How to Build a Daily Japanese Study Habit (Without Burnout)

We connect New Year momentum, Ekiden grit, and Murakami’s running log to practical Japanese study that survives real life. Flexible systems, tiny daily wins, and the power of noticing replace vague goals and pressure to “master” everything.

• defining minimum viable study to protect consistency
• replacing output goals with input systems
• using interests and authentic media to sustain motivation
• embracing ambiguity and iterative understanding
• making phones boring to reduce distraction
• self-compassion, “don’t miss twice,” and growth mindset
• safe uses and limits of AI for learners
• input, output, interaction, and the noticing hypothesis
• note refactoring to test and deepen understanding
• recommendations: Look Back, Hundred Meters, inakyu’s Hope Core video, Murakami’s running book

Links

• Nathan Laundry This Psychology Experiment Helped 121 People Beat Doomscrolling
• Extranet Shaquille I'm Tired of Listening to Nerds and Dweebs
• Psycho Lingo The problem with Comprehensible Input
• Python Programmer What the Science Actually Says about ChatGPT and Brain Rot
• Theories of Second Language Acquisition 
• inakyu You’re Not Lazy. You Need Hope Core Anime

We’ll post an episode in February, so see you then

Transcript

New Year, Burnout, And A Fresh Start

Tom 0:30

Welcome to Like My Anime, a podcast about learning Japanese through Japanese media, culture, and linguistics. Hosted by me, Tom Scullin. In each episode, we look at some Japanese media, linguistics, or anything else I'm interested in that month, and we'll hopefully help you study Japanese. If you're watching this, welcome to the Like My Anime YouTube page. I haven't posted an episode since June. It's been a while. And so I wanted to get back into it with the new year. 2025 was kind of crazy. Um my wife didn't have the easiest pregnancy, and then trying to do a podcast, look after our daughter, do my actual full-time job, and all that sort of stuff kind of caught up with me, burnt out pretty hard over the summer. And I've been meaning to post an episode for months now. I was gonna post something about My Dress-Up Darling, and I just got in my own head trying to work through all that stuff by getting this podcast out right now. The new year is a great start because there's always New Year's resolutions and things people want to do better than they did the last year. One thing that kind of fuels that for me is every year they have the New Year's Ekiden and Hakone Ekiden it's basically like ten half marathons in a row as a relay race. So the first person starts in downtown Tokyo, runs about 20 kilometers, hands off their sash to the next person, and then they keep just running and running and running until they get to Hakone, and then they run back. The competitors are all private universities, so it kind of feels like I don't know, like March Madness or something on that level. But yeah, seeing these distance runners every year, and my fa ther-in-law, he went to one of the more competitive, or at least recently competitive universities in this Eki den. So we're always watching it every year. It's really exciting, just as a sports thing. But recently I've been trying to, recently, I say recently, like since I turned 30, I've been trying to pick up running. And so every year I try to get into running, especially in the summer break, because for Japan, the summer break goes from about the middle of July to the end of August. So every year I get about six weeks just to myself, and I get to do whatever I like. We have other city school activities and things and summer camps that we have to go to, but for the most part, I get six weeks unpaid vacation, and so that's usually where I can kick start my exercise routines. But this Ekiden every year in January reminds me that it's been a couple of months since I went running, and even as a runner, it it helps as someone who runs occas... very occasionally, uh, it helps me enjoy the event more. Oh, the school in second is a minute and a half behind the school in first. That means that he has to pick up his pace and he has to probably run every kilometer that much faster than he he usually runs it. And he's got to push himself and will he make it and will he start flagging around the 17th kilometer? Can he do it? And if he pushes too hard, maybe his school will drop back into third. And oh, this school that always wins, they're in 11th. What what's going on this year? And it just is really fun and gets me back in the mood to run again. It's something about living in Japan that's helped me want to start running. Part of it is also that I get a yearly physical through my work, and every year they tell me, hey, you're getting fatter. And so since I was about 30, I've been trying to run more, and nothing really worked out. Weirdly, I'm planning a Haruki Murakami episode later in the year, and so I've been reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is a really interesting, like it starts as this running log that Murakami's making of how much he's running in any given month. From there, he uses it to talk about his own life, his own career as a writer, his personal philosophy about everything. I really enjoy Murakami, his nonfiction, or at least this is the first nonfiction I've read. It is really interesting. He started running every day, apparently, when he was 33. And if I think about it, I started running seriously when I was 33. So yeah, me and Murakami. But I definitely don't run every day. And I shouldn't have wanted to run every day when I was starting out. It really is not something I am able to