Just so we’re clear on this: gigantic, Microsoftial sums of money changed hands before this article came up. This, people, is what ska fans call “selling out”…What else, oh yeah — you need one of these! Buy one or you’ll never know happiness! In fact, buy two!

I’ve previously discussed Japanizing your environment, and part of that Japanization involves covering your walls with kanji. The kanji posters I had on my walls back in the day were from Rolomail and zhongwen.com, respectively. The Rolomail one comes on three separate sheets and is used in Japanese schools; it comes in phonetic order; you need to laminate it yourself if you want to protect it. The zhongwen.com action was a case of me photocopying the index of the book, blowing it up to three or four sheets of 11″x17″ paper, and then laminating it.

Now something better has come along. Brought to you by people other than the people who brought you Jurassic Park — Paddy, a reader of this site and — it’s KanjiPoster! A massive 23″ (58cm) wide, 37″ (94cm) long wall of Japanese kanji goodness. Now, what’s so good about a KanjiPoster kanji poster?

1) It comes in Heisig/Remembering the Kanji (RTK) order. In that sense, I think it is the first of its kind. At the very least, it is the first such product I have come across. Most kanji posters come in either phonetic order or, worse, scholastic order, and generally only have relatively few characters on them.

2) It’s got kanji on it. That should be enough right there.

3) It looks sweet.

4) Contains all general use kanji and then some (over 2000 in total).

5) It’s a single poster. One poster to rule them all. All the other kanji posters I have ever made, bought, or seen are in fact not one poster but a set of multiple posters.

6) Having one of these around is very motivating. It’s like a big, in-your-face, concrete, visual tracker of your progress through Heisig’s book — a great example of posting your goals where you can see them. Even if you’re already done with RTK, having one of these around acts as a free review of what you’ve learned. Every time you cast your eyes on KanjiPoster, you’ll be reinforcing your connection to the characters. Having a bad kanji day? A glance at KanjiPoster will remind you how far you’ve come, and reassure you that while the task may be large, it is definitely not infinite. Having a good kanji day? Let everyone know — mark up your KanjiPoster (KanjiPoster is laminated, so you can write on it with a dry-erase marker) and show your friends, family and innocent bystanders just how much kanji tail you kick.

In fact, the only thing KanjiPoster doesn’t have is readings and keywords. It’s just the characters. Adding more information would probably have made things too cluttered or too big to fit on a single sheet. So, I don’t see this as a big loss.

What are you waiting for? Get a kanji poster already! Do it for the children .

[Everybody needs one kanji poster to rule them all; one kanji book or website to learn them; one SRS to review them all, and into the brain burn them -- including kids learning Chinese. So watch out for a Chinese version (HanziPoster?) in the geologically near future. As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, KanjiPoster is developed by Paddy, who reads this site, and is therefore very handsome in addition to being totally cool. He's always looking for ways to improve himself and the product, so if you have any requests or suggestions, he'll be happy to hear from you].

A reader named X-star sent me an email today. Here it is, slightly abridged, and with sections added to ease referencing.

Hey. I found your site very motivating, but slightly confusing at times. I’ve dabbled in a bit of Japanese, learned the kana/a very small amount of kanji, picked up words here and there, textbooks and classes (which I agree, suck). I’m now highly considering your method, though I have some uncertainties with it that I’d like you to clear up if you don’t mind.

(A) Learning general use kanji first. I’d understand if it was learning the readings, but if you’re only learning the meaning, I don’t see how it could be much help without knowing how to read them. By the time you could actually put your knowledge to practise, wouldn’t you just completely forget the kanji? The kana seem hard-wired into my brain now, but that’s only because I spent a lot of time on each letter – just one gyo a day, if I tried to do 25+ a day, of an even more complex writing system with a lot more strokes, I don’t think I could keep it in my long-term memory. Maybe I just have a bad memory, though.

