ダニーの日本語

How many people could have predicted from my last post that this would happen?  Probably quite a few, I suspect.  The problem with “taking a break” is that you intend to do it for a couple of days or a week, but then that week becomes two weeks, which becomes a month, and before you know it you’ve lost all your drive.

There is a bright side.  I have at least managed to maintain my immersion environment throughout the month-and-a-half of my lapse in study.  I’ve been listening to the Yomiuri Shinbun podcast in the mornings, had Japanese music in my headphones during the day, and enjoyed various J-Dramas in the evenings to relax.

So it’s really just study of Kanji that I’ve been neglecting.  When did I start struggling to motivate myself to study Kanji?  When I stopped adding new Kanji.  Lesson number 1 learned in the Heisig phase therefore is: learn at least one new Kanji every day.  It’s the new Kanji, at least for me, that drove me to do it – the idea that at the end of this anki session, I will know more Kanji than I did before I started.  New Kanji were my reward for revising old ones.

Consolidating knowledge is important, and it is possible that I was covering too many Kanji each day to revise those which I’d already covered, but the solution to that is not to stop learning new Kanji altogether!  That way lies boredom, which inevitably leads to failure.  If you’re struggling with all the new Kanji, reduce it to 5-10 new ones per day; don’t cut them out altogether.

I have a new format, which has been going since Wednesday.  I get up early in the morning and study Kanji for two hours before work.  This has been a real success – my concentration is so much better at that time in the morning, and the time limit of two hours means that I usually use the whole two hours effectively.  It has the added bonus that by the time I get to work, I’m already awake and alert so that I can get down to work straight away.  Getting up in the mornings is hard… for a day or two.  After that it just becomes routine.  And routine is good.  Routine means you just do it.