I demanded myself more than I should

Hello everyone. Before I start with today's topic, I want to thank the people who joined the challenge I set out yesterday, keep me posted on your progress! It is still possible to get involved, in case someone wishes to be part of this joint experience. To read more about this week's challenge, click here.

Now, let's move on to today's topic. I was studying German in Anki to meet the weekly challenge. Since I am the one who promotes it, I opted to learn 25 words per day instead of the 20 indicated in the challenge. However, the title doesn't refer to this. To explain it, I'll need to explain a feature of the German language.

We have two genders in Spanish, masculine and feminine. Using our logic, a chair is a "she" and an armchair is a "he", even though there's nothing in their nature indicating masculinity or femininity. We can say that we have agreed to assign these genders for linguistic "convenience".

On the other hand, we have three genders in German: masculine, feminine and neuter. Every word can be associated with any of them, resulting in der Hund, die Straße and das Haus (the dog, the street and the house, respectively).

My problem today was that I was being too strict on genders. When studying in Anki, you will be shown the buttons "again", "good" and "easy", and then you have to select depending on the difficulty with which you remembered the word. The button "again" is equivalent to "I don't know it". What I did was this: if I knew, say, the word "arrival" (Ankunft) but I didn't get the gender right, I would tell Anki that I hadn't remembered the word and the app would show it to me a few minutes later. In other words, I wasn't discovering new vocabulary because of my requirements.

So I decided to settle on knowing the word itself, hoping to get accustomed to the genders by practising both written and spoken language.

I screenshotted my Japanese deck because I've already finished today's German vocabulary haha

Have you had similar problems with the languages you are learning? Write about them in the comment box! I know there are no genders in English, but maybe you are demanding more than you should in any other aspect of your study and, without noticing, this perfectionism is tying a stone to your feet.

Regarding Japanese, I am currently learning a haiku (my teacher did me the favour of recommending it and writing it in kanji and hiragana). I know that some of my readers are learning Japanese, so I'll write it here in case you are interested.

気は長く、心は丸く、腹立てず、人は大きく、己は小さく

きがながく、こころはまるく、はらだてず、ひとはおおきく、おのれはちいさく

I'm just going to translate it, come by to find out what it means!

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Lee la publicación original aquí.