(B) No English subtitles. I suppose it sounds logical. I watch a lot of anime, and even if I say “I’ll try to actually LISTEN this time” I usually forget in a few minutes and just stare at the subtitles, though I’ve picked up a little of the shorter phrases/words that are repeated a lot, maybe I’d pick up even morefrom discarding subtitles. My only problem with it is, I don’t see how it’d be much fun watching something and not understanding what is going on most of the time, and like you say, you should always be enjoying yourself. Even something you’ve watched before would seem quite stale. Wouldn’t it be better to just put more of an effort into actually listening to the dialogue while reading subtitles? Also, I’ve heard, albeit from an unreliable source (Internet forum know-it-alls), that learning from anime and such is a bad way to learn Japanese. I can see why it could be true though, if a foreigner was learning English completely from media, with little actual contact with English-speakers, they might sound a little dramatic and out of place. For example, “temee” and “kisama” are supposed to be very rarely used, though they’re used a lot in anime, even among friends (love/hate friendships?). Though that’s probably obvious as there is a lot more drama and hatred in anime than real life. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on it?

(C) Hypnopaedia. Were you serious about listening to Japanese when sleeping? “Sleep learning”, I’veheard, is a theory that has been debunked for years now. Do you feel it actually helps? Or do you just mean listen to Japanese in the little time between while you’re trying to sleep, and until you’re sleeping?

(D) Oh and one last thing, if I follow your methods to the letter, completely immersing myself in Japanese while doing a significant amount of SRS, how long on average should it take me to be semi-fluent? As in, just know enough to understand enough sentences to say, understand the basic plot in an anime/manga/whatever? I think if I could get to the point where I can read/comprehend a decent amount of sentences, I’ll find it infinitely harder to quit than I will to keep going.

Thanks.

I actually found his questions quite difficult to answer in a way that would be satisfying to a complete beginner. I’ve been doing this Japanese thing for a while now, so a lot of it seems blindingly obvious to me. That, and, I tend to go with “the justification is in the results” style of thinking. But these are legitimate questions, and it would be nice to get an answer. Some of you who read this site have just finished Heisig, others have been working on sentences/phrases for a short time, perhaps a few months. It is to you who have just finished “Phase 2″ or just started “Phase 4″ that I make this request: could you answer some or all of X-star’s questions, from your personal experience?

Thanks for your help!

For my part, I did attempt to answer X-star’s questions, but I feel like my answers have the air of someone removed from the process and who’s forgotten what it was like for him, and keeps wondering why people’s questions even keep coming up in the first place. So, I would very much appreciate any help you can give!

I don’t think I could keep it in my long-term memory. Maybe I just have a bad memory, though.

Short answer is: “You can. Use an SRS”.
Long answer: You don’t have a bad memory, you simply lack memory tools and techniques. If you’ve never ever read and applied something like The Memory Book, then you can’t blame it on your memory any more than a farmer who’s never planted a single seed can honestly say: “the soil isn’t fertile”. Well, try planting a freaking seed, farmer! No water? Live in the desert? Build a canal and irrigate the mother! OK, that’s kind of preachy.

I don’t see how it could be much help without knowing how to read them.

A lot of people don’t before they do it.
Short answer: Try it first, and you’ll understand.
Long answer: kanji primarily have meaning. That’s why Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Korean…all can use the very same kanji despite pronouncing them completely differently. That’s why a single kanji in Japanese can have multiple readings. Because the meaning is the same. You can understand so much through “only” knowing the meaning and writing. For example:

機種名であるYS-11の「YS」は輸送機設計研究協会の「輸送機」と「設計」sの頭文字「Y」と「S」をとったもの。
machine-type-name: model name
輸送機
transport-send-machine: transport plane
設計
establish-plot(plan): design
頭文字
head-writing-character: initial (letter)
自己複製
self-ego duplicate-manufacture: self-replication
火山
fire-mountain: volcano
花火
flower-fire: fireworks

Parts of this example were taken from here.

