Am realizing I'm stressing myself too much about the Japanese and am not enjoying it too well. Any tips?

Japanese Language
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When I started the language, I enjoyed studying and stuff, up until recent weeks, I’ve been stressing myself out about it constantly. This is pretty much one of the main priorities in my life just due to the commitment of learning Japanese and it’s been fine, but I’ve come to find myself stressing over making sure my reviews on Bunpro and Wanikani are at 0 and to go through my grammar textbooks extremely fast.

The reason I do this I think is because I’m scared of burning out. I want to make sure I cover everything and drill everything and the studying habit into me before I burn out. If I feel bored, I just do more. And now I’m just stressing about the future of the language, like I’ve been trying to plan out my grammar journey and stuff which is going good, but I’m just scared of what I don’t expect. I’m scared that if I do all of this I won’t see progress, even though I am. I’m also really worried about grammar recall even though Bunpro’s SRS is recall-based from English to Japanese, and I’m worried that even after I master my textbooks and finish Wanikani, I won’t be able to string together my sentences correctly in the real world.

I don’t know why I’m worrying about this too much but that has all pretty much lead up to me feeling like the language has been a burden and feeling like reviews sometimes are an annoyance. To that, I tell myself that this is a habit, not an annoyance, and until I think otherwise, I’m gonna keep drilling it into me. Don’t get me wrong, learning Japanese is awesome and I love the benefits of doing so, which is why I am learning the language. And I definitely don’t want to stop, but if I slow down, I feel like I will get burned out and stop. I’m also just worried about failing, about quitting, which stresses me out about the language, even though I keep going every day. I now find myself thinking in my free time, are my reviews done, do I have time to do more grammar, just anything related to the Japanese language to be calm, I’m TOO focused to the point where some point I probably will get tired of it. I keep telling myself to calm down to avoid burnout, but I can’t relax if I have free time, and I’m not working on this. Even though each new thing confuses me, I feel bad when I don’t go learn and add to my reviews as fast as I can if I have the opportunity to. I know I’m going to keep having the opportunity to, but I feel some uncertainty if I’m not working towards this. Feels like everything I do revolves around this. Feels like my inner monologue keeps telling me to do this stuff, way more than I want to do it myself.

With all that said, I want to make sure I’m learning well and fast, and not stopping, but I also want to regain the balance I had when starting the language so I can relax when I’m not doing something to help with it. If anyone has some tips to find my balance and regain the fun and enjoyment I had learning the language and or at least help me remove the annoyance of not doing this constantly and finding a good balanced rhythm? All of that said, I’m still going to prioritize Japanese considering the free time I have, but I need to find balance.

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I assume you’re about to get a lot of people telling you that actually going slow is how you avoid burnout, and I mean there’s some truth to it, for sustainability purposes, not doing more than you can handle. Elements of what you’re saying remind me of myself – I went about as quick as I could, and always said if enough time passed and I hadn’t made a good amount of progress, THAT is what would cause me to burn out. And I know myself and still think I was right about it and right to push myself.

If you think you’d be served well by slowing down, by all means, it’s all about consistency and if you hang in there you’ll get there eventually. That’s the key fact, but when I say I relate it’s not that I felt like I was overdoing it, but I was regularly frustrated, feeling like I wasn’t making enough progress, things weren’t going well, etc. On and off I still am about particular aspects, but I’m essentially N1 now and reading is fairly comfortable so it’s undeniable that I’ve made leaps.

Whatever you decide, the important thing to know and as best as you can try to internalize, is that brains are really good at language learning. If you keep showing up and putting some thought into it you kind of can’t fail. But there are a lot of times progress is invisible, and it’s pretty scientifically backed that you will even feel like you’re straight of regressing sometimes, but it just isn’t true. The better you trust the process, the more sane you’re gonna stay, and the process is pretty much proven to be trustworthy.

The one key point for everyone successful I know is that at some point you gotta start engaging with real Japanese, reading and listening, and learning from there. Do that and you’re set. Difficult, slow going at first, but it’s fun. What comes before can vary greatly and it’s all the same in the end.

So the main thing is I hope you can try to internalize this stuff to just not pressure yourself so hard; it’s not needed. If you’re the type of person who would benefit from this, you can check out language learning studies even – the one consistent thing they find is people are crazy good at learning languages. When giving a test you have to account for how they’re gonna unintentionally start learning from your test. If you think you like going hard timewise, keep at it, you’ll objectively get better faster. But as best you can, interrogate if you think the pressure is just from trying something pretty new and different, or if you think, for you, working as hard as you are makes it inevitable.

