Remember this.

A language is not actually a skill. It’s not something you can take and “have”. We talk about “acquiring” it, which implies possession, but in fact it cannot be possessed as such.
A language is a habit. It is a way of being.

So if in doubt about just how to go about it, if in doubt about what you should do to “acquire” any language, forget about acquiring it…just try to be it.

Be it. Be the language.

Every moment. Every day.

And so you realize that probably one of the funnest ways to get this habit is simply to copy other people who have it.

Nothing new here, but I wanted this to have its own article. Now I’m going to wait by the phone for my family to call and tell me that they’ve disowned me for saying “funnest” …

Legal documents are a wordy morass of redundant crap…

…in English.

But in Japanese, they’re…fun. No, I mean it. Filled with cool kanji, simple, logical, direct and unambiguous language, legal dox in Japanese are actually, IMHO, a language learner’s dream. I started deliberately reading legal documents in Japanese one day on a whim a while ago. I was buying comics to read on my cellphone, as one is readily able to do in Japan, and, the purchase screen had one of those user agreements attached. And I decided to read the agreement, the whole agreement, just for kicks. And I was struck by both how easy it was to understand, but at the same time about how much I learned in terms of document and sentence structure.

Now, I can hear some voices say “but Kats, you were fluent in Japanese at this point”. I was…but, looking back, I had done a similar thing long before I was fluent. Back when I was installing a Japanese OS on my computer, in February 2005, and thereafter when installing other software, I would encounter software license agreements, and while I never read them in their entirety because I’m usually in such a rush when installing software, I did read them in part, and I was struck by how easy they were to understand. This is going to sound weird but reading legal dox in Japanese is really…enjoyable. Maybe it’s because, in terms of actual content, they all say about the same thing — “screw you and all your base are belong to us” — but they say it so edjumacated-sounding! Here’s a line from a contract a read today (I was considering signing up for Sky Perfect satellite TV, specifically to get channels of the from Hong Kong and Taiwan kind):

スカパー！DVRの利用にあたり、スカパー！DVRの不具合など何らかの原因で録画ができなかった場合や、不具合・交換など何らかの原因で録画内容が破損・消滅した場合など、いかなる場合においても録画内容の補償及びそれに付随するあらゆる損害について、当社は一切責任を負いかねます。
If in the course of using a Sky Perfect DVR, said DVR is unable to record video due to a breakdown or any other reason resulting in the user’s data being lost or damaged, Sky Perfect TV cannot in any way, shape or form be held responsible for that loss or any accompanying damage. Screw you and all your base are belong to us.

(actually, it’s from outside the main contract, but it’s from the contract page, and it still owns).

This kind of thing (contract-reading) is what I mean by “anything and everything that is in Japanese, by and for a Japanese audience, is fair game for study”. If you haven’t already, I want you to let go of the very narrow idea that only materials specifically and explicitly designated for learning are for learning. In fact, the materials designated for learning tend to suck; they tend to be the ones from which you learn the least.

Other than their being fun, there is a more practical reason for reading legal documents. Whether or not you are a lawyer, it should come as no surprise to you that Japan is a society that is basically governed by laws and written contracts. These written contracts are built on logical arguments and language that people use to secure their positions. If you do anything remotely grown-up in connection with Japan — live here, do business here or with people from here, whatever — then there may well come a time when you will have to have a more or less reasonable discussion with someone who disagrees with you, but whom you will need to win over. I may be wrong, but I feel that Japanese legalese is not as removed from normal communication and ridiculous-sounding as English legalese. For this and other reasons, I recommend that you read legal Japanese to equip yourself with the vocabulary and structure needed to go to town.

In my personal experience, people in Japan, like people all over the world, do things based on bad logic, but when shown that bad logic, they are willing to correct and compromise in a way I do not often see in the rest of the world. As long as you couch your arguments in logic, not in “best practice in other parts of the world” or “this is how we do it in my country”, you can win a lot of bloodless battles in Japan. This is from a guy who’s had to get the erroneously overcharged import duty removed from items shipped from abroad (the duty was about 10 times the value of the items), get the water turned back on at his friend’s house hours before New Year’s break, and get a doctor to give Momoko enough prescription medication so that we needn’t go to the hospital and wait in line for three hours every other freaking day (OK, every 2.5 months, but that can feel like every other day). All of it involved gently exposing bad logic to put it kindly (or arguing my guts out with polite tenacity and lots of grown-up words, to put it bluntly).

