🍵 Appreciate the learning process: embrace your mistakes 🍵

How reinforcing my vocabulary knowledge using intensive reading has changed my attitude towards relearning words

Something crazy happened recently… 🤯

My struggle remembering new words

In the past, whenever I would immerse and find a word that I had previously studied that I didn't remember properly I just felt frustrated 😩 I would wonder why I was unable to remember and recognize well words that I had been learning on Anki for months. This made me really doubt my ability to learn Japanese.

Turns out, I was doing it wrong

You know, doing Anki everyday is definitely helpful. However, it is not enough and we should not rely on it entirely as a miracle method that will make us remember everything 😞. Actually, repeated exposure to new words in context is what will help you grasp their nuances and remember them best.

For this reason, I did an experiment in August. It consisted in doing short intensive reading sessions on specific resources I was using. In these, I would look up the reading and meaning of all the words I did not recall properly, highlighting them and writing their meaning and pronunciation next to them 🔍. The materials I used for this were first 日本がわかる、日本語がわかる textbook, and then native materials like the children’s book on geopolitics, こどもの地政学.

Doing this has made my frustration somehow magically turn into excitement. I can feel that my attitude towards these “old friends” (or Anki leeches) has changed. Now, whenever I find one of them , I see this an opportunity to improve my comprehension , and feel thrilled about getting a chance to learn more about them in context 🤓.

I have felt a huge improvement in my vocabulary knowledge during this short month, and I will continue using this method in the future to boost my Japanese skills 😊.

⚠️ Warnings ⚠️

• ❌ Do not try to do intensive reading for everything you read. Trust me, I have been there and it can make reading novels very slow and frustrating. Focus on having short, specific study sessions to get the most out of this method.

• 👉 Choose materials at your target level, slightly harder from what you already know so that the difficulty will be manageable, and not too easy so you will still learn something new from it.

Embrace the learning process, and make from each mistake you do an opportunity to grow and improve ✨

Good luck and see you soon with more valuable content,

~𝙽𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚊