Woo, nice! I’ve had a lot of ups and downs myself lately, so always good to hear about the wins.

I’ve shifted my focus to automaticity. The listening practice has continued to be a frustrating disaster, and I decided to drop the focused practice and change gears towards reading–a lot–at an easy level to cement comprehension of upper beginner/lower intermediate grammar structures in my head first. The idea is once easier content becomes more automatic in my head, I’ll have more bandwidth for the additional parallel brain processing power I need when the input is by ear. I’ve already gone through an entire graded reader book which is leading me to think I might have a different problem of being short on content. That’s a better problem to have, I suppose! It should also be easier to find reading than listening material. I also ordered a Japanese folktales book at my local library that I tried a few months ago. It was a tick too difficult for me back then, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes later this week.

Automaticity is a really interesting concept, and it applies to the broader skill as well. The past week in general, I’ve found my study to be less draining, now that I’ve stopped planning and started doing the reps. I’m not holding my schedule in my head, or the processes, any of that anymore. Just sitting at my desk and knowing what to do, where my tools are. It gives me the energy to put more time into it.