do physiologically. Like I'm 194 centimeters tall, so I don't think my legs can handle running every day. I do try my best, and in the last few years, especially the summer and fall of 2024, I was doing pretty well, but I was overtraining, running too fast, and just I always ended up getting hurt or sick and somehow breaking the streak and then going months without ever running again, trying to recover and make excuses and things like that. So for me, I don't know if I could call myself a runner. I run to exercise. I run maybe even for fun. But for whatever reason, I wouldn't say I'm a runner, in the same sort of way that I wouldn't say anything really about my Japanese ability. I would probably call myself a runner before I would call myself fluent in Japanese, but in the same sort of way. I've been studying Japanese for 15 years now. My degree is in Japanese and linguistics. I've studied Japanese about as much as you can, but for whatever reason I don't think of myself as a Japanese learner or fluent or even bilingual. No, I would never call myself bilingual. But I wonder why that is. Well, I mean the why isn't too strange. There's just so much I don't understand. There's so much I feel like I'm bad at. I feel where my holes are when I'm in conversations that suddenly I'm not prepared for if the conversation veers toward a topic where my vocabulary isn't very strong. I would never call myself fluent then, but yeah, I think runner feels more like something I could say because I'm still a beginner. I don't know how bad I am, I don't know how much more I need to learn. But it also doesn't feel like there is that much. Like I'm not trying to win the Olympics, and I'm just trying to go out there, make sure that my next physical doesn't get me a talking to from the nurses of why my stomach circumference or BMI hasn't gone down again. But yeah, so I I really enjoy Murakami's book, and that's also kind of another layer of trying to get me out there. Because I've been studying Japanese for so long, I didn't really feel like this episode would be right if I said how I study Japanese or how you should study Japanese. I honestly don't know anymore. It's just seeped into every facet of my life that it just kind of becomes second nature to do whatever I need to do. Also, living here, that's not a small thing to overlook. Living here really does help. It can be overwhelming if you don't have enough language at first, but once you get that kind of base knowledge developed, there is a lot you can learn from the society around you. So I don't want to like sell a program of this, these are the six steps you need to master Japanese in 2026. No, I want to look at how do we form habits, how do we keep doing things that we want to do, even when there's no motivation to do them, or even when our smartphone is trying to draw us away from our goals. But yeah, coming back to running this month, I do feel stronger than I did before. It's been about six months since I ran or since October, so about three, four months since I ran any amount purposely. But in that three to six months, I I was still playing with my daughter, carrying her around, giving her hugs, putting her on my shoulders, and just generally not being active in a conscious way, and actually kind of feeling like I was being pretty sedentary. But I was still getting things done, still moving forward, so that now my heart my lungs are definitely outlasting my legs, and I can't remember the last time that was ever true. Like maybe in high school, when I was doing high school sports, but I also can I'm trying to listen to my body more right now. So I feel healthier, I'm going slower, I'm trying to make sure that this is the kind of lifestyle shift I've been meaning it to be for the last few years. And I think that can be applicable to language learning too. There are definitely gonna be times with Japanese where everything just feels hard, where nothing seems like you're making any actual progress. You're just kind of spinning your wheels, everything you want to do is just a struggle, especially when you first start out. Media is going to be a struggle. It's just gonna take a long time. The dictionary is gonna basically read you manga or anime, and it's gonna be really hard. But as you build up that base of knowledge, things start to get easier. You find what things fit your level, you find what things can help you improve, and you move on from there. And for me, I think my horror, my realization is that I think I have the kind of ADHD that needs to run, but I'm trapped in an asthmatic hundred kilogram body. For Japanese learners, there is something kind of similar where I think if you just keep at it, if you just push through, you'll find your rhythm, you'll find the way that studying works for you. And I want to share some things that I've found over years of studying and teaching that I think help for anybody learning Japanese or anything on their own. And that's what I want to talk about today. So the first main thing is just adaptability, being flexible, especially with language learning. There is an ambiguity to learning another language, especially two languages as different as English and Japanese, that it can be really hard for some learners. Everything is so different, everything is so strange, there's so many ways to write, there's so many ways to say things, and honestly, it's things we don't necessarily think about in our first language. So I think a big first thing is to define your own win conditions for each study session, each week, each month, or each year you're studying Japanese. What does it look like for you to have