I’ve come back from that period in language study of not wanting to do anything at all, so it’s been a couple of months since I’ve done any studying. When doing my reviews, I just keep thinking about how I’m getting them all wrong, I can’t believe I’m not getting any right, etc. At the end of the review I had averaged 70 percent correct, so why is it that perceived I wasn’t getting any right. That’s 7 correct for every 3 wrong. More than double the wrong answers, but all I noticed was the wrong answers.
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I feel like it’s sort of just a human psychology thing - we tend to feel negatives stronger than positives. You could look into some CBT methods for reframing negative thinking, if you think that’s the issue.
However, in a more practical sense, you could try slowing down on your correct reviews. By that I mean, when you get it correct relish in it a bit. Read the sentence all the way through with the correct answer, read it out loud, put a mental stamp on it. Wrong answers can feel worse because we (rightfully) spend more time looking at them to hopefully remember the correct answer next time. You could look to even out the time spent looking at both correct and wrong reviews to even out the psychological toll.
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I would think that this is a pretty normal way of thinking. If it’s something you don’t care about, even if you get half wrong it’s not a big deal. But for most of us Japanese is something that we want to be good at, so we don’t exactly get the dopamine hit when we get an answer wrong. If fact, it hits the pain receptors.
But don’t be afraid to reset some grammar if you feel the need. If it says mastered but you’re getting it wrong, it’s likely not mastered. Best thing you can do is be honest with yourself.
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Don’t be hard on yourself. Humans supposedly forget 80% on the next day… It was something shocking like that. So, be proud! Its been months and you can still get a lot right and remember so much Japanese!
Something that comes into mind is: There is a reason why on YouTube most negative videos have 2+ times the views compared to a similar positive video. Eg The games I hated in 2023 vs The games I loved in 2023
You are doing great!
Remember every mistake is a big step towards learning, so go out and make those beefy mistakes.
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Fun Story: popular youtuber / streamer / commentator sajam has to apologize in advance when he is positive about something. Just wanted to add that, even though it is unrelated to the original topic. Sorry.
That’s why looking at these stats is always valuable. I think we tend to always focus more on mistakes than when things go as planned (that may be an evolutionary trait, even. Learning from your mistakes and all that).
But as others point out there are objective reasons for mistakes to stand out: correct reviews will generally take less time than incorrect ones because you won’t spend 10 seconds staring at your screen trying (and failing) to remember what you need to answer. Once you fail you will also spend some time re-learning the item instead of immediately moving on to the next prompt.
Also if you fail a review it’s put back into the pile and will come back during the session, so that’s a reminder of your failure later on.
So if you have 10 reviews and fail 3, that’s 70% success rate but in reality you will have done at least 13 reviews (with the 3 failures coming back) so now it’s 6 out of 13 or ~45% of your reviews that dealt with mistakes and retries. And that’s assuming that you get 100% success rate on your 2nd try.
And if we consider that you spend significantly more time on average on mistakes than you do on correct items, then it’s very likely that the large majority of your review time was actually spent dealing with mistakes even though you were 70% correct overall.
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Think of it this way: if you got everything right, there would be no reason to learn it - you’d know it already! Getting things wrong is part of the learning process, isn’t it?
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The real problem is that language acquisition is made through trial and error.
The gamification of the process through SRS and such is great, but it tends to lead to comparisons with videogames where perfect score is the target.
But hey, if you make me pass a test right know in my native language - even then I probably wouldn’t score 100%.
So it’s natural to want high score but in fact the score itself is pointless. It depends on many things including your energy level, your concentration, your environment, and most importantly the time you need to bring solething from the state of consciously not know to unconsciously known.
I often draw the parallel to verbal practice - I am the type that would mostly not speak until I felt I would not make mistakes. My friends who were speaking without regard of their mistakes did go further and faster than me in terms of language proficiency.
So my only advice is : keep failing forward with pride.
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The real win comes when I’m reading or watching something in Japanese and I suddenly realize “wow, this isn’t as much of a struggle as it used to be”.
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It might have something to do with the amount of reviews you are doing at once. I know when I come back after a long break from studying, I return to hundreds of reviews, many of which I barely remember. When doing 10 reviews and getting three wrong it might not weigh on you as heavily, but if you do 100 and get 30 wrong it tends to feel a lot worse.
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Hi, personally what helped me curb this mentality was doing vocab reviews and marking even a known word as wrong just to be sure I’d 100% see it again during that session to practice it more. You can try this with the cram grammar future too if you don’t want to do this with actual reviews, and for speed, read + grade understanding is a great option.
I found that this approach turned “bad” scores from a “you did badly” thing to “you practiced and solidified your knowledge” and now they don’t bother me in normal reviews.
Of course, a word of caution that it ultimately might not work for you as we’re all different. Nonethess, I think it’s worth a try for a few days in case it does help.
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