Series starts here. Previous post is here.

I can’t find the original comment, but back in one of the preceding timeboxing posts, a kid asked a very pertinent question. It went something along the lines of:

“How can a 60-second timebox have any meaning or motivational value if you know you’re just going to have another one?”

Great question. Excellent question. Let me answer it very simply.

1. First, you’ve got go get out of the mindset that a 60-second timebox has no intrinsic value. Or, more accurately, you’ve got to get into the mindset where you can see the intrinsic value of 60 seconds. And what mindset is that? It’s this one. It’s the probabilistic algorithm mindset: it’s the mindset that says: “I’m not going to a lot of work; I’m not going to do perfect work; I’m just going to do something that helps [for 60 seconds]“. So a short timebox is saying to you: what you do doesn’t have to be big, it just has to help.
2. Once you understand that 60 seconds can have value, you are then in a position to begin to appreciate nested timeboxing. Because the whole point of nested timeboxing is to bring form to the formless. 60-second timeboxes are great, but an endless succession of them can seem, well, endless. That’s where nested timeboxing comes in. It puts these useful microtimeboxes (which I’ll arbitrarily define as any timebox of size < 300 seconds) into a larger framework of meaning. Nested timeboxing gives bigger meaning and structure to the small-but-useful microtimeboxes.
3. Finally, there’s no rule that says you have to use 60 seconds as your timebox length. That just happens to be a length that appeals to me personally. That’s just how I play the game; it’s how I roll. Remember, though, this is all a game, i.e. it is something you play at. For fun. The rules only exist to make things fun. Change, interchange and ignore at will.

So that’s the basic idea there. Keep your questions coming, they’re top stuff .

Hi Khatz,

Your recent posts, adapted from a IM conversation with you friend Maddie, really struck a chord, especially how she said she always gets sidetracked and fails. That’s I guess the position I’m in at the moment: I wanted to and indeed was learning Japanese (would never even have dared start if not for your blog, so thank you for that), but health problems got in the way — I’ve been pretty much useless for anything for the last few months, but would now like to get back into it, just don’t know where to start (again).

I’d done RTK (thanks for recommending that, btw, all those squiggles suddenly looked like writing), and was assembling a SRS deck based mainly on sentences from Tae Kim’s guide, as well as odd ones I found and liked (桜の樹の下には屍体（したい）が埋まっている！ :D).

I was still a sucky beginner, couldn’t even read children’s stories, but I was at least learning consistently. Now I’m left with a deck, much of which I no longer understand, and kanji I no longer recognise. So, I guess what I’m wondering is, where would you start from? If anything, it feels more overwhelming than when I first started.

Any pointers would be much appreciated, and thank you again for AJATT,

Amphy (in England)

To which I wrote the following reply:

Wow, so you finished RTK? Nice.

Start there. Start at the beginning. Start with the basics.
That’s where we always start and it’s where we always return.
No one’s ever too good or too smart or too dumb or too inexperienced or too advanced or too young or too old for the basics. Except dead people. Dead people suck. They can’t do jack.

You live in England, Amphy. There are foreigners there. Some of them have shaky English. Why? What is it that’s shaky about their English? Is it their lack of knowledge of Chaucer? Is it their inability to handle Cockney rhyming slang?

No…they make basic errors; they get basic things wrong. They wake up “on” the morning; they get “upon” the bus; they “haved the lunch” today. They are messing up the basics, things that a “native” speaker toddler has had drummed into his ears for 40k+ hours. Native speakers make plenty of mistakes, too — they “tow the line” and do things “irregardless of the consequences” and get fooled by “slight of hand”, but they don’t really make those habitual basic errors.

In fundamental ways, B-star, the world is very simple. We make it complex. But think about health. What does it come down to, really? Eat fruits and vegetables. Get enough sleep. Take brisk walks. Easy on the crisps and pies. These are things that your mother and her mother and her foremothers could have told you without a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. They are things that mothers have most toddlers do. The basics. The Jansport backpacks and the Nike shoes and the Garmin GPS pedometers are all great fun, useful even. But they cannot replace the basics.

So what do adults do? They never sleep because there’s “no time”. They eat junk food because they’re “busy” and “on the go”. They consume the maximum amount of legal and illegal drugs — ciggies, alchohol, weed, whatever — that their economic activity will allow. They’ll watch bad TV before they’ll read a useful book. And they actively seek to exchange vital fluids with total strangers. And that’s just weekdays. Then they wonder why their bodies are falling apart.

We all forget about the basics all the time: we need to have them repeated to us our entire lives. I sound like a crusty old man. But I’m 27…I drink a lot of mango juice; I shower infrequently and irregularly and I wear dark clothes to mask this fact — so I’m not really one to talk.

We all lose track of the basics — of so-called “common sense” — a lot. By the time we’re in our late teens, so much BS has piled up that it’s easy to lose track. But the basics are always there and they will always help you. Revisit them now and every day and you’ll enjoy yourself a lot.

So what about learning Japanese? What are the basics there? Listen to music. Watch cartoons and dramas. Do your SRS. Go one kanji at a time, one primitive at a time. That’s all there is to it. Forget? Relearn. Fall? Stand up. Stop? Start.

So pick up the SRS and take one step. Then another. When you’re tired, rest (cartoons, music, movies, comics). When you’re bored, change the channel (do something else in Japanese). When you’re hungry, eat (go for more of that other Japanese thing). When you’re full…stop (change Japanese activities again).

The more time you spend with Japanese, the more used to Japanese you get. And being used to something is being good at it.

It’s so easy it’s almost anticlimactic.

The basics. The fundamentals. These things that are, to paraphrase the late Jim Rohn, so easy to do that they’re easy not to do — easy to overlook.

Easy. Do whatever you can and want to in Japanese that is easy and fun for you right now. Do easy things that move you forward with your Japanese. The more you do them, the further and faster forward you move. But it’s never hard. Always easy.

Begin again. You’re not a total beginner so I imagine this will all actually go faster than before. Either way, there’s no shame in being a beginner (or even a serial beginner). Begin as many times as you need to. It wasn’t until my 4th or 5th attempt at kanji that I even got through, so…I speak from experience.

Begin again. There’s no level you’re “supposed” to be at right now; if you were supposed to be there, you’d be there. It’s simple cause and effect. There is no “would” or “could” or “should” — those things don’t exist: what exists is “are” “is” and “am”. You are here now. Begin here. Begin now. Don’t worry about where you are (position), just focus on where you’re headed (direction). Begin again. Begin as many times as you need to.

Everyone knows how to get back on the horse. You just do the same things you did the last time you were on her — foot in one stirrup, hands on mane, hop up and bring the other leg over. The thing is, we wonder: “is it worth it any more?”. Well…Japanese is here, you’re here, and the time is going to pass anyway. Might as well go for it.

Finally…don’t try to learn Japanese. It won’t work. Instead, let yourself get used to it. Get used to Japanese. Come into frequent contact with Japanese. Frequent. Every couple of minutes, something Japanese is happening.

But, now that I think about it, my reply kind of sucked. Too abstract. Having said that, there are a couple of good reasons why I like to give vague, high-level advice:

1. It makes me sound deep and smart
2. Whenever I give concrete advice, people on either side of the middle ground die. People who are against the advice freak out about how “hardcore” it is, and people who are in favor of the advice kill themselves trying to follow it to the letter, even if it has parts they don’t need or like. It is this latter group — the people who will hurt themselves before they’ll break some “rule” because it’s supposedly “canon” — for whom I fear most. A lot of smart, serious, perfectionistic people are in this group, and I have to protect them from themselves (!)

So, anyway…do you guys have any more concrete advice for Amphy? Anyone out there with experience making a comeback? Please share your stories and pointers down there in the comments section!

You like how I say “down there”? Very…上から目線.

In Part 1, Maddie explained the problem: she keeps getting distracted (especially by English TV shows), discouraged, and giving up. In Part 2, Dr. Khatz encouraged her to view language as a habit instead of a skill or intellectual pursuit and give herself credit for learning things in context. In this last installment, Dr Khatz reveals “the secret” of how he managed to learn Japanese on his own while still functioning as a busy college student in the U.S.

(continued from Part 2)

Maddie: Ok, so at the end of the day, I do want to do this, but I still live in America. I still have to go to work and do my bills and talk to my family, and this all has to be done in English, so it’s not like I can go and live in an all-Japanese place. I still want to learn more about code and read stuff and actually understand it, etc. etc., but I would like to learn Japanese.

I can easily, or at least relatively easily, switch my background “I live alone, and I don’t like a quiet apartment” stuff to Japanese, and I can even dedicate half an hour or so to learning to read everyday. But is this enough? I know that I won’t learn as fast as some, but I want to learn. I can’t sacrifice my life to this, but it is important to me.

Khatz: Good question. Obviously, the more you give it, the more and faster you get. As you recall, Maddie, yes, I gave everything to Japanese, but I was still a functioning college student. I mean, we talked, we hung out.

Here is what I did… Here is “the secret”, if you will…

The Secret (The Secret, The Secret…)

K: I removed any and all English that was not necessary — not necessary to my livelihood, safety or a basic minimum maintenance level for key relationships. For example: when I would talk to Momoko’s dad, I often didn’t take off both earphones (just one side).

To some that’s going a bit far, but I wanted Japanese, and I wasn’t going to make excuses. I was going to give myself, as far as possible, everything that a native speaker gets — a so-called native speaker, that is (this term is very flawed).

So, yes. My college classes were in English…but my home/bedroom needn’t be. My college assignments were in English…but why does my iPod have to have English on it? The university webpage was in English…but does my Gmail have to be?

And people say: “But what if I don’t understand?”
I’m like, “I’m a [simulated] native… If I don’t understand, then I LEARN TO UNDERSTAND, and I don’t get to do this stuff until I do.”

Sounds strict, but, like I said, I had a very playful, experimental attitude. It only comes out [sounding] strict to make me seem “good” and “disciplined”, but you know me, Maddie…

You know me… YOU’ve been to my house here… We went to school together… We took classes together… We TA-ed together in the Computer Science Building… You saw my desk area… You know I’m just a…scruffy little kid who thinks the world is his bedroom…

M: Hehe.

K: Oh yeah, I changed my OS to Japanese Windows XP well before I was “ready” because I felt (and the action proved it):
We don’t learn the language in order to be exposed to it.
We learn the language BECAUSE we are exposed to it.

