Feeling disheartened at lack of progress (10 years and going, but feel like giving up)

I can so relate to just understanding the gist of something. I’ve been trying to think back to when I was a kid and wondering if that’s how it was when I learned to read my native language.

One of the worst issues I have right now though is I can understand the overall gist of something, but can’t tell if it’s a negative or positive declaration about it :sob:

It’s weird, traditional media (books, videogames, etc.) are easy to understand and straight forward, I’m mostly talking about the way Japanese post on social media. Maybe it’s just a feature of how they talk in real life?

4 Likes

I have no similar experience with Japanese, as I don’t feel the amount of anxiety you feel around succeeding in the language. One thing that did strike me as I was reading your post, is that you are doing a lot of input, but not a lot of output. A good way to measure your proficiency in anything, is to get feedback. Reading a novel or manga only gives you negative feedback I feel. Since you feel the need to understand everything, you constantly have a list of failures growing in your mind, on paper, in a document, but you’re not taking notes on whatever you did understand, and didn’t have to look up. So there is no positive feedback coming in from that side.

I want to say, start talking to people, Japanese natives in Japanese, other language learners who are not as far along as you, to explain basic concepts. Maybe try HelloTalk or iTalki for some conversation practice, maybe where you only get corrected on glaring mistakes, but mostly can just build some confidence speaking in a way where other people understand what you’re saying.

Easier said than done, I know. There is a guy in my Japanese class, who is very dilligent about his Japanese studies, analyzing sentences from tv shows and books, growing his vocabulary in a focussed way, but for a long time he was just terrified of talking in our classroom conversations, because he didn’t want to make any mistakes. Which was a shame, since he always comes up with interesting turns of phrase, and it very learnsome to speak with him. Then about a month ago, I don’t know how, he turned a switch and just started taking the lead in conversations, asking for clarification if he lost the thread of conversation, which is great for all of us in the class!

Maybe finding an upper intermediate class to join, could help, too…

8 Likes

There have been a lot good posts here, but I’d also like to offer a more direct possible solution :slight_smile:

I studied japanese in university around 10 years ago, so my journey also started a while ago. You mentioned your anxiety holding you back and I’m glad to see that you’ve finally found a therapist that is actually helping you overcome that. Having social anxiety can keep you back from really helpful parts of learning a language, like having a tutor. Since your goal is to read novels etc and not speak it might seem that having a tutor would be overkill, but I think having a tutor who knows what your goals are would be really helpful.

I recommend finding a tutor who would be alright with online calls/chatting. Maybe you can turn your camera off to help with the anxiety. Instead of having to speak in japanese look for a tutor who would be okay with speaking in english, so you don’t feel the need to avoid sessions due to your spoken japanese skill. The main goal would be something akin to a diary exchange. Your homework would be writing small letters to your tutor. In your classes you can go over what you’ve written and they can help you by correcting mistakes and explaining the different ways how japanese would actually express that thought instead of a textbook version. And your letters can include parts about novels you’ve read and how you didn’t know how to translate something - all in japanese. If you can find a tutor who is up to it they could write you letters in return which you’d then have to translate as part of your homework as well.

This method would give you the chance to practice on those future japanese tweets as well as put all of the learned grammar and vocabulary to use. And once you’re comfortable with the tutor you could transition to just working through novels together instead. Find parts of a novel that you almost understand and during class ask help from your tutor.

In essence your tutor would be more of a study buddy who is willing to tackle the parts of learning a new language that you are actually interested in - reading and comprehension.

This whole reply is probably anxiety inducing but I’d just like to remind you that a tutor is a service like any other - you can always cancel and find a new one if you don’t find the perfect match with the first try. :slight_smile: and if you’re anxious about your first lesson maybe tackle this with your therapist to get some ideas how you could prepare for this class and how to stop the lesson if you feel it is too much for you.

Wish you all the best!

5 Likes

To put some things into perspective here. I’m almost 30 now and started learning English (German is my native language) in school when I was 12 or something. For the last 10 years I was basically surrounded by English media, be it games, be it YouTube, be it message boards like this.

