It seems to me that a lot of people may be concerned that adding pictures to SRS sentence items (just as they were concerned with adding stories to SRS kanji items) would make things too “easy”.

Well folks, if in doubt, give your SRS items to someone who’s never had any exposure to kanji and see how they hold up. Play your Chinese/Japanese audio-picture question to an untrained person and see if they can produce the text (assuming you don’t give away the text in the picture… ). I think you’ll find that they’ll be quite unable to write “dementia” just from being clued in about sicknesses and dodginess, or write down “港股暴跌逾千點” stroke-for-perfect-stroke just from seeing a picture of a number and an arrow.

Adding pictures for sentences, and stories for individual kanji items, I think, is completely non-detrimental. Remember, just because it’s not painful, that doesn’t mean you’re not learning (or perhaps more accurately, “acquiring”).

I’m reminded of my own recent experiences with Cantonese. I’ve watched the movie The Incredibles, in Cantonese, dozens of times. The most recent time (yesterday…2-3 times) one of the things I picked up was “即刻/immediately/right now”, as in “過嚟呢度，即刻/Come here this INSTANT”, in the scene where Mr. Incredible gets yelled at by his boss, and his boss is being really condescending and pointing down at the ground (”here”), telling Mr. Incredible to get away from the door. The next day (today), I was watching a different Cantonese show that I’ve also seen a lot of (a news magazine program called “事必關己”/Infolink), and for the first time, I understood what the presenter had been saying at the beginning of the show, each time he does the voiceover intro. He says: “即刻,事必關己/(translation: Coming up on Infolink/Next — Infolink/And now, it’s Infolink)”. Before it was just a sound to me; now it is a word.

What I’m trying to say here is a lot knowledge can be transferable (duh). Stuff learned in “easier” contexts — more obvious contexts — transfers itself to contexts with less “supporting information”: less obvious contexts. In a sense that’s why the sentences method and much of learning itself works — those simple i+1 sentences you learn will enable you to read entire books that are new to you; they will even enable you to infer both the reading and meaning of completely new words, and even the meaning of kanjiless words. This is analogous to how many people start their reading with manga before moving on to straight text — I don’t think anyone could reasonably contend that: “you’ll never learn to read Japanese if you look at manga, because the pictures will be too strong for your feeble Terran mind”. So don’t worry. Enjoy that it seems easier. Frankly, I think this relative effortlessness is a step in the right direction. The relative ease with which you learned language as a child (very little *conscious* effort, but tons of *actual* effort in terms of amount of exposure) should be within your reach as an adult; I think this puts it there. Let go of your addiction to struggling (lol…too melodramatic?), and focus on acquiring rather than learning.

Let me reiterate: you do not need to be told or be aware of what is happening for it to be happening. You don’t need to measure and “feel” yourself growing taller: just focus on eating healthy food. People seem to forget that they are not computers; you do not need to be explicitly told rules like a compiler; humans don’t need XML — we know bold type and list elements and surnames when we see them. When we look at something, we know where shapes begin and end: we don’t need to count pixels and color levels.

It could be said that your brain is a computer, but it is one of a thoroughly different sort from the current artificial kind. It is the most powerful fuzzy inference engine out there. It figures stuff out, it matches patterns, without a word of explanation. In fact, quite often when people try to explain something, those explanations are totally incompatible with the brain’s internal data representation formats and so they just end up creating confusion. Generally, all your brain needs to do to get it is to observe the data — any data. No one needs to tell you a rule; you’ll put it all together on your own, often unconsciously. To acquire a language then, all you need do is show yourself the data. Your brain will do the rest. Trust it.

Anyway, screw theorizing — I certainly don’t know enough about this stuff to theorize. Just do it. Results pwn everything.

And remember, dude, I am still talking about writing kanji by ear, which Noam Chomsky is said to have called: “phreaking hardcore l33t haX0rN355″.

I’m not the first guy to ever write about this kind of thing, not the best, and not the last. But, let’s give it a shot.

I don’t know if that comes out in this blog, but I can actually be a bit of a perfectionist. And this is a bad thing. I have over 300 drafts in my Gmail inbox that are “not quite right” and therefore not sent. I have about 40 long posts for this blog that have yet to see the light of the Internets. There are pages upon pages of comics that have not been put up because they’re “not good enough”.

Are we seeing the pattern here? The problem with perfectionism in all its forms is that…it creates this incredibly high standard, whereby you either meet the standard or you do not do the job at all. Or something like that. And, like, you know, you see the entryway to perfectionism in statements like “do it properly or not at all”. I used to love that phrase but now I freaking hate it. No, now I say “do it”.

When I look at how most of my projects were failing, it wasn’t from half-donkeyedness. No, it was from sadness brought about by standards that were functionally impossible to meet in anything but ideal conditions. My projects weren’t dying from chronic malnutrition, they were dying from outright starvation (preceded by some guilt-induced starve-binge cycles). And when I say project death, I mean everything starting from the daily level to the long term (since a long term project is nothing but a sequence of daily tasks and sub-projects anyway, but more on that later).

One of my largest continuing projects is the Japanese/Chinese project. And part of that involves doings my daily SRS reps. I noticed that I generally either did 0 reps or all my reps, but rarely anything in between. Multiple consecutive days of 0 reps were starting to eat away at my conscience and no doubt my skill. Why? Because I always set out with the goal to do…all my reps. Listen to Chinese every available waking hour. This is a good goal in terms of being noble. But sucky in terms of fragility. Because stuff happens.

