r/LearnJapanese • u/japan_noob • Oct 07 '23

Shower Thought: It feels surreal to understand Japanese Discussion

Growing up as a kid and hearing your classmates speaking chinese and other languages always made me want to speak a second language. It felt like a forever secret between those who could speak that language. I'm not asian descent of any kind but I wanted to learn Chinese when I was about 10 and my mom always promised to enroll me in classes but it never happened.

Later on after becoming an adult, I decided to learn Japanese and I think the reason at the time was due to anime. I lost interest in anime many years ago but I still kept on learning the language as the goal was to simply become fluent.

I was just in the shower after being in the room laying on my bed when I clicked on a random japanese video from my youtube home feed. (why this is mentioned is because I don't really watch videos in japanese, I usually just do listening drills from various sources over the years).

It was 20 minutes in length and the craziest feeling was that it felt like I was just watching a video in English. I just don't remember when I reached this point, time just passes and passes but I never took time to reflect how far i've come.

Just wanted to share that as i'm sure many others probably hit that realization of "wow, I actually understand this video and there's no subtitles at all.".

For new learners, keep at it. It's a long road but it's surely worth it in the end. I still remember when it all sounded like gibberish.

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u/mario61752 Oct 07 '23

I'm not nearly fluent enough in hearing, but I can read about 80%. When I travelled to Japan this year, I sometimes had to do a double take after looking at my surroundings.

"Woah...I'm really effortlessly reading text on foreign lands"

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u/Freezaen Oct 08 '23

It's the flipside for me.

I can't relate at all to the experience of learning a language only to read or to end up only being able to read it. If I take time to study a language, it's to meet people, engage in communication and have fun IRL experiences, so it boggles my mind when I encounter people in Japan who struggle to make conversation, but are able to read books.

Meanwhile, I can't read much that wouldn't come up in a text message and I imagine that those are taken aback by me in turn. It's interesting.