Pen-name Jason sent me this cool email yesterday:

Hey Khazumoto,

Huge fan of the site,  I’ve read almost all of it.  I come to you with a question because I respect your opinion more than anyone on the subject of learning languages.

I live in Seoul and I’ve been learning Korean for a little over 2 months.  I enrolled in a course, which ended up with me as the only one in the class, so its basically 1 on 1 tutoring for a cheaper price.  It breaks down to a little more than 10 bucks an hour so I think it’s really worth it.  I do 6 hours a week, 3 hours twice a week in the morning.

My teacher is very cute and nice, but when I told her to stop teaching from the book because I thought it was bad (IT IS!), she got a little lost in how to teach the course, because thats the only way she’s ever done it.

It’s kinda turning into me dictating what I want to learn but I’m afraid I’m not really sure the best way to maximize my 2 three hour sessions a week and when I have nothing to suggest, she just goes back to what the book would teach.

I kinda came up with [a] scheme [whereby]:

• First 30 mins is review of last class and homework.
• Next hour is speaking only, no book.
• Next hour in learning new grammar.
• Final 30 minutes is using everything I learned and review the lesson.

I do many SRS reps outside of class and have designated that as the time to learn new vocab, so learning new vocab doesn’t take up time in the class.

2 months into learning, with a 1-on-1 tutor for 2 three-hour sessions a week, what would suggest I do in class?  How can I get the best value from these 1-on-1 classes? [Emphasis added]

I understand that you are very busy, any advice would be appreciated.  Learning Korean is my priority and I know you are the man who can help me on my quest!!

Thanks a ton,
[Jason]

Let’s answer this one.

I respect your opinion more than anyone on the subject of learning languages.

GOOD MAN! I like this kid already.

Learning Korean is my priority and I know you are the man who can help me on my quest!!

In the name of the Khatzumoto, the AJATT and the Internet…

OK…no…I’m done…

Seriously, though — good question; great question!
I don’t know how workable this is for you, but my choices would be:

1. Every Day Is A Field Trip

Think of your tutor as a surrogate mother more than anything else.

Go to town with her. No, literally.

Hang out with her and her friends…go out on errands with her — shopping, bank, post office, subway station, telephone calls — then you can see and hear how she REALLY uses Korean.

Not how she CLAIMS to use Korean.
Not how she BELIEVES Korean SHOULD be used,
but how she REALLY uses it.

Her word choice, her enunciation, how she mumbles, how she bounces back from forgetting a word. The shape of her mouth. Her word choice. Her actual decisions about formal versus casual register.

Wherever possible, record your conversations to playback and perhaps even discuss/question later.

Eat with her. Cook with her…have her tell you the names of foods and how to eat them, as you eat them.

Copy her music. Watch what she watches — especially comedy. Read the comics she reads. Watch her favorite movies with her.

Walk around town, have her answer your questions:

• “Mommy, what’s that?”
• “Mommy, what does that ad say?”
• “Mommy, why are those two men kissing?”

This is highly unconventional, but ultimately, IMHO much more fun and more effective. I’m sure she’d rather be hanging out at the mall or something, than sitting around playing schoolmarm with you.

You live in Seoul, man! The real Korea is right in front of you. It is right outside the door. Use it. Enter it. Live it. Don’t shut it out because of some stupid book or “rule” or convention.

Basically, she gets PAID to just live her life — be Korean in Korea — and you get to reconstruct a realistic Korean childhood.

It’s practical and fun; it’s win-win. She gets her errands done AND gets paid. You can get help with your errands as you learn to stand on your own two feet as an adult:

• How do you talk to a bank teller? — Go to the bank with “Mom” and see!
• How do you do the bowing and clapping thing at a Buddhist temple? — Have “Mom” take you!
• What’s that green, stalky stuff you get with the kimchee at like every restaurant? — Ask “Mom”!
• How do you get your Internet and other utilities set up on the phone? — Get “Mom” to do it, and tape the conversation for further observation and imitation.

