They say in a lot of personal development literature that asking good questions helps us get good answers. Here are some you can ask yourself continually:

Belief

• What if I were Japanese?
• What if I had been born and raised in Japan?
• What if I were Jared in The Pretender and I had to fool people into believing I was Japanese, or else be killed?
• What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• What if it were possible to be native-like? How could I make it possible? What would a native do? What would a native be doing right now?
• What if I were smart enough?
• What if it didn’t even take smarts?
• What if I gave myself the chance?
• What if I gave myself the time?
• What if I refused to give up until I had won?
• What if I am a natural winner who just needs to step up to the plate to prove it?
• What unquestioned advantages do I have over other people? What resources and skills do I take for granted?
• How would a winner think of herself?

Immersion

• What if I could only speak Japanese?
• What if Japanese were my only language?
• What if I just turned Japanese on and left it on forever? What would happen?
• How can I add Japanese to this situation? How can I Japanize this situation?
• Is there a Japanese version of this?
• If I were a Japanese kid, what would I be doing now?
• What do Japanese kids do?
• How would a winner use the time, cash and equipment that I have at my disposal?
• How many Japanese movies has a Japanese kid watched by her twelfth birthday?
• How many Japanese books would a Japanese kid from a proper home own?
• How many minutes have I heard Japanese this past hour?
• How can I touch Japanese more frequently?
• What if I made it impossible for myself to not come into contact with Japanese?
• How can I make it so that Japanese just gets inserted into my life?
• How many minutes does a Japanese kid hear Japanese by her fifth birthday?
• Where and how can I get more Japanese books/movies/music?
• How can I make sure that I look at more Japanese websites?
• What kind of Japanese stuff can I put on my walls?
• Where’s my dead time? How can I Japanize it easily?
• How can I get Japanese into my life for free? Effortlessly? What and where are my “freebie” activities?
• What’s a time that I’m doing something manual but my eyes and ears are free?
• Where am I not listening to Japanese that I could be listening to Japanese?
• Where’s my empty wall space? What Japanese stuff could I put up there?
• What Japanese stuff can I put on my fridge? What about the toilet? What about the kitchen sink? What about the bathroom sink?
• How can I be useful to Japanese people? What can I give them? How can I make myself an asset to Japanese people? How can I make myself fun to be around? What can I help with in their lives?※
• Outside of Japan: What would a highly insulated Japanese immigrant be doing/watching/reading right now?
• Inside Japan: How do I get premium cable? Where can I put this TV so that it’s always on? Can I get a cheap mini-TV for the kitchen? Where’s the remote?
• What are some unexpected things that I can eat with chopsticks?
• What’s an easy and fun Japanese thing that I can do right now?
• What books and authors do I like in English? Is their stuff in Japanese? Where can I get it? Where can I read about it?
• Is there a Japanese embassy nearby?
• Is there a Book-Off nearby?
• Where can I get free or second-hand Japanese books?
• Are there Japanese people around needing to get rid of stuff?
• Are there any Japanese/Asian stores around?
• Is this helping me learn Japanese?
• How can I make this so that it helps me learn Japanese in some way?
• What can I do that at least helps?
• How can I make it so that this activity increases the probability that I will build and maintain Japanese fluency?
• How can I wangle and maneuver Japanese into my job?
• How can I get paid to learn and use Japanese (my way)?
• Where can I find recordings of single-digit age children speaking?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Kanji

• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What does this remind me of?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Kana

• How long does it take a Japanese toddler to acquire these?
• Am I going to allow myself to be beaten by Japanese five-year-olds?
• Surely I can out-smart Japanese toddlers?
• What’s an easy and fun way to do this?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Sentences

• What would be funny to say?
• What have I heard that made me laugh?
• What are my favorite movie lines in English?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What are some cool Japanese quotes?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off? Am I bovvered?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Output (Writing/Speaking)

• How are native kids doing who were born the day I started learning Japanese? Have I put it as many minutes as them? Have I logged the “flying hours”?
• What’s the shortest way to say this?
• What do Japanese kids say?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How would I explain this to a 5-year-old?
• What would a Japanese person say?
• What do I hear/read Japanese people say?
• Does this sound Japanese? Have I heard a Japanese person say/use this before?
• How can I say this using as few words as possible?
• How can I communicate 80% of this idea using just the words I already know?