Stuff happens. And when it does, people (well, I) tend to throw in the towel. “All or nothing”, remember? And…this is bad. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Some days you’re tired, the end is so far, yeah, you do your reps but you’re not fluent yet. So what do you do?

Do 1 rep. Just one.

Lower your standards. As Tony Robbins once said, make it easy to make you happy; lower the threshold at which you will say “yes, I am pleased”. Why? Because the more you relax the conditions for you to be happy, the more of the time you will be happy. And, ironically, by extension, the more productive you will be.

Think of when you do something bad, something that wastes time. No one ever goes “right, I’m going to smoke 37 kilograms of crack today”. Or “right, I’m going to spend the next 72 hours surfing the Internet with no sleeping or showers”. No. It’s always one more game. Just one. One more hit. Click on one more link. One more round. One more bottle of whatever it is people drink. One more round.

When you decide to do one of any small thing, inevitably you find it’s easy. In the case of things like drugs and gambling, it doesn’t seem to hurt, maybe it even seems fun. So you go on. In the case of something good, like doing your SRS reps…it’s exactly the same. So rather than say “I’m going to do x00 reps today”, just say “I’m going to do one. And take it from there”.

I was standing at a train station the other day. And the overhead announcement goes: “間も無く、2番線に、快速電車成田空港行きが到着します。” [”the rapid train to Narita Airport will be arriving soon”]. And I went, “だったら、到着しろよ。” [”well then, ARRIVE already!”] just to be funny. And it struck me right then that generally, at an everyday level, in terms of the small things we succeed at every day, we don’t so much talk about arriving somewhere as we do about going there. We don’t write down in our daily planner “ARRIVE at the supermarket”, we write “GO to the supermarket”. But in terms of the bigger things that we seem to fail at — like doing our language practice or making a kajillion euros — the goal statement is often too big and not backed by the baby steps that compose our entire lives.

So don’t say “exercise today”. Say “step outside the door” (computer geeks know what I mean: if you’re not careful, outside just doesn’t happen some days — sit in front of the computer one bright and sunny marnin’, and get up about two minutes later and think “what the DARK?!” — especially if there’s enough milk and Frosted Flakes in the house). Don’t say “do homework”. Say “solve one problem”. Don’t say “make a kajillion euros”. Say “make 1 euro”. Don’t try to arrive at your goal. Just try to go there — and congratulate yourself for it: give yourself credit for only getting it partially right, partially done. And I think you will find that the arriving will take care of itself. ‘Cause, think about it, you can’t only give yourself credit for when you get things completely right, or, well, you can and many people do, but that’s a recipe for sadness, especially since most of your life will be spent in the state of working on incomplete projects. So don’t wait to praise yourself for the whole or you’ll be waiting too long, praise yourself for the small, incomplete things you’re doing right here and now.

I’ve often said that someone learning a new language is a baby. Now that I think about it, so is someone doing anything new: and by “new, I mean “for the first time today”. You’re a baby, man. And you were born this morning! Haha. No one yells at a baby trying to walk, telling her that her posture sucks and if she has the audacity to call that bipedal locomotion then well she’d better think twice, Missy, because the Jones’ baby started walking when she was only 6 months old and at this rate she’ll be in the bottom percentile of walkers and she’ll never get into a good kindergarten or good elementary school or high school or college or job and she’ll end up getting pregnant at 11 and marrying an abusive biker and serving jail time in an escalating spiral of antisocial behavior from shoplifting to drug peddling to armed robbery all because she didn’t walk straight when she was a baby! So, give yourself credit for only getting it half right, especially since no one else will. Be your own mother — the loving kind rather than the beauty pageant kind. Goooood! Look at you!

I know exactly how you feel. You want to know Japanese and you want to know it NOW!!! NOW!!!!! NOW!!!

I know your inner monologue: “ARRRRGGGGH!!! WHY DO I HAVE TO LOOK UP ALL THESE WORDS??!!! WHY CAN’T THEY LEARN THEMSELVES!!!! WHAT HAPPENED TO JUST BEING IMMERSED IN IT LIKE A CHILD!!! ARHfshaghffhggdvhngbcgcdcbweq qqwgwhy”.

You, my friend, need to calm down. Relax. Drink some cocoa, hug someone good-looking, breathe deeply.

I know exactly what you’ve been doing. You don’t know enough Japanese to fully “get it” all yet, so, sometimes you don’t bother watching or listening, because you only understand bits and pieces of it anyway, and you wonder what happened to all the good times when you used to actually understand the words that people spoke, when you could read a page of text in like 5 seconds flat, when you ate cake with a knife and fork instead of chopsticks. So, you feel “screw it; I don’t know it now; I’m not going to know it tomorrow; who am I kidding? I’m not Japanese; I’m Joe Bloggs. This whole learning a language thing was a mistake; I belong to the culture of my birth and this suffering is what I get for going against NATURE blah blah blah blah critical period et cetera, et cetera, et cetera”.

You, my friend, need to hurry up. Quit the whining. Stop talking kafuffin. Get your immersion environment back up and running, do your SRS repetitions, go sentence-picking. You don’t have time to be worrying about this.