2. Unforgiving Essay Correction / Reading Her Email and Handwriting / Reading Aloud

Write essays about things like “my weekend” and have her check your writing with all the nitpickiness of an anxious parent. Although, I should note that the real way to get good at writing is to read more. You can get good at writing with or without a checker, but you can’t get good at writing (or write, period) without reading.

A more interesting exercise with text (and something I actually charmed my Japanese friends into doing) would be to have her forward you copies of her personal and professional emails, so you can see how real Koreans write to real Koreans in real Korean. Real emails are one of those things that are as common and useful as they are private and ephemeral — we all write email, but it’s all kept in such a closed circuit. Plug in.

Read those emails and SRS them. If she uses Korean words that are not yet defined in dictionaries, as native users are likely to do, your in-person time together will be a perfect opportunity to ask what stuff means. And, yeah, tell her she can remove any incriminating information.

Also, you are probably exposed to machine-printed Korean to the exclusion of handwritten Korean. Have your surrogate mother give you some real, handwritten Korean text. With all the electronic writing done today, handwritten language can come as a rude shock to print readers unless they proactively expose themselves to it.

One more thing on reading. Remember the bedtime story? Bring it back. Have your Korean mother read text aloud to you unprepared (no practice run), so you can see and hear her rhythm, cadence and best of all — how she bounces back from misreadings and other mistakes. Definitely record this, to listen to later. She can read you anything you want — newspaper articles, children’s books, comics…whatever.

Conclusion

Basically, get out of the foreigner-versus-native-Korean paradigm, and become her Korean kid/babysitee who just happens to have a strange condition that makes him look like, I dunno, a grown man of German(?) descent.

Due to her influence, your speech and writing may become slightly feminine (or at least “on the gentle side, for a man”) for a while. But this is not a problem; you can always fine-tune it and “man it up” later. The most important thing is to shed your foreignness and assume a Korean persona.

Linguistically, the difference between a foreigner and a Korean is far larger than that between a Korean man and a Korean woman. So, “fine-tuning” already native-like speech is one area where “Pimsleur time” actually applies — two weeks will be all you need to go from foppy metrosexual to brooding machosexual.

It sounds like your tutor is somewhat at a loss for what to do. Some of that is probably because she’s been trained, like most of us, to (falsely) dissociate fun and learning. She’s probably relieved to be off the textbook, but doesn’t feel permission to really “cut loose” as it were.

Now is your time to “lead”. But here, leadership does not mean giving orders. Leadership just means encouraging her to be herself, giving her permission to let go and chill, for the benefit of you both. Leadership here is about making sure everyone is (1) happy and (2) gets what they want. It is not about commanding; it is about almost invisibly shaping situations and outcomes — you can lead without anyone ever knowing you were leading; you can lead without being “in charge”.

So, the keyword is: “mother”. Surrogate mother.
The relationship is casual, but (in your case, since you’re paying) she has above-average responsibility to (1) answer questions and (2) slam you for any minor Korean mistake, where normal friends would let it slide or be like “dude, I’m not your tutor-slash-surrogate mother”.

The key actions are:

1. Observe:
   Observation is huge. There can be no accurate imitation without extensive observation. Think: fly on the wall.
2. Imitate: act Korean, and
3. (sometimes) Query
   In language, I find that “what?” and “how?” matter more than “why?” — most of the “whys” are either unknown, ignored, or fiercely contested. But the “whats” and “hows” are an immediate reality.
   First figure out how and what to speak correctly — Koreanly — that is your first priority. Find out why later — when you’re fluent, you can go read books about the Korean language written in Korean by Koreans for Koreans, to your heart’s content.
4. Based on all the above, surrogate mother gives: Feedback.

So don’t be her student. Be her family, her sidekick; become a part of her life, and by extension, the real lives of the real Korean people in her social network. Many Korean girls get adopted by foreign families, now it’s your turn to be adopted by a Korean girl (six hours a week)!