When you know and understand the parts, a logical composite whole is often much easier to understand. When you don’t know the parts, you’re just lost. But what about readings, you say? I’d learn those later…Seriously. There is not enough un-fuzzy logic there, see for yourself:
火山/か-ざん
花火/はな-び

For more on kanji, get it from the horse’s mouth. Read the intro and “note to the 4th edition”. Pay particular attention to this:

One only has to look at the progress of non-Japanese raised with kanji to see the logic of [this] approach. When Chinese adult students come to the study of Japanese, they already know what the [individual] kanji mean and how to write them. They have only to learn how to read them. The progress they make in comparison with their Western counterparts is usually attributed to their being “Oriental”. In fact, Chinese grammar and pronunciation have about as much to do with Japanese and English does [Khatz: no, really...this is not an exaggeration]. It is their knowledge of the meaning and writing of the kanji that gives the Chinese the decisive edge. My idea was simply to learn from this common experience and give the kanji an English reading. Having learned to write the kanji in this way — which, I repeat, is the most logical and rational part of the study of Japanese — one is in a much better position to concentrate on the often irrational and unprincipled problem of learning to pronounce them. [Emphasis and silly side comments added].

Another thing I will add is that there are plenty of words you simply cannot grasp if you don’t know the kanji; the author of the book The Kanji Way to Japanese Language Power refers to it as a sort of glass ceiling. Not only that, but a lot of times in conversations in Japanese (and Chinese), when people hear a word they don’t understand, they will ask “what’s the kanji for that?”. Kanji is the foundation of Japanese. Kana themselves are nothing but kanji mutant children. Returning to your questions:

though I have some uncertainties with it that I’d like you to clear up if you don’t mind.

I don’t know if I can clear up your uncertainties for you…what you are asking me to do is to demonstrate my powers of persuasion, and that may not work out well. Even if you remain uncertain after reading what I have to say, which you may, I would recommend you get to work, rather than stand around thinking about it. Quite often the worst crime isn’t doing it “wrong”, it’s not doing it at all. As I discuss in the FAQ section and in this article, your time should never be wasted attempting to believe or not believe in a method; your time should be spent getting results. Belief and opinion are irrelevant. Japanese is the goal. So just do something, try something.

I’ve heard, albeit from an unreliable source (Internet forum know-it-alls)

Well, there you go. You already know those guys are idiots only writing to inflate their egos.

What are your thoughts on it?

Anime’s fine. Just do what you enjoy. Sure, there is some “specialist vocabulary” and usage unique to anime — every field has its tropes. I mean, it’s like saying you should never read academic papers because you’ll end up starting all your sentences with “近年” and saying “著しい発展を遂げている” several times a day and qualifying your speech with “と考えられる” — wives’ tales are great until their wrong. The fact is, despite the presence specialist patterns, the remaining 90-95% [rough stat] of the vocab and structure in any genre, whether anime or even a period drama, is still so-called “standard”/”normal” modern Japanese. The specialist topping is just icing on the selfsame cake.

Were you serious about listening to Japanese when sleeping?

Yes.

Do you feel it actually helps?

I do. At the very least, it kept me doing Japanese all the time — from first thing in the morning to last thing at night with no time wastage (even an extra 20 – 120 minutes per day really adds up over 6 months or 1 year), it also sometimes helped me dream in it or be thinking about/in it, especially in those half-asleep half-awake states.

how long on average should it take me to be semi-fluent?

Hard to answer…It depends on how much work you put it. I’m not sure because I don’t remember when it was for me…And I don’t really know what “on average” means. Plus it doesn’t take much knowledge to understand the basic plot of anything. Besides, it’s never ignorance of the basic plot that trips you up, it’s those little twists and nuances — the things that actually make the story unique and different and interesting. Cop-out answer?

I don’t see how it’d be much fun watching something and not understanding what is going on most of the time, and like you say, you should always be enjoying yourself

Again, best to try it first. I can’t really explain it to you fully. The best I can come up with is: you still learn sounds, rhythm and other non-lexical patterns. Also, you put yourself in a position to learn incidental vocabulary. Your powers of inference are greater than you might assume. For example, I forced my English-teacher friends who want to learn Japanese to watch Japanese TV one morning, and they kept hearing the word “ほかほか” used on TV. Someone would be advertising longjohns — winter underwear — and talk about how “ほかほか” things were, and then there would be a food commercial and there’d be this piping hot rice and that word “ほかほか” would come up again. This all happened in the space of like half an hour, and these guys pretty quickly figured out the meaning and of ほかほか. But, yeah, I do recommend movies you’ve seen before.