progressed? Sometimes a study session can be just flashcards, and some days it can be a huge thing where you try to tackle pages of a book you've wanted to read. Sometimes just showing up is more important than surpassing any sort of milestone you've set for yourself in the past. So what is your minimum viable study session? What does that look like? What's the least you need to do in a day to feel like you've studied? Because unfortunately, you will need to study every single day. There's no way around that. But every single study session does not have to be hours long of drilling flashcards or whatever it is. What is the 10 minutes bare minimum you can put in? And because if you put 10 minutes to the task, chances are you might just keep going and keep studying or throw on some show you want to watch or something. Even even just putting on an drama or an anime or something with English subtitles or whatever your L1 subtitles, that's still useful. It's not going to replace other forms of studying, but it's still useful if that's all you can manage that day. And definitely early on, I wouldn't try to optimize your studying. There's no best study method, there's no best progression. I see a lot, especially in the Japanese learning community. People come at it like it's an RPG where I have to do this textbook, I have to do these flashcards, I have to do this, this, and this, and then I'll be fluent in six months. And that's just not how any of this works. There's no best, there's no perfect, but there is a way that's good for you. And so start out with a specific textbook, start out with certain study methods and learn, let it be fluid, figure out what works for you, and just experiment and iterate. One thing ADHD has taught me is that for the most part, no one else's productivity system, study method, whatever it is, will work for me straight away. I'll have to tweak it and maybe take a little bit from here. Even the best methods have to be massaged into my brain so that they work for me. And I think actually neurotypical people can keep that in mind and keep that same sort of sense of, well, that worked for them. How's it going to work for me? Going into textbooks and materials and everything that you want to do with Japanese. And and then the language itself is very ambiguous, and understanding will progress and evolve over time. A word that meant X in your first textbook, you'll grow to understand. It means, well, X in this case, but it can also mean why, and it's not quite the same as what the dictionary says it means in English. It's got a little bit of a different meaning there. And all of this stuff will change over time and you'll grow and it's okay. But that also leads me into the systems for how you're studying. Goals aren't the best way to motivate yourself because you don't know enough about what you want to do to set realistic goals. And they're just like something like, I want to learn a thousand kanji. What does learn mean? What one thousand? There's too many flaws in the creation of this goal to make it meaningful, especially if you just set it, put it on a whiteboard, and leave it forever. Goals need to adapt and evolve and move with your understanding. One exception to that is instead of this output goal of I want to learn a thousand kanji, you can switch it to an input goal of just I want to study for ten minutes a day. Whatever study that looks like, I want to get 10 minutes every single day, regardless of what else I'm doing, that will accumulate over time. I don't know that ten minutes is enough if you just do ten minutes. It'll take you a thousand years. But if your bare minimum is ten minutes and you hit ten and you keep going most days past ten minutes, then that will get results. But this idea that I want to learn 2000 kanji, I want to pass the JLPD N1, I want to do this, this, and this, those aren't super great. And I would much prefer personally and professionally with my students that people do input-based what are you gonna do with the language? I'm going to read a page in this book every day, I'm gonna study for 15 minutes, I'm gonna have a conversation in Japanese, I'm gonna write in a journal, I'm going to use the language somehow to do a thing. That is a much better goal and a much better way of like creating language learning as a habit. One thing that is a problem is our phones, though. They can be amazing because there's lots of great apps to study Japanese with, not duolingual, but they also have social media and other distractions. They're designed to distract you. So don't just put I want I don't want to use my phone. I'm putting my phone down. You have to replace the phone with something. Make your phone boring, make your phone uninteresting, make your phone not the hurdle to your success, but not even factor into it. The YouTuber Nathan Laundrie has a great video on how to make your phone more unappealing, how to make your phone not get in the way of the things you want to do. One other thing is I see a lot on YouTube and even in learning materials the word master. I do not like the word master. Learning isn't the same as perfectly memorizing. Memorization is a part of learning, but forgetting things is also a part of learning. And master doesn't mean anything? Like what what does mastering a grammar point? What does mastering a vocabulary word what does that mean? Does that mean it's it'll it turns into automatic language in your in your own personal lexicon? You can use it at will. Is that master? Is it you get it right four out of five times on whatever Anki, BoomPro, whatever app you're using? And so it's the same sort of thing with