Month: September 2019

Posted in Languages, Reading, Study methods, Video games

THE PERFECT GAME GENRE FOR LANGUAGE ENTHUSIASTS

Posted on by Mikuwashi

I’ve always liked playing video games. It has all started when I was around 5 and my dad bought a Pegasus and, obviously, Mario Bros to go with it. We often played together or I tried my skills alone and we often compared who managed to progress further – mind you, those were the times when save function wasn’t a thing in games! So every time you ran a game, you had to start it from the very beginning!

Later I discovered computer’s DOS games (Jazz Jackrabbit was lit!) and the world of computer games for Windows opened up to me. My family knew all about my hobby and, surprisingly, supported it with birthday or Christmas presents! Before you blink your eyes and reread the previous sentence, completely confused, remember that those were the 90s and gaming in my country was still considered pretty much a boys’ hobby and a bad, unhealthy hobby, too – girls like me were supposed to love Barbies and plushies. Thank God my parents were of modern thinking which meant games and Lego for me – I’d never shown much interest in dolls. Still, video gaming was restricted for most of my childhood – I got 30-60 minutes of play per day and my beloved GameBoy Color was being taken away for the school year and returned to me for summer and winter holidays. Still, I used every opportunity to play games in my free time and I still do, over 20 years later.

When I started learning English, it wouldn’t surprise you that I learnt A LOT from the games I played – especially that in 90s game translation was a rare thing in my country. We got tons of games which were not translated at all and basically imported untouched (thus available only in English, or they just translated the box and the manual, but the gameplay was entirely in English). At the time, it was frustrating, because some games you wanted to play were not translated and playing them was trial and error at first in order to figure out HOW exactly to play the game. That was especially true with Nintendo and Playstation games. I don’t remember when first translated Playstation titles hit, but it was pretty late (I’d even guess post-Playstation 2). Anyway, we had to deal with gaming in English – apart from the language benefits it was a double-edged sword because we were kids and kids are kids – if you didn’t understand something, you got angry and you dropped it, getting no language practice out of it as a result. But when you’re a kid, you don’t perceive games in another language that way.

When it came to language teaching methodology, nobody was talking about using video games as a language resource at that point as well. Everybody who played games was wasting their time in front of the screen, in the others’ opinion. This is one of the reasons why I’d never really recognised how much progress I made in English thanks to games. Fortunately, I finally did when I started learning Japanese – it was already late 2000s, times changed, I grew up and was more aware of how I study and consume knowledge. So when I asked myself what would be the most pleasurable thing for me to consume in Japanese, my mind immediately hinted that I should play some games.

But which games wouldn’t require a high level of proficiency in a language? I mean, it’s one thing when you can take your time to read and understand and, if things get too difficult, finally open that dictionary you hate so much. But it’s another story when a game moves forward before you have even finished reading a sentence simply because the game itself was programmed to do so after a few seconds… Or when you cannot move forward with your game because you don’t understand how its gameplay and mechanics work and thus you put the game away. This is something that actually happened to me when I ran Pokemon Blue for the first time (I was only a kid at the time and my English skills weren’t great, obviously, as I had just started learning it), I couldn’t pass further than the second town because I didn’t understand that I was supposed to go back to the first town to deliver a parcel. So I got stuck until I stumbled upon a Polish walkthrough and was finally able to move on. On a side note, Pokemon games were a major factor that contributed to my English proficiency – I played all of them until Sun and Moon series and replayed most of them several times. The fact that you have to repeatedly choose specific attacks and perform other repetitive actions really add up to your language skills if you’re a gamer.

Taking my above-mentioned gaming experience into account, I immediately knew that I didn’t want to play a game in Japanese I wouldn’t enjoy, simply because it would be less rich in text or of a disliked genre (for example, I don’t play sports games or shooters) at the cost of it having a lower level of language difficulty. Luckily, 2 years earlier I’d started to play games of a particular genre which was just perfect for the job: the game didn’t move from one text to another without you clicking to confirm it, it had simple game mechanics, so you don’t have to focus too much on understanding them (and they are also almost the same in most titles of this genre, so once you learn how to play them, you can play any game of this genre, just learn one or two differences in the title’s mechanics and you’re good to play it without any manual every time) AND, what was the best and most valuable feature of it, almost all of the text appearing in the game was DUBBED by voice actors, so I wouldn’t have to worry about encountering a word I could understand but didn’t know how it was written – the in-game characters were talking to me, the player, and what they were saying was displayed on the screen at the same time – this feature really cut down on my dictionary search time.

That genre is visual novel.

The mechanics of visual novel are very simple and friendly even to a person inexperienced in video gaming – your only job is to click or hit a specific button (e.g. on Playstation it’s X or O on the gamepad) in order to make the appearing text progress and you have to make some choice once in a while – usually you, as the game’s protagonist, are supposed to choose between 3-4 different options you’re offered (it can be a line the protagonist is supposed to response with or an action they choose to perform) and depending on that choice the game progresses in different ways (and leads to different endings – each visual novel usually has multiple possible endings). If you’ve ever played heavily plot-driven games like Life is Strange, Heavy Rain, Beyond, The Walking Dead – you know what I’m talking about.

Yet, visual novels are much more simple, there usually isn’t any walking on the screen, it’s more static – you can see the text box, the background image and a character sprite on the screen. Let me show you an example: 

Zettai Kaikyuu Gakuen, my favourite visual novel game

In the game, you mainly read a bunch of text while the characters, background scenery and text appearing on the screen change. The purpose of the game is to, basically, read the whole story, as you would read a book from cover to cover. Sounds boring? But pour some background music, sound effects (like broken glass or rain), voice acting, diversity of characters’ images (with different facial expressions, too!), rich plot, occasional extra detailed image (they’re commonly known as CGs, i.e. computer graphics and they usually show a scene from the game that you’re experiencing at the moment), gamepad or console vibration to the mix and you get an exciting and engaging emotional roller-coaster, that is visual novel games.

When a CG is inserted in the game, the plot still progresses, but instead of usual sprites on a background, you get a beautifully drawn image depicting the scene

In a sense, visual novels are like typical paper novels, but more interactive in their nature, as you can influence the outcome of the plot (the story usually has various endings – both good and bad ones – and it’s quite fun to discover them all), you can also see the characters (and their facial expressions too, since sprites are not the same all the time – the game usually includes several sprites of the same character with different facial expressions and clothes, which only adds to the experience), see the setting of a scene, hear the sound effects, listen to the background music (actually, they have great soundtracks and, to tell the truth, most of my favourite motivational tracks come from video games!), hear the characters’ voices and so on (I mean, especially in otome games, if you put the headphones on, it’s an amazing, out-of-the-world experience, as they use a special equipment called “dummy head mic” to record the voices. Because of that, if a game character is supposed to whisper in your ear – you’re under the impression that he/she REALLY is whispering straight into your ear. This is why I enjoy those games so, so much).

This is a perfect example of HOW MANY different sprites were created for just ONE CHARACTER in Persona 4 game – and this guy isn’t the protagonist!

So, in a way, visual novels are like a book but in a game format. However, you get as much reading practice as you would with a book, just with some handicap – because most of the text is displayed and read by the voice actors at the same time (usually excluding the protagonist’s and the narrator’s lines – but that makes a nice change and a welcomed challenge in-between the dubbed parts). You can also turn the voice acting completely off in the menu if you want a real challenge. Or just mute chosen characters – most visual novels include such options in the game’s settings.

