What exactly are you spending several hours doing? It shouldn’t take you several hours a day to do reviews, a video and one genki chapter a week…
From your other comments it seems like you’re trying to speedrun wanikani, SLOW DOWN! You don’t need to do every single lesson as soon as its available. Keep your reviews manageable so you don’t burn out! Try to keep under 100 apprentice items or it spirals out of control really fast.
I’ve been studying Japanese daily since early 2015. Honestly, don’t overthink it or over plan it. Just work on whatever aspect of the language you feel like doing in a given moment and only work on it as long as you’re enjoying it. Am I as fluent as I wish I was? No, but learning a language isn’t a race, and I’ve never burned out once in six years of daily language learning. As long as you keep making progress you keep improving.
I’m actually not trying to speed run. I think I was doing to much with a Genki chapter a week, wk twice a day, bunpro, kitsun and handwriting practice. I’m gonna keep the srs I think but have it on more of a schedule, and slow the Genki down to a chapter every two weeks.
Thanks for the feedback! I always thought I’d have to stick to Japanese at the level I’m at or I’d somehow harm my learning. Maybe I’ll give my books a look after all!
I can’t say I have a set amount of time that I set aside per day. I have a routine that involves doing half of my WK queue at lunch, then I practice writing a few of the 100 or so kanji I’d actually trained myself to write in my pre-WK days (my brain is weird–I can read well more than 100 kanji at this point, but I couldn’t write the vast majority of them. For example, if I see the character for “collect/gather” I can tell you right away what it means. If you asked me to write the character for “collect/gather” I’d have nothing). Then I try to look over my current vocab/grammer from the Attain Corp N5 course I’m currently crawling through. I’ll usually try to do another WK session at some point in the day.
That said, I’ve been studying Japanese for nearly 3 years and don’t even have an N5 level of proficiency, so my methods probably aren’t the best. At this rate, I might achieve fluency in 30 years if I’m lucky.
For what it’s worth, I am too. I don’t think I’ve ever maintained a habit for this long without external pressure. I think the fact that I’ve been able to maintain this habit is due to the fact that the srs creates structure and the app notifications put my reviews right in front of me so I can’t forget about them. So that solves two of the major problems I have with maintaining habits. If you can figure out what makes forming habits difficult for you, you might be able to work out a system that helps you too?
How to ADHD has some helpful videos on building habits and routines. Her videos are, obviously, intended for people with ADHD but the advice she gives is helpful for pretty much anyone.
Wow! How did you find such a great tutor? I’ve been on the look out for one that has structured learning and not just “free conversation” where I don’t get corrected.
Koichi wrote an article a while back about seeking the “+1 level of difficulty”; I think you’d find that a useful read!
As a college professor, the real nucleus of my job is helping students learn. The biggest piece of advice I have is to be patient with yourself. Neurologically, learning does require you to frustrate or annoy yourself a little, but if you feel anxiety about even the act of studying, then you’re overdoing it. This is probably my catchphrase at this point: give yourself permission to suck.
I have ADHD, so I suck at maintaining habits too. It can help to structure them and find set times to practice, but I know how difficult even that act can be. For a long time, I kept WaniKani as a pinned tab. I think that helped me.
One thing that’s helped me is manually typing my physical books so I could translate them and use Google Translate and DeepL as “spotters.” That might be a good thing to do with that light novel! Try to translate in your head as you type, then copy-paste everything you typed into one of those translators. I won’t lie: the typing process is agonizingly slow at first (especially with the added challenge of holding the damn book open!). But you’ll get so much faster. I’m barely halfway through WaniKani and I can already read long stretches faster than my fingers can move to type them! I like to save them as Google Docs so I can keep going on multiple devices. Here are the first few pages of The Essence of SaGa Frontier.
Believe it or not, this is common even among Japanese people! Check this video out!
I’m glad you mentioned this; my ADHD has been flaring up lately and this’ll help!
I read her page carefully and noticed she is preparing her own worksheets and makes a personalised study plan… is what I want to say but in fact I once had a conversation lesson with her before travelling to Japan. I said I was worried about the public transport and she prepared a train station map with some useful expressions and we practiced getting and giving directions.
Then, a fee months later my other regular tutor was leaving italki and I needed to find someone to do regular lessons. I remembered the tutor who prepared the map and saw she has a grammar lesson type. Tried it, was impressed with the quality and was taking lessons with her ever since.
may i join this discord too?
how to get into the haikyuu book club?
i loved the manga and im pretty sure i will never get bored of it thus the question.
i only know kana and some kanjis and no meaning of words, will i be able to survive or learn anything?
I do around 3 hours/day, including Genki (previously Tae Kim’s guide) and WaniKani, and around 6-7 hours on Saturdays and Sundays since I have more time then :). It’s been like this since roughly mid-January when I decided to pick up the pace a bit more. The only time I felt I was burning out a little bit was on Easter Monday when I stacked 3 consecutive days of heavy Genki plowing 
. But I’m used to long study sessions so that’s fine. Might not work for everyone.