Calm down and hurry up. Obviously conflicting advice. But it’s appropriate for many of us language-learners, whose minds are in conflict as it is. Now, I don’t actually know if you have these thoughts or feelings at all, but I’ve seen it enough in myself and other people to feel that it is a general pattern. I’m going through the same thing with Chinese. I just want to know it already, you know? I mean, what the kafuffin, can’t I just know something by wanting to know it? But then, I don’t quite know enough, so I have to do all this work and WHEN WILL IT END?

So, like I said, we need to calm down. Calm down, and accept being noobs. It’s OK. Everyone who starts is a noob, including Chinese babies: their Chinese sucks :). And we need to hurry up. Stop wasting time, and just hurry up and get down to work. The reason we don’t know the language(s) we want to know yet is that we didn’t work hard enough (if at all) in the past. The past is the past, we can’t change it. But we can change the future. And all it takes is one small payment in the present. Everyone who ever learned a language to fluency busted tail to do it: everyone. Whether they knew they were busting tail or not is immaterial, tail was busted. Accept that. Accept that you suck now and that tail needs to be busted. But…but…also accept that your tail-busting will be handsomely rewarded with fluency. You WILL get there. You WILL get fluent. IF you work now, IF you do just this one small thing, IF you take one step in the right direction — that’s all you need to do, take one step, rinse, repeat — then you’ll get there. You just will.

You want to sprint there and be fluent tomorrow, don’t you? I do. Unfortunately, you can’t (yet). But you can do one small thing. So do it. I know it seems small, I know it seems like just a drop in the ocean. I sometimes wonder (I’m not always Mr. Hopeful) — how can learning one more stupid word lead to fluency when there are so many effen words? The same way that one spark can burn down a forest, or one cell can grow into a person. Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier — but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.

Think of your work as water and your ignorance as a jagged rock — you need to pour water on that rock to smooth it out. The good news is that it won’t take geological time to erode the rock of ignorance, but it will take a lot of water, and so you need to keep pouring. It may not look like anything’s happening, but it is. Just focus on pouring, keep the water moving.

Since we are human beings and we do get bored, the key to keeping the water flowing is to enjoy the pouring. Enjoy the journey, because, no matter how little time it eventually takes, it is still a long trip: Longer than you might wish, but at the same time, shorter than you might fear.

Remember: languages are finite, made by humans for humans. There is nothing you are lacking intellectually. It’s not hard, just long. Now get running.

This is such a huge topic I don’t know how to…even explain it really. Or where to start. But I’ll try my best.

Let me first start with what motivated me to write this post. I was skimming Yahoo Answers/Bag O’ Wisdom in Japanese on my cellphone, and I came across this sentence:

本格的にゴスペルを習いたいと思っています。
l’d like to get serious about learning gospel music/seriously learn gospel music.

This person isn’t a bad person or anything. But the sentence just struck me as “off”. “Wrong”.

Why?

Well, because gospel music is an art that was invented and is still dominated by Africans. And therefore the methods for learning it are distinctly African. Interestingly, jazz music was also invented by Africans, but as the number of African jazz artists has dwindled with the influx of non-Africans, so the methods of learning it have seen a change as well: nevertheless, I find it almost nonsensical that people would even attempt to “teach” improvisation or syncopation: “here, let me teach you how to ‘wing it’” — huh?. And one of the things about the African way of learning is that you don’t “learn” as such. You…do, and through doing, become.

Do you get what I’m saying? Does this make sense? I’m walking a very fine line here. Um…

There’s no textbook of gospel music that enumerates the various styles and sounds of gospel music with a step-by-step historical introduction and a chapter devoted to defining what is and is not gospel music, and various “grades” of gospel music. Dude, I don’t even know how many gospel music artists use annotated music.

But does that mean it’s not music? Does that mean it’s not good? Does that mean people don’t know what they’re doing? Absolutely not. I’m not even Christian, but you need only go to a church that has gospel music and compare it to a church that doesn’t, and see that there’s a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge, red-giant-about-to-go-nova-size gap in musical quality.

What about basketball? Lots of Africans in the US play it for fun. Hours and hours of ball with their friends.

And what do we say about all these Africans?

We say they’re “talented”. It’s “genetic”. They’re “tall”. They have “fast-twitch muscles”. They have “big hands”.

Really?

Really?

Because it couldn’t be that, oh, they’ve put in thousands of hours of enjoyable practice? Heaven forbid their bodies might have changed as a result of all this practice (just because it looks effortless, that doesn’t mean there was no effort involved)? It couldn’t be that it was the only thing that seemed fun to do? It couldn’t be that certain Kenyans live at 2500m above sea level, eat more fresh vegetables than the Fresh Vegetable Monster on Sesame Street [there is no such monster, but if there were, he would have nothing on a Kenyan dinner bowl], and run to school all their childhoods and then join the military where it just so happens that they keep exercising [lots of Kenyan runners, like Moses “I eat 3000m steeplechase world records for breakfast” Kiptanui are or were military personnel], and have immense financial motivation to run, a motivation only made more immense by the fact that since cost of living is so low in Kenya, chump change like $1 million can keep you living in comfort for not one but several lifetimes. No, that couldn’t be it. Because they’re not sensitive, unique, individual human beings with psychological, social and economic motivations. No, they’re not human beings at all; they’re just specimens; little more than rabbits that can talk. They do well at the things they do well because of nothing but instinct.