Yuki Kaji, Japanese voice actor and a dummy head mic

I mostly play otome games, which is a romance in visual novel format. Of course, like it is with books, you can get visual novels of basically any genre – horrors, sci-fi, drama, comedy, slice of life, mystery and so on. The same thing goes with their language version – English and Japanese ones are the most common, but many visual novels have been translated to major European languages, like Spanish, German or French, so you can purchase those instead if that’s your target language. Just pick your poison and get some practice! 

Horror and mystery game called Death Mark (it’s available in English, too!)

What’s more, visual novels can be nicely fused with other game genres – I know very successful and engaging fusions between RPGs and visual novels (e.g. Pokemon, Persona, Ys, Trails of and Tales of franchises), horror and visual novels (Corpse Party, Death Mark) or point-and-click games and visual novels (Virtue’s Last Reward and the entire 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors franchise, Danganronpa or Ace Attorney). Not to mention the fact that you can also replay games you’ve already conquered in another language – not necessarily visual novels, but of other genres too! If you know the game’s mechanics, it makes it that much easier for you to play them, as you only have to focus on the dialogues and the plot – and they’re also something you’ve already read before, so it’s like reading Harry Potter in another language – you know the plot by heart, but you discover how it was translated or, as it is with Japanese visual novels, how they sounded in the original – I actually find it fascinating to get to know how some jokes sounded in Japanese, how closely something was translated, what was lost in the translation process and so on.

For instance, I’m a hardcore JRPG fan and love their rich plots as well as game mechanics, so I often play those (and they also feature tons of standard visual novels elements, like rich dialogues or voice acting, especially when the in-game characters are talking with each other! Just take a look at the example below). After giving visual novels a try, I made a brave choice to include JRPGs in my Japanese gaming mix – but only those I’d finished before, so I know their gameplay mechanics inside out. As of last week, I purchased a game of my favourite JRPG franchises of all time, that is Persona. I got myself a copy of Persona 4 Golden in Japanese as a result. I can’t wait for it to come and play it in the original! I’m definitely going to tell you about my experience with this one!

Persona 4’s visual novel elements
Persona 4’s RPG elements (battle)

As I’ve said in my last entry, the great thing is that because a visual novel is a game, it tends to draw you in, as games usually do, and you get curious about what’s going to happen next. As a result, rather than checking your dictionary every time you don’t understand something, you usually continue playing without that dictionary search. That is why games are great for what I’ve talked about the last time – immersion and understanding the unknown from the context. And you can benefit from visual novels especially, with their rich and captivating plots and long gameplay. Getting every ending takes around 20-30 hours of playing – that varies from title to title, of course, but it’s usually that much.

Yet, if you use games for language practice, you have to take into consideration that this hour estimate is about games you can play comfortably, that is without taking breaks to check your dictionary (so either when you’re already advanced in a language or the game’s in your mother tongue). I usually take much more time when I’m playing in Japanese because I’m not fluent yet – in total, it can take several weeks before I finish a game.

As for the games’ prices and where to import them from, I plan on writing a separate post about my games, manga and books shopping tips and sources – I’m going to publish a post on that in 2 weeks. The next week’s topic is going to be an extension of this entry – since I’d revealed that I was going to publish a post about video gaming and language learning, many people approached me, asking what game I would recommend for their level. This is why the next blog post is going to cover my personal recommendations for visual novels on 3 levels of Japanese language proficiency – easy, intermediate and hard – as well as how to evaluate whether a game we’re interested in is going to be suitable for our language level. Stay tuned for next week!

Posted in Languages, Reading, Study methods

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T USE A DICTIONARY WHILE READING

Posted on by Mikuwashi

My parents and school teachers always told me that if I read a lot, I would pick up orthography and new words more quickly. It was especially true for Polish, my mother tongue, since its orthography and grammar are quite complex and difficult, and mastering them takes almost 6 years of primary school and the majority of your time at junior high (currently probably less, since junior high has been abolished in the recent reforms and instead of 6 years of primary school and 3 years of both junior high and high school, we reverted to 8 years of primary school and 4 years of high school). As a result, we, Polish kids, spent a lot of time just completing tons of grammar and orthography exercises during our Polish classes, in tandem with learning about our country’s literature.

So when I started learning Japanese and I first had to learn both hiragana and katakana – I wasn’t surprised that it was going to take some time. In fact, I kind of expected it and my Japanese sensei (teacher) only confirmed my speculations. So, learning both basic Japanese syllabaries was accompanied with hours and hours of reading and writing practice. And it still is, because after you open the door to that world of around 2000 kanjis (borrowed Chinese characters used in Japanese; you usually start learning them after you grasp hiragana and katakana) and their readings, you realise that mastering them is definitely going to take time.

Here’s another one of my quick remarks: I’m perfectly aware that not all languages use such a distinct writing system. Lots of languages people choose to learn use your typical Latin alphabet and I’m going to address reading in such languages further down in this post. But for now, I’m going to discuss the problem of reading in a language which has its own writing system.

I wasn’t surprised that one of the first pieces of advice that my sensei gave me was to “read as often and as much as you can, as it will help you recognise those characters more quickly“. Sensei‘s advice brought that slow acquisition of Polish orthography to my mind, so I adhered to her tip straight away, believing that it was going to bring the same results as reading in Polish did – and just as fast, too.

So I started to read. However, since Japanese writing system is far more complex, I immediately hit a wall – in opposition to Polish, which used Latin alphabet, I soon realised that simply “reading” sentences wasn’t going to be THAT easy! The reason for that was that a Japanese sentence consists of characters written with the use of hiragana, katakana AND kanji. Even if you can already read the first two, the latter creates many problems even for native Japanese – each character usually has several readings which only adds to their complexity and, as a result, makes it very difficult to read correctly, especially for a beginner. Yes, there are texts which use just hiragana (like most beginner textbooks use only hiragana and katakana at first, to get you used to those and then slowly exchanges words with their actual kanji that it teaches you over the course of the book) or with furigana (which is an annotation in hiragana, located above a word written in kanji, that shows how this word should be read) so if you’ve only started learning Japanese – go for kids books or special readers targeted at beginners. This way you won’t have to check for words you understand, but don’t know how to write them yet (this is perfectly normal with Japanese – you gradually switch from writing and knowing a word in hiragana only to their standard spelling in kanji). But there always comes a time when, even in beginners’ books, appears a kanji which doesn’t have furigana and you don’t know how to read that word yet. That’s when a dictionary should be the first “person” you go to.

However, checking that dictionary is a mundane and boring hold up that usually brings frustration, especially if you have to do it several times in a row (sometimes even a few times within ONE sentence), because you don’t know how to READ this and that word. It’s even more frustrating when the word turns out to be one of those you actually know the meaning of, but you just simply weren’t aware it’s written this way. And of course, after checking it in the dictionary, even if you encounter it just a few lines later – you don’t remember it anymore, because you checked so many words on the way that it becomes confusing. What to do then?

Keep a notebook and write down those new words, maybe?

I’m in strong opposition to keeping vocabulary notebooks. I’ve rarely done it at school (only because the teachers required it) and I’m not going to start now – well, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t tried to do so in the past. I had, in fact. Quite a few times. Was it helpful? No, because searching for a word written down on paper takes much more time than using an electronic or online dictionary’s search bar to get the same result. Not to mention the fact that it didn’t help me remember the words – as I said, if you write down too many new words at once, they get mixed in your mind and you have trouble recalling them. Time-wise, it’s much more effective to check them in your dictionary again.

