That’s the idea, adding another layer of neural connections to the knowledge. Now when I look at kanji I can sort of “feel” the radicals I’ve written the most. Plus after a while it just feels good writing them, kind of meditative 
That’s awesome! And it has a big advantage, it doesn’t need a lot of material, so it can be a good pass-time in a meeting or in a train or somewhere else, just pen and paper and you can be busy for a while 
As the poster of said new moon/crescent moon post, I’m sorry you had to see that whole garbage fire that happened. I knew not what chaos I would spawn.
I haven’t studied Japanese since my last update (exactly 30 days ago apparently). I stopped because I had a moment of burnout from trying to make too many positive changes to my life at once — getting my circadian rhythm in order, eating healthy, going to the gym, doing yoga and mindfulness, seeing my psychologist every week, trying to establish and maintain a routine with a healthy work/life balance. Doing all this and studying Japanese every day was just more than I could handle and I’ve let Japanese fall by the wayside. It’s not that I don’t have time for Japanese, I just don’t have excess motivation for anything beyond what I just listed and my existing motivation only just barely covers that ^^;
Still, it’s strange not studying Japanese and not even wanting to study Japanese. It’s been such an important part of my routine for the last couple years… but now I’m kind of fine just not doing it and on an emotional level I’m just not invested in it. I hope I’ll “get it back” though, and I’m worried about the language atrophy from quitting for too long. However, pressuring myself to get started again is not going to be good for my mental health. Ideally I’d find some small way to engage with the language that had some intrinsic motivation beyond just the joy of learning (which I don’t have access to at the moment). I keep coming back to reading manga, but it’s just too hard now in the sense that I lack stamina and I kind of dread the slog:/ I’ve tried children’s anime with simple dialogue, but it’s too boring for me.
Whaa whaa 
I guess I’m just dropping by my study log to complain^^; If anyone can recommend me some adult-friendly media that won’t turn my brain to mush in like 15 minutes, or if anyone has any advice based on similar experiences I’d appreciate hearing it:) And if anyone’s advice is along the line of “consider just quiting the language”, I haven’t ruled it out but that is something I am capable of coming to my own decision about without external prompting 
for now I’m just looking for a way to potentially make the language a meaningful part of my day again without it leading to burnout.
Also, thank you for reading my study log 
, I hope I’ll be returning to it sometime soon-ish (i.e. at least in months rather than years) but right now I don’t know what probability I’d assign to that.
When I don’t have much energy or brainpower I just SRS and let time pass.
Hey! Funny coincidence, I was just thinking today about you 
I don’t have Study logs in “Tracking” so it’s very random if I see updates or not 
happy to have read your update!
So, on the subject of not really having the motivation right now, what helps me when I’m in these situations is to start on something completely new. Then it gets exciting again. So in your case that could mean drop Wanikani for a while (put it in vacation mode and don’t think about it), and instead grab a book, a manga, an anime, a movie or a game. Or even a grammar book why not, anything can do, it depends more on you. If that does the trick and makes you come back to Japanese everyday, then it’ll come back naturally to re-add to your routine things you were doing before, if you so wish.
Good luck!
My recommendation would be to engage with whatever Japanese media is most painless to you, even it that means watching stuff with English subtitles or reading translated stuff. If you want adult-friendly media that you can watch 100% in Japanese, my personal recommendation would be Japanese pro wrestling, haha, but I know it isn’t to everyone’s taste . It has the benefit of still being enjoyable and compelling even if you understand none of what’s being said.
If you’d rather read, I’d suggest something like Satori Reader, but I seem to recall you might’ve already tried it? And those stories might not be compelling enough to provide intrinsic motivation…
I like tweets because they’re short and sweet so it’s easy to motivate yourself to try reading a few of them, but twitter is becoming a more unpleasant website by the day, unfortunately… And I guess I dunno what accounts I’d even recommend besides wrestlers, haha!
This used to work, but a month ago I started feeling like I had a lot more mental bandwidth when I stopped SRS-ing 
@Akashelia Thank you for thinking of me:) and for the advice, I’ll try a few things I haven’t already and see if anything sticks. Maybe I’ll start reading A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar.
