掲示板 Forums - i’m new to japanese, does this get harder?

Yes, it gets harder, but people have this amazing capacity to retain tons of intricate detail when language is involved. Don’t worry, you can do it. The main hurdle is just to keep plugging away at it day by day.

Honestly, I don't know how people manage to remember all of it- as a generally terrible learner, I didn't expect to remember anything, and somehow I have. My only advice would just be, don't be afraid to go slow. I'm apparently very far behind where I "should" be, but I don't mind because going incredibly slow at first really helped with retention, I think. But honestly, if you enjoy learning Japanese, I'd say that's pretty much half the battle!

I wonder. Does it really get harder? Some things stick more easily, others won't stay in my memory even after a hundred repeats, because my brain and I have different ideas about what's interesting, useful and important to retain. But that was true when I was first learning hiragana, and it's still true now. Sure, kanji have multiple readings and usually more strokes than the kana, and a lot of words are made up of more than one kanji. But if you take them one at a time, I couldn't say learning 報酬 was "harder" than learning ち.

If we looked ahead at everything we had to do to complete a given task, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. I promise, just showing up for your daily practice and doing your bit will get you so far you won't believe it. You'll look back and won't know how you got from here to there.

Also (BUT I don't mean to minimise the effort of those who really have a particularly hard time remembering things), I've met so many people who had this habit of saying "oh, but I have a terrible memory" or "me, I'm a terrible learner", and it was so often not true. You think 4,000 words will never fit in your head at the same time? How many animals can you name? How many fruit, tools, holiday destinations, kinds of shoes, sports, snippets of songs, catchphrases from ads you heard as a child? There are millions of things zooming around inside our heads, and we work with them so naturally we hardly even notice what we do. Then, when we are about to learn something new, we think "but that's so complicated".

So: as long as you enjoy Japanese, you can do this. If you lose interest at some point, that's perfectly fine. But don't worry, I bet it won't be because "you can't do it" or "it's too complicated". Step by step does it, and Renshuu is here to help!