If you’re like me…I don’t know whether you actually are, but…you know, if you are, then you came from a country and a culture that largely frowns upon overt displays of emotion. Especially overt displays of positive emotion. Forget displays — simply having a positive mental attitude might be social suicide_(?) where you’re from.

As time goes on, you might have outgrown wanting to be cool in the high school sense. You might have decided that your society sucked enough that you no longer cared if you became dead to it. But you still might carry some residual tendencies towards cynicism — so ingrained was the habit of being cynical.

So when a guy like Tony Robbins comes at you with that voice and that grin (that grin )…urging you to have a positive mental attitude, when Napoleon Hill tells you that “[w]hatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, when Mormon girls called Stacy _{[whose mother, I am reliably informed, has got it going on]} smile that Utah smile and offer you cookies, your knee-jerk reaction might be to go “yeah, right”, roll your eyes rather far back into your head, and proceed to dig up the dirt behind these “tricksters”. Anyone that happy has got to be hiding something, right? Or so our culture of mediocrity would have us believe.

And then there’s the (not necessarily inevitable) fact that having hope does carry the potential to set you up for disappointment — especially in the hands of a hope novice: one almost has to learn how to use hope correctly.

My personal solution to all this is to:

1. First, avoid both hope and dread — go for a flatline — and then,

2. Gently bias myself in a positive direction by simply doubting the possibility of failure. _{Sure, you don’t know if you’re going to succeed, but you don’t know if you’re going to fail either. Indeed, if you did know things with such certainty, you would be effen omniscient and you should be picking stocks or something. But you’re not. You don’t know. And since you don’t know either way, you might as well assume and act in favour of the positive. To quote Dr. Annette Goodheart (who?):}

_{“If we’re going to be miserable we might as well enjoy ourselves [and] laugh.”}

So, this sometimes air-headed and always hard-to-sustain “YEEEEEEAAAAH!!! I’M GONNA DO IT, BABY!!!!” idea, is replaced with a calmer, easier “well, I’m certainly not going to fail” orientation. A strange sort of acceptance of positive inevitability. Or something to that effect. This is kind of hard for me to put into words.

More concretely, in terms of acquiring a language, what I’m trying to say is: don’t force yourself to succeed or produce or demonstrate or even to persevere. Give that up. Instead, if it suits you, you might try taking a more laid-back approach of “well, I’m going to dig up some soil, and plant some seeds, and put in some fertilizer and water, and then see what happens”, “I’m going to sow, and see what I reap”. It’s not quite “wait and see”, since that might not get you anywhere, it’s more a “do and see“, an “act and see“.

Do your work and see what happens. Don’t try to force the results; they will come when they come. No matter what you do, at some level, results are always outside your full, direct control. But action never is. You can always do the right thing _{[and if you don’t know what the right thing is, then the right thing might be to go find out what the right thing is]}; you can always take the/a right action.

Always. No matter what situation you are in, there is always something you can do. In extreme cases, the the thing to do might be to get out of the current situation. In most cases, it’s as simple as open the book, turn on the TV, plug in the earphones.

Something. Anything.

So why did I get to thinking this? Well, I CAN WATCH AND UNDERSTAND VIRTUALLY ANYTHING ON HONG KONG TV NOW !(T+19 months) Violent triad movies, weird accents, regular TV news, parody news, phone prank shows, Korean-made documentaries about the history of noodles…bring it. In some cases I read the Chinese subs quite a bit for confirmation, but this simply shows how fast a reader I’ve become — I used to be unable to make it across even half a subpicture before it changed…now I can read it 1.5 ~ 2 times in that same brief time window. In short,  my input is almost a Jedi, though my output be at youngling level.

