If you’re like me…I don’t know whether you actually are, but…you know, if you are, then you came from a country and a culture that largely frowns upon overt displays of emotion. Especially overt displays of positive emotion. Forget displays — simply having a positive mental attitude might be social suicide_(?) where you’re from.

As time goes on, you might have outgrown wanting to be cool in the high school sense. You might have decided that your society sucked enough that you no longer cared if you became dead to it. But you still might carry some residual tendencies towards cynicism — so ingrained was the habit of being cynical.

So when a guy like Tony Robbins comes at you with that voice and that grin (that grin )…urging you to have a positive mental attitude, when Napoleon Hill tells you that “[w]hatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, when Mormon girls called Stacy _{[whose mother, I am reliably informed, has got it going on]} smile that Utah smile and offer you cookies, your knee-jerk reaction might be to go “yeah, right”, roll your eyes rather far back into your head, and proceed to dig up the dirt behind these “tricksters”. Anyone that happy has got to be hiding something, right? Or so our culture of mediocrity would have us believe.

And then there’s the (not necessarily inevitable) fact that having hope does carry the potential to set you up for disappointment — especially in the hands of a hope novice: one almost has to learn how to use hope correctly.

My personal solution to all this is to:

1. First, avoid both hope and dread — go for a flatline — and then,

2. Gently bias myself in a positive direction by simply doubting the possibility of failure. _{Sure, you don’t know if you’re going to succeed, but you don’t know if you’re going to fail either. Indeed, if you did know things with such certainty, you would be effen omniscient and you should be picking stocks or something. But you’re not. You don’t know. And since you don’t know either way, you might as well assume and act in favour of the positive. To quote Dr. Annette Goodheart (who?):}

_{“If we’re going to be miserable we might as well enjoy ourselves [and] laugh.”}

So, this sometimes air-headed and always hard-to-sustain “YEEEEEEAAAAH!!! I’M GONNA DO IT, BABY!!!!” idea, is replaced with a calmer, easier “well, I’m certainly not going to fail” orientation. A strange sort of acceptance of positive inevitability. Or something to that effect. This is kind of hard for me to put into words.

More concretely, in terms of acquiring a language, what I’m trying to say is: don’t force yourself to succeed or produce or demonstrate or even to persevere. Give that up. Instead, if it suits you, you might try taking a more laid-back approach of “well, I’m going to dig up some soil, and plant some seeds, and put in some fertilizer and water, and then see what happens”, “I’m going to sow, and see what I reap”. It’s not quite “wait and see”, since that might not get you anywhere, it’s more a “do and see“, an “act and see“.

Do your work and see what happens. Don’t try to force the results; they will come when they come. No matter what you do, at some level, results are always outside your full, direct control. But action never is. You can always do the right thing _{[and if you don’t know what the right thing is, then the right thing might be to go find out what the right thing is]}; you can always take the/a right action.

Always. No matter what situation you are in, there is always something you can do. In extreme cases, the the thing to do might be to get out of the current situation. In most cases, it’s as simple as open the book, turn on the TV, plug in the earphones.

Something. Anything.

So why did I get to thinking this? Well, I CAN WATCH AND UNDERSTAND VIRTUALLY ANYTHING ON HONG KONG TV NOW !(T+19 months) Violent triad movies, weird accents, regular TV news, parody news, phone prank shows, Korean-made documentaries about the history of noodles…bring it. In some cases I read the Chinese subs quite a bit for confirmation, but this simply shows how fast a reader I’ve become — I used to be unable to make it across even half a subpicture before it changed…now I can read it 1.5 ~ 2 times in that same brief time window. In short,  my input is almost a Jedi, though my output be at youngling level.

