Tolerating ambiguity

When you read your first manga, you should lean heavily into deciphering your way through it. This helps ensure you’ve learned a lot of common grammar and vocabulary.

Continued deciphering into your second and third manga volumes helps, but eventually it may wear down on you to look up every unknown.

Eventually, you need to start tolerating ambiguity.

Tolerance is when you begrudgingly accept something.

Ambiguity occurs when you have insufficient information.

Learning a new language is filled with uncertainty.

Over time, that uncertainty decreases, as you learn more of the language.

When you first start reading, you will encounter many things you do not know. Grammar constructs, vocabulary words, language concepts, and so on.

There will be too many elements to properly learn all at once. And many of those elements will take repeated exposure to fully grasp.

You need to develop a tolerance for ambiguity.

This is where you accept that some things are too foreign or too difficult to understand yet, knowing that you will come to grasp and understand them following future exposure.

It’s important to keep a moderate tolerance for ambiguity.

Having too low of a tolerance results in spending too much time trying to learn each item. Progression through material is slow, which can be demoralizing and can lead to burning out on the material. Learning is denser, but repeated exposure is needed to help solidify understanding, and a slow pace hinders this.

Having too high of a tolerance leads to insufficient learning. Progression through material is fast, but actual learning is handicapped, as too many unknowns are skipped over due to getting the basic gist of it.