Right…

OK, I’m going a bit off topic, and perhaps sounding bitter, but this is a massive subject, and it’s worth more than one post; it’s worth its own book; it’s worth its own entire research field. But I’m going to keep it short, because I don’t feel like writing too much .

What am I trying to get at? Well…

The way of learning that is now dominant in the West is motivated by two ideals: classification and reductionism. Reduce everything to its parts, classify it according to those parts. And this isn’t a bad thing; it has its place. When it’s useful, it’s very useful [see Heisig for details]. But when it’s not, it sucks Type-A bird-flu infested eggs. Why? Because it tends to lead to a fallacy known as reification. Making something that is not the res, “the thing itself”, into the thing itself. The methods of learning that now dominate the West have led people to confuse the classification, the explanation, the description of a thing, with the thing. So, when a Western person comes and says “Cantonese has nine tones” [you know it’s a Western person who did this — I’m being facetious, but seriously, I find it painfully hard to imagine a Chinese person back in the day losing winks tone-counting], “Chinese has X # of characters”, “In Navajo, you can make XYZ grammar structure”, “Japanese has THREE alphabets”, “The Japanese speak BACKWARDS”, “In Swahili, there are noun classifiers used as prefixes”, and my personal favorite:

Dholuo is a tone language. There is both lexical tone and grammatical tone, e.g., in the formation of passive verbs. It has vowel harmony by ATR status: the vowels in a noncompound word must be either all [+ATR] or all [-ATR]. The ATR harmony requirement extends to the semivowels /w, y/. Vowel length is contrastive.

Dude, I am a native speaker of Dholuo [through disuse I understand tons more than I speak now, but if I went home, I’d take care of it] and I had NO IDEA that Dholuo was tonal, I just thought that was how it sounded; that was the only way there was to pronounce those words; there is no other way. My Mum told me when she came to Japan last year (2006) and was teaching some to Momoko: “yeah, dude, Dholuo is tonal, just like that Chinese of yours”. This struck a chord with me, and has affected the way I’ve decided to approach Cantonese.

I am also a native speaker of Swahili [also getting rusty through disuse — as with Dholuo, living in countries and situations where I never talk to fellow native speakers has taken its toll] and I didn’t find out about the noun classifier thing until I got into college in the US. I thought that was just how you were supposed to say the words; there could be no other way.

Can you see what I mean? Discussion ABOUT language, no matter how detailed, erudite or numerical, is not, cannot and will never be language itself. The belief that it is is the source of all difficulty and calamity. The typical student of Latin today probably knows more about Latin than most Roman citizens ever did; I can just see Roman kids all: “hey, Quintus, what’s the ablative singular on that, bro?”, but still could barely comprehend a raw Latin text let alone use the language. Put another way, you could be fluent in Japanese without ever knowing ABOUT Japanese, but you could never be fluent in Japanese only by knowing about it. This was never more vividly illustrated than when, last weekend, I went to my Sengalese friend, B-star’s house. B-star came to Japan aged 27, 7 years ago. Not a word of Japanese. He’s now completely fluent. We talked to each other in Japanese, he told me:

“When I first came to Japan, I went to a Japanese school and looked at the books, but it just kind of sucked, you know? So I was like…this isn’t going to work; I’m not going to learn this way; I just have to go out there and figure it out. Pretty soon I was speaking, and people asked me ‘how did you learn?’, I said: ‘I don’t know! Not even I know!’”.

Later in the evening we were watching a Bruce Lee movie in Cantonese, and he said:

“Once I was hanging out with some Chinese guys, and after a while, I started saying things to them in Chinese. And they said: ‘how did you do that?’; and I said: ‘I listened‘”.

Anyway, B-star isn’t the star of this tale, his four-year-old daughter is. She was talking circles around some people who had taken university-level Japanese. Because children have magical language midichlorians? Negatory…I think it has more to do with the fact that B-star’s daughter doesn’t know what a base 5 verb is (as a matter of fact, I’m not sure what this bases business is).

So knowing the path and walking the path are clearly two different things. Knowing what you’re doing and knowing about what you’re doing are two different things. I mean, I could write you volumes (no, I really could) about iconicism, subtext and hyper-realism in Toy Story but does that mean Toy Story is hard to watch? NO, for crying out loud it’s a freaking children’s movie. A thing is not its abstraction. A description or abstraction can be useful, until it isn’t, at which point it becomes little more than a legend, a ghost story whose only real purpose is to impress and/or intimidate.

So here is the African Way: stop freaking worrying, stop reading ABOUT it, stop pussyfooting around poring over the rulebook, pick up a ball and go DO IT! Or shut up and watch how it’s done, and try your own little versions of each cool thing you see. Language is not hard. Yes, LANGUAGE IS EASY. ALL LANGUAGES. Anyone who doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot with bad methods or attitudes can learn any language. ANYONE. So chill out and just Nike it. Yes, even if you had no systematic method, if you were to spend the next 18-24 months, 24 hours a day, surrounded by one language to the absolute and total exclusion of all other languages, I am almost certain that it would be impossible for you to come out without fluency.

