There was the article about how the only person you’re worthy of competing against is yourself. AndI ffeel like I’m losing, and badly. When I first started learning Japanese, people told me not to because well, as a kindergarten kid I took Chinese lessons… and I sucked. Completely. But I remembered hating all the pronunciations and how the characters looked like really ugly scribbles. Then in junior high a friend introduced me to Vocaloid and I obsessed over understanding the lyrics and started learning some vocab through transliterating the lyrics. Then at the third year of junior high my school introduced Japanese as part of the language programme. Well of course I took it, and it turned out most of my classmates were more advanced than I am. I didn’t want to be left behind so I learned all 92 kana within 2 days. That’s when I realised that if I truly wanted to learn something, I really could. I remembered my friends’ confusion when they realised I could read kana just fine (if not a bit… or a lot slower with mistakes such as mixing さand き up and… ツソシンノ) when I thought kana was just a bunch of swirly characters barely a few days ago.

The point is, before, when I wanted to do things, I actually got up and did it, or at least try to. Nowadays I just can’t and putting the slightest bit effort is so…

I mean, whenever I watch an anime and find out that I could understand a whole sentence except for one word and the subtitles turn out to be screwed up, I still jot them down to search up later. Partly because it’s rare for me to get to watch an anime, so I feel I should make use of the opportunity to study (yes, I’m that sort of person) and partly because I truly want to know what the word means.

But still I just feel like a failure in general..

Also, you should expand your environment. Don’t just focus on listening/watching; you should read too! It will help improve your language ability in different ways than listening will, and you can look up unknown words while you’re at it and learn them that way. (It isn’t necessary to look up every word, however. Just look up the ones that you want to.

I’m doing Russian all the time, for almost 4 months now, 4-10 hours a day, watching a lot of movies (since every movie is free on google in russian, this would typically be something I would continue if I am fluent one day).
Although I notice improvement since I started, the improvement is somehow different then I expected. In stead of learning new words, I now recognize the words I already knew in more situations (and more often). Which makes me wonder… will I ever learn the difficult/fancy words? And do I need to (since I still can’t follow everything in a movie)? Do I need to switch gear and also read?

I’m not doing any SRS because I’m to lazy, it just seems so much work (and a little boring).

Regards,
Tom

I suffer from social anxiety and this s##t of bad thoughts, failures… make life a hell. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. It’s so difficult to make it go away and start thinking positive.

But the thing is start. Right now.