It took me YEARS to finally watch TV shows in English too and then only with English subtitles. It’s been only a few years, that I dare to watch new shows without subs. And even then, when the show The Witcher was new I wanted to give it a try and I remember having to concentrate like crazy, because on top of the language it has absurd amounts of world building and weird vocabulary. So I dropped that :joy:

6 Likes

I’m not sure if it will be of great relevance, but since reading VNs was one of my primary reasons to start learning Japanese, I’d like to chime in with my experience with those.

Currently I’m in a strange position, where I became kind of addicted to reading VNs in Japanese. Even though my Japanese reading speed is much slower, and I have to look up many words, when reading translated version I cannot escape that strange mode where I keep comparing translation against original, or (in case of unvoiced parts) guessing what the original text would be :wink:

Also there’s that nagging feeling that not reading the VN in question in Japanese when possible would be kind of wasted opportunity.

(But then, I stick mostly with pretty simple slice of life or romance stories. I certainly wouldn’t dare to tackle something like S;G in JP on my current level :wink: )

For example, recently I bought ATRI ~My Dear Moments~, which is multilingual release, and while initially I planned to read it in English, especially since the translation seems to be rather good, finally I ended up reading it in Japanese. It took me at least three times longer than the average, but I loved it.

And as for being disheartened at the lack of progress - I also get that feeling often. But then other times I notice that progress somehow creeps in unnoticed - while I feel like I learn almost nothing, when compared to the time few months ago, there is a difference.

3 Likes

First of all, apologies if what I’m about to say overlaps with things that others have said so far. I started reading this on my phone, and I just couldn’t force myself to finish reading all the replies. It’s nice to see everyone coming together as a community with suggestions and encouragement.

OK, my impression, both from reading your post and from reading others’ comments, is that you’re someone who’s fairly driven with high standards, and who is often hard on himself/herself with regard to attaining those goals. I believe I can empathise with that, because we share those traits. In my case, however, you might say I had the good fortune of starting Chinese when I was a child, meaning that kanji pose me very few problems, and certain features of Japanese are familiar to me, because the two languages are similar in certain ways, even if they are fundamentally quite different in terms of overall grammatical structure. Nonetheless, I know how consternating it is when you want to improve and you just can’t seem to get anywhere.

Please don’t see things this way. I’m pretty sure that you’ll find my post even longer than yours by the time I’m finished. I literally write essays over messaging apps each time I have a discussion with my best friend, because I always feel the need to give more context for the sake of helping others understand my experience and point of view. I believe that’s what you’ve done here, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You could of course have said, ‘I constantly feel stumped while tackling native Japanese material, even though I usually understand the gist, and I find that depressing,’ but without all the details you provided, none of us would know what you’ve already tried and exactly how you feel. It’s alright to express the full extent of your thoughts.

Analysis of the situation

Returning to the issues that you’re facing… to start with, I understand that 10 years is a long time, which doubtlessly exacerbates the impression of not progressing despite making substantial effort. However, I don’t think your native language is similar to Japanese, and so there’s really no reason to beat yourself up over it. People learn in different ways and at different speeds, and some people just happen to have a default mode of thinking that’s more suitable for a certain field. There’s no shame in getting stuck, and there certainly are plateaus in language learning, particularly as you hit the intermediate or advanced levels, where the knowledge required for further progress becomes increasingly broad and sometimes complex. Perhaps you just haven’t found a method that works for you.