I don’t think the way of learning I’m describing is limited to Africa or Africans, and it’s not the only way of learning that African civilizations have used. All civilizations use classification, all civilizations use reductionism, and all civilizations use ad hoc learning [I think it’s safe to say that, barring RIDICULOUS exceptions, all human beings learn their so-called “native” language using ad hoc, informal, immersive (Ai2) methods, the methods I have grouped under the “African” Way], but different civilizations tend to place more importance, faith, or prestige in certain styles of learning over others, which is stupid all around because our goal shouldn’t be to do the job in the most prestigious way, but merely to do the job. Anyway, the way I’m calling the African Way is definitely something that is culturally strong among Africans inside and outside Africa. Similarly, the so-called Western Way has been increasingly preferred by people in the West over the past 250-500 years. But Westerners have made the fatal mistake of applying it in places where it cannot or should not be applied, with the result that it now handicaps them; it hurts them; it keeps their minds so…bound.

Case in point: Swahili is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn, it was invented by people in what later became Kenya and Tanzania, for the purposes of trade, it is as smooth as botox-laced eggs. YET, many Westerners who live in East Africa can’t speak it worth a darn, and whine about it. Why? It’s not because they’re bodies can’t do it; it’s because their minds won’t let their bodies do it. And this is why when a Kenyan friend came up to me and said: “Khatz, is Japanese hard? Can I learn it?”. I said: “Yes…just remember that you’re not a Westerner. To the extent that most of what you’ve read about Japanese has been written by Westerners, you can safely ignore it and just go about your business”. That sounds racist but it’s not meant to be, and I hope no one takes it that way (I was really freaking out about whether to write it or not). It’s just illustrative, in a way, of the whole point of this post. Ultimately, it’s not a matter of ethnicity, it’s a matter of worldview. Due to peer-group effects, worldview happens to correlate geographically, but…not all Africans learn the African Way, and not all Westerners learn the Western Way, and no one is bound by blood or divine decree to any particular way — you can choose to play the game differently. I recommend you do. Choose, that is. Choose how to play the game based on the conditions. Choose the tools to get the job done. Believe in yourself, have faith in yourself. But don’t bother “believe”, as such in the tools and methods. Methods are for using or not using, not for believing in or agreeing with — remember that and you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time and energy — for example, you realize that you need not bother defend your methods because they have no feelings. And you also realize that it’s simply good common sense to do the job in a fun, efficient way, regardless of whether that way is officially sanctioned as the “correct” way, regardless of what people tell you will or won’t happen.

So if you want to be good at something, maybe you should let go of whatever reservations, ignorance, academic snobbishness, cultural superiority complex or cultural inferiority complex that may be holding you back, and just try it. Don’t think ABOUT it, don’t analyze it. Stop talking, stop arguing, stop considering, stop comparing and contrasting. Just do it.

A good number of people have contacted me or written elsewhere about how using the methods described on this site led to burnout for them. No fun. Too tiring. Can’t continue.

There are two types of burnout that typically occur. Kanji burnout and sentences burnout. Both can be dealt with by application of the same techniques. But I’ll address them separately.

[Strategies for Overcoming Kanji Burnout]

Well, here’s my first question. I am going through Remembering the Kanji. (For the third time, but hey, third times the charm, right!? ) But, I am only working on this right now. Of course, I am listening to Japanese all the time, but I am not doing sentences or anything else. I feel that my Japanese learning is suffering from this. So, would you suggest I do sentences while doing RTK or wait until I’m done? Considering that speaking and understanding are more of an immediate need, but overall fluency is the main goal.

Second question is just a very general one. What do you do to avoid burnout. I’ve been doing your method for about a month now and sometimes (ok a lot of times) RTK is so freakin hard I just feel like it’s such a chore. I listen to Japanese all the time and my brain starts to feel tired after a few hours. I don’t want to lose that pleasure feeling I have from learning Japanese. So, how do you keep at it without it turning into a chore? What do you tell yourself? What tricks do you use? I know you suggest doing things that interest you, which is what I do (well, except for RTK, that doesn’t interest me, but…) but I still feel burnt out.

That was an email I got from a reader named L-star recently. Let’s take it step by step.

1. Reality check. While using the Heisig method may “only” involve learning the meaning and writing of kanji, let me suggest that this is in fact a big, hairy deal. It may feel lame “only” knowing meaning and writing, but it MATTERS; it makes a difference. Those kanji have-to-be-learned; there is no way over them, under them or around them, only a way through them. They need to be learned and the best time is here, the best place is NOW. Not knowing them is a state known as illiteracy. End. Of. Story. Don’t fall for the temptation to do something else “and kanji on the side”. Get those basic kanji down NOW; you’ll thank me later.

2. Put the fun back in it. Do your kanji stories rhyme? Are they violent and funny and full of potty humor and screaming and sassiness? If not, then are you TRYING to bore yourself? Because you might as well be. Don’t think of 女 just as “a pictograph of a woman”, think of it as a woman with a HUUUGE bust sticking out to the left. Don’t think of 晶 as just being “brilliant”, think of a character from Dragon Ball Z making a chi-bomb with the power of three suns (日) and screaming “KAME HAME HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”. Don’t think of 人 in 倫 as “person”, think of it as Oprah, or Bruce Lee, or Eric Cartman.

