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I Studied Hundreds of Flashcards Every Day for Six Months, Here’s What Happened
Studying on Autopilot
For me, 2024 is “The Year of Language Learning”. But halfway through the year, I realized more studying isn’t necessarily better. My Japanese now isn’t even comparable to when I arrived almost six years ago, but my abilities could be more consistent across all four language modes. My speaking has improved the most since coming to Japan. I’m probably the most confident in my listening skills, and my reading is okay but not great. I can read and understand almost anything written for junior high schoolers and below. And that leaves my writing ability, which has been largely theoretical since graduating from university. So there is some work to do this year, and with more than half of the year gone, some quick work.
If you search YouTube, you can pretty quickly fall headfirst into both the productivity and language learning rabbit holes of gurus, masters, and snake oil salesmen trying to convince you that every way you’ve ever studied or even organized your daily life is the exact wrong way to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Bingeing these videos for a year and trying to optimize every aspect of my life like I was min-maxing an RPG character after finally understanding the game’s mechanics made me realize one thing pretty clearly: in that…