※True story: In college I had a female friend from Japan who often took me out on her errands. Example: going to the garage to get her car fixed. She didn’t need me to speak English for her, but she says that my mere presence made her seem stronger — less vulnerable; she was concerned about being ripped off due to being both female and Asian.

Anyway, the plus side for me was, the whole time, in the car, we’re speaking Japanese.

Japanese people need you as much as you need them, especially when they’re far away from home. Don’t be afraid to be helpful. Think about it: I was able to help by just having a useful phenotype and a pulse…I do those things quite effortlessly.

Foreigners in Japan often complain that Japanese people just want them for their English skills. OK, fine, maybe so, but is that really so bad? You instantly have a quality that people want — that’s not something you can say about “back home”. Most of the time, actually, the English thing is just a pretext Japanese people use to hang out with you; because it’s just freaking embarrassing to say things like: “I like the cut of your jib, son — let’s be bosom buddies forever”. And if there’s one thing Japanese people don’t do, it’s “embarrassing”. In any case, a relationship has to start somewhere. Most (all?) love and friendship has its roots in the ground, in the practical and concrete (“he was there”); once it grows, then the leaves do end up in the air.

Pretend you are Japanese. Tell yourself you are Japanese.

Who you think you are matters more than who you actually are. Who you actually are only describes your immediate present position (P) — the sum of all your previous directions. But who you think you are will determine your direction of motion, and your direction of motion over time will determine all your future positions ([P']).

Simple example: a car sitting at a traffic light 2 blocks from the Wal-Mart is in a great position to get to Wal-Mart. But if it suddenly tells itself that only geniuses can visit Wal-Mart, pulls a U-turn and heads home all dejected, then no matter how close it was, it’s not going to get an Always Low Great Value price on pistachio nuts. All because of a change in direction. Your “car” is always moving because time is always moving.

• Who you are = Position
• Who you think you are = Identity
• Identity = Direction
• Direction → New Positions
• New Position(s) = Actuality

It’s all a simple matter self-fulfilling prophecy. Auto-suggestion. You become it because you said so. Muhammad “I am the Greatest” Ali did this kind of thing all the time; we forget that he was actually kinda scrawny for his line of work. But then again, he never said he was bigger or stronger than George Foreman. He just said he was better-looking and would beat him.

You’re Japanese. What could be more natural than…doing stuff in Japanese? And you know what happens to people who do stuff in Japanese? They get in a position to do even more stuff in Japanese. Soon enough, like tar in a smoker’s lung, they get these pieces of Japanese left in their head. They’re scarred for life.

Go scar yourself . Go cause changes in the structure and contents of your brain. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to change your hardware. Just your software.

Then again, all this may not be necessary any longer. Back before this website existed, there were few places online that told you flat out: “you can and will do it”. The general attitude was so violently negative that I personally needed to swing the psychological pendulum in an equally extreme opposite direction. So maybe you don’t need do think this way any more.

But, what the heck…if you’re looking for some fun, you might as well. The cool thing is, you don’t even have to totally believe it for it to work; I don’t think any of us totally believe anything. You just have to believe it enough for your behavior to be affected. Pretend. What if it were true? What if you were Japanese? Give it a whirl. Go be Japanese. It’s fun. And legal.

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.
Do what you can.”
~ Sydney Smith

When I first came to Japan, I hated how people wouldn’t take a stand. In the West, you’re taught that you have to have an opinion and it has to be a strong one, and if you don’t have strong opinions, you’re weak, stupid or both. In my first few weeks and months here, I was shocked at how often people simply wouldn’t take sides on an issue; they wouldn’t take a stand. They were neither apathetic nor passionate. They were simply…impartial.

And it bugged the heck out of me. I’m all for being undecided, but not for being decidedly impartial. That just seems wishy-washy. I mean, people in the West love to say ridiculous things like: “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”; that used to mean something to me…now it feels more like a hollow, idiotic threat (“Oh, crap! I’d better hurry up stand for something!”).

