Between you and reading manga in Japanese, there are three demons. Not kanji. Not grammar. Not keigo or counters.
Three demons. They will try to corrupt you and your drive to learn Japanese.
The first is fear. The second is pain. The third is boredom.
Every person who quit learning Japanese got taken out by one of these three. Most never saw the killing blow coming — because each demon disguises itself as something reasonable. Something responsible. Something that sounds like common sense.
Here's the part nobody tells you: they work together. Fear sets the trap. Pain springs it. Boredom buries you. A kill chain so clean you'll think quitting was your own idea.
Let me show you how they operate. And how to destroy them.
The First Demon: Fear
Fear hits first.
It tells you that you aren't good enough. That you're falling behind. That you'll never get there. Fear wants to protect you from disappointment by stopping you before you start.
But fear is a liar.
The disappointment it warns you about only happens with certainty if you listen to it. A self-fulfilling prophecy dressed up as common sense.
For Japanese learners, fear often takes a specific form. I call it Comprehension FOMO — the conviction that you're not yet good enough to engage with real Japanese stories, so you shouldn't even try.
Comprehension FOMO sounds responsible. "I'll wait until I'm ready." "I don't want to ruin the experience by not understanding everything." "I should finish this textbook first, just in case."
This is fear's opening move. And it's devastating. But it's not fear's deadliest trick.
Fear's deadliest trick is the infinite preparation loop.
You don't stop learning. That would feel like quitting, and fear knows you'd fight back. Instead, fear traps you in a holding pattern. One more course. One more textbook chapter. One more app level. Always training, never doing. Always getting ready, never engaging with the real thing.
The loop feels productive. You're studying every day. You're making flashcards. You're grinding vocab.
But you never open the manga. You never turn off the subtitles. You never read a single native sentence that wasn't pre-selected and sanitized for your "level."
Fear disguises itself as diligence. That's what makes it so dangerous.
And here's where fear sets up its two partners. By keeping you trapped in training mode — away from native stories — fear guarantees two things:
First, the material you study makes learning harder than it needs to be. Generic example sentences with no context, high frequency vocab lists with no relevance to what you want to read right now. You're grinding uphill with no view. That's pain.
Second, the material stays less interesting than it should be. You're reading about Tanaka-san going to the post office instead of Eren Yeager going to war. That's boredom.
Fear is the first domino. Knock it over and the other two get weaker. Let it stand and they get stronger.
How to beat fear: Stop preparing. Start engaging. Open the manga. Watch the show. You won't understand most of it — not at first. That's fine. Every word you pick up gets you closer. And engaging with real Japanese, even imperfectly, is infinitely more valuable than waiting for permission that never comes.
Fear is loud, but it's fragile. It dies the moment you start moving.
The Second Demon: Pain
Fear fades. You started reading. You opened the manga.
Now pain arrives.
Pain is reading the same sentence five times and still not getting it. Pain is looking up every other word. Pain is watching the stories you love become unpleasant because the effort required to understand them is crushing.
There's no shortcut around this. Learning Japanese is painful. Learning anything worthwhile is painful. The cognitive reps that build real understanding take time, and Japanese is so linguistically distant from English that you can't bootstrap your way in. No cognates. No shared roots. No cheat codes.
You can't avoid the pain. But you can control it. And you need to — because pain has a threshold. Stay below it and you grow. Cross it and you break.
Think of it like strength training. You want the burn — the good pain that tells you your muscles are growing. Not the sharp, tearing pain that means you've injured yourself and won't be back in the gym for weeks.
The language-learning equivalent of trying to squat 400 lbs the first time you hit the gym is cold reading a no-furigana manga with zero foundation. No grammar, no vocabulary, just ambition, the kana, and a dictionary. You might learn something. But you'll suffer, hate the experience, and never come back.
The sweet spot is about how many sentences you can crack before you're exhausted. Think of each sentence as a rep. Maybe today you can only crack one. One sentence, fully broken down, every word looked up, grammar pieced together, meaning understood. That's your workout. That's enough.
Come back tomorrow and crack another one. After a month, maybe you're cracking ten sentences in a session. After two months, sixty. The strength builds.
The mistake is cramming. Trying to force twenty sentences when you have the strength for five is stacking plates you can't lift — you don't get stronger, you just get hurt. You burn out, skip a day, then another, and suddenly you haven't opened the manga in two weeks.
Limit the pain so you can crack and come back. Crack and come back. That's the whole game. Once you can crack one sentence, you can crack them all. You just have to build the strength to keep showing up.
Here's what most people get wrong about pain: they think the effort stays constant. It doesn't. The curve bends.
Your first manga volume might force you to learn 1,000 new words. Brutal. Every page is a fight.
But by your fourth volume, you're only hitting maybe 500 new words across the whole book. Even fewer if you stick to the same series. Same characters, same speech patterns, same world. The author reuses vocabulary because that's how language works. The pain goes down. Your speed goes up. The compound interest kicks in and suddenly you're reading, not decoding.
But this only happens if you're tracking real progress against real stories. Not XP. Not levels. Not streaks. Real progress means: "Last month I had never read a page of manga. This month I read twelve" That's it. That's the only metric that matters.
