I’ve been slowing down because sometimes it’s not even enjoyable. Like I love the language and all but I get so bored and frustrated trying to learn some times I just don’t wanna do it anymore. I wanna learn a lot but I also don’t know how to stop myself from getting burnt out I guess. How do I keep it fun?
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What answer are you hoping for besides “learn from what you enjoy”? Seriously. Think about other people for once
Step 1: find content you like.
Step 2: use said content.
Step 3: supplement content with flashcards/textbook/guides/etc.
Step 4: profit.
(Step 3 can be the crappy, boring part. However, your progress will be slow without it)
You can stick with what’s fun and maybe get to intermediate in a decade if you don’t get turned off by the lack of progress. Or you can make it a habit and study every single day even when you don’t feel like it and you’ll most likely be able to meaningfully use the language in a few years. But it depends on your goals.
I like reading books
Find a fun hobby that needs Japanese. Don’t just learn Japanese for the sake of learning. I’m learning Japanese to study Kendo and learn about Japanese history and other stuff. In the past, taking up basketball as a hobby also helped me lose a ridiculous amount of weight.
My strategy is study stuff that’s just hard enough to feel like work. And have fun with the stuff that no longer gives me trouble.
Only do what you want. Don’t get it in your head that you have to do so many things in a day. I AFK cut trees on RuneScape while I do my Anki. If there’s no entertainment around, I’ll throw on podcasts in Japanese. I try to watch like 20 minutes of YouTube. Later in the day I’ll relax and read some manga. It’s about the consistency. If I feel more motivated I’ll do more, and by then I’ll have a greater ability to consume more content anyway. Marathon.
Sometimes a burn is good to make you realize your priorities again.
Also by the time I’ve done all of those things that’s easily over 2 hours.
Not sure what your goals are, but don’t be afraid to try new approaches. I personally don’t retain a thing if I’m not getting at least some enjoyment out of it. My Japanese learning leveled up significantly when I started exploring the language on my own and let my textbooks become a supplemental resource instead of my main study material. I’m not studying for a JLPT or trying to pass a college course at the moment, and I don’t have anyone to speak Japanese with, so for the time being I’m prioritizing kanji, reading, and listening. Every so often I go back to my textbooks, see if there’s anything I’ve missed, and review grammar and conjugation, stuff like that. In a month or two I might get bored and prioritize shadowing instead. Obviously if you’re studying specifically for a test it’s a bit different and your study plan should probably be more rigid but I’d still recommend mixing things up now and then to keep things interesting and to avoid burnout.
I Iike music, reading, playing computer games, and watching shows and movies. While memorizing kanji and vocab and studying grammar aren’t particularly fun on their own, things like suddenly being able to read a sign in Japanese that says “Don’t feed the pigeons!” while playing Lost Judgment or picking up new words like 黒幕 (which I learned from LJ, lol) are kind of fun.
Personally, I take a lot of enjoyment from learning in a classroom setting (or with a tutor) so I would highly recommend trying that out if you have the option. Otherwise, what I’ve noticed I do alone is go over topics relatively quickly, which gives them less time to sink in and then I start getting confused and frustrated. Try picking a topic and reading about it, and then doing countless exercises on it until you know it so well you almost get sick of it. This should increase your “success” at exercising the language and also your retention of information.
mix it up and do new things
read and write, both prose and poetry
learn some japanese songs and sing along like karaoke
download some japanese recipes and make food based on them
try drawing out crossword puzzles of interlocking kanji that all spell valid words
japanese calligraphy
take an interactive class if you have not yet
find a language partner
watch japanese television with or without japanese subtitles
There is a method I always use that I call it “The Workshop”, it might seem complicated but its actually easy.
The basis of this method is that I never really memorize anything or use Anki. I am against memorizing anything because my memory doesn’t work that way. You create a framework that makes use of what you already learned to make studying later material easier.
Lets talk about Kanji, I will try to be detailed to give you a good answer. If you need the books just tell me.
For example: 機、畿、磯、幾 all pretty much have the same reading Ki, and they are next to each other in the book, and have similar strokes as well. The beauty of my method is that the more information there is, the easier you can find clues and connections that allows you to memorize and remember them. That leaves out 46 kanji whose reading I still have to “workshop”. For example: The kanji昼 means Midday, but its reading Hiru is easy for me, the other onyomi reading Chuu is hard, but its not actually hard if you think Chuu is like 中 which means middle, in other words, midday, and that helps you to easily relate the meaning to the onyomi reading. This is what I call workshopping a Kanji. Everytime I meet it, I remember these details I have added and never forget them.
Some more workshop techniques include memorizing a hard word that gives clues for all readings like 春夏秋冬 Shunkashuutou the four reasons is a simple word that will give you easily the onyomi readings for all four kanji at the same time. Others I have to be more insane and say 液 which means liquid is kinda similar to Icky in English, so it reads eki, or 骨 meaning bone has a reading ぼね that’s actually close to Bone In English.
