So I’ve been studying Japanese now for about a year and a half with a couple breaks, but overall I’ve been pretty consistent. It has been one of the best things I’ve ever done but after starting work full-time about six months ago it has been more and more difficult to find the time I used to have to study.

I used to really enjoy doing the SRS everyday but the last couple months it has been feeling more like a chore. I finished RTK 1 last November and I have about 1500 sentences in my Anki deck.

Does anyone who has run into a similar problem have any advice? The only thing I can come up with is just to suck it up and push through the times when it is more difficult. For a long time I was also watching and reading a lot of Japanese material but that has started to fall off too. Has anyone who started with the SRS abandoned it and found they could move forward successfully? Whenever I try to think of how I’d like to learn new words even if I did abandon what I have already entered, the SRS seems like the best option by far. I see it very unlikely I would be able to abandon it because of all the hard work that went into getting to this point.

I’m basically at a plateau and finding it hard to keeping moving up. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

I'm sorry but you have not explained your problem.

What can't you do?

Can you read manga? Can you read the newspapers? Can you talk with people?

I'm afraid your post could be mine in two months.

I've also found that working full-time and studying Japanese at the same time is really difficult. I know a lot of people still do it so that's no excuse but the truth is that when working I tend to give up on Japanese after a while once I get too tired.

Now I have used some time in between jobs to start studying again nearly two months ago, I've caught up with my kanji revisions and I've added 2000 entries to my SRS (80% of them sentences) and I'm afraid of what's going to happen once I start working again next week.

I'm going to have only about 3 hours of free time every evening if I'm to get enough sleep (and trying to fight against sleep is ultimately always self-defeating), so it's going to be difficult. I want to continue reviewing my SRS and add new cards but I don't want to spend too much time on just boring revisions. As you said after a while that just feels like a chore and learning Japanese is no longer fun if it's just SRS reviewing. Also I need to feel that I'm making progress to stay motivated.

So my plan so far is to spend 1 hour max on SRS (the kanji here + vocabulary/sentences in anki) and the rest watching dorama/anime and reading manga and books. If I can't finish my SRS reviews in that time I'll catch up on week-ends (I'll do short interval cards first so it should work).

That what I'd recommend for you too, don't just do the SRS but make it a priority to spend time on the fun parts too.

I hope that plan will somehow work out. (The good news is that I'll have plenty of time to listen to japanesepod101 while stuck in the crowded public transports for 2 hours a day, yay!)

fingerscrossed Wrote:So I’ve been studying Japanese now for about a year and a half with a couple breaks, but overall I’ve been pretty consistent. It has been one of the best things I’ve ever done but after starting work full-time about six months ago it has been more and more difficult to find the time I used to have to study.

I used to really enjoy doing the SRS everyday but the last couple months it has been feeling more like a chore. I finished RTK 1 last November and I have about 1500 sentences in my Anki deck.

Does anyone who has run into a similar problem have any advice? The only thing I can come up with is just to suck it up and push through the times when it is more difficult. For a long time I was also watching and reading a lot of Japanese material but that has started to fall off too. Has anyone who started with the SRS abandoned it and found they could move forward successfully? Whenever I try to think of how I’d like to learn new words even if I did abandon what I have already entered, the SRS seems like the best option by far. I see it very unlikely I would be able to abandon it because of all the hard work that went into getting to this point.

I’m basically at a plateau and finding it hard to keeping moving up. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Here is one simple advice. Recall the reasons you had to learn Japanese in the first place. If you were more serious than just "because is fun" then you may, again, realize why it was so important and fabricate the time for it. Even if you are a Men in Black agent you should be able to find time for this.

Whatever you do, don't stop. The hardest thing is getting the momentum to restart. remember: objects at rest tend to stay at rest.