Learning Japanese with Memory Issues – Feeling Discouraged

24 comments

1. You’re not the first one to have autism, ADHD, or other motivational issues on this sub; I suggest searching “ADHD” in this sub for starters. See what you can gather.
   That way your question will be more specific, and the answers more helpful and tailored to you.

2. RemindMe! 7 hours

3. I don’t have memory issues but when I learned kana, it takes days and weeks to finally memorize all of them. My friends also cannot recall and are confused many of the characters.

   My point is that don’t compare your progress with some of these people online. Many of them are very good at learning so they tend to share their progress and might give and impression that remembering kana is easy.

4. Learning a language is a marathon not a sprint. Stay focused and keep at it. Do it in your pace. Small steps will help to keep the joy of learning and I’m sure this will also help your brain to adjust and improve.
   I started years ago and I’m still nowhere near where I want to be. But I always think about how I’ll be able to achieve great reading and speaking skills.
   Small steps for motivation can be twitch streams when you acquired more vocabulary and grammar. Making comments in the chat and having a native speaker react to it feels great. And you dont feel pressured because of the anonymity of the chat.

5. Hi! I have ADHD and also deal with brain fog due to chronic autoimmune illness that disrupts my memory retention and recall quite a lot.

   First of all: You are doing great! Your approach is solid because you are focused on grounding yourself in the fundamentals which is critically important.

   When people blaze through the foundations they don’t necessarily really absorb them and then continue to struggle to learn for a long time to come. It’s like if you watched a few minutes here and there of a show’s first season and now you’re trying to catch up on all these subplots but you don’t really remember who people are.

   Go. At. Your. Own. Pace! Your own pace is perfectly fine. Sure, in theory someone could memorize all those characters in a few hours per syllabary. By no means will they have mastered them, consistently remember them all, read at a fast pace and most importantly *actually pronounce them right.*

   It takes a lot more than rote memorization here. There’s building muscle memory in writing by hand, understanding stroke order, understanding the small tsuっand so on.

   I will give you some motivation: I would argue that studying correct Japanese pronunciation to a meaningful extent and understanding the concept of pitch accent is *more* important to get solid on first than achieving the key goal of learning all kana.

   Why? Because when people just learn kana without a rich language immersion they are likely to build habits based on mispronunciations. Always harder to correct later.

   So why is this motivating for ADHD? Because beginning language listening immersion is like ADHD god mode as you can do other things at the same time. If you’re not already doing this, just start regularly listening to Japanese language content all the time. You don’t even need to watch or pay attention. Just have it on while you’re doing other stuff.

   Consider that kids born into any culture will get a good solid year of just listening to language around them before they start producing words themselves and even then, they don’t get too coherent until age 2.

   Listen listen listen and enjoy it. Remove the stress and enjoy your own pace and what you like. It can be language learning or native content or whatever you’re interested in having on.

   Now add to this spending some dedicated time watching videos that go in-depth into pronunciation tips and mistakes, and explanations of what pitch accent means and how it works in Japanese. The YouTube algorithm is your friend here.

   Invest time into learning *sound*. It’s a different kind of memory, for the movement and flow of a language. This can be an everyday joy that will lift your spirits as you start to pick up more and more very basic sound patterns. I don’t even mean words or syllables! Just the wave of the sound and the types of sounds you hear.

   I would love to hear more about what motivates you in the first place to study Japanese.

   In my case I used my ADHD hyperfocus to my advantage and went hardcore on studying for a long time, possibly longer than I’ve stuck to most things in my life. I am happy to offer more thoughts to you and welcome you to share more about what drives you.

6. comparing yourself to other people is honestly one of the worst things you can do…because it can either

   ​

   a. give you a boost and push you to do better…

   or quite the opposite

   b. completely demotivate you and make you want to quit

   ​

   also, as far as I know I don’t have any memory problems, but it took me a solid month to learn all kana well…and there is nothing wrong with that. people can say all they want about learning them in a day or even hours….but in all honesty, it is impossible to have learned them in that amount of time and not confuse them half the time until they really get used to them which can take definitely a bit longer

7. What i did was use the language as much as possible and to understand what I can understand. I switched off of anki because I didn’t feel like it worked for me but what did work is if I just used the language every day.

8. I think people that say that they learned both kanas in a matter of hours are full of shit. I’d say it should take about 1-2 weeks depending on how much time you commit, but it’s also fine if it takes longer. Just don’t obsess over it too much at this stage, because you’ll still have a lot of opportunities to reinforce your memory down the road as you practice vocabulary.