…

Or something like that!

So far, I’ve only gotten to know a handful of Korean or Japanese-Korean girls in my life, but half of them have been, how do you say…unflinchingly frank people. Coming from a somewhat indirect culture myself, such behavior just seemed…cruelly tactless at first. But when you use this cultural trait to your advantage, it actually turns out to be a priceless gift. EVERYONE should have at least four female friends from Korea.

Anyway, enough culturally insensitive comments. The point is: extreme behavior is useful. Extreme praise and kindness can fuel confidence; extreme meanness can fuel reflection and drive; “extreme” apathy can fuel self-reliance.

Now, I don’t actually know what your tutor is like, but I’m sure you’ll figure something out and I’m sure it’ll be really cool and fun — I mean,  “get paid to play”: it’s a totally sweet deal.

Remember, all of this is just one unreasonably handsome man’s idea. It’s just what he — I — would do if I were in your situation; it’s where I would start, tweaking as necessary along the way. Ultimately, it’s your life. Make your own choices; make your own decisions.

Keep it fun, keep it Korean, and the rest is details.

Let me know what you end up actually doing and how it works for you! And maybe some AJATTeers will have succesful models of their own to share with you here .

The other day, a handsome young AJATTeer (and South Park fan) named MGV sent me this handsome email:

On your site, which is awesome, you mention that you should spend 18-24 hours a day doing something/anything in Japanese. I’m in high school, grade 10. I have school Monday-Friday. I worked it out on a piece of paper, and the most time I can spend listening to Japanese is about 10 hours, and I was a little generous.

Anyways, I was hoping you might have some suggestions on how to listen to more Japanese each day. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’m wondering how often you had college classes. In other words, how did you find the time to “get used” to Japanese.

It’s not just with listening, at most I can review about 5-15 kanji a day. At that rate it will take ages get through the kanji phase.

Life is very busy, and school is just terrible for Japanese, since everything is in English (the E word!) and it’s loud and hard to have your headphones on in, and also, the worst, school issues hours of homework!

Sorry to ramble, you may have heard it all before. It just seems like learning to understand this language is gonna take a lot longer than it has to.

If you have any suggestions, please please please write them to me or post them in some immersion article or something.

Khatzumoto’s one-line answer:

Just focus on the time you do control, rather than on what you don’t.

The government and your legal guardians practically force you to be in school, but no one’s forcing you to watch English TV in your free time, and no one else but you controls the contents of your iPod, and no one’s got a gun to your head telling you to read English websites.

Control what you can control. No one reasonably expects any more of you. Do all you can when you can. And you’ll be surprised by how much you do progress and do get done.

Limits are not always a disadvantage. What seems like friction can actually be traction — just as professional runners use spiked shoes that actually get stuck into the ground (which would seem to suck) to give them more power to push off. In fact, people with all the time in the world can be very unproductive, unless they start to give themselves some self-made traction.

All your friction can be traction. All your friction can be a gift — a brand new pair of shoes . Limits are your friend.

Think of Japanese less as something to “get through” and more as something to “be”. Japanese is just who you are. As long as you’re doing even the smallest thing in Japanese, there’s nowhere you need to be other than where you are. The thing with AJATT is that you’re not directly forcing growth, you’re just ensuring good “nutrition”, knowing that growth will naturally take care of itself.

One inch counts. One kanji counts. One minute counts. Try holding your breath for one or two minutes (ok, don’t), and you’ll quickly see that it is a very long time.

P.S. When I was kanjiing hard core, I found my daily upper limit was 25 new characters per day (plus about 100 reviews), no matter how much time I had.

P.P.S. SRSing your school subject material could help you save time. The key is to make sure the format of your SRS cards is as good as possible a  reflection of your exam style.

P.P.P.S. Anyone with any suggestions — especially people who’ve faced and solved a similar problem — please feel free to share your advice.

