Comments

You Gain More From The Storm Than Smooth Sailing — 10 Comments

  1. Such an awesome analogy. The timing of this article couldn’t have been better. Today I decided to start reading a kanji-only manga ヨコハマ買い出し紀行, it’s my first time reading without furigana and you know what, it isn’t as scary as I imagined, I mean it’s still a ‘storm’ as I find it really challenging but it’s not harsh enough to sink my ship. I’ve been only studying for ~2 months (I’ve also studied for a 50hours or so last summer) but I know just enough to get through it with a dictionary. Feels awesome to read something intended for native adults. I’m currently averaging ~2 new words/page, but I hope I can get it to 1 new word/5 pages after 14 volumes of intensive reading. The reason I jumped into this storm is because manga/anime is pretty much my main current goal so I thought why wait months until the storm calms down if I can go in now, even though it’s way harder than let’s say studying vocab, I find it way more rewarding.

  2. Couldn’t agree more. It’s those moments of intense struggle (braving the storm) where we learn the most.

  3. Couldn’t have said it any better. This advice is extremely helpful, not only when it comes to learning Japanese, but with anything in general. I find braving the J-J storm to be quite fun by the way.

    • As long as you approach it the right way, it can be a lot of fun. Without the challenge, there is no game.

  4. I’ve been getting too comfortable recently with doing WaniKani and Textfugu. I reached out to a Japanese friend to start weekly conversations via Skype. Very nervous, as I am self-conscious about speaking. So this is the storm I need to face now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>