It’s now been almost exactly five years since I started studying Japanese. I know because my Duolingo streak hit 1790 days today, just as I completed the third section—where, nominally, I’ve reached A1-level fluency.
So am I done? The question came from my teenage daughter.
I found myself trying to explain that language learning isn’t like maths, where you stack understanding layer by layer. It’s more like standing in a fog until, gradually, a cityscape emerges. I told her how I’ve developed a feeling for the foreign tongue—how rhythms start to feel familiar, and structures can be sensed even when the words remain elusive.
I’m not fooling anyone, though—true mastery remains impossibly distant.
I’ve written before about how and why I began this journey. I’ve reflected on the way something as impossible as picking up a wholly foreign language can become manageable through stubborn persistence. I’ve even compared my own doggedness to the great Richard Feynman, who famously threw in the towel just as he was nearing fluency.
And yet, here I am, realising that I’ve come to the end of the road—even though I’m only halfway through the decade I had planned to invest in this project.
The thing is, it’s not Japanese I’m quitting. It’s the green owl and its ritual insistence on a daily dose of heavily gamified language grinding. While Duo has been an efficient on-ramp, the atomic habit of opening the app each day has started to feel like an end in itself—something I’m now ready to outgrow.
So ありがとう for all your help. I couldn’t have made it this far on my own. But even the best collaborations come to an end eventually. I’ll take it from here.