Is it Burn out?

Japanese Language
#1

I’m tired extremely tired.I wake up at 6 every day of 5:30 depending on if I have Japanese lessons (4times a week).Ob top of Japanese I’m at school.I try to study Japanese every day for 3 hours as I have the jlpt in 2months :fearful:I failed the mock test completely.My Anki reviews are taking over my study time along with wanikani.I go to bed at 11 most days.I can barely do any Japanese per day other then Anki and sometimes I’m so tired I do nothing at all.Please help me !I’m going to sleep now as my head hurts right now. I’m losing any joy I had for Japanese. I’m tired good night

-Imtryingjapanese

3 Likes
#2

Take a break. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I can relate to wanting to go quickly, but the most important thing you have is your own health. Turn on vacation-mode on WK and sleep in for a few days, then see how you feel.

Take care of yourself! :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#3

You situation just doesn’t seem to be sustainable. Not enough rest, not enough sleep. 3 hours studying on top of everything else, you can do that for a few weeks max, but as you describe you won’t be able to do the same in the next two months.
Maybe concentrate in the two months only on what you need to succeed in your test. If Wanikani is not directly related to jlpt, go on vacation mode or just do reviews and no lessons.

6 Likes
#4

I’m not sure, this is burnout, rather you’re being swept away by all the things you need to do daily. Honestly, if I were in your place, I’d substitute some of these hours with something that’s both relaxing and fun, while also technically aiding your Japanese, like watching or reading stuff

3 Likes
#5

Definitely stop doing WK lessons, and stop adding any new flashcards to Anki. If Anki is really causing too much trouble, you can set a daily review cap for your deck so that it limits how many cards it shows you a day.

I would recommend, if possible, continuing to do your reviews for both WK and Anki every day until things calm down. As long as you stop adding new cards, your daily workload should go down. If you stop doing your reviews, you’re much more likely to quit, so it’s best to tough it out until things get easier again.

Once your WK and Anki reviews are at an actually manageable level that isn’t causing you strain and isn’t forcing you to lose sleep, you can consider adding new cards, but if you do, you’ll want to add them at a much, much slower rate than you were adding things before.

With WK, I recommend doing a small but consistent number of lessons a day (instead of binging them, if that’s what you were doing before). 10 lessons a day typically isn’t too bad, but if you’re spending a lot of time studying Japanese outside of WK, doing even fewer might be a good idea. The more consistent your lesson schedule, the more consistent your review schedule will be, which often makes it easier to manage. If WK starts taking too much time again, you can scale back on lessons even further or stop doing new lessons for a bit.

With Anki, it sounds like you were adding way too many new cards a day. I highly recommend cutting the number of new cards in half at the very least. If your daily cap was at 20, maybe try changing it to 10. If that’s still too much, drop it even further.

If you take a break from adding new material with both WK and Anki and then find a new WK and Anki pace that is actually sustainable for you, you might realize that it’s not fast enough for you to reach your goals before the JLPT. If this does happen, that’s okay. Don’t try to push yourself beyond your own limits. You’ll be way better off sticking to a pace that you can actually keep up with for the long term without sacrificing your health, even if it means taking a little longer to reach the level of proficiency that you want to reach.

As others have said, learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. This is especially true if you’re using any sort of SRS (especially if you’re using two). You will make progress as long as you put in the work every single day, so it’s important that your daily workload is something doable and achievable to you without causing you distress or strain. Decisions that you make today will affect your future self days, weeks, and months down the line, so make sure that you’re kind to your future self. You’ll want to plan your daily workload around what you can get done even on a bad day, not in ideal circumstances.

So just take a deep breath, stop thinking about the test (burning out and quitting would be a far worse outcome than failing a test!), and focus on doing the reviews that you have already accumulated without adding any new work. When things have settled down again, you can reevaluate your approach.

3 Likes
#6

Thank you for that extremely large explanation but to be honest I still,don’t think I can do it.I scared of sitting in a test room not knowing the answers.I’m scared of failing school and it’s affecting my sleep.I don’t feel good enough at the moment to even wake up and do anything .Even if i slow down my workload won’t I still do bad;y I don’t want to do badly.Please help

1 Like
#7

I don’t normally bother saying stuff like this on a forum. However, reading through the thread, you might want to consider talking to a therapist. Most likely, you have access to a counselor of sorts via school.