People are always whining about how “if only I’d been raised in Japan”, or “if I lived in Japan I would be immersed in it and it would be so much easier and quicker to learn it”, right? Now, I don’t know any of the theory behind language immersion, but I decided to simply take that excuse out of the equation — I would put myself in a Japanese environment all the time, no exceptions, no excuses. What I discovered was a confirmation of both my hunch at the beginning of the process and my personal life experience up until that time: getting good at a language is not only the cause of doing stuff only in that language, it is also the effect. You will be able to do stuff in Japanese because you did stuff in Japanese, rather than the other way around. Anyway, what worked when and how much is an interesting topic…for a linguist…but I am not a linguist, I’m just a guy who wanted to know a language so well that there would be zero language barrier between me and a native speaker, so that I could control the language at will, like the finely tuned machine that it is, like a musical instrument or a program, manipulating people’s feelings and perceptions with razor-sharp precision, pushing just the buttons I wanted when I wanted, all based on what I said or did not say, and how I said it.

My intuition tells me that there may be more to it than that, but I do not know for a fact whether or not that is the case. Whether or not I have read the law I will continue to avoid killing people, whether or not I understand electromagnetics I will continue to watch my TV. Research both inside and outside linguistics, is a moving target; it is a living organism. For one thing, people are always disagreeing with each other. Textbooks would lead us to believe that the truth is all cut and dry; what’s known is known and set it stone that’s all there is to it forever and ever amen. If you go out and read some actual academic papers in any field, you’ll find that everyone’s disagreeing with each other on everything, even on some of the fundamentals — virtually nothing is sacred; nothing is not up for question. Not only that, but new information is coming out all the time. All the time. Your best bet, at least in language learning, is to ignore anything that tells you what you can’t do, and just keep running experiments for and on yourself, usually using “common sense” — but sometimes going directly and deliberately against common sense. Try. Do. Always remember that Arthur C. Clarke quote: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” If you live anything resembling an interesting life, you will quite likely find yourself doing things that no one’s ever done before. It may take some time for the rest of the world (and for you) to catch up and figure out just what you did and just how you did and why it worked, but that shouldn’t stop you doing it. We — humanity — simply do not know everything yet, so as long as you don’t do something stoopid like do drugs and/or join a cult and/or kill yourself, then you’re pretty much good to go, I say.

Even something you’ve watched before would seem quite stale.

1. Have you tried it?
2. It’s not only a matter of having seen it before, it’s also helps if you enjoyed it at some level.

Wouldn’t it be better to just put more of an effort into actually listening to the dialogue while reading subtitles?

In my experience, the subs always took over.

And now, I open the floor to everybody’s comments, suggestions and advice .

OK, for whatever reason I forgot to add these to the last post. BAD Khatzumoto! Here we go:
Oh, wait, before we start, wanna here a sad story? I wrote this post out in one go like 3 days ago, and then a mis-directed click caused me to lose it. All of it, son. Desk-slamming pain. And pain from slamming the desk. OK, for real now, here we go:

0) If you take only one piece of advice I have offered in these past two posts, take this one: use an SRS. In any class that requires you to memorize something, which should be just about everything except those P.E. classes, you should use-an-SRS. How? What you do is, you make yourself exam questions during and after each class. That’s right, you make them up. And of course make answers. And of course make sure your answers are correct. While your at it, enter all your homework questions and correct answers/solutions into the SRS as well. You will be surprised how easy it is to make up questions when the material is fresh in your mind…and grateful when you see rather similar questions on the exam your instructor makes.

Why do this? So that you don’t need to cram. Cramming sucks. It sometimes works, but rarely, and it’s a huge cause of stress. What if I told you that you would never need to cram again? That’s what the SRS can do for you — make it so you never need to cram, or even do special studying for exams (other than your daily SRS reps).

