As I have been studying English, I now have some insight about studying English.

People may think English is "easy." Speaking English is not special, learning the English language is quite easy, bilinguals are not special, etc.

These pictures are not true, I think. Rather, you would need much effort to acquire decent English skills, unless you were a specially gifted one in language learning.

But I have to confess that it is I myself who (still) have such kind of image regarding English. Don't blame me. This image may be somewhat rife in Japan. I am one under such influence. (But there is a positive aspect in this prejudice. You won't be unnecessarily intimidated by the subject, unlike such is widely seen in mathematics for example.)

Why did I have this deceptive image about English? The thought process from which the falsity arose could be as follows.

You have learnt your native language before you notice it. So it seems like you have acquired your native language with ease. So you infer that language learning is easy.

But think of how much time it took for you to be able to use the language. Behind a 12-year-old child who speaks Japanese, there is a learning period of 12 years of the language, for example. This implies how much time it takes to learn a language.

Plus, there are hundreds of millions of people who speak English in the Anglosphere, as a matter of course. Meanwhile, for example, experts of mathematics are far rarer in number. So you may expect that mathematics is harder to learn but English is not.

But, then, how many people in Japan are there who mastered the Armenian language for example? Maybe the number is less than that of experts of mathematics.

Still my writing English is at the speed far short of a desirable level. And still grammatically questionable. Also the wording can be very much incorrect, I assume.

Then, what are the necessary things for my learning English?

First, I need to read through at least one or two grammar books. – Now I made the noun "book" plural, but is this grammatically correct? Even this I don't know. My checking of grammar is usually by googling a phrase, that is, by using Google as a corpus. It is not a solid way of checking grammar, though useful.

By the way, I often try a Google translation for checking, too. Of course, the machine translation is not perfect, but it may reveal syntactical disorder in the sentence in a glanceable way since it is shown in my native language.

Second, I need to read English text more and more. Probably for now I have to make this my routine.

Third, I need output practice – like this writing a blog.

The most fundamental of these is reading. If there is a litmus of one's potential aptitude for English, those three must be considered. If these acts are painful, it may signal a weak potential aptitude. Desirably, if there is no pain in doing such things, it must be a signal of a great potential aptitude for English.

I seem to have wanted a field of technology as my occupation. But why has it been so? I ask myself and I find that probably it is because I feel I could find some sense of something futuristic in technology.

But what is it that I refer to by the word of "futuristic"? It must be some academic depth and arcane complexity or something. And the sense of something cutting-edge. Why those things? Probably because I feel some sense of life in them, something lively, something creative.

But if so, what I could find such may not necessarily be in the field of technology. And I think I must think what I can do in my life is quantitatively limited. It might be that I should do what I find myself happy doing, so that I not regret later my not doing what I really wanted to do.

So it might be this: not that I choose my occupation, but my nature somehow leads me to it.

In this sense, you can think that one's vocation is not what you choose but what you are given. Vanity may hinder you from doing what you are really fit for.

Cost-effectiveness, synergy, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage ... those things can make me think which field of job I should go to.

In the field of technology, I have to keep on studying, of course. And if I go to another field I may otherwise go to, it does not change. Then I can ask myself: which is it that you can do more readily? In this regard, it seems to me that it became quite clear.

The competition of job must be severe in both fields. And efforts are needed no matter which field of the two I go to. And both require much time to acquire decent skills to perform the job.