Separately, I feel that you’re placing too much of a burden on yourself. That is, you’re expecting your learning and progress to be driven entirely by the effort you actively make, and you’re choosing methods that require you to put in extra effort in order to learn. You can’t expect your efforts to yield immediate results (again, I know it’s been 10 years, but hear me out), and more importantly, you often need to reach a certain ‘critical mass’ of language knowledge before you’ll start finding certain materials easy to absorb. I studied French before Japanese, so I speak from experience. You may need to accumulate several pieces of knowledge before a single concept becomes clear to you. As for my statements about your choice of methods requiring you to make additional effort, my evidence is the fact that you said you’re not having fun. The ‘studying’ aspect of learning any language is tiring by nature because it requires mental effort: on a typical day spent on an anime which I attempt to watch without subtitles (but with a Japanese transcription open in another tab), I probably go through 50-100 dictionary definitions. When I was studying French, I tapped at least 5 hyperlinks per dictionary definition in an attempt to understand French words that I didn’t already know in the definition of the word I was looking up. I would spend three hours a day on newspaper articles and only get through maybe 3-5 per day, even though the estimated reading time for natives was at most 5 min per article. Language learning requires effort – a lot of it. However, I enjoyed myself because I was passionate about the French language and found it rewarding to understand new words. Plus, the content of the articles interested me, so I didn’t get bored. Another thing I learnt from my experience was that different sorts of material require different amounts of effort: newspaper articles require me to find out what words mean entirely on my own, unless the meaning obvious based on context. Watching Mythbusters in French, on the other hand, allowed me to understand new words fairly easily because the setup was familiar and scientific terms are often similar in English and in French. Certain other videos and movies I watched contained subtitles in English that helped me understand slang or unfamiliar accents. As such, my question to you is, are you picking material that you enjoy? Also, are you choosing material that helps you learn, or are you using only media that places the burden of learning on you? (By the way, to illustrate what I meant about effort not necessarily yielding immediate results: it’s only after a lot of running through transcriptions while using a dictionary and watching anime – even with subtitles for almost everything – that my reading speed began to approach fluidity. The jump came out of nowhere: I decided to reopen my copy of the Tobira textbook in order to polish it off so I could move on to more advanced material, and I discovered that I could suddenly read about twice as fast as I used to, and that’s in spite of the fact that the only Japanese practice I’ve done for months is watching anime and looking up words in transcriptions. Your progress may not always be palpable, but your next big break might be just around the corner, and you may be moving forward without realising it.)

Furthermore, I think that the material you’re using to study Japanese is also contributing to your impression that you’ve reached a plateau, because text-heavy materials like light novels and story-driven games are very broad in their use of language and will require a fairly deep knowledge of Japanese, at least in areas relevant to the story and its setting (e.g. fantasy, sports, science, the Japanese school system), if you want to feel like you’ve ‘fully understood’. The only reason I can read certain pages of the Shield Hero and Konosuba light novels with relative ease is that I know the story and relevant terms well (and in the case of Shield Hero, I’ve read those pages once before). It’s more or less impossible otherwise – I can’t read the vivid descriptions of scenery in Kiki’s Delivery Service without a dictionary, even though it’s grammatically quite simple, because I don’t have the relevant vocabulary. Sure, I have an advantage because I can already recognise almost all the relevant kanji thanks to Mandarin, but that doesn’t change the fact that familiarity with the kind of language used in such a genre of books is necessary. (By the way, having kanji knowledge sometimes handicaps me, because I have a hard time recognising words when they’re not written using kanji.)

Finally, as @Saida has noted, your methods are mainly input-based. I understand that this may be due to your social anxiety, which is something I may not be able to fully appreciate – I’m often rather anxious when communicating in France in spite of my fluency because I’m afraid of being ostracised as a foreigner, particularly if I make mistakes. However, I’m aware that a lot of my fears are unfounded since most of the people I do need to communicate with will forgive me for making errors, and it’s not as though my French is bad. (I shan’t provide evidence of proficiency because it’s not relevant.) Also, my anxiety doesn’t cause me to freeze up all that much, so it may not affect me as badly as yours does you. What I’d like to point out though… is that even natives frequently make mistakes: there are rules that everyone is supposed to follow in French that few people bother with/master (e.g. verb conjugations are one of the biggest headaches for learners of French, including natives), and even Japanese people have trouble with things like kanji or the proper use of keigo.