You see, what most people call pre-exam “revision” or “reviewing” isn’t revision or review at all. It’s straight up re-learning forgotten material, from scratch, like a Martha Stewart cake. The Germans have a word for this: wastingyourfreakingtimedude. If you’re going to learn something, learn it once, and never forget it again. An SRS can help you with that.

If it’s so easy, why don’t more people do this already? Because it requires forward planning. Don’t try to SRS things up for an exam at T-10 seconds to launch; it won’t work. You need to start this SRS thing, to sow your seeds, well in advance of the harvest, I mean, err, exam. Sow. Then reap. Sow. Then reap. Sowing comes first. Pay a little in terms of work each day, maybe get a buddy to keep you kosher, make up your questions during or after each class, and practice them every day, and then reap the benefits come exam time. As Jim Rohn says, the things that are easy to do are easy not to do. Say you make up 20 questions per class session and have 3 class sessions a week…That’s 60 questions per week, or 900 per 15-week semester. Try making up 900 good questions the day before the final. It probably won’t work.

Sidenote: another good thing to focus on is anything where the instructor says “this will be on the exam” or “this is important”; that’s most of what going to class is for.

1) Use mind maps heavily where they work. Generally this is in classes that require you to memorize, organize and reproduce large amounts of disparate information. Mind maps give you that gestalt view that linear notes do not and cannot. It would not be an exaggeration to say I aced my college history classes (and by “ace”, I mean doing things like earning all points possible in the class) because of mind maps. Tony Buzan, the number one dude-above-all-dudes of mind-mapping recommends them for almost everything, and he’s not wrong as such; however, there is one field where I have found mind maps more or less useless: that would be in classes that require the memorization and application of Al Gore Rhythms: methods of calculation. So, most mathematics-type classes. There aren’t that many ideas or concepts to arrange in a typical mathematics class, you simply need to know efficient methods for solving problems and checking your solutions. So, don’t bother as much with mind maps in these classes. Try to follow the guidelines for making good mind maps, but don’t get too hung up on it, and don’t be like me and worry about “what color to use next”. Just for kicks, here a couple of my own mind maps from the aforementioned history class:

2) Quendidil was right. Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know (WSSK) is a great book, it really is, but those 12 questions that Adam makes up are just too complex. Part of being a smart student is actively choosing what NOT to do, and what to IGNORE, so Mr. Robinson probably won’t be offended if I tell you that you only need, like, 5 questions to get you through school, and you don’t even need them all in every class. Four of those five questions are your old favorites: who? what? where? and how? The fifth, greatest and most neglected of them all is: what if? Whatif is your new best friend. Get to know her. For one thing, she’ll help you in making cool SRS questions (1), and when I say cool, I mean both “fun” and “the kind of stuff that will be on the exam”. Asking what if not only gets you engaged with the material, no matter how boring or stupidly presented, but also encourages you to truly, meaningfully deepen your knowledge of said material. They say that you don’t know how good something is until it’s gone. Perhaps they should also say that you don’t know the significance of something until you consider its radical alteration or even its absence. What if water molecules weren’t shaped like Mickey Mouse heads? What if you changed just one physical constant? What if this variable were given a negative value? What if…What if…What if…

[Note: Why? doesn't seem as important a question in terms of schoolwork...but the curious might also include it in the list of essential questions, to make six. Now that I think about it, if enough of us asked "why?", we could help school suck less, or maybe even just realize that we don't particularly need school...But why be radical when we can just let the next generation waste 12+ years of their lives, too, right? Oh, I'm sorry, that was out loud ] Now that I think about it, I guess “why” does matter in school, but only in the limited, how-teacher-says sense, not in the true sense of asking “why”. Most teachers don’t want to hear what you think, they want to hear what they think repeated back to them; in this sense they’re not bad people, just vain, like many of us.

