Neocities.org

Japanese was too tough for me, and I'm coming up on 5 years in Japan. Kudos to anyone who can keep up with the rough grind.

Lots of good general insights about language learning here. One thing I find strange about Japanese learning is how "communal" it seems to be. There are thousands of little groups on the internet devoted to Japanese, and every day someone new pops in to announce they started learning it, asking questions that have been asked a million times, like "what manga are good for beginning Japanese learners?"

I guess it sounds like I’m mocking people by phrasing it this way. It’s just so different from how I learned Chinese, which was quite a solitary experience. Even now, whenever I want to talk in English about Chinese stuff that I find fascinating, I always feel like the only other people who care are a handful of Chinese Americans. Other sorts of people who I feel should be interested aren’t at all.

This ends up being unhealthy for me, because my contrarian inclinations cause me to go from just talking about Chinese stuff I like to becoming a full on China apologist, which is of course a completely fruitless endeavor from every perspective imaginable.

i think getting too involved in the "communities" is another potential pitfall... you might find yourself spending all your time chatting in english about learning japanese in some discord server instead of actually learning it