And the update shall be upon its shoulders! And its name, shall be call-ed, wonderful! Update! The migh… OK, never mind. KhatzuMemo has again been updated. Important new features:

• UI: The UI has returned to its very basic roots. However, the default font size has been increased, and there’s also the addition of ample margin space that so many people had requested.
• Stats: There is more statistical information now to help you analyze, manage and direct your learning progress. Mostly I just added median values since those aren’t as prone to skewing as the mean. More representative measures of central tendency: it’s the gift that keeps giving.
• Date Display: This is minor, but…dates are displayed with proper singular/plural units now: “1 month” rather than “1 months”. A part of me couldn’t care less, but one of my CS professors brainwashed me into caring about this sort of thing.
• Extra Reps: KhatzuMemo had the problem that it would offer you extra reps to do whether or not you had any…to do. The problem has now been fixed. Extra reps are now only offered if and when they exist.

And its name shall be call-ed: update! KhatzuMemo has been updated! Here are the main changes/new features:

• A reset password function was added. If you’ve forgotten your password, you can use your username and email to reset it from the login page.
• Changed stats page display to be easier to read, and contain more information
• Shortened and reformatted the information display between reps, for faster reading
• “Do Extra Reps” changed to sets of up to 10 at a time (rather than 5)

Your feedback is, as always, more than welcome. Also, be aware that KhatzuMemo may also be changing names and moving to a shorter, easier-to-enter domain name soon. When that time does come, you may experience a service blip on the order of a few seconds; there’ll be a clear notification beforehand, so there’s no need to worry about it.

Update: there were some security changes, too. As a result, some of your cookies may be invalid, and so you may need to log in again.

OK not everything. But a lot. Dishes have been a perennial problem for me. Wherever I have lived, whomever I have lived with, dishes have been an issue. Some of this was simply a matter of lacking tools for the job – no warm water, not enough dishcloths, etc. But, I had dish issues even when I had a dishwasher. Certainly living with other people compounds the matter, so I looked forward to when I could live alone, or just with my womanspouse, but even then, the dishes piled up.

And so, no matter how organized(-looking) I got on the outside, I always knew: “Khatzumoto, you’re not The Man; you done ain’t got nothin’, homeboy. You can’t even keep your dishes under control.” I knew….Oh, I knew.

I knew…

In life, we are often terribly concerned with outcomes. We’re always trying to get somewhere…Sometimes that makes sense. And things like intermediate goals can be very useful. But often, if the goal is too far away, or the task is cyclical, perhaps it makes less sense to focus on where we’re going, and more sense to focus on how we’re getting there.

“Outcomeism” and “resultism” often lead to short-sightedness, stress and even ethical lapses. Result-orientedness is not a bad thing at all, many areas need more of it — Japan’s overworked adults need it injected intravenously right now — but many areas also need less of it. I submit to you that more often than not, our real concern should not be outcomes or goals or products but processes. (Bruce Schneier in the hizzouse).

In simple mathematical terms, instead of aiming for a single, grand, impressive number, a value, a point like 0, or 1, or 100, such as:

• Number of dishes in sink = 0
• Exam score = 100
• P(Japanese fluency) = 1

Perhaps we should aim instead to construct a trend…a habit…a series of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny, unimpressive points.

Rather than try to get your sink empty, try to build a livable system that ensures a net reduction over time in the number of dishes in your sink. Such that the net difference in the number of dishes between two reasonably distant points in time, t[i] and t[j], is negative.

Rather than try to ace this one exam through a caffeine-aided, Herculean feat of short-term memory, try to find a process that allows you to not only ace any exam, with just a little work every day [SRS], but also ace life in terms of actually remembering the information you are paying so much money for (in terms of books or school fees or whatever).

Rather than try to become fluent in a language, try to build a process that increases over time the quantity of language X that you can comprehend and produce. Or, put another away, build a process that decreases your ignorance of language X over time (why the negative rewording? Because this turns an uphill “mountain-climbing” style process into a downhill “sleigh ride” one — and insofar as there is a real forward momentum/inertia involved in most of the processes that matter to us, the downhill/snowballing metaphor is actually more accurate than the mountain one…too/many/slashes).

The problem with our point-centric way of achieving goals and dreams and whatever-word-is-now-most-fashionable-for-”the prize”…is just that — it’s a “point”. It’s a single moment. Ipso facto, everything other than that point, every moment not spent at that point is a moment of failure. Every moment your sink is not empty, is a moment of filth and squalor. Anything that isn’t overtly and directly connected to acing the exam becomes a waste of time. Every second you are not fluent in Japanese, you are a n00b. Every day that isn’t your birthday sucks. Every day that isn’t your wedding day isn’t happy.

