For students out there, how much time do you spend each day or week learning Japanese?
Do you take breaks from learning the language especially during “hell week” or the like?
I started learning Japanese last week during our Christmas break, I usually spend around an hour per day—so far I only memorized Hiragana and some aisatsu. This is not my first attempt learning a language; I had quite a lot of attempts in the past—namely at Spanish, but when classes rolled around, I quickly dropped learning it because I easily get overwhelmed.
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Not school or university, just a busy work/home schedule, but the approach I’ve taken is “something is better than nothing” while building the habit. I think if you have 15 minutes instead of an hour, that’s okay as long as you’re doing something every day. You can just do your vocabulary reviews daily (that’s probably about 15 minutes of SRS) when you’re busy, and find an hour on the weekends to make progress.
I don’t attend university anymore but I work full-time and learning/maintaining Japanese has kind of become a hobby. I can’t tell you how
many hours I spend with Japanese, but I try to surround myself with Japanese whenever I can aka read and listen a lot to Japanese native content.
I always say it’s better to rest than to quit (which kinda applies to more situations, not only Japanese); overwhelming yourself will burn you out, doing nothing over extreme long periods of time will obviously not benefit you either. So the key is moderation; incorporate Japanese in your daily life without making it an explicit time to study, especially when you have finals coming up. Review some vocab during morning coffee, do some reading on the bus, even listening to Japanese while it runs in the background is better than nothing. And when you have more time and energy, sit down for a few hours of active studying and revision.
You are still at the very beginning of your journey; so try and find something that keeps you motivated to stay on your journey, especially when the plateaus hit. You need a goal or a reason why you want to learn, else you’ll only feel as if its a form of torture to learn this language. Personally, I prefer small goals sprinkled in between compared to “I want to be fluent” goal. Like “I want to know x-amount of Kanji by the end of the year” or “I want to read book/manga xy by the end of summer in Japanese” or “understand my fav anime in Japanese without subs” etc etc.
Many here will tell you it’s a marathon and not a sprint, and that’s 100% true.
Some weeks you got time some you don’t. If you can’t study every day don’t worry about it, slow and steady wins the race in this case. There’s been months where I didn’t really get to study and I just reviewed instead of doing new content and sometimes you’re especially motivated.
I’m not a person who organizes my time very well and am easily distracted so learning Japanese during college was actually way easier because I was also actively taking Japanese courses. Now that I’m not in that environment where I am actively learning, I find my motivation waning.
Going to uni, still a beginner, I usually spend around 20 min vocab and 25 min on new kanji + review on my SRS. Maybe fit in grammar if I feel so.
If I feel the day/weeks gonna be a hectic due to school, I ‘ll lessen my new daily vocab & kanji. If I know the days gonna be a MESS i’ll only do reviews
I usually do it in the morning so I don’t have a reason to be tired.
Immersion, i just a vid while eating etc. Or listen to podcast while doing the dishes or while walking/commuting.
Well, I study Japanese in an university so it’s already squeezed in my schedule and I don’t really have the option to keep breaks lol. Though I will just try to alternate the amount used on studying if some course requires more effort temporarily and catch up if I’m starting to fall behind.
Now that I think of it, I constantly felt overwhelmed during autumn semester because of the new grammar and kanjis that were constantly taught. I felt like I didn’t know anything and wasn’t able to learn at all. But now as I have had a little break, I noticed that I remember most of the things that were taught and they are crystal clear in my mind.
I guess I’m trying to include even little possibilities to learn to my everyday life. Watching Japanese series, listening, reading and having widget on my home screen to showcase words and kanji. Even if it’s a 5 minute learning possibility, it still counts. Every little helps!
I try to do the main body of my work in the morning after getting up, and review it before going to bed. Some days I do more than others based on how busy I am, but average around 30 minutes a day.
It was part of my major
I spend 6 hours a day as an engineering student in college. I have a spreadsheet and my although sometimes I have bad days, my average over the last 3 months has been 6 hours. I just don’t do anything else in my free time aside from Japanese.
Hi physics major here and I understand your struggle I began Japanese in highschool just before Covid hit and was able to get a big running start over Covid when time was plentiful. Once uni went in person my hour-hour and half per day ground to 10-15 minutes however I also joined the Japanese speaking club and such which really helped. I wasn’t nearly as efficient at vocab memorization during that time but continuing to use my Japanese even 15 minutes a day before bed still helped cement and internalize my grammatical understanding. Now I’m basically fluent with lowish vocab knowledge and easily pic up new words from Japanese media I consume. My point: just don’t stop, whatever you can do no matter how little will help alot in the long run