Last January, I started learning Japanese and started WK. I initially planned to spend around a year learning Japanese, and then perhaps visit Japan to celebrate. Conveniently, WK takes a little under a year to complete.
As usual, the early levels were incredibly slow and boring and I vowed to go through WK as fast as possible and set a new record, or at least as close to that as I could get without having to get up in the middle of the night to do reviews.
Obviously, WK gets a lot harder in later levels. But my commitment to the speedrun has kept me going on WK through thick and thin, week after week. However I’m now level 38 (and about to hit 39), and I’m seriously contemplating defeat. Lately I’ve been getting crushed by reviews again.
This morning, it took me around an hour and 15 minutes just to get through my morning WK reviews and Bunpro reviews (but mostly WK). And the fast levels are quickly approaching.
On the one hand, I don’t want to admit defeat. Partly out of pride, but mostly because once I stop once, I’ll have broken my streak forever and thus lost most of the motivation causing me to keep at WK every day. But on the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine doing fast levels when I can barely handle WK as it is.
I know people say you need to do more reading and so on to reinforce what you learn from WK, but I have no idea how people manage it. Although I probably spend the majority of my time on WK, I do watch an episode or two of anime most days and have been trying to keep up with NHK News Easy and listen to podcasts and so on. It feels likely barely scratching the surface and yet even that minimal amount of Japanese exposure has been a struggle to maintain, both due to the time and the immense mental effort required. I can scarcely imagine how I could devote more time to Japanese study, short of quitting my job.
Of course, my original plan seems kind of silly now because it doesn’t look like there’s any chance of visiting Japan any time soon anyway. Of course Japanese has proven far more difficult than I could have imagined, so I’m not sure I’d be ready to go yet anyway.