#All Our Dreams Can Come True If We Have The Courage To Pursue Them

Mubarza Hafeez
Nov 1 · 4 min read

Each one of us have at least one thing that he dreams of doing. It isn’t necessarily a life changing thing, but it definitely counts towards your happiness. It can be as big as being a world leader, yet it can also be a small deed like learning how to make a cup of tea. It all depends on what interests you, what you want to learn. For me, my interest lay in learning a new language, to learn Japanese.

From a very young age, Japanese culture and it’s people have fascinated me. I have always been a huge anime fan, and that too contributed to why I wanted to learn Japanese. As I also have a dream of visiting Japan at least once in my life, knowing the country’s language would definitely help. And most importantly, having the knowledge of understanding a foreign language can never hurt, it’s always a plus point.

A few years back, I started to listen to Japanese people, tried connecting their words with the English subtitles, I was able to grasp the basics of what the other person was saying in Japanese. But soon I got busy in my studies and exams, and quit the learning process.

4 years later, I joined a course Amal Academy, and that course encouraged me to pursue my interests, to start my incomplete tasks. So now here I am who spent the past week learning the basic Hiragana. I installed a Japanese learning application on my phone, picked a paper and pen, and started to move towards my goal.

At first it seemed difficult. I was out of touch from it for 4 years, but step by step, I worked. What I once knew started to come back to me, and I got to learn new things too. It isn’t easy to learn a new language, so naturally I had to face difficulties too. Japanese doesn’t have English alphabets, to learn it, I had to learn each character of Hiragana. There were so many times when my stroke of pen did not match the actual character, there were so many times I confused one character from the other, but still I worked hard. I didn't want to leave the thing again that I had left before too. As I was going through this learning process, I started to remember how I still loved learning Japanese. It gave me the feeling of joy to know that I am doing something which I actually like doing. I love how Pawan Mishra said in his book Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy, “ “One needs to pursue some sort of a creative interest in order to keep life from eating us alive.” When the world demands everything you have from you, when it starts to crush you with it’s demands, you need to have a thing that is just for you, an interest that you want to do for yourself, and not for the world.

This week I had only focused on learning the basic characters of Hiragana. From the next week I plan to work on learning to combine these characters to make small words. As I already have a rough understanding of spoken Japanese, right now my main focus is writing and reading Japanese. I hope, and will try my best to work in achieving my goal, and following my interest, and learn the language Japanese.

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