I would say my aha moment came after I started dedicating time to actually reading Japanese daily/weekly.
For the longest time, I couldn’t grasp how Japanese sentence structures were formed because it feels so alien in comparison to English.
**Today marks exactly 9 years** since I made my first entry into the world of Japanese according to this old lang-8 post: [https://imgur.com/a/56Fl38p](https://imgur.com/a/56Fl38p)
I would try to directly translate English to Japanese without actually studying how Japanese sentences are formed and structured. I would write an entry and then let a native correct it. Although somewhat useful, this approach is very slow compared to actually reading content in Japanese. Even after writing over 1000 entries, I still wasn’t writing sentences using proper grammar.
I spent the last 12 months reading NHK Easy News -> Regular NHK News -> Random Books. That’s what finally made me grasp sentence making confidently. My only regret is not reading sooner.
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**What about you? What we’re you struggling with and how did you finally overcome it?**
3 comments
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It’s a cycle for me tbh. I have an aha moment and then read something that humbles me and then have an aha moment again. Rinse and repeat for the rest of my life
I didn’t really have an “AHA” like, one second and bam
It’s more like snow melting, first everything is frozen, then patches of grass show up here and there, then the patches get bigger and bigger, and pretty soon the snow is in patches instead of the grass
but if I read something too hard, it’s back to an ice landscape.