I started learning Japanese last night. The first video that I came across was called "Learn Japanese while Sleeping." I ended up having a blast reading comments.

Then, I looked up the words "affirmations" and "meditation before bed" in Japanese. I copied them into YouTube search and watched an affirmation video to learn at least some sentences with "I," the first person singular, but I didn't learn anything because there were no translations. Later on, I learned that you don't even need to use subject pronouns. The meditation video was nice, though. I fell asleep to that lady's soothing voice.

I tried to learn Japanese again in the morning. It was kind of difficult in terms of writing system, pitch and vocabulary. I mean they're all new to me, so it's obvious that they seem difficult.

The easiest part was sentence structure or word order because it's the exact same as "standard" Persian. Particles are also understandable.

To be honest, I didn't know how to learn or study Japanese. I'd heard Japanese in movies and anime, but I've never studied it before, so I had to look up how to start Japanese from scratch.

I also watched some Japanese journal flip through videos. They all looked beautiful and I'll definitely make one some day when I start learning it.

On one of the videos I watched, a lady used an interesting metaphor to compare English and Japanese sentence structure. She said the English brain zooms out. For example, an English sentence starts with the person and what they did, then where and when they did it. However, the Japanese brain zooms in. You start the sentence with when and where. Then, you say what was done, and who did it.

So, from what I read, this kind of word order shows the collective mindset of the Japanese, the selflessness and the inclination to look inward.

(I’d actually say “the collective mindset of the East” because if you really believe that a simple sentence structure can say a lot about people and their culture, you can add other languages to the list such as Persian, Turkish and Bengali. There might be more, but I'm not familiar with other languages. I learned about Bengali in the comments.)

I think if I want to learn Japanese and be able to say I've learned something, I should take it seriously.