The affective turn in the second language (L2) acquisition literature has witnessed a shift from the periphery to a clear focus on emotions. Nevertheless, this shift tends to examine emotion separately from cognition. Vygotsky's "perezhivanie" provides a theoretical lens to explore the inextricable interconnectedness of emotion and cognition in a dialectical and nonreductionist way. This article investigates the concept of "perezhivanie" in two Chinese learners of L2 Japanese and its relevance for their language development. Data mainly collected through interviews and narrative journals were thematically analyzed. The study demonstrates how cognition and emotion dialectically foreground one another (i.e., one gains an upper hand over the other), thus shaping each learner's unique "perezhivanie" as they undertook to learn Japanese. The study showed that the two students had their own purposes for learning Japanese and that affect functioned as both facilitator and inhibitor of the learning processes. Interestingly, this study does not support the notion that negative affect results in a lack of development and that positive affect always leads to development. It also emphasizes that negative and positive affect constitute a dialectical process.