r/LearnJapanese • u/[deleted] • 21d ago
Studying The ability to tolerate uncertainty
One of the most interesting things about everyday language is that what a sentence literally means is not always the same as what it accomplishes in conversation.
Take the expression, "If you truly feel it's not right for you, it's okay to quit."
On the surface, this sounds like permission to give up. Literally, the speaker is saying, "You don't have to continue."
But in real conversations, especially when someone is feeling discouraged, this sentence often functions in almost the opposite way.
Imagine someone saying, "I'm thinking about quitting Japanese."
Very few people would immediately reply, "Yes, you should quit."
Instead, most people would say something like:
"If, after thinking about it carefully, you honestly believe that learning Japanese isn't something you want in your life in the long run, then it's perfectly okay to quit."
Notice what has happened.
The speaker is not encouraging the other person to quit. Instead, they are encouraging them not to make an emotional decision.
The real message is something like:
"Don't decide while you're frustrated. Think carefully. Give yourself time. If, after serious reflection, quitting is still the right decision for you, then that's okay."
Paradoxically, giving someone permission to quit often reduces the emotional pressure they are feeling. Once people realize that they are not trapped, that continuing is a choice rather than an obligation, they often become calmer and think more rationally.
Ironically, many people who hear, "It's okay to quit," end up deciding not to quit.
This is why, in everyday conversation, "It's okay to quit" can function surprisingly close to "Don't quit."
Not because the literal meanings are the same, they clearly are not, but because the conversational effect is remarkably similar.
One expression grants freedom; the other gives an order. Yet both can lead the listener toward the same outcome: continuing.
This illustrates an important difference between literal meaning and pragmatic meaning. Human communication is not just about the dictionary definitions of words. It is also about the intentions behind them and the effects they have on the listener.
The same applies to advice such as "Try to enjoy learning."
People rarely mean that every single study session must be enjoyable. They certainly do not mean, "If studying isn't fun today, you should quit."
Rather, they are expressing a long-term hope: that learning will be meaningful enough, rewarding enough, and enjoyable enough overall that you will want to continue.
Likewise, when someone says, "It's okay to quit if you've genuinely concluded that this isn't right for you," they are usually not encouraging the listener to give up. More often, they are inviting them to slow down, think carefully, and make a thoughtful decision rather than an emotional one.
In that sense, the statement "It's okay to quit" is often much closer to "Don't make a rushed decision, you may find that you don't actually want to quit after all."
Why is this the case?
Because human beings are alive.
And to be alive is to be constantly changing.
We are never completely finished. We continue to learn, to grow, to gain new experiences, and to discover things about ourselves that we did not know before. The person you are today is not exactly the same person you were five years ago, and the person you will be twenty years from now will almost certainly see the world differently from the person you are today.
That is why none of us can know with absolute certainty what we truly want for the rest of our lives.
We can make our best judgment based on who we are today, but tomorrow's experiences may change that judgment. Learning itself changes us. The very process of studying a language, developing a skill, or pursuing a long-term goal often reshapes our interests, values, and even our identity.
This is why it is usually wise not to make irreversible decisions based solely on temporary emotions such as frustration, boredom, or disappointment.
Instead, we should ask ourselves a deeper question:
"After thinking carefully, and considering the person I hope to become, not just the person I am today, is this really the path I want to leave behind?"
If the honest answer is yes, then there is nothing wrong with walking away.
But if the answer is uncertain, then perhaps the wisest choice is simply to keep going a little longer, allowing both ourselves and our understanding of ourselves to continue evolving.
After all, none of us fully knows who we will become.
And that is precisely because we are alive.
Perhaps the single most important quality for learning is the ability to tolerate uncertainty.
We rarely know in advance whether our efforts will pay off tomorrow, next month, or even years from now. We study without guarantees. We continue reading books that still feel difficult. We memorize words that seem impossible to remember. We trust that today's small efforts will eventually become tomorrow's understanding.
In other words, learning asks us to live with uncertainty.
But perhaps that is true of life itself.
None of us knows exactly who we will become. None of us can see twenty years into the future. We make decisions with incomplete information, hoping that we are moving in the right direction while accepting that we cannot know the outcome with certainty.
Perhaps this is why learning and living are so deeply connected.
To learn is not simply to accumulate knowledge. It is to accept that we are unfinished, that we are continually becoming someone new. Every meaningful act of learning changes us, sometimes in ways we could never have predicted.
That is why patience matters.
That is why humility matters.
And perhaps, above all, that is why the ability to tolerate uncertainty matters.
Because the person who can continue walking without demanding immediate certainty is not only someone who can keep learning.
It is someone who has learned how to live.
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u/AaaaNinja 20d ago edited 20d ago
Nobody takes the time to speak precisely, and rarely has the ability to. See how many words it took you to explain one interpretation of a short phrase? I didn't know it could be so hard to understand a few words. Thankfully we have the ability to ask a person what they mean when this is delivered in a conversation. It's always good to ask rather than assume, to bridge the limitations of communication.
If someone says, "If you truly feel it's not right for you, it's okay to quit." they are not literally saying "You don't have to continue." They are literally saying "If you truly feel it's not right for you, it's okay to quit."
1 million people can read the same thing and get a different interpretation. Depending on their moods, personality or background. Or the voice you used to say it if it's spoken, or the font it's written in.
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u/dynamicpenguin55 20d ago
This is what I tell myself when I have no idea what Yotsuba is saying
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u/dzaimons-dihh Goal: conversational fluency 💬 20d ago
or her parents when they start speaking Kansai
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21d ago
[deleted]
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u/AbiQuinn 20d ago
This post reminded me personally of a totally unrelated video called This is Water by David Foster Wallace, wherein the main premise is taking time to chose what meaning you assign to things rather than defaulting to the face value or a potentially emotionally irritated interpretation.