And there came upon the email of Khatzumoto a letter long of length, correct of spelling and accurate of punctuation. And it was good. The emailer’s pseudonym was, is and ever shall be…Farley.

Khatzumoto, hi!

First, I want to start out by saying how much I have enjoyed the site and how helpful it has been to me. I’m sure you get a lot of questions, but I have an issue that I’ve not seen addressed on your site, AntiMoon, or similar websites, and it’s giving me quite a hangup.

First some background: I’m 27, native English speaker (U.S. born), trying to learn Spanish from zero. First foreign language I’ve seriously studied. I’ve been studying about a year and have not progressed as far as I would like. I do some writing by trade, and in my personal life I’ve been told I’m funny. So when it comes to language, issues of nuance, metaphor, timing, phrasing, inflection, etc. are important to me.

I have been watching some American movies and TV shows in my target language, using them to practice my listening comprehension, using shows I already know so that I already know the basics of the plot. (For the record, I watch humor – think Simpsons – or drama/arthouse type flicks.) Herein lies the problem. I know some of these so well (okay, mostly just the Simpsons) that I know lines verbatim, and when I see them translated, I get very hung up on why they were translated the way that they were if they were not translated verbatim — does that sentence structure not exist? does saying it more literally not sound as good? why that word order? is this a bad translation? is this a phrase that can’t be translated well?

Even with native materials I have this problem — was that an eloquent turn of phrase or just bad writing? My inner radar is gone, and it’s very disorienting. It’s also making it very hard to “let go” of English because I feel like I need it as an anchor. (By looking up a Spanish word in a bilingual dictionary so I can try to figure out all the exact implications and shades of the meaning, for example.)

I’ve tried to think back to how I acquired said radar in the first place, and I don’t really know. I certainly had some helpful formal instruction in writing, but for the most part no one sat me down and said, this kind of thing is corny while this is poetic, this is funny, this is smart, this is stupid, this is formal, etc. I’m sure it can be directly traced to my massive input – I have been a voracious reader since childhood, and I’ve watched many humorous programs over and over – and I’m sure you’re going to tell me that’s what the remedy is.

But this just makes me feel overwhelmed. I think of how many years it’s taken me to get to where I am in English – two decades of lots of reading! – and it just feels hopeless and impossible. I don’t want to win a Pulitzer for writing in Spanish, but I do want to be able to be me, to keep my voice, both in conversation and in writing – and that includes being funny and handy with a turn of phrase.

So could you comment on this? I can definitely understand — and have experienced — how input can help with acquiring an inner sense of grammar (what makes “I is” sound horrible, for example) but the higher levels are giving me trouble. I think the writing on your site is funny, and you’ve said in one of your posts that you were in a comedy troop. Are you funny in Japanese?

Farley, for a funny guy, you don’t sound you’re having a lot of fun . Remember, you’re from a wealthy country. The wealthiest. You are a native speaker of its language. You don’t need to learn other languages. You don’t need to know Spanish. Life in the hispanosphere will continue whether or not you learn the thick, soft native tongue of Salma Hayek.

Realize that you’re doing this for fun. All the talk about multicultural this and global that is just a bunch of smoke language-lovers blow up people’s butts to make it seem as if what they’re doing is important. I am guilty of it, too. The real reason to learn a language is because it’s there. It is pure play. Real socio-economic need does arise if, say, you decided to move to a Spanish-speaking country for a long time. But even then, ironically, the fastest path, and the one that looks the longest, is to learn Spanish as if you didn’t have to.

OK, now to the core of your email. Humor. Think of humor as a high-order function that requires base infrastructure to exist in the first place. Kind of like how Internet access requires electricity, a computing device, literacy and a working network connection.

You don’t have that base infrastructure yet, therefore Internet access is still out of the question for you. Think about puns — you can only get puns if you first know the words that are being punned. “Cunning Linguist” only sounds funny when you know…about that activity women claim to enjoy (shopping? idle gossip? no? sexist comment? what?).

