Getting closer to a Burnout - What Should I Prioritize or Drop?

Japanese Language Questions
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Hi everyone,

I’m starting to feel burned out with my current Japanese learning routine and would appreciate some advice on what to focus on or cut back. I’m good at sticking to routines, but the time I have gets less and less.

My goals:

  • Reach conversational level by November (for a one-month trip to Japan)
  • Eventually become fluent (whatever this means)

Current routine:

  • Wanikani: Level 24, three sessions daily
  • Readlang: Daily (news, books, podcasts, plus SRS)
  • Kanji drawing: Once daily
  • iTalki lessons: 30-minute conversation sessions, twice a week
  • Grammar: Occasionally read about grammar, but not studying systematically
  • Japanese games: Play sometimes, but not actively studying

Pain points:

  • Struggling to balance study with work, relationship, dog, and other hobbies
  • Wanikani is getting harder; mnemonics aren’t sticking and each level takes longer
  • Conversation lessons are tough - forming sentences on the spot is very difficult

Other considerations:

  • Considering Pimsleur again (liked the phrases, but 30 minutes felt long the last time)
  • Looked into KaniWani for recall, but worried about adding another SRS on top of Wanikani and Readlang (also not sure if Readlang is not already closing this gap)

Questions:

  • For those with more experience, what should I prioritize to improve conversation skills?
  • Is there anything in my routine I should drop or scale back?
  • Any tips for balancing study with a busy life?
  • Should I utilise the Vacation Mode more often? For example, once a week to give me some rest?

I tried to keep it short. If you need more context, let me know! Thanks in advance for your advice!

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Since you have lifetime of WK and have conversational travel Japanese as a goal, I would honestly put WK far on the back burner.

Maybe look up restaurant menus online and see what kanji you’re missing to make sense of those. Check if you can read things like instructions on how to make a reservation. You can tailor your kanji acquisition to being more directly useful to you trip.

I’m sure there are quite a lot of resources online that give advice on what phrases or words to look out for, so you can focus on your travel language skills.

Unfortunately, doing is the best way. You can start getting used to production by shadowing if you feel you need that extra step to get comfortable.

I would also just practice on my own. There were group speaking exercises in some of my Japanese textbooks, and I’d just pick a question and answer it out loud. No feedback on if it’s correct, of course, but it made it clear that actively dredging up my passive knowledge takes getting used to.

In my town, there are some JP language exchange events that were being advertised on Instagram. My wife also tipped me off about a Japanese native looking for a language exchange partner via an expat facebook group that she’s part of.

There are also paid options like iTalky, but I’ve never used it before. Edit: Turns out I don’t know how to read. :joy: I’m sure some people knowing more about these kinds of speaking-focussed resources will chime in.

This may depend on your general accuracy and lesson batch sizes a bit, I think. Vacation mode pauses the reviews, but doesn’t pause your brain forgetting. So if you have a lot of reviews, you might also forget more. That means more mistakes, lowered SRS ranks, and an overall increase in reviews.

Vacation Mode is certainly still a good tool, because the review pile getting out of hand is murder on motivation, but an overall slow down on WK stuff might help take off the strain more.

I think it’s a great start that you have a flexible attitude towards your schedule.

Maybe list your study activities by priority? During busy times, you eliminate from least important to most important. That way your main things will be kept up as long as possible, even in a trimmed down schedule.

Best of luck!

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Across the board I’d first advise to reduce your global time if you feel out of energy especially toward the activities you enjoy less.
The most important thing is to avoid a bigger burnout.

Now that’s a nice objective to work toward to !

And it goes well with changing your routine which may give you a breath of fresh air and motivation, new is often more shiny and agreeable to work on.

I think you should go all in in that direction.
Drop WK for now.
Yes you will forget some stuff with which you do not have practice but that not problematic, you will keep most of your master+ stuff.

For the conversation part how are your listening and grammar comprehension ? Are you able to get the gist of sentences on the fly ? Did you ask your iTalki teacher(s) ?

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Thanks for the response and your thoughts! :people_hugging:

Yeah, that’s some good advice, to be honest. I could integrate this into Readlang, so there would also be an SRS to help me learn it.

Yes, I have a copy of the Lonely Planet Phrasebook somewhere. I might also try extracting some phrases from it.