And the weird thing is…I was barely even trying. Not really. I mean, yeah, I have Cantonese TV and movies playing close to 24/7 in my house, and put a laptop in the kitchen so I can watch things like The Simpsons Movie _{(that’s right, son, there’s a Canto dub…Marge, Lisa, Bart and Flanders’ voices are dead on; Homer’s is “re-interpreted” slightly, but I never liked his original voice anyway)} while washing dishes, and I have Chinese comics in the restroom, and Chinese newspapers pasted all over my walls, and Chinese books permanently sitting in my manbag ready to go anywhere I do, and…yeah…and stuff. But once you get those things set up, it’s almost all just a matter of, how you say in the simple English…sitting back and watching. Once you do set up and maintain the right environment, all that’s left is to show up…to exist.

So…just do it already. But don’t wait and worry and weep and wail and gnash your teeth over results. Don’t act like a desperate stalker, always watching, always trying to get the phone number, always trying to get to second base, always asking Mummy if you’re there yet. Sitting by the door checking the clock every five seconds is not going to make the FedEx lady (yeah, my neighbourhood FedEx guy is a girl) come any quicker. Just be cool. The results will call you when they’re ready. They always call . You need only act; you need only plant; you need only keep walking — sooner or later _{[later than you would wish, but sooner than you would fear]} the destination will practically be forcing itself into your face.

If you can’t be motivated, don’t be _{[I can’t]}. If you can’t feel passion _{[I hate this word]}, don’t. Just be curious instead. Just keep sowing instead.

The other day, a young man named M.A.I. sent me this email:

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 get it all the time now.

“Hey Khatsumodo! Love teh method! Your righting iz rully motuvashonul! I’ve been running my Japanese OS for 4 hours now, but i don’t feel much change! Hehe. Lolz!”

“Hey! I really love all your talk about immersion! I don’t know kanji yet but I picked up a Japanese dictionary today but I couldn’t understand anything!!! Is this normal??? It’s too hard! Maybe I’m just not good at languages!!! Do I have to do Heisig? But how will I learn readings and grammar?”

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 stud*ying, it still seems like something’s not quite right.*

OK. Now’s it’s time for a little section of AJATT that I like to call “REALLY? With Khatzumoto”.

Really. What the heck did you think was really going to happen within hours of you changing your OS to Japanese? I mean, really!? Really! Did you think your hitherto dormant Japanese midichlorians would instantly fire up at the sight of kanji and you’d start having friggin’ Russel Crowe Beautiful Mind moments in Japanese with equations and primitives and radicals spinning through the air? Really!

And really. Did you really think that you were going to open up a dictionary on day 1, read that 何 means ある代表的な物･事をあげ､その他のいろいろな物･事を省略して一まとめにしてさす語, and then be nodding your head in satisfied comprehension? Really?!

Really?! Did you really think that just because in The Thirteenth Warrior Antonio Banderas learned Old Norse in five minutes one night while sitting around a campfire with red-headed guys called Sven, that you could simply put in a couple of hours more effort than him, watch a Miyazaki movie or two and BAM! next morning you’re writing the following year’s effen Naoki Prize winner and Kadokawa is on the phone talking about $50,000,000 advance for the sequel and Toho want distribution rights for the live action movie starring Ken Watanabe? I mean, really? REALLY? You realize Tom Cruise’s Japanese in Last Samurai sucked, right? Even after a multi-million dollar five-minute Hollywood crash course!

What were you thinking? What was going through your mind? Where did you expect to be, and who told you to expect to be there, and what gave you the impression that that was a reasonable expectation to have?

REALLY?!

I’ll tell you what you were thinking. I’ll tell you what was going through your mind. I’ll tell you where you’re going so horribly, catastrophically wrong. Let me tell you about the left turn you missed at Albuquerque.

There is a fallacy lodged in most people’s minds that tells them that “performance on the first trial is a good predictor of performance on the 10,000th”. Well, bollocks. It isn’t. If nothing else, at a purely mathematical level, depending on the definition of points, a single data point is an unacceptably small statistical sample on which to base any judgment about anything.