But you can incorporate a little trick of mine into that dictionary search: try recalling the word first before looking it up. Think about the context in which you first stumbled upon that word. What was it connected with? What images did it bring to your mind? What was going on in the plot by then? Was this word used in a line a character said? If asking yourself such questions doesn’t help you trigger your memory, then go ahead and use that dictionary. But repeat the trick every time you see a word that you know you had encountered and checked before – after some time a memory of that word will pop up and believe me, there’s nothing more satisfactory than recalling a word on your own and then just making sure that you were correct (with the use of a dictionary).

There’s also another consequence of keeping a vocabulary notebook: the more new words you add, the more your frustration builds up and results in faster fatigue when reading and/or even leaving reading for some time altogether due to demotivation hitting in. Not to mention the fact that a mere thought of reading AGAIN puts you off and that’s something you don’t want to happen. As I’ve mentioned before, learning a language should be a pleasure, not a burden.

After several times of enthusiastically starting a new notebook for a new manga or short story and dropping them when that fatigue struck and discouraged me too strongly, I did what I do best: I drew conclusions after observing my behaviour while practising reading in Japanese. You should do the very same thing. Just ask yourself:

What is the best and most rewarding way to read in TL for ME?

In my case it was manga, tv series (including anime) and… video games. Because manga is a comic, it’s much easier to understand what is happening. In novels, you have to read those (sometimes quite vast) descriptions and narration in order to fully comprehend what’s going on. In manga, everything is presented with pictures, the only bits left to read are the monologues/dialogues, minor narration (like “3 months later the protagonist did…”) and onomatopoeia. Consequently, you don’t have to worry too much about not understanding what the characters of the story are doing – you can deduce a lot just from the frames, characters’ facial expressions and mimics as well as their actions. Manga’s also a much faster read – in fact, I keep a daily routine connected with it. Around 2 months ago, I obliged myself to read at least 1 manga chapter a day – the shortest chapters, published weekly, are only 19 pages long, so if I have a very bad day in terms of reading, I choose one of those to keep my routine. Normally I read around 30-50 pages of manga a day – again, depends on chapter’s length. There are also days when I read more chapters, but that’s entirely up to me. What’s more, as my own rule, reading more chapters does not count towards next days – meaning that if I read 3 chapters in one day, I cannot slack off for the next two days because I “read those days’ ration”. No, I have to read at least 1 chapter anyway and I’m proud to say that I stick to this resolution most times (I usually give myself 1 day off a week).

Another great source of reading practice for me is video games. I’ve been playing them for years, ever since I was a child, and at first I played them only in my mother tongue, obviously, then I used them to learn English. Well, to tell the truth, I didn’t use them consciously as a source of language practice – I was too young for such ideas. But there were a lot of games I wanted to play and there wasn’t a Polish version available, so the only solution was to buy and play the English version. As a result, I acquired most of my English skills from playing games and because of that positive experience with them language-wise, I gave them a try with my Japanese.

What’s great is the fact that because they’re games, they tend to draw you in. As a result, rather than checking your dictionary every 5 seconds when you don’t understand something that appears on the screen, you just say “Ah, screw it!” and continue playing it without taking breaks for a dictionary search. When you get into the game’s plot like you would while reading a good book, you automatically start to read more and more – simply because you’re curious what’s going to happen next. And that curiosity facilitates something I find a crucial skill in reading in your TL – guessing the meaning of a word/sentence from the context.

As a matter of fact, if you ask around, only a small number of people who are learning a foreign language do that! People tend to reach for a dictionary the second they encounter something they don’t understand instead of letting their brains do what they do best – fill in the missing information and use the context to fill that gap. Our brains are incredible in that department if you only let them! So, if you don’t understand something, read more, let your brain stomach the information it just received and let it try to give you the answer based on the context. It might surprise how much you can actually understand from the text itself, the arts (if you’re reading comics or playing a game) or your previous experience with a book (if you’d read it in your mother tongue before, for example).

What is more, if the languages you already know and the language(s) you’re studying are somehow related (e.g. they have words of Latinate origin, they belong to the same language family etc.), you can use their similarities to carry over the meaning of a word from the language you know to your target language. The same principle concerns different parts of speech – if you already know the adjective, you can figure out on your own that some word is a noun from the same word family.

Besides, the more you read this way, the more adapted to this method your brain becomes and, consequently, the more skilful in grasping what you’re reading about it becomes. Because as you read, your brain constantly acquires that new vocabulary without you realising it. And the more you come across a word in different contexts, the more your brain narrows down and specifies its actual definition. After some time you can notice that you essentially KNOW some word and even several uses of it!

This is how I learnt English – by grasping the meaning from the context rather than actual at-desk textbook studying. Funnily enough, when I’m asked what a word or phrase translates to in my mother tongue, I have trouble with this because I’d never checked equivalent of some words before, as I’d understood their meanings almost subconsciously upon encounter. However, I could provide tons of contexts and situations in which you would use a specific word/phrase and that, in my opinion, is more valuable than being able to translate the words. After all, when you’re speaking, you should subconsciously choose what words suit best in the conversation you’re having, rather than translating what you want to say from your mother tongue (AKA consciously creating a sentence). It is, unfortunately, what many people do. But that is an issue suitable for another blog entry.

Moreover, if you put your dictionary down and trust your brain’s instinct, you become that much closer to immersion in your target language – something that tremendously boosts your language acquisition and comprehension. If you don’t rely on your dictionary, you don’t force your brain to constantly switch between two languages. It stays focused on one language, only making that immersion easier. It’s like when want to cook something on two separate frying pans, but keep on jumping between them and switching off the one you’re not using at the moment because you don’t want your food to get burnt. When you get back to it, it has to heat up again. Similar thing happens to your brain when you switch between languages – it hast to boot and get into that „mother tongue” or „target language” mode all over again. However, if you stay immersed in one language (even if it’s just during your study or reading session) then that boot doesn’t have to happen repeatedly and, in consequence, your brain gets „better” at operating in the foreign language.

A lot of people say that for real immersion you should just pack and go to a country where your target language is spoken. It’s true, I’ve done and experienced it myself, but I believe that it can also be done (to some extent of course) within your four walls. That requires some dedication and free time, but it CAN BE DONE. You just have to surround yourself with as much language input as possible and limit your mother tongue input or any other distractions to a minimum. For example, ask your family not to bother you while you’re having a study session. On the other hand, increase that target language input to the maximum – read, play, watch something. Leave that dictionary alone (unless it’s monolingual dictionary – then you’re still staying within your target language) and let your brain do its magic and absorb as much language as it can (you will feel it overheating, just like you probably do when overstudying and your brain begs you for a break).

For instance, when I was playing a game called Prince of Stride, which is about a high school stride club (in the game, stride is a new type of team sport, a parkour-like relay on a prepared course), apart from the text, it incorporated some new mechanics that appeared only when the protagonist’s team was competing – like you had to pick the order in which your team would run or you had to perfectly time the runners’ relay itself in order to win and so on. Combined with the plot, the art, the characters (and their voice actors) and the soundtrack, it was so enjoyable, that I binge-played this game for 4-5 hours straight every day after work and it took me around 3 weeks to complete it in full (to get all the endings) and I basically hadn’t used the dictionary AT ALL (just a few times maybe, when I really couldn’t grasp the context). As a result, after a few days, I was in a total immersion mode and started DREAMING in Japanese. My mouth moved on its own to express myself in Japanese while having trouble to speak in my mother tongue – the exposure to TL was just so immense that my mind had to answer with me producing the language. Fantastic feeling and one of the many reasons I recommend gaming to any language learners. In fact, I’m going to write more on games in my next post where I’ll present my choices of game genres that are particularly useful and friendly to language learners even if they don’t have much gaming experience or skills. So stay tuned for next week!

