36 Hours Back in Japan 🇺🇸✈️🇯🇵

and The Dunning-Kruger Effect

A three-week break from language learning isn’t exactly ideal, but that’s precisely what happened when I traveled back to Los Angeles to spend time with my family. We went on hikes in national and state parks, watched a Broadway musical, caught a baseball game, drove out to see a meteor shower, went on a cruise to Mexico, and fit in an absurd amount of shopping and dining out.

Within the first few days, it became crystal clear that standing by to my Japanese study routine would not be workable. My original plan was to:

• Use language learning apps daily, like Bunpro and Anki.

• Finish my current read 雨の日も、晴れ男.

• Engage in daily communication in Japanese through video calls and messaging.

However, I only managed to do the following:

• Watch the live action of ゾン100 ～ゾンビになるまでにしたい100のこと～ and the anime of わたしの幸せな結婚.

• Read four volumes of the わたしの幸せな結婚 manga.

• Translated random things like package label instructions and yojijukugo tattoos.

• Talked to the dogs in Japanese.

In hindsight, it may sound silly, but at that moment, I thought, “Hey, perhaps my Japanese isn’t as bad as I believe it to be.” 🙃

My slice of humble pie 🥧

So yesterday, I sat through a full mock exam of the JLPT N2 and failed the reading portion spectacularly. While I wasn’t too confident about passing, I was at least hoping that I would guess what I didn’t know right. That did a good job of keeping my Dunning-Kruger effect in check.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability, and people with high ability at a task underestimate their ability. It’s named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who first identified this phenomenon.

In the context of language learning:

• Beginners might think they’re doing better than they are. This might be because they’re not yet aware of the complexity and nuances of the language. They might have a basic grasp of vocabulary and grammar, and think that’s all there is to it.

• As they continue learning and become more knowledgeable, they might feel like they’re getting worse because they’re becoming more aware of what they don’t know. In other words, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.

• Experts, on the other hand, might underestimate their abilities. They have a deep understanding of the language and are aware of the many subtleties and complexities. However, because of this knowledge, they can often be overly critical of their performance.

Here’s how it can progress:

Unconscious incompetence: The learner isn’t aware of what they don’t know.

Conscious incompetence: The learner realizes there’s a lot they don’t know.

Conscious competence: The learner knows how to use the language but has to think about it.

Unconscious competence: The learner can use the language naturally, without thinking.

At an intermediate level, if you’re confident but accurately aware of your skills and limitations, it’s not exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect. However, if you overestimate your abilities and think you’re more proficient than you actually are, it still could be a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Alternatively, if you’re highly skilled and yet underestimate your competence, that’s the other side of the Dunning-Kruger effect often referred to as the impostor syndrome.

The next steps 👣

I plan to leverage my jetlag to wake up earlier and dedicate an extra hour to Shin Kanzen Master Dokkai, in addition to my usual routine of extensive reading and flashcards. The difficulty of the material will determine whether I drop casual reading entirely and focus solely on textbook Japanese. However, I haven’t registered for the December JLPT yet. I’ll need to do that this week before I find an excuse to back out again.