I love reading and watching documentaries and video essays about pro wrestling when chance and algorithms drop them in my path, I just get the impression that what would appeal to me is more the years long story arcs than the individual matches and I’m not sure how to go about finding any story threads and latching onto them (apart from just jumping into it and figuring it out as I go). But in the spirit of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks I’ll do that:) I just need to know, where apart from youtube do I find jp pro wrestling?^^;
I’m still subscribed, come to think of it…
I was never on twitter, but learning japanese could have been what got me onto the platform if Musk wasn’t intent on killing it. I’m not going to board a sinking ship 
Best of luck, I hope the other life improvement sort of stuff is going well, anyway.
I’m not the best for giving advice because I seem to be very different than other people when it comes to what I’m willing to do, what might burn me out, etc, and I also keep having health problem life stress that leads to me threatening to quit again, though I haven’t fully done that yet haha.
I can tell you about things I know that are kind of easier but it’s the usual list, Shirokuma Cafe and that sorta thing you’d see anywhere online. I guess I just want to mention the possibility of coming at it from the other side – I mean I dunno your exact level and maybe this sort of thing just isn’t doable, but if anything helps me when I’m struggling with the language, it’s to just hard drop everything (clubs if I must, or anything that feels like I’m doing it because it’s easy enough or whatever) and just engage with the exact thing that sounds most appealing. Doing something potentially harder isn’t going to make it less of a slog for sure haha, but without the expectation of what you’re reading being the “easy” choice maybe dragging through it is less painful?
At which point I think that’s more up to you than anything I could recommend. Of course, this could go very wrong, but you know more than me if it sounds worth trying or not. If I were to really throw something out, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles probably isn’t terribly hard to read and it was really delightful for me (in English, hoping to replay in Japanese).
I know the feeling though, when I get a little too tired from life to keep it up I have constant nagging feelings about the atrophy. No fun. Good luck, whatever you choose.
When I started reading Japanese two years ago I was perfectly happy spending hours deciphering just a few pages of Yotsuba. In January of this year was I was at a level where I could sit down and read a (not very difficult) volume of manga in a few hours with minimal grammar lookups. When I read sentences in Satori my mental translations would almost perfectly match their translations 90-something percent of the time. Now I feel I’m closer to my earlier Yotsuba-reading days in terms of grammar — it’s embarrassing 
On reflection I think part of why reading feels so draining/painful is frustration at being confronted with the regression that’s already occured and comparing my experience to when it felt quite a bit easier…
The problem here is that all truly appealing options are projects which I would be perfectly happy to undertake if I wasn’t already doubting my capacity to write my Master’s thesis without another mental breakdown
I’d be tackling a novel now and trusting myself to work through it in spite of my drastic drop in reading level if I could just allow myself to have Japanese as my main priority…
Thank you, the other stuff is going alright, which is great. Having my main complaint be a lack of motivation/energy for learning a third language is an absolutely massive improvement on where I was this spring:)
It’s possible to remember vocabularies with SRS, just without the benefit of automated timing (and also no Anki customization). Rather that just SRS, I like looking up regardless, say JJ then more Yomichan, or just Google or DuckDuckGo.
I think it’s OK to slow down or mostly stop learning the language for a while too. Long vacations are a part of what I am now. I think we think differently in cool times versus heated times.
Yeah, that is the hard part ! I’ve written about a lot of recent ones in my wrestling journal, but it’s very much my own personal tastes, so you might not be interested in the same stuff. “Just jumping into it and figuring it out as you go” is probably the strategy that most people end up going for, haha.
The easiest way to watch it regularly is to get a subscription to one of their streaming services. The top one I’d recommend is Wrestle Universe, which nets you Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, DDT Pro Wrestling, and Pro Wrestling NOAH (plus some other stuff, like Ganbare Pro Wrestling).
A little more info:
DDT has the most regular English support (if you follow along with their official English translation twitter account during shows for live translation). They’re also the company where being able to follow what’s happening in Japanese at least a little bit is probably most important, because a lot of the humor comes from verbal interactions between the wrestlers. DDT loves to push the envelope, so some of the humor can be… not everyone’s kind of humor, I’ll put it that way, haha. For example, they have a faction called Pheromones that’s about to end soon which uses a lot of sex-based offense. But the company as a whole has a massive amount of variety, so there’s also a lot of just straightforward wrestling as well as extremely wacky gimmick matches.
