Failure

Okay. So that was bullshit.

I think I made it about 3 or 4 weeks or 2 or 3 months before I completely burned out; that can extrapolated through this combined graph:

You can kinda see two efforts. Two spikes of drive. So it’s obvious that passion and motivation are good but not sustainable resources. After a while it became agonizing, un-fun. After which point the spark was gone. Then I quit all vocabulary practice for about two or three weeks before I was able to start up again. When I did restart I started meandering between objectives and found that more immediately fulfilling than the route memorization of a single deck. So far I’ve dabbled in several, trying to get caught up to ‘where I am’ in the Genki Series. With “Genki 0” being the primary point of failure in this report.

I still believe consistency is the key here and one thing I’ve found I love is graphing my activities:

• アンキ Flash cards, apps, and route memorization
• 教科書(きょうかしょ) Time spent with text books
• ヤンーさん Online/YouTube “Learn Japanese” videos
• 読んでいる Reading
• 見ている Watching
• 聞きている Listening
• 話している Speaking
• 書きている Writing
• 教室(きょうしつ) Time spent engaged in actual instruction

Trying to maintain an everyday effort was a bit too much for me breaks are necessary during study at all levels. So I’ve refactored all of my time slots to allow Saturday to be a day of absolute leisure all across the board. I’d already done this with guitar and since then haven’t felt the pressure of failure with it since I’d started. This idea greatly allows me to maintain consistency which allows ‘the process‘ to take hold.

So speaking of guitar, things are moving along with the Fuga, I managed to make it through a section of the Fuga without hurting myself:

This was section 4 and puts me at 2 of 4 parts completed in the Fuga. Sometime around in the middle of January I hope to start on section 3. The process becomes more apparent in my guitar studies and I aim to take what I’ve learned from guitar and apply it to the process of language learning.

Because we trust the process.

So let’s see where this gets me….