And the weird thing is…I was barely even trying. Not really. I mean, yeah, I have Cantonese TV and movies playing close to 24/7 in my house, and put a laptop in the kitchen so I can watch things like The Simpsons Movie _{(that’s right, son, there’s a Canto dub…Marge, Lisa, Bart and Flanders’ voices are dead on; Homer’s is “re-interpreted” slightly, but I never liked his original voice anyway)} while washing dishes, and I have Chinese comics in the restroom, and Chinese newspapers pasted all over my walls, and Chinese books permanently sitting in my manbag ready to go anywhere I do, and…yeah…and stuff. But once you get those things set up, it’s almost all just a matter of, how you say in the simple English…sitting back and watching. Once you do set up and maintain the right environment, all that’s left is to show up…to exist.

So…just do it already. But don’t wait and worry and weep and wail and gnash your teeth over results. Don’t act like a desperate stalker, always watching, always trying to get the phone number, always trying to get to second base, always asking Mummy if you’re there yet. Sitting by the door checking the clock every five seconds is not going to make the FedEx lady (yeah, my neighbourhood FedEx guy is a girl) come any quicker. Just be cool. The results will call you when they’re ready. They always call . You need only act; you need only plant; you need only keep walking — sooner or later _{[later than you would wish, but sooner than you would fear]} the destination will practically be forcing itself into your face.

If you can’t be motivated, don’t be _{[I can’t]}. If you can’t feel passion _{[I hate this word]}, don’t. Just be curious instead. Just keep sowing instead.

Hey everyone.

All this consulting and FAQing and emailing and commenting have taught me a thing or two. A lot of people have a lot of questions, particularly fine, detailed, low-level questions.

My personal preference up until now has been to write at a more abstract level, both in order to stay more universal and also in order to not bog people down with minutiae. Moreover, I hate being told what to do, and a lot of AJATT comes down to “just go out there by yourself and play”.

However, those action-level techniques do have a place and do have value. And, as you might expect, I’ve definitely accumulated my fair share of these over time.

One other thing that I’ve observed is that some people (at least claim to ) read through all the articles indexed over at the Table of Contents, but still come out confused as to what to do: “OK, so where do I start?” And, to be fair, I would probably be in the exact same position as them. There is enough information now on this site to fill hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand, pages of a normal book. There’s a lot to go through.

So, in my boundless magnanimity, in my universal love for humanity, in my mother-like kindness, I have taken it upon myself to use these fingers and this computer, to create magic, to create…a QRG.

QRG: an action-oriented, technique-focussed Quick Reference Guide to AJATT in the form of an ebook. How do you do the hirigana and the sentances and kanjis? How do you do the emersion? [sic]. How do you do use monolingual dictionaries? How do you sentence-pick? It’s AJATT condensed into a single package for AJATTeers at virtually every stage of the process, from beginners, to phase-transitioners to high-flyers looking for new games and challenges.

The guide itself is basically written up and ready to go, but before releasing it, I would love to part-take of your wisdom, your advice, your experiences, your requests, your suggestions. What do you need to know? What do you wish someone had told you? What would/do you as a user-reader want out of a guide like this?

Comments are wide open. Let your voice be heard, and cetera!

The other day, a young man named M.A.I. sent me this email:

Hi Khatz!

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now, and I love it! I try to follow your method as much as possible, but I am not 100% immersed in Spanish (yeah, I am learning Spanish instead of Japanese) as I am kind of undisciplined. But your method is still helping me a lot!

I was wondering about what you think about a phenomenon I “discovered” lately. Here in Germany, there are a whole bunch of American people I know who speak German very little or with an extremly heavy accent. Alright, maybe the problem is that there are a lot of folks in Germany trying to learn English, so they try to practice their English on them. But another example, yesterday night I saw a Turkish TV show (yeah, I am Turkish but live in Germany) with a woman from Sweden, who had married a Turk and now stayed in Turkey. Even though she was in Turkey for a few years or so (I think) she spoke Turkish with an obviously foreign touch (accent and word order). There are not so many people learning Swedish in Turkey to excuse that!

So I was wondering, what do you think about that? What’s the reason that there are people being 100% immersed in a language, and still not attaining that “native fluency” in that language (maybe never in their lives)?

Thanks for your answer!

