49 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
49 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Joyfulness With Language Immersion"
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date: 2023-05-28T12:59:12+02:00
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---
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In this post I would like to talk about one of the most (in my opinion) joyful
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moments you will ever get when doing language immersion.
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What exactly inspired me to write this is the fact that I myself have
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experienced this 1 day before writing this article. For context, I have been
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trying to get a torrent set up on one of my VMs on which I usually host things
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temporarily, and decided to listen to some japanese music in the background
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since I knew that this was gonna be a long process.
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Most of those songs were songs that I have not listened to in well over a year
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and completely forgot about them. But these songs (like any other song) had
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specific emotions and memories attached to them and relistening them not only
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proved to give me a big hit of nostalgia and flashbacks, but the fact that I
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was able to comprehend most of them was so amazing I could not believe what I
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was listening to ([Blue Encount from
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僕のヒーローアカデミア](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtNgeDxYJzE) being by
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far the best example of what I could not understand a year ago).
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For a second it seemed like I unlocked a new area of the song that was once
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hidden to me and completely out of discussion. What I was once listening to and
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"letting it go by, without thinking about it is meaning" as to say, was now
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being automatically converted in my brain. And this is the experience I am
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talking about. The only sign of improvement I ever get is this. And I am so
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thankful that I get it from time to time because it really keeps me going like
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nothing else.
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"Oh," you might say, "but surely you can see your progress and advancement over
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time as you start to notice that you understand more and more of the content
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that you absorb." Well, that is actually quite false, in my opinion. As you
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advance in a language and learn new words day after day, the relative
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difference between what you knew 5 days ago and what you know now are so slim
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that you practically cannot see it. At the beginning though, those differences
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are quite large. As Tom Scott put it, ["Going from 201 to 202 feels like a tiny
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change, but going from 1 to 2 is a
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doubling."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9j89L8eQQk&t=208s) Although the
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topic of that video was not language learning, I honestly feel like it applies
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to language learning as well. That is why I get so happy and motivated when
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this occurence happens. It tells me that whatever I knew about Japanese last
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year is completely different to what I know now. Knowing that you are making
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progress is way better than having the idea that you are stuck in one place for
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the whole time in my opinion.
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Thanks for reading this.
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