We need to start before we can grow. You can't rely on growing before you start. It's only by doing that we will improve.
To elaborate: how many of you have been guilty of this thought pattern? If only I could... get up at 5am; study out of a textbook for an hour a day; ignore all distractions; write out my notes perfectly.... THEN I would progress in Japanese! Progressing feels impossible with your current, flawed, weak, hedonistic self. Instead, you fixate on the future self, a fictional construct who has somehow overcome all of those flaws, and is imbued with ferocious self control and discipline.
Unfortunately, I don't know anyone for whom that type of future self has manifested— not permanently, in any case. Lying in bed, planning all the things we're going to do tomorrow, it's easy to imagine a version of ourselves that feels enthusiastic about doing 90 minutes of Core 2K every day, who will patiently do textbook exercises, who doesn’t scroll instagram reels any more. In the cold light of the next morning, that self evaporates. Then of course, we criticise ourselves, not the method: if only we could be morally stronger, if only we could overpower our boredom and tiredness, THEN the method would work. The truth is, the method is entirely replaceable. It's ourselves that we should be working around.
We are all prone to akrasia— that is , making decisions against our best interest. So what's the solution?
Work with the flawed today self, move the goalposts to where you are now, personality wise— and crucially, remove choices for yourself.
On Jan 1st 2021 (at around a shaky N5 level, if that helps set the scene) I made the decision that I would never read anything translated into English from Japanese ever again— and to date, I’ve stuck to it! It was a commitment that a lot of people called crazy (and toxic, and worse), but ended up being the single best thing I did for my Japanese. I think the misunderstanding that people tend to make is that they think it was a type of punishment— whereas in fact, it became an extremely fun problem solving exercise, that didn’t deprive me of anything I enjoyed. Nothing was locked away! I could watch anime, as much as I wanted— as long as I used Japanese subtitles. Left with the choice of the easy way out, I would have kept on taking it, and I would probably still be reading inadequately fanslated manga to this very day. By removing the choice, the only decision left to make was "how can I enjoy this in Japanese?"
So, inevitably, I started to work with my flawed self: I love lying in bed and I love reading fanfiction, so rather than trying to purge myself of those habits, that January I made a new routine where I would read Final Fantasy 15 (my current obsession at that time) doujinshi in bed every morning before I got up. I "read" really casually, not being picky, only looking up words that jumped out at me, and if I couldn't understand much then I just enjoyed the pictures. The comics featured characters I already knew, so I was never totally lost, and were only around 20-30 pages long, so reading one a day, even at a snail's pace, wasn't a big commitment. If a particular panel seemed useful or helped something click for me, I screenshot it and put it in anki.
Touching native Japanese without a crutch, without any translation, also had the benefit that it acted as a guiding pendulum to point me where I needed to go next. I could constant recalibrate what needed to happen in order to progress, which would have been totally obscured if I'd continued to use English translations. For example, when I was first reading the doujinshi, I noticed my katakana reading was still shaky. So I spent a few days focussing a katakana matching game , and noticed improvements immediately. Later that month, watching the Free! anime, I spotted lots of grammar I didn't know; so I googled it and made anki cards right from the anime. It was impossible to feel stuck, because every immersion experience gave me instant feedback. What was important was that I was working with what motivated me, my real flawed fickle self. Learning grammar from Tae Kim's guide felt impossibly dry, no matter how much I wanted to want to read it, but learning grammar from bishounen swim boys with oshi seiyuu felt much more appealing.
The youtuber Ali Abdaal has a question in his book Feel-Good Productivity: "What would this look like if it was fun?" I love that, and it also makes me think of another useful question we could ask ourselves on our language journeys: "What would this look like if it was possible?"
For example, if you want to read a manga in Japanese, which feels too difficult at the moment, how could you turn that from "impossible" to "possible"? There are a bunch of ways forward. You could decide to do the thing imperfectly, you could "read" by skimming the manga to spot words or kanji that you recognise, look up anything that piques your interest, and just let the rest go— this is how I started with my FFXV fancomics. Another technique could be that you go through the manga quite intensively, making anki cards of vocab and sentences, trying to understand as much as possible. A third method could be that you decide to hit another goal before you read that manga, like you finish repping a vocab deck and then revisit and see what it feels like then. A fourth way could be watching the anime of the manga first, and getting an idea of the story from that, before going back to it. The point is, there's ALWAYS a way forward, and doing the cognitive switch from "no" to "maybe" is really important.
But you'll never figure out these ways forward, how to learn and grow, if you stay wedded to the mythos of the future self. You have to get on the bike and start pedalling now. Immersion has to be a TODAY thing, not a "would be nice some time in the future" thing.
If you choose the nuclear option, like I did, to ditch translations cold turkey one day, you WILL have the experience of trying lots of things that are too hard and having to give up on them for a while, and change course. That's not a failing! That's part of the process. It's more data points for the grand experiment. The great thing is that there are SO many things to enjoy in Japanese media that you'll never run out.
You might want Japanese to be like a college course, a neatly laid out curriculum that you follow and arrive at fluency. But have you ever had genuine success with that method before? Has it led you to being able to do what you want to be doing? If not, perhaps you should realise that language learning is best done chaotically, holistically, pulling from multiple sources and getting a 360° perspective. There is a human desire for certainty, I understand that, but when you remove your translation crutch you will realise that you're an individual with your own interests and passions and goals, so why would you follow a generic path made for the average person?
If you're vibing and having fun, you're winning. If you're stressing, or self flagellating, you need to re-evaluate what you're doing. And no one can do that for you. If anyone tries to tell you there's one true path to language mastery, they're trying to sell you something.
Stop beating yourself up and learn to love doujin.
