The Wild Web of Language Learning Gurus

Today marks exactly two years since I started studying Japanese, and although I have made considerable progress, I’m feeling somewhat disappointed with my current level. I’ve spent some time reflecting on where I think this feeling comes from.

The Japanese Self-Study Community – A Double-Edged Sword

For the past two years, I have been self-studying Japanese. I prefer learning skills at my own pace rather than joining traditional classes; however, I do find it motivating to hear about other people’s experiences and to adjust my own systems when I come across good advice. In fact, it was Livakivi’s video I Learned Japanese 1 Hour a Day for 600 Days Straight that motivated me to set study goals and provided me with a sort of blueprint. Most of my process up until now has been based on Livakivi’s journey.

While the Japanese language learning community on YouTube provides me with inspiring content, it’s also marked by heated debates about learning methods. Some of its prominent content creators project unwavering confidence, competing to showcase perfect pitch accent while boasting about their relatively rapid path to fluency. The core message: achieve Japanese fluency quickly through intensive immersion—an idea popularized by the AJATT method. Some advocate living entirely in Japanese (AJATT stands for All Japanese All The Time), abandoning your English-speaking friends and sleeping with Japanese audio playing in the background, a pseudoscience coined ‘passive immersion’. They dismiss other approaches as wasteful, including traditional textbooks, with one popular creator claiming that studying less than two hours daily means you should quit altogether.

The problem is that someone who has become very skilled at something is not necessarily good at teaching or inspiring new students about that thing, and while mastery can build self-confidence, it can also lead to unrealistic expectations when teaching others or develop into a downright arrogant attitude. Some of this might have to do with the cognitive bias called “the expert blind spot,” which occurs when someone who has mastered a skill loses sight of what it’s like to be a beginner, or maybe it’s just the fact that some content creators also have a ‘unique’ course to sell you.

Whatever the reason, a recurring part of the narrative seems to be this “no pain, no gain” rhetoric which is so pervasive online nowadays. People often showcase their intense dedication and long hours as the only path to success, implying that those who can’t match this intensity somehow lack commitment. This overlooks the reality that people live different lives with varying circumstances, and the time someone can devote to learning doesn’t necessarily reflect their passion or desire to improve.

And that gets to the heart of my issue this morning—not my progress, but the comparison to others is what is making me feel unhappy. It’s learning 4,000 vocabulary words in two years and then seeing someone on Reddit who claims they learned 1,700 in just two weeks. Comparing ourselves to others is the quickest way to suck the joy out of anything we’re doing. That’s precisely why I spend very little time on social media these days. Even though I’m well aware of the pitfalls of comparison, I still let it get to me when it comes to language learning.

And so, I want to end on a positive note as well as a reminder to myself: What matters most is that I’ve improved consistently over these past two years, studying daily without giving up and building a consistent habit. I may not have aced the N1 proficiency test in eight months or shocked any natives with my perfect Japanese pitch accent, but I’m advancing at my own pace and enjoying the moments when I am able to do new things.

As Matsuoka Shuzo, Japan’s most positive man, would say: 諦めんなよ！Never give up!

Tags: japanese