Looking for a study partner

A lot of people find it hard to stay motivated to learn Japanese, so they go look for a study partner or someone else they can study with and hold each other accountable. They are convinced it will help them stick to a routine and finally get them through the hurdles of language learning.

Pros:

• None. Seriously, there’s literally no good points.

Cons:

Everyone has different language learning goals and interest/focus areas. For this reason, language learning with a fixed study partner usually becomes one of these two situations:

• them being slower than you, so you have to slow down your learning and/or feel frustrated that you’re not doing as much as you could, until you feel demotivated
• them being faster than you, so they have to slow down for you and get frustrated, or you might feel resentful that you aren’t “as good as them”

Also, as you both would be language beginners, there’s not much you could learn from each other anyway.

Conclusion: Don’t get a study partner, it’s a really bad idea. If you need people to chat about studying Japanese or to ask for advice, there’s some great discord servers for language exchange (like EJLX). Or you can find a tutor on websites like italki.com instead (ideally a native speaker).