9. don’t compare yourself to other people, you just gotta be you

   to learn the kana what I did was to copy the charts again and again

   GL dude

10. It’s been years and years, and I am still shaky on katakana….

11. Don’t worry about how long it took others to learn something, just go at your own pace and try to improve yourself daily.

    I have memory issues from medical conditions and I’m trying to learn kanji and vocabulary, and I can know a kanji one day and come back the next day and not remember ever seeing it. I was just doing a review and asking my dog if she knew a certain kanji because I was drawing a blank (spoiler: dog also didn’t know).

    And I’ve known hiragana and katakana for years but still get ツ and シ mixed up (also ソ and ン).

    Honestly, though, once you start being able to understand words here and there you’ll be hooked. It’s really exciting when you start seeing that payoff. Just keep plugging along and you’ll be there before you know it.

12. Just dont compare yourself to others and only try to improve yourself step by step.People saying they mastered both katakana and hiragana in a few hours are simply lying. Considering they studied them for a few hours, if they dont use it the next few days they are gonna forget them or at least partially. So did they really learn them? No it takes time to manifest the knowledge.

    You should try to read actual words and sentences that have hiragana / katakana instead of kanji at least in the beginning. Helps you both reading kana and you learn some vocab and grammar. There are some free ressources with books that are pretty lightweight and only have hiragana. For example here [https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/)and https://jpf.org.au/classroom-resources/hiraganabooks1/

    Currently i am teaching someone with Autism and ADHD in private. It is more difficult and takes more time, but if you have a goal and are having fun then you will eventually make great progress. The key is just to keep going at it and dont be negative about it.

13. As someone who teaches middle schoolers, there is a HUGE range between my students on kana recognition. After a quarter of classes 3 times a week, I have students who started with 0 kana recognition to being able to recognize all 92 basic hiragana and katakana by the end of the quarter, and I have students who literally speak Japanese with their parents at home and struggle to recognize basic hiragana.

    I wouldn’t worry too much about how long it takes you to get the writing down, since it’ll come with exposure and as long as you know how to look things up that you don’t know, you’ll be fine in the long run. As someone with ADHD, I would recommend focusing your vocab and any native study material on things that interest you. I have an adult student who is really into a specific hobby, and one of the things that I’m making for that student is a list of vocab terms that relate to the hobby so that they can be used in conversation.

    I’m also currently taking a beginner level language class myself, and I definitely started just looking up vocab to talk about the stuff I like talking about since that would make things more interesting for me when I got to the part of class where I had to start writing and speaking.

14. I also have bad memory. The game changer for me was using Anki AND making up mnemonics for each word I wanted to learn. Ideally, you would ascribe one meaning to every syllable, so for example if you want learn the word いぬ (犬), you would need to make a mnemonic/story using whatever means い and ぬ in your mnemonic system.

15. My situation is different from yours, but I have been struggling recently with retention of things I’ve already learned. I can’t seem to recall things like kanji I learned a week ago, but I can remember grammar structures I learned over twenty years ago in college.

    Since you’re still in the beginning phase, give it time and be patient. Sometimes things will sort of “fall into place.” Other times you will listen to something and understand absolutely nothing.

    I’m using a textbook (Genki) and I’m trying to stick to a schedule of a unit every two weeks. I’m trying Wani Kani for kanji, after trying to brute force memorize characters, I think I need to do the radical approach. I’m really considering dropping stuff like Duolingo, I feel like I’m not really learning, just playing a game.

    The fact that I picked this up again after more than twenty years should tell you that I really do feel this is a marathon, not a sprint! Hope this helps.

16. I do not like to go into too much detail, but I have my own issues (who is normal anymore by today’s standards?) – but I learn best by Spaced Repetition Systems – Anki/JPDB/Kanji Koohei are my top three post Hiragana/Katakana. For those Hiragana and Katakana I printed out flashcards, turned them into a book and drilled them. They had the stroke and verbal story (no faint picture like some have) that I would read, say the character and then practice writing it. I did by column by column, 5 at a time and then the ‘extras’ all at once. Katakana was more difficult for sure.

17. Hey! It looks like you’ve already been given some good advice. I just wanna jump in and say I also have ADHD and autism. Feel free to reach out if you ever want a neurodivergent study buddy 🙂 (I’m a very socially awkward person but I’m doing my best to improve!!) Either way, good luck with your studies!! I’m rooting for you!