These are not happy feelings to be carrying around. This is a sucky way to live. Especially since the time outside the success point constitutes the majority of your life.

There is a better way. There is a way to ace without being anal, to succeed without suffering. Why not turn your masochistic uphill struggle into a playground slide? Just like at kindergarten! Steve Pavlina talked about it on his site, and Neil Fiore said it in the Now Habit: stop trying to finish tasks, focus on starting them instead…start enough times and the finishing will all take care of itself.

When everything is a function, then life turns from a struggle into a slide…In a sense, it is a more productive interpretation of “go with the flow“: first build the flow – decide on tiny actions that put your function going in the right direction – then go with it.

So did I solve the dishes problem? I’d like to think so. I simply wash n (right now, n = 5) number of dishes, then dry and put away m number of dishes (right now, m = n) every time I’m around the sink and have a couple of minutes free. With the task of dishes, I prefer going for a number rather than going for a time as in timeboxing, because, well…the number of dishes matters more to me than the time it takes to do them; I like the feeling of controlling the speed and I don’t have to be interrupted by the end of the timebox.

I feel kind of embarrassed literally sharing my dirty household secrets like this. Housework gets no respect. And here in the Japans, most men aren’t even involved in it*; especially men with womanspouses (mine’s a feminist, so…I’m…basically…whipped, I mean, domesticated, I mean, happily involved in a relationship of equals…there’ll be all this awkward laughter when she reads this…). But…it is a real life problem that mattered to me; it required a solution, and I think I’ve solved it. It’s been said that orderly surroundings both reflect and produce orderly thinking. I wanted order; I’ve wanted it for a long time. But I didn’t want to spend or feel like I was spending all my time maintaining it. In that sense, I am happy with this process, and I think it contains lessons that can be applied elsewhere.

Random Closing Aside

So, functions and lines rather than points. Did you ever notice how people, when they’re scolding you for not doing something, often go: “would it kill you to wash one dish!?”? Or how, when you’ve been neglecting a project or a language for a long time and it’s starting to die on you, that it’s usually not the case that you were doing too little work on the project, but that you were doing zero work on the project?

I have. So…the idea of “processes over results” is deeply connected with the idea of just doing something, just moving forward.

Overall, very simple stuff, but…it was earthshaking for me in terms of the improvement in quality of life. Hopefully it will be for you, too. And if you have any other dishwashing tips, send them to me!

*One wonderful exception is my college roommate, T-star. That boy can cook! But my other guy friends who are Japanese have basically never seen the inside of their family kitchens. It’s a good life; except for the 26-hour workday with unpaid overtime part. Take one for the team, Tanaka-kun!!

In high school, I was in the shooting club. That’s right, people. I spout all this peacenik-sounding “why can’t we all just get along” nonsense, but…I used to like guns. Too bad they get used for so much bad stuff. Maybe one day we can load them with software so they can only be used to shoot…cans and Basques </running joke> or something…Might make good paperweights.

Anyway, I’ll never forget the words of the club master/coach/adult supervisor. Wait, back up, before I even get into that, it always struck me as kind of ironic how some of us kids in the shooting club had major beef with each other, but it never occurred to us to use the…OK, I won’t even go there. I promise. I’m through being controversial.

Where was I? Oh yes: I’ll never forget the words of the club master when he gave us advice on how to get good at shooting — i.e. increase our accuracy. Combined with all the (potentially very zen/yoga-sounding) advice on how to breathe, how much air to have in the lungs at the moment of firing, how to relax and focus and stuff, he told us this:

[The key with practice is to do it] little and often.

And, I’d like to think that this is what the overall AJATT practice philosophy is, at the level of execution: little and often. What is little? Lots of nice, small, manageable, winnable chunks. Why often? I don’t really know; neurologically speaking, Piotr Wozniak (creator of SuperMemo) suggests that the fundamental mechanisms underlying human memory are designed to prioritize frequently occurring natural phenomena. Fine muscular skills like shooting are probably no exception to this.

To go slightly deeper, what does “often” mean, really? Simply that the time between chunks should be as small as possible. OK, here comes the magic that is perhaps unique to the skill of language. Take those little chunks…and then decrease the time between them to 0 or near 0. At this point “often” becomes “all the time” and you have yourself and immersion program.

But now that “often” is 0, it can be easy to feel lost, like you’re swimming in a cesspool of your own ignorance. That’s where little games like timeboxing, SRSing and sentence-picking come in. Make yourself as many silly little games as you want…whatever entertains you and keeps you in the loop. Watching YouTube clips, watching short clips of several movies you like (this is the massive turnover idea — the turnover is massive but the pieces are small).

