Over the past 3 months I’ve been doing consistent SRS again. I reset a large deck (around 50k N2/N1 + native material sentence cards) because I hadn’t touched it in years.
Something interesting has been happening.
Sentences and grammar that used to feel dense or hard now feel automatic. I’m not consciously breaking them apart anymore I just read and understand. What surprised me most is that this is happening even with sentences I’ve never seen before.
It feels like my brain is just recognizing patterns now instead of applying explicit rules.
I’m also noticing this shift with 新完全マスター N1 reading. Before, I would over analyze passages and second-guess myself. Now I’ll read a passage and the correct answer often just feels obvious. I can see why it’s right almost immediately.
Looking back, I’m starting to wonder if a big part of my previous difficulty wasn’t strategy or intelligence it was simply lack of exposure. My brain just hadn’t seen enough patterns yet.
I’m not a linguistics major, so maybe I’m oversimplifying this. But it really feels like consistent exposure to clear, comprehensible sentences has built a kind of automatic pattern recognition.
For those at higher levels:
Did things eventually “click” mainly because of accumulated exposure?
Or is there something else going on cognitively that I’m not seeing?
Curious to hear other perspectives.
by AdUnfair558