Inhae's blog

You know these days when you have a lot of time (the whole day or the whole afternoon, or several hours) to study your language but end up doing nothing?

There are so many things that you want to do (or need to do) that you don’t know where to start. If you decide to do something first, you end up thinking that this other thing is more important and switch to it. Then you realise that you should definitely do something else and switch again.

There are also the things you don’t want to do and avoid doing by spending your time in other more pleasant but not so useful activities. And of course, instead of actually doing things, you search the internet for tips on how to do them.

In the end, you feel frustrated because you did spend the whole day “studying” your language, but you didn’t do anything really.

I guess this happens to all of us. It happens to me all the time! But my life does not depend on my Japanese level, I’m learning Japanese as a hobby, and I do enjoy spending my day with Japanese even if I am not actively studying it!

Don’t be too hard on yourself if you feel that you haven’t been productive, we don’t need to be productive all the time, we don’t need to be progressing all the time, and we don’t need to check boxes on our to-do list all the time!

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.