A couple of years ago, I was watching a Morning Musume video and saw lots of strange characters flashing along the screen, along with a bunch of gibberish. And then I thought to myself, “I would like to learn Japanese”. And thus, a goal was set.
Two years later, I am wholly unsatisfied with my progress towards this goal, and I’m not going to lie, I’ve been seriously thinking about quitting. It’s still something I want to do so the odds are that I won’t, but it is currently a miserable process for me and I am pretty sure I’m doing something entirely wrong.
And I think the first thing I did wrong was to set a goal of learning Japanese. Goals never work.
First of all, it’s an amorphous target. What does it even mean to learn Japanese anyway? Does it mean that I want to become fluent? To what degree of fluency do I want to achieve? Does it just mean that I want to read manga, or be able to hold an intelligent conversation with a Japanese person? The honest truth is that I don’t know. I don’t know why I set that goal other than because it seemed an interesting thing to do, I don’t have a “definition of done”, nor is there a sensible one that is even possible, and I have no idea what the correct way to even achieve this goal is. So I throw a lot of money at the goal, and make some progress, but at the end of the day I’m entirely unsatisfied – both with myself and with the progress towards the goal.
I have a goal, and I have no system for getting there.
This is complicated by the fact that learning a language is not something that you can realistically achieve by learning. I mean, you can learn vocabulary, and grammar, and all that stuff, and by learning you can get to the point where you can make sense of what something is saying, and you can say something sensible as well, but it requires a lot of thought, and by learning, it will always require a lot of thought. Language is not an academic exercise – or at least the fluent execution of a language is not an academic exercise. You need to get to the point where something just feels wrong, and that is something that cannot be learned.
So it is completely clear to me now that I am approaching this in entirely the wrong way. I am trying to learn a language, when learning a language is essentially impossible. I set a goal for myself that I cannot reach, and I failed to create a system for making progress towards that goal that gives me any kind of sense of accomplishment.
Put another way, if I continue just learning for the sake of learning, I may as well stop now, because I’ve already failed.
I must revisit my original motivation for setting this goal, I must unset the goal, and I must instead replace it with a system that will ultimately have a similar result.