M: Ok.

Touch the language

K: Now, if all that seems hard to do, one simple hack is this: increase the FREQUENCY with which you are exposed to Japanese. Focus on just touching Japanese — coming into contact with it — even if it’s, like, have a batch file that plays a Japanese song or opens a Japanese YouTube video once an hour, every hour. Something, anything — touch the language.

Seems silly, sure, but think of all the years of starting and stopping and classes and giving up and teachers leaving and books bought but unopened and hating yourself and blaming yourself and doing hulu [watching anime but only with English subtitles] instead. How intelligent was that? How efficient was that? At least you’re having fun, with YouTube…those Japanese commercials and game shows are hilarious.

M: Ok, it’s good to know that just trying a little is still trying and worth it.

K: Everything is worth it, everything counts. None of this “it was in context” nonsense.

M: And I can at the very least choose 5 shows that I like on hulu, watch those, and then the rest of the time, just watch, or listen to anime. That in itself could be huge — you don’t want to know the number of hours I’ve listened to shows I don’t even like…

K: Exactly. AND you could, if you want, watch those shows IN JAPANESE. What now, woman? I mean, it’s not essential, and you get to watch them anyway, right? So why not.

Get a solid grounding in PLAY!

K: Some people say, “What about the serious stuff?”
…What, like the Japanese tax code? Gimme a break!
(1) Play IS serious stuff.
(2) Play is serious stuff.
(3) Native kids always play, play, play, play first.
(4) Serious stuff will handle itself once you have a solid foundation in PLAY!

The playing around part is fundamental.

Think of how you can game and even use a computer. It’s all because you played around with these things. Same thing with speaking English — it’s ALL play.

Think of the people you know who can’t game or speak English or use a computer. It’s because they never tried to PLAY at it, always trying to be serious…

M: Ok, I feel more heartened.

K: Stepping off soapbox…

Kay, I’m back to normal now, I think. So yeah…no pressure…no techniques, Madz. Japanese isn’t something you “go do”. It’s just part of who you are.

Get a solid grounding in play. Play first. Fun first.

Whatever I can do for you or get for you here, let me know.

M: Thanks muchly!

*The End!*

In Part 1, Maddie explained how she keeps getting distracted (especially by English TV shows), discouraged, and giving up. Dr. Khatz challenged her assumptions and proposed that learning Japanese just might be a whole lot easier and simpler than she had been led to believe. Their conversation, edited from an IM chat, continues below.

(continued from Part 1)

Khatz: Okay…next order of business. So you want results, but when you can’t get them quickly (in the past, with Japanese, at least) you decided to…throw Japanese out altogether? i.e. to do nothing whatsoever that might bring you closer to the result?

Worded like that…does that make any sense to you? Is it fast or nothing?

Maddie: No, but sometimes, I feel like it’s this giant endeavor.

K: Ok… Is going at 0 speed better than going at 1~3 speed even though you wish you were going at 10 speed? Is 0 better than 1~3?

Cutting people off is underrated

M: I’ve also been struggling a lot these days with what I should be spending my time on. I spend hundreds of hours on my cosplay and similar projects, and most people think it’s retarded.

K: Do you like these people? Are they the ones paying for your cosplay? Are they going to pay you money to do things they DO think are worthwhile? Do they live with you?

M: No, they don’t. But I’ve felt very misunderstood recently…

K: I know exactly what you mean

M: One of the things I get super-frustrated about is that no one would tell me I was “wasting my time” if I was making costumes for the local theater troupe, or if I was making quilts, or any number of things like that… What makes my interests any less valuable than yours?

K: Exactly. Those people are full of crap and unless they pay you money or are VERY good kissers, you don’t have to listen to them.

If they don’t like it, they’d better get used it. I’ve had some of those acquaintances… deleted them faster than spam. “Stop cosplay. Be BIG FOR HER”…ok…bye.

It is not ac-freaking-cceptable Mads. You’re, what, 25? 26 now?

M: 27.

K: 27, ok. (Me too!) You’re 27 years old and people are pulling that high school crap on you?

Personally, I find it inspiring… You’re living the dream in so many ways…you get paid money to make VIDEO GAMES.

Dude, Maddie, I won’t lie. I would hate you for NOT doing those things. Your anime passion infected me…

M: Hehe.

K: So…what it comes down to is your casual acquaintances…suck…and you need better ones who understand what you’re about.

There comes a point where they either shut up and accept you, or they have to go. I don’t know if you’ve reached that point with those peepz, but just know…that is an option maybe, you know, waiting in the wings…

Dude, cutting people off…it helps THEM, too. Now they don’t have to be annoyed by you. You’re doing them a favor…

M: lolz

K: Cutting people off…very underrated.

Don’t intellectualize language-learning

K: Third thing… You’re intellectualizing language-learning. You’ve learned it as a “school subject”… You’ve taken “classes”…

So…most or all of the English you know now, you know from English class, right? And before you went to English class you knew no English, right?

M: Yeah… I see your point.

K: And you keep your English up with textbooks and English class… You review the material, right? So you don’t forget.

Because, how are you going to know English otherwise, Maddie? And you need it for work and stuff…need that English…

A language is not something we compartmentalize. It is practically life itself. It’s like the air, literally like the air. I venture, Maddie, that you have spent as much time away from English as you have away from air.

M: Well, I have traveled, but I never stopped thinking in English.

K: Even when you’ve watched Japanese, there’s been English text down there. And when you came to Japan, you were, yeah, thinking in English…talking in English to Chad and the crew. Your guidebooks were in English. The hotel people spoke English.

I mean THINKING in English, Mads, were you born that way?

M: Probably not.

K: You have made this English thing such a habit, it literally stays in your head even when you get in a plane, go up into the stratosphere, cross an ocean, get away from America…and still…in your head…there can be English.

But that’s besides the point… A language is more like a sport, Mads. One of my neighbors here, Eisuke, he says it’s like a conditioned reflex. When you really know a language, you don’t intellectualize it. You intellectualize THROUGH it, but when you speak, you speak that way because that is the way.

When you turn on Hulu, you’re not like “it’s time for me English practice”. You’re just watching TV with so-called “first” and “native” languages. You don’t even TALK about the language. It’s like it’s not there because it’s everywhere.

Yet every phone call you make, every TV show you watch, thought you think, every person who makes fun of your cosplay, every person who is nice about your cosplay,every  sign you see, every song you listen to — all these things are language/English practice: every single one of them.

Everything is in context

K: Now, you said you could read polyester “but only in context” — oh, so you’re supposed to know it OUT OF CONTEXT? When the heck are you going to read about polyester out of context? I’ll tell you when — on a school test.

Quick, Madison, tell me every English word you know. List them right now, every last one.

M: lolz

K: Tell me every single English word you understand…and if you can’t tell me, you must not know/understand them. In real life, EVERYTHING is in context. Everything is in a sub-menu. And that’s how the heck it should be.

Context-flattening is not real. It’s easy to make/grade, but it’s not real.

M: So true.

K: So you’re good at Japanese. You know some Japanese, but you won’t even give yourself the credit because it was IN CONTEXT? Is that fair?

M: Ok, I guess not.

K: Would you tell your (hypothetical) miraculous virgin baby that she was a loser because “you only know how to say that word because you saw it context”? Would you say this to a child? a small child? your child? a lot? And if you did, do you think they would grow up happy and wanting to learn?

So why is it okay to be abusive to you? Because it’s you? Is it okay to slit your wrists and do drugs then? I mean, it’s YOU…it’s your body… And let’s say you made the drugs by yourself at home using legal stuff from Wal-mart. You’re not financing the drug trade so it’s okay, right? I mean, it’s paint thinner…and alcohol…alcohol is legal…so it’s okay, right?

But literally every time you don’t let yourself feel good for small successes like that, you create drugs in your brain and give them to yourself. You might as well slap the baby each time she makes a mistake: “STOP BABBLING!!!” “That was in context, you prissy little know-it-all!”

It’s just mean. And we get away with this because most of it happens in our head and nobody else is watching the little child inside suffering.

I learned Japanese by accident

K: You’re a lot like me, I think, Mads. You are so driven. You want this Japanese so badly that everything smells like failure — too slow… “in context”… (*eye roll* ) I know because this is how I have often felt about Chinese. You beat and beat and beat yourself, and we pretend it’s “discipline”… But it creates so much pain that you just go watch Hulu (i.e. practice English) instead.

I learnt Japanese by accident, Maddie, while trying (i.e. being mean to myself and creating a struggle) to learn Chinese. I was just fooling around with Japanese. It was just a game. There was no point — it was just an experiment. As the hippies like to say, the journey was the point.

M: I thought you wanted to so you could work for Large Japanese Corporation?

K: No… I wanted to work at Large Japanese Corporation so I could get paid to keep playing with Japanese. I knew if I went to, say, an American company, I’d have to do English all the time. (I also loved Large Japanese Corporation products, having grown up with them.) But Large Japanese Corporation was literally a ploy to get paid to keep messing around with/in Japanese.

And it worked. They did all my paperwork. Flew me over, twice. Paid to ship my stuff from the US — boxes and boxes and boxes. Did my insurance paperwork. Helped secure my Japanese name. Let me talk, read, write and listen to Japanese ALL DAY LONG.

M: Hehe.

K: And then put money in my bank account every month for my troubles. So yeah, it was the other way around…

A language is NOT a skill, Madz. It is not. You don’t “know” it. You don’t “know” English. You LIVE English. A language is a habit.

So you don’t get good at it. Don’t ask yourself if you’re getting “good” at it. You get USED to it, and you get so used to it that you could literally…fly to the moon, Maddie. You could leave the planet Earth to-day — TO DAY — and there would STILL be English rolling around in your head, you’re so used it.

You don’t speak it right because of those stupid exercises you can’t even remember any more you did in some English class at some high school. You speak it right because you don’t freaking know any other way to speak it. You actually have to THINK about how to suck at English. You would actually have to TRY to suck at English. You would have to make an intellectual effort and heat up your processor…

You dream in English. I mean, can’t you even be unconscious and be rid of this thing? What the heck? (Funny thing is, though, if you were to truly stop all English for long enough, you would forget it, but it would take decades… | Mr Uwano comes back from the dead to say ‘Good Day’ – Times Online)

You are already a success story

K: So you are still practicing. And you have one marvelously successful language experience: English, the language everyone and their dog wants to learn. You speak perfect General American English. You are a success story — you have a success history — and you are repeating this success even now. Look at us practicing English right here.

