Any spicy brained people here? How do you manage?

[Tooko554]

(Only just found out that mental disorders are referred to as having a spicy brain. Who’d’ve thought?)

I’ve always struggled with Japanese, which I’ve mentioned before. Learning individual words and grammar points is easy, and I can remember them fine, but give me a sentence and I simply just can’t. It’s the same with my uni studies. So I’ve been seeing this psych for a while, and while talking about this and a few other things she’s like “Dude, you’ve got ADHD. That’s why you can’t put ideas together”.

So I was wondering. Anyone here have mental disorders or whatever, and how does it affect your Japanese journey? How do you work around it?

[drhultenstein]

its called having spicy brain?
me Having ADHD the inattentive kind.
i mostly struggle with grammer conjurations and not fully understanding or remembering grammar rules so i find it easier to remember them by feel instead and pattern recognition from seeing them alot.
memorising words in a vacuum is easy like on wanikani but i struggle more with vocab more on here as they have different meanings in different context.
and i misspell some words alot causing my accuracy to drop

[Montaigne]

I find with language acquistion that it’s more down to exposure than anything else. We can do grammar and vocabulary exercises, but we’re not going to become fluent through these. It’s more that they’re a vehicle for increased information.

The more study I do, the more I find myself sat there either adding an answer automatically or not understanding which particle should go where but just that the correct particle just “feels” right.

We’re all capabale of learning languages because we’ve already learnt one. I speak English, not because I did vocabulary or grammar tests but because I spent thousands of hours being surrounded by the language and my brain picked up what was correct and what wasn’t by absorbing everything going on around me.

It’s so much slower as an adult learning a foreign language, and we can use short cuts to increase our knowledge but they’re just tools to get the information into our brain until muscle memory takes over. The more Japanese sentences you can read, japanese language movies, TV shows etc you watch the more exposure you get to the language and your brain will gradually pick up the meaning, till one day you’re reading a sentence and you just understand it.

I also do what I enjoy, so I bounce all over the place and let my curiosity take me where it wants to go, rather than trying to force a set process onto my learning. I do what suits me and at the same time accept that I will make a lot of mistakes, not understand a lot but that this is also part of the process and getting things constantly wrong is also of benefit.

I’m autistic with ADHD.

[h4nn4]

Hey there,
Im on the spectrum quite a lot too, so I feel your concerns. Im a bit different though, as I mainly have autism (that kind of autism where you sometimes struggle with people, get overstimulated and have obscure interests and think differently than other people). However, my psych aswell forwarded the idea that I could have the inattentive type of ADHD, meaning no hyperactivity, but being easily distractable and so on.

For me, fixed routines help. The better I am living my live and manage my neurospicyness, the better language learning or really living works for me. This means going to bed at latest at 11pm, doing sports and meditation every day, eating healthy, rarely consuming caffeine, no alcohol and other drugs, not a lot of sugar. I’m doing this to the best that I can, but healing is nonlinear, so I sometimes don’t manage - but I try.
If youre not living healthy and putting your body and mind first, you can not learn a language either, even more if you’re being neurodivergent. That is the pill we all - neurospicy or not - have to swallow. Would an athlete who trains for olympia engage in being up until 2am, consuming lots of sugar, stimulants or worse? Be like that athlete. Learning a language is a marathon of training aswell.

Currently, Im also working on getting diagnosed with AD(H)D aswell to get that sweet Ritalin or something like it. Have you ever had an energy drink? I know, it is a bad thing, and Im not doing it regularly, but once had to. It was amazing - all the topics of my studies and other stuff I could remember, no brain fog, full focus and clarity. I managed to write a 4pages long essay for Uni that I had to submit that day in 2,5 hours. It went amazing and I am still proud of it to this day!
My psych told me this is what ADHD meditation could do.

Besides those general life advice, I would advice getting lots and lots of comprehensive input. Its fun and if youre lucky, you might be able to even fully turn your brain off when it comes to watching videos or listening to podcasts. Keep in mind that it should absolutely be comprehensive input for your first few hundred hours, otherwise you will due to the nature of ADHD most likely get frustrated and quit. Afterwards, let the sunken cost fallacy kick in and engage in harder material.

Tl:dr; don’t stress about it too much, put your physical and mental health first (japanese will come way better then), absolutely don’t force the language into you and take it easy and natural. Then, everything will fall into its place.

May peace be upon you.

[emmsy]

I am AuDHD among other things, and first getting into Japanese was definitely a difficult process. I frequently took month long breaks and thought about quitting so many times. For me, having a routine changed everything. On my off days from work, I always do my Japanese in the morning. It’s become a part of my daily routine and I very rarely skip it even if I don’t feel motivated. Such a strict routine might not work for everyone, but even just making sure you have a little bit of time every day to at least do your bunpro and vocab reviews helps get into consistently studying if that’s an issue for you.

