Setting your priorities for successful Japanese study

Sun 25th Jul 2010

 10

 by 

 Chris Gaunt

 in Journal

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It all depends on your goals in life, but if learning Japanese is something you wish to do, you will need to make sacrifices at some point. Some of you will have made that sacrifice by spending years at university to study Japanese. I wish I'd done the same, but life takes us down different paths.

I'm still self-tutoring, whilst working full-time, meaning I am the student and the teacher. It's tough work, but I get to learn about myself in the process. I've found no book, website or piece of software is going to do it all for you. You have to be tough on yourself. One thing you have to do is sort out your priorities.

It's easy to be distracted, especially with the internet a few clicks away. It's also very easy to fool yourself into thinking you're doing a good job of studying by doing everything online. If smart.fm tells you you've done enough, is it right? Most likely not. You really have to keep questioning if what you are doing is moving you forwards in your study at a decent pace.

One way to sort out your priorities is to make sacrifices. To give you an idea of what I mean here are some of the sacrifices I have made for my goal of learning Japanese.

Sure I could start trying to play games in Japanese, but I've tried that and more often than not I'm focusing on the game and winning, not on the menu options or the dialogue. So that just didn't work. I love gaming, and always will, but even in Japanese it's not time well spent.

So I have quit playing games and have set them as goals. Once I pass JLPT N1 I can play games again, like Diablo III and Starcraft II, which I want to play sooo badly!

N1 is the final test in the JLPT set. That's going to take me a long time to pass! That's why I've made gaming the final reward. It has to come last, because it's so distracting. If I set it as a reward for passing JLPT N3 then my study is going to take a nose dive, I just know it.

Sometimes you have to work around your own weaknesses. One of my weaknesses is that once I get into a good game, book or programming project I just have to finish it, sometimes neglecting things, such as study or washing the dishes ^^

I recently got hooked on the Warhammer 40k books. They are just a perfect match for me and I can devour a trilogy set in record time. However these too only distract me from my goal.

So I've packed up my English language books. The books aren't going anywhere, they will still be there when I come back to the them in a year or so. Now I'm reading and studying Yotsubato, and this time I will get to the end of the first book! It's just slow going at the start.

I love web development. I enjoy making new sites, new applications and trying out new programming languages. It's good for my career, but I'm living in Japan now, language comes before anything else in business. Sure I can put together an awesome web app, but if I can't talk in Japanese what use am I to anyone here in Japan?!

So all my side projects are on hold until further notice.

I've gone through phases of love and hate with blogging, but recently began enjoying it again. I have ideas for a new design & content structure I want to implement but it's going to take time. Once again this is just another distraction and does not add any benefit to my study.

I'll keep blogging, about once or twice a week, but until I pass JLPT N5, the very first level, I can't redesign or do much development on this blog.

I'm a movie addict, but from now on I'm forcing myself to watch with Japanese audio. This means I will miss some major cinema releases, but that's fine. I will just have a lot of awesome movies to enjoy once I reach my goal.

I have a ton of English music, but now it's all stored on a remote Amazon S3 account. The only music on my computer is Japanese. I'm even listening to kids nursery rhymes, it's kinda fun!

That's all the sacrifices I can think of right now, but during each day I am thinking "Hey, I should be doing this in Japanese" and do my best to continue doing so in Japanese.

Some of you might not need any rewards or incentives, the enjoyment of learning Japanese is enough for you. Well, I am jealous, because I love Japanese, I find kanji fascinating, but I still suffer from burnout or I get distracted.

So now I'm not only the student & the teacher, but I am also the bootcamp army sergeant, kicking my ass whenever I get distracted.

What sacrifices have you made?