You know how people are always “keep an open mind”, “listen to other people’s ideas” and good stuff like that?

Bollocks.

Kind of. Here’s the deal. The information that comes into your life is already heavily cut and edited. If nothing else, the finite nature of your life makes it so. You will never see every piece of info that exists. So cut that out right there. You can either control what information comes into you, or have it controlled for you by time limits. I recommend you take control. So far so good. What about specifics?

So, I like living in places where you’re free to think and do and read and write and say pretty much whatever you want — places like Japan. That’s my public life — a democracy. However, my private life is a dictatorship. I only let in the ideas that help me, the rest I passively ignore or actively refuse to let in. Yes, I live a life of censorship. And I censor out ideas that do not help.

My favorite idea to censor out is the “it’s too [hard/difficult]” idea. A lot of people go, “well, Khatzumoto, I’m just being a realist; I’m just stating fact; I’m just making an objective remark on the situation”.

More bollocks. No, they’re not. They’re making a very, very subjective comment on what they think the situation is. And even if they were attempting to make some kind of objective assessment (which they’re not, but even IF they were), it just doesn’t help. It doesn’t help to tell someone “x is hard”. In the mind of a beginner, all it means is “X is IMPOSSIBLE”; it is so discouraging and it prevents people from even starting in the first place, those who do start quit at the first sign of trouble, which automatically reduces the population of successful finishers, which in turn feeds the idea that something is hard, and soon you have a vicious cycle in place.

The real problem never was and never is the supposed difficulty of the task; the problem is people saying its difficult. When people say something is difficult, they don’t really mean it’s difficult, they mean “it’s too hard and only people with ‘talent’ can do it; only people with ‘the knack’ can do it; only ‘children’ can do it”. Just like when you ask someone if they can do something for you and they say “maybe”, they don’t mean “maybe”, they mean “no, but I don’t want to offend you by being direct”.

No one is saying you’re going to be amazing at it on your first day, or even your first month or even your first year. But you know what? The surest way to fail is to quit doing it. If you can’t skate, or program, or speak a language, it’s not because a supernatural white ball of gas in outer space doesn’t want you to. It’s not because of your parents — leave them out of it. And it’s not because of the task itself — don’t be a wusspot. It’s because you haven’t done it enough.

A lot of times we say someone is “good” at something. I think this is inaccurate. It would be more correct to say she is “accustomed” to it. We don’t get good at something so much as we get used to it. So, I’m not “good” at Japanese, I’m just accustomed to it. I’ve seen those kanji before, I’ve heard those words arranged in that sequence before, I’ve seen that sentence pattern a zillion times. When you’re “bad” at something, it’s not so much that you’re bad at it as it is that you aren’t used to it. And the way to get used to it — to get good at it — is simply to do more of it.

No one that I know of was born with any skills other than screaming, eating, and going to the toilet — oh, and blinking, we wouldn’t want to forget blinking. They didn’t know how to speak, they didn’t know the rules of cricket, they didn’t even know what numbers were. They learned them. Humans learn things. That’s what they do. Humans come into this world with no skills — application software — installed, their hardware barely works. All they have is this learning operating system. Guess what? It’s more than enough. As long as you have that OS, you can do it.

So don’t come around here telling me something is hard. Tell me how to get good at it. Give me a step-by-step process for working through it. Don’t focus on the problem, focus on the solution. Don’t blame the game, don’t even blame the player, just fix the technique.

Rejoice! Another update to KhatzuMemo is here! New features include:

• Recycle Bin: all deleted items automatically go to the recycle bin. They can be restored/undeleted, or you can empty the recycle bin outright [you need to to scroll to the bottom of the screen to do so; this is a precaution to prevent accidental emptying]. Deleting items from the recycle bin causes them to be deleted for real. Gone. No coming back. No retcon.
• View Text as Image: this is still an experimental function and has a lot of limitations. Its purpose is to allow one to read Chinese on a typical Japanese cellphone (while Chinese and Japanese both use kanji/hanzi, there are some Chinese kanji that are currently outside of most Japanese character sets for data processing…sad), by converting the text to an image. If you plan on using this, be warned that it is very picky. It only works when all the text is full-width, including Arabic numerals, Roman letters, spaces and punctuation. Here are some examples of input.
• OK (these will be converted properly to an image)
• １０７歲澳洲婆婆網上開博客
• 本文在有的地方將繁體字稱為正體字、倒不是因為臺灣這樣稱呼、而是為了表述的方便。
• 本文在有的地方將繁體字稱為正體字，倒不是因為臺灣這樣稱呼、而是為了表述的方便。
• NG (these will not be converted properly to an image because not all the characters are full-width).
• 107歲澳洲婆婆網上開博客
• 本文在有的地方將繁體字稱為正體字, 倒不是因為臺灣這樣稱呼, 而是為了表述的方便。
• Various Preemptive Security Fixes
• Repetition Scheduling Tweaks