Suggestions

  1. You may want to consider using material that might be more enjoyable and easier for you to absorb new words from. I believe that you will enjoy anime, since many popular anime are based on light novels and games, including visual novels. Just a few examples of such anime (admittedly not all of them were super popular in their day): Konosuba, Re:Zero, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, Fate/Grand Order (and the rest of the Fate series), Hyperdimension Neptunia, Problem Children Are Coming from Another World?, My Teen Romantic Comedy Was Wrong as I Expected (aka Oreigairu – you may be able to appreciate this story since the main character is a loner who initially has a hard time seeing a point in social interaction and tolerating other people), How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? and many more. Anime is, I believe, a good medium for learning new words, especially when the learner has a decent grammatical foundation, which will allow easy conversion between slang and standard forms, and between casual and polite forms. That seems to be the point that you’ve reached in your journey, and so I think you could give anime a try. I suggest you try watching it with English subtitles (or subtitles in your native language if it isn’t English and if such subtitles are available) so you can get the gist of what’s going on even if you can’t catch all the words in Japanese (which is perfectly normal). Don’t be ashamed or worried if you run into new grammatical structures while watching anime. It happens to me all the time, and I think the main reason I know a good amount of N3 and N2 grammar is the fact that I’ve come across such structures while watching anime. If you run into a new grammatical structure, you can try googling ‘[structure/quote from anime] grammar/meaning’. If you’re not able to figure out what’s been said based on what you hear (again, perfectly normal – no pressure), you can attempt to look for transcriptions on reaction blogs: ‘[anime name] [episode number]話 感想’. (The kanji are read ‘wa’ and ‘kansou’. The whole block means you’re searching for ‘[anime name] episode [number] comments/impressions’.) I usually look for transcriptions on Anicobin (I’m certain of this one) and Gno.izumi (I think that’s what it’s called). Anicobin is usually easier to use. In either case, not every single word is transcribed, and transcription quality varies from anime to anime, but I’d say at least 90% of the dialogue turns up, which is more than enough for a good watch-and-study session. These reaction blogs only show up for anime that aired after 2013 (based on my experience), so you’ll have to rely on your ears and subtitles for anime older than that. If you need a dictionary, I suggest you use https://ejje.weblio.jp (Yes, the webpage will show up in Japanese, but you just need to put something into the search bar in order for it to work. The definitions are in English, and example sentences are usually translated.) in addition to Jisho.org. You can move on to monolingual dictionaries (here are the main sites: Goo辞書 (‘jisho’), Kotobank, Weblio) when you’re more advanced in order to get used to thinking in Japanese alone, but you don’t need to worry about those for now if you don’t feel ready.
  2. An alternative to finding a tutor, if you decide you’re not ready for one (though I think it really is worthwhile to give it a try – I personally benefit from regular exchanges and practice with my good friend, who is a fluent speaker of Japanese), is to find forums on which you can write and receive corrections. WaniKani is one such possibility on which you can create practice threads (here’s an example of a practice thread created by another user: [Beginner non-staff activity] 日常の日記) or join writing activities, like the thematic threads in the beginner’s Japanese section. I’m pretty sure you can do the same thing in the intermediate/advanced section if you prefer that. Other options include the HiNative forums. The advantage of WaniKani is that exchanges can go on for much longer, meaning that it’s easier to have meaningful discussions and to receive clarification. The reason output is helpful is that it allows you to actively retrieve words and structures you already know from your memory, improving your retention and strengthening your sense of how the language works. This will allow you to move structures from the realm of academic ‘book knowledge’ into the realm of deep, intuitive knowledge, since they’ll become familiar to you as you see and interpret them more often.
  3. This final suggestion is based on personal experience and my preferences. It may not work for you, and so I only ask that you consider trying it while being prepared to cast it aside if it is of no help to you. I have a feeling that, like many people who use flashcard systems (I’m not saying that flashcards are necessarily harmful – WK works well for many people, after all –, but I think it has a tendency to make people accustomed to such a mindset), you may be relying on memorising translations and bits of knowledge wholesale. That is, you have a tendency to learn each new structure as a block, together with its translation (e.g. some people memorise 〜ていられない as ‘cannot afford to ~’), relying on repetition alone to drill it into your memory, instead of breaking it down into more manageable chunks and attempting to find links between new knowledge and what you already know. Please don’t take this as a criticism or accusation – that is not my intention, by no means; I’m simply attempting to point out what might be going wrong, especially since flashcards have a structural tendency to atomise knowledge with the aim of creating separate units for easy acquisition. After all, you said that you’re afraid of ‘forgetting everything’, meaning that your current methods leave you with the impression that retention is going to be a lot of work, and perhaps that you’re just going to need to constantly cram an ever-growing pile of information into your head. What I’d like to suggest is that you start looking at Japanese the same way as you probably see your native language: as a set of units of meaning that combine to form more complex, but equally meaningful structures. The question to ask is, why do these phrases and expressions mean what they do? To return to the example I mentioned earlier, there is often no need to mindlessly memorise structures and constantly review what they mean – their meaning can be derived from context and from their components: 〜ていられない (which is a so-called N2 grammar point, making it seem quite advanced) is simply a て-form + the negative form of the potential form of いる. In other words, it’s just a form of 〜ている, which indicates a continuous state, to which one adds an idea of possibility (‘can’) and a negation (‘cannot’). Thus, it literally means ‘cannot be in a state of 〜’, meaning that one cannot stay in such a state, and thus ‘cannot afford’ to do so. This sort of analytical breakdown can be applied to a whole set of complex expressions, meaning that there is often no need to memorise new structures by rote. I may, however, be preaching to the converted, since I suspect you’ve already seen such breakdowns due to your background in linguistics. In any case, I thought it might be a good idea to bring these ideas up, since people sometimes do not apply such knowledge to tasks such as learning kanji, even though they are themselves composed of meaningful units which can facilitate comprehension by being broken down to the intermediate level in order to make use of known connotations, without necessarily requiring a complete breakdown (e.g. it has been suggested on these forums that 帚(ほうき), which appears in 掃除 (そうじ)=the act of cleaning up, be registered as a ‘broom radical’ instead of being broken down into multiple components such as 彐 and 巾 in the construction of mnemonics). Associative memory is a powerful tool, and so making such links should help you on your learning journey, if you haven’t already attempted to make use of them.

