Hi everyone, I’ve been learning Japanese for slightly more than 4 months now and while I’m very happy I started learning Japanese, I have, once in a while, a huge motivation drop where I just have no motivation whatsoever and I just botch my Anki, right now, I’m doing 12 new words a day with the Core 2k/6k deck (I’m at 1870 right now) and trying to do some Kanji every day with RTK, I first tried to do 20 kanjis a day but the more I progress the more I lose motivation doing so, I’m now at barely 10 and I often skip days. I also try to follow Japanese Ammo with Misa videos as they are very easy to follow and don’t really require extra work (at least for now). I would also like to do a bit of sentence mining here and there to get a bit of exposition to the language but I have no motivation for it as well…
My routine feels like a boring loop that takes a huge chunk of my free time and that doesn’t feels really rewarding, in my mind, things will start getting easier and more fun when I’ll be more comfortable with grammar and when I’ll be done with RTK but I’m scared that when I’ll reach this goal I’ll feel like it won’t be enough again… Has anyone been through a similar situation? What did you do to get out of it?
3 comments
Step 1: Define your goal more – why are you learning? Is it just for fun? Adjust your expectations to your goal.
Step 2: Find a different study method if this one is burning you out. 20 kanji a day is a lot, play with the numbers a bit. Anki / RTK / Core 2k/6k are good tools to facilitate studying but aren’t going to get you there.
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Step 3: Stop relying on motivation and instead practice dedication and discipline. For the same reason it takes weeks and weeks and months and months to go to the gym and get fit, it’s the same with language. Motivation get’s you started, dedication gets you to the finish line.
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Find a textbook or some other way to study the grammar points, no point in learning tons of words if you don’t know how to use them. And not only that but while you learn the grammar you are going to also learn words anyways so that’s better.
Shadowing is hard, and rewarding if you can do it.
I also like reading – so I try to read a lot of Japanese, manga, articles, whatever I can find. Getting yomichan and connecting it to your anki will help you build an anki deck based on words you are reading so the learning is more relevant to your interests as well since you choose the thing to read. Yomichan is great since it can help access the dictionary right from your browser with the click of a button.
There are a million ways to approach learning the language keep tinkering til you find one that sticks and then go for it.
Remind yourself of your goal. Maybe there’s a game, book, film you want to do in Japanese.
Review your progress. Look back at something you struggled with a few months back and remind yourself of what you have gained.
Edit – and don’t burn out. If your routine feels like a chore reduce it some more. But I’d recommend doing even a tiny bit every day.
Ask yourself why you want to learn the language and what you are going to use it for. That should be motivation enough.
Learning a language should feel fun and something you would want to learn. If it just feels like a chore maybe you’re not learning it for the right reasons.