As time has gone on, I’ve come to love Japanese impartiality (plus, I mean, it’s not like people are impartial on everything — I am being a bit simplistic here). And I’ve come to dislike opinionated people who think they know everything. Even when they’re right. Ironically, though, that itself as a form of…opinionatedness. So it’s not like I’ve become toadly acculturated. Because if I were toadly acculturated, if I really did 「以和為貴」 (value harmony), I’d be all: 「人それぞれですね」(“well, everybody’s different, and that’s mmm kay”)。

Anyway, back on topic. The point is: we plan and (attempt to) act with too much certainty – not in ourselves, but in the environment. We act as if the environment were full of certainty, as if we were cogs in a giant machine in which everything has already been decided. And that’s stifling. In many ways, we humans don’t like certainty. Boring jokes, boring people and boring movies are all called “predictable” – too certain.

We’ve all written to-do lists before…
…And then proceeded to do nothing that’s on the list.
Why?
Because we’re dumb?
No, because we’re smart.

Those lists of things to do (or, more accurately, the way we use them), rob us of the freedom to exercise our creativity. There’s too much certainty. Certainty of having to be stuck doing a specific thing in a specific place in a specific (read: boring) way. There’s this idea that there’s this One True Best Optimal Correct Method of Doing X, and our only job is to find it and then execute. If we find it, we succeed, if not, we just kind of suck.

But let’s take a step back here. You have to realize that your certainty is false. It feels real, but it doesn’t exist. Are you freaking Nostradamus? Can you tell the future? How do you even know – when you write the list – that those things actually need doing? I mean they probably need doing, but there’s no certainty. Heck, most of the time, you don’t even do the things on the list after about the second item, so why do you even bother write them in the first place?

We are oppressed by a false certainty – a false certainty of method, boredom and location.

So the first thing to do is free yourself of the notion that you know how, where or when anything should or will happen. Because you don’t.

Now we’re having fun. We’re unpredictable now. We’re like an early M. Night Shymylan movie, or a good-looking but mentally unstable woman, or homemade cookies. No one knows what the heck’s going to happen next.

But a part of you counter-rebels against this rebellion: “Isn’t that just irresponsible? I mean, we simply throw our hands up and let things go to the wind?! Isn’t the goal for us to work like clockwork, acting with perfect reliability and precision? OK, maybe not perfect, but isn’t it at least our goal to be somewhat reliable?”

There you go pulling words out of my mouth again.

The keyword is, indeed, “somewhat”.

So, that false certainty we discussed earlier might be described as a deterministic action model. A part of us knows that this model is flawed, but we still try to force it to work, and the result is usually analysis paralysis – we just don’t do…anything. We procrastinate; we spin our wheels; we stare into space; we go to Facebook; we check our email. Anything but deal with the lunacy of trying to make a deterministic action model work in a world where we can’t even predict next Tuesday’s weather with certainty.

Think about this for a moment – we can look into deep space, but we don’t know for sure whether or not your picnic next weekend is a go.

What I’m suggesting is that we embrace the holes in our knowledge, embrace our flaws, embrace our imperfect human nature (even as we strive to continuously improve), and adopt a more probabilistic action model.

Don’t try to get things done. That’s too hard. Too painful. Too annoying. Too prone to failure.

Don’t try to get things done.

But…

Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.

Don’t try to get things done. Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.
Don’t ask if you’re doing the right thing.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of having what you want to happen, happen.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of you getting what you want.

Don’t work with the certainties; it hurts too much; it’s too painful. Work on pushing up those probabilities.

Next time you feel so overwhelmed in your quest to become fluent in Japanese, that you just sit there and do nothing, sit there and watch English-language shows on Hulu to try to drown out the guilt you’re tripping on (just like Maddie used to), stop yourself, wake up and smell the probabilistic coffee.

Watching a Japanese anime instead of running off to Hulu may not be as “perfect” as doing your SRS reps, but it demm </SouthAfricanAccent> well increases the probability of your actually learning Japanese, more than some English escapism ever could.

Doing just one SRS rep may not make it so that all your SRS reps get done, but it demm sure raises the probability that that will happen, more than sitting there doing nothing does. (The wording on this blog is getting weirder and weirder).

