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Hitting a Wall: When You Can’t Study | ||
Tags: Burn-out | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 1 of 23 29 July 2013 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||
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For the past 12 months, I did something that I never did before with my Japanese studies: I studied consistently. I made routines, I stuck with them, and my Japanese has improved considerably. I started Portuguese nearly a year ago as well, and I have studied that consistenly and learned a lot. I'm really happy about that.
Now my consistency is under attack, as I have hit a wall I never thought I would hit. Simply put, I can't bring myself to study nowadays. And I have no idea why. Maybe it's the summer heat and humidity. Maybe it's the fact that the summer holidays have begun at my school, and I have more time than I know what to do with. Well, let me describe my situation. My weekly routine for Japanese was to study out of my intermediate textbook, listen to podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, do Anki reviews, use a playlist to review all the past audio from my textbook and podcasts, read some articles and short stories I found on the Internet, and on rare occasions write a diary entry or a very short story. I studied on average one hour a day. My Portuguese routine was similar. I studied out of my beginner DLI Portuguese Basic course, listened to podcasts from PortuguesePod101.com, did Anki reviews, used a playlist to review all the past audio from my textbook and podcasts, and read some texts that I found on the Internet. I studied on average around 45 minutes a day. This was fine up until about a week and a half ago. Suddenly I found myself unable to even muster up the motivation to open my textbooks and study. No problem, I said. Why don't I take a break from the textbooks and just read some more articles and text from the Internet? So I tried that, but after a couple of days that became stale like year-old sliced bread. You're not reading what you are interested in, I said to myself. You read about sports, music and travel in English. Find stuff like that in Japanese and Portuguese. So I did. That didn't last too long. I was interested in the material, but the waves of unknown vocabulary were frightening. Ah, those news articles are too difficult - way above my level, I thought. Find something easier. And I was able to do that with Japanese: a website called Hukumusume. A great website! A bunch of stories, plus a feature called "What happened today?" It quickly reviews historical events that happened on a day, plus gives a little story or fairy tale connected with those events. They have something for every day - that's 365 or 366 pieces of reading material! I enjoyed reading those for a few days, but then I hit a wall with that, too. I would try to read, and my eyes would gloss over and my brain would shut down - for no apparent reason. I wanted to read it, but I couldn't. Maybe the problem is too much reading, I told myself. How about just do some listening for a while? So for a couple of days I just did podcasts and some audio reviews. That was sort of okay, but the problem was that I could only listen to so much before my brain started to tune out my L2s. Perhaps I could listen to something for about 10 or 15 minutes, but after that my brain would shut down. And then what do I do with the rest of my time? Something in English? Sheesh. Right now I'm thinking about just continuing to listen for 10 minutes in my L2, then for the rest of my study time do some writing. It's funny; I don't like to read fiction, but I love to write fiction. The hard part is thinking about what to write, but once I get some ideas in my head, I can write for a long time. And with writing, I can go at a leisurely pace. If I spend an hour writing one sentence, because I have to look up words in a dictionary, that's fine, because while writing I'm in my own world. I have the visuals and images in my head, and I want to express them. With reading, spending the time to look up the words in a dictionary is like cracking open a coconut; your patience runs thin after a while, even if you do want to drink the coconut milk. So writing is nice. The problem is that if I'm listening for 10 minutes, then using the rest of my study time to write, it's heavily unbalanced - mostly output. I worry that such a situation could hinder my language development. A solution would be to put a few of my writings on Lang-8 (not all of them; that would lead to me feeling pressure to write to "impress" the people at Lang-8), have them corrected, and get input that way. However, then I would need to spend the time to correct English writings. Of course, if I have study time that I can't use, heck, why not correct some English writings. Anyway, I've probably written too much here, so if you are still with me, I wonder if anyone else has hit this kind of wall? I did a search here, but the walls that other people hit involve learning vocabulary or grammar, or going from intermediate to advanced, or beginner to intermediate. It seems that nobody has a problem where they want to study, but they can't bring themselves to study all of a sudden. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Universum Diglot Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4141 days ago 9 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French | Message 2 of 23 29 July 2013 at 5:25am | IP Logged | ||
I think everybody has this problem, with anything in life, from time to time. Don't overthink things too much - the world is not going to fall out of orbit if you give yourself a break for a while. If you start pushing yourself when you don't feel like doing it, you'll only make it more of a burden. If Japanese is really important to you, the motivation will come back, don't worry! 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 23 29 July 2013 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||
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There's nothing wrong with say, reading a paragraph in a book, deciding that's unappealing, then start to listen to some music and deciding the song rankles you, then putting a DVD in the machine, deciding the plot is too corny, and then look for some new music, etc. We do this naturally in our L1 and should give ourselves permission to also do that in any language that we're working on. Keep trying different things until you find something appealing enough to stick to doing. And give yourself permission to then later go onto doing something else.