While you’re at it, it can’t hurt to think about if these methods are serving you best. WK, Bunpro, and grammar textbooks are all perfectly fine. But like I said you have a lot of choice, so is it possible the amount of straight up reviews is stressful or anything? Either service could be dropped. Maybe traditional textbooks are bringing up that school style stress, etc.

This could extend to considering what type of progress you’ll feel good about seeing (over the longer term, remember). Personally I do think Japanese gets way more fun when it’s measured not in how you did on kanji reviews but in what you’re able to read. I tend to think for the average learner at least learning in a traditional way to N4 or so before doing heavier reading is advised, but you could hop into the beginner book clubs here today and would would patiently break apart every single line you asked about. Need a ton of patience for this, but there are people who just look everything up pretty much from day one and drag through line by line. In less extreme forms, there are a lot of people who believe stuff like direct kanji study slows you down, just learn them by words when you read and get to the reading faster, and people have gotten very good that way. I mostly mention that stuff cause if being able to start reading would be particularly motivational for you, it might be advisable to fasttrack it. But what you’re doing now certainly works too.

What you do is really up to you. Don’t let worrying about methods paralyze you too long – the point is that they’re all good so discard one if it’s not meshing with what’s most enjoyable for you personally, but all roads lead to the same place. You’re gonna make it either way if you keep wanting to, it’s just a question here of how much it’s gonna hurt along the way. I definitely didn’t manage to chill enough earlier overall to stop it from hurting more than it needed too, haha, but that’s just kinda my personality sometimes unfortunately :sweat_smile:

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Thanks so much for this detailed post!

This definitely brought my stress down and confidence up about this. Thank you for sharing your experience with it too.

I don’t plan to “drop” what I’m doing for the sake of maintaining SRS, but I think what I might do is remind myself I have the options of dropping certain stuff, as long as I keep up in a different way that makes me move forward as all points do lead to one eventually. The on-rails experience from Wanikani, Bunpro, and the Genki textbooks defently also helped me feel a bit more on track so I think what I’ll be doing is slow one down and speed one up just to try, mainly because I think I can handle some more mental vocab drilling for the time being and slow down complex grammar concepts a bit.

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It sounds like you enjoy going at a faster pace but maybe you’re going a little too fast. Striking that balance is difficult - I just got over a multi-week almost-burn-out myself! I was going super fast, lots of cards, and then bam! But I still studied every day, just less so. So I went from “I need to study as much as possible to be engaged” to “actually now I need to slow down to be engaged” and that’s something that’s often missed - there is no magical formula. What works this week may not work next week.

So if right now you enjoy going full speed, don’t let that stress you out over the “maybe”. But if you eventually sense you need to slow down, then let yourself listen to your body.

And find something to enjoy. I had a whole week where I just listened to podcasts, no flash cards, and it was glorious because I enjoyed that. Now I’m hardcore into doing some reading to finish up my book clubs. It’s not as organized, but it’s what I need this week. I’ll go back to my more methodical “do all the things and all the cards” that I was going for almost 4 months straight when I’m ready. Variance is natural.

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Yeah, I agree that the having a good balance is gonna help me enjoy my studies more and keep me away from burnout.

I want to try to just avoid burnout in the first place no matter what, so I think striking that balance is something I’ll be trying to figure out at the moment. For me, what I can handle also changes sometimes. Sometimes I’m extremely motivated to go fast and can handle it, but sometimes not, but consistency is key here. I’ll definetly find out the best way for me to go about this.

Thanks for your feedback!

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I can certainly relate, on or off days or periods where I’m feeling it more or not. Will just add, when you’re doing SRS this is the one place you do want to be careful, you don’t want missed days since that is the beginning of a pileup waiting to happen, so you need to make sure the review load you’re setting yourself up for doesn’t exceed even what you feel up to on your worse days. Beyond that, yeah, knock yourself out when the energy is there.

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Would definitely second this! There are plenty of ways to practise your Japanese outside of the SRS, so direct any extra energy you’ve got somewhere it won’t come back to bite you later :sob:

I think what helped me when I came back to doing SRS (after, funnily enough, making trouble for myself by going too fast) is to treat it like a ‘bare minimum’ - having SRS to do every day keeps you exposed to the language even if you’re not using it in class/to read/in real life, it’s not a true substitute for Actually Using The Language. So it doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re ‘not doing much’ - the ‘much’ can come elsewhere!

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You don’t mention it but I’m assuming you immerse in content too right? Because I’d put much more of my time in there than in just focusing hard on actual study.

I realize that we feel most productive when actively studying something (textbooks, SRS, etc.) but after learning languages for a while, I realized that just “being with” the language is very important as well. This sounds super esoteric, but I just mean listening and enjoying content in Japanese (with or without subtitles) over a large amount of time (years). I say this because no matter how fast anyone studies grammar and vocab, they would still have to encounter it in the real world (immersion or conversation) multiple times to see the exact use and possible nuances of it.

Personally I like to call it “immersion tax”. This just means that after studying a topic, I believe that we learn it fully after we can see it in use by real natives or native-targeted content. I don’t really think output helps as much with reinforcing this because how can we output/apply what we don’t know? That is, how can we know the nuances of a word or grammar point without it being shown to us by actual natives? We can only output within our actual capabilities and intuitive understanding of the language, which would be much more basic when compared to a native. Output has a place of course (creation greatly benefits understanding), but especially early on I think it’s more important to focus on input.

After learning Korean (10 years) and Japanese (6 years), I realized that our brains each have a unique timeframe for us to absorb the language to the point where it becomes intuitive. It took me til year 5-6 of studying Korean to actually comprehend spoken sentences (albeit because I was mostly immersing and not studying), and it took me til year 3 of Japanese to do the same (mix of immersion and SRS).

We all take a long time to really, truly, understand a language compared to other things because it’s such fundamental knowledge for humans. How well we can learn is literally tied to how well we know a language. Therefore, learning a language requires much wider breadth of learning and understanding compared to anything else, as it’s literally one of the building blocks of society, so there’s so much that needs to be known.

Liken it to how long it took us to learn math. From learning our numbers (pre-school) to basic arithmetic (elementary school) to algebra, calculus, etc. (high school to college). That’s pretty much your whole youth right there, just to really have a grasp on another fundamental topic for humans.

I’d personally rather learn 1 thing a day with a guarantee that I won’t burn out, than 10 things a day with a chance to burn out. As you say, it’s more important that you don’t burn out, and I agree. I’d much rather a constant steady-state of learning than sporadic bursts of extreme learning. Hate to be cliche, but languages are a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll get there when you get there, all you need to do is keep moving forward, speed isn’t really relevant.

All this to say, you can absolutely take it much slower than you are going. You say that Japanese is one of the main priorities of your life, this implies to me you plan to be doing this your whole life, therefore, you will be with the language for a very long time. Just take your time and enjoy the sights, there’s absolutely no rush.

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One thing I’m curious about is why japanese is one of your main priorities ATM. If it really is that important to you though, I think the fact that your internal monologue is what it currently is isn’t some mistake that should be fixed necessarily.

So, my take. Saying the conclusion first, I think the problem isn’t the quantity or nature of what you’re doing, its your relationship with it.

Much like daisoujou, I think I see some parallels between you and me, so I’ll give my experience and maybe offer some possibilities for why I’m not as stressed as you and you can see if any of them resonate/seem worth exploring.

So to give background, I too learned the japanese. I mean, I got N1 a few years ago with a pretty good score, no explicit studying for the test. I can read books without a dictionary. I can talk to japanese people fine. Through out almost my entire japanese journey, every time I would switch to a new focus (e.g. starting listening, starting reading books, starting speaking) I had the same exact fears. What if all this practice doesn’t actually work. What if XYZ time has passed and I still cant do ZYX. Its funny, I actually learn a good handful of things outside of japanese and they all end up the same. I’m currently learning illustration and I have the same fears that I won’t improve despite having literal evidence that I have over the past 6 months. So I’m just like you in that regard. And I think it’s a good thing because its always kept me focused on what I could be doing better and making sure I’m not just going through the motions (which actually will kill progress) and actually thinking about the stuff I’m doing. But clearly if it goes unchecked it can be a great source of stress.

When such a grand undertaking is important to you, its natural to be worried about the future since thats where the fruits of your efforts lie. But almost paradoxically, you need to learn to ignore it. In my video I think I said something along the lines of “take your eyes off the prize”. You can’t be fluent. The you I’m talking to right now doesn’t have that option. The skill you want is an emergent property that can only exist if you accumulate enough. The only thing that you of right now, and for the next several hundreds of days can do is make your contribution to that and appreciate the culmination of your past contributions to it.