Let me be frank. Japan is not a multiethnic country in the modern sense on a large scale (of course the people of Japan originally came from all over Asia, but everyone combined to form a new people, the Japanese people, and therefore Japan can be said to have only one ethnicity)…yet. And that’s fine. The only problem is that this means that non-ethnic Japanese who speak Japanese are rare…for now. Simply put, Japanese people do not expect you to speak Japanese and so in that sense they think you’re stupid in the way that we all think that people who do not speak our language are stupid — we do not think they can handle a complex, nuanced discussion. This is not a good thing or a bad thing: it is merely the way things are. Frankly, I see it as an opportunity. Since most people in Japan currently hold such low linguistic expectations of you, for you to exceed those expectations, by what appear to be such astronomical margins, works in your favor — the shock value alone can win the day for you. Anyway, so, yeah, to get some Japanese people in some situations to take you seriously, as you may need to from time to time in adult life, you may need to make all their base belong to you. The best way (I have thought of so far) to do this is through language that is firm, well-reasoned and a liiiiiiiittle cold(?) — don’t be a jerk, don’t be rude, but don’t be a pushover either. One of the best places to learn such language, I think, is in legal documents. That and the proceedings of Japan’s law-making body (the House of Representatives), available in full in video here. For those times when you really need to talk like a no-B.S. adult, this is some of the best preparation you can get.

I’ve said that most legal dox amount to “screw you and all your base are belong to us”. That’s not entirely true — sometimes stated explicitly and other times openly implied between the lines are your rights. Get familiar with legal documents, get over the intimidation, start reading them, and you can potentially get more out of life here as and when you need to.

I have no formal legal training, nor am I particularly interested in the law for its own sake. But, that doesn’t matter. Contracts are a part of our lives. At the end of the day, what is literacy even for if it is not at least for reading, understanding, analzying and evaluating the documents that run our very lives? If you don’t read the things that matter, then it’s the same as you not being able to read at all; you’re as defenseless as those Americans who got outright lied to and swindled by European invaders into signing away all your base are belong to us documents (see 1492 to 1970 for details) . And like, if all the people in the US who bought houses on subprime loans had actually read and thought about their contracts before signing them, they might have known that they were getting screwed and in danger of having their base belong to someone else. But they didn’t read them. We are a society, a generation, of people raised on the Cliffs Notes of life. We read about the law, we read about the Constitution, we read about the budget, but we almost never read the actual, original documents; we never bust out a calculator and actually add up those numbers that get thrown around in the legislatures of our respective countries, not unless it’s something stupid and irrelevant like Moby Dick or Macbeth. Not that Moby Dick and Macbeth don’t have their place, but if you’re not a Macbetholigst, they’re about as important to your daily life as yesterday’s episode of One Piece, which is to say less than the dust that gathers in the fan on my laptop even as I type this. Dude, that cellphone contract you and I signed without reading, that thing matters, we should have read it and not just trusted the shop guy’s hand-waving explanation talking about how it “should” be OK. Shop guys (and girls) will mislead you with qualified statements that are lexically true “in some cases…”, but practically quite false. Before you sign away the next two years of your life to AU or Softbank, you should seriously cast your eyes and mind upon that print, fine or otherwise — ask for the large-print senior citizen version if the regular one hurts to read, but whatever you do, READ it. Spend at least as much time perusing the pertinent contracts as picking the colors on your keitai or the wallpaper of your house. This is your life; this is real; this is important. OK, end of dad lecture .

Anwyay, I just realized that maybe I haven’t expressed myself very well in this post, which would be ironic, but…whatever. Um, here are some links to more legal dox (primarily software user agreements) and to all the Sky Perfect agreements bundled up into one file.