3) Class summary sheet. This is another golden Adam Robinson idea. Too many of us live on an intellectual hand-to-mouth basis. Heck, too many of us live on a financial hand-to-mouth basis, but that’s another story. Just dragging our feet to class, day in day out. Sitting in there…trying to chew gum while the teacher isn’t watching. No idea what the dude is talking about. Only the vaguest idea of what we covered last class, and no idea of how today’s class fits in the whole. Playing with our pens, pretending that they’re aeroplanes. Or maybe that was just me. But, regardless of how stoopid certain things about school are [and there are a lot of things stoopid about school, any frank teacher will admit this to you, and he will admit that the primary reason that things are being done the way they are is to make them as easy as possible to grade]…

Dude, we need gestalt [am I even using this word right?]. We need whole. We need the overview. Don’t wait for someone to give it to you — no one can give it to you in a way that suits you, but you. The way to give yourself the overview is by having a single sheet of paper that contains a summary everything that has been covered in the class up to the present time. You update this sheet after every class, shrinking and abbreviating as time goes on. In my math classes, particularly calculus, I made this sheet linear — it contained nothing but calculation methods — but for everything else, I used some kind of mind-map structure, because things tended to interconnect more.

4) Exploit “state”. Do work during and after class, when the material is fresh in your mind. Strike the iron while hot. Wait till later to goof around (don’t wait too long, though ). When the project or class “state” — all the data and nuances and ins and outs of some project or class — is all fresh in your mind, USE it. Reloading wastes time/self. What this means is practice is: try to get as much work as possible done during class or shortly thereafter.

5) OK, so textbooks suck, yes, they were made by war criminals and sadists in their spare time. But forget about whining. MINE the suckers! MINE them for exam questions, and put those questions and answers into your SRS (0). On second thought, do be a bit picky — you only need mine the parts that are important to the instructor.

5.5) Get other books — supplementary books, books outside of the set framework. If you wanted to learn about something in real life, you wouldn’t get only one book, would you? And you wouldn’t get only the book or books that one person told you too, would you? I didn’t think so. But for some reason, we tend to this at school. We tend to only use the assigned textbooks. Big mistake. First of all, remember this — at present, textbooks aren’t written for students, they’re written to impress the people who are in charge of buying them for, or assigning them to, students. Secondly, even if textbooks were actually written for students, it is statistically unlikely that a single human being or small group thereof would have the combination of willing, ability, and clairvoyance to explain everything to you in just such a way that you would understand it perfectly just from the one text. So you need other books, just like you need a second or even third medical opinion. Hearing things from another perspective may be just what you need to make something click. I remember how some physics books would simply assume that I knew how to do something that I did not necessarily know how to do, so I went and got other physics books that actually showed the simple details and basic assumptions of certain calculations. Also, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but my algebra sucked before I really actually had to use it, which was in calculus class, and I had to teach myself algebra using a book called, funnily enough, Algebra: A Self-Teaching Guide, and on top of that, I got another book called How To Ace Calculus (a math book that’ll have you laughing more than like 90% of the shows on Comedy Central…oh was that out loud?), and, yes, I did ace calculus.

6) Schoolwork is a product, not a work of art. It just needs to get done. You only get rewarded for producing it in a timely fashion. “Timely” is medieval Swahili for “long before lateness is even an issue, or otherwise ASAP”. There is no reward for worrying about it, nor for hating it, nor for putting your soul into it. So produce. Quickly, efficiently, and yeah, maybe you can find your joy in your speed and efficiency. All you perfectionists out there: get it done. Remember: you have other stuff to do that you actually care about — like Japanese. Lots of anime to watch, manga to read, senbei(煎餅) to eat, Pocari Sweat to drink. So get the schoolwork done and out of the way, and don’t let it eat any more time that it needs to. Remember Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion — use the law against itself; shrink the time through timeboxing (see previous article) and get work done quickly.

OK, that’s all I’d really like to say about schoolwork at this point. I kind of feel unqualified talking about school because of the failures that I previously discussed, but, having said that, I have also had pretty massive scholastic success, and that success was basically always accompanied by a good, systematic method. I have sometimes been too lazy or too perfection-obsessed to apply good methods, but when I just applied them, I did really well. Use these methods, make them work for you, keep your common sense set to “on”, and I imagine you should do really well, too. Especially with the SRS thing.

