everyday feels like torture and i feel like im not making any progression in anything i do
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Nice title lmao
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Try friendly ways to study. Try reading mangas, watching animeās without subtitles, try writing u routine in japanese (with IA help if needed, but try to do it yourself 1st). This way u will se u progression. Obviously, progression takes time.
Nice thing about that, is if you write something today, and read it in some months or weeks, u will see u improvement. If no improvement, u probably have at least a facility on it.
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If you donāt enjoy it, why not just not do it?
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Donāt force something.
If something isnāt feeling right, at least right now, forcing it usually makes things worse. If you feel such a way, then itās okay to put it on the back burner. If you want, try to revisit it with a refreshed mind or maybe find something else that speaks to you more.
Also I changed the title of the thread to something less crude.
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Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn in general (at least for English speakers), and when it comes to proficiency thereās just a huge chasm between A2 to B1 and from B1 to B2 (this is true for any language really). What I really think might make it painful to you is that youāre wasting your time and you could do something that is more āworth itā, and fair enough if you need to get better at your work/academics, but ask yourself if itās really time wasted compared to just watching random stuff on social media platforms that you donāt even care about. If youāre bilingual you might share the experience of consuming content in a second language that you donāt really understand yet, I know I do, but at that time I wasnāt really frustrated because I didnāt feel like I was having a breakthrough every day or I wasnāt understanding enough of my ātarget languageā. Try viewing it this way, thereās only a few things that are more āworth itā than language learning, which is spending time with people you care about, and getting better at what is it that you do primarily for a living, then if you really want to learn a language that takes thousands of hours to get proficient in you have to forgo a lot of the āoptionalā stuff that we are so surrounded by these days. Then come to realization that the dread of not understanding anything of your target language is something that is completely due to undue expectations that you set on yourself.
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How long have you been studying? What are your goals for learning Japanese? If āeveryday feels like tortureā maybe you just donāt like language learning. Unfortunately, it will take years of consistent and dedicated effort to become proficient.
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I donāt know. Iāve gone crazy and I donāt know a way back. Suffering every day is just a part of it.
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+1 to everything said, but also friends, comrades, fellow-commiseraters. Like your doing now, reaching out to the japanese learner community and just sharing in the experience can make everything feel way less suffocating.
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Embrace the crazy
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If you can find a group class locally, usually this is a good bridge into studying if just doing it in isolation feels like torture.
Also, it can be good to have a plan going in. Learn Japanese: A Ridiculously Detailed Guide is still one of the best compasses out there.
Lastly, focusing on just one thing at a time can be a huge help. Whether itās vocab, grammar or a phrase book, it can be less overwhelming to do it all at once. Above guide has good recommendations for this.
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Thereās already a lot of advice but I think I can add in mine:
Iāve been studying daily for about 8 months and I feel like Iām never going to stop even though I have hit some obstacles since then.
First of all, if thereās nothing you find enjoyable, or if you donāt really need it, there is no issues in taking a break or stopping altogether. Though you will lose proficiency which is something you have to weigh the pros and cons of on your own.
If you want to continue, maybe take it a bit slower, and make something enjoyable/satisfying your priority. That was Anki for me: Immersing could be quite unfun when podcasts were not very interesting to me, anime was boring without understanding any of it and I could spend minutes trying to decipher one textbox in a game.
Having a core Anki deck that I downloaded gave me a clear objective of x amount of cards with a reasonable amount of cards per day, it could get annoying but I wanted to have it done anyway.
And sometimes I would find other objectives such as starting to seriously study grammar and thatās how I got to Bunpro, then now I realized I have a chance at the N3 so Iāve managed to give myself daily objectives for that. While still mining vocabulary without considering the JLPT so I feel like Iām naturally improving instead of only going from level to level.
In conclusion you can take it slow for a while, and let yourself naturally be taken to new ways of studying, or trying ways you havenāt tried in a while but might be easier.
I am personally really focused on not getting overwhelmed at the moment (reducing daily anki cards, only doing reviews on bunpro without adding new grammar points or vocabā¦)
Anyways, good luck with your study, I still feel like Iām a beginner myself but your own progress can sometimes surprise you.
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hahaha youāve come to the wrong place to ask that!
we all went crazy years ago but the real question is;
did we go crazy because we study Japanese, or did we start studying Japanese because we were already crazy !
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From a person whose been there, but also realizing there is not a one fits all solution, my suggestion is to try different things until you find something enjoyable.
For me textbooks just didnāt work, classes didnāt work, just listening to endless content didnāt work. It wasnāt until I stumbled across Pimsleur when things started to become fun. Then little by little, having Kanji trickle in, more words, a little bit of grammar, and using the things I learned, not hiding them away like a perfectionist who feared the opinions of people who wouldnāt care if you died tomorrow.
Things arenāt really fun when you donāt understand them, and Iāve been there and still am in many ways. If you really love Japanese and really want to do this, youāll find a way even if it takes a while to find it. And even if you try to quit, if it is something you love it somehow has a way of coming back into your life. We live in a world of speedruns and FOMO, but me; I just want to sip my coffee while I casually study a few words a day.
In other words, taking it at my own pace is what prevents me from going crazy.
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Immersing for a thousand hours every day didnāt do it for you? Speedrunning N1 in two hours didnāt either?
The YouTubers told me it would help make me into a Japanese man if I did all of those.
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based off the little info given, only advice I can give is to not compare yourself to others. go at your own pace and celebrate any victory you find, no matter how small.
Nope, it didnāt make me into a person who believed they learned Japanese better than Japanese people themselves. Caught in the illusion of my grandeur because a Japanese person said I spoke Japanese better than them, even thought thats just another form of being Nihongo Jouzued.
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wait is this the method
I relate to this quite a bit. What are you comparing yourself to? Other people? Yourself?
Comparing yourself to other people is easy but horrible to do. I often think of the famous quote ācomparison is the thief of joy.ā I almost always find this to be true, and especially when learning Japanese.
Whatās harder but better to do is to compare yourself to where you were previously. Itās much harder because you often donāt really notice the minor improvements you make. In my case, I often notice things that Iāve forgotten, Iāll often stutter when saying the most basic of phrases. But when I think hard about it, I remember that I do know more than I did.
Also, and I think this is important to remember, SRS systems are painful by design. Systems like Bunpro, Anki, WaniKani, etc are designed to show you thing that you donāt know. Basically these systems show you all the things youāre bad at and rarely the things youāre good at. Everyday Iām making the same mistakes and of course I get āpunishedā by being reminded the next day, and so on.
In the end, these systems can lead you to believe (or at least make you feel like) youāre not making any progress.
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While Iām new to this website Iām not new to learning Japanese, and I think you just need to find facets of joy within learning. For example, I really love birds so I will practice reading wikipedia pages about different birds, even when at the start it means having to dissect one word or piece of grammar at time. However, if you are just starting out then throwing yourself in the deep end like that might just make you feel worse because itās so easy to see how much you donāt know. If that is the case for you, then try going back to basics and doing something easier. If you are interested in reading then natively might be worth checking out. For a listening focus I would recommend trying out JapanesePod101. Itās very good at slowly introducing new concepts and making you feel like you understand each lesson.
At the end of the day, learning a language, especially Japanese, is never going to feel easy, and especially not effortless. In fact, it will probably never be āfunā, but it can be interesting and engaging if you take the time to find the right method for you to make it so. If it only ever feels like a chore, you will quickly burn yourself out.
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