Hello everyone,
I have been studying Japanese on and off for some time, I had period of high motivation where I studied a lot, and period where I kinda let it go. Recently I've been in another period where I'm very serious about it, and have reached the point of reading a whole (easy) light novel in Japanese, with ~100% comprehension (with the help of yomitan), on top of about 100 manga chapters. This is the first time I've been able to do something like that, where I can derive direct pleasure from the fact of practicing Japanese, rather than feeling like I'm just studying. But it's still rather tedious to do with all the dictionary lookups, and the anki routine, and I'm scared that when my motivation will wane, as it does (I go through some pretty clear ebb/flow motivation cycles), I will struggle to stay consistent, and now that I can actually feel closer to my objective of being at least halfway decent at Japanese, I decided to do what it takes to not let it happen anymore.
So I'm trying to be more serious about it, and make sure I stick to it long enough that I can read at minimum manga/basic light novels relatively easily (I don't need to read super fast, just not too slow, and without needing to spend a lot of time rereading some sentences many time to finally extract the meaning). And then I can more easily keep at it, since the one thing that I regularly do anyway is reading manga/novels.
For this I started to investigate on how to work on my discipline, but for extra "oomph" I want to add some accountability from third-party. But I'm not sure how to proceed about it. In the past I managed to somewhat learn some language that I had no motivation for, by going to physical classes, so that's definitely a possibility. But there are no possible physical classes for Japanese I can attend locally.
So that leaves only the following:
- Online classes, but I'm struggling to imagine what they would look like in my case. My main interest for learning is to consume Japanese media, but that is 90%+ reading. How would for example a tutor be able to coach me when I'm not targeting speaking or writing Japanese (especially at my level, I'm more interested in understanding input, this is anyway the approach that is often suggested), and I'm not specifically aiming to take any specific JLPT exam. So how would homework even look like? And I'd rather have some set objectives to meet regularly, so I'd much rather have some form of assignment.
- Maybe some kind of reading group where there is some kind of interaction ? But I can't imagine either what that would look like, and so I'm not even sure where to look since I'm not sure what I should be looking for.
- Something else I'm missing? I don't know
I can readjust my expectations if necessary to something more concrete like "let's target N3!" or something like that if it's no good with my approach, to keep me having to make progress somewhere, but I'm not sure if this will not risk conversely slowing down my progress towards being able to read okayishly.
So I'm hoping on some enlightened advice from experienced people. What do you think about this situation ? What would you do in my place ? Anything I'm missing ? Anything I'm getting wrong ?
Sorry for the long post,
Thank you in advance,
by Fl0conDeNeige