When I started studying German vocab intensively (up to B1 now) I started with notecards and it took like a couple of weeks per 10 words (verbs with conjugations and nouns plus genders). At some point things rewired and now 10 words a day is pretty simple.
I’ve been using country-identification as a doom scroll alternative. It’s a fun game with at least a little bit of benefit. What’s weird is that something markedly changed and it got way easier all of a sudden. Like something changed in terms of how my brain interpreted the maps. I suspect it’s probably closer to language learning for a pictographic written language (eg mandarin).
The assumption that “rewiring” means something like “clean engineering where parts can be cleanly replaced” seems a little faulty to me. Maybe I spend too much time around wires, but “rewiring” to me means “a lot of time, a lot of difficulty, and a lot of effort to wrangle a complicated mess of interconnected things.” Which seems about how the brain is.
