In April, my book club is going to read Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami. I thought it'd be so cool to be able to read this book in its original language! But I can't. Sadly, I haven't made any progress with my Japanese in several years.

I started learning Japanese in late 2021. It wasn't serious at first; I was just using Duolingo and learning the basics, like the hiragana and katakana syllabaries. After that, I started using Anki — a flashcard app. I downloaded a deck that someone else had made, and I've been using it ever since. You learn 20 new cards per day and review some of the cards from previous days. It was going nicely at first, but I was skipping some days, and with the spaced repetition algorithm that Anki uses, you can't really afford to do that. Your debt piles up quickly.

In August of 2022, I received an email to the effect that, "You haven't used Anki in six months. If you remain inactive on the app, your account will be deleted." I got so busy with life that I completely neglected my language learning. The next time I launched Anki, I had 800 cards I needed to review. I turned off adding new cards to the deck, and it took me several days, even weeks, to get through them...

Since then, it's happened a few more times. I can't stay consistent. I'm too lazy to review my cards, the debt piles up, then I have to relearn some words I forgot, and it's just not fun. I still use Duolingo from time to time, but it feels like a waste of time. I've also tried Busuu, which I feel is better at teaching you grammar. It also has a community aspect — it prompts you to record or write a few sentences, which are then supposed to be checked by native speakers. You know, like Journaly. But my recordings were completely ignored, which is discouraging. I guess Japanese has lots of learners and not enough reviewers. That's not the case for Russian — for every recording in Russian, there are dozens of comments and corrections.

I feel like I should do something else. Comprehensive input would be cool, but how do you do it if you can't comprehend anything? I bought a book with simple Japanese fairy tales that had translations and a vocabulary list for every story. It's aimed at complete beginners, but I don't understand anything. I'd have to sit and decipher every word that I don't know if it isn't in the vocabulary list.

I thought of writing simple posts in Japanese, but I'm afraid I wouldn't even be able to understand any of the corrections or comments. And even something simple about what dog breeds I like took me a few days to write.

I don't know how to move forward. I chose a hard language for a reason, but now I feel it's too hard. I wanted to exercise my mind, and now I realize how naive I was.

Sorry for the rambling.