M: Ok, so at the end of the day, I do want to do this, but I still live in America. I still have to go to work and do my bills and talk to my family, and this all has to be done in English, so it’s not like I can go and live in an all-Japanese place. I still want to learn more about code and read stuff and actually understand it, etc. etc., but I would like to learn Japanese.

I can easily, or at least relatively easily, switch my background “I live alone, and I don’t like a quiet apartment” stuff to Japanese, and I can even dedicate half an hour or so to learning to read everyday. But is this enough? I know that I won’t learn as fast as some, but I want to learn. I can’t sacrifice my life to this, but it is important to me.

K: Good question. Obviously, the more you give it, the more and faster you get. As you recall, Maddie, yes, I gave everything to Japanese, but I was still a functioning college student. I mean, we talked, we hung out.

Here is what I did… Here is “the secret”, if you will…

(to be continued…)

What is “the secret” (the secret, the secret…) of which Dr. Khatz speaks? Find out next week in the third and final installment!

There’s one dream, however, that has remained elusively beyond the reach of this avid anime fan, gamer, and cosplay seamstress–the dream of learning Japanese. In this extensive conversation adapted from an IM chat, Khatz plays language therapist to the distressed would-be AJATTeer.

I always get sidetracked and fail

Maddie: Khatz…

Khatz: Yes, Maddiekins?

M: Can I really teach myself Japanese? I’ve attempted a couple times, but I always get sidetracked and fail…and then I gotta start over when I try again. It’s something I want to do, but I feel like if I really wanted it, I’d try harder…

K: Go on… I’m hearing you… Multiple failed attempts, leading to evidence for low confidence in this field… What were your previous attempts like? What did you do? How did it feel?

M: Well, I’ve never gotten super far… The first time, I took a “class” that my friend had at my old job. We learned the hiragana and katanana, and then she started teaching us basic phrases and things. But few were very into it, and she got busy and fed up, and so that stopped.

Then I decided about a year ago that I really, really was gonna do this. So I started learning the hiragana and katana again, and I bought that learning kanji book that you said to get, but never really cracked it. Before I’d even gotten a handle on the basic symbols [kana] again, I got sidetracked and stopped…not sure why…I think other things just got in the way.

I think it often feels daunting and overwhelming… I’ve never properly learned another language. When I took German in high school, I had 5 teachers in 3 years. I didn’t come away with much at all. We were all terrible my 3rd year, and my teacher was very frustrated with us…

K: OK…daunting…no previous success experience…getting sidetracked…teachers giving up on you…apparent long-term efforts with zero gain in German…

Tell me more about your mother I mean the daunting feelings with Japanese…

M: Well, I gotta learn a whole new writing system. At least I have things I actually want to read/listen to in Japanese, but I don’t want to just learn to speak, or just learn to listen, or something like that. I really need to learn to do it all — read, write, speak and understand.

K: Writing system…ok… At the same time, you do want to do it all…so the desire is all there…

M: Yeah, it is. I would have loved to go to the Trigun Premier and have even an inkling of what was going on…oh, and be able to watch anime without having my eyes glued to the screen so I can read the subtitles (yes, I know there are dubs, but a) they aren’t on Hulu, and b) the Japanese voice actors are better and you know it).

K: lol… Japanese voice actors are the stuff.

I’m an easy-out kinda person

K: How did you feel when you were practicing? or in class? Were you happy? Was it fun?

M: I think it was fun. But I’m unfortunately an easy-out kinda person. That’s why I watch TV and play video games so much — it’s easy to just turn it on, or plug it in and go with it; it’s just right there.

K: Hehe. Me too

M: I love doing my cosplay, but even that is sometimes hard to get motivated on. In general, I have a hard time getting motivated on things where I want a result, but it will be weeks or months before I actually see any real results.

K: Definitely.

M: I mean, I’ll work on it for a while, even be really good for a few weeks, but then work will get crazy, or I’ll go out of town, and it throws me off, and then I forget, and it’s not part of my routine, and then 3 weeks later, I’ll be like “oh yeah, I was gonna do that”, but by that time, it feels like I’m starting from scratch, so I’ll be like “oh, well, I’ll start that when I’ve got time”…

K: How often do you watch anime by the way, Mads? Every day…?

M: I really only watch it when my friends get together. I’d watch it more if I could watch and do something else, but even though there’s hundreds of hours for free on Hulu, I haven’t gotten into anything ‘cause it’s such a huge commitment… And I can’t watch anime while playing a video game like I can with my stupid US shows.

K: How come?

M: They are subbed, not dubbed, and so I have to watch all the time to read and know what’s going on. I listen to TV more than I watch it, in general. There are about 4 or 5 shows that I will actually sit and watch, and the rest are mostly empty-apartment filler. I watch a lot of shows, but very few do I really care about.

Language-learning was harder than anything else in school

K: Anything else from your language-learning experience that sticks in your mind?

M: I know I had a much harder time with it than just about anything else in school. I’d forget words a lot — blunt memorization isn’t any fun, and in some ways it almost felt like cheating? I dunno how to exactly explain that, but yeah, for German, I certainly never drilled or memorized as much as I should have.

K: Almost felt like cheating? Why did it feel like cheating?

M: Well, cheating is not the right word for it… It was probably more along the lines of I rarely just had to memorize stuff before, so it didn’t feel right? It was many years ago, so I’m extrapolating a bit, but I do remember it being harder than anything else, and then after we lost our teacher half way through, and the next two were so terrible (one of them didn’t even speak German), then after that first year, we were all pretty crushed.

K: Yeah, you guys were abandoned. What good experiences have you had with language-learning?

M: None?

No, I’m trying to think… I’ve never talked to anyone in a foreign language. I’ve been able to read, like, the tags on some of the clothes I bought in Japan, but that was very context-specific.

K: Oh yeah? What did they say?

M: Polyester.

K: ポリエステル

M: Yeah, that. I can recognize enough of the characters to, in context, know that that says “polyester”.

By learning about Japanese, I was able to mispronounce my own language in a way that was easier for them to understand? I doubt that counts…

K: lol… In Khatz’s world, that TOTALLY counts btw

M: On my first round through Japanese “class” I was able to put together my first complete, original sentence. I think I can still remember it… maybe.

You’ve been abused

K: Have you read any of AJATT.com, and if so, what have you read of it? (Just so we can save you hearing things you already know )

M: I’ve read some of it. It’s been a year, though. I know your view of “you can do anything, just not everything”, and your confidence that anyone can do this.

K: ‘k…I’m about to go into soapbox mode…but stop me if you have any questions or objections or…just get bored. Especially if you get bored…

M: Ok.

K: You’ve been abused.

1) You’ve been living in America. This is a very pushily monolingual country. Many people in America are afraid of foreign languages and assume that they are only good for spying, missionary work and insulting people. All non-English speakers have had trouble passing on heritage languages — Italians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, even Hispanics.

2) And then there was the German class thing. You kids were screwed over quite royally there…irresponsible adults…

M: Well, if you know other languages, or several languages, it can be seen as a mark of intelligence, but that isn’t always good in America, either, like it’s a waste…

K: lol Exactly. Richard Hofstadter talks about a lot of the issues behind that in Anti-Intellectualism In American Life.

3) And then there’s all the negative brainwashing about language-learning in general and Asian languages in particular: “hard” … “different” … “need to be smart” … “age” this … “age” that.

But all that’s in the past now. We can de-allocate that from memory, which leaves us with you here and now…

Just leave Japanese on

K: Earlier you talked about wanting results in Japanese…feeling frustrated…feeling daunted. So you watch some Hulu…or listen to American TV or whatever… Basically, you go practice English. Why not just leave Japanese on while you game?

M: ‘Cause I don’t understand it?

K: Because you don’t understand it…ok…

Say you were to…somehow…have a kid today…by miraculous conception. Would you refuse to speak to the kid in English because she does not understand?

M: lolz, yeah, no.

K: Why do you refuse to allow the Japanese child called マッディー to listen to her native language — because she doesn’t understand? Why does American Maddie get special treatment? Is it because マッディー is Asian?

M: Can I really pick up that much just by listening? I’ve been able to hear phrases that I’ve learned in my “classes”, but I don’t feel like I’ve really picked up on much that I didn’t know before-hand, even though I’ve watched anime in Japanese, with the English subs. I know people have just watched enough in a foreign language to pick it up, but that hasn’t seemed to work for me all that much. Maybe I just haven’t given it a real chance, though.

K: Bingo. (Cute Girls, Mathematics, Language)

Let’s say you had this baby today, this miraculous baby, and you let her listen to English once a week with friends and took her to English class a couple hours a week…but then nothing happened. Would you give up and say “she just can’t pick up the language”? (rhetorical question)

And that whole watching-Japanese-with-English-subs thing… This is why I recommend people turn off the subs, really — or at least keep them off most of the time. Because I found something interesting… When I would watch anime with subs, back before I could understand it, I found that I would RECALL the anime all in English. Even though I watched it subbed…with Japanese voices…the voices would play in my mind completely in English. But maybe that was just me…

M: Yeah, I do the same.

K: Oh, you too?!

M: But I often “hear” text.

K: Okay…next order of business. So you want results…

(to be continued…)

Don’t miss the next installment, in which Dr. Khatz warns of the dangers of intellectualizing language-learning, extols the virtues of learning in context, and explains why it is important to cut off people that don’t accept your cosplay infatuation.

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 .

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.

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}

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.}}

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.}

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.

Hi Khatz!

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now, and I love it! I try to follow your method as much as possible, but I am not 100% immersed in Spanish (yeah, I am learning Spanish instead of Japanese) as I am kind of undisciplined. But your method is still helping me a lot!

I was wondering about what you think about a phenomenon I “discovered” lately. Here in Germany, there are a whole bunch of American people I know who speak German very little or with an extremly heavy accent. Alright, maybe the problem is that there are a lot of folks in Germany trying to learn English, so they try to practice their English on them. But another example, yesterday night I saw a Turkish TV show (yeah, I am Turkish but live in Germany) with a woman from Sweden, who had married a Turk and now stayed in Turkey. Even though she was in Turkey for a few years or so (I think) she spoke Turkish with an obviously foreign touch (accent and word order). There are not so many people learning Swedish in Turkey to excuse that!

