TL;DR- If you’re feeling like your studies are stale, try out some new resources! Be it an app, a new SRS, just reading, a youtube channel, audiobooks, you name it, just so long as it’s new to you. It may re-spark your desire to learn! Don’t give up, Japanese can be really challenging at times, but you’ve got this!
Lately I’d been feeling a little unmotivated in my Japanese studies. I took a 3 week holiday from studying during Golden Week and after because my parents came to visit, I’d stalled out on new Bunpro items because none seemed to be sticking, my Kitsun 10k reviews were piling up (and take ages, for those of you who haven’t tried it), it was becoming a burden. My conversational skills and reading skills are at a pretty comfortable place that I wasn’t even sure proper studying was helping anymore, and was forcing myself to study half out of habit and half out of not wanting to blow the money I spent on JLPT registration. I just didn’t much feel the results of my studying as much as I used to.
Then, last week, I watched a 日本語の森 JLPT N2 video for the first time.
GUYS.
IT FELT SO GOOD.
Something about being able to understand an entirely new grammar point being explained in native Japanese with real examples broken down and analized was so incredible. Not only did it reaffirm that yes, my studying is paying off, but it also made it exponentially easier for me to understand the new grammar. Anyone who has started to study grammar knows, English and Japanese don’t exactly meet up super well in terms of translations. Direct translation is near impossible because so many words/phrases overlap in one case, while either not working at all or changing meaning entirely in another in one of the two languages. So having Japanese explained in Japanese somehow just made so much more sense to me.
All this to say, my desire to study is back and with the July N2 in my sights, I’m strapped in and ready to blaze forward all over again.
To the Japanese language, I just have this to say: お前はもう死んでいる。