Your peer group is not your age group. Your peers are Japanese toddlers, not gaijin forum trolls and not Japanese people your age.
If you hadn’t been schooled, you’d know that your peer group is not your age group. Your age group is determined by your parents’ sex life — just like your nationality and your ethnicity — you had no choice in the matter: your Mom was tipsy; there was a couch; one thing led to another.
Your peer group is determined by your behavior. Your choices.
Stop comparing yourself to people whose parents got randy around the same time as yours did.
Start comparing yourself to people whom you act like, or whom you want to act like.
If age mattered like you think it does, if your peer group were your age group, then everybody of the same age as you would quite literally be the same as you. They would have achieved more or less the exact same things at the exact same time. Obviously this more or less never happens. Why? Because it’s not time that matters, it’s choices.
Only stupid people care when you wormed your slimy body out of your mother’s nether regions, and how many times the Earth has gone around the Sun since 😛 . (← Abusive assurance, a logical fallacy…yeah, that’s right, I picked today to start pointing out fallacies in my fallacy-riddled writing). And you’re not stupid.
Stop counting years. Start counting choices.
ね！いい点。
そういうについて、さほど意気消沈なくてもいい。
今こそ、よりよいを選択します。
〜エフ・ヴィ
yeah, I completely agree. Actually I wrote/recorded a very similar post on my own blog a while back ( bit.ly/U5sIOp )
It almost amazes me how people compare themselves to people who’ve been speaking a language 10,20,30 odd years longer than they have, and then get all neurotic because they’re not as good.
It literally makes physically angry every time I hear someone use the old excuse.
Why? Because they actually believe it. In my experience if you try to tell them otherwise they will retaliate and give you all of the reasons in the world why they’re too old (most of my friends are only 18-22 to add insult to the wound) to learn.
“your Mom was tipsy; there was a couch; one thing led to another.” LOL! I love the humor here. It’s so refreshing compared to a stuffy classroom environment. 😀
I’ve been trying a lot to remember this lately, so this post was certainly appreciated. I constantly get frustrated because I’m trying to function at the same level in Japanese as I can in English, despite not having spent nearly the same amount of time with Japanese. Instead of trying to instantly be a Japanese 25 year old, I probably need to accept being a Japanese toddler for a while – with the compensatory knowledge that at least it shouldn’t take another 20 years before I can use Japanese the way I want to.
Actually that’s a really good point, most language learners are somewhere around the level of a toddler or slightly older child, not an adult, and should therefore be using the materials and methods that would work for such a person (for the most part, with minor adjustments e.g. listening to music or watching movies that might not be appropriate for a young child).
Cheers,
Andrew