I hope my post wasn’t too wordy for you :stuck_out_tongue:, and I wish you all the best. Please don’t give up if you find Japanese interesting – the world’s most prolific polyglot, Alexander Arguelles, was no great shakes at languages in high school. We all have the ability to acquire new tongues, and we simply need to find out what works best for us.

11 Likes

I so identify with this. Sometimes I’ll be looking at Japanese on Twitter or HelloTalk, and my husband is like, “Oh, what does that say?”

I’m like, “They love this thing! Or…they love that this other person hates this thing! It’s definitely one of those two.”

Husband: :sleepy: You know those are opposites, right?

5 Likes

I don’t want to give you my life’s story but here’s the summary:

  • self studied in college
  • worked part-time in a Japanese restaurant while studying
  • landed an engineering job in Japan
  • lived there for a year and got burnt out
  • moved home and didn’t study for two years
  • randomly decided I loved Japanese and have studied every day for 6 months straight

Sometimes a break is perfectly reasonable. If you do love the subject, you will find the joy again. Nothing you do in life is a waste. I’ve been studying on and off for about 8 years.

Hope this helps!

7 Likes

Reading this thread reminds me of how language learning or the acquiring of any skill in life is measured not in months or years but in hours.

3 Likes

I think the problem isn’t your situation, but your outlook. You are making all these judgment statements: “I should be having fun; I should be further along; I am not improving enough.”
These evaluations of your circumstances seem to be the cause of all your worry and you should give them up.
That beings said, I know that is difficult to do; changing your mindset is among the most difficult of tasks to perform.
Personally, I think a large part of your problems would lessen if you try to view reality from a more objective rather than subjective place. Replace the “shoulds” in your life that represent obligations/expectations with “shoulds” that represent reality.
What do I mean by this?
Well, should really has two main uses in a sentence: to denote obligations, such as “I should help my mother with the dishes,” and to denote what is probable, such as “a ball should come back down if you throw it up.”
This second should denotes what you think is likely the reality of the situation. Try to re-frame your perspective around this “should” whenever you have a thought involving “should.”
For example, you said, “I should know these words.” next time you have these thoughts, ask yourself, “is this true,” and “what is the reality of the situation?”
If you said, “when I throw a ball up it, it should stay in the air.” It will cause you a lot of distress when the ball doesn’t stay in the air, because the brain wants you, your thoughts, and reality to be in alignment. At such a time, if you asked yourself, “is it really true a ball should stay in the air,” and “what’s the reality of the situation,” you could honestly say to yourself, “the reality is the ball comes down, so it should not stay in the air.”
Similarly, ask yourself, “is it true that I should know these words? What is the reality of the reality of the situation?” Then say, “I don’t know these words, that is the reality of the situation. So, I shouldn’t know these words. How do I know I shouldn’t know these words? I know I shouldn’t know these words because I don’t know them and that is OK.”
I think if you give this kind of re-framing a try, a lot of your worries will disappear.

