What's your obsession?
How loving things has pushed me forward.
涙腺が緩む is certainly a good phrase to know if you enjoy crying over books as much as I do!
After having a pretty good immersion month so far, I have been thinking about how much I love reading. I used to love reading in English a lot too growing up, and it feels like I’ve sort of re-fallen in love with the act in my target language now. As I posted about in my walk down memory lane post though, reading wasn’t the “thing” that initially got me into learning Japanese!
It all started when I heard my first Japanese ending songs via anime on TV. Outside of Spanish, I think this was my first time hearing a song sung completely in a foreign language. I looked up the songs and looked at the lyrics, and just sort of decided that I wanted to be able to understand. And from there I learned the kana by turning romaji lyrics into them. I had whole notebooks for this process! After that, I just started learning what some words were and….yada yada yada, the end result was that I ended up here today!
There is something so pure about diving into something because you suddenly become obsessed with it. And I definitely didn’t stick to the one thing, in this case being music! The act of buying CDs from Japan meant I’d look through the booklets and see non-lyric text that I wanted to read. Then I also noticed some bands would have English translations of their lyrics, or Japanese if their songs were sung in English. This made me realize just how much of the media I already loved existed first in Japanese! This led to me re-watching anime in Japanese, looking up video game terms in Japanese, finding new content, like J-dramas, to watch, and eventually I landed on books too.
All of that, because I liked something and wanted to pursue it further! I didn’t care about textbooks or learning how to speak right away. I just wanted to understand the things I liked in order to fuel my budding obsession!
Any time I made meaningful progress with Japanese, it was because I let myself have a ton of fun. The times I paused was because I had other things to focus on or because I was getting in my head about my own progress. What especially was harmful was comparing my learning journey to others. People who didn’t even like the same music and video games as me. Why should I have cared? I was learning for the Goods! Still am too!
I cannot imagine my journey going any differently than it has. Even if I have some regrets about the time frame, I’ve always been into something. And those somethings have lead me to new places and new things. Learning the lyrics to Dearest and Life Is Like A Boat eventually lead me to falling in love with the light novel series 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~, otherwise known as Ascendance of a Bookworm.
Sometime last year, I kept trying out a few different light novel series. I guess in some ways I was obsessed with the idea of finding something new to love! But Ascendance of a Bookworm volume 1 ended up being a bookclub pick that I wanted to join in on. And it was one of the first series I got really far in! So much vocabulary I learned I can actually point to and say “I learned that from Myne!”.
The final volume of the light novel series was just released this month, and yesterday I finished it. I was sobbing! Every part of the book was making me cry because it felt like such a giant goodbye. There were previous volumes I was trying to slow down reading because I knew the end was near, but in the end this was a goodbye I was super excited I was able to have. I loved something so much that I saw it through to the end! In Japanese! It felt like a journey within a journey, starting and finishing a long series in my target language. I didn’t only read Bookworm of course, but it is the most precious to me.
There are other things I’m just as obsessed with outside of Bookworm, and it may be no surprise to other people to hear it’s Final Fantasy related!
Final Fantasy X Japanese content was one of the bigger arcs I had earlier on in my journey. I made an Anki deck thanks to the power of Audacity and my own willpower to continue that had each line of text and the corresponding audio from the main story. No fun pictures like other subs2srs decks, but I was okay with it! But that process made me want to make other video game Anki decks over the years, so even though they were tough and involved a lot of manual work, I did it because I loved it.
Final Fantasy XIV is definitely my current Final Fantasy obsession. I mentioned this previously, but I’ve started up a project to see just how much text I can grab from the game to count how many characters it roughly has. I’m very much still in A Realm Reborn, and since I’ve been reading so many novels this month I haven’t done much else, but I’m excited to have this project for awhile. What’s fun about being able to play an MMO in Japanese is that the world feels so alive. I get to move my character around and interact with tons and tons of Japanese in a variety of ways. It’s just so cool!
I have previously used textbooks as part of my self-study, but those were only tolerable because I had all of these things I was excited for! Textbooks were just a means to my immersion end. It was cool to see grammar points in Final Fantasy XIV or Bookworm after learning it from a textbook though. Definitely made everything stick better for me! Of course, some things can be learned straight from your immersion material. てっきり～と思う is one that comes to mind for me!
I know there’s a lot of people who think that the thing they like is something to be enjoyed after getting better at their target language, but I’m very much in the camp of enjoy those things right now! Enjoy them later too! But those things you actually genuinely and truly love can be your power. You don’t have to learn anything in an optimal order. ～ていく、～てくる were some of the very first things I learned just because songs lyrics had these! You think I knew what a て form was? Nope! I got there eventually, but it was way more fun to just learn what I needed for what I wanted. My J-drama arc has forever etched 脊髄小脳変性症 into my brain. I’ve known this for over a decade and have never needed it for anything else besides the series I was watching. But how cool is it to know?!
Dive in! Yeah you’re not going to understand things right away. Yeah it might be frustrating. But for me it’s way more frustrating trying to learn from materials I couldn’t give two crepes about.
So I ask you today, what is your obsession? What’s that thing in your target language that you cannot get enough of? What are you looking forward to?
Please share, my life feels empty without Bookworm. (╥﹏╥)
Congrats on finishing 本好き! Glad you enjoyed the journey, and I hope you can find some other series to fill the void.
I'm not sure what would be "my obsession", but I do have many things I like! And some of the ones I love the most are my driving forces to keep learning Japanese, even if some of them are still difficult to understand. But every time I go back to them in Japanese I feel I understand them a bit better, so I can feel the progress!
By the way, happy holidays~
“Those things you actually genuinely and truly love can be your power.” spitting straight facts!!
Like you, the things that started out being my guiding passion to learn Japanese (video games like yakuza, final fantasy 15, the persona series), were then quickly added to by new obsessions that I didn’t even know existed until I learnt the language (VNs! Isekai light novels! ALL THE BL MANGA!) . I think that’s the really fun thing, that you don’t know what new things there are to love until you get going.