So if you want to read this website but green and orange are starting to bore you, then consider reading it in blue over here.

That’s right, folks. Original and plagiarized quite without my permission and proudly in violation of copyright. And it’s all there. But in blue. And sidebar on the left hand side. Perfect for that “change of pace” — rather like when you rearrange your bedroom…with furniture stolen from someone else.

Please feel free to visit them and give them feedback. Topics might include “how copying and pasting the text from AJATT but with a blue theme, is a step up”. I am open to other ideas as well.

(Many thanks to Damien of Anki for saving the day by finding the plagiarized site, and then giving me a phone call to help calm me down ).

I’m not the first guy to ever write about this kind of thing, not the best, and not the last. But, let’s give it a shot.

I don’t know if that comes out in this blog, but I can actually be a bit of a perfectionist. And this is a bad thing. I have over 300 drafts in my Gmail inbox that are “not quite right” and therefore not sent. I have about 40 long posts for this blog that have yet to see the light of the Internets. There are pages upon pages of comics that have not been put up because they’re “not good enough”.

Are we seeing the pattern here? The problem with perfectionism in all its forms is that…it creates this incredibly high standard, whereby you either meet the standard or you do not do the job at all. Or something like that. And, like, you know, you see the entryway to perfectionism in statements like “do it properly or not at all”. I used to love that phrase but now I freaking hate it. No, now I say “do it”.

When I look at how most of my projects were failing, it wasn’t from half-donkeyedness. No, it was from sadness brought about by standards that were functionally impossible to meet in anything but ideal conditions. My projects weren’t dying from chronic malnutrition, they were dying from outright starvation (preceded by some guilt-induced starve-binge cycles). And when I say project death, I mean everything starting from the daily level to the long term (since a long term project is nothing but a sequence of daily tasks and sub-projects anyway, but more on that later).

One of my largest continuing projects is the Japanese/Chinese project. And part of that involves doings my daily SRS reps. I noticed that I generally either did 0 reps or all my reps, but rarely anything in between. Multiple consecutive days of 0 reps were starting to eat away at my conscience and no doubt my skill. Why? Because I always set out with the goal to do…all my reps. Listen to Chinese every available waking hour. This is a good goal in terms of being noble. But sucky in terms of fragility. Because stuff happens.

Stuff happens. And when it does, people (well, I) tend to throw in the towel. “All or nothing”, remember? And…this is bad. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Some days you’re tired, the end is so far, yeah, you do your reps but you’re not fluent yet. So what do you do?

Do 1 rep. Just one.

Lower your standards. As Tony Robbins once said, make it easy to make you happy; lower the threshold at which you will say “yes, I am pleased”. Why? Because the more you relax the conditions for you to be happy, the more of the time you will be happy. And, ironically, by extension, the more productive you will be.

Think of when you do something bad, something that wastes time. No one ever goes “right, I’m going to smoke 37 kilograms of crack today”. Or “right, I’m going to spend the next 72 hours surfing the Internet with no sleeping or showers”. No. It’s always one more game. Just one. One more hit. Click on one more link. One more round. One more bottle of whatever it is people drink. One more round.

When you decide to do one of any small thing, inevitably you find it’s easy. In the case of things like drugs and gambling, it doesn’t seem to hurt, maybe it even seems fun. So you go on. In the case of something good, like doing your SRS reps…it’s exactly the same. So rather than say “I’m going to do x00 reps today”, just say “I’m going to do one. And take it from there”.

I was standing at a train station the other day. And the overhead announcement goes: “間も無く、2番線に、快速電車成田空港行きが到着します。” ["the rapid train to Narita Airport will be arriving soon"]. And I went, “だったら、到着しろよ。” ["well then, ARRIVE already!"] just to be funny. And it struck me right then that generally, at an everyday level, in terms of the small things we succeed at every day, we don’t so much talk about arriving somewhere as we do about going there. We don’t write down in our daily planner “ARRIVE at the supermarket”, we write “GO to the supermarket”. But in terms of the bigger things that we seem to fail at — like doing our language practice or making a kajillion euros — the goal statement is often too big and not backed by the baby steps that compose our entire lives.

