Feels like that’s the case for me right now. Started learning cause I wanted to be able to read LNs, but now lost interest, but put in way too much time and effort to stop now.
Kinda funny almost, the whole sunk cost fallacy thing.
You start to do something because it interests you,
Lose interest in it later on,
But can’t stop it because you put too much time and effort,
So in the end you are left with a skill you have no interest in ever using.
Makes for a cool party trick tho.
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It will cost even more time and effort to keep studying though, for something you say you don’t really care about anymore.
Therefore, if you quit now you can spend the time on things you care more about.
I wanted to be able to read Manga/ watch Anime and can do with not much problem now. If also I happened to get a job as an English teacher finally that would really make my studying look like a time waste in retrospect.
I still wouldn’t call language learning a wasted effort though. I even want to finally improve my French someday too despite having no intention of turning it to a living. I even wish I had the mental fortitude to learn some crazy stuff like Ithkuil imagine having a diary filled with Ithkuil writing and Ilaksh Glyphs people will think you are some sort of a wizard or something.
Don’t lie to me and tell me you don’t want people to think you’re a wizard.
Do you not enjoy Japanese anymore? If not, I guess it doesn’t make sense to force yourself to do it because of sunk cost fallacy.
If it’s just that LN no longer interest you, maybe you can find some other uses for the language which will motivate you? Other types of media to enjoy? Japanese friends? Job usage?
:C Oh man… I guess.
I started learning because I wanted to go to Japan. Go to school there, go to work there, something. :C but my parents wouldn’t help me and eventually all opportunities were lost or slipped by.
Eventually yes, working on it just became habit. And I guess to a certain extent it is still habit. But I’m happy. I’m starting to watch TV shows in Japanese and play video games in Japanese and that’s good enough for me.
Started learning Japanese so I could read manga without having to wait for a decent translation. Then I started to lose interest in manga and learning japanese as a result of that.
Recently got a girlfriend who’s Japanese and barely knows english so I guess that makes for good motivation.
I think you misunderstood the point of the sink coat fallacy. The point is that if you recognise the effort to finish completing something is more than you stand to gain by doing so, you should abandon it regardless of what you’ve sunk into it, because that’s *irrelevant* compared to remaining cost vs possible gain.
If the only thing keeping you going is the sunk cost, then stop. That will only make things much harder for literally zero extra benefit.
There is no “complete” for a language, and it’s not like you need to keep going to cash out. It’s not sunk cost because your current level is an adequate reward for the time you put in. It’s up to you if you want to keep doing it as a part of your life, or if you’d rather work towards something else.