My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread

(2016-06-17, 7:20 pm)RawrPk Wrote: That's awesome! Actually I feel my vocab has improved when I actually don't worry so much about my progress. Extensive reading  + Anki has definitely helped. Also I don't really worry too much anymore if I don't understand something or if I forget as long as I know there is always another encounter of the word. The reinforcement helps a lot! So right now my learning is very laissez faire.

I still have ways to go but I'm sure I'm better than I was when I decided to jump back into learning Japanese.

It's all about input and regularity. You might get a really frustrated every now and then, that's not unusual... but all you really have to do is keep on getting input as usual. Get input every single day and trust your brain. Our brains do their thing while we sleep every day, so it's only a matter of time.

Skipping days is probably the worst thing anyone can do, because you end up not taking full advantage of how your brain works. The reason why finding enjoyable stuff is so awesome is that no matter how slow your progress feels, it's still fun to do what you're doing anyway. So instead of losing motivation and breaking the cycle of improvement by not getting your daily dose of input, you just keep on having fun and let time take you where you want.

I like to say that while you can buy many things, you can't buy knowledge of a foreign language. No matter how good your teacher, textbook, and learning tools are, the real currency you use to buy foreign language proficiency is time. Now that I think about it, it probably looks like I'm lecturing you or something... sorry about that.