Toriaezu's English Essays

All Blogs are Terrible

With my inept self-introduction out of the way it seems, in a way apropos to my possibly excessively contrary nature, that I should probably start talking about what I've often found makes blogs terrible.

Admittedly, the above title (All Blogs Are Terrible) is superlative. Far from thinking all blogs are terrible I'm actually a regular reader of philosopher Edward Feser's blog of which (as far as I can tell) I've greatly benefited from and have even found some of the musings in the blog of a former classmate to be, if not helpful, than at least interesting. So why write a title like "All Blogs Are Terrible"?

Well, as a learner of Japanese I'm not entirely unfamiliar with a blog by the title of "All Japanese All The Time" which strikes me as a massive thorn in the side of people looking to learn Japanese.

Language acquisition is fairly complex business and often times include periods of drought, frustration, stagnation, and a kind of deep skepticism of what one's efforts to learn a language will ultimately amount to.

Hence my frustration with the sophomoric sales pitch (for lack of a better term) of that accursed blog: "[L]earn Japanese... by having fun".

This is a load of garbage.

The fact of the matter is that learning Kanji and vocab *alone* is (at least when aiming for the JLPT N1 in a timely fashion) a grind. Even the author of the blog himself admits to using time-spaced flashcards to learn the language.

Using time-spaced flashcards is significantly mentally demanding task. It's straight-up rote memorization, the kind (well, in some ways harder, in others easier) you were once forced to do but have since-long forgotten back when you learned your times tables.

To be sure, this can be edifying -- though often in the same way that weight-lifting is.

But the process itself is often one of focus, delayed-gratification, and getting unfortunately sidetracked.

More relevant to this current post however, is that the real problem with that blog is that it's central tenet is that people looking to learn Japanese should reader, listen to, or otherwise use as much Japanese as possible while, at the same time, being a giant, bloated, verbose mess. In other words, if you're spending your time reading that blog in order to learn Japanese, you're doing something *positively contrary* towards the actual goal of language learning.

What the offer there basically does is profess to give you the secrets of how to learn Japanese while setting before you a giant digital tome of writings, the constant reading of which is largely going to eat up your time.

Which brings me to the central point of this blog post which is to invite you to consider why you're reading this or what good could possibly come from doing so.

For my Japanese readers, there *is* the benefit of being able to encounter native English prose written in (what will hopefully be) a coherent and well-structured way. Despite the many lamentations about the current state of the American education system, the fact of the matter is that four years of college (much more than that in my case, though this is more of a matter of coincidence than continuing rigorous education) is usually a decently long enough amount of time to hammer out the quirks in ones writing.

I was raised in the midwestern America, so my grammar, word-choices, and other idiosyncrasies are that of the "mainstream" American vernacular -- something which seems oddly hard to find at times for many Japanese people looking to learn what seems to be the fairest description of 'natural' English.

For my native-English readers, however, I'm not sure what reasons I can give you for checking up on my essays.

For many of you, the experiences of an American living in Japan may prove to be interesting, but as someone who has both read other blogs on the country and actually lived here, I think most writers tend to be either too melodramatic, too self-referential, or too avoidant of considering what could possible constitute an objective look at the phenomenon of culture too write something that ultimately seemed to capture what real differences, though there really aren't any, between the 'West' and Japan.

At any rate, all I can say from here on out with regards to what good reading this blog will do you is: "mileage may vary".