Here’s my Khatzumoto attempt at an answer. It’s really an extension of ideas previously covered here by me, and here by AntiMoon, and summarized in the words of Kató Lomb as recorded in her Polyglot: How I Learn Languages.

The fact that a linguistic microclimate is more important than a linguistic macroclimate is proven by many of our older émigré compatriots. No matter where they live, they can’t acquire the foreign language properly even after 10–15 years’ residence, simply because they have built a Hungarian wall around themselves and their children, bridge partners, or even business partners. [Emphasis added]

A large part of the answer may simply be, well, is, the fact that many people who seem “100% immersed” aren’t really immersed. Period. They illustrate the simple truth that just because you’re near the water, that doesn’t mean you’re taking a bath — one must actually enter the tub. You will find that these people continue to mostly/only read books, watch movies, work with and talk to people in their primary/native language. There are many Western men married to Japanese women, with Japanese-speaking Eurasian children, who know no Japanese beyond the basics. Many first-generation Chinese immigrants in the US may have lived there for decades, yet can barely speak English. There are Western men who have lived in Korea and Arabia for 10+ years who can neither speak nor read these phonetic scripts. What happened to the kanji excuse? They have all physically walled themselves in.

But their wall is also psychological. You see, it turns out that pride is another factor. Many adults feel silly making the sounds of the new language. And they are so invested in their current identity, that they will cling to their current intonation — whether or not it be appropriate to their new language — as a way of “feeling themselves”. They are afraid of making the sounds of the new language and being made fun of. Ironically, their strong foreign accents are the silliest-sounding thing of all — as you’ve no doubt experienced, someone who at least tries to sound Turkish when speaking Turkish, or French when speaking French, or Japanese when speaking Japanese, is much more pleasant to the ear.

I am kind of undisciplined.

Discipline really isn’t the issue per se. Not in the way we usually think of it: “making ourselves do boring, painful, mind-numbing crap we don’t really want to do in the hope of some future reward”. This process shouldn’t need discipline. Or, more accurately, it is impossible to use so-called “discipline” and “willpower” on a project of this length. Discipline is too scarce a resource for anyone to attempt to use it over any significant period of time. Any project that requires sustained self-directed effort for more than several hours or days is not one where you want can use self-coercion.

Instead, you want to combine fun (attraction) with inertia. In your case, it might go something like (1) Find fun stuff to do in Spanish. (2) Remove Turkish/German from your life to create inertia. This is analogous to removing all unhealthy food from your home, then replacing it with food that is both tasty and healthy. The result is that you will eat this healthy food (1) just because it’s there, and continue to eat it because (2) it tastes good. “Food” must fulfill the conditions of abundance, variety, desirability, and availability, if it is to be eaten. If you are to “eat” Spanish (i.e. healthy food), you need to have lots of Spanish that’s so tasty you eat it merely for the pleasure of eating it, not because it’s Spanish and often not even out of hunger.

By the way, I personally subscribe to the idea of discipline as “remembering what you want”. This is a totally different animal from all these masochistic attempts at inflicting suffering upon oneself. This re-definition of discipline essentially carries us in the direction of remaining in touch with the joy and curiosity that led us to fall in love with a language in the first place.

So don’t try to use traditional discipline. As long as you are a normal, healthy living organism with a drive for self-preservation, any attempt to hurt yourself will inevitably fall flat. Don’t suppress “human nature”, use it. I happen to love sitting around watching movies and reading comics, so I simply transfer these activities into other languages, and what were once bad habits suddenly become highly educational activities worthy of remuneration, praise and websites.

While hiding in the linguistic microclimate of the native language will not help, any attempt to force oneself out of it is destined to meet with violent resistance and ultimately failure (indeed, the only way force will work is if it’s initiated and maintained externally, and that gets you into all kinds of issues of [child] abuse and human rights and ethnic cleansing and all that good stuff). If in doubt, observe real toddlers — there is no shame, no doubt and no boredom, only adventure. Fill that bathtub with toys, jump in, and before you know it, you won’t even want to get out.

