Language Journal: January 23rd 2019 - Finally Catching Up To Me
Many of the people on the forums I read start burning out and losing motivation to keep up with Japanese months, weeks or even days into starting. So, the fact that I feel like I'm starting to hit the first real waves of it 2 years in? Feels pretty good.
I'm not giving up or stopping. But, I do think that this may be a sign that I need to start pursuing other avenues for my progression.
The last few days I've started trying to buy myself some breathing room by not doing my new Anki cards and focus on bringing down the daily load first. The annoying thing about SSRS programs is that this practice takes a few days to start feeling the results. The first problem is, with my settings, once a new card is marked as good, it gets pushed out 1-4 days depending on how well I did. And I usually drill the cards over and over until I feel comfortable pushing it out 4 days.
This means that not doing new cards today won't really impact my review numbers until about 4 days from now. And, I'll probably need to keep it up quite a bit longer than that if I want some sort of longer term easing out of the process.
That being said, I stopped a few days ago. This might be something like day 3. Tomorrow the reviews are down... but that doesn't mean it is day 4. Like I said, review numbers are a bit lumpy. Tomorrow's review count of 133 is noticeably less than usual, but also, not the lowest I've seen in the last month. I don't really know where I want to be. But, I feel like an average of 100 reviews and 20 new cards. Then I might be able to start trying out some additional practice tactics.
With my Plex server up and running, it is a lot easier to stream my home movies in Japanese on demand. I also have the manga. But, none of those are at a level or quality of learning where I can cut out the flashcards. The flashcards I have contain a decent mix of polite and casual speech and the phrases are a lot more applicable than what you'll find in manga or anime.
At the same time though, I don't feel ready to jump up another level in terms of manga difficulty. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the language will be any more natural. And secondly, there is a bit of fear that it will be like Chiemi San Kyoudai in that I'll be fumbling with Jisho and my Android dictionary to look up words based on radicals.
It sucks, but, maybe it is time to circle back to Kanji and work on learning the readings there. While I don't feel that the readings are important at the earlier stages, I certainly need to start doing something to make me feel more at ease with them in general.
I don't know what the answer is at the moment. But, I do know I need to slow down on the flashcards for a bit. Even just talking about things I could fill the time with is getting me a bit more excited. I just need to fix the things causing my lack of motivation first.
I'm not giving up or stopping. But, I do think that this may be a sign that I need to start pursuing other avenues for my progression.
The last few days I've started trying to buy myself some breathing room by not doing my new Anki cards and focus on bringing down the daily load first. The annoying thing about SSRS programs is that this practice takes a few days to start feeling the results. The first problem is, with my settings, once a new card is marked as good, it gets pushed out 1-4 days depending on how well I did. And I usually drill the cards over and over until I feel comfortable pushing it out 4 days.
This means that not doing new cards today won't really impact my review numbers until about 4 days from now. And, I'll probably need to keep it up quite a bit longer than that if I want some sort of longer term easing out of the process.
That being said, I stopped a few days ago. This might be something like day 3. Tomorrow the reviews are down... but that doesn't mean it is day 4. Like I said, review numbers are a bit lumpy. Tomorrow's review count of 133 is noticeably less than usual, but also, not the lowest I've seen in the last month. I don't really know where I want to be. But, I feel like an average of 100 reviews and 20 new cards. Then I might be able to start trying out some additional practice tactics.
With my Plex server up and running, it is a lot easier to stream my home movies in Japanese on demand. I also have the manga. But, none of those are at a level or quality of learning where I can cut out the flashcards. The flashcards I have contain a decent mix of polite and casual speech and the phrases are a lot more applicable than what you'll find in manga or anime.
At the same time though, I don't feel ready to jump up another level in terms of manga difficulty. Firstly, there is no guarantee that the language will be any more natural. And secondly, there is a bit of fear that it will be like Chiemi San Kyoudai in that I'll be fumbling with Jisho and my Android dictionary to look up words based on radicals.
It sucks, but, maybe it is time to circle back to Kanji and work on learning the readings there. While I don't feel that the readings are important at the earlier stages, I certainly need to start doing something to make me feel more at ease with them in general.
I don't know what the answer is at the moment. But, I do know I need to slow down on the flashcards for a bit. Even just talking about things I could fill the time with is getting me a bit more excited. I just need to fix the things causing my lack of motivation first.
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