There is no passing or failing when learning

The members of the NativShark team, including myself (Ty), have talked to thousands of learners over our collective decades of experience both learning and teaching Japanese.

We've noticed that many learners seem to have a deep-rooted, fundamental misunderstanding of what learning really is, and it's one of the biggest sources of grief and burnout that a learner can face.

Thankfully, we can avoid this misunderstanding via a quick mindset adjustment.

The learning misunderstanding

Learning is either "passing" or "failing".

When we don't recognize a word we've seen before or we mix up a kana/kanji with a different kana/kanji, we think we've failed. If we can't produce something from memory, we also think we have failed.

This is a very understandable mindset.

It's how we've all been conditioned to think because of school. I don't know about you, but I can't recall taking many tests where I got answers "half-right".

It's either right and I pass, or it's wrong and I fail.

The problem with this misunderstanding is that you're constantly judging yourself when you're not perfect 100% of the time.

This judgment for failing causes us to constantly be disappointed with ourselves when we study and usually leads to burnout because we're "just not smart enough" to learn Japanese.

The reality of learning

Learning is a spectrum.

If we were to think of it as a percentage, then "not knowing" something would be 0%, and "knowing it as second nature" would be 100%.

If we've seen a concept before, it almost always lies somewhere between these two numbers.

When we don't recognize a word we've seen before or mix up a kana/kanji, we have not failed.

We just knew it maybe 20 or 30% of the way.

The good news is that this means you're in the process of learning it! Your effort is paying off, and you are making progress toward your language goals.

If you didn't know it to some percentage, you wouldn't have been able to go "Oh my god I knew thatttttttt" when you had to look it up again. You wouldn't be able to mix it up with a similar word or kanji, as nothing would look even vaguely familiar.

Thanks to this, we know that we have learned it to some extent.

Fluctuating knowledge

Every time you interact with a piece of Japanese, this percentage goes up a bit.

Sometimes it might be a big jump, say 10%, and sometimes it might just be a small one, like 1%. Sometimes, it doesn't change but it prevents a drop in percentage, which is great too.

You're preparing yourself to understand it in the future. You might get it next time ^^

The same goes for producing words, grammar points, and so on. You need a considerably higher percentage to be able to use them functionally. This might even be something like 80 or 90%.

What's interesting is that this percentage is always changing based on tons of factors.

For example, if you didn't get a good night's sleep, everything might temporarily drop by 10% until you get some rest. If you're stressed, not focused, or just generally not in the zone, you might also get a similar drop.

This might look like things you would have known or been able to say just not coming to you in a particular moment. This isn't a failure, this is simply how learning is.

Alternatively, if you're in a situation that has a lot of strong contextual relationships to certain words, you might get a 20% boost to all of those contextually relevant words.

Eventually, you'll find yourself using words when you're not even sure where they came from, but are correct for the situation. I think every language learner has experienced this at some point in their studies ^^ (or will if they haven't yet).

There is a problem, however: This percentage slowly decreases when you aren't studying Japanese.

Thankfully, there is a solution.

Study as often as possible

And keep in mind that forgetting and remembering is part of the learning process. Every time you mix something up or need to look it up again, you increase the percentage that you know that particular thing.

And thankfully, once we've learned something, the percentage will never truly hit 0 ever again.

Even after a long break where you feel you've forgotten everything, most of your knowledge is just sitting underneath the surface of your brain at 5 to 15%, waiting to be reawakened ^^

Check out this article if you're coming back after a break and feeling a bit lost!

In other words, just show up, press this button, and be patient and kind with yourself:

It'll take time, but all you need to worry about is slowly increasing that learning percentage consistently!

The rest is details

A personal example

I can't tell you the number of times when someone has asked me what new Japanese I learned during my studies today and my mind goes absolutely blank.

And of course it would— I just started learning that concept. I have it 5% of the way learned. How could I possibly recall and produce it?

I also can't tell you the number of times that I've seen a native speaker mix something up. It's not a big deal because, aside from learning percentages, we're human and humans make mistakes all the time. That's just being human.

They just say "あれ？" (huh?) and then move on immediately after a short laugh.

I think us learners could get a lot of value by adopting that approach as well

Just gotta keep swimming.

And don't be afraid to laugh and forgive yourself the next time you mix up ツ(tsu) and シ(shi).

I know I'll do so when I mix them up the next time myself, at least 🤣

The day after writing this, I mixed up ツ and シ

I was meeting some people for the first time and we started talking about Pokemon.

I looked up the evolution of ポッチャマ (Piplup) in Japanese because none of us could remember what the name was.

The evolution is ポッタイシ and I read it as ポッタイツ... which was a combination of embarrassing and hilarious

We laughed it off and moved on ^^

Good luck!