squinting

For the past three or four years, I've been wearing the night and day contacts that you don't have to take out (theoretically) at all for a month. I get so used to being able to see that when I do take them out, I feel extra blind. Between taking out my contacts and getting out my glasses, I realized that the feeling was one I had been having a lot of late.

When I don't have any corrective lenses, I can only see so much. For example, in order to read a typical paperback book without glasses or contacts, I need to hold the book about six inches from my face. Pretty much anything further away than six inches is blurry.

The feeling I get when I'm trying to do anything without my glasses is similar to how I feel when I try to listen to Japanese. I can see general shapes and colors, and I can tell the difference between a pile contains clothes and one that contains clothes, but everything is blurry. I end up squinting most of the time to try to focus my vision. I remember reading about how you could improve your vision by looking through a pinhole when I was little. I never really understood how it worked, but it did work, to some extent.

When I'm trying to understand Japanese, I feel like I can understand words and phrases here and there, but the general picture is never really in focus. I try "squinting" by trying to watch shows without the subtitles, but I can never understand everything. The words are all out of order, and my brain doesn't want to process them, especially since I don't know most of the words anyway. But I still try, and I know that I've improved a lot in the last six months, but it just seems like such an impossible task sometimes. I won't ever be able to see clearly without glasses or contacts unless I get laser eye surgery or something to that effect. I wonder what the language equivalent of that would be?