Hello, I’ve been studying Japanese at an average pace for about 2 years now but recently I have gained much more interest in learning as Japan is somewhere I really intend to go to in the future. I would like to increase the frequency of my study, but I am just very busy with other subjects I am taking, work and hobbies. Guitar (hobby) in particular takes out a lot of my time and I by no means intend on quitting. Not sure if getting up earlier would help at all, I wake up at 7am always but I still feel there aren’t enough hours in the day. If anyone could share some study tips or could tell me how I can make/organize time I would really appreciate it.
3 comments
Then don’t think of your time in days. If you don’t have enough time In a day then maybe think in terms of weeks. Set your goals based off of that and maybe switch between guitar and Japanese every other day to reach that goal.
Your schedule is full, sleeping less won’t help, it’s way harder to learn if your sleep deprived.
You need to find a way to either do things concurrently, e.g. listen to podcasts while doing simple physical tasks. Or substitute non-study activities for study activities. For example: quit reading news in English, read news in Japanese. Quit watching any video entertainment in English , only consume YouTube/Netflix/… in Japanese. This latter choice can be tough, you’re probably giving up something you enjoy, but if you want to make time in an already busy schedule, you have to identify activities you can cut out and replace with language learning activities (or guitar practice, or whatever activity you’re trying to find more time for).
Podcasts in particular are great, since there’s probably at least 15-30 minutes a day you are doing something simple that you could concentrate on audio only content at the same time. You probably can’t double your study time this way, but you can add a little bit extra time everyday by finding ways to stack listening and other activities.
Other than this, there’s other time.management approaches, scheduling activities, stuff like that. This isn’t language- learning specific, and I’ll leave it up to you to do your own research in this topic if you haven’t looked into it yet.
you have to give something up to get something