How to deal with anxiety while learning

[Arppen]

Hey all!

I’ve decided to take Japanese seriously for once at my 33 years old as my third language (Spanish native and pretty good english, I believe). So, now I’m using Bunpro + Wani Kani and also trying to do some immersion (Watching streams, even playing one “easy” game in Japanese which is Pokemon Let’s go for now!)

But I feel like I’m not going “fast enough” even though I’m doing my daily reviews + 10 bunpro lessons + daily lessons on Wani Kani.

I’d like to know if any of you feel anxious about your progress too, and how you deal with it. And of course, any tips in general for a beginner learner is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Vardaark]

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and Japanese is a very different language from Spanish and English.

10 lessons + reviews + wanikani is plenty fast enough, I would recommend getting a textbook to go with those and spending maybe an hour a day doing that if you want to round out your self-study, finding a teacher would also be great or short of that somewhere you can practice speaking (not AI, it veers wildly from too strict to too pandering, often bizarrely in the same prompt).

You’re already on the right track doing wanikani and bunpro though, both are very robust tools I wish I’d started using much sooner.

[Makishimu]

I agree with Vardaark on everything except one point: I don’t think a textbook is necessary.

As soon as you start feeling more comfortable with the language, try to immerse yourself as much as you can every day. Passive, active… reading, listening, gaming (like you’re doing now with Pokemon), anime, dramas, etc.

Keep immersing yourself every day, and if you use Anki, you can start creating a mining deck. This will help you learn words that you actually feel are necessary.

If you do 15–20 new cards per day, that’s around 500 new words per month and more than 5000 in a year. Of course, it’s going to take time compared to other languages, but just keep doing this and you’ll see progress very quickly.

[jrmr50]

According to nihongo con teppei podcaster

average amount of time to gain fluency (a nebulous thing but hey) is around 7 years. Can be done in 5 (usually by those with the advantage of understanding kanji already i.e. Chinese) but equally can take 10 years or more.

I’m coming into my 5th year of studying seriously, and I’m intermediate level I’d say, with a long long way to go (so definitely looking at being 10 years or more)

So a really long-term outlook is required. Today’s learning methods won’t be next years necessarily. Just keep going, keep enjoying and go for it.

[thelizard]

About the fast enough:

I’ve been going roughly at your speed for 1.5 years and I can function in Japanese. I’m not fluent but I can hold long conversations, joke around, watch movies, etc. All of this of course to a “limited” degree, I can watch slice of life dramas or series in domains where I have the vocab ready (you’ll develop those domains surprisingly naturally without much extra SRS), but if you give me a political drama or something about a topic I didn’t prepare, I won’t understand much. On top of that, the first 6-7 months of learning felt like they were going nowhere because you need a certain mass before starting to make any sense of this completely different language from ours. I feel like reaching the point I am at in English, will easily take me years and years though.

Is this not fast enough?
Is there a pressure reason, that you need to go faster?

Furthermore, whatever I learned quicker is weird. I had short bursts of adding more, and whatever I rushed through is much less secure and stable in spontaneous use.

Other than that I agree the advice ITT is good but a textbook really isn’t necessary

[frogg]

Three years of learning here, (hopefully) N3ish. I can have long conversations with natives on everyday topics as long as you don’t look at my sentence-building skills too closely and am starting to get more confortable with some manga and anime on the easier side.

It’s a bit frustrating to know that you won’t be have to access the media you want for yet another few years, but that’s how it is. Rushing it doesn’t really work and tends to end badly, as proven by all these “fluency in one year” threads out there. It seems like you’re keeping a steady rhythm and doing everything right, so all that’s left is to keep at it and be patient. Have fun with Pokémon!

[Xelbas]

I’m also new and share some of your concerns.
What is helping me so far is remember my goals:

• Take my kids to Japan in a couple of years time without looking like a totally hopeless tourist
• Play GB games in their original language (pokemon, saga, golden sun…)
• Read manga and watch animated films

I’m prone to anxiety, over-fixation and burnout so I deliberately slow down my pace.
I think this initial phase, before reaching critical mass, can quickly feel like a second job. Therefore, I’d suggest doing whatever you can to make it enjoyable or at least slow down enough to feel in control rather than like you are just doing another chore.
I do not know about you but early on in my English learning journey I remember for a long time feeling like I did not know enough. And the amount of work in front of me seemed gargantuan.
Then one day, something clicked.
So now I am just enjoying the process of learning, without self inflicted pressure, and hoping that one day things will “click” in Japanese, too.
All the best

[jinsu2301]

what helped me is to simply break it down mathematically.

let’s say I need a 10k vocab to immerse with relative ease. if I learn 10 new words a day, then that’s 3650 words a year, which means even if I take some days off, I will get there in about 3 years. (that’s not saying that I don’t immerse right now)

knowing that it’s really just a matter of time to reach certain goals means that you can stop focusing on daily progress and just “let it happen”.

and the reason why I know this works is because I never actually “studied” English. I had English classes in school, sure, but I never sat down and crammed. I failed vocab and grammar test more often than not and even had to repeat a year in middle school because of my bad English grades. but over time, with enough exposure, it eventually just started sticking. now I’m fully fluent.

compared to that, yes, Japanese is more difficult for me as a German/English speaker, but I’m also putting in actual effort, so I’m really not worried. I just sit back, do my lessons and reviews and trust the process.

