Okay, fine, so that’s a picture of Captain Hindsight and not a picture of Captain Obvious, but it’s still sort of the same meessage: In order to know Japanese, Japanese has to be Obvious to you. D’uh. That’s pretty obvious itself, right? I think the really interesting question, though, is how to get to this point. Sure, you could say you want to “learn Japanese” but what does that mean? I think it means you want to get to a point where the Japanese language is “obvious” to you… where even when you look at something you don’t quite know yet, it’s “obvious” what the meaning is. The real question that’s on most Japanese learners’ minds, though, is this: How the #$@! do I get to this point? How do I make Japanese obvious?
That Is So Obvious!
I should have known that big square thing was up to no good…
A few months ago I read an article titled “You Don’t Understand Something Until You Think It’s Obvious.” I’ve had a little time to mull on it, and I’ve been finding more and more examples of why this is important with Japanese learning (and not to mention any other language as well).
In the above article, Bassett talks about math and programming, but a lot of it is applicable to Japanese as well. I’d say the main point of his article is that when you’re learning or doing something (in his case math or programming) you struggle with a bunch of little things and have a bunch of little epiphanies until you reach the point where things are “obvious.” When things are “obvious” you can look back and be like “oh, jeepers, that was easy. I should have been able to do that much more quickly” (yes, I am assuming you talk like Shaggy from Scooby Doo).
The idea is that there’s a lot more to learning something and getting to the point where it’s “obvious” than meets the eye. To most people, it seems like a bunch of random actions leading up to the “obvious” result (if you even manage to get here at all, to be honest). The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to me that there are a lot of things all Japanese learners share with each other in terms of their journeys to “learning Japanese.”
On the other side of the spectrum, there are also a lot of things that a lot of people do that actually hurt their quest to make Japanese obvious. Like, a lot of things… not to mention really big picture things that can make or break the end result for you. I want to cover these things too, so that you run into fewer walls that could potentially end your Japanese learning career.
After realizing all this, I started writing one big “Making Japanese Obvious” post where I talked about all these different things. Then, I got to the 1000th word and was only about a tenth done. That’s when I decided I ought to break this post up (this here is part one).
So, over the next couple months I’ll be posting about “Making Japanese Obvious” in an attempt to help you to reach that beautiful peak yourself. A lot of the info actually parallels what I do in TextFugu, but now I’ll be writing these crazy learning theories out so that you can all benefit from them in at least a sort of abstract sense while you’re studying Japanese on your own. Either way, I hope it’s going to be incredibly helpful.
How We’ll Make It Obvious
I have probably 7-10 posts worth of content in my head around this subject, and I’m hoping to get it all up in the next one to two months. I’ll be posting at least one of these “Obvious” tagged posts every week (possibly more, though we’ll see) and they’ll all come back to the central theme of how to “Make Japanese Obvious.” Why? Because when it’s obvious, you know it. The hard part (and the part we’ll be covering) is the whole “how to get there” portion of things.
So, mull on that a bit. Over the next few days, think about things you think of as “obvious.” How did you reach that state? It might seem like magic… but there were certain things you did to get there. What are you good at? What did you have to do to make it obvious? How can you apply that to other things in life? Noticing little things like this that are normally hidden can really give you a boost – that’s exactly what I hope to do with Japanese learning for you with these “Obvious” posts. Because the more you know, knowing is half the battle…
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See you soon, obviously.