Skin going all wrinkly and junk…

There is a natural tendency to view this in-the-bathroom-but-barely-even-getting-wet phenomenon as something negative, as yet another example of how you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. _{I don’t buy that at all, and I hate how we’re always just trying to find excuses to euthanize old dogs. While we’re at it, why don’t we just go Logan’s Run and murder everyone when they turn 30, since they’re never going to amount to anything anyhow? If the dog’s not learning, it’s not the dog’s fault — it’s the trainer’s fault!} I take a different view altogether. That foreigners can go years in a country virtually unscathed by the local language, is, I think, an example of the triumph of the human will . It shows just how powerful our ability to shape our personal environment — our microclimate — is; it shows how we can resist seemingly overwhelming counteractive forces; it is a feat that should perhaps even be celebrated…OK, maybe not that far.

Anyway, for us who actually want to learn a certain language, all we have to do is run this process in reverse. Stop resisting the target language, and become more receptive to it. Receive it. Accept it. Become it. If a Japanese person can create a Little Japan in Kansas (as some of my friends from Japan have), then…an American person can do the same. It’s that simple.

I leave you with this quote, apparently from some guy called Paulo Coelho:

We wouldn’t worry nearly as much about what others thought of us if we recognize how seldom they do.

Thanks for reading. I am sure there’s much more to add on this issue — if  you have any insights, please feel free to share.

Another day, another email pregnant with possibilities for insight to help us all. Her name is B-star. And this is her story, in her own words. Heavily, heavily edited for spelling :

I’ve been studying Japanese for a looong time. Like most people, I sucked at it until i chanced upon your method. It works much better and I suck less.

Here is the dilemma: I’ve stopped. I have to urge myself to even watch a Japanese cartoon WITH SUBS, much less a raw cartoon.

This has been a problem throughout my life. I’m what u call a chronic procrastinator. A normal procrastinator puts things off till lata and tries to reason it out in their head. A chronic one puts it off until whenever and has no reason why.

I’ve explored my belief system à-la-Robbins, and I do have some sucky ones that I need to handle, but I was wondering what you had to say about procrastinating at my level.

Specifically, I wanted to ask you how you get through your “desert” moments when you don’t do anything you’re supposed to do. What do u tell yourself? How do u get back on track AND STAY ON TRACK (which is always harder to do)?

Hope you can help oh great one of the Japanese (that’s me sucking up to you so you’ll give me a life-changing answer. LoL)

LoL indeed, young B-star. LoL indeed. And good question, by the way. So here’s the answer: Maybe…probably…wait for it…:

Maybe you just don’t want to watch that particular anime that much. Maybe you’re just not into it any more…for now.

Ask yourself this question: “If I were fluent in Japanese, and I didn’t have to do anything for ‘learning’ or ’study’ reasons, would I be watching this right now?”.

If your answer is anything but an emphatic “of course, motherlover!”, then

1. Don’t bother watching that anime or whatever. Just effen don’t. That’s it.
2. Find something you do want to watch, that you would watch anyway simply for the sheer fun of it
   a) If you can’t think of anything, then get more stuff, and/or look through all the stuff you can get your hands on until something pulls and holds you in.

Sometimes stuff pulls you in but can’t hold you. Dump it. The media has to be worth watching in its own right. Recall what made you want to learn Japanese in the first place — you watched stuff because you wanted to watch it, and you stopped watching as soon as you were bored (this counts for reading, too by the way…and for video games — fortunately, most people don’t play video games ad boredomium [somebody, please, hook me up with the real Latin for this] so they typically don’t need warnings like this). I am saying do the same thing — keep switching stuff up (Massive Turnover) — just be sure the thing you switch into is Japanese, that’s all.

As Mark Twain is said to have once said:

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and…play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT turn Japanese into work. Don’t turn it into “study”; don’t turn it into 勉強 (a word that refers to scholastic study in Japanese, but actually carries the rather negative meaning of “coercion” in Chinese). Just play at it. PLAY. That’s why I keep telling people: don’t make all these rules about what is and is not OK for you to do in Japanese, or how Gokusen is over-coloured by the argot of juvenile delinquents or watching Love Hina will make you talk like a girl — it doesn’t matter, you need to learn all that vocabulary in order to truly be proficient in Japanese anyway, so whatever you watch is fine — as long as you’re enjoying it right now.