18. The only person to compare yourself to is who you were yesterday. Everyone runs their own race, and no two people have the same track in front of them.

    And I can tell you, the people you encounter online who present themselves as advanced Japanese learners are:

    1) Among the absolute upper percentage of motivated, dedicated learners.

    -or-

    2) Lying weebs.

    On the internet at large, mostly #2.

    I was in an Asian Studies program at a global top 20 university, through undergrad and graduate school. Almost nobody without an East Asian cultural background stuck through all 4 years. (Students with a thorough/native background in Chinese knew the kanji, while Korean has very similar grammar to Japanese). From 200+ people in the 1st year class, the 4th year course was only like 12 students.

    I can also tell you from living in Japan there are foreigners who spend years there and never manage to push themselves to even learn kana. They just have a partner or friends handle their adult lives for them.

    So really, you’re doing fine.

19. I am Japanese with ADHD, with ASD tendencies.

    I started learning English from music and movies. And I learned a few other languages besides English, but learning Korean and Thai characters was a real pain. I felt it was pointless repetitive behavior.

    Why don’t you try different ways of doing things that suit you and not others or the textbook way?
    You don’t actually have to write the letters with a pen, the keyboard does it for you.
    Once you can read hiragana, why don’t you take a break from learning the letters themselves and watch anime, manga, or TV dramas?

20. First of all, don’t compare yourself to others. Just focus on how you’re improving. You have to play the long game when learning Japanese, and comparing yourself to others is just going to demotivate you.

    Second of all, struggling to remember kana when you’ve only been studying for two weeks is completely normal and is not a sign of having memory issues — it took me a few weeks to get somewhat comfortable with recognising kana, and that’s completely normal. People saying you can learn it in a few hours are either straight-up lying or are using “learn” to mean “understand a few things about it and maybe remember a few of the kana soon after you first saw them”. Getting good at reading kana (and Japanese in general) comes with practice.

    Forgetting things is a constant struggle when learning a language, and all you can do it do your best — funnily enough, it took me a month to remember how to read the word 忘（わす）れる (to forget) because I kept forgetting to how to read it. That’s just how it goes.

21. I’m not diagnosed with anything but I struggle heavily with memorization, especially when stuff isn’t in context. You see these stories of people who do 50+ anki cards a day and they talk about how they can retain it perfectly. It’s great that they can do that, and very impressive, but for the vast majority of us it isn’t that easy. I know a lot of guides say this only takes a few hours, but remember, most of these guides are written by people who are already very advanced. When you are proficient in something, it’s easier to say that something that you did a long time ago is easier to do than it actually is, if that makes sense lol.

    No matter how many times I repeat some cards in a single day, I just can’t seem to memorize everything without any stumbles. It isn’t until I look at things over and over and over again until I get it. It’s almost like a switch flips when I remember something while it is in context. It isn’t until that exact moment, where I recall something for the first time without any outside help, that the word finally sticks. I struggle a lot with comparing myself to others success stories, expecting that I should be further than I am, or that I am not doing as good as I should be doing.

    Comparison truly is the thief of joy. So what if it takes you a little longer than what you expected to memorize something? I know it’s cliche and easy to say, but comparing ourselves to others, *especially* in language acquisition, is what demotivates and takes away from our own tiny successes.

    Even if it took you 2 weeks to memorize Hiragana, celebrate that, you did it! You got further than many of those who have gone down the path to learning Japanese. (I know I just said that we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, but this is about the small victories lol). Celebrate the wins and don’t worry about the losses. You aren’t in a race, and you shouldn’t feel any disappointment for the time it takes you to learn something. The fact that you *did* learn something, even if it wasn’t in record time, means you are doing great. Just keep on keeping on, and as they say, trust the process. We’re all on our own individual journeys here. Keep at it and don’t give up. Just let go and take each day as it comes.

22. These really help if you’re a visual person! It helped me a lot when I was first starting out 😊

    [Tofugu’s Hiragana Guide](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/)

    [Tofugu’s Katakana Guide](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/)

23. My leech stack is getting bigger by the day. The words are important to.

24. I also have asdhd (autisem + adhd) and yeah some people online can learn super fast and some learn slowly, dont race them, do it in your own speed, i learn kinda slowly but with tryin my best to stay consistent i have reached 1070 kanji + kana +1200 vocabulery, i am not fluent yet after 2.5 years but it took me 7 years to learn english as a teen and i am defenetly faster this time around, even if it is slow compared to youtubers that got jlpt n1 in 16 months