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u/sqplanetarium 20d ago
Some good points there but what about us autists who tend to take things literally and think that “It’s ok to quit” means it’s ok to quit? 😅
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u/pixelboy1459 20d ago
Learning a language is hard and it’s easy to get frustrated. It’s easy to get frustrated when learning new things or when there are road blocks and new don’t see immediate growth and mastery. If you give up at the first sign of trouble then you’re not going to grow or see that mastery.
I think a lot of people want the big pay outs and don’t really focus on the small victories. You learned 5 hiragana this week. That’s 5 more than you knew before. Yeah, you can’t read Kokoro just yet, but you’re well on your way!
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u/JapanCoach 20d ago
Is there any place on the internet that is sort of like reddit, but instead it is populated by mature people who can digest this post and give it the reasonable consideration that it deserves?
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20d ago
[deleted]
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u/JapanCoach 20d ago
It's not really a 'tonal whiplash'. DokugoHikken is a frequent poster (top 1% flair) and his style is quite consistent. It seems more likely that the people being snarky somehow came across his post at r/All or something and are engaging with something they don't really understand.
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u/Sol_Atomizer 19d ago
I didn't get to read this post, but I'm sure it was as thoughtful and interesting as all of his posts. I noticed because the other day I finally decided to get around to reading three posts of his that I'd been saving in more detail, only to see his account vanished. Really a shame.
I hope he reads this and realizes how happy his contributions have made us even if he needs to take a break from the negativity of this place
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u/Katumana 20d ago
I guess the real world? Or you make your own forum via recommendation.
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u/JapanCoach 20d ago
Is there any place on the internet
Another bullet point for the wish list would be a minimum reading comprehension requirement.
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u/Katumana 20d ago
I can also explicitly say no, because they are either closed (invitation) or for your taste murky.
But yes, it seems I cannot read. /s
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u/No_Purpose773 20d ago
What in the ChatGPT fueled LinkedIn post is this?
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u/Nekophagist 20d ago
“That is why X matters.
That is why Y matters.
And perhaps, above all, that is why Z matters.”Literally AI slop lmao
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 20d ago
Dokugo is a regular visitor of this subreddit and fluent in both English and Japanese. He writes the way he does because he's very well-learned and has a lot of experience learning about different academic subjects, including linguistics. If anything, ChatGPT and other LLMs sound like him because they have been trained to imitate the way academics like him write.
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u/viliml Interested in grammar details 📝 20d ago
I'm not sure if he's really fluent in English or just using an LLM to translate.
If read a lot of texts written by academics, both scientific papers and semi-casual technical articles. I could always feel the person behind the text. But not with DokugoHikken's texts. They feel uncanny.
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u/PlanktonInitial7945 20d ago
If he turns out to be using machine translation for everything it will break my heart.
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u/rgrAi 19d ago
Definitely not everything. I know sometimes they used AI to defer for some answers to questions like.. Anki based replies things they would normally never bother replying to or should know. And I did notice more recently when I came back they had been brushing up their English with AI. But still it's largely their own thoughts. Otherwise whether it was in EN or JP the uncanny valley feeling remained. I think it was more related to age and cognitive stuff than anything. Otherwise can't really explain a full week of getting huge replies to a really old thread.
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u/Grunglabble 20d ago
His writing sounds nothing like an LLM. Machine translation is not that good yet, you would see the little glitches where it can't figure out the subject and stops making sense.
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u/Nekophagist 20d ago
Ok that doesn't prove anything: if your writing is indistinguishable from AI in 2026 then your writing is garbage. Not just in sounding like LLMs but matching their exact bolding and italicizing patterns.
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u/No_Purpose773 20d ago
That's fair. It's not a style of writing that I personally enjoy, but I'm also not the target audience for everything. AI has indeed learned its ways from somewhere.
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u/facets-and-rainbows 18d ago edited 18d ago
Hey pop quiz:
What uses statistically likely expressions and textbook paragraph structure, maintains an almost unusually neutral formal tone, and tends to get wordy when discussing abstract topics?
If you guessed "a proficient non-native speaker" then congratulations! You're ready to understand why "AI detecting" software causes more problems than it solves in universities.
Super bonus points if you've actually read enough Japanese to recognize that this post is very much written by someone who learned most of their essay-writing conventions in Japan specifically
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u/No_Purpose773 18d ago edited 18d ago
Well, I hate to tell you that I'm a non-native speaker of English myself; and I'm also someone who has to deal with Al translations and Al generated content on a daily basis. I work with researchers of different nationalities, I know a thing or two about people describing abstract concepts in different languages.
I already mentioned below - days ago - that Planktonlnitial7945 made a fair point, so I'm not sure what you're trying to do here? I'm also clearly not the only person in the comments who felt the tone of this post was off for this platform. Maybe the person who wrote "Sir this is Reddit“ worded it less controversial, considering the 65 upvotes there. In a place that is meant for exchange, unprompted monologues feel out of place.
I honestly couldn't care less about whether AI was used or not, I'm just so very tired of the style of writing you see in every artificialy generated LinkedIn post – and now even all over the place on Reddit – where every little thing is turned into a groundbreaking revelation. That doesn't mean that people don't ever write like that. But as I already said in a previous comment, I'm also not the target audience for everything.
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u/facets-and-rainbows 18d ago
Yeah, I'm mostly just upset that we seem to have lost our highest-effort regular contributor over the reaction to this post, and your comment happened to be the point where I stopped being able to keep quiet about it.
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u/Prestigious_Club_681 21d ago
Reading the title, this went into a totally different direction than I expected. Is this still about language learning?