January 22
君の名は , 9 pages.
I’ve been reading a bit more relaxed these last couple of days, not trying to comprehend absolutely everything. I was starting to feel just a tiny bit burnt out recently, working on the text quite thoroughly, and I needed a little break for my brain I think. Which is funny because I still work quite a bit looking up words and grammar here and there, but without the pressure of having to add things to the SRS. I think I’ve been feeling the pressure of having to add new words everyday, as a way of perhaps measuring my progress. I need to be careful not to fall into the SRS trap, to mindlessly add words for the sake of it and forget them in the future.
But anyways, I’ve been pretty happy with my progress so far. I’ve only felt this way very few days, and normally I think I’m learning a lot. I think it gets very overwhelming for me when the text gets significantly harder, and it has become harder again. I always do my lookups in a J-J dictionary first, and bilingual second. Sometimes the JP definition is easy to understand, and the bilingual dictionary helps reinforce it with a (many times somewhat inaccurate) translation; sometimes the JP definition is awfully hard and the bilingual dictionary is there to hold my hand and whisper words of love into my ears. The whole process gets very tiring when the text gets harder and there are many unknown words to look up and/or add to the SRS. But otherwise, when the level is just right, it’s honestly a pleasure and I love it.
I will probably continue to read this way until it gets easier again.