Things are not going well for me this year.

I went on a trip to Las Vegas earlier this year at the beginning of May and after that trip, I completely stopped learning Korean for a solid couple of months. I'm not sure why, but I did. I remembered looking at Italki, wondering when I should set my next lesson, and not setting it. My flash cards on Anki are now several months old. It will take several hours to get through them all and catch up.

I got back into lessons earlier this month. They've been going pretty well so far, but I can feel how much I've forgotten. It's been so much and I feel so stupid. I feel like I'm not making progress. I look back a year from this point and it honestly feels like I'm at the same or even slightly worse level as I am now.

The lesson today was not good. I forgot so many things. I forgot the word for rain, umbrella, kid, grandpa. I constantly forget the simple words for location like front and back and beside. It's not going well. I think I need to recalibrate my strategies. Obviously this isn't working towards my goals.

I need to focus more on recalling words and less on exposure to them. I need to consolidate my Korean vocabulary to the most common words possible. I think the way to do that is to copy the words from the My First 500 Korean Words book, The dictionary I have of 2000 common words, and let my tutor know that I want to focus more on repetition and recall during lessons. When we cover too many words, I just can't focus on all of it.

My time with "passive" learning is starting to feel like a waste of time since I'm not actually learning anything. It feels like I'm learning, but I'm not actually learning anything.

I guess part of this is that I'm coming back from not learning Korean for a while, and part of it is that I have forgotten a lot in that time. There's nothing I can do about that now. I can only focus on what I can do in the future. Don't let the second arrow harm me--like what the Buddha teaches.