So don’t say “exercise today”. Say “step outside the door” (computer geeks know what I mean: if you’re not careful, outside just doesn’t happen some days — sit in front of the computer one bright and sunny marnin’, and get up about two minutes later and think “what the DARK?!” — especially if there’s enough milk and Frosted Flakes in the house). Don’t say “do homework”. Say “solve one problem”. Don’t say “make a kajillion euros”. Say “make 1 euro”. Don’t try to arrive at your goal. Just try to go there — and congratulate yourself for it: give yourself credit for only getting it partially right, partially done. And I think you will find that the arriving will take care of itself. ‘Cause, think about it, you can’t only give yourself credit for when you get things completely right, or, well, you can and many people do, but that’s a recipe for sadness, especially since most of your life will be spent in the state of working on incomplete projects. So don’t wait to praise yourself for the whole or you’ll be waiting too long, praise yourself for the small, incomplete things you’re doing right here and now.

I’ve often said that someone learning a new language is a baby. Now that I think about it, so is someone doing anything new: and by “new, I mean “for the first time today”. You’re a baby, man. And you were born this morning! Haha. No one yells at a baby trying to walk, telling her that her posture sucks and if she has the audacity to call that bipedal locomotion then well she’d better think twice, Missy, because the Jones’ baby started walking when she was only 6 months old and at this rate she’ll be in the bottom percentile of walkers and she’ll never get into a good kindergarten or good elementary school or high school or college or job and she’ll end up getting pregnant at 11 and marrying an abusive biker and serving jail time in an escalating spiral of antisocial behavior from shoplifting to drug peddling to armed robbery all because she didn’t walk straight when she was a baby! So, give yourself credit for only getting it half right, especially since no one else will. Be your own mother — the loving kind rather than the beauty pageant kind. Goooood! Look at you!

OK, sometimes I hate writing these. Not because I don’t like you , but because they’re kind of a distraction from actually doing the doing. Nevertheless, I do have progress to report, so here goes:

Cantonese Early Start

One week before Thanksgiving last year (2007), I began some experimentation with Cantonese (but did not inhale? What? 1960s hippie references not funny for you?). The details are going to have to wait, so don’t ask — I’m still experimenting. It did however necessitate a change in how I learn Mandarin.

SRS Question-Answer Pairs Flip/Shift

The way I had been SRSing Mandarin (and Cantonese) was like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

ANSWER (BACK):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0
あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Chinese sentence front, reading and meanings on back. I’ve flipped that slightly to look like this:

QUESTION (FRONT):

nin2 yao4shi4 bu4chi3 xia4wen4 de0 hua4， xiong1di shi4 zhi1 wu2 bu4 yan2 de0

ANSWER (BACK):

您要是不恥下問的話，兄弟是知無不言的

あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

xiōngdi【兄弟】
（３）〔同輩に対して自分を謙遜していうときの称〕私．
③[謙]友人または聴衆に対する自称．

〔不恥下問〕bùchǐ xiàwèn
下問を恥じず．
[成]自分より下の人に教えを請うのを恥としない．〔敏而好學，～〕（論語·公冶長）敏にして學を好み，下問を恥じず．〔您要是～的話，兄弟是知無不言的〕あなたがもしわたくしのような者にでもお問いになるのでしたら，知っている限り申し上げます．

zhī wú bù yán【知無不言】
〈成〉知っていることは何でも話す．
【補足】“言無不盡bù jìn”（話せば餘すところなく語り盡くす）と続ける．

かもん【下問】 〔貴人などが〕目下の人に問いたずねること｡下聞(ｶﾌﾞﾝ)｡

Phonetic reading[here, green] on the front, actual text representation[here, red] and definitions[here, black] on the back. My task is to produce the Chinese text (and of course know its meaning[here, blue], not give a translation per se but just know what it means), given only the phonetic reading. So far, it’s working VERY well. I’m finding that the readings basically memorize themselves if I’m able to produce the hanzi given only the reading.