Write this on your liver: just because anything is OK to watch in Japanese, that doesn’t mean that everything is worth watching…to you that is. One person’s Star Trek is another person’s…well, I can’t imagine how any human being could fail to love Star Trek, but you get the idea.

Immersion Responsibility is a Two-Way Street

Anyway! Your only responsibility is to do stuff that’s actually in Japanese; the remainder of the responsibility rests entirely with the Japanese stuff — media — itself. The media has a responsibility to entertain you. You don’t have to find the value in it; it has to demonstrate its value to you by being so much fun that you don’t notice time going by — by sucking you in. It has to make you wish that eating and sleep and bodily hygiene could take care of themselves because they cut into your media time. And if it doesn’t do that or it stops doing that, then you “fire” it by changing to something else. You are the boss and there are no labor laws. Fire the mother. You do the work of setting up and showing up to the environment, but after that the environment must work for you.

Some people will tell you that you can only enjoy stuff in a foreign language once you’re fluent. That is some chicken-and-dinosaur-egg nonsense right there and I will tell you now — you can enjoy authentic “funbun” (For Native By Native — thanks to two young Chinese-acquiring studs for this word) stuff in a foreign language right from the get-go. If you simply stop turning it into work and trust your taste. You are in charge now. You decide what comes and what goes, and boring stuff always goes. It doesn’t matter if it has the same amount of Vitamin J as 50 bowls of rice; it doesn’t matter if it has traces of Nagase Tomoya’s urine on it — if it’s boring then it’s out. the. door.

In fact, you can make a game out of this. It’s kind of the “Aim to Fail” of media exposure — find Japanese to throw away. Or, put another way — focus on how much Japanese you discard. How much Japanese stuff do you “skim”, “sample” or “try”, only to throw away? Increase this number, increase the number of Japanese things you discard and the amount of cool stuff you hit will naturally increase as well. It’s all just probability games. As I’ve hinted at previously, I’ve been doing that throughout the month of May 2009 with Cantonese. My goal was to try (not necessarily watch from start to finish, but at least try — sample) 100 Cantonese movies. Now, I may or may not actually hit 100, but (1) that’s not the point, and (2) the reason I may end up not hitting 100 is because in all that randomness I found 3 or 4 movies that were so cool I wanted to watch them again and again and again.

Let me make one thing crystal clear: I. Do. Not. Read. Or. Watch. Things. Repeatedly. Out. Of. A. Sense. Of. Duty. I don’t do anything — the film [or book or song or game or whatever] does it to me. It just so happens that there are some films out there that are so well put-together, with lines so beautifully delivered, with plots so funny, with timing so perfect, that as soon as I hit the closing credits I find myself wanting to go back to the beginning. Having said that, if you do not want to repeat, then do not repeat. Just don’t; don’t even go there. Remember — your only responsibility is to the Japanese language as a whole, everything else is disposable; nothing is sacred. The canon is not closed.

Skim, Sample, Skip and (Sometimes) Stay: The Bookstore Principle

While we’re here, let me tell you a thing or two more about that 100 Cantonese Movies In One Month sub-project, and what I discovered while doing it for the first time.

Have you ever noticed how you seem to have more fun at the bookstore skimming books than at home with the books you bought? Well, it’s because, at the bookstore, you skim. You sample. You skip all the crap. Skim, sample, skip. You only stay when you find something you like.

