Before taking care of grammar, we’ve got to address this first. While it’s true that thinking “I am invincible” won’t actually make you invincible, thinking you’re useless will most definitely work against you. We all have limitations; the trick is designing personalized methods that play to our strengths and reduce the impact of our weaknesses. I don’t recommend motivational pep talks or a glamorized sense of self-worth or capability. Just be real, be honest. Look at the landscape that is Japanese. There are grassy rolling hills, but that’s the endgame. Look around your feet and see that you’re standing before mountains. Allow yourself to say, “some things here are easy, but overall this is going to be hard, painful at times even.”
Can you control how much sleep you get? Life prevents some people from doing so, so if that’s the case, I understand. But otherwise, you’ve got to take care of your body. Effective language learning is hard, hard work (even if you’re only doing it all internally in your head), and if you show up already exhausted and defeated, you will continue to waste most of your time.
As for language learning, if you’re in dire straits, I recommend we take inspiration from our first steps. You learned your native language by constant exposure. You were fluent before you read any native-language textbook on grammar. Yeah, it took years, but because you were immersed in your native language environment, you really didn’t have a choice. This is a double-edged sword, though. When we have the choice of kicking it in our native language environment and playing fun games, talking with friends, reading, etc. or doing something in a language that hurts to work with, we’d obviously naturally be like the electron and take the path of least resistance.
This is your strength, not your weakness. WaniKani is the Balloon Fight in Animal Crossing, The Prairie King in Stardew Valley, the hack-n-slash dream in MGS3. WaniKani is the game within the language-learning game. The hacker spirit and the gamer spirit are not terribly different. Games have rules, mechanics, and the gamer is first at their mercy, struggling to win and understand how everything works. But then the gamer masters the mechanics, and as Morpheus would say, begins to bend and break the mechanics, and now the game is at the mercy of the gamer who is only limited by the core mechanics. I can air dodge? Sweet, watch me basically use that on the ground. Now I’m wavedashing with some invincibility frames to boot.
The “rules” for effective language-learning are guided by general human psychology and how the brain works. Your specifics, though, are entirely dependent on how you work.
Back to language-learning, predecessors to WaniKani looked at how kanji was being learned in Asia. Sure, it works, but it takes years of formal education. These people realized it could be done more efficiently with imaginative memory. They effectively hacked the kanji-learning system. Others studied memorization techniques and realized the efficacy of spaced repetition. These people effectively hacked study methods.
WaniKani is sufficiently gamified, but language-learning in general is not as gamified as WaniKani. This is where you hard work starts. No PS2? No problem. I’ve got emulators, and now I’ve got save states and memory editors and all that action. What about the Japanese language? No Japan? No problem. Time for you to emulate a Japanese environment. But you’re not going to Japanese primary school, no. You’re recreating a world in Japanese, so you get to pick things that interest you, things that are fun. You mentioned you like to bounce your attention around to different things all the time, so fill your surroundings with Japanese versions of all of those different things. These are the “laws” that can be broken (you don’t need to go to Japanese primary school).
Some laws can’t be broken, though. As others have said, you’re probably like most people in that you won’t retain what you don’t use. That’s the limit of la cabeza. Keep your SRS handy, because you need to use its memory-hacking approach to reinforce the grammar you learn as you jump between all the media you’re interested in. Remember that time you became a Street Fighter grand master by playing three matches? Right, didn’t happen. You had to go back to the same arena, with the same character, and the same buttons, and try new combinations for hundreds, nay thousands, of hours, but eventually you recognized patterns, and you start to predict your opponents’ moves, and you start to crank your own out subconsciously. Japanese is now your Street Fighter, and your score is how much you’re able to understand in reading and listening and then eventually how much you can correctly output.
What are the variables in your environment that you can control? Which Japanese things are you interested in? These are the things you can tune and exploit.
Have you tried making sentence cards out of the examples sentences for the grammar points?
It’s got to be fun. If it’s a chore, you’ll opt to do other things. Not everything in the beginning is fun, so you might have to develop a reward system for yourself. Want to game a little? Not so fast–have you finished a single Tae Kim grammar point? Or have you done your Anki reviews? Or have you made some sentence cards? Knock those out, and then take a little break.
When it comes to anything language-learning for me, I personally find “read x pages of the novel” or “learn y vocabulary terms today” to ironically make me reluctant to learn in some cases. Ugh, x, y?! I have time for x/4 right now, but I want to knock it out in one fell swoop, so I’ll save it for when I have time later. “When I have time later,” hah. So I just remove the x, the y. “Read the novel,” “learn vocabulary.” Psychologically, this helps me, as there are no expectations. Just do it, and stop wherever you need to stop. I often find myself doing more than what I otherwise would have committed to.
Right now you’re getting punched in the face, but with some hacking on your own environment and with transforming any conceptual language-learning to language-learning reinforced by practice, you will become Daigo.
Also, hearkening all the way back to the initial quotes in my response, if you’re down on yourself, maybe check this out. There are three yous, your new best friends.
From sapiens to ludens.
-Kojima Hideo
nowadays you read the intermediate one or the advanced one? How do you do that without feeling bored?