best or all these other words that just don't kind of really mean anything and ultimately don't help us progress with our our studies and and create an unrealistic bar for how we're measuring understanding. It's okay if you read through a description of a grammar point, do some exercises and then move on. And then the next time you go to use your Japanese, you realize you want to say something that way. Not only but also I need to ah I wanted to talk about this thing but I also wanted to talk about this thing. How do you say that in Japanese again? So that sort of trigger will try to get you to first active recall it's called first recall it from your memory and if you can't then that's a good clue to go back and study that again. Eventually you'll master things but that's just called fluency and it takes lots of time. So we don't need to master anything right now. We just need to be made aware that things exist and then let our own brains notice them in the wild when we encounter Japanese that's the best thing you can do. And another thing that kind of gets lost in some of this stuff especially on like learn Japanese Reddit and things is pursue your interests in what you're studying and how you're studying. Why do you want to learn Japanese? What do you want to learn when you're learning Japanese? You don't have to just power through a textbook you can use the textbook of course but you can also supplement it with it's called authentic material. So stuff that's intended for L1 speakers of that language. So anime, manga, dramas, light novels, games, news articles, anything that a Japanese speaker, an L1 speaker of Japanese, would consume just for fun, yeah, you try it for fun too. Do you like animals? Do you like sea creatures? Do you want to learn all the kanji for fish just for fun? That might not be the most useful for a conversation but if it's getting you to your desk, getting you to your study space every single day then that is perfect. I think there is this pressure to you have to study you have to study the 4K 6K deck on Anki you have to study with Genky textbooks you have to do this you have to do that you have to pass N1 and really if you want to work in Japan you might need the JLPT N1 but you also will demonstrate your Japanese ability in the interview for that job. So you might not need the JLPT N1 because you can just be interviewed for a job in Japan and then get that job based on your Japanese. For study abroad some universities depending on the program you're trying to get into will require a minimum Japanese proficiency which is shown with the JLPT but I think this assumption that everybody has to do XYZ in that order or you're not fluent is wrong. Study how you want study what you want study what motivates you to study and then you'll get fluent in no time and yeah like I didn't at the beginning but I really like kanji now. They're really really interesting. There's so much complexity to most kanji and it's just an amazing writing system that can pack so much information into these characters. But it's also a headache for most Japanese learners and there definitely was a time where I did not like kanji because I was getting kanji quizzes every every day in the university courses. But yeah what do you like kanji grammar, history, some subculture in Japan? What is it that you want to learn about? Try to go find somebody talking about it on YouTube. Try to find an article talking about a band you like try to use your interest to fuel your study sessions. And then the next point I want to talk about is this feeling of being all by yourself when you're self-studying is kind of true. You don't have a teacher and so you'll never have that kind of solid authoritative answer to any of your questions but you do have resources and you do have you probably have people in your life that can help you too. So my first big recommendation is please please please read the introductions to your textbooks and other language learning resources that you're using. The introduction will always or almost always have the author's thought process for why they structured the resource the way they did, why they included what they did, what their goals with this resource are and how they would like it to be used. It also explains the formatting and symbols used throughout the book and it often explains the meta language the language we use to talk about language in that introduction so what a noun, a verb, an adverb, all those sort of things. But it will also explain the meta language for Japanese. There are some things that are different particles are a big one that early learners will run into that aren't in English. Think of an introduction as the owner's manual or the instruction manual for the tool you just purchased. It's going to teach you how to use it effectively and what they wanted it to be used for. Of course you don't have to follow that but it definitely is a place where I've seen other learners stumble because they didn't know how the person that designed the tool they're using wanted them to use it. And another big thing especially with ADHD is who can you study with if you know somebody that's farther along in their Japanese journey that's an amazing resource of course study with them or friends who speak Japanese. That'd be an incredible help. But with ADHD there's something called body doubling so you don't even need to be studying the same thing. It's just being in a room with someone else who is studying keeps you more motivated to study and stay on task and focus do what you're trying to do more than usual. So if you can figure it out with some friends either in