I rather like the Spanish word “deshabituarse”, which basically just means to lose a habit.

Spending roughly 40 mins on my languages now, the odd day or 2 did an hour of Japanese, but altogether starting to make work on the languages. My other hobbies are sort of languishing though by comparison. Despite the increase in my language studies, it’s been an overall downturn in efforts. I guess I’m still trying to get back on the horse.

I have a bunch of trans friends, count me in on the HRT info dump.

From dabbling in it, I’d say just go ahead and start anywhere, Duolingo even, whatever wets your toes. The plan can form as you’re going, you don’t need some massive study routine planned out before you start, as you generally need to change things up and change things to suit you better as you go anyway.

If you’re stuck for starting places, there’s Duolingo and DreamingInSpanish, and also maybe a Spanish book to also reinforce grammar concepts.

Realizing despite the lack of work done in Irish, I’m able to understand bits here and there even so. Also realizing that I was never taught future tense in school, (I was a very early dropout of the education system and was never home-schooled). I’m managing to get a lot farther in my Irish studies due to the Molly lectures, I need to go back over a few of her videos for better reference, and still have yet to make that card generator for Anki, so that’ll still take a while. Also to add, Anki have their own third party API for making/managing cards, but I’ve never really gone into APIs very much so that’s like probably the second time going to really try to pick some package not made by Python themselves.

Next to that, Spanish, I’m completing, but being lazy on, still need to dive more into Migaku and flash cards. Duolingo completely restructured their Spanish recently, and suddenly expects me to know another 10+ words I’ve never seen before, like the word for a hake fish, I never even heard of a hake fish before, let alone in Spanish. Also they’ve seemingly replaced a lot of the example conversations with AI voice actors instead of retaining their regular voice actors, and it’s just, idk, they might be saying the words correctly, but it sounds like I’m listening to someone choke on food throughout.

Then the Japanese, I’ve been slowly pushing through with my piles of reviews and they seemingly just keep getting bigger no matter how much I put away. Ended up spending a whole hour today on Japanese flashcards, and still have 120 cards left in my pile. Which is another thing. I’ve set the goal of putting 30 minutes a day onto each subject and I’m realizing that that’s far from enough to get far in any language. Especially for my Japanese, which should more like be AT LEAST a full hour, bare minimum. I’m doing all this work and getting nowhere fast it seems.

This all being said, I am going to pace myself building up to the lofty goal of an hour per language each. I still have other, probably more important things to do during the day, besides my languages, and I’ll probably be leaning on things more once I build up the nerves for it. Rather take it easy, get there very slowly instead of jumping in and immediately burning out.

Still doing the maths, reading, Blender, programming, daily self care, and chores. Again, not as much as I want to do, but I’m still sort of staggering as it is, so I want to be careful about overdoing anything.

The Irish course I was doing ended up being super basic. Ended up turning to a course called Irish with Mollie instead. I’ve heard plenty her Irish isn’t exactly “native” level. But I’ve let perfect be the enemy of good for too long, so I ended up getting the course, and I have to say, it is hands down the best Irish course I’ve used to date, perfection be damned. However, now phonetics and lenition and uru are much more natural now and easier to understand. I genuinely feel like if I was an expert in Irish, I could do my best in actually creating my own lesson based structure set for this and not just a tourist trap setup. There’s plenty of examples Mollie gives for her charts and etc, but there’s no actual wordlist or the like to learn from, so I guess I have to do the labour myself, which shouldn’t be too bad once I put my mits into webscraping/automation with Python.

Next to that I ended up letting my Japanese build up over the last week or so, sitting on a vocab list of 300 words to review, so that’ll take me a few days to get through. Spanish is doing okay, but I’ve become increasingly lazy when it comes to sources. I bought that Spanish book not too long ago, but it’s grammar is very basic, so I don’t know what to use for a more intermediate book, but I guess I haven’t looked well enough.

Doing various other things like maths, programming, reading, and Blender.

My Irish lessons start soon! Other than that, just been mindlessly at my studies, missed most of a day, otherwise doing okay. Going to start my studies today in probably an hour from now. Sort of mellowing to Gorillaz Demon Days right now to turn the temperature of the day down. It’s helping. No real hangups this week, save for getting piss drunk yesterday. Still feeling it today. So just going to dive in when I can.

