Patrick McKenzie: belief

Transcript context

…This is after 20 years, right? Yes. Granted, my feelings in this are partly filtered through with the lens of I’m something of a writer in English. I am not benchmarking myself against the typical students of the Japanese language, but I’m benchmarking myself against my own proficiency in reading and writing English, so I feel an enormous gap in my proficiency in reading and writing Japanese relative to my proficiency in English, and that weighs on me. If you step out of the me-view of the world, the point at which I was an effective professional at reading and writing Japanese was maybe two to three years after I got to Japan, so after a total of six years of study, and I was not the most diligent student during those six years. I think if you’re not a heritage reader of Japanese or Chinese, you should benchmark it at least three years to be professionally capable at it. You’re doing a startup. How is that evaluated in the Japanese marriage market?…

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