Dealing with the Japanese study blues

August 17, 2024

The other day in the community, we got a great question about how to deal with the feeling of not understanding the Japanese you've been encountering recently.

This can be a tough feeling to deal with.

Thankfully, it's also a normal one. I'm pretty confident that every learner has felt or will feel this at least once or twice at some point in their study journey. Or many, many times.

It's a familiar feeling to me, at least ^^

How do we overcome it?

Before we start, I'm assuming that you're using a comprehensive resource or set of resources that cover everything you need to know to reach a high level of Japanese proficiency.

This ensures that we are indeed seeing what we need to see to accomplish our goals.

NativShark is one such resource:

You'll need an account to press the above button! Start your journey for free if you don't have one yet:

If you find yourself struggling with starting your studies or showing up consistently, then I recommend giving these a read:

Building study habits

Finding your study sanctuary

You got this ^^

Alright, now how to deal with this feeling.

First off…

Go easy on yourself

Reaching a high level of proficiency in Japanese takes years.

It took me about 5 years of consistent study to start feeling mostly comfortable interacting in Japanese across most situations I found myself in.

So if you're a few months in or even a few years in, it's completely understandable if you find certain sentences difficult to break down. And honestly, this can and will get us no matter where we are in our journey.

Try not to beat yourself up over it too much ^^

Know what to focus on

When you're looking at Japanese that isn't quite clicking, there's a chance you're trying too hard to "fully understand" it.

Trying to understand every nuance of every sentence we see is simply too time-consuming for us to do. I would also argue it's not even possible until you have a very wide knowledge of Japanese used in many, many contexts.

This means that all we need to aim for is understanding the gist.

If you're using NativShark, look at the sentence, look at the context (every review sentence has context starting in Phase Two), look at the translations, briefly think about how some things might tie together, and then keep moving.

If you understand the general idea of the sentence, you have succeeded.

Try not to listen to your brain if it's screaming at you that you "don't actually understand" it ^^

All you need to focus on is making small improvements in your understanding.

Once you keep moving on and are introduced to new vocab and grammar while seeing more and more Japanese in new contexts, all the Japanese you've seen in the past will slowly begin to click more.

↑ I can't tell you the number of times that I've been introduced to a new piece of Japanese throughout my journey and it took me weeks to actually feel like I'm beginning to understand it, let alone be able to use it in my own Japanese.

Eventually, though, it clicked with or without me realizing it. I attribute this mainly to simply not giving up and being consistent in my studies.

Giving your brain time and space to recognize the patterns is often all you need to do. ^^

Speaking of giving your brain space…

Do a review week

Generally speaking, it's often helpful to progress when feeling stuck. And it's what I recommend in this article.

However, feeling overwhelmed causes burnout.

And preventing burnout takes priority over what's "most efficient".

So it could be a good idea to take a week off of doing new Units / learning new Japanese. This lets you take a bit of time to let your brain "catch up", in a sense.

After that week is up, get back into learning new Japanese, and keep in mind that you're aiming for small improvements in understanding, not big "Ah-hah!" moments

Breaking down Japanese

When I'm looking at a long sentence I don't understand, what often helps me the most is starting from the end of the sentence.

Since Japanese word order is essentially the opposite of English, this can give us the upper hand because we can break down sentences in a way that we are familiar with.

I broke down how to do this a bit in the Tanabata newsletter, but please feel free to ask me about this more in the #newsletter channel!

Perhaps I write a newsletter completely about this idea as well. Let me know if you're interested in that by either replying to this email or in the community ^^

To access the #newsletter channel in the community:
1. Create a Discord account
2. Join the NativShark Community Discord
3. Click here to open up the #newsletter channel

Thanks for reading and looking forward to hearing back from you!

一貫いっかん

Did you know the counter for pieces of sushi is 〜貫かん?

Be sure to check out the rest of the lesson which is filled with vocab you'll wanna know when you visit a sushi restaurant here in Japan 👀:

If the above Japanese is difficult for you, all you need to do is keep hitting the Study Now button and you'll understand it when you get there. When using a comprehensive study resource like NativShark, it's just a matter of time and consistency. The above is from a lesson in Phase Two, Unit 285.

NativShark goodie bag

NativShark Units

4 new Units have been added to Phase Three ^^

As always, these Units are filled with vocab with their own unique contexts that help you understand Japanese at a deeper level, any relevant new kanji, and natural conversations called Dialogues at the end. They also have the following lessons:

Thanks for reading all the way to the end!

Happy studies,
Ty & the NativShark team