person or online to study together that would be a great way to boost your study sessions. And then what is available online there's kind of too many amazing Japanese resources online from YouTube to Instagram, TikTok, websites materials, resources, apps and why I say too much is you don't really want to talk to specialists as a beginner. So there's like the Japanese language learning subreddit if you go in there to ask what you perceive as simple questions like what's the best Japanese textbook, what's the best Japanese learning app, what's the best way to do XYZ, you're gonna be confronted by people that aren't where you are. They don't remember what it felt like to be just awash in potential resources that all seem about the same and they have built up opinions and things and it's just it's hard for a beginner or for a lower level learner to sort out what it is that they want to do, what it is that they need from their learning resources. So I think a good thing for learners to do is to experiment on their own and make sure that the things they are using the apps, the study materials the ways of studying are things that fit them fit their lives and kind of stay away from anybody using the words best and scam. Another good video I saw from the YouTuber Psycholingo he's a language teacher and psycholinguist he talked about comprehensible input the idea that all you need is language that you can understand, you can comprehend, and then you'll become fluent in your target language. I don't necessarily agree with that either but he pointed out a thing that I hadn't thought of is that because you don't have a teacher a lot of the input you want to consume is not comprehensible. As teachers we try to do what's called scaffolding and we try to make a piece of media that we're using in a class more understandable for our students. We give them vocabulary lists we give them grammar breakdowns we give them comprehension questions we give them a partner that might be a little bit better at the language and none of those things are available to the self-studier but what is is perseverance keep studying keep studying vocab keep studying grammar keep trying to re-watch the same materials reread the same materials that repetition also kind of helps reinforce comprehension. So there's after watching this video I kind of got a little down and thinking that like oh well is it is it impossible to self-study a language? And no I think it's not ideal, but uh it's definitely possible and it takes probably a little more work than self-studying math or coding or whatever else you want to learn because it's not quite as analytical and the way humans acquire language is a little bit tricky. We'll talk about that a little later but even linguists aren't quite sure how we do it. But one thing I would caution is the use of AI and LLMs in language learning. First because I don't want them to steal my job but also it's just not there's no way to mitigate hallucination with any model. LLMs aren't telling you the truth per se or what they know they're telling you what is statistically the most probable answer to the question you posed given data they were trained on there's no knowledge of the subject and because of that without the user being knowledgeable of the subject there's no way to fact check what the answers you're getting are are they valid or not. It'd be easier to just use dictionaries or things like that rather than AI because you're gonna end up using those dictionaries to check the answers anyway. One thing I love using AI for is just as a personal assistant or a way to think about things. For uh a language learner they'd be great at coming up with study plans, study session ideas. They could create comprehension questions. If it's a short text like a news article I would trust it to make some decent comprehension questions. Just tell the AI your level and it should be able to bang out some key terms and some grammar and comprehension questions. I have never used it that way so I can't verify if it is useful but that seems better than what is the difference between like above and over if you're an English learner. I think those kinds of questions are not a great idea to ask AI. And then I another YouTube video from the YouTuber Python programmer he did a great rundown of all the different research out there right now of how AI seems to impair our reasoning and cognitive abilities and how using AI makes it harder to reason on our own. And those critical thinking skills are really important to language learning. So it might be a better idea to let ChatGPT be your language learning assistant rather than your language learning teacher. And then another big one is just being compassionate self-compassion. Like I said forgetting is learning you need to forget things too everything isn't just going to be perfectly memorized on the first try. You're gonna have low energy days you're gonna have stressful days with family, friends, work, whatever it is come at the problem with a little bit more patience for yourself and compassion. And one thing I've learned with therapy is using neutral language to talk about how our day is going today was the worst today was the best today was great no no just today was fine today was a day we got through it. That's all that it needed to be the study session happened and that's more than I can say for the days when I didn't study. One big thing I like to keep in mind for anything I'm trying to do and turn into a habit is don't miss twice. So like with me not posting for months missing one day is fine. Missing one session if you only study a few times a week missing