I’m not saying not to do sampling — we do it all the time; perhaps we even need it survive — when you take a sip from a cup to determine how hot the entire drink is, you are sampling. But this assumes that heat is evenly distributed throughout the liquid. When the cup is the size of a language, and every learning method is like a non-turntable microwave, then expect that a sip after two seconds of heating, generally, tells you jack squat. And this, by the way, is why the US has a 50%+ divorce rate, because most people in the US use a marvelously intricate, painstakingly delicate and utterly useless mate-sampling system called “dating”, to select partners for a completely different system called “life” (‡taken from my forthcoming book: Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena II)

But when we see a baby fall do we tell her to quit this walking thing while she’s ahead and let the “more athletic” Afro-Carribean babies do it? When we hear our baby ga-ga-goo-goo unintelligbly, do we have her euthanized because she sounds like a retard? When she drools, do we beat her senseless because that’s just gross?

Well, that’s what you would be doing to yourself if you were to give up at this point. You would be euthanizing the nascent Japanese version of yourself because he sucked the first time.

But adults “euthanize” themselves and each other all the time. If that new, magic Solution To The Problem they paid $200 for doesn’t work, adults will mercifully “kill” the nascent Japanese child inside them, with soothing appeals to “I’m too old for this” and “I just lack talent” and the all-time favorite — “I don’t have the time” — never having given her a real chance to grow. We adults are quick to accuse small children of impatience, when in fact we are the impatient ones and the children simply lack a sense of time altogether.

You could suck at tennis right now; you could be the worst kid there on your first day. But if you simply racked up enough trials to form a sufficient statistical sample, you could get really good, and if you went even further, you could go on to surpass Pete Sampras. Realistically, though, you won’t surpass Sampras because you’re a whiner who finds excuses for not following her dreams, but barring severe physical disabilities, if you really wanted to, if it mattered enough to you, you could do it. Remember: most people drastically overestimate what they can get done in 2 days and drastically underestimate what they can get done in 2 years.

But who wants to go that far? Screw it. Go on. Give up. Give in. Kill babies. You might as well. They’re ugly and hairless and useless anyway.

What’s that? You don’t want to be a baby-killer any more? OK, let’s help you work with that. Remember how Michael Jordan missed over 9000 shots in NBA games alone? Think about what that means — it means that this man missed more shots than most people take in their entire lives. This is the arithmetic of success: conduct so many trials that the number of errors you experience exceeds most people’s lifetime trialcounts. This is  the meaning of aiming to fail.

I read a great quote the other day:

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re about average.

No one in all of human history has been born comprehending the real text of any language on their first try. Why were you supposed to be the first? But at the same time, all who have continued, and put thousands and thousands of hours into it, have gone on not only to comprehend text but in many cases to create text themselves. I bet if I’d thrown you an English newspaper when you were two years old — after two solid years of constant exposure to English — you’d have been hard-pressed to even hold it the right way up.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying: Push the continue button and play another round. The absolute worst thing you could do is not to fail, not to look stupid, but to run away from real Japanese. Stay. Stay. Stay. The Japanese Fairy does not visit those who flee. The Mastery Fairy hates baby-killers. The longer you stay, the more certain your victory; it’s that simple.

And this is why this thing has to be fun, because it will be relatively long and because it will be constant “failure”, of a sort. You can’t push your way through it, you have to find a way of making it pull you along. I leave you with the sage words of a young man named Ryan:

if your study of Japanese [hurts], YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

*Sincerest apologies to T-star for singling him out like this and lumping his very legitimate question with the other two — which aren’t real, in the sense of actually having been written by other people, but are very realistic in terms of reflecting a composite of actual emails I have received and I kid you not about the spelling — and sincerest thanks to him for being such a good sport about it! You, sir, are a gentleman and an AJATT hero!

In another place and time [the other day], I came to make the acquaintance of a young gentleman with looks so sharp that Johnny Depp is yet to recover from the blow to his ego. The young man’s name was T-star [not to be confused with the Japanese T-star], and this is his story.