Ditto for listening to Japanese music while you read English-language documents..

Or doing your Japanese SRS reps on your iPad while you sit in on an English-language meeting.

It’s not perfect; it’s not certain. But the probability that you will (1) learn some Japanese now and (2) get back into doing more Japanese later is infinitely higher than it would be if you were doing nothing.

You catch my drift? If you can’t do the so-called right/perfect/correct thing, whatever you fantasize that thing to be, at least do something that helps. Something that moves you forward. Something that gets you in the ballpark. Something that’s somewhat right. Size doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Only ballpark. General direction. General area. All up in there (literally waving my right hand in vaguely circular, kinda conical way). That’s the basic idea. That’s AJATT immersion. It’s also what the situational goals thing is about.

Maybe you can’t do the 100% certain, perfect, ideal, Platonic thing that gets you The Desired Outcome. But if you do so many fun, easy, simple, short, quick, little things that The Desired Outcome has a 97% probability of happening, then, well…call it a win. It’s the difference between a deterministic algorithm that you don’t have the time or energy to execute, versus, small, short, simple, easy, lazy, ad hoc (=random) methods – probabilistic algorithms – that, while imperfect, will actually get done, because it’s just so easy.

100% * 0 action is still 0%. 0.485% * 200 tiny actions is 97%. An action that has a 50% chance of not helping you with your Japanese (i.e. that has only half a chance of helping you with your Japanese), repeated enough times can give you a 99.99% probability of success in Japanese.

OK, I’m getting a bit carried away here. Fake math facts, real math truth. You get the idea. You know who you are. Make your choice.

“Nothing” is the only too little; “not now” is the only too late.

EOF

PS: Paradoxically enough, I am finding that it’s important that you (1) abandon certainty in the environment, while simultaneously (2) embracing certainty in yourself. But we’ll leave the details of that for another time…

Tired? Busy? Overwhelmed?
Can’t do 100%?

Then do 50%.

There’s nothing wrong with a half-a**ed job. Do half an a** now, half-an a** later, and pretty soon you have a nice, round a**. J-Lo would be proud.

What’s that? You can’t do 50%?
Then do 50% of that.

1. Still too much?
2. Cut in half again.
3. Return to step 2 as many times as necessary.

Keep cutting until you get to something so small, that you start tilting your head to one side, curling the corner of your mouth, and squinting your eyes in a sort of “That’s it? Are you kidding me?” pose. Sort of like the face Pope John Paul II made when I told him about this idea.

You have found a cell. A unit so small, you don’t care any more. A few years ago, this one cell actually split up so many times that it became Jennifer Lopez’s derrière. I hear the same thing happened to you, too. I’m guessing it was more mitosis than binary fission, but…same difference, really — it’s all cell division.

Can’t do your SRS reps today?
Do half of them.
Still too much?
Do half of that.
Too big? Keep dividing.
Maybe you’ll end up just doing one.
And that’s fine.

Just keep dividing those cells. Just keep cutting things in half. You basically never have to feel like you’re doing anything, you just focus on division. The addition and multiplication will take care of themselves.

“easy and hard are nothing more than words to describe how much you resist doing the work”

There is no “hard”. There is only “needs smaller steps”. Cut. Slice. Dice. Make things too small to resist. That’s most of what timeboxing is about. It’s what our “cell division” is about. It’s what Maurer’s Kaizen Way (改善道 hmmm…sounds like a martial art  ) is about.

You already know how to do this. You’ll have trouble regularly eating whole tomatoes, but if those same tomatoes are simply sliced up and placed between strips of bread, suddenly there’s no tomato left. And this is all happening despite the fact that you’re probably eating more than before.

The same thing goes for apples. You see a whole apple and you’re like “meeeh, I’m not feeling so apply”. Until, that is, a sliced apple is placed in your sphere of influence. Pretty soon, you’re running out of apples.