So I was wondering, what do you think about that? What’s the reason that there are people being 100% immersed in a language, and still not attaining that “native fluency” in that language (maybe never in their lives)?

Thanks for your answer!

Here’s my Khatzumoto attempt at an answer. It’s really an extension of ideas previously covered here by me, and here by AntiMoon, and summarized in the words of Kató Lomb as recorded in her Polyglot: How I Learn Languages.

The fact that a linguistic microclimate is more important than a linguistic macroclimate is proven by many of our older émigré compatriots. No matter where they live, they can’t acquire the foreign language properly even after 10–15 years’ residence, simply because they have built a Hungarian wall around themselves and their children, bridge partners, or even business partners. [Emphasis added]

A large part of the answer may simply be, well, is, the fact that many people who seem “100% immersed” aren’t really immersed. Period. They illustrate the simple truth that just because you’re near the water, that doesn’t mean you’re taking a bath — one must actually enter the tub. You will find that these people continue to mostly/only read books, watch movies, work with and talk to people in their primary/native language. There are many Western men married to Japanese women, with Japanese-speaking Eurasian children, who know no Japanese beyond the basics. Many first-generation Chinese immigrants in the US may have lived there for decades, yet can barely speak English. There are Western men who have lived in Korea and Arabia for 10+ years who can neither speak nor read these phonetic scripts. What happened to the kanji excuse? They have all physically walled themselves in.

But their wall is also psychological. You see, it turns out that pride is another factor. Many adults feel silly making the sounds of the new language. And they are so invested in their current identity, that they will cling to their current intonation — whether or not it be appropriate to their new language — as a way of “feeling themselves”. They are afraid of making the sounds of the new language and being made fun of. Ironically, their strong foreign accents are the silliest-sounding thing of all — as you’ve no doubt experienced, someone who at least tries to sound Turkish when speaking Turkish, or French when speaking French, or Japanese when speaking Japanese, is much more pleasant to the ear.

I am kind of undisciplined.

Discipline really isn’t the issue per se. Not in the way we usually think of it: “making ourselves do boring, painful, mind-numbing crap we don’t really want to do in the hope of some future reward”. This process shouldn’t need discipline. Or, more accurately, it is impossible to use so-called “discipline” and “willpower” on a project of this length. Discipline is too scarce a resource for anyone to attempt to use it over any significant period of time. Any project that requires sustained self-directed effort for more than several hours or days is not one where you want can use self-coercion.

Instead, you want to combine fun (attraction) with inertia. In your case, it might go something like (1) Find fun stuff to do in Spanish. (2) Remove Turkish/German from your life to create inertia. This is analogous to removing all unhealthy food from your home, then replacing it with food that is both tasty and healthy. The result is that you will eat this healthy food (1) just because it’s there, and continue to eat it because (2) it tastes good. “Food” must fulfill the conditions of abundance, variety, desirability, and availability, if it is to be eaten. If you are to “eat” Spanish (i.e. healthy food), you need to have lots of Spanish that’s so tasty you eat it merely for the pleasure of eating it, not because it’s Spanish and often not even out of hunger.

By the way, I personally subscribe to the idea of discipline as “remembering what you want”. This is a totally different animal from all these masochistic attempts at inflicting suffering upon oneself. This re-definition of discipline essentially carries us in the direction of remaining in touch with the joy and curiosity that led us to fall in love with a language in the first place.

So don’t try to use traditional discipline. As long as you are a normal, healthy living organism with a drive for self-preservation, any attempt to hurt yourself will inevitably fall flat. Don’t suppress “human nature”, use it. I happen to love sitting around watching movies and reading comics, so I simply transfer these activities into other languages, and what were once bad habits suddenly become highly educational activities worthy of remuneration, praise and websites.

While hiding in the linguistic microclimate of the native language will not help, any attempt to force oneself out of it is destined to meet with violent resistance and ultimately failure (indeed, the only way force will work is if it’s initiated and maintained externally, and that gets you into all kinds of issues of [child] abuse and human rights and ethnic cleansing and all that good stuff). If in doubt, observe real toddlers — there is no shame, no doubt and no boredom, only adventure. Fill that bathtub with toys, jump in, and before you know it, you won’t even want to get out.

Skin going all wrinkly and junk…

There is a natural tendency to view this in-the-bathroom-but-barely-even-getting-wet phenomenon as something negative, as yet another example of how you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. _{I don’t buy that at all, and I hate how we’re always just trying to find excuses to euthanize old dogs. While we’re at it, why don’t we just go Logan’s Run and murder everyone when they turn 30, since they’re never going to amount to anything anyhow? If the dog’s not learning, it’s not the dog’s fault — it’s the trainer’s fault!} I take a different view altogether. That foreigners can go years in a country virtually unscathed by the local language, is, I think, an example of the triumph of the human will . It shows just how powerful our ability to shape our personal environment — our microclimate — is; it shows how we can resist seemingly overwhelming counteractive forces; it is a feat that should perhaps even be celebrated…OK, maybe not that far.

Anyway, for us who actually want to learn a certain language, all we have to do is run this process in reverse. Stop resisting the target language, and become more receptive to it. Receive it. Accept it. Become it. If a Japanese person can create a Little Japan in Kansas (as some of my friends from Japan have), then…an American person can do the same. It’s that simple.

I leave you with this quote, apparently from some guy called Paulo Coelho:

We wouldn’t worry nearly as much about what others thought of us if we recognize how seldom they do.

Thanks for reading. I am sure there’s much more to add on this issue — if  you have any insights, please feel free to share.

I’ve been studying Japanese for a looong time. Like most people, I sucked at it until i chanced upon your method. It works much better and I suck less.

Here is the dilemma: I’ve stopped. I have to urge myself to even watch a Japanese cartoon WITH SUBS, much less a raw cartoon.

This has been a problem throughout my life. I’m what u call a chronic procrastinator. A normal procrastinator puts things off till lata and tries to reason it out in their head. A chronic one puts it off until whenever and has no reason why.

I’ve explored my belief system à-la-Robbins, and I do have some sucky ones that I need to handle, but I was wondering what you had to say about procrastinating at my level.

Specifically, I wanted to ask you how you get through your “desert” moments when you don’t do anything you’re supposed to do. What do u tell yourself? How do u get back on track AND STAY ON TRACK (which is always harder to do)?

Hope you can help oh great one of the Japanese (that’s me sucking up to you so you’ll give me a life-changing answer. LoL)

LoL indeed, young B-star. LoL indeed. And good question, by the way. So here’s the answer: Maybe…probably…wait for it…:

Maybe you just don’t want to watch that particular anime that much. Maybe you’re just not into it any more…for now.

Ask yourself this question: “If I were fluent in Japanese, and I didn’t have to do anything for ‘learning’ or ‘study’ reasons, would I be watching this right now?”.

If your answer is anything but an emphatic “of course, motherlover!”, then

1. Don’t bother watching that anime or whatever. Just effen don’t. That’s it.
2. Find something you do want to watch, that you would watch anyway simply for the sheer fun of it
   a) If you can’t think of anything, then get more stuff, and/or look through all the stuff you can get your hands on until something pulls and holds you in.

Sometimes stuff pulls you in but can’t hold you. Dump it. The media has to be worth watching in its own right. Recall what made you want to learn Japanese in the first place — you watched stuff because you wanted to watch it, and you stopped watching as soon as you were bored (this counts for reading, too by the way…and for video games — fortunately, most people don’t play video games ad boredomium [somebody, please, hook me up with the real Latin for this] so they typically don’t need warnings like this). I am saying do the same thing — keep switching stuff up (Massive Turnover) — just be sure the thing you switch into is Japanese, that’s all.

As Mark Twain is said to have once said:

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and…play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT turn Japanese into work. Don’t turn it into “study”; don’t turn it into 勉強 (a word that refers to scholastic study in Japanese, but actually carries the rather negative meaning of “coercion” in Chinese). Just play at it. PLAY. That’s why I keep telling people: don’t make all these rules about what is and is not OK for you to do in Japanese, or how Gokusen is over-coloured by the argot of juvenile delinquents or watching Love Hina will make you talk like a girl — it doesn’t matter, you need to learn all that vocabulary in order to truly be proficient in Japanese anyway, so whatever you watch is fine — as long as you’re enjoying it right now.

Write this on your liver: just because anything is OK to watch in Japanese, that doesn’t mean that everything is worth watching…to you that is. One person’s Star Trek is another person’s…well, I can’t imagine how any human being could fail to love Star Trek, but you get the idea.

Immersion Responsibility is a Two-Way Street

Anyway! Your only responsibility is to do stuff that’s actually in Japanese; the remainder of the responsibility rests entirely with the Japanese stuff — media — itself. The media has a responsibility to entertain you. You don’t have to find the value in it; it has to demonstrate its value to you by being so much fun that you don’t notice time going by — by sucking you in. It has to make you wish that eating and sleep and bodily hygiene could take care of themselves because they cut into your media time. And if it doesn’t do that or it stops doing that, then you “fire” it by changing to something else. You are the boss and there are no labor laws. Fire the mother. You do the work of setting up and showing up to the environment, but after that the environment must work for you.

Some people will tell you that you can only enjoy stuff in a foreign language once you’re fluent. That is some chicken-and-dinosaur-egg nonsense right there and I will tell you now — you can enjoy authentic “funbun” (For Native By Native — thanks to two young Chinese-acquiring studs for this word) stuff in a foreign language right from the get-go. If you simply stop turning it into work and trust your taste. You are in charge now. You decide what comes and what goes, and boring stuff always goes. It doesn’t matter if it has the same amount of Vitamin J as 50 bowls of rice; it doesn’t matter if it has traces of Nagase Tomoya’s urine on it — if it’s boring then it’s out. the. door.

In fact, you can make a game out of this. It’s kind of the “Aim to Fail” of media exposure — find Japanese to throw away. Or, put another way — focus on how much Japanese you discard. How much Japanese stuff do you “skim”, “sample” or “try”, only to throw away? Increase this number, increase the number of Japanese things you discard and the amount of cool stuff you hit will naturally increase as well. It’s all just probability games. As I’ve hinted at previously, I’ve been doing that throughout the month of May 2009 with Cantonese. My goal was to try (not necessarily watch from start to finish, but at least try — sample) 100 Cantonese movies. Now, I may or may not actually hit 100, but (1) that’s not the point, and (2) the reason I may end up not hitting 100 is because in all that randomness I found 3 or 4 movies that were so cool I wanted to watch them again and again and again.

