Hello.
This short post will be about …anyone might want to study Japanese – in the beginning. And then perhaps more towards the end of it all I will probably ramble about …to study Japanese.

Now, I might have thought it would be a good idea to start off with some proverbial statements in the like of “It’ll make your life better” or “oooh, the connections you’ll make with people!”. We all know that “being fluent” would be great. But what I think we need is something more personal than that.

I can’t just receive a random reason and expect to take it as my own and feel passionate about it. That has to come from me not some other guy. Initiation and maintenance of the process must come with meaning from within. Otherwise it will become meaningless within a few hours or maybe last a few weeks, but before too long it will fade and the focus will go.

Answering questions other than “why do I want to do this?” becomes less important until this is answered properly. For me the process took about 3 years, but there is little doubt in my mind that it can be done a lot faster than that with a properly trained memory.

It was a huge recent revelation of mine that this thing we take for granted each day “memory”, can be honed to be phenomenally better than it already is. Something else that causes difficulties is “limiting beliefs”, typically with regard to one’s own ability when it comes to language learning. I might think that I am just no good with languages, but the truth is simply “I really have trouble with is remembering stuff”.

Humans are geared for language, and if you bang information at your brain often enough you will be sure as a 1 year old child banging a shape into the side of a shape sorter that eventually she will get the shape into the box. If you have ever seen one of those super memory guys on TV manage to memorize an entire deck of cards in just 3 minutes. (the truth is they have more time than 3 minutes though, because he also have the time when they are “looking” at the deck for the first time, that’s from the Derren Brown audio books

This might lead a lot of people to the conclusion that he is simply “gifted”, but that simply isn’t true. All he has done is learn a technique and get good at it. True he is good, but only like a footballer passing a ball successfully to another player. They practiced it and eventually could do it better than most people can.

So as with other skills, if you just practice then you will eventually be very “practiced” with it.