Category / Cartoon

by Inhae

These days…

You know these days when you have a lot of time (the whole day or the whole afternoon, or several hours) to study your language but end up doing nothing?

There are so many things that you want to do (or need to do) that you don’t know where to start. If you decide to do something first, you end up thinking that this other thing is more important and switch to it. Then you realise that you should definitely do something else and switch again.

There are also the things you don’t want to do and avoid doing by spending your time in other more pleasant but not so useful activities. And of course, instead of actually doing things, you search the internet for tips on how to do them.

In the end, you feel frustrated because you did spend the whole day “studying” your language, but you didn’t do anything really.

I guess this happens to all of us. It happens to me all the time! But my life does not depend on my Japanese level, I’m learning Japanese as a hobby, and I do enjoy spending my day with Japanese even if I am not actively studying it!

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel that you haven’t been productive, we don’t need to be productive all the time, we don’t need to be progressing all the time, and we don’t need to check boxes on our to-do list all the time!

by Inhae

Blog anniversary and new schedule

I am a few days late, but my blog turned two years old!

I take the opportunity to announce a change in my blog schedule. I find it very hard to post twice a week as I had planned to in January 😔. Obviously, the preparation for the JLPT is taking too much of my time.

I also want to change a little the direction of my blog. As it is now, my blog is very personal, I use it mainly to record my own progress, write a language journal and stay motivated.

While I will continue to write this kind of posts, I will certainly write them less often. I found that it was easier to talk about what I was doing to learn Japanese last year because I had time to explore several methods and experience new things. This year, I don’t really have much to say other than “I finished the 20th lesson of my JLPT grammar textbook”, haha.

What I really want to do now is to write posts that could be useful for other language learners like learning tips, textbook reviews, novels recommendations and so on. These kind of posts will certainly take some time to write, but this is the direction in which I want to go.

To sum up, you will find on my blog:

  • Personal updates of my Japanese learning journey. I think that I will write when I feel that there is something interesting to say rather than forcing myself to write once or twice a week.
  • Longer posts about things that can be useful to learn Japanese. I have several ideas of upcoming posts, but they take a long time to write.
  • Book reviews, as usual.

Unfortunately, I cannot really schedule these posts, but I will do my best to write as often and regularly as possible.

Thank you for following and reading my blog!