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…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 ]

If you read enough personal development books, you will eventually come across mention of one of the most profoundly meaningful statistics in the history of sports. That statistic being that for many years, Babe Ruth simultaneously held both the career home-run [714?] and strikeout [1330?] records. Crazy, huh? It’s almost as if he were trying to become a living object lesson. Remember, he didn’t have “a lot of strikeouts“: he held The Strikeout Record; he failed More Than Anyone Else at hitting, not just for a couple of months but over his entire career — we are talking about a professional, by the way, a person whose job it was to play baseball. Notice how he had a 3-digit homerun count and a 4-digit strikeout count; he struck out almost twice as many times as he hit a touchdown…He was the best because he was the suckiest. He succeeded the most because he failed the most.

What does this mean? It means, to paraphrase Anthony, son of Robbins, that: massive failure is the key to success. Michael of Jordan said it himself:

The Ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Glóin, by any craft that we here possess. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Even some random guy from some random organization called International Business Machines said it:

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade.

Now, I’ve heard all these quotes so many times that they don’t really grab me any more when I read them, but let me illustrate using my favorite person — me — as an (yes, I am that narcissistic) example.

At this writing, my KhatzuMemo stats indicate that since New Year’s Day 2007, I have done about 58000 flashcard reps with a retention rate of about 91%, where retention = a rep score of 3 or above. Sounds respectable enough. But, you realize that what this means is that I have failed to correctly read and/or comprehend a Japanese sentence item at least 5200 times over the course of two years and change — can you imagine tagging those end to end to end to end in a video (that would make a pretty cool “lowlight reel”)?! More than five thousand failures. I’ve been wrong more times than there are stars in the sky visible to the naked eye [someone please check this]. I’m just saying: that’s a lot of fails. And if we (royal “we”) were to start counting from 2004, it would be about 100,000 reps with a similar 90-95% retention rate — that means something on the order of ten thousand failures. That’s ten thousand times I couldn’t correctly read or understand a sentence or phrase in Japanese: I am a failure.

And yet, I am very comfortable with both written and spoken Japanese. I can read, write, understand or say whatever I want or need to. I just got done doing all my taxes without a hitch. Clearly, this scale of failure helped. You’ll forgive the focus on SRSing, it’s just that it’s something that’s easy to measure and therefore compare quantitatively.

Robbins goes on to discuss the number of times Walter Elias Disney was rejected by banks when he wanted funding for some goofy idea about a studio making full-length cartoons, and the number of times Sylvester Stallone was rejected when peddling the script for some kind of adult-oriented movie involving interracial pairings of sweaty, half-naked men touching each other with leather gloves in front of excited crowds of people. Most people would have given up.

Of course, it goes beyond Hollywood…I have friends who won’t go ice-skating with me because they’re afraid of falling. They have fallen 0 times. 0 failures. They have never failed at skating. But they also can’t skate…at all. In fact, I imagine the best skaters have also fallen the most times.

Arguably, a lot of our fear of failure most likely stems from how schools punish it. Schools promote avoidance of failure. This is a recipe for mediocrity. No meaningful success seems to come without hearty doses of failure. Failure needs to be celebrated. It needs to be sought actively. Failure is what needs to be for dinner. I love blaming everything on school. But then, most of us did spent the greater part of our waking lives from toddlerhood to early adulthood either in school or in preparation to go to school or travelling to and from school or doing homework for school; schools have plenty to answer for; they can’t bait with compulsory attendance and then switch to learner-parent responsibility forever; they can’t keep waiting until someone gets killed and then feign shock at the “discovery” that they’re a breeding ground for violence (am I the only one who thinks that school shootings are actually surprisingly rare?) Off topic. Anyway…

So how can you start failing? I think the thing is simply to find something you can crank at. Find or build a mechanism that allows you to fail a lot. Perhaps three figures minimum, possibly and preferably 4, 5, 6, maybe even 7+. Chances are, this mechanism will also allow you to succeed — in fact, it’s more or less guaranteed to bring you success…eventually.