A joke in language is a somersault. You are trying to pull somersaults…but you can’t even walk yet. Which is not to say that you will never be able to pull them, it just means, you do need to build basic coordination and motor skills before you start busting the sweet ninja moves.

You need to be positive to the point of arrogance in your thoughts (“I am Spanish”), but short, simple and straightforward in your actions (“this sentence; this book; this show; here; now; this moment; this second; fun”). You need to be: Humble, but not diffident. Eager, but not harried. Determined, but not self-destructive. Like my good man Makoto Itou likes to say: “festina lente“. Hurry slowly.

You will get the jokes; you will be funny: you will find your voice. I found mine in Japanese. In fact, I found my Japanese voice so well that non-native users of Japanese hate my Japanese, just like non-native users of English hate my English. In both cases, you have a collection of otherwise simple ideas wrapped in a convoluted morass of criss-crossing running jokes based on things happening “off-screen” — random cultural background — that you have to already know about in order to even understand it, let alone enjoy it. And that is as it should be: I wouldn’t want to write Japanese that gaijin enjoy (even if I did, I couldn’t — not enough infrastructure to work with). _{Nor would I want to write the kind of English that the Education Ministry here in Tokyo seems to find fit to print in its approved textbooks.}

You will get there. But to get there, you need to let go of both your starting point (English) and your goal (Spanish) and just focus on the road — doing Spanish things here and now. Let go of the wall of the rink, and forget about the other side. Just skate on the ice you’re on now. That means, it may well be high-time for you to go monolingual.

It’s said that humor is about betraying expectations. “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s corns” (<— not funny)….that type of thing. As you have already realized, you don’t yet know enough to even have expectations, let alone build and break them. That’s all.

You can’t be funny in Spanish before you know good amounts of it any more than you can make an order at a restaurant by screaming out of your car window on the way there. Which is not to say that you will never get to the restaurant. Just that, for your own benefit, you want to get in a roadworthy vehicle, drive attentively and keep going until you get there…and know that a few red lights _{(apparent “learning plateaux” — in truth, these are just periods of time where your progress goes invisible, not non-existent)} here and there are not the end of the world.

Certainly, it took you a long time to get to where you are in English. But a lot of that time was (1) unproductive and (2) at a point in your life when you had lower mental capacity. You have more mental capacity now, not less. But you probably also have years of bad ideas and unreasonable expectations of input versus results. Ironically, you’re probably less patient now than when you were a child with a “short attention span” _{[perhaps our attention spans never change and it's just that we change how we behave when the time runs out? I dunno...]} In any case, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes because you will be enjoying yourself the whole time anyway. Right? Who cares how long the road trip is if Salma Hayek’s going to be there the whole time?…Or something like that.

So be patient. Keep being Spanish. It’s really that simple. It really is. Focus on what you can control directly. You can’t directly control when you become a Castillian Chris Rock. But you can directly control the expansion (and contraction) of your passive vocabulary. Expand your vocabulary. Expand your knowledge. Work faithfully, calmly and enjoyably on each brick and you’ll soon find yourself a nice little lego castle.

If you keep going, you’ll almost certainly make it. But if you stop and give up, you never will. It’s Spanish, dude. All European languages are really just dialects of each other anyway _{[here's a fight-starter]}. You’re practically there already .

For more and better advice, from a real expert, go talk to Ra-Moses, Prince of SpanishOnly. He’s the man now, dawg.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Do you even like “The Simpsons”? It seems as though it has you doing more neurotic thinking than actual laughing. You need to start having fun if you’re wanting to avoid being that sad paradox — an unhappy funny person. Hint: if you’re getting worked up about it, then you’re doing it wrong.