Let me make one thing crystal clear: I. Do. Not. Read. Or. Watch. Things. Repeatedly. Out. Of. A. Sense. Of. Duty. I don’t do anything — the film [or book or song or game or whatever] does it to me. It just so happens that there are some films out there that are so well put-together, with lines so beautifully delivered, with plots so funny, with timing so perfect, that as soon as I hit the closing credits I find myself wanting to go back to the beginning. Having said that, if you do not want to repeat, then do not repeat. Just don’t; don’t even go there. Remember — your only responsibility is to the Japanese language as a whole, everything else is disposable; nothing is sacred. The canon is not closed.

Skim, Sample, Skip and (Sometimes) Stay: The Bookstore Principle

While we’re here, let me tell you a thing or two more about that 100 Cantonese Movies In One Month sub-project, and what I discovered while doing it for the first time.

Have you ever noticed how you seem to have more fun at the bookstore skimming books than at home with the books you bought? Well, it’s because, at the bookstore, you skim. You sample. You skip all the crap. Skim, sample, skip. You only stay when you find something you like.

The key to having as much fun at home as you do at the bookstore is to start behaving the same freaking way at home. Treat your bookshelf less like some oversized wooden embodiment of all that you want to be but aren’t, and more like a bookstore. And do this with everything — text, audio, video — everything. Only those lame indie-music-loving friends force you to listen to a track “because it’s good for you”. Them, and people in authority who are bad at being in authority, which would sometimes seem to include most people in authority. Real friends and equals leave you alone. I feel like I’m on a completely different subject…

A good movie or book or game or whatever is like a good friend. And a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend. And a good snippet of a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend: you stay with them because you like them, not because you have to or should. Don’t stay with them out of some sense of obligation, don’t add more “shoulds” to your life and “should all over yourself”, as Antonius Robbinicus once so eloquently put it.

When something or someone is cool, she/it/he will make you want to spend more time with her/it/him. There will be no duty involved.

One never gets bogged down at a bookstore. One only gets sucked in. So why…why trudge through a boring anime or game or book? Because you “should”? Because other people are looking and you might look illiterate if you skip too many pages? Because you have to finish what you started? Fuhgeddabout it, man. Instead, remember this: there are no other people and there are no means and there is no rule except “have fun in Japanese”…if a book or a movie or even a person gets dumped along the way, then so be it. There’s plenty more where that came from.

Both Active and Passive

To go even further, what this means for us is that: “It’s in Japanese therefore it’s good for me” alone is not reason enough to watch something. It has to be fun AND in Japanese. As Rossini almost said, but didn’t:

“All Japanese is good, except the boring kind”.

If it’s boring, then don’t watch it. Switch to something else. Simple. Period. End of sentence. Case closed. “But I might learn something!”, you say — yes but you’ll probably die of boredom before you do. The truth is, you can learn something doing anything, so there’s no reason to go mentally chewing broken glass on the off chance that you might may could build some character.

Media is like Kleenex in that it’s really good to use and very hygienic, but once it’s been contaminated with snot (boredom), you throw it away. Only those stingy relatives you visit once a year force you to reuse dirty Kleenex. For your own health: throw away or put aside all boredom-contaminated media and get a new box of tissues. _{Good media’s actually re-usable, of course, so the Kleenex simile has holes in it. Not as big of holes as those in Stargate “we just travelled to another galaxy to meet a community of humans whose ancestors were abducted at the dawn of Earth civilization, but somehow we’re perfectly able to communicate complex technical instructions in life-and-death situations using a fully-fledged 20th-Century Standard American English vocabulary all without a Universal Translator or any other such magical device and oh look they have USB here, too” SG-1, though.}

This is such an important point that I’m going to repeat it: you actively move through media, constantly changing what you watch as soon as it gets boring, but at the same time, you passively wait for something to come out and grab you. When that thing does find you, you will know; there will be no doubt, because it’ll stop you in your tracks. And you’ll have a beautiful time together (indeed, time may well stop). And then you’ll get tired of it, and start moving again.

Tip: when something grabs you, you might want to find out who made it, and start looking for other work by the same creators. In my experience, if you like one piece of work by a certain creator, the chances are much higher than random that you’ll like her other work. For example, did you know that Trick, Ikebukuro West Gate Park, Handoc, Keizoku and Sushi Prince were all directed by the same guy (TSUTSUMI Yukihiko) ? These are all some of the coolest shows, Japanese or otherwise, ever made. So cool, that it would be worth acquiring a certain language just to be able to enjoy them fully.

Conclusion

To conclude:

1. If you’re bored it’s not your problem and it’s not Japanese’s problem — it’s the media’s problem. Change the show, not the person and not the language.
   • The reason you feel like all of Japanese sucks is because you have mixed the pure, clean spring water of fun Japanese stuff with the runny, cholera-infested turds of obligation. Purify the water — remove the obligation, so that you are left only with fun stuff, and Japanese itself will be fun for you again. _{As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I went through a stage when, for some inexplicable reason, I simply couldn’t bring myself to sit down with a book; I always ended up watching TV instead; this really bugged me — had I attained literacy just to never use it again? But when I sold off the 30-50% of my “bookstore” ( well, bookshelf) that I wasn’t interested in any more, suddenly reading became super fun again, and has been ever since. I continue to treat most books like disposable items to be processed — read or not read — and not some kind of proud decoration, and I continue to read heavily. Also, I skip the boring parts of books just like TV. DO NOT READ THE SPECIAL INSETS IN MANGA JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO! In the case of anime and movies — don’t feel like you have to follow every single moment. Remember, it has to bring you in. And it’s OK to stop sampling after even 30-45 seconds. Fire the media. You do not have to finish what you started.}
     
2. “Throw away” is a synonym for “change”. I can watch a movie 10 times, until suddenly, at the 11th viewing it’s like…mmmmyeah: it just starts chafing. Maybe 6 months later you’ll want to see it again. So it’s…not necessarily a matter of all-out disposal — especially with stuff that you’ve liked before — more one of switching things up. Often enough, I find that something I once didn’t feel at all excited about, has magically grown on me.
3. Tools for switching things up for free: LiveStation, YouTube, KeyHoleTV, NicoNico, the Internet, real-life Japanese friends.
4. Tools for switching things up for cheap: Japanese shops [i.e. shops for Japanese people], Netflix and other video rental options, TV where available.

Thus spake Khatzumoto! So it shall be written! So it shall be done! And now it’s your turn. How do you turn those dry “desert” moments into a sweet, tasty “dessert”? Please share .

I’ve been working with your method for almost six months now, and although I’m doing the things you talk about on your website, and putting a lot of time into studying, it still seems like something’s not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, and it seems like everyday after I’ve finished my reps i have a feeling like there’s “something not quite right” and “I wish I could ask Khatzumoto x…” Well, I guess I have made progress in this six months, I mean, I certainly can write more kanji than I could; I can use a J-J dictionary, even if its still a bit clunky, and I’ve probably read more now than I had in the previous year I had been in Japan, but I can’t help feeling that this method isn’t working as well as it could be. Or maybe, I’m not working as well as I could be.

The other reason I’m looking for a bit of guidance is that, now having come into the belief that “classes suck,” I’m considering turning down a chance to attend to the “most prestigious/famous/well-known/full of academic wankers” Japanese school…in favor of taking a job here (doing sound engineering) and continuing to study AJATT style. Basically, I’ve got a lot riding on your belief that I can do it on my own, but maybe I need a little help getting myself to that point.

To which I responded as follows, but in Japanese:

My dearest, most precious T-star,

The situation you’re in right now is what you might call the “uncanny valley” (yes, this is an extension of the original usage of this term, but it makes sense here). Meaning that you’re at this point where you’re not a beginner and you’re not advanced; you’re in a “half-boiled”, in-between stage.

Have you ever eaten a half-boiled potato? Have you noticed how they almost taste worse than raw ones? In the uncanny valley stage, it’s common to feel like a half-boiled potato — to think that “Dude, I’ve been boiling all this time — am I EVER going to soften up and taste good?! Or, am I just driving up the gas bill or what?! What the truck, already?!” In fact, people who depend on school to learn a language almost never graduate from being a half-boiled potato, although many of them are convinced they’re the tastiest freedom fries this side of the Romulan Empire. That is, until they actually meet with their target language in its unadulterated form, at which point they decide that either they themselves are stupid or the target language is stupid (funnily enough, no one ever seems to find a problem with learning methods).

It’s not like you can’t read characters, but you still can’t breeze through them effortlessly. It’s not like you can’t say stuff, but you frequently find yourself tongue-tied. When you’re intermediate, it’s almost always like that. That’s what sucks about being intermediate.

And to make things worse, you’ve somewhat forgotten about “having fun” and discovery and the sheer beauty of the sound of Japanese, and become obsessed with “competition,” “progress,” “goals”, sentences, retention rates.

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill for breaking out of this valley. Well, no…there is, but it is simply this: “continue”. Even though you are definitely improving during this stage, it’s normal to feel like you can’t see the results, so there is no need to worry or give up.

Why is it like that when you’re an intermediate learner? I have a hard time understanding it myself, but let me venture a “Khatzumoto hypothesis”. Be aware that I’m just throwing out ideas, and I’m not sure if any of this is actually correct or not. With that disclaimer in mind…

It seems to me that all intellectual improvement actually progresses at a roughly linear rate. In monetary terms, it would be like increasing your savings by exactly $10 every day with (almost) no interest. So then, what happens is, even though the absolute rate of improvement doesn’t change, the relative rate inevitably declines to very near zero — to the point that it is completely imperceptible on small time scales.

Let me illustrate: when $10 one day becomes $20 the next day, you get all excited, like: “Whoa! It’s doubled!” But when $10,010 becomes $10,020, you paradoxically feel all let down instead, like: “What the chump change! Still not enough to do jack shWindows ME.” You have four orders of magnitude more money, yet you feel worse rather than better.