Why did I make this change? Well, for one thing it was more fun. I like writing Chinese. But in terms of more “practical” reasons…it prevents confusion for me between Cantonese readings and Mandarin readings in the cases that a Mandarin and Cantonese text are the same which they are when it comes to Written Cantonese. What I mean is, I have this kind of relationship going with kanji/hanzi:

Hanzi→[Cantonese, Mandarin]

But there was too much overlap between the Cantonese and the Mandarin. To prevent that overlap, I have done this:

Cantonese→Hanzi
Mandarin→Hanzi

But, I find that I am still comfortably able to do this:

Hanzi→Cantonese
Hanzi→Mandarin

Not in spite of, but because of flipping directions. I really can’t explain it beyond that. Another interesting thing that I’ve found is that the characters where I was continually having issues with the Chinese reading were also ones where I was actually a bit shaky on the writing. Interesting, huh? [However, I still do think it's advisable to learn meaning and writing before and to the exclusion of the reading, a-la-Heisig. This is because while there are phonetic patterns in hanzi, there are too many exceptions (I think) to make them useful, to an adult at least(?), until after you know the writing. For example 購(gou4) and 構(gou4) sound the same, but 講(jiang3) sounds completely different, despite sharing the same component on the right-hand side].

Another motivation was that I found my Chinese listening relatively weak. But literacy is crucial and I love text. So, what this does is both use and build strength in both writing and listening at the same time. Given a phonetic representation of Chinese, you have to produce the text (and of course in order to produce the text correctly, you have to have understood the phonetic representation). In that sense it’s like taking a dictation.

Could you do this for Japanese sentences/phrases, too? My first answer was actually, “no”. But Momoko said “yes”. And after trying it, I would say, “yes”, too. So, yes. You definitely can, and in fact I would heartily recommend you try, because I think it would do wonders for your kanji production skills and your listening comprehension skills (remember, there are no subtitles in real life). And of course if you can write it given the reading, you can read it given the writing, no problems. So, here’s an example of how you might do things for Japanese:

QUESTION (FRONT):

くさなぎ　もとこ
しんちょう：ひゃくろくじゅうはち　せんち
こうあん　きゅう　か　の　じっしつてき　りーだー。

ANSWER (BACK):

草薙素子
身長：168糎
公安９課の実質的リーダー。

That one’s from the Ghost In The Shell SAC 2 website. One exception to this style of SRS pairs in Japanese is personal names outside the context of a sentence. The number of plausible kanji variations for names like Hiroyuki (e.g. 弘之, 広幸, 裕幸, etc.) and Keiko (e.g. 啓子, 桂子, 慧子, etc.) runs into the dozens and hundreds. You know how it is — everyone wants unique-ish characters for their kid. So, in these cases, I would suggest doing things the “old-fashioned way” for names. Specifically:

QUESTION (FRONT):

中山廣幸

ANSWER (BACK):

なかやま　ひろゆき

That’s the primary method I used to learn how to read Japanese personal (and place) names, and it’s worked very well for me.

Am I going to go change all my Japanese sentences in my SRS? No, too much trouble. But, my Chinese SRS pairs have the property of having full pinyin, so it was easy enough to flip them.

Nota bene: this flipping we’ve discussed is not the same as producing (translating into) Chinese/Japanese given English. I found that that sucked for me, not least because the same phrase can be translated multiple, multiple, multiple ways, so who’s to say what’s correct? One key feature of truly useful SRS question/answer pairs, I think, is to have a very limited number of reasonably possible correct answers — preferably only one plausible correct answer. That way it’s a good, “fair”, useful test. Translation does not allow for this. Plus it ties one to another language too much, which is not a good thing unless you’re laddering…and even then. But I digress.

Make Your Own Books: Printing Out Webpages

This is going to go down in history as a “flash of the blindingly obvious”, but…printing web pages is to a great way to give yourself more or less free reading material in a target language. Especially when you don’t have access to things like newspapers. You can just go to a news website or even the Pedia of Wiki, print yourself and article and carry it around. Best of all, unlike a book, you don’t have to be kind to it, you can mark that thing up with crayola like there’s no tomorrow. Then, when you pick sentences out of it for your SRS, you can just copy-and-paste and save yourself some typing. Yay!

