Yeah, this was exactly the case for me. I was even worrying that I’d never get past the point where I could read sample sentences but anything beyond that seemed perpetually beyond me.
Opinions vary greatly on this, but I think that personally it’s best not to worry too much about leeches.
In the same time it’d take you to learn one leech you’d probably be able to learn 10 or even 100 words that do stick, and since you’re never going to learn all of the words in Japanese anyway, you’re basically sacrificing all those other words for the sake of only one.
And if that one word is really that important, it’s probably also pretty common, meaning you’re likely just gonna learn it through immersion eventually anyway.
I’m not 100% following this myself, and you may not agree, but still, just throwing the idea out there
I can really relate to this tricking the brain. I’ve found myself watching Japanese let’s play videos for fun while thinking “damn, I really need to stop procrastinating and do my studies today!”… That’s how you know you’ve got your brain fooled!
I still feel like that with novels at times, I open them and see the wall of text and think that I’ll never be able to read along with the intermediate/advanced book clubs as I’ll never be able to read fast enough etc. It’s hard to see your progress though when you’re checking it every day, it’s such a gradual process that daily checks make it seem like you aren’t going anywhere.
I try to review my overall process a bit less frequently, maybe every month or two, gives a bit of time for the progress, or lack thereof, to become apparent.
No that’s a fair point because eventually your leeches do consume so much of your time. I’ll be honest there’s been a few vocab words in WK that no matter how many times I’ve failed them and tried to learn them they just don’t stick. If they come up for burning as long as I get the reading correct I’ll pass the item if the meaning I enter is anywhere near the proper one.
That reminds me of a TED talk I watched once, I can’t remember the name of the guy who did it but he was a procrastinator and he explained what it was like to be a procrastinator using his ‘procrastination monkey’ theory. It was really good