In life, whether it’s learning a language, building a blog, doing research, applying for jobs (if that’s your thing), trying to get good at shooting basketballs or even doing whatever it is people do to get into…romantic entanglements, many people — especially beginners — go for the surgical strike, because they’re so afraid of screwing up. There’s just one flaw with the surgical strike plan: only a surgeon can do surgery — only a highly trained expert with a matured skillset can even hope for a decent result on such paltry time resources. How do you get a matured skillset? By failing. Generally, it would seem that only someone who’s missed tons of shots gets to hit consistently. Also, at the risk of adding too many parenthetic asides, actual surgeons of the medical persuasion obviously deal in situations where, how you say in the simple English, failure is not cheap. Then again, I did see something once about robotic “practice patients” for medical students, so clearly there are efforts being made to make failure cheaper for them, implying that they are also, in essence, trying to fail into success.

As a beginner, trying to go for that surgical strike is akin to giving a newborn baby an NES controller and saying: “you have 15 minutes to beat Mario…or else you will never amount to anything, you lachrymatory ball of fat!”. It’s as if beginners were a novice sniper trying to hit a single target using their first and only bullet; that’s how most people right now tend to operate. But that’s only a viable option if you’re statistically a really good shot, which, almost by definition, a beginner is not [no statistics to go off of]. Unfortunately, failure to recognize the value of failure happens in sports all the time: too many people judge and are judged based on their first performance — how many egos have been crushed (not mine, but…people I know) because of using such a ridiculously small and downward-skewed sample? How many doors have been closed to figurative newborn babies? How many Michael Jordans get cut from high school teams?

In middle school, I can remember how in both P.E. classes and inter-school sports teams, the time, attention and resources were disproportionately concentrated on boys and girls who were hitting puberty at 11, and the rest of you kids with your slow-growing bodies could just bugger off, even though our parents were all paying the same tuition (the sports was not a business — no TV revenue or scholarships like NCAA, not even an effect on enrollment).

Now, why this middle school business still bugs me more than 10 years after the fact, is because the deafeningly loud silent lesson it taught was that effort didn’t matter and there was no such thing as meaningful development and improvement over time; only genetic predisposition mattered; only being 11 years old and having facial hair mattered. It was Gattaca Lite.

At some level, I can understand the school coaches’ problem — they needed to make a winning team as quickly as possible…but, again, that’s not really doing school any more, if only because nothing profound is being learned; that’s more of a professional/club thing where the focus is on execution. As a compromise, a dual sports system might work, with a “we’re gonna use you now” short-term competition-centered section for freakishly large children, and a “build your skills now for the future” long-term training-centered section for children who like sports but aren’t yet big enough to be “useful”. Kind of a “separate but equal”…waitaminute!! They did kind of try something like that by having multiple teams per age group, but the resource distribution was insulting; remember: everyone was paying the same overpriced tuition and the sports teams neither made money nor contributed to name-brand recognition…yet somehow the “lower” teams were invariably put on The Fields That The Groundskeeper Forgot, using equipment that had been oh-so-delicately aged to perfection by the finely tuned athletic machines of the Higher Teams. Where’s Linkin Park and a razor blade when you need them…

Anyway, in less violent/jocky terms, letting go of the surgical-strike philosophy means: don’t try to write a magnum opus if you can’t even write an opus. Don’t try to write a novel if you can’t even write a short story. Don’t try to run a marathon when you can’t even run around the block yet (whoops…got jocky again).

It doesn’t take too much perception to see that the key with failing this much is you need to make it cheap. Time-cheap, money-cheap, effort-cheap and emotion-cheap. So each round needs to be short, not cost a lot, not take too much energy, and not be too crushing to the old dignity [on the dignity, you may just have to let go of your pride; this has always been very hard for me to do, but if the goal is worth reaching, then in some cases it might be worth eating humble pie for; my pride is usually set to off when it comes to languages — I try to mentally revert to the state of a toddler, where curiosity supersedes pride]. Maybe this cheapness is another reason why small, short, winnable games are so good: A short game can be played many times –> many failures –> lots of success

According to the man himself in The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Moore, the best comics writer in the English language before me (why are you making that face?! wot iz that face?) — started out writing 4-page comic stories. Said he:

“I learned my craft doing very short stories, 3 or 4 pages each, which is an excellent way to learn writing of any sort.”