In fact, there may be a biological reason for this. It’s been said that humans are quite sensitive to acceleration (change in speed), but have a very poor grasp of fixed speed ¹…The thing is, you don’t even need a biologist to lay it all out for you. Anyone who’s flown on a plane with or without snakes has experienced this first-hand. On a passenger plane flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo, the most exciting (terrifying?) part is the acceleration during takeoff. When you’re up in the air traveling over the Pacific Ocean, though, the speed feels no different than it would if you were riding in the family Ford Taurus. Even though the plane is moving the fastest during the middle of the flight (at about Mach 0.8 — that’s almost the speed of sound, be arch!), it’s always the middle of the flight that is the most boring part. We are faced with the most amazing of ironies: the fastest part of the flight seems the slowest.

My point being, learn to distinguish between “speed” and “acceleration” already!

You’ve been adding to your Japanese knowledge bank word by word, and your “savings” will keep growing word by word. It’s just that you’ve gotten to where it’s hard to feel your growth — more accurately, it’s hard to feel your acceleration, because you are essentially not accelerating; you are moving at constant velocity. But you are growing. You are flying. And if you just keep flying, you’ll eventually land in Tokyo. So K-E-E-P F-L-Y-I-N-G, O-K-A-Y? Stay in the air.

At the same time, simply being told to “continue” despite mind-numbing boredom isn’t exactly going to psyche you up or boost morale, or even result in learning. Indeed, there’s one more thing you’re going to need to follow through with this kind of self-study program.

That is, to “lose yourself in it”. In other words, completely forget the “self,” forget the reason you’re studying Japanese, forget what other people think — everything — and immerse yourself wholly in “having fun” — call it intellectual hedonism if you want. Forget why you are doing Japanese. Do Japanese because you are Japanese. Do Japanese because Japanese is fun. Do Japanese because it’s there. Do Japanese because it’s what you would be doing anyway (think about it — you’re learning Japanese so you can do stuff in Japanese, so you might was well do stuff in Japanese, because that’s what the Japanese is for in the first place! The cause is the effect is the cause. The means is the end is the means.)

Beware especially of caring what other people think. And stop comparing yourself to other people, starting today [not that you are, but...various forces can sometimes bias people towards feeling the need to prove themselves to the world]. No good can come of it. As anyone who has spent time observing children — regular, garden-variety children who grow into regular, garden-variety adults — understands, each person grows according to their own unique schedule. Some children can already talk up a storm by the age of 2, while some don’t get beyond baby gibberish until they are 4. Some girls have their menarche when they’re 8 years old and some have to wait for it until they’re 16.

When babies learn to walk, they don’t have everybody and their dog giving them advice on posture, telling them “you don’t need to learn to walk any more because we have cars, electric wheelchairs and Segways”, telling them “only Japanese babies can walk, because they have a lower center of gravity and live close to sea level”. They are largely left alone; they grow when they grow. You need to make it so that you are left alone, too.

I could fill a whole website with stories of how slow I am on the uptake. Slow, that is, if you were to insist on comparing me to other people. For example, my voice didn’t break until I was almost 17. Pretty late when compared to all the hairy English kids I was surrounded by at the time. Years late. But, ultimately, these variations are nothing to work oneself up over. And there will come a day when no one but you even remembers this time. Today, no one ever comes to me and goes: “Whatever, Khatzumoto, you talk a good game, but I heard your voice didn’t even break until you were 17, Mr. pre-op castrato!” In fact, As long as I don’t bring it up, no one is any the wiser. Babies walking, toddlers speaking, girls menstruating, boys’ voices changing — everyone gets there at their own pace.

So why not scrap this whole “self” vs. “others” thing and get down to having some serious fun. That might sound stupid at first, but if you go ahead and approach it that way, your brain will naturally work better, as it tends to do when you’re enjoying something (or whatever the brain does…I dunno…I just use it), ensuring substantial improvement. You will learn far more having fun than not having fun. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that you will only learn when having fun.

Rather than asking “Mommy, are we there yet?” the whole way through this road trip called acquiring Japanese, start doing stuff like singing songs, playing on your PSP, reading manga or enjoying the scenery. It’ll make the time pass by so quickly that you’ll almost be upset when you “get there”. You will actually feel this loss…this void…this nostalgia for when attaining proficiency was such a wonderful, clear-cut destination for you.

Long journeys are not the only places where we can experience the phenomenon of the-middle-seeming-worse-than-the-beginning. When you get a haircut, your head is messier mid-way than when you first entered the barber shop. When you tidy a room, there soon comes a point in the tidying where the place is more chaotic than when you started. And these are the only examples that come to mind right now…feel that depth of life experience!

Some people might write all this off as “obvious” or “self-evident”…but it is these obvious things that are the easiest to forget. Often, the more something “goes without saying”, the more it seems to need saying.

Anyway…

Have fun.

It’s been a long time since I was an mid-journey acquirer of Japanese, though I am one of Cantonese now. Let she who is with intermediate experience also cast a commentary stone this way and give T-star some more advice.

[P.S.

but I can't help feeling that this method isn't working as well as it could be. Or maybe, I'm not working as well as I could be.

Just what is it that would need to happen in order for you to stop feeling this way? I have a feeling of my own: nothing short of being Perfect Right Now would satisfy this desire. And the only way that that's going to happen, is if you continue. In the absence of overwhelming external force, the only thing that's going to get you to continue is the pull-in power of fun. So you might as well go have fun ]

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 .

Are you of the school of thought that a person can only learn X languages to complete fluency? Perhaps that was a bad explanation, but I guess would you say that you can use your method multiple times for different languages or would you advise a student to just concentrate on learning, say only Japanese, to complete fluency instead of learning a lot of language to a pretty good fluency?

Second question is, what would you advise someone to do if they studied a language for a good amount of time but they are reluctant to continue because of… whatever. Bad experiences with the culture and/or people of the language? Or perhaps that is an issue for a psychoanalyst, who knows?

Great questions. These are issues I’ve been thinking about myself for a while now, and especially deeply over the past few months. These just my present thoughts, they may well change in the future; I’ve only taught myself one language so far, and so I cannot and do not claim the right to discuss the issues you’ve raised with any authority or particularly deep experience.

How Many Languages?

There’s a lady called KIN Birei, whom I love and hate at the same time. You see her on Japanese TV now and then. Typical fiery, illogical, right-wing, Japanese woman, right? Wrong — she’s Taiwanese, living in Japan in exile since her college days (1958); back then, the government of Taiwan didn’t like it when you said “Taiwan”, because Taiwan = China and cetera. Her Japanese is perfect — at the risk of stating the obvious, just because someone’s East Asian, that doesn’t by any means give them a free pass to other East Asian languages, so her effort is impressive and as praiseworthy as any other learner’s.

Anyway, in one of her recent books, she discusses raising her children here. They were born and raised in Japan by her and her fellow Taiwanese husband, but since Japan doesn’t presently have jus solis, they are Taiwanese. KIN Birei said that she believes, languagewise, it’s “better to have one or a few sharp knives in your kitchen, than many blunt knives“. To the point that she focussed more on teaching her kids Japanese than Mandarin or Taiwanese; I’m not sure how much Chinese her kids know; they may well know some, although it sounds like they might not know ANY. In any case, she said that the most important and useful language in Japan is Japanese, so she thought it crucial that her kids’ Japanese be spot-on, even at the expense of Chinese. I was shocked…To find that I agreed with her. Like I said, I usually hate this woman [she makes baseless and disparaging marks about Chinese people and civilization that feed into the "Chaana's gon' git us!" book circuit on the far right: "Chinese people only care about getting the most done for the least effort", no kidding, it's called rational thinking]. But I think she’s right about language and kitchen knives.

Too many of us language learners are dabblers, dilettantes, hobbyists. Of course, it depends on one’s goals. But if we really want the maximum benefits of knowing a language, I think those max benefits only come with (native-level) fluency. If you want to be able to actually cut stuff, you need a sharp knife. You want to be able to use your languages to do (cut) ANYTHING. And fast. Understand everything from standard to regional dialects, read fast, speak fast and correctly, write fast and correctly. Otherwise you just have a collection of blunt mental; it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t do anything or it doesn’t do enough. Then there’s the social aspect — again, this is related to language as a social tool — you want to be persuasive. And to be persuasive, it helps to be funny, I think. To be funny takes some cultural plugged-in-edness, and being plugged in takes time — you do have to plug in. Anyway, when I learn a language, I want to know it so well that I would be perfectly OK if it were the only language I knew. Again, it is a matter of goal. At one time, my goal in Japanese was to be able to function completely as an adult in Japanese society, to be comparable to a native speaker in terms of being able to do anything a “typical” Japanese adult could do in terms of language; I reached and passed that goal a long time ago. Now my goal is to be better than most native speakers — to persuade, to amuse and even to linguistically intimidate if necessary for being taken seriously ["how thick is yooour kanji, Mr. Yamaguchi?"]; I plan to live in Japan a long time if not permanently, so this is both my desire and my social responsibility.

Another factor is, personally, I don’t want to spend my whole life learning languages from the bottom up…It takes time and highly focussed energy. I want to spend my time enjoying what I’ve learned, extending what’s already been built. I already get to do that in Japanese; it’s a great feeling just to be able to read or watch anything, talk to anyone, in Japanese. After Cantonese and Mandarin, I’m out of the game, at least for several years…except maybe just enough Russian to travel through Central Asia, if that. Otherwise it’s chill, write, watch, read, talk and just generally “be” — in Japanese and Chinese.

Language skill isn’t only a matter of “get it once, and you’re done”. It’s not catching a ball. The moment you stop using a language, you start losing it. I no longer function in two of the three languages of which I was a native speaker as a child, because of disuse. Last week, after I went for some days without hearing large amounts of Japanese (long story short: hanging out with Americans and their vegetarian Thanksgiving), I knew and my Japanese friends knew — it just took longer to “come out”, and it didn’t come out cleanly. Now, if you are strongly rooted enough in a language, then…you may never experience appreciable loss; I’m sure if I never spoke or read or heard another word of English after today, I’d still be fine. But, such rooting takes time, I think. So, you can get good at other languages, you can acquire several, but neglect may seriously weaken the ones not being focussed on, unless they have deep roots.

So, learning a language is like building and owning a house all by yourself, in that not only do you have to do the construction, but you also have a maintenance burden — a burden that no one else can bear, you can’t get a real estate agent to do if for you — you need to, essentially, live in the house throughout the year, even if not every day. Otherwise, it gets dusty, termites come in and start chewing stuff up, and eventually the house may fall. Technology may one day solve this problem (stimulating the brain directly? I dunno), I think SRSes are a step in that direction, but for now you’re on your own.