Yes, this is a reason for me to consider another look into Pimsleur, but I also have some other shadowing resources I could check, which are less time-consuming.

My accuracy was good before reaching level 20, but it’s significantly decreased since then. I Currently have approximately 200 items in the Apprentice level. My reviews tend to accumulate around 100 per session (if I do it three times a day).

Yeah, I’m doing something like this. Wanikani and Readlang have the highest priority at the moment, but maybe based on your input, I could re-prioritise this a bit. I’m just a bit afraid of putting Wanikani in the backlog :upside_down_face:

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I forgot in my first answer but… try to release the pressure on yourself.

You do not have to have any level for November. Learning can be a pain or enjoyable and you really need the enjoyable parts. You’ll already be able to read a ton of stuff there.

If you haven’t already try to find a common sentences decks aimed at travelers for the basics (directions, toilets, food, buying stuff etc) even better if those have sound and you can shadow.

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Thanks Yandros for chiming in! :people_hugging:

So you mean going into vacation mode and not doing Wanikani at all? That would feel so weird, I think, considering I’m doing Wanikani three times a day for more than one year :sweat_smile:

I think I’m the most worried that I’ll never find my way back into Wanikani once I drop it for a longer period :fearful:

So listening is fine, I guess. Sure, during my conversation lessons there is occasionally a "もう一同お願いします” but most of the things my teacher says to me I do understand (maybe I should note my teacher is also very good at adjusting his talking style to my level, so maybe there is a bias here).

I’m also listening to the Nihongo Con Teppei Beginner Podcast, and here I also understand most of the time the basic gist. But sure, if people start talking faster, or someone has a 関西弁 it’s getting more confusing.

Grammar-wise, I know the basics. Currently, I’m not focusing too much on grammar (which might be bad, not sure), as I hope to pick it up over time.

My teacher suggested I take the intermediate conversation level class instead of the beginner class. I’m not sure if this counts as feedback :sweat_smile:

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That is in itself a (small) problem. I think it’s important to build confidence in your ability to retain things or to stop for some period of time and get back into it. You must be able to rest or focus on different aspects of your learning without fear of forgetting the rest.

(That said you have roughly 1200 items in circulation under enlightened so stopping the lessons and reviewing will already decrease frequency a lot in a few weeks.)

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Just to make sure I got it right, do you suggest dropping Wanikani for some time entirely or just new lessons? :sweat_smile:

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Depend on how much time it takes in your available study time. Dropping new lessons is a good start. It mostly depend on what you are replacing it with and how much effort you want to put in the conversational direction before your trip. WK is not helpful at all in this aspect so it has low priority. But also consolidating what you have in circulation will make the loss smaller so it’s your decision.

Basically what are you okay to sacrifice to have more time to train your conversational skills ?

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I’d probably aim to make my study routines a little less rigid. You need to feel the fun. Have a look again at what you’re doing - I’d suggest that if something’s really causing you pain, jettison it for the moment (you can always return to it).

For myself, I like to set minimums (and they are sometimes pretty minimum) so I can tick that box at the end of the day and feel good about myself. Anything I do above the minimum is a bonus & so (paradoxically) I often do way more.

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This is great advice. It feels bad to drop something temporarily (sunk cost fallacy and all) but if it helps you to keep going overall it’s worth it!

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Thank you all so far for your input! After a walk with my dog and some thought, I’ve decided to implement the following strategies:

  • Wanikani (thanks @YandrosTheSane and @Omun)
    • I’ll pause new Wanikani lessons until I return from Japan. This should hopefully reduce the time I spend inside Wanikani in the coming months.
    • I’ll utilize the Vacation Mode once a week to focus on other activities.
    • If these measures aren’t sufficient, I’ll completely stop Wanikani until I return from Japan.
  • iTalki (thanks @Omun)
    • I’ll prioritize role-playing with my teacher to practice situations I’ll encounter in Japan, such as hotel reservations and ordering food.
  • Readlang (thanks @Omun)
    • Currently, Readlang serves as an Anki replacement for me. So, I’ll focus on listening to Japanese podcasts for listening comprehension and going through the Lonely Planet Phrasebook to extract important vocabulary.
  • I’ll try to define as a minimum requirement for my Japanese studies to do at least one of the following activities daily (thanks @Lisaveeta)
    • Wanikani
    • iTalki
    • Readlang

If you have any further thoughts, please let me know! Otherwise, I’ll try this approach for now and see how it goes. Hopefully, this will help already :smile:

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I’m glad you noticed how you were feeling in time to adjust! I also want to point out that you have a short term goal, and focusing on shorter term goals also helps with burnout, because you don’t have to constantly think of this day that feels like it may never come where you are suddenly good at Japanese. But, you can study in preparation for your trip and imagine how cool it will be to interact in Japanese in Japan, and that can help you keep motivation.