I haven’t actually timed myself, but I believe I’m spending over two hours a day on language learning, maybe leaning closer to three some days (I’m also currently unemployed and am no longer in school, so the time I’m spending on languages is replacing that). It’s spread out throughout the day, though, so it doesn’t feel like a lot until I add it all up!
I don’t think I spend more than a combined hour on WaniKani and KaniWani most days. According to the heatmap script, I average about 70-100 reviews a day on WaniKani (and I feel like I do generally half of that on KaniWani currently), plus 10 lessons. I do all of my WK reviews two to three times a day, which typically amounts to 40-50 in the morning, then the rest before I go to bed.
I’ve also been spending a half hour or more on other things, like learning how to write the kanji that I’m learning, and watching one video each day from the Japanese Ammo with Misa absolute beginners playlist.
Additionally, I’ve been spending at least an hour on Spanish. Maybe 10-20 minutes on Duolingo daily, plus an hour or so of reading a novel in Spanish. Eventually, I’m going to replace this time with reading Japanese materials, but for now, I’m getting into the habit with a language I’m more proficient in (since my Japanese isn’t far enough along yet for me to be able to read without a lot of struggle).
Not enough.
I’ve started GENKI 1 on September 2019 and I’m still at Genki 2 Chapter 20. Currently I’m doing one chapter every two weeks, so I should be done soon.
On WaniKani I’m spending about 30 - 45 Minutes in the morning, 30 minutes during lunchtime, 15 after work and 30 - 45 minutes before sleeping.
I do my Anki review in between, it’s around 20 minutes.
My Bunpro Reviews are 20 - 30 Minutes after work.
This is my personal mandated schedule.
My “free schedule” looks like this:
I watch about 2 episodes Japanese Anime almost every day (40 minutes).
Sometimes I try to watch Japanese YouTube, browse Japanese Twitter, 5ch and try to read Japanese stuff on my Kindle.
I just started reading the 名探偵コナン manga (fortunately WK has a lot of useful vocabulary for this) and downloaded a sample of コンビニ人間.
I tried to read 名探偵コナン about half a year ago (around level 30), but it was still too hard. Now it’s a lot more manageable.
Please come right this way! ハイキュー・Haikyuu! 
Vol. 2
In the home thread there’s a link to a shared spreadsheet where we put vocab words we’ve looked up.
There have also been characters each chapter with less than five lines (like the crowd at matches), if you want to try your hand at reading and translating a small amount.
Feel free to just hop in! I joined recently and everyone’s been very nice.
It’s different for everyone.
If I weren’t married, I would likely spend a large portion of my non-work hours in Japanese. I am getting older and Japanese is something I really, really want for myself.
With WK, I spend probably an hour or two a day on. Then BunPro I am going slower but do that daily as well, and that’s probably 30-60 minutes a day.
I then try to ensure I consume at least one episode of SOMETHING in Japanese without subtitles every day. Some days I miss out because I watch a Mr Ballen episode on YouTube instead, but I do at least try.
I would say I am spending 4 hours a day on Japanese when I can and 2 hours at the worst. With the pandemic and lingering lockdown mentality, I find this works perfectly for me.
Thank you for this! I used to watch her about ten years ago when I was first in college but she’s drifted off my radar.
ADHDers unite! It is so hard to keep going with things. Trying to motivate myself is next to impossible.
I appreciate your suggestion about typing out the light novel. I DESPERATELY want to read it but at level 8 it’s gonna be tough (especially as a level 8 with 2 months off) but it would be fun to at least use it to learn some new kanji, or see what I recognize! I’ve never used DeepL - usually use ichi.moe - but I’ll give it a whirl!
Simple answer: Not enough. Once I finish school this December, I’m really gonna up my game, finish Genki I, and try and get into one of the many book clubs on here.
I do WK daily, but everything else like studying grammar or reading depends on my mood. My overall motivation for studying Japanese is pretty high, so some days I spend hours and hours studying, and enjoy it a lot. But there are other days when I just go through my reviews and that’s it. I like this kind of a system because it makes me do something every day, but I also have a lot of control over my workload and can adjust it based on my mood / energy / motivation level. I don’t have ADHD, but I have other mental disorders that can affect studying, especially long term studying. To me, working around my disorders is always about trying to strike a good balance between being active and getting plenty of rest.
Abigael answered this, but also, sometimes I find that going slightly above my level (like maybe now I have to look up a few things) allows me to sometimes do more, like playing neko atsume in Japanese, super simple game, I can understand some dialogue, but not much. Even so, I write down the sentence on the screen, look up what I don’t know (listing conjugations that are unfamiliar as well) then I keep going, and hopefully, soon I can reach a level where I don’t need to look up too much while playing it, being able to understand from context.