TJPW has almost no official English support anymore 
. But they have me, haha, so if you want translations of stuff, there’s the pro wrestling thread here for all of my translation rough drafts, and then my blog has all of the finished translations. Some matches have a lot of Japanese said in the ring and can be a bit inaccessible without translation/Japanese fluency, but most of it is pretty accessible!
NOAH has an official English account now, though it doesn’t translate as much as the DDT account. Thankfully, NOAH isn’t really a very talky promotion! They also publish Japanese transcripts of the post-match comments on their website, which is super handy. The Japanese account publishes the post-match comments videos, and often the twitter captions have a good chunk of the dialogue transcribed. NOAH is probably the easiest to enjoy with low Japanese proficiency, since talking during a match is rarely a plot point, haha.
GanPro is probably the least accessible, both in terms of unofficial and official translation. They’re sort of the “indie” brand under the CyberFight umbrella of companies, so their big shows are a lot smaller than the other companies’, and they have a more down-to-earth spirit of grit and determination rather than like these super epic narratives. One of my friends really loves them, though, and she barely has any Japanese ability.
I think Wrestle Universe has some shows available to watch for free (DDT’s big show Judgement on 2022.03.20 and TJPW’s big show Grand Princess on 2022.03.19 were both great), so it might be worth checking those out! If you’re watching for the first time, I’d probably go with English commentary to get a little more context (they’ll also translate post-match promos and such).
Besides Wrestle Universe, there’s New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is the biggest pro wrestling company in Japan, and which has by far the most English support, as well as Japanese commentary available for I think every single modern show. I fell off of them pretty hard last year, though, so I can’t really recommend NJPW in its current form.
There’s also Stardom, which is NJPW’s sister company (albeit with its own streaming service), and which is the biggest joshi wrestling company. They have some amount of official translation (the videos have English subs, though they’re not the greatest quality), but the post-match comments don’t make it into the video uploads, and aren’t translated (my friend used to translate them as well as the press conferences, but she burned out on it and stopped). I don’t watch Stardom anymore, but when I did, their shows and stories felt pretty accessible to me.
An important note if you do sign up for any of these streaming services: they all charge you on the first day of the month regardless of when you signed up initially. So it’s best to sign up at the beginning of the month, otherwise you’ll get charged for the initial sign-up, then get charged again a few days later…
There actually is a fair amount of stuff out on youtube from most companies, though if you’re a long story arc person, usually it’s not enough to really follow those. But there are a few companies that air most/all of their shows on youtube! So if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you actually do have some options.
The one I’d recommend the most is ChocoPro, which is also very accessible to English speakers! They have a very unconventional set-up (most of their matches are done on a mat in a tiny room instead of in a traditional ring), but the matches are a lot of fun and they’ve done some great stories. I haven’t been keeping up recently, though, so my knowledge of ChocoPro lore is all a couple years old by now . If you want to try them out, I linked a trilogy of ChocoPro matches that I loved in the pro wrestling thread, though sadly Lulu Pencil hasn’t been wrestling lately.
ChocoPro has the youtube chat for some bonus extremely low stakes reading practice, too (Wrestle Universe also has a live chat now)! It’s pretty evenly split between English and Japanese, at least from what I remember.
That’s probably way too much info, haha, sorry! If you want a place to start, I’d recommend checking out those ChocoPro shows/matches I recommended and see how that goes.
It’s an appropriate and appreciated amount of information, thank you! I’ll be trying out Wrestle Universe, Stardom, and ChocoPro next month:)
OMG… bless you for even coming on here to complain to us!!
If your entire life for the next several months was (i) try to get enough rest and eat healthy and feel good; and (ii) work on the Thesis; and (iii) try to have fun to stay sane… but don’t use it to procrastinate on item ii…
That is all a reasonable person can request of oneself, imho
In a way, when you come back to Japanese, what you remember is what you know so well that it’s securely in long-term memory. And the rusty stuff is stuff you had to go over more times to make it knowledge, anyway. It will “come back” in less time than it took going into your brain the first time!
私はSleepyさんを支援します!! 
I’m really late with this reply, sorry for that.
It sounds like you had (and have) a lot on your plate, so please don’t feel bad about venting!