3. Colors. While we’re on the subject of fun, realize that the adult world is black and white and monochromatic and dull. What happened to paints and smiles and visual excitement? It’s time to go back to the roots: it’s time to go back to kindergarten. Get some color in there. Go out and get some non-toxic crayola crayons right now (they have these “twistable” ones that come in a hard plastic casing and don’t go breaking or making a mess like the ones we had when we were kids). Draw pictures of your kanji stories for fun. Maybe you could draw little cards with people on them, related to the kanji. And then put these cards on your wall (hey! free Japanese posters!). Do it! It doesn’t have to look “good”, it just has to be fun.

[Edit: once in a while, you get a comment that blows out the actual article in terms of quality. This was one such comment from the man who goes by the handle nacest. I wanted more people to see it, so I’ve copied it up here]:

I think that you could have done better in the “kanji burnout” part.

In my opinion the biggest obstacle while doing RTK is not the amount of colors or realizing that you must do it no-matter-what. It’s the approach. If you are anxious to complete the book soon, if you are keeping count of how many kanji are left, then you will have to suffer the pains of hell to really finish them. There’s a LOT of them. It’s a four digit number. Every kanji is a mere 0.04% of the total. It’s not gonna be a quick process, IF you await the end of it. It’s like boiling water: I don’t know about the other places, but in Italy they say that the water will take longer to boil if you stare at it expectantly. I’m amazed at how well this applies to your (khatzumoto’s) metaphor.

Just enjoy the trip. Forget about finishing the kanji. Do them every day, and get used to it. Feel the flavor of the chinese characters. Every one of them is extraordinarily beautiful. If you are a philosopher, you may even seek enlightenment in their ancient shapes. Eat them like they are a fourth (fifth?) meal in your day, necessary for your good health. While you do this, one day, when you are least expecting it (more or less) you will hit kanji #2042 (or 3007 if you want to). Then you will be unable to believe how fast you were. I know it because it happened to me, even though it took me 11 months to complete the book! (don’t worry, it will take you much less, I was just using too little impetus with the first 1000 kanji. I finished the second half in about a month (after finding this site, by the way))

True story: once, a journalist on a trip to Egypt met a desert Bedouin. The Bedouin was used to traveling huge distances in the Sahara with his camel, taking weeks at a time. When the journalist told him that in the West there were airplanes that could cover the same distances in a few hours, he answered, perplexed: “And then, what do you do with the rest of the time?”.

The time you spend while aiming at something, no matter how long it is, is still part of your life. There is no reason to not savor and enjoy it in relaxation like the rest of your days.

[Strategies for Overcoming Sentences Burnout]

1. Look forward. If you quit now, you’ll regret it in 6 months; it’s that simple. And you’ll have to pick up the pieces all over again, because you’ll have fallen back. You might be like this one German guy I knew, who knew all his kana and some basic vocab and then forget it ALL through neglect. If you quit now, you-will-regret-it. You don’t want to be that guy telling his friends and family and guests about how “yeeeah, I used to know me some Japanese”…do you? Not that you should dwell on the negative: focus on the positive (#6 — Remember the Dream).

2. Look back. When you’re always trying to learn more, it’s easy to forget to appreciate how much you ALREADY know. Look at you! Look how far you’ve come! Look at all you know. Take a look around. Remember how you used to suck? There was a time you knew nothing. Every legend started from zero, and so did yours. You came this far. You can go further. Just keep on keeping on.

3. Log it. Logging can be a great help; it gives you something to look back on, a sense of achievement. And helps you keep going because it creates at least one thing you have to report to — you have to do something worth putting into your log otherwise you’ll lose “face”. One caveat though — keep the logging simple such that it doesn’t become a burden. A plaintext Notepad file with timestamps and one or two comments on recent progress, ideas, experiences or impressions is more than enough. You want to spend as much time as possible making history rather than recording it, so stick to the highlights. It may not seem like much but you’ll be surprised by how good it feels to go back over it. Momoko taught me how to do this.

4. Get more stuff. I’m sorry to bust out the consumerism card here, but if you think that a couple of books and CDs are enough to get you fluent in Japanese, you are, as they say in Tokyo, quite mistaken. What I mean is…You need MORE stuff. MORE input. MORE videos, MORE music. You’re trying to simulate an entire country here, remember? You’re giving yourself the Japanese childhood that you happened to miss out on. You need more stimulation. You need to hear and read all kinds of stuff that interests you. It will cost some money, BUT…it’s money far better spent than on some stupid, boring classes where you wouldn’t have learned anything anyway oh crap I said that out loud again. Plus, getting new stuff is fun. I don’t know about you, but I get a kick out of the idea that every time I buy a manga it’s an investment in my education — and, in fact, it really is.

5. Chill. It’s my fault for getting people all worked up about sentences. Your aim in life is not to dart around with your eyes and ears open catching sentences like a whale catching krill. I mean, that’ll kind of happen anyway but there’s no need to force it. CHILL. Just let the music play, run the movie, leave the TV on, skim the comics, put up the posters and just chill. When a sentence needs to be learned, it’ll call YOU. It’ll come for YOU. You collect sentences because you WANT to; you have to want the individual sentence; this project is too big and too long for anything to be a chore. You surf the web in Japanese, when something comes along that’s interesting, you pick the sentence, if not, leave it. Just enjoy BEING “Japanese”. Of course ethnically and culturally you’re not actually Japanese, BUT — what would you be like, what would you know and do, if you had been born and raised in Japan? Reading manga, watching TV and movies, listening to music in Japanese, right? Talking once you were able…being affected by trends in speech. Just enjoy yourself IN Japanese. Be yourself, IN Japanese. Don’t “do” so much. Just “be”. Just float in this world of Japanese or whatever your target language is. The sentences will come; you don’t have to struggle for them. If you just keep your immersion environment going and relax about it, your curiosity will carry you the rest of the way. Just lay back and enjoy the sounds.