It’s not the “appetite” (ability), it’s the presentation. If you’re in charge of something (like learning a language on your own), you’re in charge of the presentation, too. Make it look nice for yourself. Make it appealing. Make it fun. Probably, your mother used to do this kind of thing for you. Now, no one does it for you. No one gives you colorful books and sweet-tasting medicine. Why? Because you don’t need it? No — because you can do it for yourself. You still need help, you’re just not helpless.

Do half-a**ed work. Make it so small and tasty that you cannot resist. Work from the most simple to the most complex tasks. And chill. Our actions compound whether we worry or not. Our actions produce effects of their own accord. We just have to do our part on the cause side. We often cannot directly control effects and it’s generally a huge waste of energy to try. But we’re always in charge of a bunch of causes. And that turns out to be more than enough. We already control all the causes we need to control.

Do your little, half-a**ed part. Let nature — biology, physics, whatever — take care of the rest.

Remember, it starts with one cell. The roundest buttocks…all used to be one cell. And no matter how big they get, they’re still nothing but a bunch of cells.

I spent my early childhood in a semi-rural environment, up in a place high above sea level. We enjoyed twelve months a year of autumn, rolling green pastures. There were cornfields, cows, horses, sheep, goats, dogs and, yes, leopards. It was beautiful. The kind of place that would have made enterprising English people 100 years ago go: “Johnson…let’s kill almost all the natives, steal the land, rename it, and then force the survivors to work on it for us”.

I did a lot of “experiments” growing corn (we called it maize, but…whatever). Every morning I would have breakfast with milk straight from our cow, tomatoes from our vegetable patch, guavas from our guava tree, eggs from our chickens. Sometimes I would actually milk the cow myself, but…I actually found milking really hard to do — I couldn’t seem to get the squeeze right. I was much more interested in the drinking part of the operation anyhow. And someone had to play with the rabbits.

I wouldn’t say I grew up on a farm, but…on the way to school, it almost seemed like there were as many people in cars as on horses.

Why am I already taking you down memory lane at my age? Why this whole…Mormon devotional speech routine with the stories of barns in Idaho and double-digit child families presided over by stern-but-loving fathers? You’ll see. Bear with me.

So, here in Japan, I again live in a semi-rural suburban area. Not nearly as rural as my place in Kenya, but certainly more rural than the 23 wards of Tokyo. There are acres of rice paddies just a few minutes down the road. Plenty of tractor-only or tractor-priority roads. Vending machines with vegetables and eggs fresh from the field.

This semi-rural place is about an hour out of Tokyo.

So yesterday, I go into Tokyo proper. You know, just to hang out. And I was doing my usual, I dunno…machinations. Calculating optimal subway routes in my head, getting really excited about having gotten on a train six minutes earlier than the original plan, and therefore put myself in a position to enjoy slower changeovers down the line. Momoko rolled her eyes at me: “yay, 6 minutes”.

And it hit me right there. To the extent that I was playing and “winning” at all these abiotic, artificial games, I was building and exercising at least one form of intelligence. I could feel that Flynn Effect . I could see how living in an information-rich urban environment could really raise one’s IQ. The city was making me smart.

On the way back from Tokyo, I saw a little train ad for a Berlitz summer crash course in English, marketed specifically at people who’ve been neglecting their English all year and want to really “skill up” and “level up” in a frantic, intensive burst of summer righteousness. “Learn 6 months of English in 5 days”…

Yeah, right.

The city makes you smart. The city makes everyone smart. But the countryside makes you wise.

You don’t have to live in a big city to be an urbanite. You just have to be removed from natural growth processes such as food production. Pretty much, if you don’t grow your own food, you are an urbanite. The majority of people who live in the more comfortable and convenient countries of the world, are urbanites. I am an urbanite, too. I just had the privilege of an extended rural experience a long time ago.

I submit to you that it is because so many of us live in urban environments, that we have trouble learning languages or doing any kind of sustained long-term project. We give up on our languages; we give up on our blogs; we give up on exercise; we give up on diets; we give up on New Year’s Resolutions by mid-February; we give up on reading Tolstoy. The words “long time” are anathema to us.

In urban environments, for the most part, we do not get to observe, ponder and participate in a wide range of organic (biotic) growth processes. In urban environments we do not move far; we do not see far (buildings block our field of vision), and thus we cease to think far and act for the long. We see no connection between the present and the distant future.