I don’t think anyone has the right to say what’s impossible, anyone who does is generally asking to be embarrassed by future generations. I’m just saying there’s a price to be paid for everything, including true multiple-language fluency.

Bad Experiences and Abandoning a Language

As for bad experiences, the International Society of Jerks and Richardheads (ISJR) is a worldwide organization. Wherever there is a language or a culture, ISJR members can be found in it now and then. But good people, lots of good people, far more good people than ISJR members are there, too. Be sure to surround yourself with them. Be sure that you’re not letting individual richardheads represent/taint a whole language and culture for you. And if you still don’t like it, then, yeah, drop the language. But be really sure you’re sure, because it is a large investment of time and resources both mental and physical; it’s not something to throw out lightly.

You know, every now and then, here in Japan, I’ll meet someone who’s a jerk, and I’ll think “what am I even doing here? why did I even bother? Japanese people are so X”. But…that’s unfair; it’s unfair of me to slam all of Japan and Japanese people because of the occasional drunken middle-aged man, or housewives who stare, or even the lady at immigration who is, in fact, a retard [you can talk to her in keigo, and she will respond in baby talk; she is clearly a first-degree retard], or whatever. As it turns out, these people are (1) ISJR members and (2) tend to carry out ISJR activities on Japanese people, too. There are entire creative works more or less dedicated to the things Japanese ISJR members do to Japanese people in Japan (Obatarian about selfish old women, Densha Otoko about drunken men in trains). In the vast majority of cases, it seems to me that if someone is a jerk to you [for being a foreigner], they are generally jerks to fellow countrymen, too — this is a fact. When Momoko and I were trying to get married here (looong story), there was this…creature…at city hall, and I had my Japanese friend T-star talk to him to see if City Hall Creature could be tamed, and T-star calls me back after attempting to negotiate with City Hall Creature and says: “Khatz, that guy…he’s…a richardhead; I have never had to deal with someone so unreasonable. Japanese people aren’t supposed to act this way, and don’t take him as an example for the whole country”. ISJR people aren’t picky.

Most of the time here, old women are telling me that I’m a “nice young man”, more than once older guys have randomly said: “Khatz, you can’t leave Japan! You know so much about it now, it would be a huge waste. You should just stay here forever; you’d be a good Japanese person.” One time, a schoolkid came up to me and went “Harro (hello)” and I said “欧米かっ？！[stop trying to be American!]” and we had a huge laugh about it. I’ve only bought rice twice since I came to Japan because T-star’s family sends me HUGE bags of fresh rice and vegetables from their fields. People will *thank* me for speaking Japanese because they were worried that they were going to have to use their rusty English. The taxi drivers by my train station always take the time to say hello, and update me on what’s happening in Prison Break. The people at the Japanese Consulate in Denver processed my visa with incredible speed, and then said “good on ya, kid; ganbatte in Japan” to me. The other week, I was pausing from a walk to read manga, and a random man stops his minivan and goes: “[You can read Japanese manga?]” and I’m all “…yes?” and he says: “Good job!” and then drives off. So…if you really put your negative experiences into perspective, you’ll probably find that they are easily cancelled out by the positive. Perhaps it’s time to recall what made you want to learn the language in the first place. No matter how many retards get employed at immigration, one person like T-star trumps them all.

“…I can certainly see how an emphasis on reading sentences leads to a large vocabulary and an intuitive sense of grammar and usage. However, what about listening and speaking? To what extent have you found that reading skills transfer over to these areas? On the site you talk about surrounding yourself with Japanese TV, movies, and music, but unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult to capture in an SRS. I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much. Do you recommend the use of simple (yet admittedly contrived) audio resources like Pimsleur, JapanesePod101, or something else?”

Perhaps there’s nothing intrisically wrong with your typical language-learning tape, but:
1) I never used them
2) The people I have met who have used them, have trouble with real Japanese as it is spoken by actual Japanese people…
…because, as you said, they ARE contrived. So contrived as to be almost useless. Have you heard the kinds of tapes people in Japan and other countries use to learn English? Let me give you an example:

“How do you do? My name is Smith”
“Pleased to meet you. My name is Tanaka.”

The same Japanese people who listen to this kind of thing are the same ones who can’t successfully order fast food at a Wendy’s in America, or follow an episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”. These are the people who blame English for being “hard”, blame people for “talking too fast”, and/or buy into some quack-science nihonjinron theory that “the Japanese ear cannot process those frequencies”, because, well, it certainly couldn’t be the case that their learning methods were deficient to begin with, since they spent so much time and money on them, right? Hmm…

You see, the stuff on those English tapes, it’s not that it’s not English, it’s just that it’s the dead corpse of English injected with linguistic formaldehyde(?)…that was a spectacular failure of a medical metaphor…Anyway, it’s not alive. It’s like a wax sculpture of the actual living person that is English. I mean, who in their right mind goes around saying: “how do you do”? The English tapes would have you believe that that’s normal. And to top it off, those tapes tend to be about as entertaining as watching nails grow. Fake and boring — not a great recipe for learning.

“unlike reading material, real-world sources of audio and video are more difficult”

Aha! There’s a contradiction. Most people go around wailing about the perceived difficulty of written language. Now it’s spoken language that’s the problem. It can’t be both. Which is it? Well, in truth it’s neither one. I will admit that listening to real Japanese and reading/writing real Japanese require attention, effort and some time. Which is exactly why you can’t afford to put them off. You HAVE to start with them as soon as possible because they are “difficult” (which really only means “different” — you just need to get used to them). So start with real Japanese audio-visual sources right now. Of course, you won’t understand most of what’s said, but I guarantee you will understand at least one word. That’s how you start. With one word. For the longest time, you’ll only be able to pick up individual words. But from words you’ll grow until you pick up whole phrases, then sentences and then, eventually, the entire show. It takes months, but it is a finite process. And it’s not just words — the rhythms and cadences of real Japanese are important for you to hear, too. There are sounds that Japanese people naturally shorten, lengthen or combine. There are places in the sentence where you pause or don’t pause. The visuals — the facial expressions, the shape of the face/mouth, the bridges (“さあ”, “ええ”）. The hand gestures, the body movements. All of these are part of Japanese, too — a part that is a heck of a lot more easily, more enjoyably and more effectively (in terms of memorization) learned by direct observation than by having some textbook just list them for you.

Of course, it’s rough when you start, but it gets easier. In the beginning stages, take words you hear on TV and get short sentence examples of those words, then build on that. Nouns of course are a big part of any language — always learn a noun together with a verb that acts on it. Adverbs with verbs. Adjectives with nouns. Pay attention to what particle (wo, ni, de, etc,) is used with it. Start taking small, single steps every day while literally keeping your eyes and ears on the prize (reading, speaking and understanding REAL Japanese), and you will get there. It’s not a matter of “whether”, but of “when”. And the more time you spend on it on a day-to-day basis, the sooner “when” will come. The more you are exposed to real Japanese, the more comfortable you will become with it. It will become your default daily reality because you’ll have made it so.

I don’t actively oppose audio-learning tapes like I oppose classes, but it seems to me that they give you a false sense of security and achievement. In reality, Japanese is never going to be spoken as slowly, clearly and precisely as it is on those tapes. People (especially women) are going to talk FAST. Men are going to mumble. Things are going to be shortened — “azzaimass” is as common and natural as “arigatou gozaimasu”. Better that you face reality on a daily basis from the beginning than be lulled into safety only to have it pounce on you suddenly. The fact that people who listen to language tapes of Japanese/French/whatever are STILL floored when they go to the country only underscores the fact that those tapes can’t have been such great preparation in the first place.

“I can imagine how intermediate students might be able to learn something from TV & movies, but as a beginner, things like TV Japan just go over my head without helping me to learn very much.”

Right. That is true. But I would still recommend that you watch as much TV as possible. Having said that, understanding only bits and pieces can be unsatisfying after a while. That’s why I also recommend JAPANESE-DUBBED VERSIONS of movies and TV shows you already know and like. In my case, that meant lots of things like “Star Trek”, “CSI”, “Monk”, “The O.C.” and “Independence Day”. You know the premise; you understand the relationships; you know the plots and you may even have all the dialogue memorized. So it becomes a matter of seeing and hearing the stories you love recounted in Japanese. Since you know what’s happening, you can focus on the Japanese. I’ve found it to be fun, effective and satisfying. Even crappy B-movies turn to gold in Japanese because the predicability of the plot and dialogue frees you from figuring out “what the heck is going on here?”, allowing you to focus on “oh THAT’s how to say ‘arm photon torpedoes’ in Japanese”. You never know when you might need to have a photon torpedo armed .

In terms of learning languages, cause and effect behave strangely . If you want to get good at listening to real Japanese then the way do it is by listening to real Japanese. In other words, being able to function in real Japanese settings is both the effect and cause of exposure to real Japanese settings.

Language tapes make you feel like you are really learning something; they give you a sense of progress and achievement…But again, sometimes, I’m afraid this is a false sense. For one thing, you will almost never hear or have the same conversations as are on those tapes. Even if you ask a question that you learned from the tape verbatim, will you get the same response? Almost certainly not. But those tapes don’t prepare you for the asymmetry of reality — there are a myriad of ways to say the same thing; other people are going to use words and expressions in a quantity and variety greater than you personally ever will. Your ability to understand can’t just be on a par with your ability to produce, you have to understand much more than you will ever produce. Going back to the Japanese people who’ve learned English but have trouble at fast-food restaurants: “Here or to go?” and “Shall I supersize that” were the questions that stumped them.

What was the problem? You could fill reams of paper with the answer to that question. They didn’t know about the “verbing” of nouns, compound words, slang…whatever.

What is the solution? Put more fast-food sections on the English tapes? No. That’s simply patching a problem without actually solving it — treating a symptom without curing the disease.

You can’t just increase the amount of vocabulary either, at least in part because the obvious basic features of a language (standard grammar structures, noun vocabulary) alone will not allow you to function smoothly in that language. Not even close. As much as the more obvious features of a language are necessary, equally necessary is a deep or deeper understanding of the underlying logic of a language. I don’t know what this understanding should be called, some people call it an instinct or an intuition, but that almost sounds too intangible because whether or not someone understands this underlying logic very tangibly makes or breaks them in a language. Not understanding this underlying logic is the cause of translations that are grammatically and syntatically correct but that just don’t “work”. They just don’t “sit” right. They’re awkward, stilted. They’re not “wrong”, yet they are completely wrong. For proof, watch any Japanese TV commercial with English in it: “For your number one”, “Inspire the next”…Hurrrnnh?

