- Social Resistance
- Reading and Respectability
- Flame Less + Journal More = Win
- Turn Yourself Into A Monster: What To Do When People Around You Are Not Encouraging Or Supportive
- Don’t Be A Hero
- Their Freedom To Hate → Your Freedom To Become Great
- The Righteousness of Selfishness
- Whose Team Are You On?
- Don’t Debate: Experiment
- Shadowing: No One Will Ever Love You Again
“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons…if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”
Thomas Szasz
If an idea makes you afraid that no one will ever love you again, then it’s probably a good idea. Here’s a dirty little secret: Murderers get loved before, during and after the fact. Women falling in love with — and marrying — convicted murderers happens so often it’s no longer even newsworthy. There are Slavic people who think Hitler was a good guy. You could literally cause the deaths of millions and someone, somewhere will still love you.
Now, I want to go on record here and say that the official AJATT policy on murder is that it’s a bad thing, right up there with pins-and-needles and bleeding hangnails. And Starbucks shops that close too early, because WTF kind of coffee shop closes at 9pm? And genocide? Oh, don’t even get me started on genocide…that’s worse than immigrants.
What? They’re takin’ our jerbs.
But I also want to go on record and tell you that, if you could do something morally reprehensible and still be loved, don’t you think you could just do something weird and still be loved? Again, not necessarily by a specific person or group, but by some person and/or group of persons. Rhetorical question. You could.
You aren’t gonna die and only people who were inclined to hate you are gonna hate you anyway 1, so please, play that anime, shadow them voices and visibly carry around Japanese books like you own the place, because you kinda do. You own your personal space. It’s your little moving kingdom. No one can take it away from you (Pauli Exclusion Principle, mate).
A lot of people are afraid of shadowing — embarrassed to be seen or heard doing it. But as I see it, the socio-economic prospects alone of the kind of people who would make fun of someone for learning things are so woefully abysmal that they inspire only pity. You should feel sorry — bitterly, tearfully, Bambi’s-mother-just-died sorry 2 — for the kind of people who would make fun of you for shadowing. A few years from now, they’ll literally be begging you for help with Japanese and then they’ll be begging you for advice on how to learn Japanese, but by then you’ll be, like, I dunno, Nelly in Ride Wit Me. It’s a total non-issue.
Nobody you want to be like would make fun of you for practicing, even — especially — if your practice method looked and sounded weird. Because everybody you want to be like knows that looking like an ugly duckling now is just a swan precursor. The uglier the better. The people of the kind that you are becoming, that you are growing into, know that it’s all part of the game; they respect you; they support you; they’re hoping for you to succeed. For real, even if they’ve never met you, they wish you well. They don’t think you’re a wannabe 3 — in fact, they wish more people “wanted to be”. And somebody, some groupie, somewhere loves you or soon will 😛 .
That is all.
Notes:
- You could literally give a gabillion jillion dolllars to charity right now and someone would find something bad to say about you. Call anyone on any rich list and ask him or her. Human beans are creative. ↩
- Yeah. Spoiler alert, be arch. ↩
- Plus, what’s wrong with being a “wannabe” anyway? What’s wrong with wanting to be something? Isn’t a baby trying to walk a wannabe walker? Are you supposed to ride in a stroller and crap your pants for the rest of your life? Is that “keeping it real”? Is that “remembering your roots”? ↩
I love to study at starbucks, but recently I’ve been trying to hide my Japanese books from others. I was kind of startled one time when this group of Koreans made fun of me for learning Japanese. I feel a lot better after reading this post. Thanks. I needed it.
Wow, that’s lame. Next time if the same group of people show up, you should make fun of them for their best athletes being StarCraft players. :/
They’re just jealous cause they weren’t born Japanese ;p. Let their hate fuel your in-progress legend.
“They’re just jealous cause they weren’t born Japanese”
Uh, no.
「日本に生まれたかった」とか言ってるチョンが大勢居るニダ
Are you explicitly trying to hide your racism by posting in Japanese? What a coward.
I’m not trying to make this a political debate, but there are more Koreans that would rather watch the Japanese suffer from genocide than to actually be Japanese, and vice versa. Because of the Korean wave, there are some Japanese that may say they wish they were Japanese, but there are more Japanese that want Koreans wiped out.
I know this site has a lot of weeaboos and hate Koreans and Chinese and believe that they’re inferior to Japanese, but don’t go generalizing 70 million people over what 3-4 people have said. With the animosity between the two countries, there are very few people in each country that wish they were the other.