In urban environments, things do not get better with time — they get worse. Things do not grow, they decay. Things do not regenerate, they just die. We don’t really reuse things (although we occasionally pretend to get other people to reuse things for us and call it “recycling”). Your TV doesn’t grow into a big-screen TV. It gets old, becomes incompatible with the new TV standard, stops working, and gets thrown away. Certainly, it doesn’t appreciate in value. About the only thing that grows in an abiotic, urban environment is interest — but evidence abounds that few of us urbanites understand even this man-made growth process.

We are divorced from the cycle of life.

• An oak tree grows tall, strong and majestic, deepening its roots…the older, the better. Sometimes it talks to hobbits .
• An old TV becomes sodaigomi (oversized garbage). Dead weight. Bulk.  It gets thrown in the dumpster, to be replaced with something new — the newer, the better. Just like those fad diets and New Year’s resolutions…

Since urban environments rarely give us the privilege of observing natural improvement over time, it becomes hard, even impossible to believe that such a thing exists. That’s why so many of you can come to AJATT.com and be like “pull the other one, Khatzumoto”.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Francis Bacon…Bits

The urban environment, being largely unnatural (or, if you prefer, unlike most of the rest of nature — because you could argue that everything we do is “natural”) is largely devoid of lessons and metaphors to help us understand nature. This doesn’t seem to be a problem, but of course it is, because we (our bodies) are a 100% natural, organic…biotic system. You are not powered by AA batteries…yet.

Because we do not understand nature, we do not understand ourselves. We try to act on ourselves without understanding ourselves; we try to act as if we were machines. And it almost never works. Oftentimes it even damages and/or kills us.

There’s a lot of open space in rural areas. So the farmer sees far. Perhaps as an indirect result of this, she also thinks far. And she can act in the now for the far.

Have you ever seen a farmer handling seed? Have you seen the reverence? The care? The conscientious storage? The excited acquisition? Even though they’re nothing but seeds; they’re tiny; they frequently look nothing like the finished product.

But the farmer loves seeds. She loves them because she can see beyond the present; she has seen growth before and she understands that she will see it again: all she has to do is do her part. She’ll till the field and never once complain that “I’ve been tilling for 3 weeks and nothing has happened”, because she understands that things have their season. She understands that things grow and mature of their own accord — if only they are nourished. She understands that things can take a positive form quite unlike their present form as a result of her actions long before the transformation.

The farmer understands that:

1. Things take time, but
2. You cannot be idle during that time
3. You have to do your part so that nature can do its part

Sidenote: When I say “understand” I do not mean “know about”. In this context, I’m using “understand” to refer to internalized, procedural knowledge rather than declarative knowledge. Successful lionesses clearly “understand” how hunting works, even though they may suck at verbalizing about it.

The farmer lives on timescales of seasons and years and generations. The farmer may have inherited the land from her ancestors, and she will pass it down to her descendants, and they to theirs. Years and decades are not an unimaginable eternity to the farmer. Heck, (assuming no hormones, which is perhaps a statistically unrealistic assumption in the current US, but a fair one in the part of the world I’m from) it can take a couple of years for your cow to even start producing milk.

The urbanite detests lengths of time. The urbanite hates small things. The urbanite loathes beginnings. The urbanite uses “back to square one” as an insult. To the urbanite, spending his life in various types of squares, the first square of something is a terrible place to be. Unless an urban institution makes him do otherwise (and even then), the urbanite lives in the eternal present and immediate future, and acts for results and gain in the present and immediate future. He may go to college for four years, but only for the paper, and he’ll cram the whole time there. He lives in, on and for conclusions. His is a world of ends and results, not means and processes.

Just about everything for the urbanite comes finalized. The urbanite’s food often comes to him pre-packaged and pre-cooked; his clothes come to him ready-made. The only natural growth and change he regularly sees are, again, decay processes — the food he eats turns into either feces or a substrate for mold. His electronic devices become obsolete and turn into trash. His car wears out. Fashions become “so last year”. Jokes become stale.

