*Continued reading*

Thanks for the encouragement

Do you have an mp3 player? If so, load it up with (also pirated) music and audio rips and perhaps some (legitimate) podcasts and listen to it all the time. Your parents don’t have to know what you’re listening to. In fact, keep it secret. Like a game. If you get discovered, you lose. If you don’t have one, get one however you can. You can get a really decent one with tons of storage for under $50. Hell nearly any cell phone can store and play audio as well.

Watch Japanese shows and movies and anime when you’re at the computer.

Develop a hidden stash of Japanese stuff that you come to for motivation. Learn Japanese like a ninja: stealthy and unseen and completely fictional.

Plunder, pillage, rape, and steal. Guerrilla warfare. That’s the name of the game. Do you understand? ಠ⌣ಠ

So I stopped studying Japanese at home (where I spent 99% of my non-school time) and only studied it at school during lunch and afterschool sessions. My classmates mostly approved, so it wasn’t an issue. However, I didn’t have much access to study material. It’s not like our school library had anything in Japanese and I didn’t feel comfortable buying anything as I didn’t want my parents to find material in japanese. It was depressing.

Then, MANY years (9 years) later I grew up and realized: I don’t give a ****. It’s not my fault their language isn’t as interesting and I’ll learn what I want to learn. If I feel like it, I might learn portuguese AFTER I master japanese and that’s that.

I went back to learning japanese and my parents once again showed their dislike so I told them that I liked the japanese language and I’ll learn it because I want to. That was the end of that and they haven’t complained since. Actually, they started being more encouraging. My study habits have improved since and I honestly feel that in a year, I’ll be relatively fluent. In the past 6 months since I came back, I’ve accomplished more than in the 9 years before then.

Sometimes, the best thing is to just tell those people you’re gonna do what you want to do, and then do it. 

I sure could benefit from that right now…

How do *I* deal with social resistance? In a nutshell:

1. If the person is not supportive, and deals more bad than good stuff onto me, I ditch him/her out of my life. Plain and simple.

2. If that person does much more good than harm to me but it’s just not supportive with X idea, I tell him/her that as weird as it seems, I know what I’m doing, and would also tell her/him something like: “Come on dude/gal, have some faith in me! :D”

3. If the person is a complete biatch to me, but it happens to be the person that maintains me economically (thus he/she can’t be ditched):
I do something even better than not arguing. I tell them they are absolutely right (even when they are not), tell them exactly what they want to hear, and then just go work on what I wish, either the journey of becoming fluent in English/Japanese through immersion, or becoming successful in Internet Marketing.

BTW, I can’t find the post called “Are You The World’s B*tch?”!! I even searched in Google and nothing! Do you guys know where it went? I love that post, it’s almost the best of all AJATT in my opinion… D:

This past year I’ve been working on Swedish and Esperanto as well as German, all using whatever TV, movies, books, audiobooks, etc that I could find. For Swedish lately, I’ve been using “Avatar: the last airbender”, which has a swedish dub.

Next project is Dutch. I’ve created some parallel texts in Dutch/English for the Harry Potter books (using ebooks and a program called “hunalign” that matches up the sentences automagically). In one month, I’m going to try to read all the Harry Potter books (all 1.1 million words) while listening to the audiobooks, and following along with the translation in my sentence-by-sentence parallel text.

all of us gaijin外人 learning Japanesse are not Nihonjin by blood, but by SOUL 魂, if you catch my drift.　日本の魂を持ってると信じて。
shut all negativity in a cold dark place where it can shrivel & die, 例えばthe ‘fridge, and down that ramune！
don’t go for the cola unless it says コーラ on the label.

on another note, a wise person, whose name i forget, said that 9X% of all statistics are bogus. pure garbage .

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with that sentence alone. I learned two languages on my own, one to near-perfect fluency, the other to very good. (German and Chinese) Now if I tell anyone I’m learning a new language using so and so method, I don’t really care whether or not they think it’s a scientifically proven method. (Science can’t keep up with the faculties and complexities of the mind anyway) After all, I’ve done it before. I speak German all the time since I live in Germany now, and I speak Chinese every day with my fiancée who is Chinese. Who’s going to argue with me Oo? Someone who only speaks one language? Pah.

Don’t let anyone talk down any method you read up or invent yourself to learn a language or do anything really. The mind is a flexible being that will use ANY method to learn a language or anything else if you are interested. (I learned German by reading novels with zero fluency and checking every word in the dictionary and writing down the English translation, and I learned Chinese by watching Chinese medieval fantasy series, chatting, and talking…)

So in short, do whatever works, above all, do whatever you want!