On Passion in Studies

I am currently preparing for a significant change in my life. In about a month, I will be moving to Japan and start one year of prep school. After that year, I’ll be applying to universities in Japan to pursue a further education there. Honestly, it still hasn’t sunk in that I’ll be moving halfway around the globe in a handful of weeks. I’m expecting it to hit sometime mid-May, as I’ve settled into a new routine and will be getting used to life away from what I’ve grown up knowing. It’s exciting, thrilling, terrifying, and so much besides that, all at the same time.

During this year I’ll be taking the EJU, Examination for Japanese University, or 日本語留学試験, alongside a few other tests, some for the application and some for fun*. I took the EJU as a mock for the first time last November, and the results that I received were quite encouraging. So, I want to go further and do my absolute best during this year to improve on my score and see how far I can go.

But regardless of how I do or where I end up, there is one significant change that has (very) gradually occurred over the course of the past years that I am most excited about. I am enjoying the studies. I’ve always enjoyed learning on its own, certainly. But to actually discover my own passion where I find myself going down rabbitholes and working through textbooks on my weekends and during my free time after I come home from work—that is new. That is something that I’ve only been experiencing these past few years, with increasing frequency. And I sincerely hope that I will continue down this path as I go along.

My journey in learning Japanese has given me an extraordinarily precious gift: rediscovering a love for learning, and the discipline to support the passion and intrinsic motivation with volume and structured study. Perhaps because it is a subject that I encroached entirely voluntarily, that I find it so rewarding. There were no grades, and no structure, and no extrinsic motivation to learn the language. It was something that I decided to do on my own, and that has made the difference.

This warrants an entire blog post of its own, but during school, I never particularly found any motivation or interest in studying. In applying myself towards a goal. Certainly, because I didn’t have a goal in mind. There were so many different things that I wanted to do and so many different people that I wanted to become, that I couldn’t even begin to make a choice. And I didn’t. I had no objective during my studies, and suffered intense procrastination. I enjoyed the classes on their own, but the second something was assigned, I immediately assigned all of my brainpower to anything but completing the task. Now that it’s been a while since that round of high school, I’m able to fully disclose this, of course, but a lot of the work was completed in unnecessarily caffeinated, extraordinarily panicky late-nights. And I didn’t learn my lesson for the longest time.

But parallel to my studies, I pursued Japanese as a simple hobby. A passion project for fun. And boy, did I learn. It was unstructured, and my discipline in studying was poor at the time, so it didn’t bring about significant results for a long time. But, it did build me a starter base for the language. And it planted a seed for the future.

I finally went on that dream trip to Japan. For two weeks, I enjoyed the country with its culture, food, and people. And I loved it. I spoke in Japanese the entire time, and got some praise about it! I felt like I was on top of the world. There’s a graph that’s quite well-known in the Japanese learner community concerning Japanese. I very much fell under the “Woah, I’m absolutely fluent in Japanese” section. Despite the fact that I was using google translate and looking up kanji for a drying machine. But the encouragement and the amount of fun I had in the country gave me a significant motivation boost.

Significant enough that, as the COVID pandemic came on stage and went into full swing, I had a new goal: to study Japanese properly.

I gave my studies structure, and I had a goal of taking the JLPT, the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I joined a few online communities of learners, and I got myself some textbooks. Life and a lot with it happened in between and I had other priorities, but then I got back to it in earnest in 2021. And all of a sudden, the once-abandoned dream of doing something in Japan became a reality. The abstract, ambiguous goal that I had set for myself suddenly took form, and I could potentially go to Japan if I really did something with my language skills.

Suddenly, as if by magic, as if it was there all along, a powerful motivation appeared. And the discipline to support it, that had been slowly filtering through the cracks over the years, had appeared alongside it. Because the small bursts of motivation weren’t giving me enough momentum to make the progress that I needed or wanted. I had a clear-cut goal in mind, and I was working towards it in a structured way for the first time in my life.

Of course, the ‘structure’ that I’m talking about took a while to figure out, and much trial and error. I wasn’t particularly efficient in my study methods. That part I’ve only been properly tackling and figuring out this past year. But I passed the JLPT N2 and N1, and the Kanken 2k, a kanji-focused exam aimed at natives, and I then went to Japan to take the EJU. And this isn’t to toot my own horn—at least not entirely, but rather to emphasise the fact that passion and goals are imperative to progress—but this was all done while I was working full time as a freelancer, and coming back and finishing high school as well, in order to pursue my studies.

The greatest thing about rekindling, or maybe even simply kindling, this flame of passion for learning, is the fact that it reaches out to other disciplines as well. I love to learn about all sorts of things, and now I have a fundamental structure to tackle a new topic that I’m interested in. Where before I’d abstractly scroll through a wikipedia page or watch a youtube video and leave it at that—which of course, I still very much do—I now study so many different things on a daily and weekly basis. It’s an overwhelming amount of knowledge, and it’s humbling to know that there is still so much more out there, and realising just how little I know and have touched. But it’s such a pleasant feeling of being overwhelmed.

It takes me back to when I was young, and every little thing in the world had its own entire dimension of ‘unknowns’ and ‘learning’ to it, that you got to explore bit by bit. Of course, the tests still sucked back then. I wasn’t as much of a test masochist as I am now as an adult. But the joy of learning is still there. In a different way. But it’s still just as enjoyable, if not more.

Tackling studies and courses and education when you have something in mind and after experiencing life a bit more is entirely different. My perspective has changed immeasurably, and I have come to treasure learning so much more than I ever did. I find myself extraordinarily lucky to be able to pursue this passion. But before I did, I slowly was rediscovering the joys of learning after “learning” (read: schooling, academia) was something I considered in my past. And yet, surprisingly, tantalisingly, and excitingly, all of the learning is only ahead of me.

You live and learn. I’ve heard it a thousand times as I’m sure you all have. My absolute favourite thing is talking to people about their passions. The way their eyes light up and how people can go on and on about a subject you know nothing about is something that will never stop providing me boundless happiness. And I’m glad that I can partake in that and occasionally, be able to talk someone’s ears off about Japanese Kanji.

I hope that I was able to send a few sparks of interest in the direction of your hearths. Maybe, they were able to relight the embers and start a slow burn. If they did, I’d love to hear all about it. If you have something you’re passionate about and need an ear to talk off about it or a pair of eyes to read through it, please send it my way.

*I mentioned here that I’m taking some tests for fun as well. I would never have imagined being in this position five, six years ago. The fact that I would be pursuing additional studies for the sake of studying and learning and challenging myself was not only out of the question, it was simply not even taken into consideration.