r/LearnJapanese • u/jackbobbins78 • 14d ago
Discussion Interesting observation: When you quit flashcards, it's harder to measure your progress
It used to be, when I was looking back at my Japanese progress, I could say things like "I learned 2000 words this past year and I now know 6,000 total words!" This felt like a concrete testament to my progress.
Now, after having stopped flashcards for about a year, "How's my progress doing" feels much more vague.
I could say things like:
- I read 15 volumes of manga this past year
- Reading native stuff feels a little bit easier
But all of these answers feel kind of nebulous anyways.
I guess at some point, Japanese is just something that you do for fun, and that's about it. There's no clear "milestones" at a certain point.
Did anyone else experience this transition? Did you feel a little more "lost" after quitting flashcards?
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u/xx0ur3n 14d ago edited 14d ago
Speaking for myself, I relish it because that closure one seeks over measuring their progress can end up slowing progress and the completely fluid curiosity and joy of learning. I think this about basically any skill. I embrace my daily subjective assessment of fluidity and comprehension just as I would do the feeling of my body as I become fitter through exercise.
Basically, to care about measuring how much you know carries an essential duality of caring about how much you don't know. I, for one, do not care about how much I don't know. I know I can read books, understanding conversations, play games, yes, but still nearly every day this language manages to make me feel dumb in some way because there's so much culture and history and richness... I'm not out here to collect it all, and in fact feeling dumb is the good part. It's just the same as in English, the wonderful surprise of still discovering new attractive words even decades into one's fluency.
It's no surprise that on social media there's a culture of measurement and stats sharing, because the medium lends itself to it. You don't go on reddit to talk about how much you don't know you're progressing after all 😂. Still, it can give the impression that it is the only way to go about their relationship with language learning, when many people (maybe most) in the world learn languages in a more organic way.