Prince of Stride: Team order choice screen

As you can see, you don’t really have to use your dictionary while reading. As a result, you get much more pleasurable and smooth reading experience. Of course, if you come across a sentence or a passage so packed with new vocabulary or grammar structures that you cannot decipher it – feel free to use that dictionary! I do that too, but I limit its usage to those extreme cases. Apart from that, I use the context and I recommend this way to you as well, as I find it more satisfactory and, obviously, much faster. It also feels very rewarding to be able to understand more and more without depending on a dictionary. Many pleasant readings!

Posted in Attitude, Choices and sacrifices, Motivation, Study methods

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAKING CHOICES AND SACRIFICES

Posted on by Mikuwashi

I really like Instagram. Sure, I like Facebook too, but I truly grew to like Instagram over the last 3 years since I opened @mikuwashi. At the moment, I’m following a variety of accounts: bullet journal-related, watercolour-related, Japan-related and a few months ago so-called language studygrams joined my “following” list, too.

As more and more posts uploaded by self-study language learners started to pop out in my feed, I began to notice that while most of the posts had this positive undertone in regard to that person’s studies, some posts were of complaining or demotivational nature, like: “I’m studying X atm, such a pain” or “I finally finished topic X, almost died doing it”. I often approached such people via dm (as I find it completely understandable that most people don’t like some pointing-out remarks being thrown in their face in the comment section) and asked them WHY they are/were studying such a topic then if it doesn’t “spark joy” in them (if we were to quote Marie Kondo’s famous words). 

Here’s a quick remark – I’m not talking about topics people find difficult for them. Everyone has their strong and weak spots in terms of topics, grammar structures, even words (some of them just can’t stick, no matter what you do to remember them). In such cases, it’s only natural that people need more time to grasp a particular term or structure that they find confusing – it depends on a person and is completely normal. It’s also a separate issue when you’re going to school or university and the teachers ask you to learn something because it’s in the curriculum and you need to learn it in order to pass a subject or to get a better grade. Yet, as I’ve already underlined in one of my previous posts, I believe it’s possible to give yourself room for choice and freedom in your official education. Just not as much as you can when studying on your own. However, here I’m talking about learning a topic, vocabulary or some other aspect of a language or target culture that doesn’t interest you or that you find completely unnecessary in your studies, yet you go over it anyway – just „BECAUSE”.

Most people I asked were independent learners and they were unable to tell why exactly they do that. Some even gave it a longer thought because it had never occurred to them before that they HAVE A CHOICE not to follow the textbook 100%. “Because it’s in the book and I do it from cover to cover”, “because I saw other people learning it so I’m doing it too” or “because I have to” – those were most common answers I received. But another question immediately popped in my head: who imposes this topic it on you if you’re self-studying? The answer is simple: only yourself. So why aren’t you questioning your material? Why don’t you stop for a second and give yourself room to think: do I really need this?

Why do we tend to learn everything we encounter without filtering information? For example, if we have just started our journey with a language and right now we’re learning its first grammar aspects like basic tenses, why do we tend to learn ALL the uses of a particular tense? “Because I won’t have to go back and learn it later” – sure, but are you going to use all, give or take, 7 uses of Present Simple (if you’re learning English)? Do you really need to know that you can use it to comment a football match or is the fact, that you can use it to talk about your daily routine enough for a beginner?

Of course, you don’t need to know that and you even shouldn’t. At least not in the beginning – unless you want to feel as if you’re going in circles without making any progress as you’re too focused on stopping and learning everything there is instead of moving forward. Give yourself time, you’re not going to become fluent in one day. There will come a day when that match commentary will be crucial to you and that’s when you will learn that Present Simple can be used there. You have to realise that fluency is a long journey, it takes a lot of time and effort and (unfortunately) it never ends – languages evolve and change all the time, so we have to update our knowledge. Instead, be patient and do things at your own pace – don’t look how fast the others are going, don’t get discouraged that somebody could grasp a particular topic faster than you – they’re probably thinking the same thing when you breeze through something else they found difficult and time-consuming.

This is one of the reasons I love “Try!” books so much (grammar books for Japanese). They’re divided by their JLPT level (where level 1 is the highest, advanced, and level 5 is the lowest, elementary) and even if some structure was introduced on the elementary level, they gradually present its additional uses in the next books. For example, in the book for N4 level, I learned that なら (nara) is used to create a conditional sentence. In the book for N3, I learned that besides the conditional, you can also use it to make a suggestion or to give advice. Providing information bit by bit is something I truly appreciate in grammar books – instead of throwing all there is to know about a structure in your face, they reveal more and more uses before you with each book, just as your language competency grows and you’re ready for that next twist.

Yet, even if we do pace ourselves and try to do things our way, why do we still treat textbooks as some kind of a bible that tells us what exactly needs to be studied? They don’t always cover everything, after all. It doesn’t include certain topics that you’re curious about – you’re left on your own trying to submerge into the Internet for answers and information. And also – why are we reluctant to skip something that doesn’t interest us or doesn’t bring pleasure but we decide to succumb to pain and endurance instead? Does covering all the material bring satisfaction? Yes, perfectionism brings pleasure somehow, but is it worth the discomfort and/or decrease of motivation?

The answer is simple: no, it isn’t.

It’s one of the first conclusions that had come to me, even before I graduated. I hated the fact that I was forced to study something I didn’t perceive as useful or interesting. It made me sick to my stomach to think of learning such material. There were times when I sat in the class and wondered “Hey, what am I doing here? I’m wasting my time.”

Do you want to waste your time?

Or do you want to feel you’re on the right track and making progress towards your goal?

Then make choices in your own studies.

But also learn to make sacrifices.

Because if you start to choose what to learn, you will have to sacrifice something at the same time. That’s what choices in studying means – they are intertwined with sacrifices. That’s exactly what happens when you take responsibility for your own studies rather than rely on somebody else’s judgement (like school’s, in form of a curriculum or teacher’s demands) in terms of the studied material. You have to learn to omit, to skip, to sacrifice things on your way towards fluency. TO omit, not HOW to omit. Before all else, you need to realise that you CAN actually omit stuff you don’t like or don’t want to learn. HOW to do that surfaces later and is a very personal matter – it’s all about you and your choices in the end. But first, take a breath and do that initial step – embrace the freedom of choice that was given to you and make the most of it. Because I’m guessing you’re gunning for that fluency, right? You want to understand your target language, speak it, devour it, chew it and then release your progress to the world?

After you start thinking about those two aspects, you’ve already become a different, more aware learner. This is something school doesn’t teach you, at least it didn’t teach me – it asked me to blindly follow what was imposed. So I did, I didn’t ask questions WHY we have to study this. Nobody taught me to think differently. But at some point, when my frustration was on the verge of exploding, I started questioning myself: does studying really have to look like that?

No, it doesn’t.

