Argus, there are a very tiny number of people who have the combination of intellectual and athletic ability to successfully learn a martial art without direct instruction. It's not merely a matter of effort or discipline -- it's a balance of athletic ability (coordination, proprioreception, kinesic linking and more) as well as the ability to understand the written material and translate it successfully. Consider that my teacher literally spent months telling me "tighten your forearm, like this..." followed by "no, that's not it, like this..." and we weren't fighting the written word. Let me use your own analogy of learning a language. You claim a reasonable level of fluency in Japanese, and I suspect that you can probably read it (probably in one of the various romanizations) pretty well, and understand it when spoken, especially by people like newscasters or voice-over narrators -- but I suspect that there are many nuances of pronunciation and even spoken sentence construction that would make someone who learned it more interactively almost laugh. I still respect your achievement -- but I doubt it's comparable to even a Rosetta Stone type learning process. Or, if it is, it's probably taken you much longer than a truly interactive method would have.
I've got around 25 years of training in my martial art. I'm currently working on a form, and I'm using notes given me by the person who taught me. But they aren't my notes, and I hit a major snag with them... I'm not sure what he means by things as I read them.
Rather than trying to be some form of autodidact in martial arts -- get some actual instruction. Your time will be more productively used, and you can turn that autodidactic energy to something else that will be more rewarding of that learning method. Heck, you'll even get to spend some time with people and maybe even have some fun. I add that since most people I find trying to do so much learning on their own also tend to be somewhat socially isolated. Whether the isolation is a result of having to work to learn things or the learning method reflects something deeper is immaterial... and probably unprovable. But moving out of comfort zones is a big thing that happens with a lot of martial arts training.
I've got around 25 years of training in my martial art. I'm currently working on a form, and I'm using notes given me by the person who taught me. But they aren't my notes, and I hit a major snag with them... I'm not sure what he means by things as I read them.
Rather than trying to be some form of autodidact in martial arts -- get some actual instruction. Your time will be more productively used, and you can turn that autodidactic energy to something else that will be more rewarding of that learning method. Heck, you'll even get to spend some time with people and maybe even have some fun. I add that since most people I find trying to do so much learning on their own also tend to be somewhat socially isolated. Whether the isolation is a result of having to work to learn things or the learning method reflects something deeper is immaterial... and probably unprovable. But moving out of comfort zones is a big thing that happens with a lot of martial arts training.