When the lessons are too hard....

[wolfmaster]

I don' know if it's just me being a bit slow, i've been doing fine with lessons say 1 thru 60ish, without explanation, I can still understand the conversation, and pick up about 80%ish. But all of a sudden, after lesson 60, I cannot understand at all.
Should I keep repeating these lesson or can i still move forward? It's kinda sad

[Joey]

same thing happened to me at about lesson 50 or so, unfortunately that led to about an 8 month slump where i got through maybe 10 new lessons because i lost motivation to learn more. But I was able to regain motivation once i started to emerge myself in as much Japanese language things as I could, like trying to read comics, watching dramas and other tv shows, talking with pen pall, because to fully enjoy those activities I knew that I needed to keep learning Japanese so I just started doing it and now I average a new lesson every 2-3 days.

[Elfunko]

Its a learning curve. Get over it or forever stay below it. Just keep pushing, you'll catch up. And if your not "immersing" yourself like noted above thats gonna make everything that much more difficult.

[Javizy]

This happens to me all the time. Often, it's new vocabulary or maybe verbs in forms I haven't heard them in before throwing me off, but as long as I can get an idea of what's going on and recognise a decent number of words/grammar, it's not too disappointing.

If you read the PDF and then relisten to the dialogue, you'll find it a lot easier (usually I do this at least twice). I try to get to a point where I can read through it smoothly without using a dictionary. After that, it's easy to recognise all the words in the audio dialogue. If you can get to this point after not understanding a lot at the beginning, then you've learnt a lot more from the lesson then you would have if you understood it first time.

If you do have major problems, it's good to take a break from new lessons and review as many old ones as you can every now and again. I should really do this more often.

Like Joey said, get as much exposure as you can through interesting mediums. Watching TV shows is great for listening practice, and hearing words/grammar used in new contexts. I also have an e-mail "penpal", and you actually learn a lot from each e-mail, because you have to review grammar, kanji, Google words to see how they are used, etc. It also gets you used to talking to Japanese people in terms of politeness, directness, etc.

[wolfmaster]

THanks guys- I have been relistening to the old episodes, it's much better... i hope it's not that i kinda already know what the conversation is about...

I watch alot of japanese drama, i get really excited when i pick up words that I learned from here!