Maybe you need some serious South Park-level potty humor to rid you of all pretensions of (to?) seriousness. Yeah, watch South Park in Spanish. Back in the day, I watched a ton of it in Japanese and was getting compliments on how natural my expressions were (e.g.: “マジかよ？！”) right from day one.

Finally, your take-home points:

• Let your metric of success be how much fun you’re having, not how much perfect verbal acrobatics you can pull right this instant.
• Focus on native-like process, rather than native-like results. The results will come from the process. Gosh, I get tense just reading your email .
• The coolest part about learning a language by having fun/like a native is that you get to do all that cool stuff that classes usually look down on and treat as a “supplement” to “real” study _{[because we all know that you're not really learning until you're having trouble staying awake and all your school shirts have drool stains from the uncontrollable fits of napping that boring classes send you into but I digress]}. You get to eat dessert as your main course all day every day! Ice-cream for breakfast! Don’t go ruin it by mentally abusing yourself over your temporary suckage. Think of all the cool stuff you get to do as “study”! For crying out loud, you’re watching cartoons! You can be a kid again! This is awesome beyond compare. Cowabunga, my friend.
• If you know more today than yesterday, then you’re winning. Looked at in this sense, the race really is only against yourself.
• Trust your materials implicitly. You have to. You have no place judging the quality of Spanish-dubbed media; you simply do not have the equipment (yet); you are not at that level (yet), so the rule is: if it was made for native speakers, then it’s good enough for you. End of story. There is one — and only one — question on which you are qualified to pass judgment, and that is: “am I enjoying this?”.
• You can’t tell jokes before you can get them. If you do, it’s either a mistake or an accident.
• You cannot analyze before you have anything to analyze with — it’s like trying to use a pencil sharpener when you don’t have an actual pencil to sharpen: you just end up cutting yourself. This is a major problem in the current educational culture of the West _{[we're painting with big brushes today*. Deal ]} — premature analysis. Always with the trying to make pots without clay. Be the Spanish, be physical, learn your katas. You have to do before you can fully understand.
• Timebox or otherwise limit your dictionary lookups so that you can get lots of quick “wins”, as well as nip compulsive behavior in the bud.
• Bilingual dictionaries are lying to you. They will never give you the full, true story. Would you tell a Spanish speaker to go digging through her espanol-ingles dictionary to find the “true” meaning of English words? Might as well tell her that El Nino is Spanish for “the Nino”.
• Last but not least: “Don’t use words to learn the meaning of sentences, use sentences to learn the meaning of words“. Greatest quote ever. Not by me, by the way.

If any of you good-looking AJATTeers has any tips for Farley, please feel free to share . You always put things much more succinctly than I do. Also, disclaimer: I do not know Spanish.

_{*I don’t know about you, but I smell another installment in the Baseless Remarks About Compex Social Phenomena series}

Another day, another kid named J.R. (different from the last!), all up in my email:

Hey Khatz,

Your method when applied to languages like Chinese and Japanese makes perfect sense but I am trying to learn Korean and Finnish.

My problem is with Finnish. A Finnish word can have up to 14 cases so do I need to make a sentence for each case?  If done that way, it seems like I could make it to 10,000 sentences quite easily, but the 10,000 wouldn’t be the same as say 10,000 in Japanese/Korean/Chinese.

Appreciate the feedback.

OK, first of all, I have a secret ^{(the secret, the secret)} to tell you. Come closer. Closer. ‘K, here we go:

There are no cases in Finnish.^*

Just make whatever sentences you need to make as things come out of your immersion environment. Just treat everything as if it were a different word. Focus on the difference in *meaning*, since that’s what actually counts.

Think about it in English — fundamentally, the difference between “I go to school” and “I went to school” isn’t one of tenses of the verb “to go” or whatever…the two words, “go” and “went”…the two sentences actually have different meanings. In theory, they are mutations of the same word. In practice, they are different words. “He eats the food”, “he ate the food” — these things are different.