For all of the time I’ve been reading this blog, Khatz has never advocated people here to blindly hate Koreans/Chinese just because the majority of Japanese people do. From my understanding, he wants people to think of themselves as being Japanese when learning Japanese so that no one can make excuses about “Oh, I’m American, this is too hard” or “Oh, I’ll just use English because Japanese is too hard.” He has never advocated for people to carry the same prejudices the Japanese have against other nations.
If you’re too big of a pussy to respond in English, then don’t bother.
Well, if you could read what I wrote you would know that it wasn’t even racist, and considering that Koreans and Japanese are the same race, what you made sort of makes no sense. That’s like a guy in Europe making fun about how “obese” Americans are and saying they all own firearms and have McDonalds pumping through their veins, and then being called a racist.
Making a joke about a country equals Racism these days? Oh jeez.
I also want you to know that I don’t blindly carry “prejudices” of the Japanese. I’ve researched the political and social histories between the countries, so I sort of know what I am talking about.
3 or 4 people have said? Well, when there is anti-Japanese elements in the Korean public education system, most older people in Korea hate Japan, When big Korean people like that Soccer player act pro-japanese they get hated in their country, when the country treats an Assassin who killed the Japanese prime minister in 1909 like a Hero, when at the Soccer games they have to resort to showing huge political banners, like this Year in July and the London Olympics with that Soccer player who ran around with a sign, I do have to say it’s more than 3-4 people.
I don’t blindly “hate” koreans or Chinese. I don’t even hate to begin with, I just find that a lot of the stuff Korea does is just stupid. Like the time when a company was forced to Apologize to Korea because they made an iphone case with the Japanese Navy Flag, because the koreans said it was like the Nazi flag, because tons of people were killed under it.
Give me a break.
Once again, I don’t hate anybody. And if you could read what I wrote you would realize it wasn’t even that bad, just a “rude” joke to respond. I just don’t like the political and social antics that Korea causes.
Talk about over-reaction.
Though somebody like you most likely hasn’t done much research of the past.
you’re using the word チョン how is what you not said racist?
Being mean-spirited towards a certain nationality is not “racism”. It’s just being a [bleep] [bleep] [bleep]. Racism is a Western concept that was created to reconcile ideals about morality with the subjugation of others by classifying people into the categories of race and then ordering them into a hierarchy.
u are taking stuff in the internet too seriously and personal bro
Time to pretend to be egotistical, Mwahahahaha!
First, I want to say that I really like you and the other anti-weeaboos, no seriously, I really do. You guys are SO successful in your hobby(along with other groups of people of course), that nobody(they give up or lose desire of such) ever gets fluency in Japanese, ever.
There is a single problem with your tactic, of course. Ya forgot to account for me, ME! See, by making sure everyone only speaks English, I will eventually get the ability to speak the language and pretty much be the only one who can in the radius of at least 100-200 miles+, so thanks very much for that.
Now, you must obviously must be thinking, I’m just like everyone here you really dislike with a deep passion. Well, not really. My reason for Japanese is because I love it, I want to read Japanese Textbooks my way and most importantly, I’m totally in love with their food and want to read Japanese food labels!
The only things anime I have interest is Touhou vocal music, which I use with a Bookmark randomizer I found on Chrome’s Webstore.
So thanks alot for unexpectedly giving people like me a leg up in this world.
Alright, you’ve inspired me. I’m gonna’ go kill my neighbours.
Oh, you’re talking about shadowing… alright, we’ll put that aside for now then.
… but for realz. How and why did humans get to the point that learning is ‘weird’ and something to be embarrassed about? Why do I get odd looks for watching asian media, as though exposure to different cultures is something to be ashamed of? I’ve gotten funny looks just for reading the Art of War.
Somebody saw me reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms and asked what it was about, when I replied that it was a Chinese historical novel the reply was a long pause followed by, “…what’s the point in that?” to which I replied “What’s the point in anything?”
Why is reading an old historical novel seen as weird and pointless yet Fifty Shades of Gay is hot stuff?
Ah, I’m under impression that anybody reading a book that doesn’t look like school assignment or famous book would be called weird and/or get funny looks.
I love shadowing and have been doing it for years. I even did a review of some great Japanese shadowing books. I highly recommend them!
youtu.be/IVkGrGuDdCk
I love shadowing, and it’s super useful, but I’m not sure I want to do it on the train or walking down the street either. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that’s fun to do that might be better done at home. Still, I guess you could always just pretend like you’re having a phone conversation with someone, and then maybe it wouldn’t look so weird.