The battle against laziness

oh that’s interesting. How’re your language skills now? My speaking skills are very bad comparared to others. I’m trying to brush them up before going to japan.

WaniKani will never have more than 10 items active at a time in a review session. And you can always use the wrap up button to do smaller batches of reviews.

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The difference between before and now is that you’re thinking too much. You’re thinking too much about your “lack” of progress, about forcing yourself to do reviews. That’s the difference between the You that did reviews and the You that skips them.

Stop thinking. Forget about forcing yourself to do anything at all. When you brush your teeth every day, you’re not thinking about how many brushes you give each side. You just do it.

You don’t need to know how many reviews or lessons you have. You don’t need to think about your accuracy or leveling up speed.

The number 1 reason people reach lvl 60 is because they show up every day to do the work. It’s not about speed or intellect.

Forget the other stuff. Those things are stopping you from getting to the goal. Just go for it. Don’t be afraid. This is what guarantees you success. Do it and you’ll win.

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Very zen! :relieved:

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Such good advice. I will come back to this comment whenever I struggle!

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Thanks for your advice helpful durtle.

Don’t worry I will reach 60…but sometimes in the future. At least I wanna get to 50 by the end of this year. maybe I should JUST DO IT and when I feel lazy I should come here and whining asking (that’s part of the current plan haha )

BTW do you have any plan after reaching 60 jpr? that’s crazy speed of you I remember when we were same levels. You should hold a new wani record :hugs::hugs:

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You need a little challenge.

In addition to what a lot of other people have already brilliantly suggested, you could actually incorporate these two things into your studies. Of course, they shouldn’t be your main source of studying, but after you’ve done some formal studying for the day, you can actually read Japanese material, or, play Japanese games. It will help reinforce some of the things you’ve learned, teach you some new things, and you’ll get to have your fun.

I’m sure someone has already said this but I can’t be bothered to read it all :

When I start feeling this way, it helps to remember why I started in the first place. I also decided to slow way down on WK to focus on other areas of study and it’s helped my motivation.

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I always feel a little bit of annoyance at how long my reviews take, but I generally can get past it by doing five or ten reviews then hitting “wrap up”, finishing that little set, then doing it again and again until I’m done. Somehow it seems like less work?
I don’t even take a break between the sets, but because it’s like 5 sets of 20, it doesnt feel neverending the way 100 reviews in a row would. You get rewarded with the screen telling you how well you did for each set, so it feels like proper progress!

I’m a real quitter, so I don’t know how long I can keep up Wanikani, but my advice as a fellow lazy person is that you shouldn’t be so down on yourself about not finishing a specific task you set for yourself.
The real goal is to learn Japanese right? You don’t necessarily have to be using Wanikani or studying consistently to reach that goal. Wanikani is great! But you’re not bad for not doing reviews. And not doing your reviews doesn’t mean you won’t reach that goal. If your reviews or studies are not what you want to do right now, maybe watch something or read something fun in Japanese. You’ll still be advancing towards your goal, but in a different way.

I don’t want to even think about all the classes I half assed, or all the half finished grammar books collecting dust in my room, or that N2 kanzen master I only read the first 5 pages of. But I passed N2 anyway! Maybe in 2020+, with even more unfinished learning materials, I’ll pass N1 :joy::joy:

Basically I’m saying it’s okay to quit stuff and procrastinate, so long as you keep doing something or other at some kind of frequency. You’ll reach your goal, whatever that is, eventually.
Studying any old way and only doing reviews when you’re in the mood might slow down your progress, but I think it’s also way less likely to burn you out or make you give up entirely. I find that having less negative feelings about the work I didn’t do, makes me less likely to procrastinate that same work in the future.

Maybe that’s actually kind of demotivational (if so, I’m sorry!) but I myself find it very alienating to just constantly see people saying to push through and keep at it no matter what. Cos that’s just not possible for me :joy:

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Oh gosh, have I been there! I think that coming to the forums to commiserate is a good plan, it reminds you that you’re not alone, we’ve all been there, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t still get through it! I am going to use a lot of the advice on this thread for myself, for sure.