It’s quite understandable that some part of your daily life, here it’s Japanese, had to “make way” for more pressing matters or things you wish to incorporate into a routine. And in your case you have a big endeavour such as a Master thesis which is going to take a lot of effort and energy to write, even more so when you’re already feeling mentally drained.
In that case we are in a somewhat similar spot as I’d like to be able to set up the start of my thesis for my degree at one point in 2024 and I’ll also have to think on how I can still incorporate just a tiny bit of Japanese daily or every few days to keep a momentum going and to not experience too much regression. Yet, I have no idea if I will be able to pull this off or if I’ll have to set aside Japanese for a few months as well because one of the student advisors suggested solely focussing on the thesis whenever it will happen with the little energy I have – and it certainly sounds like a rational thing to do.
That’s why your approach sounds perfectly fine to me and if setting some routines aside during your writing process in favour of your thesis might keep you from experiencing a breakdown, so be it!
An on the topic of regression in (language related) knowledge: I too consider it to be very frustrating, but I tend to regard it as “knowledge on standby”.
By that I mean that yes, you might notice that you became slower at reading after a while of not reading just as you described and that feels discouraging. But at the same time, you’re not starting at zero which should not be overlooked as a baseline is already there and it will take much less time to catch up with it and build upon it because (usually) brains are very malleable.
Getting to a former point of knowledge might not even take that much time and you might surprise yourself – I have an anecdote on this matter: my first Japanese classes ended in 2012 and after an almost complete hiatus of years, I picked up classes in 2018 again.
I decided to enter a lower A2 language level class as I didn’t wish to start completely new because I didn’t want to go through learning Kana again and thought that even though I was rusty, I at least knew the basics still.
Well, the first session of roughly 2 hours was excruciating and it frightened me since I noticed just how much I had forgotten and I kept stumbling over relatively simple exercises and stammering my way through the short speaking practice session. Luckily, the teacher spoke to me in private right after that lesson and encouraged me, saying that they thought that I have it in me and to just give it a little bit more time while also just reading through the previous chapters in the textbook to jog my memory.
Of course, the teacher could have just said that to not lose another potential student (and source of income) but I do think that they were genuine (because I ended up studying under them for 1 year and my impression of them being genuinely interested in teaching people remained).
Despite that unpleasant first session, I decided to trust the teacher’s judgement and try again even though I still felt intimidated as hell from that first lesson. I stayed in that course and I think it took me around 5 more sessions and reading through the respective chapters in the coursebook to mostly feel up to speed again. From that point on, I could do almost all exercises during the classes without too many issues again. So after slightly more than two months and a bit of extra study, I was able to kind of override that pause of 6 years that had made me rusty.
After that experience, I don’t have too many doubts anymore when it comes to me catching up somewhat quickly even after hiatuses again despite things being very painful at the beginning (provided my mental health is also not completely terrible, making my brain slow).
I have faith that while the first few attempts at reading again might be rather difficult for you and while you’ll have to push through negative feelings and regret, that it won’t take you long to feel like you’re at the point of a few months ago, when reading manga was very much possible. And once you’re back at where you’d left off, you can start acquiring new knowledge again.
From what you describe, especially saying that you don’t wish to quit it completely, it sounds to me that you do have a spark when it comes to Japanese learning. Thus, I reckon that there’s a very good chance you’ll be back at learning or engaging more with Japanese soon, even if it takes months. That’s why I’ll wish you much success with your thesis and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you may have more energy and a time slot open for squeezing in some more Japanese study soon.
I’m sorry for the late reply too^^; I meant to thank you for your kind and encouraging words sooner but you posted right before my last exam of the semester and I thought I’d put it off until just after that, but then I was traveling to visit my parents for the holidays, I had a deadline to meet related to my thesis, Christmas happened, etc. My study log hasn’t been on my mind until just now.
I’m feeling a bit of an aversion to posting in my log without having anything substantial to say about my studying — so I’ll just say thank you again for sharing your experience, I’m optimistic about getting back into a routine sometime next year but until I do I probably won’t be browsing the forums or posting much, if at all (I’ll be experimenting with getting back into WK and reading in January, but I might not post about it and I’ll quit at the drop of a hat if/when it feels like it reduces my available energy for university).
