i’m living and working here, too, and that’s all the motivation i need. being able to speak opened a lot of doors, being able to read opened others.
i don’t put pressure on myself. if i hang on a level for a couple months, then that’s fine. starting again and again doesn’t get things done, but going slow still means you’ll progress.
first i’d stop new lessons and work on the review stack. if you do 100 a day, then a similar series of reviews will come back after the timers ran out. i’d pay attention to that. better to work on the stack slowly and having some items rot due to being reviewed too late (can always re-learn those), than to create your very own nightmare by thinking that powering through them in one go gets them out of the way.
My motivation largely comes from the regular breakthroughs I make.
Being able to watch/read stuff I couldn’t before. Being able to communicate better than before. Getting around better using only Japanese than I did last trip etc.
But there’s also an unquantifiable something about Japanese itself to me. It just still feels like a cool language to understand and use, and I still get small kicks out of simply doing that.
I have simple trick to staying motivated. after I finish reviews for the day, I open up my diary on wanikani page and i draw a star.
If I am feeling in a dumps, I look in the diary and I see how it is filling with stars and i want to draw new one.
It is not so much about motivation as about showing up every day, even if for just 10 reviews.
Set for yourself some day limit of review which feels easy and achievable even on bad days (THAT IS SUPER IMPORTANT! DO NOT BE AMBICIOUS!) and draw a star after finshing it. Repeat every day, until you run out of paper.
I had 1600 and it took me about 2 and 1/2 weeks to get back to normal where I started feeling comfortable doing lessons. I would do them in stacks of a hundred, usually two or three stacks a day, and then on the final day I did a push of 450. it was discouraging at first because I was getting a lot of enlightened items wrong because I took a 3-month break although it really only took a week to get past that point so if you’re feeling down know that it won’t last very long.
I am super lazy and I found it so hard to stay motivated, hence I tried to create a wanikani morning routine.
Every morning I wake up 30 mins before usual to do at least 5 lessons and all my reviews.
I’m not progressing that fast but doing 5 or 10 lessons a day and doing reviews everyday means every morning I have less than 100 reviews and everything is more manageable.
Plus, I don’t want the streak count on my wk heatmap to start over again, it’s a challenge against myself
this is really cute and so crucial. Thats why the Wanikani heat map is helpful for me. I did break my streak last night actually since I was working on my college homework and finding a way to do school + wanikani after 5 years of not being in it is hard. So for sure I felt a small “oh noo~~~” but I did my 10 reviews with my fried brain and will retackle it tomorrow.
I’d say my biggest motivating factor is how engaging with the language makes me feel. In the entire time i’ve been studying it, I haven’t encountered the “I NEVER WANT TO STUDY THIS AGAIN” feeling quite simply because I trust that there is a wall with everything I learn, and that integration tends to happen when I continue to just show up and do the work. That wall will crumble far quicker by just repeatedly showing up then trying to figure out how to scale it, ya know?
One of the things I also like do is is peruse the forums for people’s stories and journeys with learning japanese. I find that learning a new language and creating discipline around it has allowed me to be more disciplined in all areas of my life. Japanese means a lot to me, like a lot a lot, and altthough I don’t have a lifetime account, trying to finish it under a set time due to finances is not one of those motivating factors.
What keeps me going are those little breakthroughs that accumulate. I love that feeling of crossing a threshold. I like breaking ground and stepping onto a new frontier. So I guess…fall in love with the process? Idk? lol. But let us know how you do with it!
Well I didn’t manage to get it done by Monday, but I got both wk and kw down to 0 on the Monday commute home! Is guilt a good motivation? Maybe…
(Ignore my lesson queues lol)
For me, I quit KaniWani and stuck with just Bunpro and WK. KaniWani was too much extra frustration for the value I got out of it and definitely one SRS too many to keep up with.
Motivation-wise, I like to watch Japanese TV - a random episode of Japanese Style Originator (on Netflix) with the subtitles switched off, or some sumo coverage, and see how much of it I can understand or even guess at. It’s a fun way to use the knowledge without the test conditions.
I’m also quitting KW and started みんなの日本語 becuse I needed to actually be able to understand, speak and maybe even write a bit of japanese instead of recall.
For Wanikani, I do this routine:
Every morning at 8AM, all new lessons and reviews
Every evening at 10PM, all new reviews, and if I’m not tired, lessons too, else just reviews
During the day, when I’m bored, I see if I have a couple reviews here and there (usually not much, 10-20 reviews a day), should not take more than 5min break.
It works wonders for me and keeps me from getting overwhelmed with reviews, with a level speed at approximately 7.5 days per level for now.
I use WaniKani Statistics to keep me motivated. I’m calculating a bunch of “what ifs?”. “If I keep up at this pace, then I can reach this many Kanji and should be able to read this much”. It can either demotivate or motivate yourself. Seeing the graphs really help to visualize my progress.
I keep seeing “みんなの日本語” mentioned around but when I google it I get a ton of weird sites completely in japanese. Would you mind posting a link to this learning site please ?
みんなの日本語 (minna no nihongo) is a textbook to learn japanese that is often compared to Genki textbook in that they teach japanese in a more formal/scholar way but with a good amount of practices, listening and exercices. This is a good book to beginner, as the shokyu1 will give you a level around approximatively JLPT N5 and the second book a level around N4.
You’ll need both books above That’s the main strong and weak point of those books:
Strong point because it immerse you more into Japanese this way if you only use the translated sentence and grammar point and then focus on reading and listening. Also above is just the english version of translation, but it is translated in 12 different languages, so probably available in your mother tongue. (For example I picked the French translation and I’m having a great time)
Weak point because it requires more focus and determination to be able to follow the instructions all in Japanese, but you’ll get use to it after a short while.
Also, while it does have a few pages on accent and hiragana and katakana, it’s best if you know thse beforehand
I already caught up to the amount of kanji you’ve done!
That’s the main strong and weak point of those books: