I have been learning Hanzi characters (actually, more like Sino-Vietnamese) as a hobby since the beginning of this year. Last year, when I helped one of my colleages with learning gre vocabulary, the interest for Anki sparked again in me and I started working on my Hanzi deck.
In order to make learning fun (or maybe just less tedious), I practiced the habit to wake up at 6am everyday to do my Anki reviews. This takes approximately 30 minutes each day, and I am rewarded with a positive sensation after having learned something to start off the day. It was great.
It was even better when I have more time to learn during the covid-19 social distancing. I pushed myself to reach the milestone of 1000 characters, and I made it. There was one problem: the way I did it was something similar to a cram. The downside of learning more cards in a short span is that you have more cards to review later. After having reached the 1000 milestone, I decided to slow down a little to clear out those reviews before learning more cards.
And then this happenned:
The obvious corollary is that I lost my learning streak, along with my enthusiasm to learn. The number of cards I work on each day gradually decrease, my habits of learning in the morning vanished, and in the last two weeks, I have two black dots in the heatmap, representing the two days I forgot to work on my cards.
Enthusiam is a fragile thing, and if you break your rthythm, you will end up like me: I turned my motivation drills habit into a burden to work on everyday. For the next few days, I am going start learning new cards frequently again. Hopefully that by learning new things, I can get back my momentum after these few weeks of Anki burnout.