Some advice I can give from my experience is to make sure not to just study, but to have fun with Japanese and remember why you’re doing all this in the first place. @Ncastaneda already mentioned reading novels, but what about joining one of the book clubs here to help you get through it? The beginner’s book club is going to start reading ARIA the Masterpiece on June 23 and @marcusp is putting together another one for にゃんにゃん探偵団. Or you can even just track whatever other books you’re reading on something like 読書メーター, here’s a thread where some of us have shared our profiles so you can follow other Japanese learners if you want.

For playing games, if it’s too much to actually play games in Japanese, you could watch Let’s Plays in Japanese on YouTube. LayerQ has one channel I found linked somewhere else on the forums that I enjoyed.

I find it really helps to find ways to have fun with it, that way you’re not forcing yourself, but you still get practice, and can see how what you’re learning is helping you to get closer to understanding things, and it also gives you motivation to want to keep up with the less fun studying so you can understand even more.

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That’s a great point – makes it a lot easier to wrap up a session and walk away when you’re frustrated.

Edit: Seanblue noted that the wrap up button does mostly the same thing, but it’s still nice to be done immediately rather than ten items after you’ve decided that you’re done.

Hello fellow procrastinators

In another thread you just mentioned that you have been trying to level up fast and this is usually what happens to me when I do that. I just had 3 very fast levels, then I had a very busy week, my reviews were stacking up, I kept forgetting a lot of the items that were still very new and I could not bring myself to do any lessons for a couple of days.

I want to go fast and finish WaniKani soon and move on to other resources but it seems I just don’t have enough free time and mental energy in my life to do it at full speed. So what I do is the same thing as others have already recommended: no new lessons, keep doing reviews. At some point the apprentice and guru count will have gone down and my brain will feel ready for lessons again.

When it is really, really bad then I enable vacation mode between my review sessions. I come back, do 20 or 50 reviews, how ever much I can do and then I re-enable vacation mode. I do that until I’m back down at 0 reviews. Because I just had a busy day today and could not do reviews at lunch break and now I’m back at 160 reviews. This is OK when I have a “good phase” but right now it is demotivating.

During the times where I take it slower with WaniKani I try to do other stuff. Switching resources seems to help with motivation. Stuff I like best is of of course everything that is fun: my subs2srs Anki deck, clozemaster and reading (currently graded readers only, hopefully I can move on to other stuff in the future).

You can do it. Having ups and downs in motivation is normal. The only thing that matters is that we keep showing up :slight_smile:

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In general, any way that gets you to keep studying is a good way to study :slight_smile: Just find something that works for you, and everything will come together (very slowly mind you – a spoonful of patience makes the Japanese go down and all that)

It’s okay to wish to go full speed. Everyone wants it and they should. They value their time and they value themselves.

However, the problem is that everyone tries to go for the marathon on the first day. That’s not how it works. You start preparing for a marathon not by running 40km, but by running. So why other things in life have to be different? Well, they aren’t :slight_smile:

Start by warming up. Make sure to keep your reviews to 0. Enjoy that process of putting them back to 0. Then, add lessons. Enjoy getting all that new knowledge. Repeat. Keep running, because eventually you’ll start running faster, you’ll learn more in less time, you’ll surpass what you thought it was impossible. And enjoy the run. This is a marathon, no one will get to the end if they’re not enjoying the process :slight_smile: That’s how records are made.

Nah, I’m sure there are faster people :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll be making a post in 4 days and I’ll get back to you about this there :slight_smile:

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I did not know this! Thank you for clarification. Also I didn’t even know the wrap up button existed…

Speaking of such things, do you know of a script that hides the percentage correct/items remaining (maybe preferably a toggle?) that sits in the upper right corner of the screen? I find it minorly irritating to have those sitting there all the time. Thanks!

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I do not know if there is one or if such thing is even possible, but I recommend you to ask about this to the people that actually create our lovely scripts :slight_smile:

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Someone gave me this advice a few years ago, and I have found it helpful.
You don’t have to do the whole thing now, or perfectly.

Just say to yourself, “I choose to start this task with one small, imperfect step.”

I actually wrote that sentence out and stuck it above my desk.

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