I’ve been following a routine for roughly 3 weeks now, what I do is I wake up, take care of anything important, then I sit down and study grammar and vocab which usually ends up being 3 hours. I learn 5 grammar points and 35 new vocab a day. I try to take long breaks to split up the long time, but it’s not working. I’ve stopped learning new grammar points because it’s already 70 reviews a day. For vocab it’s 90. I can’t make it lower, and if I stay away from reviews I start forgetting. I can’t take it, I can’t even watch shows in Japanese even though I’m starting to understand. I don’t want to throw away all of my progress when I’m starting to understand. I need help.
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Unfortunately, this is the grind of creating any successful long term habit. It gets hard and people hit walls in Japanese after studying it for years even, but it’s important to take breaks when needed and keep pushing. Make sure you’re taking the time to review past material. When studying, it’s hard for me to not keep pushing through new material but eventually, your brain is just gonna be throbbing from how hard you’re pushing it. Especially living outside Japan or a Japanese community, learning and retaining the language is much more difficult and the only way to counteract that is expose yourself to the language every day. But don’t feel like you can’t take a day to relax your brain; Rome wasn’t built in a day 😁 Try thinking of new ways to get language exposure like reading simple mangas or making games. Hope you make it through dude
Your number of reviews is actually still pretty low, because it has only been 3 weeks. If you keep adding 35 new cards/day you will soon be at 300+ reviews/day. That’s why it is typically recommended people only add 10-15 new cards/day. I would also generally suggest to not spend much more than 30 min/day with Anki, as it gets very tiring after a while.
I think your issue is really a matter of expectation. It seems like you are making good progress, but 3 weeks is nothing. Language learning is measured in years.
This is a marathon not a sprint. Keep at it, maybe slow down to a more comfortable pace, and you’ll get there eventually.
Marathon not a sprint. Slow down and spend more quality time on less material. Quantity isn’t quality. Also that’s a lot of daily time, if you’re already burning out then cool down before you burn up.
First of all, why do you need to study that much at once, especally at the beginning? This does not only led to a burnout(atleast for most people) but its also just information overload which could result in less content sticking, eventough you had more input.
I would suggest learn smarter, not harder, what does that mean?
Start slow, if you feel like you could invest more time, slowly increase it, this work in both ways, its ok(well its actually the most important) to reduce youre investment if you cant keep up with it(it doesnt matter what the reason may be for it). If you want to extend your study time, try to find a topic/method that brings you joy, so you are actually looking forward into studying(I cant tell you what this may be for you, as i dont know you). Also you shouldnt just look for joy to increase you study time, you should also enjoy the whole process, because(I can only guess as you never stated something about that) after all, its a hobby(which consumes a lot of time), we choose them to enjoy ourself and our sparetime.
Slow and steady wins the race(no learning < slow learning).
Also you should not worry about forgetting things, because forgetting happens to everyone learning a language, heck it even happens to our native languages.
Japanese will take years to progress, there is no point in trying to speedrun, if youre not into it for the long run, then another hobby would may fit better. Im not saying you should quit(by no means) but if youre not able to change your attitude towards the learning process, you will not only have a bad time, but may quit before you reach some goals you may set.
There is no shame im progressing slower then others. I personall would rather spend 4 Years progressing slower and enjoying the full journey, than speedrunning and grinding down the same content in 2 years without even considering my own fullfillment.(im not saying that there are no people enjoying this approach).
Take a break, reset your mental, im sure you will be able to make it!
hey don’t give up
try to itemize what your perfect study routine would actually be
For me, anki was taking over an hour(!) and I had to stop adding so much to it. Now Anki takes 30 min and I get to read for the rest of my studying (reading is FUN).
You’re going to hit walls in learning any language. When you hit those walls, keep practicing so you can retain what you’ve learned. At some point, you figure out how to scale those walls, and progress is restored again. Stay persistent!
I recommend you do something fun instead of just grinding for hours and hours. [Here](https://jpdb.io/web-novel-difficulty-list) is a difficulty list of web novels. Look up on YouTube how to download and install Yomichan which is a dictionary browser extension that pops up when you hover over words. Reading has been proven to be the most productive activity you can do in language learning and it’s way more fun than just grinding vocb and grammar.
I think you’re just studying too much, when I was a beginner I’d study maybe a couple hours on a really motivated day, most days were less than an hour. I did that little because that was how much I wanted to study, and I didn’t burn out because of that.
Slow it dow. If you don’t want to study, maybe just do 20-30 minutes of review. If you’re feeling motivated, go at it as long as you want. But forcing yourself to study too much when you don’t want to isn’t gonna be super helpful in the long term.
You don’t learn languages by memorizing x words and y grammar points. Learning more of those is certainly essential, but you only really learn by using the language over the course of many years. No need to rush things in the first few weeks.
Take a week break at least. This isn’t a race, you’re not competing against anyone but yourself. Think like: 5 years from now, when you’re reading comfortably a piece of media or news that you enjoy and understand most of it, will those weeks you took off even be in your mind?
You can set new cards to 0, so you’ll only review previous cards, and the number of reviews will slowly diminish until you’re ready to learn new cards again.
Taking a break is never a bad thing; *really* long breaks are.
I’ve been studying Japanese for 5 year on top of going to school for Mechanical Engineering at one of the hardest schools in the US.
I am Japanese by heritage (quarter), anyone who did speak Japanese in my family is now dead. So I made it a goal for myself to learn how to speak Japanese. Then that goal migrated to professional goals, and by chance I met the love of my life and now I’m even more motivated to speak perfect Japanese.
Even though I have pretty grounded goals instead of “I wanna listen to anime without subs!” I also get very overwhelmed and exhausted. The longest break I’ve taken is 2 weeks; I believe that this is the sweet spot where you can clear your mind and come back with minimal short-term losses.
My review count on Anki is around 200 cards and it takes me roughly 80minutes to study them all. Just remember when you are comprehending Japanese, whether that’s from anime, videogame, drama, or the news, you’re reviewing Japanese. Not all studying happens consciously and through Anki. Anki is a tool for you to get repetition and drive the important things into your long-term memory.
Have you practiced *applying* these things you’re learning? Are you using a textbook? Or are you grabbing grammar points at random from a reference book?
Assuming you’re using Anki, keep in mind that the number of daily reviews you’ll end up with in the long term is about 8-10 times your number of daily new cards. If your retention is low, it can be significantly higher. So if you’re already having issues with 160 reviews, you should seriously consider lowering the number of cards you add every day *right now.*
> I genuinely don’t know what to do
> 3 hours
less. do less. most people when starting to practice something new start with 30 minutes a day.
if you’ve never studied/done anything long term, i’d lower that further. 15-20 minutes. once you do _that_ for 3 weeks, if you’re actively chomping at the bit to do more, start upping it 5 minutes/week. i expect you’ll reach your tolerance before an hour/aday.