What I Needed to Hear as a New Language Student
From the perspective of just having finished my first year of community college learning Japanese
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When I first started on this journey to learning the Japanese language, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was super eager and impatient to just be fluent already, and I did everything I possibly could to race to that perceived finish line.
Welp, I’ve survived an academic year (3 quarters) of Japanese classes, and I have learned a lot of things about myself, my learning style, what it takes to successfully learn and study a language, and so much more.
Here are a few things I would have told myself when I first started my classes and this journey in general.
There’s no substitute for time
As much as I dreamed about a shortcut to learning, a la Rocko’s Modern Life, learning a new language simply takes time.
When I first began studying, I wanted to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. I researched tips and tricks for studying, bought several tools and books, and was generally in a big hurry to learn. But it simply doesn’t work that way. No amount of study hacks, tools, or anything else could help me learn as fast as I wanted.
Learning a new language is a long road, and time is a valuable part of the learning process. If I had accepted that sooner, I would have saved a bunch of money and frustration.
Start with small habits and build on them
When I first started studying, I studied as much as I felt like. Turns out “as much as I felt like” for an obsessive person like me meant hours every day. But because the brain can only take so much, only a small portion of that time was actually productive.
What I found most effective were the little things I did each day that helped. Using a vocabulary app a few minutes every day, tutoring once per week. Consistency is not only the most important of studying, but it’s also more sustainable when…