After realising that simple fact, your world of studying starts to change. It’s terrifying at first – you don’t yet know how to make that choice CORRECTLY. But let me reassure you – there’s no right or wrong here. It’s perfectly fine to make mistakes and take your decision back. Yes, they’re reversible! After all, you’re growing in your studies, you’re gaining knowledge, so of course your choices are going to differ, too. Heck, even things outside your studies change, you’re maturing as a person, your life situation and preferences become different – so obviously they’re going to influence the way you study and alter it.

My N4 vocabulary textbook with 3 types of vocabulary highlights I use

For instance, when I learn vocabulary, I tend to highlight words. I actually have a separate colour (grass green) dedicated to, as I call them, “bullsh*t” words that I choose to skip. This colour helps me recognise them and go “Oh, THAT word. What was it? (Checks the word) Oh. Okay. Let’s move on.” For example, when I was doing my vocabulary textbook for the N4 exam, I stumbled upon the word for the catholic church. I hovered over it with my usual highlighter for new vocabulary (orange) and then suddenly thought: “You know what? I don’t need this. I’m not going to waste my time memorising something I find unnecessary”. And that’s when I chose another highlighter for words I’m skipping. Why do I highlight them at all if I don’t want to pay attention to them? Simple enough: as I create flashcards, my eyes just search for any highlights on the page – if I see green, my brain already knows that even though it’s a new word, I can carry on looking for other highlights without bothering with the green ones. If I see orange, I know it’s a new one and needs to be added to my flashcards for sure.

To tell the truth, I use a third colour too – dirty yellow. It indicates that I had trouble recalling what that word meant but I have definitely encountered it before and I label it as necessary to my studies. What’s more, if I use that yellow to highlight, I leave myself a bit freedom, as it’s a signal that I can postpone the final choice whether I want to learn this word till the time flashcards will be made. As a result of such colour-coding, I don’t have to read the entire page again, I just scan it for highlights every time I create new flashcards.

You can actually see how I remade my decision on two words

The same situation happened with Japanese words 輸出 (yushutsu; export) and 輸入 (yunyuu; import), which I have highlighted with green at first, as I thought: “Hey, I’m not going to read stuff about economy, so I don’t need them”. The funny thing is, these two came back to bite me in the ass and I’ve encountered them numerous time since I first saw them in my vocabulary book, not only in economic context! So I went back and rehighlighted them with orange and then quickly added them to my flashcards.

This is one more thing that’s important about choices – don’t be ashamed of them. If it turns out you actually need something you initially omitted, don’t be afraid to MAKE YOUR CHOICE again and welcome something back in your studies. Nobody’s going to stick it to you and don’t let them if they try – you’re learning for yourself, not somebody else. Others don’t have to like it. YOU DO. YOU – and your choices – are the most important element of your studies.

Posted in About me, Attitude, Choices and sacrifices, Motivation

WHAT SHAPED MY CURRENT ATTITUDE TOWARDS STUDYING

Posted on by Mikuwashi

As I sat down to write the post about the importance of making your own choices in studying, I realised that I should start with a little history of my own studying. “Why does she want to talk about herself?!” – you may think, but what I’m going to tell you about the choices was heavily influenced by my experiences as a student. I believe that you would be more likely to make the same connections I did when you get to know and understand what shaped my current attitude toward studying.

In primary, junior high and high school I was your typical model student. Not straight As, but I never did worse than 1-2 Cs on my school certificates (funnily enough, except for English classes – I had a very strict and demanding teacher back in junior high and I had a D in his class for 2 years straight! He let me graduate with a C in the end). I’ve always liked studying, it gave me satisfaction, yet I was something I would describe as “dumb learner” – I learned everything by heart as it was. I rarely made my choices when studying. I studied what the teachers told us to. Yes, I did read extra stuff I wanted to get to know more about (e.g. I liked and still like to learn more about space, stars and planets), but when it came to the classes’ content – I studied everything we covered and what was necessary to perform well in tests. Regularity was also the key, I studied every school day, did homework right after school. I used to walk around my room with a notebook and explained to myself the material we did in class. In this regard, I was never much of a fan of typical learning by heart. I preferred (and still do) to comprehend the topic and then try to explain it in my own words, often aloud (and while doing that walk around the room thing). It worked great while at school. But I later realised that it wasn’t going to work as great in academic environment.

If you have ever entered university, you know that the amount of material is impossible to master in full. There simply isn’t enough time to learn and research everything as deeply as you would want – unless you want to become a studying robot who doesn’t do anything other than sitting at their desk with a bunch of textbooks. Obviously, that didn’t work for me – I wanted to enjoy my university years as much as possible, make friends, gain some working experience perhaps.

As far as my first year was concerned, I was able to keep my old studying routine. But when I made it into my 2nd year and heavier and more difficult subjects kicked in, I had to quickly learn to make choices and sacrifices: what to focus on or if to study at all. Here’s a confession I have to make: there were times when I postponed studying as late as possible, there were exams I passed by sheer luck when I studied for them briefly before the exam (even just a few hours before it) or didn’t study at all. Here’s another confession – I’m not making it to boast, it’s simply important that you know – I have a very good memory and over the years I learned to use it pretty effectively in my learning process. Hence I was able to memorise the crucial points for an exam while most of my peers believed I spend DAYS preparing for the exam. The truth is, I was as lazy as other students. I just could pick stuff up more easily and quite skillfully predict what was most probable to appear on the exam.

In total, I spent 9 years as a university student (half of that time I was working full time as well) at 3 different universities with 3 different majors: finance and accounting, law and English philology. I only hold a degree – both BA and MA – from the last one, I dropped out from the first two after finding out it wasn’t something I want to do for a living. What’s more, the first two were my parents’ ideas, only English was my own choice, so it had to result in finally graduating and getting a degree. It’s one of the reasons I believe that, ultimately, YOU should be the one making the choices about your studies and future. You can be inspired, you can be given advice, but it’s YOUR CHOICE to make. It’s also fine to change your mind and dump something completely if you feel that pursuing it just isn’t worth it anymore. It’s yet another experience that affected my current attitude toward studying.

The years I invested in those majors made me a very experienced university student, but on the other hand, heavily affected my drive towards studying in general: it plummeted so deep I couldn’t see the bright side of it anymore. I started to find it bothersome and frustrating – not because of poor results, but because I was so desperate for freedom in my studies and more free time to delve into my private studies (namely, Japanese). As I grew up as an adult, I discovered that I’m a very independent person – and that feature also passed onto the way I study. I could barely make any choices as a student and that fact began to suffocate me, little by little – the content to study was imposed, textbooks decided for you and you also had to take the lecturer’s favourites into consideration, which rarely lined with your own. There were tons of, what I call it, “bullsh*t studying”, that is material that you either don’t need to learn by heart, because in normal circumstances you would check it in reliable sources (e.g. as a lawyer obviously you’re going to read that legal act and check for any updates and/or changes rather than relying on your memory) or material that doesn’t correspond to your interests or future career path. Not to mention you had to take “bullsh*t subjects” shared by most university majors (at least that’s how it works in Poland) like I.T., logic, economics or history of something you don’t give a sh*t about or of something that is totally outdated (I still remember that I had to LEARN BY HEART info on FLOPPY DISCS back in my 1st year. Come on, it was already late 2000s, nobody used or cared about them anymore)!