There are linguists who devote their careers analyzing and explaining this underlying logic. And that’s a good thing. Meanwhile, textbook writers try (and almost always fail) to codify this logic, which leaves a student confused; or they ignore and sidestep it, leaving a student ignorant and defenseless: after months or years of fake, whitewashed textbook-style Japanese, some students never recover from the shock of “real” Japanese and give up, mystified and mystifying this “impossible Eastern language”, because, you know those East Asians, so “inscrutable” (*eyes roll into back of head*).

I believe that the individual wanting to become a native-like speaker is best off training her brain’s instinct to simply DO it. To get it right and “keep it real” from the beginning. Leave the analysis for the academic discussion because it’s too long-winded and clumsily-worded to be useful anyway — you need to know real Japanese and you need to know it soon. You need to be flexible, fast on the uptake and quick on your feet. The way to do that is to expose yourself to authentic, by-and-for native-speakers Japanese on a constant basis — to observe, understand and imitate real Japanese. Face reality from the beginning.

And that’s not all. Don’t even get me started on different regional accents. Where’s the tape for those? Just think of how many accents you as an English speaker can deal with, even though you may only speak with one. Japanese has dialects, too. You don’t need to use them, but you can’t pretend they don’t exist.

Just because you feel like you’re learning, that doesn’t mean that you really are. Just because you feel like you’re drowning, that doesn’t mean that you won’t swim and live. Feeling that you know Japanese because you can follow fake tapes of it is like feeling like you know an animal because you’ve seen it stuffed in a museum or tamed at a circus. It just doesn’t work that way. You need to see the critter “alive” and in “the wild”. Build yourself a “hidden observation post” ( i.e. acquire and surround yourself with real Japanese materials whether or not you are in Japan) if you need to. Or, if you’re in Japan, turn on the TV and radio; go down to the video store. Whatever it takes. You can take this “language as animal” analogy further. Who are the Western world’s greatest experts on gorillas and chimpanzees respectively? Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. Both these people literally surrounded themselves with the subject of their study. They didn’t go to the circus, the museum or the zoo. They went to forests in Cameroon and Rwanda to see the real thing. It’s not that they were smarter than their colleagues — they just had better methods. The same goes for language, except that language has the benefit that you don’t have travel to it in order to “feel the realness”. The very nature of language allows you experience it across space and time. In other words, you can bring the language to you; you can turn wherever you are into a little Japan without any fundamental loss of authenticity.

I know I’ve said some harsh things here, and it’s not meant as an attack on any particular audio publisher. They are all trying their best to help people. And there are, in fact, realistic audio tapes out there (I used some for Chinese once), but I definitely get the impression that these are few and far between, the exception rather than the rule — the same company will produce one or two good (realistic) tapes, but then put out a lot of cookie-cutter stuff, too. When learning a language HAVING FUN is crucial. If something gets boring, take a break. If something is always boring, throw it out. Life is short, so do things that are fun and productive.

A baby is born into the world. She doesn’t know ANY language or ANY customs. Three years later, she’s not only talking, she has to be told to shut up. “Well, babies are magical”, people say. Bollocks. Babies are stupid and ignorant. But with that ignorance comes an ignorance of embarassement, of fear, of limitations. 24/7/365 for 2-3 years, they are exposed to their native language(s) and as toddlers “suddenly” become quite fluent in it/them; no one ever tells them that it’s “hard” or that “it can’t be done”.Nothing is ever expected of babies but success. There is no magic to it; it’s not a “miracle”. If you take a seed, plant it, water it and give it light, don’t act surprised when one day things suddenly start shooting up out of the soil. If we really look at the conditions under which babies are working we see that their success is virtually inevitable. When we as adults work with the daily devotion and unshakeable conviction of a baby combined with our extensive knowledge, life experience and abstract reasoning abilities, we also inevitably succeed; we work our own “miracles”. You and I have to believe that we adults have a lot more going for us cerebrally than babies. What, then, stands in our way? Only ourselves.

Spoken and written language are not hard: if given the chance, they come naturally to all of us. Just think of all the idiots you’ve met in your life …most could speak and write just fine.

• This is a tough one! If you’re like me, you’re a greedy little hobbit who wants to know everything. So here are some tips:
• Pick the ones that stretch your knowledge slightly, not so much that you’re lost, and not so little that you’re simply tagging “です” on the end. One vague guideline when you learn, say, a noun, is to learn it with the verbs that act on it.
• Picking the ones you’d like to say or write one day is an excellent start. There are many sentences out there and you’ll have to get pretty selective. Don’t be like me and feel like you have to learn everything you see. Go for what seems the most valuable.
• The other thing about picking sentences from your input is that it takes a lot of mental energy. So the key there is to just keep going until you drop. Go until you’re tired of it, then take a break from picking sentences but never take a break from getting Japanese input. As far as possible, you should spend every waking hour (and maybe even sleeping hours, if you it doesn’t keep you awake) receiving Japanese.

• The short answer to that is anywhere and everywhere that native Japanese is spoken and written. More concretely:

• When I first started, I got them from the Starter Oxford Japanese Dictionary. As the name implies, it’s very good for starters, but you will soon outgrow it.
• 2ch is perhaps the most famous Japanese forum site. It’s got a forum for every interest. Here, you can read a lot of the words of just regular Japanese people. There’s lots of both slang and more formal-toned discussion. As you may be aware, it was thstarting point of the Train Man phenomenon.
• Electronic dictionaries, like the Canon IDF-3000 and later the Canon V-80, have been key sources of sentences. These can be quite expensive, so do shop around a bit.
• Internet dictionaries. If you don’t yet have an electronic dictionary and/or a software dictionary, the Yahoo online dictionary is a decent substitute. It has tons of example sentences in both the bilingual Japanese/English and the monolingual Japanese sections, respectively. BUT!! BE CAREFUL OF ANY EXAMPLE SENTENCED LABELED “[慣用表現]” — these are awkward; do not use them.
• Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is the place to look up the pronunciation of Japanese names, in the “Translate Words” section. However, the example sentences on the site sometimes contain errors. They are mostly good, but I would avoid them to be safe; you don’t want to go learning erroneous Japanese, and when sentences are your primary learning medium, you need to be able to trust what you read 100%. The Yahoo online dictionary is mostly based on highly-regarded, rigorously edited paper dictionaries that have been around for a while (decades?). WWWJDIC is a bit newer and more open source. Don’t get me wrong, though, I mean no disrespect to Dr. Breen.
• In February 2005, I installed the Japanese version of Windows XP on my computer. This was an important move. It is also a reversal of our typical idea of cause and effect in that: it’s not that you know so much Japanese that you can use a Japanese OS. Rather, it is by using a Japanese OS that you learn a lot of Japanese. If you use a computer a lot, consider turning it fully Japanese.
• And, of course, there are the usual suspects: movies, books, dramas (dramedies and soap operas), news and videos.
• Fuji News Network’s online newscast can be depressing, but it’s how I learnt to understand the news.
• Yomiuri Online recently (2005-ish) started podcasting a lot of both audio and video content for free. You don’t need an iPod to watch/listen to it. They also have a superbly written geek section.
• If you’re a fan of BitTorrent, then the good people of D-Addicts record shows from Japanese TV, sometimes complete with commercial breaks. uTorrent is a good BitTorrent client.
• When it comes to movies, I watched a lot of dubbed Hollywood movies, because (a) I knew I already liked the movie, and (b) I already knew the situation and what dialogue to expect. Dubbed Hollywood movies can guarantee you both enjoyment and learning.
• I love Star Trek, Seinfeld and Will Smith. You can find Japanese versions of these on Amazon.jp. These generally come with Japanese/English audio and Japanese/English subs.
• If you don’t have a Japanese DVD player, then a PC or a region-free DVD player will work for playing DVDs purchased in Japan. You can score a region-free player in the $50-$100 range (shipping included) without breaking a sweat. J-List and Amazon.com are good places to start.
• A word of caution: never use English subtitles. You won’t learn any Japanese, you’ll just depend on the English subs. In my case, I have watched Japanese movies with English subs but then had memories of watching it in English. So if you have English subs, turn them off and keep them off.
• As far as books are concerned, manga are the absolute bomb for learning real Japanese. Personally, I prefer stories that are somewhat grounded in reality. In fact, there is even some very good non-fiction manga out there, such as the “Life: A 4.6 billion year journey” series produced by NHK. Anything written by Kaiji Kawaguchi will be very interesting. Again, Amazon.jp will be happy to sell to you.
• Japanese translations of good English books abound. Just like with dubbed movies, they give you the advantage of having a clue what to expect going in. About half my book collection is Japanese translations, the other half is homegrown Japanese books. In college, I even got Japanese editions of my computer science textbooks. Once again, Amazon.jp will hook you up.
• It is important that, when you hear spoken Japanese, you get independent written confirmation of what was said. So if you hear a sentence in a movie, you want to confirm it with the Japanese subtitles. Of course, there aren’t always Japanese subtitles for you to confirm with, so some solutions are to:
• Ask a Japanese person to confirm.
• Get a dictionary, look up the words you think you heard and use the dictionary’s example sentences, instead of the sentence you think you heard.
• Here’s a little dictionary trick: if you ever come across a word that you want to learn but that has no example sentence, then use the definition itself as your example sentence.

• Yes. (Both). One of the best books for that is Naoko Chino’s All About Particles. Back in the day, I learned at least one example of every grammar point in the book. For a solid foundation in Japanese grammar, few books can be more highly recommended.
• Tad Perry’s legendary, free Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese Grammar is also a keeper, in terms of the example sentences. Read the explanations, but don’t bother to memorize them and don’t worry if you don’t understand them. Focus on getting the example sentences.
• Last but absolutely not least, Tae Kim offers brilliant, lucid explanations of Japanese grammar in his Guide to Japanese. Great for example sentences, and a good place for you to go find out stuff that I had to figure out.

• Yes! Absolutely! Start as soon as possible and reap the rewards! Or sow them . Or whatever farming metaphor you like best.