Comments

Feel you Aren’t Getting Better Yet? — 18 Comments

  1. Usually when I feel like my skills have gotten worse, it’s simply because I’ve gotten a bit further out of my comfort zone than usual and realized once again how much I still have left to learn. It’s an illusion, but a useful one.

  2. That was very encouraging to hear about the periodic lows. It helps to keep my spirits up and my confidence a bit stronger. Thank you.

  3. As soon as you began to show graphs I knew which one you were going to end up with. Or, rather, I knew what the one I would pick looked like.

    Really, I think we are actually loosing our ability speak Japanese all the time except when we are actually learning or using it. SR systems are based on this concept and its easy to see that their probably right because they work so well.

    Anyway, great post. I loved it.

    • If only there was a way to get to the 1st graph. But knowing that the struggle exists is half the battle.

  4. Phew! I was read about other people having seemingly linear or exponential growth and was worried why mine felt so erratic. It’s great to know that I’m not doing something wrong.

  5. I’m not really sure if this is the appropriate topic to be posing this question. (would be really nice to have a general question section, or perhaps a forum?)

    I am trying my best to stop thinking in English when I am doing my reviews and to just think in Japanese. However when doing this, I have noticed that sometimes I will look at the sentence read it out aloud correctly, and then think to my self, what did I just read…

    Even though I am reading it correctly and not translating it to English, its like my brain isn’t sure, until I translate it into English in my head. And then its like, “yeah, you were right.”

    Its like an internal self doubt system that I am finding difficult to get away from.

    And then I will have to read it again…

    • As long as you feel you understand, that is enough. Try not to get too caught up in whether you “really” understood it. Because as you’ve seen, self doubt comes in, and then you might get obsessive on your sentences as to whether you really understand them and constantly check with the English.

  6. Do you reccommend any textbooks or core books to use alongside your method for a beginner? To just build a solid foundation into an intermediate level? Or is literally RTK, passive immersion and writing thousands of sentences in anki all thats needed?

  7. Thanks I needed this. I was getting depressed with RTK because some of the old ones seemed to be getting harder to remember. I see now this is a case of ‘2’ above: I have now added so many Kanji (2000+) that there are ‘clashes’ with the old ones: similar keywords, similar stories, similar glyphs.

    Hopefully the ol’ brain will figure it out in time….

    • Yup, RTK becomes a bit of a pain when the similarities start getting in the way. The brain knows what it’s doing though, so once you get past the clashes, things get clearer with time.

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