Good luck!

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Exactly! I’m already looking forward to the trip, which is also a big motivator, but I think my mistake was to keep my current routine (aimed for the long-term goal) and add on top new routines for the short-term goal. Now I try to shift my current routine to fulfill the short goal and get rid of things which are not helping for that. Especially the input from all of you guys helped with that realization :heart_exclamation:

Hopefully I’ll receive some 「日本語は上手ですね」during my trip to further boost my motivation for my long-term goal :laughing:

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Your most pressing goal is to become conversational by November. I would suggest putting WaniKani on vacation mode until then as WK doesn’t teach you how to converse. Also, leave any grammar studies or reading practice (unless you also want to improve your reading for your trip to Japan).

I would say to heavily focus on speaking and listening for your goals. Put your all in those private tutoring lessons. Then do some listening practice with YouTube videos (or whatever else you can find) of day-to-day conversations, and try shadowing what they say.

Good luck :pleading_face: And return to the SRS hell after your Japan trip :laughing:

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I think I’ll evaluate the amount of time I spent on WK in the next week, and if it’s still too much I might pull the trigger and set it to Vacation Mode (as mentioned I’m kinda hesitant to do that but this was suggested now too often to further ignore it :fearful:) but you are correct, WK will not help me with the current short-term goal.

Any recommendations on that?

I’m already looking forward to this :melting_face:

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Hooray for a trip to Japan!

It’s totally normal to get overwhelmed sometimes and have to regroup. Learning Japanese is a looong process. I thought I’d chime in because conversational skills are my strongest in Japanese, far beyond my reading. (I’m working hard to try and catch up my literacy now, because studying new grammar, vocab, and compositions on paper helps tremendously with progression too ofc).

However! For several years my primary study method was through hour-long sessions on Italki once a week. I started when I was halfway through Genki 2 and have kept going every week for years now. In those study sessions, we did use textbooks and practice grammar as a guide. But the practice was almost entirely verbal, only the tiniest bit of reading.

Wanikani did fall on the backburner until now, and I do feel guilty sometimes because I’m behind in reading compared to my speaking. But ultimately, I’m so happy that I prioritized having conversations, because now I get to have fun and funny talks in Japanese every day.

So my advice is to put your time and effort into those Italki lessons each week no matter what! Again I did what I could afford (both in time and money), which was one 1 hour session per week. But the more you do, the quicker those patterns will develop in your brain, and it will be fun to notice how far you’ve come when you’re in Japan!

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Thanks for your input! Since you’ve got some experience with iTalki, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how I can make the most of my conversational lessons with my teacher.

It seems like you’ve been more focused on grammar, while I’m mainly using iTalki lessons to improve my speaking skills. That’s why I chose the conversational lessons, but I’m not sure if a more structured approach with grammar would be more beneficial for me. What do you think?

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Don’t do it. Building a habit is the hard part, if you managed to stick with WK daily for so long then you don’t want this to go to waste. Don’t use vacation mode, just reduce the number of lessons you do (all the way to 0 if you feel like it) but keep doing the reviews. The load with drop drastically within a week or two.

In general I advise against brutal changes in your routine, adjust smoothly. Don’t drop WaniKani, just reduce your pace and reallocate the time towards something else (Japanese or otherwise).

When you feel like focusing on kanji again you’ll just have to up the number of lessons and everything will continue smoothly.

Never, ever, ever use vacation mode. It shouldn’t even exist IMO, it’s just a trap.

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You mentioned the 30 minute Pimsleur lessons feeling too long. I recommend taking a walk outside while you’re doing your Pimsleur lesson, it sort of takes your mind off of the length of the lesson and the exercise itself is great. For whatever reason, I find it really difficult to just sit in one place and do my Pimsleur lessons. But walking + Pimsleur = chef’s kiss.

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