How To Learn A Language, Step 1: Find "Motivation"

If I can confess, up until about a month ago, my studying of Japanese consisted of a two-fold strategy: willing myself to learn it and hoping to learn by passive osmosis. Surprisingly, simply wanting to learn something really badly will not actually make it happen. Equally surprisingly, simply hoping to just absorb it by being constantly surrounded by it also does not work.

So, motivated by the consuming rage that accompanies being a mute I charged my way to the bookstore and bought out the Japanese language section.

And I must say, it's surprising just how much you can learn by actually studying. However I have seemed to approach a weird step in the language acquisition process. I can generally understand what people around me are saying (or saying at me) yet I don't have the ability to respond back. Which is even more frustrating than the situation I had been in before. It's the language learning equivalent of "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly" (see, random credit-filler film analysis courses do have a purpose, namely name dropping to make a person seem refined).

However I have two constant sources of motivation. First, I will not allow myself to make an ass out of myself: I bought these books in a fury of motivation I can't take the expected route and burn out after a month.

And second, it's amazing how the motivation to learn a language can be sustained when the results are a little more, what shall we say?

Tangible perhaps?