I think we've experienced this enough times already, where we set a respectable goal for ourselves, achieving or even surpassing it the first few days... and then started to stumble and struggle after that. And then we'd scold ourselves on those days, and start putting pressures and forcing us to drag ourselves across the finish line that day, even though most of the time we have a justifiable reason for failing those goals, be it lack of sleep, other, more pressing life obligations, etc.
And then funnily enough, we'd start to get philosophical about it. We'd start to think things like "Why are we even doing this? Is language learning something that I actually enjoy? What will I even gain after reaching fluency? I don't even like anime all that much anymore", all for having read 7 pages short of what my daily goal is.
Those thoughts would usually be followed by a pseudo soul-searching journey, browsing various Reddit/blog posts and YouTube videos about goal settings, about hobbies, about finding happiness in those hobbies, etc. We'd then make grand decisions about our LL journey based on our particular frustration that day, for example if we're tired of having had to look up hundreds of words in a particular chapter, we'd make the decision to never look up a words ever again, and justified with thoughts like "a dictionary is a flawed summary of what a word actually means, it can actually harm your understanding of that word" and other stupid monologues like that.
And if that's funny, what's even funnier is that as we wake up the next day, those feelings usually disappears without a trace. It's as if those journal notes that you wrote about your decisions going forward was written by a drunk man who was venting out and ranting about nonsense. If the next day happens to be a day where you have more energy, where work doesn't stress you out too much, usually you'd actually be able to surpass those goals you set, and once again those negative feelings that you had felt like a lie.
So I think ultimately speaking, we're all humans. We have days of low energy, we have days where work and family issues overwhelm us, we have days when we're simply excited to do something else entirely (yes, other fun and fulfilling hobbies do exist!). On those days, just do the bare minimum like read a single page of a book or watch a 10-minute YouTube video so that we don't break the chain, write a brief summary of your roadblocks that day in your journal, and... forgive ourselves.
Accept the days we couldn't achieve as much as we wanted to, or even embrace them. Embrace our humanity, appreciate the fact that we can be compassionate for ourselves, and that we have a life outside of this hobby. If we keep going after that, we'd be able to look back and actually be proud that we gave ourselves that break, because that's what made us able to keep going and not quit.
Because really, while you can fail your goal to read 600 pages a month, or to listen to a podcast 15 hours a week, ultimately, you can never fail learning the language.
(Source: Someone who has never made the decision to quit learning English, and is now going through the struggle once again in Japanese)
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