So, um…Today, there seemed to have been a little problem with this site. You may have seen an “Internal Server Error”. That issue has now been resolved. I’m not sure what it was exactly, but it may have been my fault (theory # 1: a database query gone wild; theory #2: an act of war on the part of the Goauld). Anyway, sorry for the trouble caused. You may now feel free to continue your regularly scheduled reading/SRSing.

No such thing. I think. I don’t think there is such a thing as doing “too much Japanese”. A language isn’t just a hobby, it isn’t just something to kill time, it’s a life skill. LIFE skill. That’s English for “important”. There aren’t many things in life that it’s nearly impossible to function without socially, and that you can use for literally your entire life, but language is one of them.

Having said that, I did have time management problems, especially my penultimate semester of college. I didn’t graduate on time. But Japanese wasn’t the problem, the problem was deeper than that. The problem was my perfectionist attitude to my work, and my not allowing myself to sit down and work on a single project to completion. Now, some might say: “well, Japanese was taking all that time, so cut off the Japanese and focus on your coursework, you can always pick up the Japanese later”. Again, I say “no”.

A project that is going well should not suffer for a project that’s going badly. This is just my personal opinion, but I really do believe this. It’s easy to look around at your projects, and see how well Japanese is going, and be like “if I just take away a little bit of that time mojo that Japanese takes, my other projects can do well, too”. No, son. For one thing, there is no guarantee that if you just give those other projects more time, they will go better. You may just end up making all your projects suck. More importantly, though, what those other projects need might not be time; they may need to just get done more efficiently, especially if they’re projects that have local importance (timewise), but not the direct, lifelong importance and usefulness that true fluency in a language has. I think it’s better to excel in one field and let other fields suffer, than just to kind of be mediocre-to-sucky at everything. And this isn’t just random cruel Khatzumoto advice, it was advice I received during that penultimate semester at college — far better to do well in some of your classes and bomb others, than to try to even things out and pretty much risk bombing them all.

The people who most have this issue between loyalty to an important personal project like learning Japanese, and loyalty to other projects that are also somewhat important, are students. To you students, my advice would be this.

1. Keep doing the Japanese. No ifs ands or buts.

2. Try to work it into your coursework/schoolwork directly or indirectly. Even if it’s just having music playing in the background.

3. When you do your school projects and homework and such, do it to completion in one sitting — this is what I didn’t do consistently that penultimate semester I had trouble. I was almost always jumping from project to project trying to put out fires. Ironically, only when I did sit down and practice single-handling did I get anything completed. Do not leave things half done. Context-switching may work for computers, but it sucks for human beings. Work on your own timetable and not the teacher’s/class’. What I mean is, don’t wait until the homework is “on the horizon” to get it done, don’t wait until other people are worrying about it or the instructor is talking about it. Obviously get it done before the deadline, but get it done well ahead of that if that’s convenient for you. Batch it up and do perhaps a month’s worth all in one sitting. Don’t be passive and wait to be prompted. Take initiative. For more detailed advice, I would consult my sources of advice, a mixture of books and blog posts:

• What Smart Students Know: pay particular attention to the part where the author (Adam Robinson) discusses what the real difference between various classes is. Hint: it has nothing to do with the subject name. You will never think of school quite the same again.
• Timeboxing: Have you ever wondered why you often seem to work so well when a deadline is coming? This is kind of why. The key here is simply to set the deadlines and parameters on your own rather than waiting for other people to set if for you — this way is far more efficient and far less stressful.
• Do It Now: Pay particular attention to the advice to “use single handling”.
  
• The Memory Book: Want to learn how to memorize arbitrarily long numbers (hundreds of digits and more?). Plus stuff that’s actually useful as well? Try this book.
• 10 Tips For College Students: All you perfectionists out there take an especially good look at point # 5: “Triage ruthlessly”.
• Graduating College in 3 Semesters: This advice is golden:
  

  “the negative side of type-A (aka “hurry sickness”) need not be present. That type of behavior is in fact induced by a lack of clear focus, trying to label too many things as urgent AND important instead of taking the time to discover the core of what’s most important and meaningful to you.”