The key to having as much fun at home as you do at the bookstore is to start behaving the same freaking way at home. Treat your bookshelf less like some oversized wooden embodiment of all that you want to be but aren’t, and more like a bookstore. And do this with everything — text, audio, video — everything. Only those lame indie-music-loving friends force you to listen to a track “because it’s good for you”. Them, and people in authority who are bad at being in authority, which would sometimes seem to include most people in authority. Real friends and equals leave you alone. I feel like I’m on a completely different subject…

A good movie or book or game or whatever is like a good friend. And a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend. And a good snippet of a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend: you stay with them because you like them, not because you have to or should. Don’t stay with them out of some sense of obligation, don’t add more “shoulds” to your life and “should all over yourself”, as Antonius Robbinicus once so eloquently put it.

When something or someone is cool, she/it/he will make you want to spend more time with her/it/him. There will be no duty involved.

One never gets bogged down at a bookstore. One only gets sucked in. So why…why trudge through a boring anime or game or book? Because you “should”? Because other people are looking and you might look illiterate if you skip too many pages? Because you have to finish what you started? Fuhgeddabout it, man. Instead, remember this: there are no other people and there are no means and there is no rule except “have fun in Japanese”…if a book or a movie or even a person gets dumped along the way, then so be it. There’s plenty more where that came from.

Both Active and Passive

To go even further, what this means for us is that: “It’s in Japanese therefore it’s good for me” alone is not reason enough to watch something. It has to be fun AND in Japanese. As Rossini almost said, but didn’t:

“All Japanese is good, except the boring kind”.

If it’s boring, then don’t watch it. Switch to something else. Simple. Period. End of sentence. Case closed. “But I might learn something!”, you say — yes but you’ll probably die of boredom before you do. The truth is, you can learn something doing anything, so there’s no reason to go mentally chewing broken glass on the off chance that you might may could build some character.

Media is like Kleenex in that it’s really good to use and very hygienic, but once it’s been contaminated with snot (boredom), you throw it away. Only those stingy relatives you visit once a year force you to reuse dirty Kleenex. For your own health: throw away or put aside all boredom-contaminated media and get a new box of tissues. _{Good media’s actually re-usable, of course, so the Kleenex simile has holes in it. Not as big of holes as those in Stargate “we just travelled to another galaxy to meet a community of humans whose ancestors were abducted at the dawn of Earth civilization, but somehow we’re perfectly able to communicate complex technical instructions in life-and-death situations using a fully-fledged 20th-Century Standard American English vocabulary all without a Universal Translator or any other such magical device and oh look they have USB here, too” SG-1, though.}

This is such an important point that I’m going to repeat it: you actively move through media, constantly changing what you watch as soon as it gets boring, but at the same time, you passively wait for something to come out and grab you. When that thing does find you, you will know; there will be no doubt, because it’ll stop you in your tracks. And you’ll have a beautiful time together (indeed, time may well stop). And then you’ll get tired of it, and start moving again.

Tip: when something grabs you, you might want to find out who made it, and start looking for other work by the same creators. In my experience, if you like one piece of work by a certain creator, the chances are much higher than random that you’ll like her other work. For example, did you know that Trick, Ikebukuro West Gate Park, Handoc, Keizoku and Sushi Prince were all directed by the same guy (TSUTSUMI Yukihiko) ? These are all some of the coolest shows, Japanese or otherwise, ever made. So cool, that it would be worth acquiring a certain language just to be able to enjoy them fully.

Conclusion

To conclude:

1. If you’re bored it’s not your problem and it’s not Japanese’s problem — it’s the media’s problem. Change the show, not the person and not the language.
   • The reason you feel like all of Japanese sucks is because you have mixed the pure, clean spring water of fun Japanese stuff with the runny, cholera-infested turds of obligation. Purify the water — remove the obligation, so that you are left only with fun stuff, and Japanese itself will be fun for you again. _{As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I went through a stage when, for some inexplicable reason, I simply couldn’t bring myself to sit down with a book; I always ended up watching TV instead; this really bugged me — had I attained literacy just to never use it again? But when I sold off the 30-50% of my “bookstore” ( well, bookshelf) that I wasn’t interested in any more, suddenly reading became super fun again, and has been ever since. I continue to treat most books like disposable items to be processed — read or not read — and not some kind of proud decoration, and I continue to read heavily. Also, I skip the boring parts of books just like TV. DO NOT READ THE SPECIAL INSETS IN MANGA JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO! In the case of anime and movies — don’t feel like you have to follow every single moment. Remember, it has to bring you in. And it’s OK to stop sampling after even 30-45 seconds. Fire the media. You do not have to finish what you started.}
     