Most of us are adults, or at least pretend to be; almost all of us have some unavoidable exposure to languages other than the one we want to be learning. That’s fine. The key is to get back on the horse as soon as possible. Don’t let the water go cold, get the fire back burning hot and bright again the moment the wind dies down. We may not be able to erase the gaps, but we can minimize their length. Forget your guilt about whatever time you have let pass; it’s gone. All you need to do is focus on how you can get moving again, how you can get back on the right track (*Chris Farley arm movements*).

You don’t have to always be on the defensive: don’t stop at just trying to keep your little candle in the wind burning. Become a pyromaniac: set fire to the things around you. Go on the offensive — try interleaving your target language into your daily life even in situations that don’t welcome it with open arms; like weeds in concrete, let it come up through the cracks of even the toughest environments; let it soak in there like AIDS in a California bathhouse. Also…Basques <parsing error>?

…

I used to work cleaning buildings in college and walked to and from campus uphill both ways in 12-foot Rocky Mountain snow with the wind blowing in the opposite direction…we weren’t allowed headphones and it’s not like I could read on the side. But we were allowed overhead music. Guess who managed to get them to play Dragon Ash and other sterling Japanese bands? I took a road trip with my wife’s parents; they don’t speak Japanese — yet; I can’t ignore them for the whole trip (actually, they were always really supportive about the Japanese thing and would have gladly let me ignore them, but I didn’t want to) — what do you do? What do you do? I played Japanese music in the car, and not just any Japanese music, but Japanese music that sounded just like their favorite English bands (they like folky 1960s stuff like The Carpenters and The Doors, so I played them ゆず/Yuzu).

There’s always a crack, there’s always something short and sweet you can do. Find your own piece of little and often.

違ええんだよ！全然違えんだよ！そんなこと毛頭ございません！

実はネ、拙者を含めて多くの外国人がホザいて来た「ニッポンの人種差別」というのは、事実無根の愚痴に過ぎない。「『外人』は差別用語」だの「人に見られている」だの弱音を吐くより、先ずは全面的に自分達の日本語能力をレベルアップした方が遥かに得策。他人の国に住んでるのにその言葉をちゃんと学ぼうともしない我々外人＝差別用語を語る資格の無い、迷惑的な存在だけだ。せやから、理不尽な主張を抜かす前に責任を取りましょう。何よりもここは日本で、国の主は日本国民（俺らも税金払ってんだけどね（笑））。そんなに辛い想いをしてるなら、他に200カ国ぐらいの国家がそこら辺に轉がってるし・・・

っちゅう事を、僕とYouTubeのTkyoSamが英語圏の皆さんに、今回のビデオを通して伝えたいと思った譯。殘念ながら内容は英語のみなんだけど、まあ、ターゲット層も英語圏の奴らだから或る程度合理的な選択かと存じまする！因みに、ワイは「植物中心食生活」（←関係ねえだろうがよ！^_^）のお陰で結構減量してるので、興味のある方は是非ご覧あれ！・・・やっぱり無いか・・・

Not really. In fact, not at all. In fact, people need to shut the truck up, learn Japanese (especially reading and writing), and stop overanalyzing every interaction they have in Japan like some kind of sociopathic girlfriend. As much fun as it is to try to demonize Japan, certain highly vocal countries which shall remain nameless have more racism between the cracks of their pinkie fingernails than Japan does in all 120 odd million of its bodies put together. We all need to give the people of the J-land a break (they’re busy at it is), and learn to have the finesse — I’m one to talk — to discern “racism” from misunderstanding from culture from just being a jerk. If you must hate something, hate individuals.

That’s the basic idea of the video was very kindly put up by TkyoSam. TkyoSam’s like “Konnichiwa, motherlover! I want sushi!”, and I’m like “No! I implement Fuhrman! Look how I’ve regained my girlish figure!” and he’s like “Like I give a truck! You don’t have to eat, just come! We’re recording video!”.

So we’re there, getting around like 寿司 on a 回転, recording a video while I eat peanuts out of my bag…Anyway, yeah — here ya go. Two parts.

And to the housing thing, let me add, you will never ever be prevented from living in nice places or from making PILES of dough in this country. And isn’t that what really matters? There’s really nothing to complain about. I mean, what, are we babies that need everyone around us to smile and applaud whenever we expel waste (グー！)? Is that it (for the record, I would actually like that, but this is early 21st century Japan, where most people simply have-no-time-for-you)? Extreme example…but it hints at something: namely, that what most people are really missing may be a loving family environment.

Remember: no likey = no havey to stayey. There are about 200 countries in the world, no use getting itchy haemmorrhoids over 1 [that's smaller than California!].

