…lillefluff’s comment. O.O. Thanks for that. You definitely sound like a native speaker. You have just compounded my belief that I can achieve fluency in a reasonable amount of time.

I especially like that you have become a grammar nazi. I think it would be amazing to get the point where I correct native Japanese speakers ^^

…you’re kidding! Your English is superb! Congrats on becoming fluent. I’m still in the middle stages of Japanese, but I’ll keep going nonetheless.

To all you people who are struggling in the middle, I just want to repeat what has already been said: keep going. I spent what feels like a small eternity in this stage where I could “kind of” understand English and got the gist of a book, song etc, but didn’t quite catch the nuances and details, but I kept on reading English books nonetheless, and gradually things got more clear. Now I’m getting a kick out of learning (and using!) “strange” advanced vocabulary and being a proud Grammar Nazi in a language other than the one I was born speaking, and it feels awesome. The same thing -will- happen to you and me with Japanese, too.

I think this is what kept me going for a long time. Every once in a while my comprehension would jump up a step, and things would become a bit clearer. And that’s the most amazing sensation- something that would have been gibberish to you a few months ago now makes _some_ sense. I found it kind of addictive.

The truth is that it’s really hard for me to justify the amount of time I’ve spent on Japanese, unless I just say “I’ve spent that time because I enjoyed spending it.” I figure that the opportunity cost of learning Japanese to a high level is probably at least a million dollars, if you compare it to the most lucrative thing you could realistically have been doing. Very few people will ever recoup that through learning Japanese. And, even if you’re not likely to have been doing the most lucrative thing you might have in that time, you could have spent it with friends and family, or in learning to play the piano .

Now, though you might think otherwise, I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from learning Japanese. What I’m saying is that since, in a mini-maxing sense, ignoring the pleasure you derive from it, learning Japanese makes no sense… it only makes sense to learn Japanese if you enjoy it. and, for me at least, the key to that is to abandon any sense of “duty”. I mean- you could say everything I’ve said above about playing video games. But you never hear people angst about how they haven’t played enough hours of GTA IV so far this month.

So enjoy the fact that you can kind of understand things you couldn’t understand just a short time ago. You’re right that it’s a great feeling when you get to the point where you understand almost everything being said in a Japanese TV show, or can read a book without using a dictionary (much ). But it’s hard to get to that point if you aren’t fascinated by the intermediate steps. It’s like looking through a soaped window, and wiping it clean, again and again… every time you wipe it a little more detail is revealed, and in some ways the earliest passes reveal the most interesting things.

Anyway, the more learning Japanese (or any other language) is play, the more you will learn, I think. So, if you are discouraged, stop doing what is discouraging you, even if it is important, and start doing what you enjoy. You will learn more Japanese by doing something that is inefficient than you will learn by avoiding doing something that is efficient. And in the long run a lot of what looks like inefficient enjoyable stuff is actually more effective than the seemingly efficient dour stuff anyway. Good luck, and keep having fun with it.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1368/1

The Wright Brothers probably had thousands or tens of thousands of failures over several years, but they did it in such a way that they could keep failing until they succeeded.

I’m in this “valley” myself at the moment, what makes it worse, is that I’ve had to drop the time I spend on Japanese due to being so busy with life calling. Like someone mentioned, it’s useful to material of varying difficulty. I’ve been noticing this kind of stuff myself. Sometimes when I’ve been pushing the harder material and go back to the easier, it feels a lot easier.
It feels so.. “uncanny” when you kind of *can* understand what they’re saying, or what you’re reading, and it’s fun alright, but not quite as fun as it would be with a higher level of fluency. It’s a sort of “try me” of what it will be like once you “try it” more. (Well, it could be de-motivating as well, but I go for the positive sides.)

I’m not going to write some huge post that is really boring to write (mostly), about how awesome you are, and how motivational this post was. I’m only going to say one thing…

I needed this, thanks.