The problem with fake progress — the kind apps hand you through points, badges, and leaderboards — is that it masks whether you're actually getting better. You level up, but can you read more of the thing you care about? If the answer is no, the progress is a lie. And lies don't sustain you when pain hits hard.
Find your sustainable weight. Track your real gains. And if you want the full breakdown on building a daily habit that actually compounds — minimum viable effort, bonus time, the activity-atrophy cycle — I wrote a whole piece on that: The Fastest Way to Learn Japanese Is Embarrassingly Easy.
No pain, no gain. But too much pain, and you won't come back.
The Third Demon: Boredom
You beat fear. You're managing pain. You're showing up every day.
Now the final demon arrives. And it's the most dangerous of the three.
Boredom.
Boredom is dangerous because you will underestimate it. After all, the way to avoid boredom sounds almost insultingly easy: just don't read boring things.
But boredom is sneaky. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't feel like boredom. It feels like strategy. Like maturity. Like doing the responsible thing.
Here's how it gets you.
You opened the manga you love. You're fighting through it. But pain is hitting hard — every page is a slog, every sentence takes five minutes, and you're looking up more words than you're reading. So you do what any reasonable person would do: you listen to the experts.
"Read at your level." "Start with something easier." "Work your way up."
So you put down the manga you love and pick up Yotsuba&!. Or Doraemon. Or a graded reader. Or a children's story about a rabbit going to the market. You tell yourself it's temporary. A stepping stone. You'll build your skills here and then go back to the good stuff.
This feels responsible. It feels like what a smart learner would do. It's not.
Here's the problem: you would never read Yotsuba&! in English. You (maybe) wouldn't read Doraemon in English. You wouldn't read a graded reader about Tanaka-san's weekend in any language. You didn't choose these stories because you care about them. You chose it because someone told you it was the right thing to do.
And that's boredom's way in. Not through stories that feel boring — through stories that feel smart. You're not sitting there thinking "this is boring." You're thinking "this is what I should be reading right now." The boredom is invisible because it's wearing a lab coat.
The stepping stone is a trap.
You tell yourself you'll move on once you're ready. But "ready" never arrives, because easy stories don't prepare you for hard stories. They just make you comfortable with easy stories. You still have to make the leap eventually. The gap between Yotsuba&! and the manga you actually want to read doesn't close just because you read more Yotsuba&!.
So you stay on the stepping stone. Weeks. Months. You finish one beginner manga and start another. You're still "working your way up." But you're not climbing. You're circling.
Meanwhile, your motivation is bleeding out. Slowly. So slowly you don't notice. Each session gets a little shorter. The gaps between sessions get a little longer. You start skipping days. Not because anything went wrong — because nothing is pulling you forward. There's no cliffhanger making you flip the page. No character you need to see survive. No mystery you have to solve. Just a rabbit. Going to the market. Again.
By the time you realize your habit is dying, it's already on life support. You thought you were on a stepping stone. You were on a treadmill.
Here's the warning sign: if you're more relieved to finish a chapter than excited to start the next one, boredom has already sunk its claws into you. You're reading out of obligation, not desire. And obligation is terrible fuel for a marathon.
And here's the connection that ties everything together: boredom is fear's final form. Remember The First Demon? Fear kept you away from real stories. Pain made you retreat to safe stories. And safe stories — the "level-appropriate," expert-recommended, strategically selected stories you don't care about — turned out to be a prison. Fear built the cage. Pain pushed you inside. Boredom locked the door.
How to beat boredom: Follow the fun. If you're going to struggle either way — and you are — struggle with the thing you love. Hard stories you care about will always beat easy stories you don't. Always. The pain of reading your favorite manga at 10% comprehension is fuel. The ease of reading a graded reader at 90% comprehension is poison. One hurts but keeps you coming back. The other is comfortable and quietly kills you.
The One Weapon That Kills All Three
Here's the insight that matters: all three demons share the same weakness. Stories you genuinely love.
Stories you love dissolve fear — because you care enough to engage even when you're not ready. It manages pain — because you'll push through difficulty for a story that has its hooks in you. And it prevents boredom — because you chose it. Nobody assigned it. Nobody gamified it. You picked it up because you wanted to know what happens next.
That's the whole secret. Not willpower. Not discipline. Not some mythical "language learning gene." You need stories that pull you forward so hard that fear, pain, and boredom can't get a grip.
Every hard skill has these same three demons. Learning an instrument, getting in shape, building a business — fear, pain, and boredom show up every time. The people who succeed don't have some superpower. They found the version of the work that they can't stop doing. The guitarist who plays for fun. The athlete who loves the game. The founder who's obsessed with the problem.
Find your version. For Japanese, that means: what would you read even if it were in English? Start there. Read that. Study that. Build your entire approach around that.
That's why I built Ashiba — to teach Japanese through the manga you actually want to read, not the stories someone else decided you should study.
If you can beat these three demons, you can learn Japanese. And if you can beat them here, you can beat them anywhere.
頑張れ。