I really struggled with this when I was learning trading especially. Because I was like "I want money now and I don’t want to lose money. Took a lot of meditation and reflecting to come to grips with wanting something desperately, but knowing all I could do is make a contribution to my future self being able to do it. But once you do, things get a lot easier. Because you realize its not your job to be a superstar anymore. Its your job to face your own ignorance, struggle, and make certain mistakes now (and learn from them) so your future self won’t have to.

But ok, this is only part of the puzzle. Now, we need to set expectations for our contributions. In a time where you really have a level head I’d say sit down, read through the experience of some of those who came before you, get an idea for how long things realistically take and how fast you want to get there given your goals and capabilities. Then, I’d say stick to it. Any time you find yourself “not in the mood”, harness the power of that internal monologue to get you to do it anyways. Whenever you finish what it is you wanted to do and that internal monologue is making you anxious, remind yourself that the you of today has done your job, and its worked for many who came before you who were no smarter or gifted than you.

Last piece of the puzzle maybe, is that you’re scared of what you don’t expect. Yeah I mean this one I could relate to as well, but it actually went away after my japanese journey for all skills. I think what I came to realize is just how clueless beginners are, myself included. Like for art, when I first started out doing coloring I saw myself progress really fast and remember thinking that one illustrator I liked didn’t seem that hard to replicate. Like maybe I could do it with a hundred or so hours of practice. But I knew from japanese: the more you try to learn, the more you’re gonna get humbled. So I was aware that it seemed one way, but went in with the expectation that my “opinions” were probably extremely off base and going to get corrected hard core. Couple hundred hours later, they are currently getting absolutely destroyed as I realize colors, for some fucking reason, are not as simple as they seem.

Anyways, all that to say maybe what you need is to have your expectations shattered, get back up, and look back and realize “yeah theres no way I could have anticipated this”. Once you’ve come to accept that in great journeys there are developments no beginner could foresee at the start, then you realize the truly important thing isn’t that things always go according to plan. Its that you persist and adapt when things don’t go to plan. And I mean, shiet, that goes for life in general too, right? I know it must not feel great having it suggested that maybe the solution for the thing you are anxious about is experiencing it, but it was true for me at least.

Not sure if any of that actually feels applicable to you, but hopefully it was worth the read!

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Perhaps a bit of a different take to some of the other great replies in here, but I too can relate to your story. I studied Japanese in school but made little effort to expand my knowledge after graduating. Eventually I stumbled upon WK and thought— “Okay this is it! A really simple A to Z system to learn kanji and tons of vocab. I just need to power through it.” Maybe part of my high expectations is how the WK FAQ says you can technically finish all 60 levels in something like 13 months. I think that’s if you max out lessons, but I have always just used the standard 15 per day. I had a trip to Japan coming up and I let that be my motivating force.

Well, I burned out anyway. Somewhere around level 8 and right after my trip. I felt a lot of the same pressure to perform and advance that you described. After I realized I wasn’t studying much I paused my account and didn’t think about it much for six months. Then sort of by chance I decided to get a lifetime membership. My thinking was if I was going to really learn Japanese it was going to take a long time, and better not to have the pressure of wasting a monthly subscription fee when I wasn’t able to study at full speed. This actually ended up being a great move for two reasons:

  1. When I reactivated I had a lot of review items that I was able to burn. I managed to get about 90-95% recall which boosted my confidence and cleared out my queue.
  2. I realized it’s ok to go slower or have lapses in my journey. In my head WK went from a monthly fee I felt obligated to get value from into something like a permanent resource that’s there when I want it.

At the same time I looked into other resources so I didn’t feel like I was biased completely towards kanji vocab study. I recommend languagereactor.com and watching some Japanese TV. Seeing the way native speakers use vocab I knew, but in ways I’d never expect coming from English grammar was mind boggling. But I can see how with every WK level a little more of the puzzle is coming together. And that feels good! It’s also a fun way to discover and save common words you want to learn ahead of the WK ordering.

Good luck!

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I also started to feel overwhelmed when I did Level 8. Now I’m doing Level 9 very slowly and concentrate on vocabulary. I’m also having a Lot more wrong answers than in the earlier Levels.

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Thanks everyone for the wonderful replies and feedback!

I should have worded this better. As in main priorities in life, I mean that’s one of the main things I’m focusing on in my life right now, as in I’ve made the big commitment to study this language, so it’s gonna be a part of my life for some time considering the difficulty of learning Japanese in general.

