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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 553 of 706 09 July 2014 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just saw iguanamon's post in another thread that the Deutsche Welle Portuguese service to Africa is going to end on January 1st, 2015. WHAT?!? That means I need to grab those radionovelas as soon as I can. There are a TON of those there. But I do have about five months to do it. Still... very sad. :( Edited by kujichagulia on 09 July 2014 at 4:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 554 of 706 10 July 2014 at 4:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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This may come as a surprise (or perhaps not, if you've been following my log from the beginning), but I'm seriously thinking about aborting the "extra effort" plan for Japanese.
You might think, "But you were doing so well!" And that was true. I was about to annihilate the goal of 420 minutes of Japanese for this week. Yesterday (Wednesday) I ended up doing 115 minutes of Japanese, which left me with only 80 minutes to go in four days. The goal was perhaps way too low. But that doesn't really matter, because I began to see the signs of possible burnout (yeah... just three days into this. Unbelievable, I know). This morning on the train, I was reading Sleeping Beauty. The story is interesting, and I'm enjoying it. But for some reason, my brain felt tired today, and after 30 minutes I wanted to stop. But you have 10 minutes to go, I told myself, and that would be 40 minutes towards your goal. Keep going! It'll be worth it! So I kept going, but reading the story was not as fun as it was before that. I was forcing myself to read. When I start forcing myself to read... well, that is a good recipe for burnout. I shouldn't have to use such mental energy to force myself to read something, especially when my brain is struggling. And it brought me back to a concern I had when I started this challenge. I hate keeping track of minutes and hours. First of all, it's tedious - even when I approximate times. Second of all, I end up doing activities not to learn a language, but to reach my weekly goal. I know that sounds confusing to most of you. I think a lot of people at HTLAL love timed goals. Super Challenge, monthly goals, 6-Week Challenge, etc. And that motivates a lot of people to do well. But I guess I'm different. Having a timed goal does drive me to study more, to do more than I normally would. But it also adds more pressure. I easily feel pressure, and most of the time it is self-created. And pressure leads to stress, and stress leads to burnout. Having a timed goal seems to send me into overdrive, and I end up overheating. I'm like a cheap 1970s car. I think having a short-term timed goal is good. If this was a one-week challenge, it would be okay. But I was planning to do this "extra push" for an unspecified amount of time. If I'm feeling a little pressure and stress after only three days, imagine in three weeks! Of course, one of the things I could do is - to use this morning as an example - simply stop reading after 30 minutes and do something else for 10 minutes. It would have had to be in English, because as I said, my brain was tired at the time. That would have been fine, though, because I had done 30 minutes, and that meant I had 50 minutes left to do by Sunday. But my long-term strategy was to raise my weekly goal month-by-month, until I'm consistently studying at this pace in Japanese. But if it is this stressful, why aim for that? And if I need to keep my Japanese goal to 420 minutes a week or so, then why did I have to reduce my Portuguese time? I can reach that goal of one hour a day in Japanese, without sacrificing Portuguese, simply by studying just a little more at home (extra 15 minutes) and on the weekends (perhaps an extra 30 minutes). I did way too much. OK... it's decided now. I'm going to abandon my little project and go back to what I was doing before. I just need to make sure I put in a little extra effort at home and on the weekends. But no logging minutes. And oh, by the way...
...another reason not to do grand schemes. Edited by kujichagulia on 10 July 2014 at 4:25am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 555 of 706 10 July 2014 at 6:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've had some time to further reflect on what I wrote earlier. (I also re-read that Habit Killers post that Expugnator kindly shared with me earlier in this thread.) I think that the "extra effort plan" I had was bad because I was trying to do far too much. If I want to increase the amount of time I do Japanese each week, it's a bad idea to chop off over half of my Portuguese time and hand it over to Japanese. I didn't think so at the time, but that was far too drastic - like a crash diet when you try to lose 15 pounds in one week - and it's no wonder that I was feeling stress.
A much better way is to make small changes here and there. If I wanted to cut some Portuguese time and give it to Japanese, it's much better to start with 10 minutes, perhaps do that for at least a month, then maybe cut another 10 minutes... in other words, go very slowly. But I don't even need to do that yet. My problem is consistent language time at home during weeknights and on weekends. I sometimes don't do any study at home, especially on weekends. If I can consistently do 15 minutes of Japanese a weeknight, that's an increased amount of Japanese time. That's the only change I need to try to make right now, and once that mini habit has been established, I'll go from there. On that note, is there a consistency thread for just one part of the day? Edited by kujichagulia on 10 July 2014 at 6:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5252 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 556 of 706 10 July 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kuji, have a look at zenhabits- creating the new normal short post. It's all about starting small and working your way up, sticking with the new habit until it becomes the new normal. Edited by iguanamon on 10 July 2014 at 1:48pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 557 of 706 10 July 2014 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@iguanamon - Thank you for that link. By the way, I'm reading zenhabits every day now. That is the new normal for me right now. :)
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5156 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 558 of 706 10 July 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you iguanamon! I saved it and will keep rereading it when necessary. It fits well with my beliefs even though I often get a bit too obsessed and complicate things. Still, that's a reference and I believe I managed to make quite a bit of things simpler so far.
I think you took an important step and you're getting to know yourself better, kuji. I'm not skilled at giving advices on not being so hard on oneself, because I often am, and I also do a lot. I just think you should take something into account: You had been counting minutes for whatever activity you do. But except for the time you watch/listen to something, you tend to do the other activities faster over time. For example, if 1 year ago it took you 20 minutes to read intensily an article in Japanese, you may do the same today in 10 minutes. So, just keeping doing the same activity for 20 minutes till you get burnout may not be the safest thing. Just accept you've speeded up with some activities and they will naturally take you a shorter time and you can focus on other ones. You don't necessarily have to keep doing them for the same amount of itme. As a matter of fact, you may reduce your proposed time and even get to do much more than before. This is pretty noticeable with reading, as people who are doing the SC point out so often. It used to take me 40 minutes to read 20 pages in French, and now I can maybe do it in 20 min. If I had committed to simply doing 40 min of reading in French regardless of the amount of pages, that would sound like a neverending chore. Instead, I am still doing an amount that allows me to progress and I'm saving time for other activities. Also, I used to watch 20 min of French TV a day but now I'm watching 10 min of video. It's a harder material but I wouldn't have improved if I hadn't tried; I just decided to do it for a shorter period and it is working just fine for my progress in French. Edited by Expugnator on 10 July 2014 at 11:10pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6587 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 559 of 706 11 July 2014 at 2:24am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, no, but it's up to you how specific your goals are. It's also possible to set a goal only for the weekdays or for the weekends, or have "every other day" as the minimum :) edit: to clarify, you can definitely have goals like "do something in Japanese for 15 min when at home" or pick any specific activity that you do at home etc. Edited by Serpent on 11 July 2014 at 2:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4837 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 560 of 706 11 July 2014 at 7:01am | IP Logged | |||||
Wow, I never thought about this before, but it makes a lot of sense. Thank you! So with this in mind, I probably don't have to change a thing. I do, however, need to study more at home, because train time is becoming less and less reliable. But knowing what you mentioned takes a lot of the stress away.
Thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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