I started learning Japanese the only way I knew how to learn: Enrolling in classes. Two times per week, 3 hours each, I sat in a classroom surrounded by other people, learning together, socializing. I went to the library on the weekends to do homework and studying from the test books, we got. I had my Anki setup to learn the needed vocabulary, but that was pretty much the only time I looked at a screen. I was glad because at my desk job, I work in front of a screen for eight hours a day. I explicitly chose language learning as a social hobby to get away.
Then covid hit and classes went to Zoom. So now I was working from home eight hours a day, and afterwards spent another 3 hours in another video call. I quit soon after. I couldn't handle it.
Since then, I have tried to keep a routine up, I tried following the best-practices of the internet. Immersion, Sentence Mining, all the good stuff. But now I'm literally in front of a screen 90% of my waking hours. Eight hours of screen time at work, 1 hour of Anki, maybe some bunpro, more time reading stuff with a pop-up dictionary in my browser, playing some Visual Novel, watching some anime.
I mean, I could go for a walk and listen to podcasts, or do some discord language exchange. But all of this is so far detached from what I actually wanted to do, when I started learning this language.
Ys, I've been on this journey for over 7 years and I still can't read without a pop-up dictionary, I usually keep up the routine for a month or two and then I get burned out by all the screen time and quit.
How do you all manage this? It's really not sustainable and stopped being fun a long time ago.
by sota_ka