What Nutmeg Can Teach You About Learning Japanese (Patreon)

Recently, some good friends very kindly took me on a multi-day trip into the wilderness. As you might expect, we travelled through areas that lack many of the urban conveniences we take for granted. One day, back at our base in the nearest town, I took a long-awaited and much-needed shower.

And it hit me.

All this time I spend in the city, fussing over whether to shower in the morning or at night or both. But it really doesn’t matter that much. Ultimately, you just need to take showers frequently enough to prevent, you know, bad body odour, disease, and unsightly accumulations of dead skin and other “debris”. The details are secondary.

When you take a shower doesn’t matter nearly as much as the mere fact that you shower at all. When should you practice Japanese? How should you hold your pen when you write kanji? What kind of pen should you buy? What should you do about the metatags on your SRS cards?

Don’t fuss. The main thing is to be exposed to Japanese at all. Everything after that is nutmeg. Good, but absolutely not worth fussing over. Even if you were making egg nog (the homemade creation of which I am the undisputed king), you’d muddle through somehow without it :) .

F-bombs are limited. Use them judiciously. Only drop them on worthy, juicy targets. Don’t waste your f-bombs on nutmeg. Save them for milk and eggs.