But I think that getting into a huff about “elitism” is counter-productive, and generally misguided. People who are good at stuff tend to be elitists. Khatz is good at sugar-coating his elitism, but most people aren’t. You brought up programming- man, you wouldn’t believe some of the guys I studied with. The guy I learned the most from used to ask really difficult questions out of the blue, and if you didn’t get them right he wouldn’t talk to you for a week or so- it was like you weren’t in the room. He was actually the first guy who ever implemented a truly functional programming language, and had been one of Tony Hoare’s best students. At any rate, those guys made Gordon Ramsay look like a cream puff.

Anyway, I know that my progress has been a bit better than linear when it comes to Japanese. One real milestone for me was getting to the point where I knew the on readings of all the common characters, and understood which wave of Chinese influence they had come in on (for instance buddhist terms tend to use the less common readings that were picked up earliest.) That makes it a lot easier to pick up new vocabulary, as long as it is vocab that has Sinitic roots. But, my progress has definitely been much closer to linear than to quadratic- that’s why I say that O(n lg n) is the best easy to understand approximation of it, over time.

The thing about taking short breaks is that you take them in order to avoid long breaks. 15 minutes isn’t long enough . If you try to push past the point where you’re really feeling burnt out you’re going to have- well, you’re going to have exactly the experience you describe. Sometimes you really do need to just stop with the Japanese for a few days. But when you do that you ought, I think, to continue to do just a bit of Japanese (maybe about a half hour a day or so). Keep up with the SRS, listen to a song, whatever. Try it the next time you’re feeling really burnt out. I think that if you take a few _short_ and _infrequent_ breaks you’ll find that you make better progress. The key is to only do it when you really need to.

People aren’t as different as you think, I think. They have the same shortcomings, generally, but to different degrees. Anyway, any method of learning that doesn’t take human weakness into account is flawed, IMHO. I think that’s what Ryan was getting at, and while I don’t agree with him on all the specifics, I think that there’s a good point at the base of what he’s saying. If you find studying something overly painful you’re unlikely to keep it up long enough to get good enough at it for it to be useful to you. So you ought to ration your pain- only do things you don’t like doing once you’re sure that they are essential. In effect you should have a pain budget, and treat it like a financial budget… don’t let yourself get too overdrawn at the pain bank. You won’t be able to afford the interest in the long term.

And Khatzumoto’s advice regarding this matter is completely correct, at least for me. Sometimes you’re stuck in a doldrums. You don’t gain immediate enjoyment from what you’re doing anymore because you don’t see any progress, and because of that, the idea of doing whatever it is that you are doing becomes less tempting in comparison to all the other things you can do.

You could say that taking a break at that point is a good thing to do. And yes, maybe a small break might be helpful. Like a 15 minute break. But I think the best thing you can do is just push on. Don’t make it painful, but don’t rely on instant gratification anymore. It’s at times like this where I believe you are about to make a huge jump in your proficiency level, if you just keep going. I’ve dropped programming so many times in the past because it became “boring.” And because of that, I’ve wasted a lot of time, and I could be soooo much better right now if I just _continued_.

And the problem with “taking a break” when it gets “boring” is that it becomes a habit. Whenever there’s a slight resistance, you stop (and when I say “you”, I really mean me, because I don’t know how general of an experience this is). And stopping at time like that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, which means that the next time you think about doing the activity, you might feel a little bit of resistance towards it.

@Ryan: While I’ve never used it, the victory calender sounds like the type of thing that I’d like. Everybody encounters different problems when learning new things, and requires different solutions. To call an idea like the victory calender nonsense just because it doesn’t fit with the way you do things is nonsense itself.

I have a problem where I can’t remember what I’ve accomplished, so I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. Creating a calender to keep track of all of that would really help me remember that I’m still moving forward. And maybe once I felt better about it, then I wouldn’t use it anymore. And that’s fine. The victory calender, and everything else like that, is a tool. If the tool serves a purpose, then use it. When you don’t need it anymore, stop using it.

People have their own problems and shortcomings, and they bring those into whatever they do. This problem that I have is a problem with myself. It’s not unique to learning Japanese. You may not share this problem, so you may not require the same tools.