Did anyone just stop tracking your reading time in Japanese? I used to track to the minute running a timer any time I read something in Japanese so I could hit my daily goal of 1-2 hours a day. Now I still want to beat that goal but I also feel like being glued to a timer before I read somehow reduces my motivation to do it. I want to just spontaneously do it but then it feels like I’m not tracking my progress accurately or well enough. Anyone else who doesn’t track reading time? What’s your approach if not?
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I never tracked my time, I only read things I like so I don’t have that problem
I find it hard to track times, total kanji, total phrases. When I set my goals I usually do a page number goal or cards per deck. Or a goal by the end of the month. Time intervals are hard to measure because you could do 1 hour of good reading or 3 hours poor focus reading
someone probably did
but I track all my time it keeps me sane and I never feel guilty like “I didn’t study enough today”
(Edit because I sent by accident before finishing)
I think I’m in a similar position. I started tracking my daily japanese exposure/learning in the process of slowly getting back in track and recovering my mental health. Now I try to reach 3 hours a day of focused inmersion, be it reading manga, a novel or watching anime. Tracking my time helps me with my motivation and it let’s me see if I have focused too much time on one type of media too. It’s a bit of a hassle but in my case the pros outweigh the cons. It has helped me tons to get back into the habit and I’m really enjoying the process. Added bonus is like seeing the numbers go up! Lately there were days I thought of stopping time tracking but I’m not sure I’d be able to reach my daily goal if I do it now.
you have to be seriously mentally ill to do that in the first place
Why would u track? It makes no sense and it won’t affect your progression.
I just made a half hour of reading in the morning part of my routine. I don’t track the time spent, I just follow the routine. There’s a set time when I need to stop to get ready for work.
To be honest I even admire a bit people who record whole their learning. I barely have any records, maybe ~10 results for tests and reading speed at different stages.
Personally I use almost completely passive way to learn. I like to read, and I just switched from English books to Japanese books after ~500 hours of learning. And as a off-topic comment, I like how Japanese literature is much more flexible with characters emotions and thoughts, it’s quite unique. The only thing outside of that in my learning is probably that I often get curious about small details and then I search explanations about it later. Like it’s common that there could be several options, for example, people can use る tense and can use た tense in similar situations, or can use のだ、ものだ、ことだ and sometimes it looks very similar, so if I don’t understand why one was used and not the other, it’s these things that worth to check for me. Such passive learning is extremely harmonic, but it’s also slower. How productive is our learning significantly depends on our intention to learn. The more you want to learn, the more attention you pay to new things in Japanese. How kanji looks, how it’s pronounced, maybe you use SRS for it later and so on. And typically the less you have interest in learning, the more you try to skip it and figure out the meaning of everything unknown in the simplest possible way. One of such examples can be more advanced stage when people can understand overall meaning without a dictionary, so people stop to translate new words completely and now it’s just something, something like that, instead of precise definitions with descriptions how it differs from other words. There is no way such learning would be very effective, it would work in a long time, but you would need much more time for that. And it’s not even only advanced stages, I actually caught myself that I don’t even look so much at new words. If I can’t recognize it, I just directly translate and look at it’s meaning, so kanji shape is vague and I don’t know it’s pronunciation. This is basically the result of ignoring intentional learning.
Such way I think it depends a lot on personal goal. I my case I achieved my goal quite early, I got able to read books somewhere between N4 and N3 and from that point my learning speed became quite slow. If you aim at N1, it’s better to keep some intentional learning habits for faster results. And if you aim at near native level, you better to use SRS daily to keep it within 3-5 years range instead of 10-20 years with more passive learning approaches.
In your case, you don’t ask so much if you should track your time or not, but for me it seems you rather ask if you should aim at specific minimum daily learning amount or not, like whether you should force yourself to learn more or not.
Nah, tracking time is definitely a no no for me. It kills my motivation too.
But the issue remains, we could spending too much time on it by mistake, the time we don’t have the luxury to dedicate to it.
To tackle the issue, I plan my study session in a way that it only takes an hour or so to finish for me without having to track it.