• Time Power / 頭がいい人、悪い人の仕事術: As AntiMoon is to the AJATT Method, so this book was to Steve Pavlina’s time management advice. Yes, there’s a Japanese translation, so “one stone, two bird” for you!

Like I said, I’m not a time management genius by any stretch of the imagination. I did get straight A’s for most of my college time, with two spectacular exceptions:

a. The first was the one semester where I registered for one class, never went to it and never did the homework…I did go on a roadtrip to Colorado, though — I don’t know what I was or wasn’t thinking, but there you go; I have dubbed this one “The Summer of Procrastination on Steroids”.

b. The second time was where I simply never sat down and focussed, and spent the whole time worrying about what to do — but not actually doing anything. I call this one: “The Winter of Anxiety on Steroids”.

So, I was an A student. But those A’s usually came at immense personal and temporal cost. I became a stranger to my friends and the shower. Because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. And I even practiced time management to some extent, but (looking back) for all the wrong reasons — under a set of false premises. Back then, Khatzumoto time management was a way to “schedule my oppression”, as it were. Schoolwork always came first. If in doubt, school it out. That type of thing. I certainly scheduled personal time, but that was merely time I used to rest up so that I could…do more schoolwork. Any time I made “for myself” could be and was replaced by schoolwork time. Classic type…whatever type of behavior that is. Masochism? And it was only really towards the actual end of my university career, and really maybe after that even, that it was brought to my attention what the real purpose of time management was, and it is this: to get the crap you have to do or need to do out of the way, so you can focus on what you want to do and actually give a care about.

So work efficiently and “work all the time you work”, and get that crap out of the way, so that you can focus on Japanese. Yeah, there is such a thing as the joy of a job well done, and putting your soul into your work and all that good noss. But you can’t do that soulful job for everything, you simply can’t. So get the “necessities” out of the way chop chop, so that you can lose yourself in manga or something, free of worry and commitments. There is nothing wrong with rushing certain things. There is nothing wrong with something being good but not perfect. I recommend you consciously choose what to do well, and what to let slide, and be happy with that choice. You have stuff to do and a life to live, don’t waste it on stuff that only tangentially matters to you any more than is actually necessary.

4. You are more important than your schoolwork/job. The suggestion to “do your best, but give it a time limit, and once you hit that, screw it” (timeboxing) is all well and good, but I don’t think one can actually apply that advice until one has an intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic) sense of self-worth. Dude, you are more important than that schoolwork, more important than that job, more important than some random test. You matter. Your preferences matter. Your choices matter. Your desires matter. And you have the right — the duty — to make executive decisions that take you into account. Hey, no one else will.

5. There is no time management. Then what the heck have I been talking about all this time? Something else: self-management. There is no time management. You can’t “manage” time. You can’t store it away and keep some for later, and shift some to Barbados to save money on taxes. The time passes of its own “free will”. And you can’t stop it. All you can do is make fun choices for yourself as that time goes.

6. To conclude, we often talk about people having some kind of personality type, as if they were born that way and could not change: “I’m a type A person”, “I’m a packrat”, “I’m messy”, “I’m organized”. Well…forget that biological determinism. Just, be what you want to be, or need to be. I used to be a packrat, too. I couldn’t throw anything away. That changed rather quick fast hayaku when I came to Japan. Now I live by “if in doubt, throw it out”, and my life is much better because of it. What am I getting at — you don’t have to be one way or another, you can change, you can adapt, you can become better. Your performance levels right now are not fixed; they’re not “because that’s just how you are”. They’re more to do with your workstyle — your technique. Improve your technique and your results can improve dramatically. And some of those techniques are really simple.

Anyway, I’m a bit out of my depth here with this time/self-management stuff, I don’t really feel qualified to speak on it as an expert. But listen to the people I listened to; they’re right. Don’t rob your future to feed your present. Don’t let the urgent hijack the important. Figure out what’s just important to other people versus what’s important you. And keep doing Japanese.