Good luck! Edited by Snowflake on 29 July 2013 at 5:52am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 23 29 July 2013 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I can only talk about my own experiences, but for me, forcing myself to study when I don't feel like it absolutely kills my motivation and progress. I've learned my lesson and nowadays when I feel my motivation waning I simply stop studying. Sometimes there's another language that feels interesting, but often I'm just not into language learning at all for a while and I spend time with other hobbies. After a few months I usually feel my motivation return and I get back to it with gusto.
It might not work the same way for you, of course. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 5 of 23 29 July 2013 at 7:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you all for the posts!
Yeah, even in my L1 I'm always changing what I do. I spent time before learning and playing the guitar, then decided I didn't want to do that. I once bought a bunch of books about gardening and tried to set up a container garden, but that didn't last long, either. I'll go through a period of reading a lot of history books, then all of a sudden get tired of that and start reading a bunch of sports biographies. Speaking of sports, this year from January to about March I got "rugby wanderlust", started learning, listening to, and watching anything rugby that I could get my hands on, then got tired of it and went back to my "core" sports of soccer and basketball. I did the same in 2012 with cricket. A few years ago I gave kendo a try, but got tired of it very quickly, and now I'm wondering if I should try capoeira. So yeah, it's no surprise that I want to change what I'm doing in my Japanese and Portuguese studies. What should be the surprise is that I kept up the same sort of routine for so long. I must have really improved my discipline skills in the past year! I think I'll try what I mentioned earlier: 10 minutes or so of listening a day, plus writing. Who cares about input vs output. If that doesn't work, then I'll just do the listening every day. But I really do want to keep up with Japanese and Portuguese. The desire is still there to learn and improve at those languages. I just want to enjoy what I do to learn them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 6 of 23 29 July 2013 at 9:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Considering that your normal study routine is usually tied up with your work routine it's not
so surprising that now the summer holidays have arrived you're struggling to focus. I also find that come holiday time I have a tendency to overestimate how much time I can devote to study. There are chores to catch up on, fun things I want to do, and even on a completely free day there is only so much I can learn. When I really can't motivate myself to study but feel guilty my usual solution is to watch TV in the target language. It's easier to stay focused than the radio and takes minimal effort. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 7 of 23 29 July 2013 at 10:44am | IP Logged | ||
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The challenge is that you absolutely need breaks, in languages and in everything, but if
you take a break with language study it starts to fade. 12 months of active studying is great. Treat yourself, and give it a rest. Just make sure you get some exposure, through something you like, to keep the language alive. I wouldn't worry about keeping it 'balanced' per se. There are no grades at the end of the year, right? If you only read and your language or writing skills slip a bit, don't worry. As long as some of your skills are maintained, the others can be retrieved. ... and this advice is from someone who hits walls all the frikkin time. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 23 29 July 2013 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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When all other motivation fails, my last fallback is high-quality children's cartoons on DVD. They're typically about 23 minutes long, so it's easy to say, "I'll just watch one!" and wind up watching 3 or 4. They also have cool visuals and relatively simple language, so even if I miss some details, I still have fun.
I've done this in French with box sets of Ulysse 31 and Avatar. It helps to have something I really like. And my reading and listening comprehension has jumped considerably as a result of extensive activities during the Super Challenge. But in general, it doesn't seem to matter too much exactly how I spend my time with French. Reading, writing, watching, speaking flipping through grammar books, doing Anki reviews, reading comic books—it all seems to help. And I do take long breaks where I do nothing more than extensive activities and a handful of Anki reviews. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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