Even Moore-sensei’s early stories were likely unbefitting what we’ve come to expect of the Alan Moore legend. Knowing what we now know it would probably be easy to see or trick ourselves into seeing, the Moore mojo unfolding, but if we were to look at them “blind”, my gut tells me we’d be somewhat rather unimpressed. Anyway, my point is, he had something he could crank. He had something he could fail at over and over and over again. He had a mechanism he could grind himself on until he got to razor-sharp perfection. He practiced with 4-page stories but matured into a graphic novelist just as you practice with phrases, sentences and pages as you gradually grow into a fully-fledged reader of your L2.

Mojo is made rather than born. I remember one time, I was at a gaijin friend’s house, arranging Internet service for him over the phone in Japanese, and then I hung up, and he and his roommates, having heard the entire exchange, decided that I had a “talent” for the language. And, frankly, I think I do, too; in fact, if you ignore minor details like how I once turned my entire life into a Japanese camp and spent all my disposable income on Japanese materials and severed any human relationship that significantly conflicted with doing Japanese and ate cake with chopsticks and slept with headphones on just-to-make-sure, then…yes…it was pure talent.

*Not a positive example, but this massive failure business, by the way, is why spam works. Spam has found a mechanism that allows it to fail on a massive scale, this mechanism is called: “email is fast and free, motherlovers”, and what a wonderful mechanism it is. Can you imagine the indignity of paying for email? Forget them apples. Now, most people aren’t going to buy into those…how can we be delicate about this…”organ enhancement” medications they sell in spam, even if I, I mean, my friend, needed them, which he doesn’t, but IF he did, he wouldn’t buy them. But someone somewhere always does. When you send out, what, a million emails a day — 365 million emails a year, son — you’re bound to get someone to bite, as long as the probability isn’t 0 (and in life, the probability is almost never 0 or 1), then you are guaranteed that you’ll get someone to buy your spam product even if I, I mean, my friend, were just buying those pills as a joke and didn’t really need them and was just testing the system. For our theoretical spammer, even if 99.99% of these 365 million theoretical emails fail, that’s still 365,000 theoretical customers in the bag. That’s 365,000 people willing to pay ca$h money for the pills they need to (theoretically) bliss her out with their weapon of mass expulsion.

All this talk about massive failure = success…is exciting when we’re talking about it here in the squeaky-clean, theoretical Lalaland we can create for ourselves in the brief window of time where we’re reading and writing a post, but back in the real world, when you actually fail you don’t necessarily feel so good; we’re not trained to be excited by that sort of thing. And perhaps it’s for the best that we aren’t — what a bitter, Greek-tragedy-on-steroids irony it would be to instantly dislike or fail to recognize the success you had worked for. My personal solution is to largely ignore the immediate failure-point at hand, and get excited about the overall process-function [of failing massively]; that’s how I stay excited and keep going. Individual failure-points are easy to feel bad about; as soon as they pass, ignore them. Let go of them and focus on the next round. You don’t think MS are still having crying fits and sleepless nights over “Microsoft Bob“, do you?

…Laughing fits, maybe.

Having said all that, AntiMoon’s advice to “shut up before you hurt yourself” (which morphed into my advice to “shut up until it comes out correct and naturally by itself”) still holds. Personal developmenty advice of the kind that is the subject of this post can seem to run into contradictions because it’s so broadly applicable that nobody bothers to provide more rigid domain definition; suffice it to say that significant exceptions and counter-examples of virtually every principle exist; they may be rare, but they do exist; try not to go emo when you run into one. Think of these ideas as one of many tools in your toolbox; they work really well in some cases and not so well in others.

Anyway, enough talk! 問答無用! Time for you and I both to hurry up and get failing. And when people tell you to stop it because it won’t work and you’re crazy, as they probably will, you can think of Thomas Watson’s words:

[Dude.] A [homie] flattened by an opponent can get up again. A [homie] flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Oh yeah — I would love to read your suggestions for little games to fail at, or links to similar discussions, so please feel free to share them.

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

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

I knew…

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

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

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

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

Perhaps we should aim instead to construct a (continuous) function, a trend…a habit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Closing Aside

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

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

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

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