All those experiences resulted in a very frustrated and demotivated learner who couldn’t wait to finally graduate. I’m still proud that I actually managed to accomplish it – though I know I have to be grateful for my master thesis’ promoter who acknowledged my passion for Japanese and let me incorporate it into my MA thesis. It was the only thing that pushed me forward over that last year at university, making that MA degree possible.

Now here comes a good question: leaving the university so unmotivated, so genuinely sick of studying, how come I’m able to study again and I do it with pleasure (and also every day)?!

The answer is very simple: I knew I had to wait for some time and I would finally miss studying. And I wasn’t mistaken: in January 2019, I returned to my beloved Japanese, this time on my own, with my own rules and choices. As for how that happened in that period between my graduation and last January as well as what conclusions I drew, based on the experiences I described here, I’m gonna include that in my next post, as I promised. Let’s say the topic of making your own choices in studying is a two-part discourse with this way too long introduction I’ve just written. See you in part 2!

Posted in Choices and sacrifices, Languages

WHAT LANGUAGES DO I STUDY?

Posted on by Mikuwashi

If you’re following my Instagram account, you already know that I’m an upper-intermediate learner of Japanese. Currently, I’m studying towards my December goal, which is JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) on the N3 level. After taking it (and, hopefully, passing it) I plan to continue my studies on the N2 level and I will probably take the N2 exam in 2-3 years. Since I’m already a university graduate, I grew to like taking my time with studying because nothing is pressuring me anymore. I don’t need my Japanese for work, university grades or anything. I just looooove the Japanese language and plan to use it when I finally go to Japan for some sightseeing (and *coughs* tons of shopping *coughs*). I also enjoy reading and watching Japanese productions in my spare time.

Since I don’t study formally anymore, I can really make my own choices about my studies, rather than complying with those imposed by a teacher, a lecturer or a boss. If I want to spend more time on a textbook chapter I’m doing, I can. If I want to write pretty notes or flashcards, I can. If I want to stop using my textbook for a while and enjoy a game in Japanese as a part of my studies instead, I can. As a result, I can really take my time with the language and make progress on MY terms and with a pace that brings me both pleasure and satisfaction.

After so many years of studying compulsory and uninteresting subjects at both school and university, and after trying (and dumping) several foreign languages, I began to choose and study languages which I’m interested in and enjoy studying. If I don’t, I simply dump them with no regrets at all (maybe with just a tiny bit of guilt because of how much money I’d spent on materials on that language before I made my final decision whether it’s even worth pursuing or not – it’s a bad habit of mine).

Another language, which I had taken up recently, is Korean. At the moment I’m learning Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and then I’m going to start a coursebook for absolute beginners. My motivation here is as simple as it was when I first decided to learn Japanese – I enjoy Korean dramas and manhwas (the Korean equivalent of Japanese mangas) and I want to understand and enjoy them in the original. I also like the sound of Korean, it creates this fluffy, butterfly-like, feeling in my stomach every time I hear it. The very same thing happens to me with Japanese (nothing beats the strength of this feeling WHEN dealing with the Japanese language, though, it’s just the best, I’m all kicks and giggles EVERY TIME), which makes both of these languages very enjoyable to study and it also works great as a motivator.

There’s one more language which I TRY to study (“try” is a very good word here, since I’m so irregular with studying it) and that is German. I had studied German during my compulsory education, that is throughout primary and high school, so I reached this pre-intermediate level with it, further continued it at university when I had to choose a foreign language as one of the classes. Language classes are mandatory during university studies in Poland, but you get to choose what language you want to learn as a part of your curriculum. I always chose German, since I had already known some of it and I couldn’t choose English since my major was in English.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with German. There were times when I really enjoyed it (especially if I had good teachers or pleasantly looking textbooks – I’m your typical visualiser) and times when I really hated it (especially due to my everlasting lack of ability to comprehend and remember nouns’ gender and German cases, no matter what I did to make them stick). German is the only language I study because I must – I need it for my work purposes. This is also the reason WHY me studying it happens so rarely (even though I really like the textbooks I chose for myself). However, since I do not genuinely enjoy the sound and structure of German, I learned to be very picky with it – I only study and memorise what I absolutely need. I work in tourism, so I pick up and revise vocabulary and structures relevant to my work, like accommodation, rooms and furniture, places in town, tourist attractions, food and restaurants, giving directions and so on. I skip politics, ecology, animals or even topics as simple as family members or school subjects. Because I don’t use that knowledge at work, anyway! So why should I bother learning it?

As for choosing what aspects of a language to learn and what to omit, I plan on writing a separate post on this matter, as I often see people needlessly studying what they DON’T NEED AND DON’T ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT. This is especially true if you’re not bound with a course’s syllabus or any exams – then you really can choose what to study*. Why you should do so – please check out my next post.

* Yet, I do believe it can also be done even when you’re studying a language at school, university or during a course – it just takes a little more work and compromise on your part. How to do so – I’ll also include my past experiments in the next post.

Posted in Motivation, Study methods

7 STUDY RULES I FOLLOW

Posted on by Mikuwashi

1. DECIDE ON THE SPOT

That’s right. I do not plan what I’m going to study when I sit down to do it. I do not make grande plans like “I will do 3 chapters tonight” or “I will focus on book X tonight”. No, I don’t tell myself stuff like that. Instead, I sit down and ask myself: “So, what do I feel like doing tonight?” and I just do it. And it feels great!

Honestly, this was something I found so irritating at school and university. I had a set book to go over. I had set homework to do. I had a set chapter to read. I absolutely hated it! If the chapter was boring, I couldn’t skip it. If a paper or task was dull to write/do, I couldn’t skip it without damaging my grade.

But when I study on my own, of my own motivation – I can. I can skip exercises I don’t like. This is something I also learned to do – if an exercise is a bore, don’t do it. Don’t kill your motivation for the sake of finishing the whole book PERFECTLY. Go to the task you really wanna do. Of course, you have to be moderate with this, don’t skip all the tasks! 😉 I, for instance, tend to skip some writing exercises like WRITE A DIALOGUE, because those bore me to death. And I don’t feel guilty about doing that AT ALL.

Why? Because I noticed that forcing myself to do something I don’t wanna kills my motivation and I don’t want that to happen. Maintaining your motivation helps you sit down every day. Think about this – how many times, while at school, you got sick in your stomach simply THINKING that there’s this mundane homework that’s waiting for you on your desk? And you put off doing it for as long as it was possible? That’s what I’m talking about. It feels much, much better to make your own decisions about your studying process, rather than blindly following every exercise in a textbook or following just one textbook, when you really feel like reading a passage of that novel you bought the other day.

The other thing connected with this point is the amount of work you wanna do. As I wrote before, I do not plan to “do 3 chapters tonight”. Why? Because I’m a working adult with a family. If you share my situation, you know that sometimes plans don’t work out – you’re tired, your family needs you, something simply happens and needs your attention. This is another reason why I don’t plan – I do not feel guilty when something comes up. Yet, I try to do something daily. Even if it’s just flashcards revision, reading a little or watching an episode in my target language.

