In my early days of Japanese I really was aggressive about finishing and doing everything I could in Japanese. Now that my tastes are pretty much set and I know what I like to read and watch, I just wanted to remind everyone that language learning speeds up with enjoyment. If you don’t like what your doing, change it up.
For me, I finished the first volume of Made in Abyss which took me roughly 2 months to read because
…
Wait for it
…
It wasn’t fun for me to read or watch (even the anime).
I read 4 volumes of other manga I loved in a weekend. It was easy, because I enjoyed it.
This post isn’t to s*** on Made in Abyss btw, I’m just a simpleton that likes Anime about punching things or making art.
What are some series or shows you dropped just out of lack of interest?
Generally I find you can have something be difficult but interesting or easy but not as interesting [or best, easy and interesting, though I don’t know if you’ll learn as much there]. If it’s both difficult and not that interesting it’s an easy drop.
So far I dropped Kiki Delivery Service’s because the effort-to-reward ratio at that time was severely off. I think I could go back to it soon, but I don’t know if I can strictly be bothered right now.
Oh, I dropped この美術部には問題がある! 1 | L23 because I thought the manga was kind of meh, even though we were reading with the club.
I don’t really watch much anime or TV, most of my listening practice is podcasts and YouTube videos so if something doesn’t interest me it doesn’t last long anyway.
And for reading I’m actually fine forcing myself for the most part. There are some graded readers that were boring and I stopped them, but they were collection of short stories and I did at least finish whatever short stories I started.
However, if we look past boredom, I have dropped some if they were too hard at the time:
Namely:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
A Christmas Carol
Xenosaga I&II for the Nintendo DS
But I plan on going back at the end of next year to try them again. Especially Xenosaga because it’s sci fi and that game has a ton of reading so it’ll be a good challenge to undertake before the N2!!
I couldn’t agree with this more. I’ve often found that the amount of reading I do almost grinds to a halt if I’m trying to force myself through content I don’t enjoy or that’s too difficult. I’ve taken a more lax approach (and effective for me) recently where as long as I’m reading every day, I’m fine to skip around different books to whatever I fancy in the moment.
I’ve found a couple of the ABBC manga difficult to finish/have dropped just because they’re a bit too cutesy for me (sorry Ookami-chan and Hinata-chan!) I much prefer shounen/seinen and am happier looking up double or triple the amount of words if the story is something I’m more invested in.
I think it’s OK to grind, as long as the balance hasn’t crumbled. But it’s also OK to DNF. Language learning does speed up with enjoyment, as the existence of amount is more important than without.
Language learning continues with equilibrium, process, and motivation, rather than just enjoyment.
Even if choices may be limited. I would jump to a better choice.
I would disregard the crowd, and prefer my choice, and my pace. I can’t totally, though. That’s stress.
I’m really bad at this. I’ve gotten better in the sense I won’t continue with book club offshoots if I’m not interested. I think the only manga I have officially dropped without finishing the volume was ウスズミの果て, and that’s less that it was boring and more that it was not great for my mental state.
Honestly there’s a few things in my reading pile I probably should drop, at the moment they just sit there and I read a little every few months. So, they’re still being read, just slowly.
My biggest annoyance, that extends beyond stuff in Japanese, is when I lose interest in something I know I like. It is frustrating to realise every time it happens. And every time I think of I just force myself to keep doing the thing it will be fine, but it is not and needs to be left alone for a bit.
Adding on to this, sometimes people don’t change it up because “theres nothing I’m interested in”. I didn’t have this issue for reading material, but I did for listening material.
In those times, what I did was extensively look at many youtubers, their clips, and different audiobooks. I made it my job to look for compelling content just like I considered it my job to clear out my reviews every day. It took days/weeks of sifting through content to find a couple sources I really loved, but once you do studying gets a lot easier and you can do it for longer. I still have great memories coming home after work and watching japanese youtube for hours when I found some great playlists from my favorite streamers archives. Language learning is probably the only skill where you can legitimately become top 1% in a skill by watching entertainment. Like, use that shit to your advantage. And the youtube algorithm is meant to keep you engaged on the site. In any other case that would be a detriment to your productivity, but if you just make a japanese only account you can leverage that to your advantage.
And here I am, reading through Naruto. Currently at volume 65 of 72 in two/three months. I’d watched the anime ages ago and stopped when the filler kicked in. This time, I was going to finish things, and I was going to do it with the source material in the original language.
The filler kicks in around the time Naruto should go off to train for two years. That’s about 20 volumes in with the manga. The story nosedives in quality past that. The war arc might be one of the worst shonen arcs I’ve read. You can’t do a world war if you’ve never fleshed out that world. I find it debatable if you can even call it a world war if every country in the world unites to fight against like… Three dudes. I haven’t had much enjoyment at all past vol 20 and it’s getting excruciating at this point. But… I’ve gotten this far, so might as well finish.
It’s also the only Japanese manga so far where I feel like the translation might not have robbed that much characterization or interesting wordplay from the original, because the original just doesn’t have that much of… Anything. So I haven’t really been learning all that much either. Outside of a reinforced feeling that the things I enjoy reading in Japanese are definitely enjoyed because I simply enjoyed reading them. It wasn’t just because I was reading them in Japanese, because there’s definitely things I can read in Japanese that provide no enjoyment at all.
It’s a good lesson to have learned, but a smarter person wouldn’t spend 50 volumes of a manga learning it.
I’m going to take a long break from reading manga after this and go back to light novels instead for a while.