At Some Point You Are Going To Lose A Battle
Everyone wants to win. All the time, if possible. The good news about learning Japanese is it is filled with victories spread out everywhere. You win all the time. The bad news is that when you lose, you feel you lose big, and it comes at times when you feel like you shouldn’t be losing.
When everyone does Kana Conqueror and Jalup Beginner, for the most part it feels like a series of consecutive wins. I’m not saying that there is no challenge or struggle, but you always feel like you are going straight forward. Continuous wins make you used to winning. But then you get to immersion. Then you get to J-J. Then you try manga. Then you try novels.
You lose all your first battles.
You are overwhelmed and surrounded by the enemy. No matter how much I tell you to be ready for it, you won’t be. When you tell a winner who has been winning nonstop that he’s going to lose now, it’s hard to believe. Maybe you’ll be different. Maybe you won’t lose. You haven’t lost this up till now. Things will work out.
And then you lose.
It’s just hard to prevent. You built up all that experience from fighting in the early worlds. You’d assume when you start the next world you are fully ready for everything. But you aren’t. You may have the abilities to prepare for these new worlds. But battles are different. The strategies you need to use will be different. You’ll face enemies you’ve never seen before and need to develop a new game plan. You can’t prepare yourself for that.
Prepared for defeat
What do you do after that loss?
Get right back up and start training again. Work your strategy to take that loss into account and fight on. You may lose again. But just repeat until you win. You play until your wins overpower your losses. And then your losses start fading away, leaving eventually only wins. That’s the natural progression of how everything will work out for you.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
It’s like playing an RPG, when you fail, sometimes you need to go back and do some level-grinding before moving on again. Losing can also be kind of a level check or even ego check to let you know you need to slow down or change things up or something.
Good point. Losing allows you to reassess your own situation and keep you aware of where you are in the level-grinding > challenge > level-grinding > challenge balance.
Ever since I left the warm hands of Jalup beginner I’ve been losing battles. The first few loses were awful but then you get numb to the losses and start to focus on improving. At the moment, my j-j understanding rate is much much higher than it was when I first began intermediate. It gets better I promise
No one expects the losses, so it catches everyone off guard. But once you gain ground again, you know what to expect.
I’ve been riding a winning streak because now manga are just a breeze to get through and the novels I have chosen recently have also been easy to get through. But looking just at the news headlines on LINE News has made me have to face a weakness: kanji related to news/current events. But since this is something I want to have in my pocket, it’s time I get ready to lose for a little bit. But I know how I want to fight this battle so I know that eventually I will end up the conqueror.
Well said. These losses happen whenever you try a new dungeon. I recently had to learn a bunch of sea transport vocabulary for translation, and I had a few bumps along the way.