In a lot of AJATT posts I tend to give the impression, unintentionally, that I’m more courageous than I actually am. It’s what you might call a sin of abbreviation; I cut out most of the parts where I made mistakes and took wrong turns, focussing on telling people what worked and what went right. So, the legend is now ossifying, and it just seems like I had this Big Dream to own Japanese and I did Big Research and then made up a Big Plan and took Big Massive Action on it, executing to Big Completion, and then I wrote a Big Site and became a Big Man all in one straight line, looking neither to the left nor the right.

I’d like to believe that story, too, but it’s not how it actually went down.

First of all Big Dreams, Big Goals…these things are scary…hey — let’s start capitalizing all our nouns, like in German…No? OK…No.

Big Dreams are scary. People will laugh at you; they take a long time to achieve; they can even seem impossible. There’s a little voice inside you going “dude, maybe he could do it, but you?”, “maybe you could do it back then, but things are different now, son!”

I am working on Chinese now, laddering through Japanese. I get lots of praise and congratulation on and off the Internet for the Japanese Project and its success. But this praise can kind of go to one’s head. Not in the sense that one becomes arrogant and egotistical — I was already arrogant and egotistical. Rather, one gets a sense of entitlement. One starts to think that it should be one’s right to simply sail through any language or similar endeavor and it should just be a walk in the cake. Also, Basques.

But it’s not like that. I still have to put on my proverbial pants one leg at a time. I still go through one SRS rep at a time. I still learn one sentence at a time. Real physical limits apply; I’m not Dr. Manhattan, walking around with superhuman language powers in a perpetual state of semi-nudity who the heck does he think he is anyway?! And this can be discouraging, because it’s easy to talk on big time scales — months and years — and talk about long-term residents in a country having the “social responsibility” to learn the local language; it’s easy to talk like a Big Man, who’s Seen It All, but ultimately you still execute at the same time scales as Everyone Else and you still don’t really know What Lies Ahead, or even if you do, it’s hard to feel motivated by it when it’s so far away. Like David Allen says, no matter how Big you get, it all still comes down to, what, answer emails, attend meetings and make phone calls…you are still tied to Real Life and simple, “numbnut” tasks. You still live through minutiae.

Long story short: You want to “own” at your target language, you want to be native level, but you also want something to show for it well before the 10,000 hours and sentences are up, right?

Right. And me telling you “just suck it up”, is not helping, right? Right. I know it doesn’t help because I told myself and it didn’t work. Which is why I am suggesting you also use:

Intermediate Goals.

Within your overarching goal of complete command of a language, you want to have little Baby Goals. Larger than the baby steps, but smaller than the Big Goal of Major Ownage.

When I was starting to learn Japanese hardcore, my first goal was just to be able to freely conduct basic daily communication. For that, I primarily used the ideas contained in A. G. Hawke’s “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast“, eventually taking them to a positive extreme.

After I got there, my next goal was just to be able to talk with my Japanese friends about whatever I wanted. And also watch comedy shows (I wanted to know what my friends were laughing so hard about) and tell jokes. I got there.

Then my goal was to be able to function as an adult in business/government/specialist situations, just like my Japanese friends. I got there.

And then my goal was to be able to function completely like a native speaker, with no barrier, no difference, no gap between me and whoever I was talking to. To communicate with such razor-sharp precision that everything I said or did not say carried intentional meaning; I wanted to be the puppeteer with Japanese words as my puppets. And now my current goal is an extension of this, mainly focused on speed and writing.

I’ve frequently discussed using ultra-short-term goals on the level of hours, minutes and seconds. And long-term goals on the level of several months and beyond. But it has occurred to me that intermediate/mid-term goals (circa 3 weeks ~ 3 months), which I have basically neglected to discuss, are just as important and useful, in pulling one forward. It has occurred to me that I had used them myself to achieve success, but had forgotten to share the idea here.

So, if the pressure of “10,000″ and “Native-Level Fluency” is getting to you, if you’re feeling some “cognitive dissonance” [certain members of my family hate this phrase] from the constant reminder that native-user media gives you that you are Not There Yet, then perhaps you could try setting some intermediate goals. Examples:

• Set a 1-month goal for number of hours of listening.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of pages or words or characters read (generally, I find these measures easier to deal with than whole books, since I often switch books before finishing).
• For 1-3 months, focus your energy on mastering a specific area of your target language, like TV news, or a certain anime, or other topic — whatever interests you.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of sentences or reps…be careful not to get carried away.

Anything that gives a feeling of achievement and also brings one closer to the Larger Prize of “Major Ownage”. That graph is just kind of a rough guesstimate of what happens. Anyway, feel free to share your own experiences and suggestions…