Been working on myself more again. Only still doing the 30 mins Japanese and Spanish and Irish, but now also doing an hour of programming and an hour of Blender and 5-20 mins of maths again. It’s funny since before even with just JP, SP and IE, I always felt I could be doing more with the languages, and I find it funny because doing the programming and Blender stuff seriously made start maths and language studies feel a lot easier. If I don’t study the harder subjects until later that is. Also always thought to myself I didn’t have enough time in the day to focus on my languages for long enough, but this new schedule seems to make me realise I’ve been telling myself falsehoods all the time, (despite sorta knowing they were falsehoods, but at least now I can feel they’re false).

As per Ashtear’s advice from last week, I did look up online about JP courses for me, the only local one I can properly attends already doing a course, so I can’t start a JP course there until maybe 2 months from now. So I’ll be aiming to start around then if it’s cheap enough.

Also the past 2-3 years I only learnt about 1000 words, but since the new year started, I now know 1500 words, I must have really put in the work effort the first few weeks of January to go that far in so quickly. I plan on ramping to that point again if possible.

So yeah, doing better again now. Thankfully.

Based on Duolingo, I’m N3 (lies), and MaruMori/other apps I’m N5. I have seen all vocab for N5 and have about 300 mastered words out of the 1000 or so words. I still to this day keep forgetting katakana just because it’s not very common in loan words I’m given on the MM path. I could honestly make do with a proper course as well, you’re probably right about that. I haven’t really looked into group activities for Japanese, but now that you mention it, it would be a good idea to help get my foot further in the door.

Also I can’t seem to see your comment on my Lemmy instance for some reason, but I can get the reply for some reason in PMs?
What’s that about?

It was like 10 euro an hour, which, I mean, if I really really really tried, I could make something work, but I think at least for the start of this course, it’ll help set me up for success, because I’ll be able to at least attempt speaking the language properly, getting the phonetics right, and that being important. Then the reading, and phonetics to readings and etc, and dialects, and understanding nuances of gender based grammar better (Duolingo is absolutely shit for explaining any of that), and well, just overall language attempt. This will be my first actual proper course I paid for, as I try to be self learned, but I guess for this language I’ve completely given up on finding decent sources, since everything good is still all over the place.

I use Duolingo with the audio turned off for a bit. Sionnach at an odd time if I want to see if the apps updated to something with more of a bite, but my main go to has been Teach Yourself Complete Irish by Diarmuid Ó Sé. I also tried the book Gaeilge Gan Stró, but it felt too touristy in its approach to teaching it, learning whole sentences before they explain the individual words. Complete Irish is more explained, however condensed and to the point which is a bigger strength to me, but also sort of a bad point too.

I sort of want a longer grammatical explanation and then examples, and then maybe some SRS to work with like an Anki card deck. There’s a lot of Irish resources out there, but none of them are good. And the best you can get are just old hardcopy books.

In a while, whenever the depression fully goes away, I’ll probably automate my own Anki card word-lookup Deck. But yeah, just I need my energy back firstly.

Doing 30 mins of Japanese, 30 mins of Spanish and 30 mins of Irish again. Also yeah I know for languages like Japanese, it’s still not enough. Though I am watching a fair amount of shows that incorporate the languages. Still need to go to comprehensible input videos for all though.

Also thinking about picking up a proper language course that might start in the next few weeks, but I’m unsure if that’s a good idea or not. It’s a 10 week course, that spans 2 hours per week, and it’ll cost roughly 200 euro. So it’s like a tenner an hour or something, which is decent, but I’m not sure if I can afford it just now is the thing, but then again I’m unsure if they’ll have these courses again in the next few months. I have about a week or so before courses fill up, so I’m limited for time, so I’m just mulling these things over in my head wondering if it’s worth it or not.

Depression and anxiety have hands, but I’m getting back into the swing of things… Slowly. Also more bad news, so it’s just been a real struggle of late to continue, but still trying.

Bad news hit me lately so just been sorta struggling to maintain streaks, let alone study.
This thread’s always a motivator, so might end up doing a bit more after I close out of this.
Just, yeah, life, I guess.

