Linguistic Burnout

I have been being really harsh on myself over the past few weeks for not being more fluent at Japanese than I am. Truth be told, I have a lot more Japanese experience than a lot of others in my situation, putting me at a huge advantage, but I'm not standing next to those people on a daily basis when I'm failing to communicate in my everyday life.

Truth be told, even in just the last 3 weeks, I can already see improvements in my confidence, vocab, and listening recognition. I guess I'm expecting myself to go from "advanced japanese" to truly fluent overnight, when in reality it took me 4 years of studying in college to get where I am now. What's more, my studying in college was for about an hour a day, 4 days a week, plus a little homework here-and-there. The rest of my time was devoted to other academics that were more time consuming, or to my personal/social life. There also weren't really many opportunities for practice, as there are very few fluent Japanese speakers walking around in America. Here, very nearly every minute of every day is Japanese practice of some kind. I wake up and use Japanese to work my cell phone and air conditioner. I attempt to read the label of my yogurt in the morning to see if I'm getting any nutrients out of it besides calcium. I have to read and listen to location names on the bus on my way to school. I hear Japanese spoken around me by coworkers throughout the day, and occasionally, I get the chance to attempt participation in those conversations. When I'm not busy doing some kind of work at school, I'm studying Japanese. After school, I use Japanese to navigate public transportation, the supermarket, household goods store, clothing store, etc. I use Japanese to get a form I need from the government office. Even when I'm out with English-speaking friends, I'm often the one translating the menu or asking for directions, as I'm often the de-facto Japanese speaker of the group. When I'm at home, the TV is always on, even when I'm not watching, so that I can hear it spoken as much as possible. While watching TV, I try to vary the subject matter I watch: educational, foreign language education, travel, cooking, local and international news, high-school drama, adult drama, comedy, game shows, trivia shows, variety shows, etc. I try to take notes in Japanese when making diary entries, etc. If I open a bank account, I write up a list of every vocab word I can think of ever needing to use related to banking and attempt to memorize it.

So, whereas in America I was probably getting maximum of 8 hours of Japanese practice per week, 9 months out of the year, here I'm getting about 15+ hours of Japanese per DAY, every day. That means that I could potentially get 4 times more functional Japanese language experience in this one year than I got in the last 4 years of college combined.

Basically, my head is about to explode from new Japanese vocab that I've been being force-fed. Sorry, in hindsight this was a really pointless rant. I had free time....correction, I was bored out of my mind.