Imagine actually keeping blogs up to date. Couldn’t be me and I’m not going to pretend it ever will be. A lot of things have changed in my life since I last posted, so please bear with me!
For starters, I picked up painting again for money. Balance has ever been my enemy, and it proved a formidable foe once more in 2020 and 2021. So I was doing art and then getting burnt out of it and only wanting to play video games for the rest of my spare time. I was painting things I didn’t really enjoy, but they sold fairly decent. I’m putting it in the past tense because as of this moment I have not had a commission for awhile and it’s honestly relieving.
However, the reason I’ve been able to focus less on getting commissions is because my grandfather passed in February of last year, and left me with a small inheritance. I knew he was sick. I knew he would not be getting better. I knew all of this and yet it still hit me like a fucking truck. I’ve had relatives die before. I’ve had another grandfather die years back. None of this was able to prepare me for how I felt. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but I was a goddamn mess.
And yet it’s those soul-punching moments that tend to spur me into action. Finally. I wish I could be normal and just do what I want to do, what needs to be done, at any given time. But it took his death to revitalize my passion for learning Japanese. It was him who started me out on my journey at the ripe age of…good lord, 13. He bought me a computer program that taught me a lot of basic stuff and I consider it to be my foundation. All because of him. When I was first able to get a job for having some vague Japanese knowledge, he was so proud. And when my PTSD got in the way of keeping that job, I felt so much shame in letting him know I had to quit. I felt like I was letting him down. Like his help meant nothing. I feel extremely sappy writing this, especially since I’m an atheist, but I thought “Maybe if I can finally get to a high level of it, he’d be proud of me again”.
Looking back on it now, I think I just wanted something to keep me going through all the pain. I dove my ass right back into Japanese wholeheartedly.
“I’m going to pass N1 the December after this one. I want to have a job that utilizes my skill in the Japanese language one day!”. I had a fire lit under my ass and a giant knot in my heart, but I was moving forward.
The first few months after his death, I was still using Anki. I still had this idea of sentence mining cards and getting to that sacred 10,000 number. I came across a video by Leafling Learns regarding sentence mining while utilizing Notion and gave it a shot. It felt like such a breath of fresh air! Because I was still playing FFXIV at the time, I figured it would be fun to use her method with quest dialogue from the game. So I’d organize my Notion nicely, write word lists physically in a notebook as well, and then put the i+1 sentences into Anki. I had this workflow for months! Up until June 2021 anyway.
Covid’s an asshole, and delayed a lot for everyone. For me, it meant that I couldn’t go visit family for a few months even after my grandfather died. I wanted to, but there were too many risks to take and I never in a million years wanted to get my little brother sick. I was one of his caretakers before moving in with my boyfriend in 2019, and was extra protective of him as a result, so we were waiting for everyone to be able to get vaccinated. My family was able to hold a memorial for my grandfather in June. It was absolutely wonderful. I hadn’t seen my family since 2019, and even to be able to see everyone, despite the circumstances, was such a blessing. Unfortunately, the hotel we stayed at on our way home from the trip was not blessed by anyone. In fact, it truly was cursed.
Bed bugs made me quit Anki.
What a stupid thing to have happen. Our hotel room was littered with bed bugs. Everything we owned had to be quarantined for a bit to make sure they all died off. We had our shit baking in my old-ass Toyota Corolla on the roof of a parking garage for 2+ weeks. This included my laptop with Anki. I had no backups, nor a place to even utilize it even if I did! I was feeling beyond upset. I had finally been consistent for months, I even kept up my reviews while visiting! And for what? Bed bugs to ruin my fucking life? I remember crying and feeling ridiculous about it. But thankfully, I also remembered reddit.
Enter JPDB.
An SRS website I heard about from some post that I was probably reading while pooping. I scrambled trying to find it, using my two brain cells to search the subreddit I saw it in. And on July 1st, the day after we returned from our bed-bug-dead-grampa-trip-from-Hell, I was back into the swing of things. I made an account and just started going nuts. I assumed I’d return to my Anki/Notion routine after my laptop’s trip from its own Hell.
Well, I assume a lot of things sometimes. It has almost been a full year and I’m still using my beloved jeepy deeby. Switching from sentence cards to vocab cards + hella immersion has done wonders for my bruised soul. This has been the most consistent I’ve been in my entire life. While I mostly mean in terms of studying Japanese, it’s probably just also true in a broader sense as well. But because I’m no longer doing sentence cards…there’s no need to hit the magical 10,000 sentences.
I’m now left pondering why the 10,000 sentences mattered so much. It felt so magical and out of reach. It was something I vaguely remember wanting for years. Why was I so hung up on that? Didn’t I know that the real stonks was how many words I knew in JPDB? Or how many books at a 95% coverage I have?
In all seriousness, I don’t know why past-me thought the way she did, but present-me is having a good time. I’m trying to be much more flexible and kind to myself. I still have a goal of passing N1, but I’m not going to put pressure on me to absolutely find work. Living with PTSD is hard and quite frankly I fucking hate it, but I’m doing what I can with what I’ve got. I have people who love me and want me to do what I can in my own ways. I’m so grateful for that.
…I did end up quitting FFXIV though! I had a lot of fun playing it in Japanese all the time, and playing on alts on Japanese servers, but quite frankly I don’t have the money to keep playing. I will live vicariously through streamers though, and I’m forever grateful to have played a game I loved so much that I used it as a learning tool. While I know there’s a free trial, I’ve personally graduated onto reading and finishing books…with decent comprehension this time around!
Future posts will likely reflect my JPDB and immersion material experiences. I’ve actually studied all the JLPT grammar at this point, so it’s not likely that I’ll have any more grammar posts.
I’m in a new decade of life still learning Japanese. I might be a turtle, but quite frankly I’m just glad that I’m still here doing what I enjoy.
学ぶマンダ 