fallen into the trap everyone warns you about before starting your language journey: don’t burn yourself out.
When you first start up you’re going to be ready to go. Watching everyone else who has already obtained a confident grasp on the language, or even those still studying but are leagues ahead of you will undoubtably fill you with a sense of being left behind. These people have been studying for months, if not years, already. And you ujust started last week. Absent a time machine the only way you can get to where they are is to hit the books and put in twice as much effort as everyone else.
The problem with this mentality is that it’s quite unsustainable. You might be able to keep it going for a bit, months even. I had been going full speed ahead for almost 2 months now, writing kanji in my notbook for hours every day. But now that the holidays had come and my work drive plummeted of a cliff in favor of playing games while under about three layers of covers, each day it was becoming harder and harder to get myself to my desk and start up the kanji review. And the thing about building habits is that momentum is key. Being consistent and keeping your momentum going is far more important than how much you do something in a given day, because all it takes is a few days of saying “not today” before you’ve been saying it for a week.
Right now I was at that point. A few days had passed since I last cracked open the book and my spaced repitition application was starting to pile on the reviews. My momentum was all but halted, because if I wanted to get back into the swing of things now it meant getting through well over 4 hours of backlogged reviews, and I really didn’t feel like sitting down and writting out kanji for 4 hours. If I didn’t start now though that backlog would only continue to grow, and if I thought spending 4 hours was bad how would I feel next week when it ballooned to 6 hours? I need to do something now or this whole thing is over before it ever started.
I did eventually work through that massive backlog of kanji, and afterward learned a valuable lesson. Language learning isn’t a competition, despite how much it can feel like one at times if you ever join a community of Japanese learners. Ultimately, the person who studies for 2 hours a day is going to make it further than someone who studies 4 on and off. Like interest on a mortgage your knowledge is going to compound day after day. Something you learned a week ago might help you learn something new today, while the inconsistent person is trying to catch back up to where they were when they last got in the mood to study.
Now, will I take this lesson to heart and aim to be more consistent in the future?
Probably not.
雲の上 