Momoko is really amazing, she only recently started learning Japanese, but she’s had, virtually word-for-word, the same grammatical insights as one of the most respected (if controversial) Japanese writers: HONDA Katsuichi (本多　勝一). Honda discussed his ideas on grammar in his primer on how to write easily understandable Japanese: 日本語の作文技術 (Nihongo no Sakubun Gijutsu, Techniques for Japanese Essay-Writing). Between them, Momoko and Honda have taught me things that I never knew before; they have opened my eyes to new possibilities.

And it makes me sad. Sad because there’s so much that I don’t know; I am so ignorant that it makes me wonder what business I have running a site telling you how to learn Japanese? Why not just shut down?

I really was thinking that. But then it hit me: I am reading Honda’s book in Japanese and I almost never need to use my dictionary — I even know the readings of the special kanji he gives readings for. I am reading books about Japanese grammar and about how to write Japanese in the Japanese language. Something, somewhere must have gone right…

To paraphrase Honda: most people are taught in school, and continue to believe as adults, that grammar has been decided. It’s this list of rules that’s fixed, unchanging, was set down by intellectual superbeings in the ivory tower. And that’s a bunch of bollocks. Grammar is a moving target. As we speak, it is literally in flux, shifting like the desert sands. OK, slower than desert sands, but it is on the move. To see it as a fixed thing is to see it in error.

Which brings me to my first point: you are probably fluent in at least one language: your “native” language. In at least this language, you almost always know when a sentence is right or when it is wrong. And although you can almost never explain why, if you were to just read a well-written grammar book, you would very quickly understand why. That’s the thing about grammar: it’s only useful after-the-fact!

Grammar is like conspiracy theories: good at explaining past events, but lousy at predicting the future: too many exceptions, conditions, procycles and epicycles make it inelegant, much like Ptolemaic cosmology.

Grammar is an ex post facto analytical tool; it’s a tool for talking about language after the language has been written and spoken. But, as for actually learning/using language and knowing what to say before you need to say it, grammar is about as useful as an extra orifice at the tip of your elbow.

Before grammar, learn Japanese. Get fluent at real Japanese first. Learn the how. Afterwards, you can start to look at the why of grammar and be like: “oooooooh that’s why”. When you try to use grammar a priori, you only end up with verbal diarrhea for text and brain farts for thoughts; when you use grammar a posteriori, then you have insight.

Because grammar is a tool for discussing language, you first need some language to be able to discuss. In fact, you need a heckuavalot of language; you need a buttload of reference points in order for grammar to be at all meaningful. Anyone who has learned Latin in school knows this by counterexample: “decline the ablative singular of bellum”, says the teacher. WHAT? Who forking cares?! The ablative singular just doesn’t mean anything to most of us (oh, wait, it means “by/with/from/in/on/at”…yeah, thanks, that really helps: it totally makes sense now ). The problem isn’t that Latin is dead; the problem is that almost everyone who studies it knows so little of it that a grammatical discussion has no analogue in actual experience and therefore is a form of verbal diarrhea. Make no mistake: humans are concrete beings; we talk of abstract generalisms, but we think in concrete analogies.

Focus on sentences, sentences, sentences. Learning thousands of correct Japanese sentences will build your Japanese senses; it will develop in you that child-like instinct to decide “this is the right way to say X”. And then, after that, when you want to sharpen the saw, you can read all about Japanese grammar in Japanese, written by a Japanese person who knows what the heck she’s talking about.

So that’s the deal with grammar. I know I’ve put some grammatical explanations in the sentence packs and in Dick and Jane, but those are just hand-wavy explanations to soothe your natural desire for a reason, and they come after the sentences because they are less important. What matters is actual Japanese; grammar may be cool for discussion, but it simply won’t help all that much when you’re up Shiitake Creek (a famous Japanese creek made entirely of mushrooms) without a paddle. When you’re alone on the ground in Japan, you don’t need to know whether or not “kuru” is a base 5 verb. You need to know how to open a bank account.

I’ve figured it out, people. I finally brought a magic bottle of Japanese special sauce from down from the mountain. You can learn Japanese in one second, and I will show you how…

Sort of.

OK, so I really wrote that title to make you look (Haha! Made you look!), but it actually has a good deal of relevance to the content of this post. Which is basically this: it only takes 1 second to learn Japanese.

