I think that my expectations about the differences between these two areas have been proven to be quite wrong. I’m curious to hear if others feel similarly about this.
I decided around 5 months ago to learn Japanese. I spent several weeks messing around learning kana and playing with Duolingo. Eventually I realized I needed a real plan. I decided that vocabulary was going to be a massive mountain to climb, and kanji sounded even worse. So naturally I got on WaniKani first, just under 3 months ago.
Not long after, I got on Bunpro for grammar. I figured grammar would be the easy thing. I learned Spanish pretty well (5 years of classes between middle and high school) nearly 30 years ago, so I know how hard grammar can be, but I also know that a lot of that in Spanish (and English) is due to the many tenses we have, and first vs third person, gendered nouns, etc. I thought Japanese had a lot less of that, so grammar would be cake.
Well…
My WK progress is screaming. I’ve averaged ~8 days per level (currently level 11) , and my total accuracy is above 96% (and I’m still hard on myself for it not being higher). Even stranger, my fear of kanji is gone! They aren’t terrifying… they’re fun! And they make the entire language learning process easier, which I never would have expected.
But…
Bunpro has turned into something of a drag. I’m halfway through N5 grammar and have been moving slower and slower, skipping days, etc. My review scores are embarrassingly low, sometimes below 50%. I’ve been trying to change the ship’s direction, and eventually I realized that verb conjugation is just a lot harder and more open-ended than kanji identification. And I have to be ok with making a lot of mistakes early on. And also that 5 lessons per day is too many for me, which motivates me to do 0 instead. So I’ve decided:
- 3 lessons per day
- be ok getting answers wrong
- always press the cram button at the end of the review
This is helping a lot. I’m back to daily practice. But I’ve also realized that I’m a perfectionist, and that approach is sometimes hard with language, and maybe grammar in particular. I don’t like making any mistakes, and that’s really not possible with grammar. When you meet a person who speaks poor English, their vocab is never the issue… it’s their grammar. And the only way you get better is just by moving forward anyway, in spite of the many mistakes you’ll make.
It’s weird, when I do get a really complicated conjugation correct on the first try, sometimes I’m not even sure how I did it. And then the perfectionist in me gets mad that I don’t know, because I feel like I should be able to see the mathematical proof or something. But really, language was never meant to be learned that way. Children learn language every day all over the world, and none of them are mathematicians. It just becomes a part of us if we stick with it.