Let me put it into numbers for you — typically, it’s about 2-4 hours a day of actively working on the language [SRS reviews and new entries], 2-4 hours of handling business in another language out of necessity, and 16-18 hours of just having text and sounds come into your life without “working” on them as such (tasks can overlap). Everyone’s daily routine is a bit different, but that’s the basic pattern.

6. Remember the dream. There you are. Speaking Japanese as if you were born and raised in Japan. Blazing through Japanese books. Flying through manga like a butterfly. Stinging like a bee with witty comebacks to your friends. Remember the dream. Remember why you wanted to learn this language in the first place. And use the dream to guide you now — you want to learn Japanese in order to enjoy yourself and get things done in Japanese, right? Guess what the way to do that is? That’s right: By ENJOYING yourself and getting things done in Japanese. Imagine yourself doing regaling your friends with your Nagase Tomoya impression. Imagine yourself reading 200 books a year in Japanese. Imagine yourself curled up on that beanbag reading all 6 volumes of Akira in one sitting. Imagine yourself talking rapid-fire on the telephone in Japanese. Picture yourself writing kanji like you own the place, the strokes freely flowing from your mind and out of your hand: yes, any and every kanji you need to, from memory. Picture yourself laughing and sharing obscure pop culture references with a group of people. Never let go of the dream. No matter how little it seems you know now, always be dreaming the dream.

That’s it for now. Smile and have fun.

A lot of people from foreign countries — including people of Japanese descent — come to Japan without a lick of Japanese. And stay that way. For years. Here’s why. I just made this list up based on personal observations, so it’s not complete or definitive. If you have any ideas, feel free to add or whatever.

1. Bad Company
Foreigners who don’t know Japanese have a rough time meeting Japanese people. So they hang out with other foreigners. Result? They get great practice at everything but Japanese. They form their own communities, visit foreign-centric websites, watch movies from back home. Dude, you can even go to a karaoke bar and only play American or Chinese songs. They essentially do the reverse of all Japanese all the time — “anything but Japanese language and people wherever and whenever possible”. They ghetto-ize themselves, creating a foreign enclave in Japan, an enclave that comforts and accepts them for not knowing the language of the country in which they have chosen to live.

2. Getting By
You can get by in Japan without Japanese. Emphasis on the “get by”, as in “survive”, not “succeed” or “thrive”. You can make it. It’ll suck — you won’t know what most signs mean, you won’t be able to negotiate or search for cheaper housing, you won’t be able to search the Internet for the best deals on electronics, you won’t be able to have meaningful conversations with people. But you’ll muddle through. You can take trains, go shopping, point at pictures in restaurants, and learn basic survival phrases. And anything you really can’t do (like go to government offices), your bilingual Japanese girlfriend can help you with.

3. School
Sorry, school. But Japanese language school is about the worst thing that ever happened. Part of this is because a lot of the teachers are either..

4. Condescending Japanese People
A lot of Japanese people, I’m told, are basically taught nihonjinron (日本人論) in middle school (I don’t know whether this is true or not). And what that basically says is that Japan and Japanese are unlike anything else in the world, no foreigner could ever “get it”, and even you Japanese kids will barely get it without years of formal education. Anyway, where the belief comes from is irrelevant, the point is that people go into adulthood believing this. If you don’t know Japanese but have Japanese friends, coworkers or teachers, then a lot of these people may not believe that you can learn Japanese to a meaningful level. Thanks to the suckiness of school, a lot of Japanese people have “learn” English — that is, if habitually spelling and saying “sorry” as “solly” can be constituted as learning English: they “failed” at learning English; they expect you to fail at learning Japanese. That’s a poisonous attitude to be exposed to. Having said that, there are many Japanese people who will encourage you and give you the benefit of the doubt, so you still have the responsibility to overcome this.

Or…

5. Well-Meaning, Do-Gooder Native Speakers
Now, you’d think that I’d be all for native speakers. And I am. But there’s a proviso — I focus on what native speakers do, and what native speakers say, but not what native speakers say to do. Native speakers have no freaking clue…how they did it. They don’t remember being babies because they were babies. You and I get to be babies as adults, so it’s different. Anyway, so, these native speakers perhaps try to figure out how they did it, and they figure it must have been due to school, since, after all, they spent all this time there, right? Wrong. For one thing, they knew Japanese before they went to school — all “normal” toddlers can talk quite fluently. OK, but what about reading and writing? You can’t deny the effect of school on literacy, can you, Khatzumoto? I can. Two points. First, lots of Americans go to school, and look at what that did for their literacy, even with an allegedly “easier” writing system. Second, and more importantly, the way most Japanese kids learn to read is the very embodiment of inefficiency.

