I get it, I really do. I would advise just doing reviews for a while, add no new content until you’re feeling better about it. At the same time I would still council 50+ reviews in “I don’t care right now” mode is still better than no reviews, but at the same time 無理しないでね。
Be as nice to yourself as you can, you are making progress!
Thank you. My only concern with doing reviews in that state of mind is getting impatient and pushing them forward even if I get them wrong, which can mess with the SRS accuracy – even though I guess it’ll correct itself over time.
Yes, for me it depends what material I’m engaging with.
Some series I’m just enjoying the series for what it is.
Then others like Saga of Tanya the Evil I’m sitting there with like 20% comprehension completely overwhelmed by the amount of unique 1 off military language being used
On days where everything goes well you don’t learn as much shrugemoji
Getting it wrong a few times and dropping SRS levels in the long run certainly won’t hurt your retention. It is very frustrating and that’s the problem, but in terms of the SRS and learning its all happening correctly. Your brain is rebelling against the hard new stuff your forcing in.
Try and be Zen don’t worry about accuracy numbers or progression. Do the reviews, add stuff when you feel you can. It will happen! Honestly you’re doing good even when its doesn’t feel like it (and today’s numbers look bad). As you say “it’ll correct itself over time” and goes for many things.
頑張って
There is so much advice in this thread, but I feel like it all just represents out particular problems we face and deal with.
But I feel like we don’t know what kind of problem the OP faces.
We know that OP started learning japanese around a year ago, and now is able to read N5 material, while facing “bad days?”
What I mean, is that it’s really little information, we cannot work with that, we can only say what we do when we have “bad days” but for many people those “bad days” have different roots. At this point without making additional question, I don’t feel like we can suggest something that will hit close. If we have more data we can build more realistic hypothesis about why OP feels like that, and clerefy them again by asking before giving an advice.
For example the type of data I would ask is:
Something else that could do something with your bad days?
If we know responses, new questions will arrise so we could ask them, and by answering those questions, OP might find more questions themself that are still unanswred, and by trying to answer them they might find what causes those bad days.
“Bad days” are ones where practice/reviews go poorly (lots of missed and incorrect items) and learning new items doesn’t go well. These combined, lower my sense of confidence, while there are a lot of other days where I have a steady sense of confidence, where I feel good about my progress. My main question (which has been answered, thankfully!) was if other people experienced this same cycle of ups and downs. I was just looking for other peoples’ personal experience with this sort of thing, and people have been very helpful with that.
In your list, you mostly identified it – it’s poor sleeping combined with brain fog that comes after a bad night of sleep. I’ve been dealing with sleep problems the past year. I’m trying to work on improving it, but there’s only so much I can do when my body won’t cooperate. So I mostly know WHY I perform worse sometimes, it’s just a matter of hoping my sleep can improve.
For me personally, it has helped a lot to consciously make studying into a daily habit. But it’s not nearly as strict as that sentence makes it sound.
Essentially, I take a moment every single day to sit down and study, for a minimum of just ten minutes. If after those ten minutes I feel like it’s absolutely not going anywhere, I stop for the day and go do something else. Sometimes I’ll come back to it later that day, sometimes there’s just no way I can manage it. If the ten minutes went well, I continue for however long I feel like. Some days turn into full study days (those are the really good days), other days it’s just possible to finish my Anki and/or wanikani/bunpro reviews for the day and then I’m unable to do more.
How well it goes varies day by day, and that’s okay. The most important thing is that I’m building that daily habit, and I at least give it an honest try. If during those ten minutes I’ve given it my all (whatever that is for that day), the day has been a success. Allow yourself to have bad days, and take a moment to appreciate the good ones when they happen.
That seems to me like a problem of testing.
For example if you switch your methods to those where you are not being tested, shouldn’t it resolve the problem at once?
edit: I mean it’s one proposal that doesn’t require going deep and understanding why faling cards trigers this function of feeling frastrated
so true
my normal fix for bad days is going to watch cute cat videos or scrolling anime memes - feel so much less productive than the rest of you guys lmao
my bad SRS day solution? i simply watch ghibli movies without subs and call that studying for the day