Reading Japanese has allowed me to feel like a curious child in elementary school again

Studying Japanese has been a restorative, daily joy of mine. Just wanted to share this little observation in case it helps motivate anyone. Because I have a busy job as a software developer in the US, I can only study 2-3 hours a day. Studying Japanese makes me feel like I have a daily routine again, with little wins, just like I did when I was in elementary school.

In elementary school, when I first made the jump from picture books to novels, in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grade – I recall vividly not knowing what words meant, and getting frustrated when I couldn’t understand a sentence, but then over time coming back to the sentence, and saying, wow I got it! I remember reading A Ring of Endless Light in 5th grade, and thinking wow – I don’t understand anything!!!, but just the fact that I finished it, made me proud of myself.

I’m 30-ish, and I first started learning Japanese in ninth grade when I printed out these hiragana and katakana sheets in this binder. At the time I gave up because the kanji was too hard and I was too busy with school. Then I took two years of Japanese in college. I wish I had taken 4. For about 8 years, because of work, I took a break from all language study. Then I just came back to it 6 months ago with Duolingo.

Now, I look forward to the weekends when I can study all day long in bed using the different apps I have, like Skritter, Kanshudo, Duolingo, and Satori Reader. I also play a bunch of games on the Nintendo Switch in Japanese, like Persona 5, Yokai Watch, Pokemon, and a bunch of Kanji games. I make a game out of using the Japanese only dictionary, to take a compound, and read the definition in Japanese, and try to guess the english translation. It’s surprisingly fun.

Now, I just bought some books off Amazon in Japanese from Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami. For the first time, I am reading novels in Japanese – it’s hard, I don’t understand everything, and I know… that it will be months before I can. Learning Japanese really makes me feel like I’m learning something novel – something from scratch, because the form of thinking is so different.

I feel like a kid again because once I was able to take a leap into native materials, anime and video games (which is something I ALWAYS, ALWAYS wanted to do as a teenager), my brain is changing, I can understand new ways of thinking, it’s like I’m in the *know,* like I get what’s going on, I can access content I want immediately, I don’t have to wait for a translation into English, which might never come.

And Kanji is just so cool. It’s not always logical but when it is it’s just so mysterious. Part of it is how clever ideas are constructed from the radicals, and how gamified the learning has become, and how successful I feel when I study a compound and can recognize it in game dialogue.

It’s truly a psychologically invigorating experience. More so than French, which I’m an intermediate speaker in. There’s no language like Japanese, where the language learning itself is so systematic and modular. I would say from Persona 5 alone I record 100 hours. Which means I’ve probably spent almost 2000 hours learning Japanese. It’s crazy but I don’t want to stop, it’s almost addicting, I wonder what being almost a native speaker will feel like? But I know that when I become fluent – I imagine it will feel like I forget that I’m speaking English or Japanese, it just becomes second nature.