I haven’t been seeing this a lot, but I do get it more thanks to your advice. I agree that I’ve been looking at the end goal more than the smaller building blocks of progress I’ve been making which, eventually will be enough to reach the end goal. eventually, as long as I’m consistent

I don’t think it really resonated with me that if I want to apply this in the real world at some point or really want to understand something, then I do need to immerse myself more than sinking my eyes into some SRS input box or a textbook. Thanks for the advice.

I’ll stop worrying about what I can’t control, at least for right now, and just work on things I can control, like doing these things step by step and not stopping, because eventually, no matter where I started from, I’ll end up in the same place.

Thank you for the reality check, or the reality check experiences you have had, this prepares me for my upcoming trip for around a week there in like 2 weeks, that I shouldn’t have the expectation to know everything, and that what I had in my mind isn’t going to be what actually plays out, and that even the immersion is also helpful. When I go and I do get the humbling I need, I won’t make it affect my goals, and I’ll make sure I don’t quit no matter how disappointed I may be, and if I do end up finding something I do know, I’ll thank the consistency and work I put into studying to understand it, and reaffirm that every day I learn and memorize more, I’m one step closer to the end goal.

Eventually, after the immersion, humbling, and consistency, I’ll be there, being fluent or at like N3/N2 level is out of the picture until I get what I need to do first out of the way, I’ll be focusing on each step and gradually advancing. and also fixing my patience

Thank you everyone for the wonderful advice!

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I suspect one of these days you will dream in Japanese, hear something spoken that you will know what it is without translating, or start to think in Japanese. When that happens, you’ll know the language is sinking in.

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Do you know how Long it Takes to dream in another language? This happened to me with english but I think it happened only after I started to View a Lot of YouTube Videos and Reading books in english.

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Total tangent, but it’s funny to me when people mention dreaming in Japanese. The only dreams I have regarding the language are this same general one that comes back occasionally, where one way or another I am trying to speak Japanese to someone and absolutely unable to :sweat_smile:

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I had a dream several years ago where I was writing kanji on Coke cartons, but had no idea what I was writing!

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I had a couple of nightmares about my Japanese class. In one I had lost my friend’s daughter and was feeling very guilty wandering looking for her, while the rest of my class was learning kanji!

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My 2-cents, I completely agree that you need to find things you enjoy so the learning is bring benefits. I find SRS methods work, but they can be excruciating. I can only bear to do one at once, so I won’t do wanikani AND anki or I would go insane. You can always take a couple of days in wanikani vacation-mode and do the fun stuff without having a depressing build up of reviews. I’ve found the Genki graded readers very good for a bit of light relief as you are going through Genki (assuming that is the textbook that you are using), but there are lots of alternatives. Also I write a little bit of Japanese everyday in a journal to give me some practice of using the grammar structures that I’ve learnt in the text books, if I am unsure I ask ChatGPT to check it for me. this sort of practical application makes me think a bit more.

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Hmmm, why so fast? What’s the rush? You say it’s because you want to avoid burnout. Well, that doesn’t add up for me. Burnout happens when we force ourselves to keep achieving without let up, and then when we hit a bump in the road we become stressed and worried and and and… all those emotions just build up until we achieve… burn out.

So, slow down. Like, real slow. Savor the new lessons, the reviews. Enjoy watching your knowledge and learning grow, step-by-step. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

But I do commiserate with you. I recently restarted WK back at Level 1. Previously, I too, was blasting through and frustrated that new learnings didn’t stick. And that frustration feeds itself. Stress and fear of failure causes our amygdala to retreat into self-protection: flight or fight. And then that happens learning just shuts down. So, consciously allow yourself to decompress and enjoy the ride, slowly.

I’ve limited myself to 5 lessons/day. Very small. But… who cares? It’s not a race. My goal is to learn Japanese—one of the hardest languages—because it’s fun to be there, interact with people, and be able to communicate even a little. But I’m able to do it more and more with time and learning.

What’s YOUR goal? Why even study Japanese let alone kanji? My advice: don’t say “I want to be fluent.” What’s your definition of that? Passing N1?

I suggest downshifting your goal to something smallish, like just making a base hit and standing on 1st base (a la baseball). That’s all, a standup single. Not a bases loaded home run.

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I personally burned out when I went slow. It wasn’t until I went faster that I was able to enjoy my studies more and be more consistent. For some people, all in is a lot more manageable than half throttle. Just like how I preferred quitting smoking cold turkey but other people prefer an incremental approach. Maybe not your experience, but those people do exist.

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