2. “Throw away” is a synonym for “change”. I can watch a movie 10 times, until suddenly, at the 11th viewing it’s like…mmmmyeah: it just starts chafing. Maybe 6 months later you’ll want to see it again. So it’s…not necessarily a matter of all-out disposal — especially with stuff that you’ve liked before — more one of switching things up. Often enough, I find that something I once didn’t feel at all excited about, has magically grown on me.
3. Tools for switching things up for free: LiveStation, YouTube, KeyHoleTV, NicoNico, the Internet, real-life Japanese friends.
4. Tools for switching things up for cheap: Japanese shops [i.e. shops for Japanese people], Netflix and other video rental options, TV where available.

Thus spake Khatzumoto! So it shall be written! So it shall be done! And now it’s your turn. How do you turn those dry “desert” moments into a sweet, tasty “dessert”? Please share .

I get it all the time now.

“Hey Khatsumodo! Love teh method! Your righting iz rully motuvashonul! I’ve been running my Japanese OS for 4 hours now, but i don’t feel much change! Hehe. Lolz!”

“Hey! I really love all your talk about immersion! I don’t know kanji yet but I picked up a Japanese dictionary today but I couldn’t understand anything!!! Is this normal??? It’s too hard! Maybe I’m just not good at languages!!! Do I have to do Heisig? But how will I learn readings and grammar?”

I’ve been working with your method for almost six months now, and although I’m doing the things you talk about on your website, and putting a lot of time into stud*ying, it still seems like something’s not quite right.*

OK. Now’s it’s time for a little section of AJATT that I like to call “REALLY? With Khatzumoto”.

Really. What the heck did you think was really going to happen within hours of you changing your OS to Japanese? I mean, really!? Really! Did you think your hitherto dormant Japanese midichlorians would instantly fire up at the sight of kanji and you’d start having friggin’ Russel Crowe Beautiful Mind moments in Japanese with equations and primitives and radicals spinning through the air? Really!

And really. Did you really think that you were going to open up a dictionary on day 1, read that 何 means ある代表的な物･事をあげ､その他のいろいろな物･事を省略して一まとめにしてさす語, and then be nodding your head in satisfied comprehension? Really?!

Really?! Did you really think that just because in The Thirteenth Warrior Antonio Banderas learned Old Norse in five minutes one night while sitting around a campfire with red-headed guys called Sven, that you could simply put in a couple of hours more effort than him, watch a Miyazaki movie or two and BAM! next morning you’re writing the following year’s effen Naoki Prize winner and Kadokawa is on the phone talking about $50,000,000 advance for the sequel and Toho want distribution rights for the live action movie starring Ken Watanabe? I mean, really? REALLY? You realize Tom Cruise’s Japanese in Last Samurai sucked, right? Even after a multi-million dollar five-minute Hollywood crash course!

What were you thinking? What was going through your mind? Where did you expect to be, and who told you to expect to be there, and what gave you the impression that that was a reasonable expectation to have?

REALLY?!

I’ll tell you what you were thinking. I’ll tell you what was going through your mind. I’ll tell you where you’re going so horribly, catastrophically wrong. Let me tell you about the left turn you missed at Albuquerque.

There is a fallacy lodged in most people’s minds that tells them that “performance on the first trial is a good predictor of performance on the 10,000th”. Well, bollocks. It isn’t. If nothing else, at a purely mathematical level, depending on the definition of points, a single data point is an unacceptably small statistical sample on which to base any judgment about anything.