I also find it helpful to remind myself that this is a learning process; I am not going to be perfect at everything and it takes time to improve. I can get really intense about my interests and it gets frustrating sometimes when I feel like I’m not making much progress. But it’s better to just focus on the small victories and take things day by day. Focus on what you can understand, not what you can’t. Higher comprehension will come, it just takes time.

And as others have mentioned, exposure is key. For me, I like having a piece of content that I am working through that I try to fully understand, and then have something else that I do more for fun and I don’t worry about fully understanding everything. My fun thing right now is watching a let’s play on youtube. There’s definitely a lot I don’t understand while watching, but it’s entertaining and I don’t stress about what I don’t get. Having multiple options to chose from helps with my motivation a lot. Some days I only do stuff where I am trying to 100% understand everything. Some days its a mix of doing that and also giving myself some time to watch an episode of the let’s play. Some days my brain is tired or I just don’t feel super motivated, and I’ll only watch the let’s play.

Experiment and find out what works best for you! If you find that you’re getting bored or demotivated, switch it up, try doing something different! Enjoying learning is extremely important. Take breaks if you need to; sometimes motivation comes back stronger after giving your brain a break. Take things at your own pace, and don’t worry about progressing “too slow”. Language learning is a long process, and it can be even harder at times because of our different brains.

[banndsand]

I haven’t really thought about how my spicy brain affects my language studies much differently than how it affects everything else in my life. Through speaking with learners over the years, I’ve found that everyone has their own path, so I mostly chalked up my patterns to just being how my brain wants to do it, spicy or otherwise. But I suppose there are a few things that stand out.

For one, like some others with various types of ADHD or AuDHD before me, my motivation toward my studies has varied a lot over the years. At times it is really all I can think about for days, weeks, months, and I progress so much, but to the detriment of everything else in my life. Other times I burn out after going so hard, or studying simply falls by the wayside as my interests take me elsewhere for a number of months or years.
To try and keep things a little more steady and sustainable, I do like the others above have said:

1. I try to increase and diversify my exposure to the language. Sometimes this means pursuing the novelty of a new study tool or immersion method, or the social motivation of joining a group of learners, or just taking some pressure off of absorbing everything and instead finding fun and manageable Japanese media I can enjoy. Like everything else in my life, I don’t see this as a quest to find the One True Learning Method, but more of a rotating inventory of ways to work with my brain in whatever state it’s in at the time.
2. I try to maintain at least a bare minimum of a routine around my studies. If I can do anything related to learning Japanese every day, then that’s a win in my book. As someone who is prone to forgetting about everything as soon as I stop thinking about it, this keeps me from doing that with Japanese at least. On top of that, it lowers the barrier to entry for getting back to studying in earnest. Even if I’m just taking a few minutes every day to review flashcards, when I do get back to lessons and immersion I will be less overwhelmed and I will remember more.

On top of the points above, I also see studying Japanese as something that helps my spicy brain in multiple ways:

1. Between the various learning apps’ metrics and my own hand-written notes, it gives me some satisfaction to be able to look back on what I’ve learned or, dare-I-say-it, accomplished, on days where I’m feeling like I’m incapable of doing anything at all.
2. Language being a social thing, it has led me to make friends with other learners and first-language Japanese speakers. In hard moments where my past self would have fallen into a cycle of self-isolation and depression, I now have more reason to reach out to people and have positive experiences with them. Support comes in all forms, be that addressing the heavy stuff or simply leaving it at the door to focus on something more lighthearted for a while.
3. I would caution that this one should be approached with moderation, but studying Japanese has also been a helpful distraction to me from life’s worries. My spicy brain used to keep me ruminating on bad things a lot of the time, and keeping me up all night. At some point years ago I started distracting myself with flashcard reviews. With today’s technology, I can even do this as I fall asleep! I often joke that flashcards in bed is how I got where I am today in terms of Japanese, though nowadays I fall asleep so quickly during bedtime reviews that I actually have to make sure I do some reviews throughout the day too. Good problem to have! (Of course, if things are really bad then it’s still not enough, but at that point I take it as a sign that I should be dealing with the situation in other ways.)

Ultimately, learning and maintaining a language involves finding ways to integrate and make it a part of your daily life. Fortunately with language there are so many ways to do that, though that also means it can be overwhelming and confusing to find what works for you, even moreso when taking into account brain states and change over time. But please remember that no effort is wasted. Even with my meandering path that has had many years-long breaks (so far), getting back to the language still feels a little bit easier every time, and it has been immensely fulfilling. I can only wish the same for everyone else in this thread.