The Problem with Learning New Skills

There has been quite a drop in the number of posts in this blog and that is indicative of a drop in pace of my learning Japanese. At first, the lag developed when I took a short break to deal with my friends death. After a few days I continued to use it as an excuse. Eventually it got harder and harder to motivate myself to study. I had cut the Pimsleur lessons back to three a week, stopped reading further in TextFugu, and even spent a week of doing only maintenance on my WaniKani and not learning new unlocked items.

I finally decided to get back in the saddle today and to my surprise, one of the sections I covered in TextFugu was about "The Dip." This is when after initially learning a new skill the amount of results coming out of effort put in begins to drop, at least for awhile. This means that the intermediate stage of learning a skill is riddled with putting more effort into it and getting less out of it. I was running into this before I took my "break" and was a factor in my lack of motivation.

I'm familiar with this concept, I have seen it before with Spanish, IT knowledge, and singing. It's really important to push through it because after you pass "The Dip" the amount of effort required for results is lower.

So, this is me picking it back up.

To be fair, I didn't completely stop learning. Pimsleur offered some really good new grammar points and I have gained a ton of new vocab from WaniKani and Anime. I did try to focus on learning more vocabulary than anything else. Being able to read and write more words will really make learning the grammar points more fun. You can only go so far with basic nouns and verbs before you start to get worn out using them over and over.

I have been working in my head on a full Japanese post about myself. There are a few more things I'd like to pick up before I write it, so it will be "in the pipe" for awhile. The upside is that I am able to write full paragraphs now. Granted, my skill level shows, but I can do it none-the-less.