Learning Japanese: The Journey of Just Doing

The need to feel that one’s performance is perfect from the get-go is a common affliction...but the compulsion to be perfect is the enemy of the progress.

“Where do I start?”  This is a question we often ask ourselves of big projects we want to start.  Learning a language is certainly one of those projects.

In fact, learning a new language is more like a journey.  But it’s not the type of journey that’s like a vacation; it requires a lot of effort and time investment.

I started my journey learning Japanese the first day of college when I dropped the serious chemistry and math classes I signed up for during orientation to instead take elementary Japanese.  I was shocked that my instructors literally started speaking only in Japanese from Day One.  I was challenged by the requirement to learn kana (the basic Japanese alphabet) within one week.

Nonetheless, I had fun in class every single day despite attendance being mandatory Monday through Friday—an experience most students of other majors would understandably shun.  Little did freshman me know that I would ultimately graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Japanese Language.

But this accomplishment and the hundreds of hours of class-time enjoyment did not result in fluency.  After all, learning a language—especially one that is ranked among the hardest for native English speakers to learn—is a journey, and earning my degree was just the beginning.

I always wanted to live in Japan (specifically, Tokyo) for an extended period of time, half of my incentive being becoming fluent.  I relish the densely high people-energy atmosphere that ironically feels built for introverts.  I appreciate the culture of actually efficient public transport and walking over driving.   I value the elevation of communalistic respect that yields a peaceful, clean physical and social environment.  But life is life, and like many Americans, I ended up staying in the U.S.  (California is an amazing place to be anyway!).

Today I have every opportunity in front of me to increase my fluency.  I have the flexibility of working from home.  Almost 15 years later, technology has advanced to make looking up kanji (Chinese characters) incredibly easy.  Even ChatGPT can help train you!  Moreover, I daily interact with someone who speaks Japanese fluently.  And let’s not forget…I also have a degree…in Japanese.

So, what’s holding me back?

I realized it’s the fear of not uttering a perfect sentence.  The need to feel that one’s performance is perfect from the get-go is a common affliction—at least among many Americans.

But the compulsion to be perfect is the enemy of the progress.  Being more focused on the journey toward completion rather than perfection frees up one’s capacity to perform better.

I learned this recently as someone who started to learn how to dance this year.  I got very frustrated with myself when I could not perfectly execute the moves of any one eight-count.  Not only was the fixation on perfect execution holding me back from moving on to learn new ways of moving my body in subsequent eight-counts, but the frustration that came with not being perfect was blocking the energy. I needed to simply advance.

It is the same with learning a language.  You just have to put time into it and “do.”  Perfection is the enemy of “good enough.”  And good enough eventually becomes fluency.

This is my declaration to begin again my journey towards Japanese fluency.  I hereby hold myself accountable and will update readers on my journey here in Ryuall Magazine and through SeiJay Eikaiwa.

At the end of the day, “where do I start?” is not a question we should even ask ourselves before we start a journey towards self-improvement.  Instead, we should embrace the essence of starting by unmindfully just doing!

Indeed the feeling of accomplishment at the end of your journey will make you happier than any vacation because it is a long-lasting self-investment in your mind, body, and soul (I will write another article about what I mean by this).  I hope the chronicles of my journey inspire you to progress on something in which the fear of not being perfect is holding you back from your otherwise wholehearted desire to achieve :)

Join me by commenting below expressing something in which some level of mindfulness is holding you back from from the accomplishments of your dreams.