4 Likes

For me, I feel like my reading speed is kinda tied to my speaking speed. I find a lot of times when I get tripped up reading stuff its because I can’t even properly say it. I always remember when I first learned なければなりません I thought it was impossible for me to say, but my teacher forced me to say it many many times. Now I can spit it out sooooooo fast. When I’m at home study now I generally read everything out loud, and I find the more easily I can say something the faster I can read it. Its sounds pretty basic, but maybe it could help with reading speed?

Otherwise, relax! Reading a VN should be fun not a chore. Maybe separate your Japanese study time from your play time so you can enjoy both without the stress? I tried playing some games in Japanese, but it ruined the experience for me. So I now have separate material and time for Japanese studying and unwinding. Just my two cents, good luck!

4 Likes

I wasn’t expecting so many replies and suggestions! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to take them all, but I did have to set some time aside to sit down and read everything, so I really appreciate it. ^^ I’ll have to think about some of these things, but people are right about my outlook on things. I’d probably need to try and learn more through output rather than input, but as far as things are right now, I’ll just have to make do with the latter. A tutor would be nice but uh… yeah, I have enough emotional baggage to fill up a 747. Maybe someday? Either way, I appreciate it. :smiley:

Let me just illustrate how my frustrations tend to emerge, and how the ‘fun’ part of the learning process slips away. Last night, I looked up a particular visual novel someone mentioned on a discord server that I’m in, and while looking at screenshots, I found this:

Screenshot

I figured I’d try my hand at reading it. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d tried a VN in Japanese and I did finish a couple… Barely understanding it, yes, but still. The moment I laid my eyes on the first sentence and beyond though, I drew a blank. I could understand a few words, but as for the actual content of what is being said, I could only get bits and pieces and more or less make an educated guess. I came to the realization that this was far, far, far, far above my skill level even though I know that, after so long, I should be able to read something like this. And I couldn’t. I felt like a total loser, thinking I’d be able to understand something like this and fully appreciate it. But I couldn’t. I could only vaguely understand it, even after parsing the sentences. If I actually tried to picking the full material to read, it’d probably take me a year. So even if I did, a single reading session would leave me so mentally drained with the effort I’d have to make to understand it and all of the additional mental baggage, that the fun gradually slips away, and I give up. I’d just drop it. And I feel like a loser after that, dedicating myself to some delusion that one day I’d be like one of those fancy people that read visual novels without needing translations. But here I am, with my 10-year-basic-Japanese, with expectations that really were nothing more than just delusions of mine. Maybe I don’t have the mental faculties or capabilities for it. I just don’t know. All I know is with the way things are going, and knowing that my methods of immersion are not yielding results, I find myself increasingly more disheartened and depressed at it.

And for the record, this isn’t something that happens with Japanese either. I used to work out a lot up until two or so years ago, but after some time, I just felt so dissatisfied with it, dissatisfied with the way I look and my body and how I’d have to gradually force myself to exercise, that I just quit. I was never happy with it to begin with. But with Japanese, I want to at least be able to push through, because my hobbies are connected to it, and I don’t want to rely on translations for the rest of my life. But knowing that 10 years from now I might still not be able to read a text like in that screenshot, it’s extremely crushing. I don’t want to give up, but at the same time, I feel like all of my effort has been for nothing. I’m wrong, but I don’t know how to fix that. I feel trapped. That’s a level that I’ll probably never be able to reach. If I was still 18 I’d consider just manning up and following through with many of the suggestions people have given me here, but my time is running short. That’s basically what it is, I think. I feel like a loser.

I’m sorry, I don’t want to feel like such a downer, especially after all the feedback. I guess I just needed to open up a little.

4 Likes

That’s great to hear! I can’t really help with the language part of it, but I know that for me, learning how to re-parent my inner child (or the part of me that still reacted as a wounded, over adaptive child) was life changing in both my relationships and the way I interact with myself. Maybe you are doing some of that work already, but I thought I’d mention it… It literally rewires your brain with love to get it out of the subconscious structure you’ve internalized as a child (low self esteem, need to be “perfect”, etc…).

3 Likes

That sample you posted seems pretty complex if you ask me. I barely know any of the words in the first two sentences. You say you should be able to understand this, but why exactly do you feel this way? When you attempt reading stuff like this, do you use a dictionary? At my current level I certainly couldn’t read something like this without a dictionary, and even then it would probably be a slog.