Less, even. It only takes one “moment” to learn Japanese. In other words, the smallest unit of time you are capable of perceiving is all it takes to learn Japanese. Without getting esoteric, I think we can safely define this thing called a moment — the smallest perceptible quantum of time — and this thing is all you really have a hold of in terms of action. Sure, we talk about hours and years and centuries, but those are nothing but way s of collecting moments; they are abstractions. The moment is concrete. The moment is where you live and act. You have never taken an hour to do something as such. You simply did one thing in one moment, and then another thing in another moment, and then called it an hour to spare everyone the grim moment-to-moment details.

So, you’re sitting there, and you’re thinking “I want to learn Japanese”. But, you think it’s going to take forever, the classic “ten years”; you think you’re going to have to live up on a mountain in Tibet (which as we all know is in Japan, just like the Shaolin Temple), wear a kimono and marry a Japanese woman called Kumiko, and all that just so you can get decent at doing every day things like buying milk. As for literacy, forget it! I mean, haven’t you heard? Japanese was invented so that foreigners could never understand it! Not even Japanese people understand it! So why bother, right? Give up! Turn on MTV instead, because TRL is on, and they might show that Gwen Stefani video where she wears a tank-top; that’ll be good. Let’s save time and heartache and watch that instead! Right?

Right.

No, of course freaking not! Let me hit you with some knowledge. All your learning of Japanese is, is simply a string of moments in which you learn something and remember it in the next moment when you’re learning the next thing, such that you know more in the next moment than you did in the previous moment. You know more now, than you did one second ago; you know more one second later, than you do now. You know more today than yesterday and more tomorrow than today. That’s it. The key here is the moment. You don’t have to spend ten years, you only have to spend this moment, right here, right now. Now. NOW! There is essentially nothing else to it, but whether or not you become fluent in Japanese entirely depends on your little choices in these tiny, “insignificant” little moments. Surely two minutes of MTV can’t hurt, you say? No, my friend, those two minutes don’t just hurt: they’re killing you.

All you have to do to climb the mountain of Japanese (newflash: it’s really a hill, by the way), then, is put one foot in front of the other in the direction of up. Come on, how hard is that? All you need do to learn Japanese is learn one kanji/kana/word/sentence and then use that knowledge to learn the next. You don’t need to be a genius, a billionaire, or of Asian descent: you just need to be consistent. To use some really cool metaphors I once heard: Japanese is like rowing upstream, just keep paddling; it’s like warming a rock, all you have to is sit on it. As a reader on KanjiClinic once said: learning Japanese doesn’t take brain-power, just butt-power. So get comfortable on that rock and enjoy your ride.

So, I know I keep saying this, but, Japanese isn’t something you acquire as much as something you turn into. And the only way you’re going to turn into it is by using (all of) what you have. And all you have is this tiny, precious moment that you’re busy wasting on deciding whether or not to watch Gwen’s new video. Solution: don’t watch it. Watch a Japanese video instead. Two years from now, you’ll still be able to go back and YouTube “No Doubt” in about two seconds; but for now, let it go. As Winston Churchill once said to me when we were hanging out: “Gwen Stefani will still be pretty in two years, but if you don’t learn some Japanese right now…then in the morning you’ll still be ignorant”.

Dude, now that I think about it, Winston Churchill would have written a great blog about Japanese: “We shall learn it on the beaches; we shall learn it in the fields and in the streets; we shall learn it in the bedroom…”

Anyway, take care and always always always have fun!

In college, I worked as a janitor. Supposedly because all the TA spots were filled up. Looking back, I should have been more enterprising. But more on that later. Whatever it is about janitorial work from 10pm at night to 6am in the marnin’, it brings out something in people. In my case, it was arguments about the randomest crap ever. My favorite kid to argue with was dark-haired, buff, belligerent, French-looking and French-speaking Chris.

He was a 400m runner on the track team, but had quit because he thought he would never get good. Specifically, he said he had quit running because he could never be as quick as the Africans on the team; they had “fast-twitch muscles”. I told him that he was spewing 24-carat B.S., and that the real reason he could never be good was that he had given up on it. So, I guess the bullet point you can take away from that is persistence matters and never give up. My good mate Calvin Klein put it best:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

Which is nice, and we could talk about Calvin Coolidge all day. But enough of designers and dead presidents; back to me. So, later, still in college, at a nicer job, I worked with yet another dark-haired, bellicose, French speaker. His name was Peter. He also argued that because he wasn’t African, he could never be good at basketball; he could never be Michael Jordan; he could never be 6’8” (or however tall MJ is), look good with a bald head and have “fingers as long as bananas”…He must be right, right?