Aside from that. Firstly, take a real rest day, where you truly do nothing; spend time in nature. Give yourself a break, you’re only human. Then try this exercise; sit down and write out the outcomes of those worries. Imagine what the worst possibility would look like, after thinking on that, formulate a course of action (the plan) you’d take in response to that outcome happening. This is an effective way to get out of your head, and the best cure for anxiety is action (ironically enough).

Failing out of school or not doing well on an exam etc., truly isn’t the worst thing in life, the worst would be death. As long as you’re still breathing, you can still take action. If you are scared and anxious to do, do it scared and anxious, it’s okay. One step at a time, my friend.

6 Likes
#8

Think in terms of output not input. Are these 3 hours productive ? Would you achieve more or less if you were to cut them to 2 ? And by more or less I don’t mean number of words you ‘know’ in Anki but how much real progress you’ve made.

SRS can really be busy work when you can potentially achieve more with other methods. Mine is intensive reading. I read the same pages of a book over and over until I understand them perfectly.

Also don’t forget that sleeping is one of the most important part of the learning process.

And last, there will be an other JLPT exam next year and the year after.

#9

There are plenty of people on this forum who have failed the JLPT one or more times, and things have managed to turn out okay for them! I know someone on this forum who accidentally took the N1 when she wanted to take the N3, and needless to say, she did not pass, haha. If all else fails, you can treat the test as a practice for taking the test. Even if you know absolutely none of the answers, you can still see what it’s like, get a feel for the time limit, see how it’s structured, etc. That experience will help you be less nervous for taking the test again in the future (which you likely will do even if you do pass, because there are multiple levels of it, and it sounds like you’re a beginner?). Which JLPT level are you taking? If it’s the N5, you’ll probably have no trouble with the kanji section at the very least.

Even if you fail school, that’s not the end of the world, either. My brother has failed school several times, and he’s still doing okay for himself. I know lots of people who failed in school who later went on to become very successful. I know it all feels like the most important thing in the world when you’re in the midst of it, but if your anxiety is affecting your sleep, that is only going to make it harder for you to do well.

Paradoxically, sometimes we need to slow down in order to go faster. Right now, what you are doing with your workload simply isn’t working. It’s too much for you, and the information isn’t all fitting into your head, and learning this way is damaging your health. If you went through fewer flash cards every day but actually learned them, and were able to get more sleep without this huge pressure hanging over you, you will be progressing faster than you are now, trying to do too much at once.

Depending on which JLPT level you are trying to take and where your Japanese skill is at now, it might be physically impossible for you to pass the test, and that is okay! If that is the case, then you can get a head start now for when you attempt the test again! As long as you keep at it, your proficiency with the language will improve over time. It is going to take a long time no matter what you do. But in your current situation, you are not going to have an easy time learning anything, and you are going to be much more likely to give up entirely. Any change that relieves some of the pressure on you will be an improvement on what you are doing now.

Can you try pausing adding new lessons and just doing your reviews? Maybe set the Anki cap down to 100, too. You don’t have to complete all of them in one day! Just do what you can. It’ll probably take a few days before you notice the effect, but you should start to feel a lot better about your current workload. I don’t personally recommend taking a day off entirely, because I think this will just increase your panic, but if you can manage to at least chip away at those reviews and gradually push them along, you’ll see some of the pressure lighten.

7 Likes
#10

Thank you :blush:. I’m taking the n4 I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now on and of Ik I can pass n5 as I’ve taken a mock test and I got I think 140/180 and that was ages ago . I don’t know why I got so worried all of a sudden :joy::sweat_smile:

2 Likes
#11

Emotions are irrational; there’s no explaining them

1 Like
#12

Sounds like you’re just doing too much. While it would be amazing to do the same amount of study every day, requiring a specific amount is going to naturally become a chore over time. I’d say don’t give up and keep going, but take it slow for a little while. Read a page, watch a show, or write a journal and then if you can stomach that, then do something else you will enjoy. It’s best to stop when your still “high” on learning because you’ll still want it later. If you exhaust it though, you’re going to go through what you’re going through now. Finding something you like in your target language isn’t always easy but just studying isn’t fun if you’re not using it for something that brings you joy.