Hi, just want to tell you that after a looong break (1 month) without touching almost anything about japanese (except for anime) I feel like I understand better the language. It feels weird because I was ready to struggle with it because of the break, but maybe this break was the responsible of my improving but I don’t know why… What do you think is the reason I understand better japanese after a long break?
6 comments
You’ve been subconsciously processing it!
maybe you were fatigued
It’s easy to get caught up on the things you don’t understand whilst studying for long periods. A long break gives you time to clear your head of those things and start again.
I doubt you understand more Japanese than before. You have looked at it for the first time in a while, reflected on what you do know, and realised that you actually made some decent progress.
Just remember this when you do jump back into it because the fatigue will inevitably come back.
The brain likes it when you take breaks so that it can work on problems subconsciously. I think for language learning it’s easy to say the more we read/ listen the faster we’ll learn but taking a break once in a while is probably more productive. We come back we’re less fatigued and somehow our brains just get the language better.
A month break is a little extreme. I feel this would create more setbacks than
progression. It’s good to take a break here and there to let your brain
process what it’s learned, but a month of not learning new material means you’re simply not learning new material.
Just some anecdotes from my personal experience but
– lots of input (YouTube videos in my case) without really trying to improve and just enjoying them without understanding completely lead to massive gains in listening comprehension and general comfort with the language for me
– taking breaks and forgetting has been great for building intuition for me. I’ve relearned some words 5 times but that just means that I never really knew them that well to begin with. Forgetting and relearning helps get me to where I want to be which is being able to guess and be correct — pure intuition
If you’re just learning Japanese for fun, the most important thing is to have fun. It’s unfortunately very easy to optimize the enjoyment out of it. If you feel your typical study schedule is unsustainable, perhaps you can adjust it, but otherwise it sounds like your time off was just the end goal of most explicit language study anyways: just using the language without worrying about it (assuming you were watching without English subtitles).