Rhetorical question. Peter was wrong. Handsome, but wrong. If his goal was to look like Michael Jordan, then that was one thing (cosmetic surgery). If his goal was to play exactly like Michael Jordan, then that, too, was one thing (acting). And if his goal was to score as many points as Jordan, or play in the NBA like Jordan, then that was yet another thing (practice).

In my own roundabout way, what I’m trying to explain is that Peter thought that playing as well as Jordan meant the same as being Jordan; he was failing because he had conflated Jordan’s appearance with Jordan’s skill; he was trying to be too many things: to be tall, to be black and to be good at basketball. He should have just picked the one: becoming good at basketball. Practice would get him there. He has a nice body on him, and could teach that body basketball. At the end of the day, Michael Jordan is a human being; he breathes air and his pooh smells; he taught himself an advanced skill just like every other human being has; he became the best in his field through extensive practice and dedication — he and Larry Bird are famous in the NBA for being particularly dedicated to practice, with the habit of always starting it earlier, doing it longer and harder than all their teammates. As Calvin Klein said, talent won’t get you anywhere, nothing is more common than talented people who are failing in what they do.

Now, unfortunately, in order to be like Mike, Peter might have to scale back on things like school, candy and hanging out with ditzy girls with names like “Kimberley”. But if he really wanted to do it, he could get into the NBA and break Jordan’s records. But therein lies the problem: Peter probably wasn’t willing to do those things. He wanted it all. Sorry, Peter, no dice.

You can have be or do ANYTHING. It’s not just something the nice teacher at school told you; it’s the truth. But you cannot have, be or do EVERYTHING.

You can learn Japanese to fluency. But it will cost you. Not much money; I must have spent less than $1000 directly on Japanese over a period of 18 months. But time, friends, attention; these things are a form of wealth, too. And Japanese demands them.

Your parents may have told you, when you were a kid, “nothing in this world is for free”; “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. They were probably angry at you, or themselves, when they said this, so it has a bad association for you. They were probably giving you the “don’t flirt with pedophiles” talk…

What your parents meant to tell you is this: everything in this life is acquired in exchange for something. Whether or not that medium of exchange is money is inconsequential. It’s kind of the “Law of Conservation of Stuff”: all things being equal, stuff is neither created nor destroyed, but is traded for other stuff, one way or another. Even if someone gives you something for free, they are exchanging the loss of that thing, for the gain of extra space, or your friendship. Our parents may have made it all sound like a bad thing (“nothing is free”), but it’s actually a good thing; it’s wonderful. Because the fact that everything has a “price” (an exchange rate) means that everything can be “bought”. All you need do is make the exchange.

In terms of learning Japanese, there is essentially one thing to exchange: your language. And that means everything that is in your language. The people, the literature, the food, whatever. You have to want to know Japanese better than whatever your native language is. You must desire Japanese so much that you would be willing give up (exchange) your native language for it. As it turns out, this exchange is only temporary. But, if you do not have the desire to make the exchange, if you desire to hang on to a non-Japanese life, to non-Japanese friends, and to non-Japanese books/movies/songs, while you’re trying to learn Japanese, then, I am by no means telling you that you will fail, but don’t be surprised if you do. And if you do fail, don’t blame it on your ability. Your ability was never insufficient. It was your desire that was lacking; your desire for Japanese was insufficient, it simply didn’t outstrip your desire to see Pirates of the Caribbean 4: Black People in the Lagoon are Cursing with your friend Matt, before the Japanese dub came out. You wanted it all; you wanted both the non-Japanese life and the Japanese life. Well, guess what — those two things tend to cancel each other out.

Let me say it again: you can have, do or be ANYthing, but you cannot have, be or do EVERYthing. As long as you want it enough to do something about it, then you will have native- fluency in Japanese. So, if Japanese is what you want, then get ON it. ALL OVER IT. STICK TO IT. Live Japanese. Breathe Japanese. Drink it. Sleep it. Everywhere. Everything. All the time. Ignore other languages; push them out of your life like small children that get in your way when you’ve been standing in line all night waiting to buy a PlayStation 3; hey, those kids had it coming .

And why do all this? Well, because you want to. You want Japanese, that’s why. You want to function in Japanese society; you want to read the newspaper, go to the bank, write the book, watch the anime, read the manga, make the friends….whatever. And you’re willing to make this exchange in order to get it.

Right?