8 Likes

Hmm, I do use dictionaries a lot. Jisho has been a great companion to me for a long time now. I guess when I say I ‘should’ know that, it’s more of a strange way of saying ‘I’ll never get there’. Now that I think about it, it is kind of a weird thing to say, huh? I guess I’m just not aware of my own level, or other materials’ levels? Maybe I’m pushing myself too hard? It’s frustrating to think about it because, like I said, I’m just afraid I’ll never be able to get there… I wonder if it’ll take another ten years. I do understand the concepts behind a sample like the one I posted. I know the grammar, or can at least point out when it’s being used. The particles, conjugations, that sort of thing. I have a hard time with compound sentences and then combined that with all of the relatively unknown words, I guess I just feel lost. There’s that ‘what now?’ kind of feeling. And that is further compounded by the fear that I’m doing something wrong. I don’t know. Now I’m kinda confused. =/ I guess the way I interpret the language is lacking.

3 Likes

Try reading web articles with Yomichan.

It makes looking things up less tedious. Bonus points if you use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary, but you can plug in the same one that Jisho uses too.

2 Likes

Oh, I already have that, thankfully! It definitely helps a lot. :smiley:

Another problem I realized I have (and knowing it at least gives me some comfort), is that I often read or listen to something in Japanese… but my mind immediately tries to interpret it in English or my native language. I guess I’m just not thinking in Japanese enough… Which means my immersion is lacking? It’s a difficult habit to break.

It could also mean that what you’re reading is a bit above your level (maybe not by much though?). Personally, when I implicitly understand something I’m reading in Japanese I don’t translate. But if I had to look up a lot of words or if it’s a really long, confusing sentence, I often find myself translating it (at least in part) into English.

6 Likes

A lot of people replied already, but I wanted to +1 the idea of having actionable, concrete goals. The more specific, the better. When you say you “should” know words, or that you wish you knew them, what does that actually mean to you ? For example, does it mean that you would like to know, I’m making this up, the 8000 more common words ? Think about your specific goals and put them on paper. I had a tendency to have “goals” that weren’t measurable and that were more on the abstract side, ex. : “I want to be fluent”. This can mean so many things. By forcing yourself to choose specific, mesurable goals, you get many benefits :

  • it gets way easier to track progress because you can actually mesure it, which in turn is very satisfying and encouraging
  • you can easily break down your main goal into mini-goals or steps : what is needed for you to reach the goal ?
  • by aiming for a certain date, you can check if your goal is realistic. Let’s say you want to learn 8000 new words in a year, but you know you don’t have more than 15 minutes to dedicate to this goal per day, and that on average, learning 10 new words takes you 15 minutes. Well, you can actually calculate that and adjust your expectations by either aiming for less words learned in the year, or pushing back your target date. (this one is really dependant on personalities, deadlines can work for some people, but trip others up)
  • but most importantly : by actually having to think about your specific goal, you’re having to process your self-expectations and the emotional load attached to the goal. Let’s take the example of the “I should know these words”. I’ll speculate here a bit and use it as a starting point for how a thought process could go from there. So, if we break this down, you wish you knew more words. How many words ? Which ones ? Are you expecting yourself to one day know all of the words in the dictionary ? Sometimes, we don’t even realize what our expectations are before we force ourselves to truly examine and measure them. In this scenario, if you found yourself having this chain of thought, you would probably end up admitting : “I’m not being fair with myself. I can’t actually know all the words in the dictionary. Would I expect this of the greatest learner I know ? No. Now, what I actually want is to understand more [common words/words related to X field/etc.] or simply know that I am making progress and learning new words every day. How many words would make me happy, and give me the satisfaction of knowing I’m working on my goal ? 15 words a day sounds about right.” Etc.

You probably already know this, but try to use the SMART goals guideline as a starting point, it really helps !

Also, remember to celebrate your victories ! Break down your goal into milestones or mini-goals, and celebrate each :clap: and :clap: every :clap: one :clap: of :clap: them :clap: ! Get yourself a sticker. Some candy. Make a pretty board you hang on your wall and check the heck out of that step’s checkbox. You’re making progress, that is amazing ! And I can tell you’re dedicated, 10 years of study is so impressive, I really admire your focus !

6 Likes