one session is fine. But missing two sessions and now you're starting a new habit of not studying your new habit of not doing the thing is off and running. So just whatever you can, however you feel try to do even your bare minimum study session for that second time so that you don't start creating a chain of missed study sessions, of missed runs, of missed podcast uploads you keep on track the best you can even if it's not what you were hoping for in your study session or run or podcast episode. And yeah despite how much productivity gurus have hijacked this term but your mindset is actually very very important. There is evidence showing that someone with a growth mindset is more likely to acquire a second language and will acquire it quicker than someone who isn't as open to that way you think about your studies, the way you think about your learning has a huge impact on how well you can do them. And that is another thing to keep in mind. And something I I like to think about is something I call note refactoring. So you can test your skills and test your knowledge by trying to go back and write a summary of a grammar point or rewrite some explanation in your own words and that is a huge help and has been a huge help for me in learning all kinds of things of whatever I'm trying to study. If I try to put it in my own words or try to explain it again to someone else that has gone a long way to help cement my understanding and last I want to talk about Richard Schmidt's theory of language acquisition and that is the noticing hypothesis language learning is just the process of noticing more and more usable language both in input and output. So the process of acquiring a language inherently takes time and there's no way around that unfortunately I can't guarantee you'll be fluent in Japanese in 30 days because it's not physically possible. There's not enough time but worrying about efficiency or the best way to learn it just doesn't help and it stresses people out and will maybe lead to someone quitting Japanese before they make any sort of progress. So basically the main hypotheses for how humans acquire a second language are input if you've heard of Dr. Stephen Crashin this is the one he came up with you acquire language by receiving more and more understandable language. And so the more language you understand that means there's more language to be understood and it's just kind of a virtuous cycle of growing from there. The output theory is kind of the reverse you acquire language by producing more and more. So every time you go to produce language you notice that there's something you don't know how to say and you need to go back and study more and the more language you use the better you get at using language. Another theory that I like is the interaction theory where you acquire language by using it with others. So both the input and output in conversation you get kind of tested to fill in the language you may or may not know you try to work around and negotiate meaning when there is a gap in your knowledge but you want to keep the conversation going. You want to keep talking but you don't know the word so like for example oh yeah yesterday I went to that place um uh because I I had to I had to bring my book back uh what is it called? It's like a bookstore but you you you don't buy books they let you can you can take books. Uh what is that called and then your language partner conversation partner might offer oh a library? Did you go to the library? Oh yeah library because in my little role play I was an English learner that forgot both the words for library and borrow so that's going to be really hard to complete that conversation on paper but speaking a language is surprisingly much much easier than reading or writing even listening sometimes. So you can work with the person you're talking with to get to where you want to go in a way that a book or an anime episode is never going to be so forgiving. So the interaction theory is a pretty solid hypothesis I like that one. And then the one I'm pretty confident is is that or interaction are probably the ones that are right is the noticing hypothesis and that's you acquire language by noticing more and more about your own language input and output. So the more you notice in your input the more you notice in your output oh this is how the they use that phrase oh this word can mean this too oh okay cool oh yeah that's like English referring back to your L1 your first language is a big way of noticing things is seeing how people use like Language in context helps you notice more things, and just getting more and more data points to put into your brain of this is how this word is used, this isn't how this word is used. In the dictionary, it said it meant this English word, but they don't use it the way that you can use this English word, so it's a little different. Those all kind of build up and build up until you've acquired a language. At least that's how I feel. As both a Japanese learner and an English teacher, I feel like that's the most correct uh model for how people learn languages, but we're not decided. Linguistics hasn't decided. But and then interaction theory, I mean, humans are social animals. Language is a social tool. So it would make a lot of sense if this interaction theory is a big way of learning and acquiring language. And kind of why we're seeing a little bit of pushback, maybe is that feels too strong, but uh with crashing and the input hypothesis of just setting someone in a room with Netflix or whatever is not going to get them fluent in a language. You need that kind of push and pull, you need to output