The Despair of the Serial Beginner

So, I’m working on Chinese right now. All Chinese All The Time. Or, “Mostly Chinese Almost All the Time”. Something like that ;).

You may be aware of how I’ve had an intermittent relationship with Chinese. Starting for a bit, only to stop. So sometimes I wonder: “what’s so different about this time? Why am I going to succeed this time? What about all those other times?”. Well, I proved it with Japanese, so Chinese should be cake, right?

It is, kind of. But it isn’t, kind of. Japanese and Chinese are related, but they are still totally different languages. So again, I wonder: “what’s so different about this time? Why am I going to succeed this time?”. Because I am. Because I decided to succeed. And because there is no such thing as “Chinese”. There isn’t this single monolithic thing called “Chinese” that I am trying to swallow whole. There’s nothing but a finite (yes, there is an end) collection of sounds and symbols that any human being is capable of encoding and decoding. All you have to do is learn these sounds and symbols one at a time. Eventually, you get to the point where you can encode and decode them freely. This, we call fluency. But you never have to tackle it all at once. You never have to do anything superhuman. You never have to concern yourself with the whole. You just have to work on parts. Just be consistent. Just knock in those golf balls/sentences, day in, day out [I like to pretend that my sentences are balls and my cellphone is a club…weird]. Boom. Boom. Boom. The “language” — the whole — will take care of itself, you never have to see or worry about it. All you have to see is this character, this sentence, this moment. That’s all. Quit worrying, quit thinking, quit hoping, quit wondering. Just do. Here. Today. Now. This one. I don’t know if I wrote this for you or for myself. And I know it repeats a lot of what I’ve said before. Oh, well :D.

Sometimes, I also worry about my Chinese pronunciation. I don’t think it’s bad…it isn’t. But, does it sound indistinguishable from a Chinese person? That, I don’t know. But I realized that the solution to that is just to hear more Chinese, and pay attention to it. There’s no magic to sounding like a native speaker — it’s just acting. It’s just doing an impression while keeping a straight face.

Splitting Audio for Aural Snacking

In a previous project notes post, I mentioned that I would rip the audio from DVDs in order to make a radio play-like experience. What hit me at the time I was doing this with Japanese was how long these were. I mean, you rip a DVD, and a typical movie runs 90 minutes, that means you have a 90-minute mp3. I never did anything about this back then; it wasn’t that big a problem. However, now with Chinese, I noticed that I almost never listen to my mp3 player for 90 minutes straight [not because of Chinese itself, but because my daily routine has changed]. This created a situation where I would hear the beginning of something a ton of times, but I almost never got to hear the middle or end.

…Which is bad for three reasons: (1) it’s boring, (2) it’s boring and robs me of chances to get listening practice from the rest of the DVD and (3) it’s boring and often I ended up avoiding listening to the movies in favor of music. The solution that I came up with was to split the 90-minute mp3 file into what is, for me, the perfect chunk: equal parts of approximately 3 minutes and 30 seconds — the canonical length of a pop song. I then put these audio clips on random shuffle. It’s fun, because of the variety [it’s kind of like…”aural snacking” on bite-size chunks of fun, like that cocktail party food with the toothpicks and all the different cheeses and stuff, whatever you call it]; you don’t have to make this commitment to listening to the whole movie from start to finish, but you get to enjoy it in pieces that are long enough to provide great listening practice, short enough that you can’t get bored, and spread out evenly across the entire movie so that you get to hear dialogue from every part of the film even if you don’t invest a full 90+ minutes. Anyway, not earth-shaking, but a fun hack, I think.

There is a completely free program available that does that splitting (an mp3 splitter) here: I looked for a free Japanese one, but to no avail.