A couple years ago, I took a Japanese course at a community college and got an A. I absolutely loved it because my teacher was good and the assignments she gave her students were effective in learning the language. Since then, however, I’ve barely progressed in my studies and even struggle to spend over 5 minutes on Duolingo.
I definitely want to continue learning Japanese because it’s always been a goal of mine, but just unsure what to do next to advance my studies. I’ve graduated college by now but I would still like to find an effective Japanese tutor/program online as well as feel motivated to learn the language. I’m still relatively a beginner, but I know hiragana, katakana, some kanji, and basic sentence structure and conversation topics.
Any recommendations or advice? Thanks
6 comments
I think it’s the same as any hobby/interest, you need a reason to learn it. You say that it’s a goal of yours to learn it but why? What’s the reason.
If you figure out why you want to learn to it, rather then just “it’s a goal” you might find motivation.
To not lose interest over a long time means you need to prevent or know how to handle the boredom phase, avoid burn out, set realistic goals and experiment with a routine so you get good results that keep pushing you forward. Like everything else, we only keep doing something if we see the results of our efforts. Being realistic about it helps as well.
It’s similar to sports. Say you enjoy running. You run everyday, the same track, the same distance, the same pace, the same time of day. That’ll get boring really fast. If you overdo it, however, you’ll only set yourself up for injury and burn out. A healthy routine with different runs (long distance, speed, endurance etc) and rest days is ideal.
Japanese is a like running a marathon. You write you want to live in Japan and teach English; which is a realistic endgoal. But you need to set smaller goals in between. If you only see your endgoal, you’ll feel frustrated if your progress after a year or so isn’t satisfactory to you. Hardly anybody runs a marathon with only four weeks of training, at least not inexperienced runners. Same for language learning: it takes time and continuous effort.
Smaller goals would be: Read the first texts, write the first diary entry, know x amount of kanji, pass a JLPT level, read the first text without furigana, and so on.
Motivation isn’t the same every day. Your discipline might vary. Life happens and you might not have the time you’d like to dedicate. And that’s okay!
You need to find yourself a good and healthy routine that provides progress and revision and new input. In my opinion, classes only benefit for the basics. After that, learning speed varies greatly among students and most are better off with self-study.
In the end, you need to find what works *for you*; everyone’s different and learns differently.
Many, myself included, recommend Genki 1+2 as workbooks. They are really good to bring you to upper beginner level. From there, you can make the leap to lower intermediate with graded native content, listening and conversation practice and textbooks like Tobira or Quartett, if you enjoy textbook work. Anki is recommended by many to learn and revise kanji and grammar, I personally am not a fan.
Make Japanese a habit in your daily life. Learn to rest; cramming for hours and hours a day won’t get you far. The intermediate plateau is a big hurdle for learners and it’s better to take it step by step than being discouraged.
(sry for that wall of text, I guess I got a bit carried away hehe)
Seems to me like you were enjoying the class setting..maybe find another japanese class even if its not in college?
Other than that, id say at the level you are describing i started playing games in 100% japanese(im a gamer so this made sense for me)
So maybe just finding content you enjoy (making sure is not insanely difficult content)
One thing you could try is to study and practice with stuff that interests you. Doing Duolingo exercises can get really boring fast (also Duolingo isn’t really great for studying).
If you enjoy Japanese music and want to understand the lyrics, why don’t you try making some reading and listening exercises around it? For example, take a song you want to learn and try listening to it and transcribing the lyrics. You can do it in Kana or do the Kanji if you recognize something and know it. Replay bits that are hard to understand until you think you have it figured out.
Then, find the lyrics and use them to review and correct your work. It will help you put Kanji and their readings together, find a lot of new words and phrases, practice your writing, and work your listening skills in one single exercise around stuff you enjoy.
If you dont have a problem with grammar atleast try to learn 5 or 10 new words everyday, i always try to learn new word when i dont to do grammar
You probably get your motivation back in a few weeks
You need to have fun. When i started I was really into anime so I watched thousands of hours of it and learned from it.
When I lost interest in anime I got into otaku culture like type-moon and touhou so understanding those was both a goal and really fun practice.
I’ve grown out of all of that stuff but I still enjoy listening to music and reading novels so I still use it for hours every day.
The moral of the story is that as long as you are having fun learning it you are going to make progress, but if you really have no motivation and no reason to learn then you may as well quit its not like once you’ve reached a certain level of fluency you will be satisfied since you had no reason to learn in the first place. At least that’s my two cents.