2. STUDY PLANNER

This was the first thing I did, even before I opened a textbook back in January 2019. It’s not my own solution, I once saw somebody do it on Instagram and I thought “this is it!”. As a bullet journal user, I can totally relate to writing down what you want to study on a particular day. However, I did my planner differently – I write down what I HAD DONE on a day. And it works wonders since it’s connected to no. 1 on this list – I’m not bound by plans. I simply go with the flow. Yet, I track what I do and it feels great to sum up what you’ve done over the month. You look at your planner (in my case it should actually be called a “register”) and say “Hey, I wasn’t fooling around as much as I thought – look how much I actually did!” And that is why my usual study planner month looks like this:

I do take some days off. Sometimes it’s good to just relax and do something different or to take care of something that came up. I mark such days with “OFF”, so I know I skipped studying. It also helps to boost my motivation when I take too many days off. I tell myself „Oi, girl, gotta get your sh*t together! Sit down right now!”. Yes, I do feel guilty sometimes. But it vanishes the moment I sit down again and can mark my progress in the planner.

3. TEXTBOOK TRACKERS

Bullet journal user speaks again here: track your progress with a book/course/tutorial/video series (or whatever else you use)! I do mine this way:

I tend to do it in different ways, depending on the book. I either mark a chapter as a whole or break it down into smaller sections (e.g. reading, writing, listening, whatever the book is structured like), especially if it’s long. After I’m done, I can place a dot. After I finish the whole book, I can tick it off. It feels great to look at it again, seeing and feeling that pride that I finished it. I also track my textbooks on GoodReads – it shows you how many percents you’re in (and how many are left). It feels really good to update my book status both in my bujo and on GoodReads. Plus it can help you track how much time you spent with a book, since GoodReads shows the date when you started reading a book.

4. HUGE GOAL AHEAD

It’s good to have one major goal in front of you – it could be an exam (e.g. mine for 2019 is passing JLPT N3 level), it could be a book you wanna read and finish, traveling goals, people goals (e.g. communicating with your foreign family, friends or SO in their mother tongue) and more! Choose something that feels „big” for you – it doesn’t necessarily have to feel „big” for others and don’t worry if it doesn’t. It’s your choice, your studies, and your progress, not somebody else’s.

5. SMALLER GOALS ON THE WAY

Apart from that big goal, choose several smaller ones while you’re progressing towards your main goal. They can be time-related, like “read 1 book this month” or “learn 100 words this month”. Mine include finishing off a tv series, book, manga or anime series before the month ends, learning a set amount of vocabulary, doing Anki almost daily, doing a section of a textbook, preparing my own flashcards and so on.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget – reward yourself when you achieve one of the goals! I love to treat myself with a bag of unhealthy, fatty, salty chips since I have a thing for them 😉 For the main goal, use a bigger reward – again, “big” is subjective here, just use something that makes you super hyped for the reward and, consequently, boosts your motivation much more than “just” a bag of chips. For example, for taking JLPT N3 this December, I’m gonna reward myself with a limited edition of a Playstation game in Japanese, so I can enjoy it after those exam preparations. I already know it’s gonna be awesome to finally play it after being done with JLPT!

6. SOME THINGS HAVE TO DONE DAILY

Even if you’re taking a day off, make sure to do at least 1 thing every day – in my case, it’s my flashcards. I really recommend using a spaced repetition system (like Anki, Memrise, Quizlet, TinyCards or simple paper flashcards and a box) for your vocabulary. And this should be done every day, unless you want those revision flashcards to pile up, which is counter motivating – if you see too many of them to review, you don’t want to do them. If their number is small, you will go over them more eagerly. Regularity is the key here. This trick also kills your “I haven’t done anything today” guilt, because you’ve done at least this one regular thing, so you’re off your mind’s hook.

7. EVERYTHING COUNTS

I see people studying and being frustrated with themselves, saying “I haven’t done much today” while, in fact, they did. They just don’t count much stuff they do. Some people only consider textbook or class studying as real studying. I don’t. I count EVERYTHING I do in the languages I’m learning. And that includes:

  • browsing the Internet in your target language (TL),
  • watching tv series for pleasure (no subtitles or with subtitles in your TL),
  • reading something (be it a novel, a comic, a magazine, an Internet article, etc.) in your TL for pleasure,
  • playing games,
  • watching youtube,
  • speaking with someone in your TL (either in or outside the classroom, even if you just ask somebody for directions, IT COUNTS),
  • creating flashcards,
  • revising flashcards,
  • writing a diary in your TL, and so on.

Basically, anything you do in your TL, count it! And don’t forget to register it in your planner, so you can later see how much smaller, but still significant, progress you made!

Posted in Motivation, Study methods

WHERE DOES MY MOTIVATION COME FROM?

Posted on by Mikuwashi

In my very first post here I mentioned that I do not have to go to school anymore, yet I still study and, if I can be honest, I still find that rewarding and pleasurable. There is little checking of my knowledge, though, since I don’t write tests and I rarely take exams (only the official language level exams, like JLPT or Cambridge ones). If there’s no school, there are no grades, tests and other performance motivators like that. So, how do I find that motivation to actually sit down and study, while being an adult (who has REALLY had enough of official education) with home, family, life and work responsibilities adults usually have?

I don’t.
I really don’t.

This was something I struggled with when it came to my Japanese. When I lived in the city where my university was, I used to go to a language school once a week. It was simple, it put me in a routine, so I went with it and studied for the sake of the course. But as most courses, that came with the usual package – tests, teacher’s questions during the lesson, the urge to impress your course mates with your knowledge. So that worked as a motivator.
But what to do when it just isn’t possible for you to go to a language school? Or to join any other classes or courses? What if you don’t enjoy online courses (that’s my case)? What to do then?
Well, my solution is what most books on motivation say, really (and books on motivation to write novels, too, since I read tons of those as well).

You gotta stick it out.
You just sit down and do it.
There’s no rocket science here.
As there is no “sudden inspiration” in writing (the inspiration when suddenly you feel you have a great idea and you just have to sit down and start writing), if there’s no motivation in you, you create it.
Yes, you basically sit down and start DOING IT.
JUST. LIKE. THAT.
Like this guy says:

This year, on January 1st, for the first time in many, many years, I made a New Year’s resolution: restart my Japanese and do it (almost) every day. And so I did. Something just clicked, I sat down with one of the textbooks I bought over the years and I just started to go over it.

Of course, this is no miracle story, I helped myself. I used the knowledge OF myself that I acquired over the years, the knowledge OF HOW I STUDY AND HOW I KEEP MYSELF MOTIVATED.

This is something you have to do yourself. Observe yourself, test different solutions, take advantage of different factors that motivate you and choose the ones that work best. It took me many, many years to realise that you are the one who controls your studies. What you learn is your choice and it’s a fantastic choice to make. It feels AWESOME when you’re doing what you want to do, rather than studying something which is imposed on you.

This conclusion I came to after so many years of being a model, (almost) straight A student, is something I’m going to share with you below. Here go 7 rules I follow when I study. I’m going to include them here and in the next post if you wanna share them or go back to them without needing to read this introduction again.

1. DECIDE ON THE SPOT

That’s right. I do not plan what I’m going to study when I sit down to do it. I do not make grande plans like “I will do 3 chapters tonight” or “I will focus on book X tonight”. No, I don’t tell myself stuff like that. Instead, I sit down and ask myself: “So, what do I feel like doing tonight?” and I just do it. And it feels great!

Honestly, this was something I found so irritating at school and university. I had a set book to go over. I had set homework to do. I had a set chapter to read. I absolutely hated it! If the chapter was boring, I couldn’t skip it. If a paper or task was dull to write/do, I couldn’t skip it without damaging my grade.

