I know in Spanish class, my teacher brought up an interesting point. She was explaining why she used one tense instead of another in a sentence. The sentence was “I study Spanish,” and she used that tense because she is still learning Spanish, even though it’s her own language.

Now that made me think. I’m still learning English. For example, I didn’t know the word “extirpate” until yesterday. I never heard of the word “abnegation” until I watched Divergent. I remember my friend learned that the word “zeroth” is in fact a word in Physics class with the 0th law of Thermodynamics.

If you’re a native English speaker, chances are that there’s still a myriad of vocab words you could learn. Even if you know argosies upon argosies of vocab words, you could still learn to understand Shakespeare’s plays and how to talk that way.

Once you start studying a language, as long as you keep in contact with the language, you don’t really “stop” learning it. Sure, you might reach a day where your efforts don’t help you as much as they did in the beginning, and you might have already accomplished your initial goal for starting to learn Japanese, but that doesn’t mean you should stop.