Looked at this way, grammatical inflection ceases to be a burden, and instead becomes a tool for expressing oneself more precisely. You go from “Effing sonofa I have to learn all this effing mothereffing B.S.” to “SWEET! I can tell people what I will have done if I were to have been X; the future really is perfect!”.

So don’t think of the depth of variation of a single word. Pretend everything is flat. Treat everything as its own, independent word. Sometimes, it’s just easier this way. In practice, this does mean that every case will eventually be represented in your SRS, but not that you’ll necessarily have to decline or conjugate every single word that inflects — you are after all a human being; you know a pattern when you see it; you don’t need everything declared; you’re a gap-filling, pattern-matching machine. Do as much as you need to “get it”, and no more.

As for number of sentences, I doubt more than 10k will be necessary to reach a high level of proficiency. Remember that the sentences are just a tool/by-product for and of massive exposure to native materials.

For more, check out AntiMoon.com — Tomasz and the crew wrote about learning English, which is closer to what you’re trying to do in terms of certain language features.

Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried to learn Finnish, but if I were to, this is exactly how I would do it. Starting with a phrasebook, I would just accept the sentences “as is”, and let the patterns present themselves to me over time. In any case the key is always to realize this: learning a language does not require pain, boredom or suffering.

^{_{*OK, maybe there are, but only because and as long as people keep saying so. They’re a theoretical construct that’s generally useful for analysis, and generally worth crap-all for praxis.}}

A funny thing happened on the way to my email:

Hey Khatz,

I’m currently using my SRS to practice sentences, but I’m having trouble keeping up with the workload. In your recommendations you say you should be able to write (copy out) each sentence.

Do you recommend copying out the sentence every time it shows up in your SRS? Or just the first time, or every time you miss it? Whats your stance on this. I’d be interested to know because at about 1 minute per card writing everything out, I tend to burn out pretty fast. Sorry if you’ve answered this somewhere on your site already, I couldn’t find it if you have.

Thanks for your time,

J.R.

Great question. I’d been meaning to address this at some point . This is of course all assuming you’re doing the “classic”/”original”/”vanilla”/”recognition”-type sentences, where you are to read aloud and understand a sentence written in actual Japanese. For Japanese, I continue to use this type of sentence card myself because it’s so time-cheap. Anyway, to the point:

Writing out the sentence (or some part of it, e.g. the part you got wrong) each time you miss it is enough*. In fact, it’s ideal, I think. It’s the perfect balance between thinking (“which ones should I write?”) and effort (“I need to sit up with pen and paper and write this shizzle!”) and gain (“I know stuff!”).

Indeed, you may often find, as I do, that there is a strong correlation between ability to write out the sentence and ability to read it correctly. There may always be things you can read but not write, but there will be few/none that you can write but not read. For whatever reason or reasons, the act of writing out the parts you get wrong will impress them upon your memory a lot more than merely seeing them. Maybe it’s because the writing out forces you to focus a bit.

Anyway, have fun. If anyone else has tips for J.R., feel free to share .

_{*N.B.: Just so we’re clear, this post is about sentences. For kanji, you’re going to want to write everythaang out.}

So, I’m there on the Internet, minding my own business, when BAM! The series of tubes conspires to hit me with this:

Hey Khatz, your website has really inspired me. I’m 15 years old, and I love Japanese culture. I’ve always wanted to be fluent in Japanese, but felt that it was impossible. However, one day I came across your site. At first I was like, “Whoa, this guy must be some kind of genius! Fluency in 18 months? Wow!” But then I got to thinking. I realized that you are just a normal guy who found a great (wait no, the only) way to achieve fluency, which is by the immersion process.

So I thought, “What the heck, I’ll buy Heisig’s books and try my best to live the life of a Japanese child.” I hadn’t gotten far when people began to notice what I was doing. My friends told me I was “crazy”, my teacher’s said this method had never been “scientifically tested”, and even my own parents said that what I was doing was “absolutely worthless”. I need some encouragement, Khatz. How did you overcome what other people thought about “all japanese all the time?” Can you give me any tips?

