This is yet another post about Kanji, Language, and some personal struggles I have with Japanese language learning…
As of current– RTK is going swimmingly… I love it, I love every bit about it… The stories, the primitives, and the kanji. However, for all the goodness it brings it also brings with it new challenges, that for me, are raising some old devils back to haunt me once more.
For nearly all my life, since as far back as I could remember, I hated tests… (Or I should say Disliked them very much). I never got how a test could so easily measure my full potential, or how it was some fair representation of my intellect. So something that, for the most part, is fairly neutral and benign became overtime something I loathed like Kryptonite.
Having undertaken this RTK challenge– I knew by default as I adopted SRS as a means of studying RTK and measuring progress that I would have to do battle once more with the ‘test demon.’ Sure enough tonight was one of these battles.
It was a brand new set of thirty sum odd Kanji that I had yet to test like between 810-848– I started the flashcard program and one by one each keyword brought nothing but blanks… Some were promising, but when I wrote them I wrote the order of the primitives wrong. So by the fifth or sixth one that old deep feeling of anger and disappointment began to swell. I stopped the test– grabbed my book of stories that I write my keywords in– and thought that 5 minute cram of stories would give me a chance at getting something. No such luck– it was stupid thing to do– I was grasping at straws, because I had lost the point of this whole exercise.
The point or reason I’m testing is to “Remember the Kanji” and this frustration, which led to anger, brought back fears I’ve always had about tackling something of massive proportions. It’s that I was was going to fail, stop, or give up– That always leads to self-justification, but ultimately disappointment.
Those are hard words to say, much less to write. They indicate a weakness on my part, but I’m becoming a firm believer of “that which is my weakness can be overcome through persistence.” So I persisted, unassisted by kanji-book-crunch, and carried on with the test. I squeaked out a mediocre 65% which I know isn’t exactly stellar. I immediately began to write the 17 or so characters I got wrong on a sheet of paper. I titled it my “Failed Kanji List” and posted it to my wall… This hasn’t been the first time, nor will it be the last– but remarkably ‘trouble kanji’ I’ve had in the past- one’s I’ve written a failed kanji sheet for, I’ve overcome them in time.
The principal here is not to look back in anger and acknowledge that weaknesses you are having (or always had) are some sort of justifiable barrier. Because they are not, in fact every one of these ‘ghosts’ that re-appear that you conquer goes to show just how awesome you really are. Failure can be overcome with motivation. That because in an of itself, failure does not represent Total-Failure– So I’m back on it, motivated and ready for a another set and not worried in the slightest because I know I’ll get them.. And maybe as a bonus I’ll overcome my fear of tests & failure..
Just another footnote as a travel down this path of knowledge. (More to come too on this string of thought).
~J out
