Is Willpower Now the Most Important Trait for Achieving Japanese Literacy?

We now live in a world where reading and understanding Japanese has become too convenient

When I moved to Tokyo in 2009, learning Japanese was an entirely different experience than what we know today. Electronic dictionaries were more common than smartphone apps. Digital flashcards had yet to go mainstream, so tangible ones, homemade or prepackaged, were the primary way to learn kanji characters. Before the prevalence of handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR), looking up one of these characters was an arduous undertaking. Japanese learners had to rely on SKIP codes (pattern identification) and radicals (kanji components) to navigate paperback kanji dictionaries.

Technology evolved over the next few years. The meteoric rise of smartphones ushered in several prominent apps that replaced print and electronic dictionaries. Digital flashcard apps with spaced-repetition algorithms became the default way to drill kanji, vocabulary, and even grammar into our brains. Studying was streamlined and convenient. The digital pipeline that fed us Japanese knowledge was exponentially wider than ever before.

In recent years, cloud computing introduced us to OCR, voice recognition, and AI translations —…