The title of this post is a reference to a piece I wrote some while ago, reflecting on lessons from failed peace-building efforts in the Middle East. Teaching yourself Japanese is a slightly less daunting task, but nevertheless one with plenty of opportunities to give up in despair.
A friend of mine just did. He was so far ahead of me that I thought I’d never be able to catch up—until one day, out of the blue, he quit. He’d been at it daily for a decade but still foundered when trying to follow even the simplest conversation. So he threw in the towel, considering all those thousands of study hours a sunk cost.
It struck me that a similar thing happened to Richard Feynman, the great physicist.
Ever competitive, he took up Japanese to outdo his sister. He tells the story in his autobiography Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! about how his sister, Joan Feynman (a renowned astrophysicist), had spitefully started sending him letters written in kanji. This triggered a bad case of sibling rivalry, leading him to nearly master the language.
Now, when Richard Feynman set his mind to something, he wasn’t in the habit of giving up. At this point in his life, he had just finished getting fluent in Portuguese—just for the fun of it—and he’d be damned if he couldn’t pull the same trick with Japanese.
He studied diligently, even spending time in Japan.
Only to find, eventually, that he wasn’t up to the task. It wasn’t so much the language itself but the deeply foreign cultural norms that made Feynman fold. He realised, he explains, that no matter how fluent he got, he would never truly understand Japan.
Feynman’s story reminds me of Dutch-American writer Ian Buruma, who beautifully sums up his disillusionment with Japan in his book A Tokyo Romance.
Here’s someone who really gave it a shot. Buruma lived and breathed all things Japanese. He studied its filmmakers, he married and divorced Japanese women, and he called the country home for fifteen years.
Only to eventually pack up and leave, feeling like the whole experience had been little more than a dream—that he’d never be able to arrive at whatever mythical destination he had once imagined.
And here I find myself, celebrating first my 666th consecutive day of studying Japanese, then hitting another emotionally significant milestone, only to now keep grinding away (today is day 1682).
Have I ever felt like giving up? Hell yes. Studying Japanese is hard. It’s nothing like picking up French or Spanish (both of which I found challenging too). More like chipping away at an enormous mountain with nothing but a measly chisel.
So yes, I’ve often felt like giving up. The reason I haven’t cuts to the core of why it’s ever worth trying to achieve anything as elusive as a skill—especially in the age of AI and ever more competent translation tools.
I never studied Japanese in order to one day master the language, much less ‘conquer’ Japanese culture or crack some kind of code. I study Japanese because I like the resonant vibration my brain is put in when I’m busy doing it. More than that, I’ve become somewhat addicted to it, to the extent that a day without Japanese somehow feels lacking.
This, to me, is the essence of the process-over-product ethos. If the process itself isn’t rewarding, the destination is unlikely to be satisfying. Because yes, there’s actually such a thing as a destination, even when studying a very hard subject. You might not ever fully get there, but you can get close enough to smell it.
Astrophysicists (speaking of Richard Feynman’s sister) have this concept called asymptotic freedom. I’ve written about it before because I think the expression has such powerful poetic potential. I’m coming back to it here because it feels like an appropriate label for the fleeting feeling one sometimes gets when nearing a certain goal—simply by not even striving for it.
There’s a perhaps far-fetched corollary to all this in the life of Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian émigré wrote his first nine novels in his mother tongue, only to reinvent himself in English after fleeing the USSR. Unlike Feynman or Buruma, he didn’t just wrestle with a foreign language—he conquered it, shaping it into something distinctly his own.
Reading Nabokov’s English prose, I’m often struck by how he transcends the usual constraints of an acquired tongue. His sentences don’t just demonstrate mastery; they shimmer with a kind of otherworldly precision, as if fluency in two languages had granted him a third, uniquely his own. It’s a testament to the fact that approaching a language as an outsider can sometimes be an advantage—that, with enough persistence, what first feels like an insurmountable barrier can become a vantage point.