AJATT Inspiration: Make The Process Fit The Person

This is a new card I had today! Over the past few days I’ve been reading a bit from Guin Saga volume 6, and came across this word. Normally, I see this word written as 御者 so it was cool to see the new-to-me variant 馭者. I appreciate that something in my sentence bank had this variant too!

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This week, I've been thinking about all the different ways I've tried to learn Japanese over the years. All the various methods and tools I tried to use led me to what I'm doing today, so for that I am grateful. But there were certainly times where I would get frustrated with myself when I found a method wasn't working. So of course, I am reminded of this brief AJATT post.

Don’t hate yourself. Don’t get down on yourself because the method isn’t working. You’re fine. You’re not broken — the method is. Don’t cut yourself. Cut the method.

For any method or process, there are people who swear by them, people who have found success through them. Knowing that, it can be extremely frustrating trying out a method and just feeling like a failure.

Over a decade ago now, I tried to go fully monolingual for the first time. My Japanese was still extremely basic, but I read an article on JALUP about branching J-J definitions and saw the success people were having with it.

Here’s what branching may have looked like if I actually used yomichan back in the day. Except there would be way, way more back then teehee.

I absolutely did not make it far into this. I stopped and started so many different times, hoping that a new path would make it easier. This process of creating a Word document with the starting definition and then seeing how many pages down I would get before actually figuring out the first definition was so demotivating for baby me. Obviously I still learned some Japanese during this time, but I couldn’t handle that lack of motivation the more I tried to stick to the method. At one point, I started to believe that if I couldn't stick to this, then clearly I was just not cut out for learning Japanese. I stopped SRSing and doing any active learning for a long time.

Something else I tried doing, instead of using Anki or Supermemo or any other digital SRS, was the Goldlist method. I enjoyed keeping notebooks and writing with pens even as a teenager, so I figured this could be fun and engaging for me. I didn't stick to this, I felt like a failure, I stopped trying to learn for awhile. A pattern that happened all too frequently for my first decade or so.

These of course are just examples from my own learning history! There's tons of methods out there. And I will say that none of them are broken or bad necessarily - but everyone has different interests and needs. So rather than trying to force the methods onto myself, I should have instead asked myself "What do I like about these methods? How can I make them work for my own workflow?". The most important question though is “Do I like this method? Is it serving me well?”. And sometimes, I just don't like something! And that's okay to admit. It took awhile, though!

I think when it comes to self-studying, it's important to have a positive mindset. Though, that can be true for everything I guess. But it's easy to feel isolated when you're self-studying, since most of what you're doing is done, well, alone. Being able to bounce study ideas off of people and gain inspiration is incredibly important though, so try not to isolate yourself too much!

A method not working is simply more data you now have collected. It's not a mark of personal failure. You tried something new, it didn't work out, so now you can either steal the parts you didn't hate or try something else entirely. Make something for yourself that's full of recycled bits of other methods!

From my two examples above, it turns out I still really love learning from J-J definitions. I just hated the idea of branching. When I learn new words now, I can handle most monolingual definitions, but I tend to get excited when there's a new word thrown in. I'll usually find a 1T sentence from my bank for the word, and then add that word's definition. That's a more fun loop for me!
From my failed Goldlist method attempts, I learned that I always want to have a notebook nearby to write in. The act of writing feels so simple, but is something that empowers me! I just didn’t like the idea of using it as an SRS. But writing does help my memory a lot, so I always like incorporating handwriting into my days.

I can't wait to see what other things I start doing one day. I'm glad I'm finally (I hope!) over the mindset of always feeling down whenever I try something new and it doesn't work out. Like Khatz says, cut the method. Don't hurt yourself trying to force something that isn't working. It isn't your fault! There's a way out there for everyone, it's just another adventure to figure it all out! Your process doesn’t have to be someone else’s exact process.

Are there any fun things you all do when learning a language that you can't see yourself living without?
For me it's probably sentence collecting. Sentence mining and using Obsidian to collect fun sentences for a few different purposes has really made everything I do in Japanese feel like a positive feedback loop. Let me know your answer so maybe I can have more new things to try!

Anecdotally - today marks exactly 3 years from when I decided to take Japanese seriously again. My momentum hasn't let up since, and I'm really happy that something good came out of something that made me incredibly sad. I hope my grandfather is happy with how far I've come!

See you next week for February's roundup! It may not have been a hardcore month, but boy howdy do I have some ideas for March!!