A Wild Update Appears!
As you’ve noticed, I haven’t given you any updates in a while. The reason for this is quite simple:
After having spent 3 months on a pretty heavy daily routine of studying Japanese, I felt like there was something wrong with my approach.
Even though everything was sticking in terms of kanji, vocab, grammar, and even the advances I’ve made in being able to speak Japanese, my enthusiasm slowly faded over time as I felt like I haven’t really been engaging with what made me like Japanese as a language in the first place.
The Problem
Unfortunately, the one thing I’ve been spending entirely too much time on, and really made up most of the time I have been spending on Japanese, has been just grinding vocabulary.
I knew rationally that I should grind vocabulary so I can finally start engaging with native content, and that I only really have to do it until the end of N3 (haha, right?) but even that delusion didn’t help with how I was feeling about the language emotionally.
Somewhen around mid-May, I realized I need to take a break from the way I’ve been engaging with the language until then, and I decided to just “drop everything” and only do what I felt like doing in the moment.
That meant no longer stressing over optimal times to add new items to SRS, no longer checking my SRS apps literally every damn hour, and not having reminders to go over textbook content or shadowing or whatever else it is I was doing.
In essence, I ended up practically dropping Bunpro. Funnily enough, I had dropped Bunpro because it had become my main way of absorbing vocabulary and at hundreds of review a day, at some point I’ve just had enough. It wasn’t fun:
I got tired of retaining words magically without an actual proper understanding of why that word exists in the language in its form in the first place. I didn’t have problems with just memorizing it, (SRS tends to make it stick regardless through exposure), nor did I really have any problems remembering the nuance of the words.
I simply felt like I no longer connected the vocabulary to the language itself and instead was just working on trivia largely disconnected from it until I actively encountered the term or got to use it, which wasn’t often enough.
What Ended Up Happening
Even though I generally slowed down for a bit, I kept up with my WaniKani reviews and after a month was again back at going through it at full speed.
In fact I ended up spending more time learning kanji through books and online resources as well, and generally having fun learning more about them.
Unfortunately, due to Bunpro having been my main way of studying vocabulary and me having dropped it for that reason, I didn’t really invest much time in studying grammar either until last week.
In this period, I kept engaging with native Japanese content (I’ve even set my system languages to Japanese and pretty much every app I use defaults to it now so I have no choice but to be exposed to it if I want to get basically anything done), and still kept talking to myself out loud and thinking in the language as much as I could.
I’ve also kept going through textbook content, although slower, mostly focusing on the reading, listening, and cultural insight parts, and I suppose also got exposed to new vocabulary that way (without inputting it into SRS).
Eventually, I slowly got back into grammar, and started doing grammar only reviews here again.
I am now completely up to speed on my grammar reviews, and am even pulling ahead of schedule considering I find that Japanese grammar was also to me a really gratifying part of the language to study.
As of yesterday, I’m also now working through my pile of 1’600 accumulated vocabulary reviews, hoping to get it down to zero without adding new vocabulary entries before the end of the month.
So What Now?
What now is that I’ll keep focusing on kanji and grammar as they are the parts of Japanese that although some might say not as practical are at least gratifying to me, and will potentially delay my vocabulary goals until later.
My hope is that by focusing on grammar and kanji (aka the fun parts), it will allow me to make up for my break from vocabulary later on anyway as I’d have a more solid grasp of the language itself.
Maybe I won’t make N3 by the end of August, but I’m still confident, with a renewed drive, that I’ll be able to make N2 by the end of December.
At least I’m glad to have taken this somewhat extended break to allow myself to rediscover why I wanted to learn Japanese in the first place, and worst case scenario, I’ll have another wave of studying consistently for a 2 to 3 month period, at which point it will hopefully get easier.
Then I can sit back and re-evaluate my relationship with the language and how I study it again.
This is just a first small hurdle in the N1 speedrun dream.
The real problem is weeks having 7 days. Want to do something every second or third day? You are doomed to cycle through the days. Whoever decided to make the number of days in a week a prime really wanted to make sure you get a day of rest per week. I resorted to completely ignoring the date or day for personal things and only use it with other people now.