language, you need to use language, you need to try to talk to people and get things wrong and fill in the blanks. And it's a messy process to learn a language, and it can make people want to quit a lot of the time, I think. And I know my students aren't up for English every single day we have class, but it's also good, I think, to push yourself on days you don't feel like you want to study on days you don't want to go out for a run and try to do the thing. And that's basically how I'm recording this episode. Uh pushing past that kind of hesitation. Uh I and we'll go back and recap some of those points is just adaptability, being able to change the way you study to fit your needs on the day, creating systems rather than goals to ensure success rather than goals to measure your success. Pursue your interests. Learn the way you want with the materials you want. That's super important for keeping motivation up and keeping you interested in learning long enough to actually get somewhere with Japanese. This idea that you're all by yourself as a self-studier is not wrong, just over-exaggerated. You have the writers of your materials that you're using, they explain themselves. You have people in your social network that can help you, if not study Japanese specifically, they can help you keep on track and keep studying resources online, including this podcast, hopefully, to help you find what you need for materials or study methods or anything like that. Self-compassion is very important when studying or when trying to start a new habit of any kind. Be kind to yourself, be understanding, and try to measure your successes and forget your losses. And then finally, my preferred theory of language acquisition or preferred idea of language acquisition is that the more you notice about Japanese, the more you can use that Japanese. So if you can't notice anything in the language, there's no language for you to use. And I really think that is the best idea. So with vocab and grammar and all this sort of stuff, we're kind of priming the pump, getting ourselves in a position to notice more stuff when we go to talk to someone or watch anime, read manga, watch a drama, a movie, whatever it is. So we read, we study grammar and vocab so that we can notice how it's used in context, and then once we have that context, we can use it in our own language. And I think that cycle explains language acquisition the best to me. We are at the end of this podcast, and I'd like to leave it off with some recommendations on what to watch, maybe what to study, even. The movie, I think lots of people know it, but the Fujimoro Tatsuki movie of Look Back is kind of amazing for this sort of stuff. His manga is really good too, but the film adaptation also helps build this idea of building a habit, building skills, and pushing yourself to do more with a hobby than to just do something for fun. And kind of the struggles with that and how people struggle with comparison and managing time and all that sort of stuff. It's just a great movie for obviously the Japanese, but it's also a great movie if you're feeling down about how you've been studying Japanese recently. Similarly, is the movie Hundred Meters about sprinters, about hundred meter sprinters. These two boys. One is kind of naturally talented in elementary school and goes on to do track in junior high and high school, and the story picks up again in high school with these boys. The other boy is a transfer student, and he's naturally very clumsy and kind of a terrible runner and very slow. But for whatever reason, his goal is to set a world record. He just doesn't give up no matter how many times he loses, no matter what anyone tells him, he just will not give up. And that kind of the difference between natural talent and and sheer force of will is uh a great uh motivator for Japanese learning too. There's gonna be people, especially in a classroom setting, there's gonna be people that are just seemed good at this for no reason. I never was one of those people. Japanese was really hard. I never got very good grades. And one of my teachers, the last day before I graduated university, she told me that the first time she had me in a class was in the first year or maybe the second year, and she was convinced that I should quit. I thought you should have quit. You were never gonna speak Japanese, and you did it. You graduated. You're fluent, good job. And that kind of resonate with that character that just is too stupid to give up. A hundred meters is a great movie to help you feel motivated in your Japanese studies. Another YouTuber, inakyu, and all these links will be in the description. She had a great video on Hope Core anime to help you motivate. Give her video a watch, and you will get a bunch of other recommendations of great anime series to help you stay motivated with your Japanese. And then, yeah, like I said at the beginning, what I talk about when I talk about running is a great book and a fairly N3 level read, N3 N2, low N2, high N3 level read from Murakami. It's probably easier than a lot of his fiction stuff, but there also is an English translation that's very good with most of Murakami stuff. And so that is a definitely a great book for like motivation, life, philosophy, all those sort of things. I'm really enjoying that book, and I think you might enjoy it too. But yeah, look back, 100 meters, inakyu's video on Hope Core anime, and uh what I talk about when I talk about reading. I'll leave or sorry, what I talk about when I talk about running. I'll leave you with those until next month, and I'll be posting an episode in February. So I'll see you then.