I then move on to words: Some words are very easy and intuitive to gather their meaning, like 液体 liquid body or liquid, or 人骨 human bone some words are harder to ascertain their meaning from their kanji components like 共産圏 The communist bloc. These are the words you have to “workshop”. This word is composed of Together + Assets or property + Sphere or Circle > Collective property sphere, you can easily gather the meaning after that.
I never memorize a reading or a kanji unless I “workshop it” in terms of reading, meaning, and words. Today I met a new word on twitter which was 周年記念 Anniversary commemoration, but I decided to use the double Nen as a clue that this is something more important than just a year, and the rest can be inferred from the Kanji meanings themselves (Whole Year 周年+ Written Down Ideas記念) means its a year where you want to write down your sentiments about its passing or about the whole year = Anniversary. The reading of the individual kanji is something I have workshopped before to remember with the help of the book as I explained in my earlier examples.
Another example is 臣 meaning retainer or vessel (usually a trusted person) so I have decided to use Shin from 信じる to imply a trainer is trusted. I hope you see how I use kanji I learned to empower my learning of other kanji similar in meaning. Of course I only memorize or work shop words that has Kanji I studied before from the book or workshopped before myself.
As for grammar, its similar, for example, lets tackle the grammar pattern Kurai Nara.
くらいなら Means I would rather not do the thing before it, and do the thing after it. But that’s not the issue, there is another issue which is the conjugation of the verb before it. It is usually preceded by a verb in dictionary form, so I have decided to use Kurai Nara as a clue by saying the verb is 暗い, meaning its dark or dull, in other words not conjugated by anything that gives it flair, since there are other Kurais in grammar, you can use the other part Nara to imply becoming dark, or becoming dull, hence not conjugated.
There are other steps involved, like for example googling similar words in meaning to check the difference between them, like 短 and 低, which the book doesn’t really say much about, but you will easily become confused when u read words that are translated similarly, so you choose to workshop and google to find out how they are different, like today I met 髪 and 毛, and both are written hair, which was weird, but when I googled I realized one is for human hair and the other is for fur or animal hairs. The rest is easy since you don’t really have to memorize much except few little readings and words and differences, which are hard to gather clues for, or you have to actually memorize them to use for clues regarding other readings.
I hope my answer have clarified everything, and sorry if it got too complicated or unclear along the way.
I’m learning a language for the first time as an adult and I’ve definitely hit that point with my target language too. I think it’s not wrong to take a break and just do or watch something you enjoy and see how far you’ve come 😊
Eventually something will inspire you to keep going, or it won’t but that’s not necessarily a problem either! Don’t stress yourself out because it’s not a race. You don’t get points for becoming fluent in the shortest amount of time possible so why pressure yourself unnecessarily?
ETA: sometimes I help or read questions by learners who are newer than I am in my target language and see if I can explain a concept to them in simple terms. This helps me check my understanding and is a form of learning in it’s own right!
Doing it with other people was always how I stayed interested
I like Duolingo a lot.
Hi AbsAppreciator! Yeah I ran into this problem since I noticed my progress stagnating a bit, so I decided to start playing Japanese video games in Japanese! If you haven’t seen the Game Gengo channel it’s a great place to get started but it will basically mean that you get to play your favourite games and while it might take forever in the beginning, making loads of flashcards on everything, after you finish one or two games in Japanese and make a couple of Anki decks for them (I’ve noticed this for myself personally) you’ll begin to understand a lot more vocabulary and even grammar. I’m personally only N4 level, but even in only 2 weeks of playing Japanese games I’ve noticed my skill level increase a lot and I made a post asking people what they’d recommend as Japanese games, so feel free to check that out if you want a good place to start!
I’ve found for me that when this happens, it’s because I think something else is more fun than the thing I’m doing or need to get done. I realized that If the reason why I’m not doing something is because it is frustrating and kind of hard, I realized I want to do something else because it’s not as frustrating or hard. I had to confront the fact that right now, it will be frustrating and or hard. If I do it later, it will still be frustrating and or hard. Realizing this and thinking about what I want (do I actually want to get the thing behind the frustration/boredom I.e. fluency in the language), I either do the thing with more peace or I don’t do it with more peace. This helps me. Maybe it will help.
Have options. I have several ways to study depending on my level of energy and focus. Anything from reading, to anki, to pimsleur, to watching Grammer videos, to podcasts, to shadowing, to anime. When I get bored I’ll switch it up a bit. Learning almost HAS to be fun or you’ll definitely get burnout. I’ll usually use several methods a day, and if u need to, don’t be afraid to take a break for a day or two to give ur brain a rest.
Habit is the only thing that keeps me going through the slog. I find language learning to be a total chore and it gets really frustrating on some bad days. I’m only in this for work so I don’t have the luxury of “finding media that is interesting”.
But experience tells me that the feeling will pass and that future me will thank me for keeping up with the daily studying.