I don’t know what I was thinking.

Actually, I’ve concluded I wasn’t thinking at all… at least, not in the normal sense.

From April to June, Peter and I had set aside three months to concentrate all of our efforts on learning Japanese. We initially thought that we would both attend Japanese language school in Okinawa’s capital city, Naha. 

However, when the results of my placement test came in, it turned out that the classes at my level were already full. So Peter went to language school alone.

I could have reviewed all the old vocabulary I’d forgotten during our times back in Canada.

I could have continued studying new language constructs, grammar, and vocabulary with Kumon, as I’d done in years gone by.

But this time?

This time, I decided I was going to tackle memorizing all of the 2200 Kanji (Chinese characters) required for basic literacy in Japan.

The same Kanji characters it usually takes kids born in Japan until the end of high school to learn.

In my defense, I decided not to learn how to pronounce them (each Kanji character has 2-6 different pronunciations). I decided to only learn their meanings and how to write them.

Also in my defense, I’d done it before. Back in 2011, when I was bedridden with a back injury, I spent a year and a half memorizing them all. But then, in the ensuing 12 years, as things got busy, I could never seem to find the time to practice them. And I forgot 80-90% of the things I’d learned.

So, this would just be a refresher, right?

Wrong.

It quickly became apparent that I would have to learn everything again, from scratch.

I don’t have a photographic memory. 

I don’t even have a particularly good memory—especially since receiving that bad concussion back in 2019.

And, in the infinite wisdom of this harebrained scheme, I decided I was going to try to complete everything within three months.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

I didn’t pray about it.

This wasn’t something I felt led to do by some divine promise or guidance.

Nope. I just thought I could do it. It just seemed the most reasonable thing in the world to set this as a goal. 

Over the next three months, I spent 3-5 hours per day:

  • copying out the Kanji over and over as I read the meanings aloud, and 
  • quizzing myself. 

I learned in micro-sets of 20-50, then grouped them into sets of 100. If I didn’t get more than 95% correct in my quizzes, I counted this as a fail, and tried again.

Each time I accumulated 500 new Kanji, I’d make a macro-set and quiz myself again (still with a pass considered 95% or above). 

On quiz days, I would try not to think too much about my answers. If they weren’t coming easily, I would keep studying.

On Kanji memorization days, I would plow through 50-100 Kanji in a single day.

In the second week of June, something rather embarrassing happened. I'd still been going to physiotherapy once every two weeks for my knees. However, over the previous week, I’d started experiencing a lot of stiffness and pain in my hands, especially when I'd first woken up from sleep. 

I started to wonder if perhaps this was a manifestation of the same arthritis that my mum struggled with starting at around my age. So when I went to physiotherapy, I mentioned it to the doctor who examines my knees before each session.

He said that if the symptoms continued for the next two weeks, during our next visit he will take some blood to test for rheumatoid arthritis.

Two days later, as I was practising my Kanji characters, my hands were getting really painful. I was starting to wonder if the "arthritis" would limit my ability to keep going with Kanji.

It was then that it hit me: maybe this hand pain wasn't arthritis at all! Maybe was is simply my hands cramping from having spent the last 2 1/2 months incessantly practising these Japanese characters for hours every day!

(Keep in mind, I still was in this weird daze, where what I was doing with all this memorization seemed completely normal and natural.)

Occupational therapy exercises for hand cramps seemed to help. (Thank you, YouTube!)

Needless to say, I felt a little foolish.

I continued my efforts, uninterrupted. By the end of June, I was finished. 

As I laid down my pen after memorizing the last micro-set of Kanji characters, a wave of exhaustion overwhelmed me. Though all the Kanji macro-sets had been completed up to #2000, I didn’t have the energy to practice my last set of 200 Kanji.

When the exhaustion continued the next day, I started thinking about the last three months. Incredulousness kicked in.

WHAT DID I JUST DO???

It was only then that I realized how ridiculous my goals had been.

It was only then that I realized that over the past three months, I hadn’t really experienced any significant fatigue at all.

It was only then that I realized that somehow, I’d been living in a dazed state for three months, and hadn’t realized that God had apparently been specially enabling me to learn all that I’d hoped to learn.

I don’t know what I was thinking.

But now, I'm thinking about the bigness of God and how sometimes He chooses to smile on us in ridiculous and marvellous ways.