Simple things are hard

How simple things

One time, I was studying japanese and I came across an idea that I now apply to many things that I’m learning. The idea is that “the simplest things are actually the hardest things to understand”.

But what does that even mean? Let me first do a tiny lesson on japanese.

In japanese, there is a particle called の (no) which is the possessive particle. If I want to say something like “My pen”, I would write a sentence like this

$$ \overset{わたし}{私}のペン$$

Vocabulary

私（わたし）- I, Me

の - Posessive particle

ペン - pen!

As you can see, the particle の is very simple to understand. But when I was a beginner at japanese, I had to stop and think about what it meant in every sentence that I was reading.

It was simple, and yet it was acting as a speed bump. Its like when you buy a book in european portuguese but you speak brazilian portuguese. You can read the book, but the vocabulary and the way that the sentences are written is different enough to where you need to think about what you are reading

The explanation that I found out for this phenomenom came in two parts:

• First is that is that complex ideas can be broken down and explained through the use of logic and some of the fundamental building blocks . This one is obvious
• The second is that those building blocks cannot be broken down and explained through logic, because they are so low level that they can only be understood through intuition.

And that is when I finally understood it. The reason that I had to stop and think about the japanese sentences that I was reading, even though they looked very simple, was that I hadn’t developed intuituion for the very basic elements of the language.

Now I try to view everything through those lens. If I am drawing and I can’t visualize how to rotate a body part, it is really difficult to have a logical explanation on what happens when you view it at different angles.