(2016-01-23, 8:47 pm)supermancampus Wrote: This is the hardest post I’ve ever written—I’ve been failing and probably lying to myself.
After 3 years, I haven’t made any real progress. I’ve done RTK lite but never finished the full RTK. I’ve bounced back and forth between kanji damage, and Wanikani. I’ve done some recognition cards, and some production cards. A new method comes out and I try it, but I don't seem to be making progress.
I’ve found myself discouraged, reviews pile up, then I get them down, and the cycle repeats.
Is it my structure, or is Japanese just not for me? I feel like just walking away from it all.
If you've ever been where I am now, and I got yourself out of it, I would love to know what you did because it seems hopeless. I expect to get flamed, but I'm hoping someone out there can get me back on track.
The only people who don't fail are perfect people. And perfection is a theoretical concept, it doesn't exist in nature. You don't want to hold yourself to that standard. You must embrace being fallible. That's how you get things done. A perfectionist is the worst thing you can be.
Failure IS progress. Most of the things we learn, we learn from failure.
The way to get back on track is to start being OK with failing. Every time you fail, you should celebrate, because you just learned something. That's the only way to allow yourself to keep trying, again and again, until eventually you reach your goal...and continue failing, as you move towards your next goal.
If you don't embrace failure, if you punish and scold yourself for failing, then all that will achieve is make it harder to try again (because you're afraid to fail again).
p.s. Look at it this way: there are billions of people, with a "b", who, at some point in their lives, wished to learn a foreign language. And they never failed at it, because they never tried. You're ahead of them all. By A LOT.
There is no one on Earth who has tried doing something really impressive, and did it without failing. And I don't mean failing once, but failing many, many times over.
Edited: 2016-01-30, 9:55 pm