I feasted, nay, engorged myself in Japanese, to the detriment of my Spanish and Irish. I’m still doing my Spanish, but it’s a drop in the ocean of what I used to do. Realized today I’m probably hella depressed, but I guess it is coming to be in waves? I guess despite my constant efforts, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere in my languages, so that doesn’t help. Feel sort of like, what’s the point? You know. Like I like learning the languages, and I want to be good at them someday, but my motivation is in the swanny.

Japanese is still getting tackled. Thinking about ditching Duolingo entirely for Lingonaut but also not sure when it’ll have Spanish done, so have to wait on that. Irish is seeing a bit more hope these days as the app Sionnach which I was referred, it had a schism where one of the owners apparently went mad and ejected a lot of the workers on it, so now they’ve diverted and are making a newer, ground up Irish learning app. Called Madra Teanga, and are also open sourcing it, as well as going to get proper native speech, such as Munster, and Connacht and Ulster dialects. Basically in the pre-planning stage at the moment, but oddly enough more optimistic than anything I’ve seen so far.

Anyway, yeah, that’s me.

Try out https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/ for free to use Japanese books. I’ve heard good things about this site. Books for all levels too.

I know new years in Japanese is 正月, but don’t know how to say happy new years despite so, also probably not going to try Spanish or Irish either just because languages do it all differently and I haven’t really gotten around to seasonal greetings yet, even birthdays for me have been hardly touched, so memory is vague.

I’ve gone absolutely ape shit diving into my languages. Doing well over an hour, maybe 2, of Japanese a day. Doing my vocab for Irish on Anki and Drops and also finally my Irish book arrived, so incorporate that and another book. AND also a friend of mine decided to pick up Irish recently, so I have that to also look forward to! And then next the Spanish. Felt like years since I’ve studied it properly, when it’s only been a week or two, and already things are clicking, so that’s also been quite motivating for me too. I want to push for a full hour in Spanish now too. A friend mentioned to me their office is looking for WFH translators for English-Spanish, so if I ever get a C1 credential, I could potentially chase after that as a job, which is hella neat.

That all being said though, the biggest disappointment of 2025 was looking at my languages through the eyes of a translation job. Pay can be quite poor despite the countless hours needed for such skills. So for me it’s best to enjoy the ride rather than work myself up for some overarching goal that might never happen (not that I’d give up, just that I might not get a translating job).

2026 is the year I go full send on all my studies. Including languages, maths, Blender and other courses. 2026 has been a complete shit year for me so far, so at least I can look forward to studying in the near and far future.

As I like to tell my friends, “I’m in my gitgud era”.

Crapped out for the holidays. Only scratching the very surface of apps to maintain streaks. After Xmas though I’ve gone crazy wild trying to dive back in. Ending up picking up 22 words a day in Japanese, and about 10 in Irish. Spanish still needs to be picked up proper, but out of all the languages I’m doing now, Spanish is by far the most demotivating.

Really wanting to push more Irish as I get into the new year. I find it depressing I’m Irish, lived here my whole life even, and don’t understand the language. Next to that, the language is actually dying off despite what our government says. So I’d like to strengthen the lifeline of the language by contributing to it.

Haven’t done Irish in a bit. Keeping up with Japanese though. Spanish is a bit hectic, but surviving a lot better than my Irish. Maths is completely fallen over and my reading habits are just standing there laughing at it.

Despite the lack of language effort, I’m reading a chapter a day, and despite reading a chapter a day it still feels like I haven’t even eaten part way into Lord of the Rings.

Japanese has seen better times, I was a bit skimpy on the vocab up until recently. Ended up knocking a 200 word a day pile down to 70. Spanish and Japanese see some sight of Busuu, bit of Duolingo, and a bit of Migaku. This all being said, there’s still not enough done. I genuinely feel like at this moment in time, I could do with hard copy physical books, not just apps, ironically though what would help my Irish a lot are apps that don’t suck like Duolingo or RosettaStone.

Time is however short, and I have no idea how I’d divide my attention per language, then again per activity for hard study. Life would be a lot easier with a teacher or some guided activity cheat sheet or something.

Despite my love for languages, and I’ve been doing this for like 2+ years, I still have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.