京都で英会話を習うなら!四条烏丸より徒歩5分 イングリッシュバフェ

2025-12-21 Study English Selfishly!

Studying any language is a long, difficult, painful process. You can’t deny it. Whether you are studying a language like English for work, travelling, or just for pleasure, it can be hard to stay consistent.

I know this because I once gave up on Japanese. I reached intermediate ability, passed the JLPT N3, but when I saw how long and steep the road in front of me still was, I realized I didn’t have the energy or motivation to keep going. So, I stopped, and over several years slowly forgot a lot of what I learnt.

Perhaps this has happened to you too. Maybe this is happening to you right now! But you see, hope is not lost! I found a secret technique for keeping up the motivation while walking the difficult path of language study. And it is simply:

Be selfish!

One definition of selfish is “concentrating on one’s own pleasure”. And that I found was the key for reigniting my interest in Japanese. I had to make Japanese pleasurable. I had to find a way to make Japanese fun.

Before giving up on Japanese and moving back to Europe, I had, perhaps overly ambitiously, bought a novel from Book-Off, simply because the cover was quite pretty and the language on the first page was somewhat readable to me at that time. But I never read it. It sat inside a box for many years. Until one day when I rediscovered it during the covid pandemic. Bored and idle, I stepped away from my video games (I was a one-time Platinum-ranked Winston main on Overwatch, for any other gamers reading this!) I decided to actually have a go at reading it.

Reading was slow. There were many words and kanji I had to look up in the dictionary and grammar patterns I had to analyze. One page would take me over 10 minutes on average. But the thing is, surprisingly, I was having fun. A lot of fun! The story was interesting and entertaining. I was reading not to study, but entirely for pleasure, and incidentally learning Japanese as a side-effect.

Since then, I have read around 25 novels, slowly increasing the difficulty over the years. More recently, I started studying Japanese seriously, first part-time with a tutor and now full time at a language school. And this whole time I’m still reading. Now I can read novels targeted at teenagers without checking a dictionary for pages at a time. But always I’m trying to push the limits of the comprehension with harder novels and someday I hope to be able to read any novel fluently that I find at the book store.

Not only that, but I also enjoy writing my own stories – something I did a lot as a child, but I stopped after starting my career in IT. Now I love to write short stories in Japanese and post them on my YouTube channel. Are they good? Probably not, but I love them and I love writing them! And again, through writing them, I am also improving my Japanese ability.

So now I am studying Japanese not only so I can live and work in Japan, but because I selfishly want to get better at my hobbies of reading and writing stories!

Studying is still hard. Especially advanced Japanese. There are so many kanji. Grammar patterns can be fickle due to the nuances of their meanings. I still get exhausted from my classroom assignments. But now, what do I do to relax? I pick up a Japanese novel and read! I’m relaxing, having fun, but incidentally still studying.

To me, this is the secret to language study. We all know consistency is key, but what’s the key to being consistent? The answer is selfishness, in my opinion. If you find your selfish hobby, your way to enjoy something in English, or whatever language you’re studying, you’ll always be able to go and selfishly enjoy that when you’re exhausted from serious studying.

If you have one, next time you see me, please tell me your selfish English study hobby!