But when I study on my own, of my own motivation – I can. I can skip exercises I don’t like. This is something I also learned to do – if an exercise is a bore, don’t do it. Don’t kill your motivation for the sake of finishing the whole book PERFECTLY. Go to the task you really wanna do. Of course, you have to be moderate with this, don’t skip all the tasks! 😉 I, for instance, tend to skip some writing exercises like WRITE A DIALOGUE, because those bore me to death. And I don’t feel guilty about doing that AT ALL.

Why? Because I noticed that forcing myself to do something I don’t wanna kills my motivation and I don’t want that to happen. Maintaining your motivation helps you sit down every day. Think about this – how many times, while at school, you got sick in your stomach simply THINKING that there’s this mundane homework that’s waiting for you on your desk? And you put off doing it for as long as it was possible? That’s what I’m talking about. It feels much, much better to make your own decisions about your studying process, rather than blindly following every exercise in a textbook or following just one textbook, when you really feel like reading a passage of that novel you bought the other day.

The other thing connected with this point is the amount of work you wanna do. As I wrote before, I do not plan to “do 3 chapters tonight”. Why? Because I’m a working adult with a family. If you share my situation, you know that sometimes plans don’t work out – you’re tired, your family needs you, something simply happens and needs your attention. This is another reason why I don’t plan – I do not feel guilty when something comes up. Yet, I try to do something daily. Even if it’s just flashcards revision, reading a little or watching an episode in my target language.

2. STUDY PLANNER

This was the first thing I did, even before I opened a textbook back in January 2019. It’s not my own solution, I once saw somebody do it on Instagram and I thought “this is it!”. As a bullet journal user, I can totally relate to writing down what you want to study on a particular day. However, I did my planner differently – I write down what I HAD DONE on a day. And it works wonders since it’s connected to no. 1 on this list – I’m not bound by plans. I simply go with the flow. Yet, I track what I do and it feels great to sum up what you’ve done over the month. You look at your planner (in my case it should actually be called a “register”) and say “Hey, I wasn’t fooling around as much as I thought – look how much I actually did!” And that is why my usual study planner month looks like this:

I do take some days off. Sometimes it’s good to just relax and do something different or to take care of something that came up. I mark such days with “OFF”, so I know I skipped studying. It also helps to boost my motivation when I take too many days off. I tell myself „Oi, girl, gotta get your sh*t together! Sit down right now!”. Yes, I do feel guilty sometimes. But it vanishes the moment I sit down again and can mark my progress in the planner.

3. TEXTBOOK TRACKERS

Bullet journal user speaks again here: track your progress with a book/course/tutorial/video series (or whatever else you use)! I do mine this way:

I tend to do it in different ways, depending on the book. I either mark a chapter as a whole or break it down into smaller sections (e.g. reading, writing, listening, whatever the book is structured like), especially if it’s long. After I’m done, I can place a dot. After I finish the whole book, I can tick it off. It feels great to look at it again, seeing and feeling that pride that I finished it. I also track my textbooks on GoodReads – it shows you how many percents you’re in (and how many are left). It feels really good to update my book status both in my bujo and on GoodReads. Plus it can help you track how much time you spent with a book, since GoodReads shows the date when you started reading a book.

4. HUGE GOAL AHEAD

It’s good to have one major goal in front of you – it could be an exam (e.g. mine for 2019 is passing JLPT N3 level), it could be a book you wanna read and finish, traveling goals, people goals (e.g. communicating with your foreign family, friends or SO in their mother tongue) and more! Choose something that feels „big” for you – it doesn’t necessarily have to feel „big” for others and don’t worry if it doesn’t. It’s your choice, your studies, and your progress, not somebody else’s.

5. SMALLER GOALS ON THE WAY

Apart from that big goal, choose several smaller ones while you’re progressing towards your main goal. They can be time-related, like “read 1 book this month” or “learn 100 words this month”. Mine include finishing off a tv series, book, manga or anime series before the month ends, learning a set amount of vocabulary, doing Anki almost daily, doing a section of a textbook, preparing my own flashcards and so on.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget – reward yourself when you achieve one of the goals! I love to treat myself with a bag of unhealthy, fatty, salty chips since I have a thing for them 😉 For the main goal, use a bigger reward – again, “big” is subjective here, just use something that makes you super hyped for the reward and, consequently, boosts your motivation much more than “just” a bag of chips. For example, for taking JLPT N3 this December, I’m gonna reward myself with a limited edition of a Playstation game in Japanese, so I can enjoy it after those exam preparations. I already know it’s gonna be awesome to finally play it after being done with JLPT!

6. SOME THINGS HAVE TO DONE DAILY

Even if you’re taking a day off, make sure to do at least 1 thing every day – in my case, it’s my flashcards. I really recommend using a spaced repetition system (like Anki, Memrise, Quizlet, TinyCards or simple paper flashcards and a box) for your vocabulary. And this should be done every day, unless you want those revision flashcards to pile up, which is counter motivating – if you see too many of them to review, you don’t want to do them. If their number is small, you will go over them more eagerly. Regularity is the key here. This trick also kills your “I haven’t done anything today” guilt, because you’ve done at least this one regular thing, so you’re off your mind’s hook.

7. EVERYTHING COUNTS

I see people studying and being frustrated with themselves, saying “I haven’t done much today” while, in fact, they did. They just don’t count much stuff they do. Some people only consider textbook or class studying as real studying. I don’t. I count EVERYTHING I do in the languages I’m learning. And that includes:

  • browsing the Internet in your target language (TL),
  • watching tv series for pleasure (no subtitles or with subtitles in your TL),
  • reading something (be it a novel, a comic, a magazine, an Internet article, etc.) in your TL for pleasure,
  • playing games,
  • watching youtube,
  • speaking with someone in your TL (either in or outside the classroom, even if you just ask somebody for directions, IT COUNTS),
  • creating flashcards,
  • revising flashcards,
  • writing a diary in your TL, and so on.

Basically, anything you do in your TL, count it! And don’t forget to register it in your planner, so you can later see how much smaller, but still significant, progress you made!

Posted in About me

WHY, HELLO THERE!

Posted on by Mikuwashi

Hi! It’s Mikuwashi here. My real name is Agnieszka, though (you can call me Aga, it’s a shorter version of my name), and I’m Polish. I’m 29 y.o. woman working full time, who has graduated university and finished her official, formal education some time ago, yet I still pursue… studying in my free time. Studying languages.

A very good friend of mine pushed me into considering a study blog, since I’m already quite active in that department on Instagram (bullet journal, watercolours, studying – if you’re interested, my instaname is @mikuwashi). I thought it was an interesting idea, but I decided to run this blog in English – I haven’t done so in a very long time (the last time was around 15 years ago on LiveJournal, I think) and I thought it would be a good language experience, since English isn’t my mother tongue, either! 😉

So, if you like to study languages and want to get to know how I study them, what strategies, methods and resources I have adapted throughout all those years since I started learning my first language (English), there you go. I also plan to include posts on resources, like reviews, comparisons of different resources, new findings etc. The latter, of course, will be, for the time being, limited to the languages I study – Japanese, Korean and German. However, I believe that tips I’m about to give you can be used for multiple purposes and/or languages, so if you’re studying something else – you’re more than welcome to discover and maybe adapt my tips into your own studies. 🙂

I hope you will enjoy the content I’m going to publish here and maybe you’ll even consider following this blog or my other social media, like Instagram (@mikuwashi) or my fb page (Mikuwashi studies).