Sons of Loki

Okay, I’m not seriously considering giving this thing up. I guess for the sheer inconvenience of it I won’t be quitting Japanese. Plus I would feel really bad about it. But I will reflect on the struggles of learning this damn language.

Stuff I like about Japanese
I get to live in Japan. No, seriously, I love it here, from the vending machines to the punctual transportation to the delicious milk. Obviously speaking Japanese makes it much easier to live in Japan, which is the best motivation I can think of.
I get to use Japanese. That’s kind of obvious, but still, it’s a pleasing feeling. I can sort of read manga and play video games, and engage in conversation occasionally. (Actually getting speaking practice is harder than you’d think.)
The language itself. I guess there’s a certain neatness to the language, a pleasing logicality to it. I like kanji too, sort of, once I’ve learned them, the way radicals combine to create aesthetic and semantic beauty from a few lines.

Stuff which makes it difficult to learn Japanese and leads to frustration
I’m not fluent. Okay, this is largely my own impatience, but I’d thought that after a year and a half (more, if you count pre-uni study) of Japanese I’d be at a point where I’d understand most day-to-day stuff. I do not. Even trips to the convenience store are fraught with confusion because I have no idea what they’re asking me. I like the pretty pictures on TV but I only understand it about 5% of the time. It makes you feel so impotent and useless, to have done so much work for no tangible benefit, and it puts you off further study.
In Tokyo everyone speaks English. Not so much frustrating, but it definitely hampers my actual daily use of the language. Either shop staff will just use English straight off the bat when they see me, or I’ll try Japanese, flounder horrifically, and the assistant will step in with English to sort me out and I’ll be too panicked to do anything but mumble back in English.
I can’t read manga. I think manga is a great way to learn Japanese, but I’m not quite at the level you need to be to get the benefit. I know I said I could up there, and I can to an extent, but it’s a hard slog which saps all enjoyment out of the experience. By the time I’ve finished looking up all the new kanji and vocab on Japanese on my iPod, it’s taken me ten minutes to read a single page and I’ve forgotten the plot. Same for video games.
Everyone else is better than me. Well, I imagine. My fellow students are lovely to a (wo)man, and no one ever flaunts their ability in my face. But when I hear someone else speaking Japanese fluently (or at a level that I can’t understand, anyway) it kills me a little inside. It shouldn’t. I should pay no attention to whatever level they’re at. But nevertheless.
I don’t have the knack. Well, who does? But it feels like a lot of my fellow students seem to find it considerably easier to pick up new vocabulary and grammar than I do. When I learn new words, it feels like it goes in one ear and a few days later out the other.
The classes are… I feel like I may as well not turn up to classes for all the benefit I get out of them. They’re 90 minutes long, and I just can’t concentrate for that long in English, let alone Japanese. And the classes are entirely in Japanese, and I’ve said this before, but I don’t know enough Japanese to learn in Japanese. The textbook is no help, because it doesn’t explain anything, and all we seem to be learning is … Actually, I have absolutely no idea what we have been studying over the last three months. I think we did keigo honorifics, and a million different ways to say は, and … I’m at a loss, I really am.

But as I said, what else am I gonna do?