WARNING: I am about to go all New Agey on you. I will snap out of it. Actually, I’m not really going New Agey,at all, it’s just going to sound like I am.

The words people say and things people do to you…could be thought of as having a numerically quantifiable emotional content. Just to sound New Age, let’s call this quantity “energy” (said in my best Southern California accent: “ENerrrgy”).

Keep in mind that I am not saying any of this actually exists. It doesn’t. Not to my knowledge. It’s just a thought model…a way of representing an idea. It has no real physical existence (except, I guess, at the level of electrochemical action in the brain, but…anyway, whatever…)

So let’s call this “energy” (*cringe*), E for short, to give this essay the appearance of mathematical rigor. Pseudoscience for the win, baby!

• E = emotional “energy”.
• -E = Resistance
• +E = Encouragement.
• 0E = Indifference

Now, it would seem that the answer is to shut out all the -E and overwhelm it with +E. Or, even force people who are giving you -E to change sign. Unfortunately, contemporary society as a whole is unlikely to start actively giving you positive encouragement, because it’s far too cool for that. As it happens, though, it’s cheaper and easier to change yourself than to wait for the whole society to change for you. Thus, rather than go all Transformers, expending oodles of priceless time and effort on the acquisition of +E (energon cubes!), we need only realize that:

All that matters is the absolute value of E, |E|.

So let’s say “you’re crazy and you suck and it’ll never work” is -100 E, and “you were born to be Japanese; you have preternaturally large reproductive organs; Japanese is your destiny“, is +100 E. Either way, |E| = 100.

So you need to turn into a monster; a monster that only gets stronger the more it is attacked. Become an omnivore. Even if you eat a plant-based diet . Eat all forms of “energy” (say it with me: “ENerrrgy”).

Let resistance fuel you — funnel that rage and despair into the productive accumulation of more Japanese knowledge. Let encouragement fuel you — grow yourself into the positive vision people have of you.

Either way, it’s all good. It’s all usable. You’re like a plant. People give you B.S., you use it as fertilizer; people give you sunshine, you photosynthesize. All you care about is |E|, and in fact, you may even get to the point where the only thing that bothers you is |E|=0. This point is called “being an attention whore, like Khatzumoto”.

Whatever you do, don’t argue. You will not win. And even if you do win, you won’t win. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” and all that. Besides, what honor is there in out-talking a retard? Yes, I said it: “women and minorities”! Every moment spent arguing with some schmuck, is a moment that would be far better spent on Japanese.

To be fair to your detractors, you are not exactly a shining example of success in your chosen language acquisition method…yet. But then again, how could you be — you’re just a “baby”. Unable to directly demonstrate the validity of what you’re saying, the typical instinct might be to go pull up some articles and shove them in everyone’s face with a triumphant “SEE?!!”. Resist the urge. You will still lose the argument. And your time. The same people who now bait with: “there’s no research to support your claims”, when shown good research, will then switch to: “So what? That research is bogus anyway! If this crap works so well, why isn’t everyone doing it?” _{[because they're too busy arguing?...痴線！]} . This arguing thing is not a winnable game.

Let your Japanese skill do all the talking, which it eventually will, thank you very much, because you’re doing some Japanese right now, right? Whatever trouble you may be facing now, it’s all just fuel. Any obstacles you face exist only to add dramatic flavor to a legend that has already been written — The Legend of How You Learned Japanese To Native-Level Fluency On Your Own.

One day your friends will be begging you to translate Japanese for them. Until that day, shut them out with your headphones and drown them out with Japanese music, if and when they get too rowdy. Besides, it’s not like you understand English anyway.

Anyway, that’s all from me.

How do you other AJATTeers deal with social resistance? Share!

Energy…now that I think about it, “intensity” would probably have been far more appropriate. Oh, well.