OK, that’s all from me. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other .

I know exactly how you feel. You want to know Japanese and you want to know it NOW!!! NOW!!!!! NOW!!!

I know your inner monologue: “ARRRRGGGGH!!! WHY DO I HAVE TO LOOK UP ALL THESE WORDS??!!! WHY CAN’T THEY LEARN THEMSELVES!!!! WHAT HAPPENED TO JUST BEING IMMERSED IN IT LIKE A CHILD!!! ARHfshaghffhggdvhngbcgcdcbweq qqwgwhy”.

You, my friend, need to calm down. Relax. Drink some cocoa, hug someone good-looking, breathe deeply.

I know exactly what you’ve been doing. You don’t know enough Japanese to fully “get it” all yet, so, sometimes you don’t bother watching or listening, because you only understand bits and pieces of it anyway, and you wonder what happened to all the good times when you used to actually understand the words that people spoke, when you could read a page of text in like 5 seconds flat, when you ate cake with a knife and fork instead of chopsticks. So, you feel “screw it; I don’t know it now; I’m not going to know it tomorrow; who am I kidding? I’m not Japanese; I’m Joe Bloggs. This whole learning a language thing was a mistake; I belong to the culture of my birth and this suffering is what I get for going against NATURE blah blah blah blah critical period et cetera, et cetera, et cetera”.

You, my friend, need to hurry up. Quit the whining. Stop talking kafuffin. Get your immersion environment back up and running, do your SRS repetitions, go sentence-picking. You don’t have time to be worrying about this.

Calm down and hurry up. Obviously conflicting advice. But it’s appropriate for many of us language-learners, whose minds are in conflict as it is. Now, I don’t actually know if you have these thoughts or feelings at all, but I’ve seen it enough in myself and other people to feel that it is a general pattern. I’m going through the same thing with Chinese. I just want to know it already, you know? I mean, what the kafuffin, can’t I just know something by wanting to know it? But then, I don’t quite know enough, so I have to do all this work and WHEN WILL IT END?

So, like I said, we need to calm down. Calm down, and accept being noobs. It’s OK. Everyone who starts is a noob, including Chinese babies: their Chinese sucks . And we need to hurry up. Stop wasting time, and just hurry up and get down to work. The reason we don’t know the language(s) we want to know yet is that we didn’t work hard enough (if at all) in the past. The past is the past, we can’t change it. But we can change the future. And all it takes is one small payment in the present. Everyone who ever learned a language to fluency busted tail to do it: everyone. Whether they knew they were busting tail or not is immaterial, tail was busted. Accept that. Accept that you suck now and that tail needs to be busted. But…but…also accept that your tail-busting will be handsomely rewarded with fluency. You WILL get there. You WILL get fluent. IF you work now, IF you do just this one small thing, IF you take one step in the right direction — that’s all you need to do, take one step, rinse, repeat — then you’ll get there. You just will.

You want to sprint there and be fluent tomorrow, don’t you? I do. Unfortunately, you can’t (yet). But you can do one small thing. So do it. I know it seems small, I know it seems like just a drop in the ocean. I sometimes wonder (I’m not always Mr. Hopeful) — how can learning one more stupid word lead to fluency when there are so many effen words? The same way that one spark can burn down a forest, or one cell can grow into a person. Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier — but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.

Think of your work as water and your ignorance as a jagged rock — you need to pour water on that rock to smooth it out. The good news is that it won’t take geological time to erode the rock of ignorance, but it will take a lot of water, and so you need to keep pouring. It may not look like anything’s happening, but it is. Just focus on pouring, keep the water moving.

Since we are human beings and we do get bored, the key to keeping the water flowing is to enjoy the pouring. Enjoy the journey, because, no matter how little time it eventually takes, it is still a long trip: Longer than you might wish, but at the same time, shorter than you might fear.

Remember: languages are finite, made by humans for humans. There is nothing you are lacking intellectually. It’s not hard, just long. Now get running.