I've noticed something over the past month or so that if i think about it daily I don't feel like I'm making an improvement but when i think back to around this time last month my ability in Japanese has already grown vastly for example I know my vocabulary has grown hugely hundreds and hundreds of new words in less that a month which i put mostly down to the great learning tools over at iknow and anki for my long term retention and the more i learn the easier it becomes to learn new words they just seem to stick better.

My understanding of grammer has vastly improved also this is probably more down to seeing 100s of sentences in context than it is me studying them on sites like tae kim , although i must admit that Japanese in Mangaland has helped alot in my understanding of things that i couldn't get my head around with sentences alone, oh and by the way i highly recommend Japanese in Mangaland even over tae kim for learning grammer as IMO it's much easier to understand and the sentences with manga context makes it even more enjoyable a read, one of very few textbooks I'd recommend.

So basicaly make sure you keep it up everyday no matter how tired/depressed/busy etc you are as most of us know that half of the time we are just being lazy you've always got time to do atleast something in your target language even if its just a quick 10 min timebox in your favourite SRS that will be 10 mins worth of knowledge that you have retained unlike if you did nothing at all, even for example earlie this week i had the worst headache that i've had in years I still managed atleast my reviews probably wasn't on my best form but atleast it got them done i would hate to see the reviews if i had left them although i did collapse in bed after that with some headache tables :D