[happy_capy]

What is the root of the anxiety? Are you doing this for yourself? Is there some pressure to accelerate?

[Hairymini]

There are always people who will have more time, more energy, more resources and more bandwidth to study Japanese. In fact there’s a natural selection bias type filter on social media that the “best” speakers are the ones with a lot of time, and those are the ones you see.

There’s also an insane level of perfectionism in the Japanese language learning community. I think this language attracts a group of people who perhaps unwittingly come across condescending - just because they’ve sunk 1000’s of hours in this language. (I might be one of them!) There’s often people who will say if your pitch accent, grammar, study methods, etc. isn’t perfect you’re doing it wrong.

The main thing about learning a language is consistency. Even studying 30 minutes a day is a serious investment of time. Consider that someone might play golf once a month, or tennis once a week for an hour and call it a hobby. In comparison 30 minutes, or even an hour a day is a lot.

Measuring progress is invaluable. It’s worth revisiting content, movies, media that you couldn’t understand before, but are able to understand now.

Ultimately make sure you have fun! And any mistakes you make whilst studying are lessons better not made in real life!

[homa]

First of all, I don’t think that it’s about going faster or slower. Even if I was studying 6 hours every day at the start, I was regularly under anxiety. I can do better, I can study more, I need to do 50 Anki cards a day, I want to be better than everyone else. Something like that.

I usually would study for a few days with a lot of energy, but then I’ll get a little bit tired, go on Reddit or YouTube where I would see people telling about how they learned Japanese, and get anxious about me not doing well enough for like two days.

With time, something started changing. I stoped trying random methods, and started trying to go with ones that make me feel good about learning. The more I studied about how I study, the less anxious I was starting to be.

It was the evolvement during a two year period of time, but if I look at myself now I might make an assumption that mainly two things changed.

First is that I understood that in my model of the world effective study is not about the quantity of cards, reviews, or words read, but about the amount of concentrated time I can spend with the language. It can be anything, but as long as it is fun, and new, which make me be able to concentrate on it for a lot time, it’s the most effective thing I can do. And with this, the anxiety of not learning effectively was slowly getting thinner and thinner.

The second thing is how I thought about progress. My brain was telling me that I want to know Japanese, and not learn it, so when I would look at some kind of video “Japanese after 30k Anki cards” I would get sad and be like “heee I don’t do enough, it will take forever”. While in reality I started learning Japanese because I was interested in learning how to learn a language, in how I learn something, how to learn something with better efficiency.

I don’t know for sure what caused me to stop being anxious a lot of times, but I think it lays somewhere in those two points.

[homa]

@Hairymini

Measuring progress is invaluable

You reminded me of another thing that I think might save some sanity for people, which I started recommending for my students.

That is writing down achievements, but not tangible like anki count, words read (well, those as well), but those that you forget after they happened, those that you feel, and forget about. For example the feeling of being able to read manga, the moment when you took pepa pig and understood that you understand all of it, the moment when you don’t have to lookup words in a specific book anime, the moment when you can understand a podcast while doing something else.

Those moment, according to me, map the real progress a learner has

[Arppen]

Thank you for the input!

I thought about mixing it up with a textbook or something else but obviously my work puts me in a rather busy situation often and what I’m doing currently is something that I can keep on being consistent. I will consider it though, super thanks for the tips!

[Arppen]

Thanks for the Anki recommendation. I’ve been considering it since learning “necessary” words for what I actually listen/read sounds really motivating. I’ll check it out!!

[Arppen]

Thank you for sharing your experience!

I’m actually going to Japan next year on March for a 20ish days vacation. That’s going to be really funny, honestly. But it’s also interesting because I’ll go again in a few years for sure and I’ll be able to compare the before and after, you know.

[Arppen]

Just for myself, honestly. I did some studying when I was younger (A few years at an institute) but dropped out due to having to focus on college and all that jazz. I think the “anxiety” is coming from the idea of “Am I doing this correctly?” and because I’m over 30 years and I feel like I have to make the most out of my still “Young” years. Silly stuff, I know.

[Arppen]

Woah, thanks for this input.

Honestly, this kinda described me perfectly. I feel the same way currently while I’m trying to do this while maintaining a rather busy job as well. This is why discovering Bunpro and Wani Kani was a life saver and simply because I felt like I could start studying seriously in the time I’m able to do it. I appreciate you writing this because it’s definitely helping me (Along everyone’s experiences and opinions on this thread) to really overcome it and be able to just keep going.

Thanks for real!!

[Viki]

The recommendation I have, not only concerning learning Japanese but life in general: do not compare yourself to others.

What is not fast enough? Compared to what? Who? Let this notion go, it just hurts you.

Learn using the methods which you find effective and fun, compare yourself only to yourself and pace yourself to reach your own goals at the timeline you decide on.

[Brand_S]

Give yourself permission to suck.

That’s the key to acquiring any skill. I’m 100% serious.

I could say more, especially since I have anxiety too. But I don’t want to give you an overwhelming to-do list. Acquiring any skill boils down to accepting and learning from your mistakes. The rest, you can acquire and tweak with time.

[Arppen]

You are right. Comparing myself to others is the first ingredient for a chaos recipe.

Thank you!