Apparently, after WW2, the day they were going to decide the new kanji policy, they locked all the smart people out of the Monbugakusho/文部科学省 (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology=MEXT) building, and by coincidence the village idiot was left locked inside the ministry building — and so he wrote the kanji policy — and when the smart people finally got the spare keys for the building, they didn’t have time to change the policy because the US military occupation government had set a firm deadline, so they just handed in the document that was there (the one the village idiot wrote), with the result that kids in 5th grade learn “幹”, “版”, “導”, “刊” and “容” BUT HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL 6TH GRADE to learn “干”, “片”, “寸” and “穴”.

Now, the initiated will have realized that kids in Japanese government schools are routinely learning structural-composite kanji before learning their structural components; like building a skyscraper and then building its foundations, or eating a banana and then attempting to peel it, or attempting to run a program before turning your computer on. It’s as if the village idiot wrote the school policy — oh, wait, he did! The village idiot was like “hmm…what is the most illogical, inconsistent, ridiculous way I can do this so that it makes kanji seem difficult?”; he was one malicious motherlover of a village idiot. Fortunately, the Japanese kids who were and are victims of this policy were just that — kids. And as we all know, kids know how to be resilient even when presented with bad logic; they’re persistent like that. And so, the Japanese school system takes it’s sweet-as-poundcake time teaching 1-2 years’ worth of kanji in 10-12 years; all because of one village idiot. The system stays alive because most kids do make it through — they may not understand how the kanji system actually works, but they can read and write and function. Hey, it’s good enough for government work, right? Besides, neither the kids nor the teachers have anything better to do than, oh, take the longest, hardest, most confusing possible road to literacy, do they?

Now, take this idea and try it on an adult. Try to teach an adult an illogical method of reading a logical writing system; try to teach her to peel a banana, throw away the fruit and eat the peel. It will only work if you can get her to keep doing it for 10-12 years, which you won’t — the adult will break.

There is a big bright side: many Japanese people realize the way kanji-learning is being handled by state schools is bunk — I’ve seen private schools on TV that politely ignore the village idiot list. Smart people in the government are working even as we speak, trying to fix the village idiot’s mistakes in various ways. Plus, there’s the Heisig Method.

Anyway, where was I — yeah, so if a native speaker tries to help you with the method of learning Japanese, she’ll probably try to school you. This is NG. Do what she does — watch Japanese shows, spend time with Japanese people, read Japanese books, eat Japanese food. Talk like she does, or her brother does or mother does or her father does, as appropriate for age and gender. But, generally, do not do what she tells you to do; she knows what she’s saying, but she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

6. Well It’s Too Late Now Syndrome
So, let’s say you’re foreign. And you’ve been here 5, 10, 15 years. And you still only know survival Japanese. But you weren’t lazy, right? You tried. You bought all the books and tapes and hired a tutor and went to Japanese school and wrote out kanji. But it didn’t work, you think it’s too late now and it’s just “too hard”. A lot of people think that. They’re wrong, but they think that. Forget about the past, think about now — it’s always the right time to do the right thing.

7. Discouragement + Lack of Persistence
Good old negative thinking. Seeing what you can’t do instead of what you can do. People make fun of you, you feel bad, you give up. You three-day-monk it, your water doesn’t boil, you give up. Stop stopping and stop giving up — the hard parts, the days when you don’t feel like doing it, when you want to stop this Japanese act and just go back to being “you”, those are the days when you need to practice even more. You can learn to overcome those days — just see them as part of the legend “I wanted to give up, but by Jordan I kept going!”.

8. Bad Learning Methods…Lots of Bad Learning Methods
Money and resources will not do the work for you (unless you plan to make a neural implant a-la-Matrix, in which case, call me, because I’d be first in line to get a USB port in the back of my head…actually, not first, but as soon as they had a stable version) where was I? Oh, yeah — buying books and materials may feel good, and may give you the impression that you’re “putting your money where your mouth is”, but if you don’t also USE the books, then all you’ve done is spend money.

9. English-language forums/fora about Japanese
This affects people whether or not they’re in Japan. You see, folks, it’s a big Internet out there. And there are lots of cool fora, where you can argue your head off. A lot of people studying Japanese spend a lot of time in these fora, day in day out, petty feud to petty feud, pet theory against pet theory. Talking ABOUT Japanese but not doing it…as if their theories would somehow lead to a solution. These people have confused being obsessed with Japanese with obsessively doing Japanese. The latter gets you good, the former just gets you into heated arguments.

You’re not going to see a forum on this site until we can work out a way to make it truly useful, not just a hang-out trap.

10. Low-A$$ Expectations
“A little bit a day”. “10 minutes a day”. “One or two hours a day”. Forget it. That won’t get you anywhere. You’re trying to learn a language here, not…pick sock lint from between your toes. Don’t get me wrong — I urge, I DEMAND that people have fun and only fun doing Japanese. But, one does actually need to do it. Don’t fear Japanese, don’t be intimidated by it. But respect it enough to give it ample time on a daily basis.

Remember, friends: Japanese is a human language — a learned behavior. It is not carried by blood, it is carried by environment, behavior and lifestyle. Millions of people of Japanese descent — Japanese-Latin-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Japanese returnees abandoned as children in China after WW2 — have zero Japanese skills or awkward, heavily-accented Japanese. Conversely, millions of non-Japanese people have native-level written and spoken Japanese. Zainichis, foreigners on TV, and cetera. There is no magic to it. Change your environment, behavior and lifestyle, and you will change with them.