I’m not saying not to do sampling — we do it all the time; perhaps we even need it survive — when you take a sip from a cup to determine how hot the entire drink is, you are sampling. But this assumes that heat is evenly distributed throughout the liquid. When the cup is the size of a language, and every learning method is like a non-turntable microwave, then expect that a sip after two seconds of heating, generally, tells you jack squat. And this, by the way, is why the US has a 50%+ divorce rate, because most people in the US use a marvelously intricate, painstakingly delicate and utterly useless mate-sampling system called “dating”, to select partners for a completely different system called “life” (‡taken from my forthcoming book: Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena II)

But when we see a baby fall do we tell her to quit this walking thing while she’s ahead and let the “more athletic” Afro-Carribean babies do it? When we hear our baby ga-ga-goo-goo unintelligbly, do we have her euthanized because she sounds like a retard? When she drools, do we beat her senseless because that’s just gross?

Well, that’s what you would be doing to yourself if you were to give up at this point. You would be euthanizing the nascent Japanese version of yourself because he sucked the first time.

But adults “euthanize” themselves and each other all the time. If that new, magic Solution To The Problem they paid $200 for doesn’t work, adults will mercifully “kill” the nascent Japanese child inside them, with soothing appeals to “I’m too old for this” and “I just lack talent” and the all-time favorite — “I don’t have the time” — never having given her a real chance to grow. We adults are quick to accuse small children of impatience, when in fact we are the impatient ones and the children simply lack a sense of time altogether.

You could suck at tennis right now; you could be the worst kid there on your first day. But if you simply racked up enough trials to form a sufficient statistical sample, you could get really good, and if you went even further, you could go on to surpass Pete Sampras. Realistically, though, you won’t surpass Sampras because you’re a whiner who finds excuses for not following her dreams, but barring severe physical disabilities, if you really wanted to, if it mattered enough to you, you could do it. Remember: most people drastically overestimate what they can get done in 2 days and drastically underestimate what they can get done in 2 years.

But who wants to go that far? Screw it. Go on. Give up. Give in. Kill babies. You might as well. They’re ugly and hairless and useless anyway.

What’s that? You don’t want to be a baby-killer any more? OK, let’s help you work with that. Remember how Michael Jordan missed over 9000 shots in NBA games alone? Think about what that means — it means that this man missed more shots than most people take in their entire lives. This is the arithmetic of success: conduct so many trials that the number of errors you experience exceeds most people’s lifetime trialcounts. This is  the meaning of aiming to fail.

I read a great quote the other day:

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re about average.

No one in all of human history has been born comprehending the real text of any language on their first try. Why were you supposed to be the first? But at the same time, all who have continued, and put thousands and thousands of hours into it, have gone on not only to comprehend text but in many cases to create text themselves. I bet if I’d thrown you an English newspaper when you were two years old — after two solid years of constant exposure to English — you’d have been hard-pressed to even hold it the right way up.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying: Push the continue button and play another round. The absolute worst thing you could do is not to fail, not to look stupid, but to run away from real Japanese. Stay. Stay. Stay. The Japanese Fairy does not visit those who flee. The Mastery Fairy hates baby-killers. The longer you stay, the more certain your victory; it’s that simple.

And this is why this thing has to be fun, because it will be relatively long and because it will be constant “failure”, of a sort. You can’t push your way through it, you have to find a way of making it pull you along. I leave you with the sage words of a young man named Ryan:

if your study of Japanese [hurts], YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

*Sincerest apologies to T-star for singling him out like this and lumping his very legitimate question with the other two — which aren’t real, in the sense of actually having been written by other people, but are very realistic in terms of reflecting a composite of actual emails I have received and I kid you not about the spelling — and sincerest thanks to him for being such a good sport about it! You, sir, are a gentleman and an AJATT hero!

Dear AJATTeers,

Since the AJATT Consulting has received such a positive response over these past several months, and has been so much fun to do, I’ve decided to expand the service by offering several new, low-cost options, including live-chat, in addition to the original high-value bulk packs. For more details, visit the Consulting page of the AJATT Store.

Oh yeah, what else — you need this to be happy and popular. Buy it.

Also, look out for some cool new articles in the coming week , discussing some key issues facing all language-acquirers.