Almost nothing in the urban environment is telling you that “things get bigger and better with time as a direct consequence of your actions starting from when they are small and nearly invisible”. The urbanite has no time for that kind of delay and verbosity.

Almost nothing in the urban environment is telling you that “you are a co-creator with nature: you do your part and nature does its part”. In the urban environment, nature only destroys — weeds grow in your concrete; pests invade your house; rust forms on your car; and heaven forbid that water — the solvent of life — should get on your electronics. In the urban environment, if it’s not new, fresh and done, then it is, literally and figuratively, stale and crap.

So when a Khatzumoto tells an urbanite — one with the urban mindset: “you’re getting better with time, you just can’t see it yet”, an urbanite smells snake oil. After all, how can things get better with time? How can the invisible become visible? How can important processes happen beyond human knowledge and intervention? It just doesn’t seem emotionally possible. The urban mindset doesn’t allow a person to understand natural growth.

To be sure, nature destroys in rural environments, too. But it builds far more.

The critical period hypothesis must be an urban invention. It seems like it would require an urban mind — someone living an urban life — to decide that a brain and body that contain more accumulated knowledge than they have ever previously contained, are a pile of crap simply because they have reached an arbitrarily decided age. Even that word “age”. In verb form, it seems to only get treated like a good thing when referring to wine and cheese.

Urbanites have a hubris and a sense of urgency about them that can be useful (throwing things away can be good sometimes)…except when it makes people counterproductively impatient. You can game and force and crash course and cram for an abiotic test. But you can’t do that with real, natural language (yet). You can work with nature — you can get nature to help you — but it appears that you can’t break nature’s rules and really win.

Farmers have a resignation to nature (their most important work partner) that can seem like fatalism, except when it’s correct and produces consistent, continuous, forward-looking behavior and desired results.

Urbanites are smart.
Farmers are wise.

And that’s why smart people like you have been having trouble learning Japanese. Not because you’re dumb, but because you’re smart. And folksy idiots like me have learned it quite well, not because we’re idiot savants, but because we understand and follow nature’s rules. At least in this part of our lives.

Next time you want to know how to learn a language, don’t come to this website. Get a popcorn kernel, put it in some soil, and water it every day. Grow a plant from seed. It will teach you everything you need to know. And while you’re at it, go somewhere high. Very high. Somewhere you can see far. Maybe there’s a tower in your town. Go up there and look down.

To win, you do need to show up. But that’s about all you need to do. You show up; nature does the rest. Arsonists know how to learn languages: you light matches, but fires burn by themselves.

Don’t work to reach goals, work to create conditions and environments.
Don’t work to achieve something. Let the environment do the work for you.
Don’t change yourself. Just change your surroundings. Your surroundings will then change you — always.

The essence of learning Japanese is in the almost meaninglessly small things you do.

When you find something so small, so apparently meaningless that you think “that couldn’t possibly help”, but it’s something that puts you in more contact with Japanese, then that, my friend, is your sweet spot. Because you have found something that is easy for you to do. You have found an “atomic action”. Now, just take that atom…and do it. Then repeat. Make that chain (reaction) go…

We’re always trying to make work harder, we’re always trying to make things more complex. When, in fact, the real “work” is in finding these simple, tiny, almost unnoticeable building blocks, and then duplicating them. We all have an action that we can painlessly (and even pleasantly), thoughtlessly, absent-mindedly, effortlessly, automatically perform over and over and over again. For me, it’s…I dunno…mouseclicks.

Click your mouse, just on Japanese stuff.

Power is in the small (repeated). Power is in the subtle (noticed).

Sure, one atom is small. One seed is small. One push of the “play” button on your Japanese media is small. But if we ignore every atom, every seed, every second, every chance that comes our way because it is “too small”, then we are left with, as the Chinese say…bupkiss.

「海不辭水故能成其大，山不辭土故能成其高。」

「海は水を辞せず、故によくその大を成す。山は土を辞せず、故によくその高さをあらわす。」

The sea is deep because it doesn’t look down on water. The mountain is tall because is doesn’t look down on soil.

We’ll never light bonfires if we look down on matches and kindling. We’ll never make it to our roadtrip destination if we refuse to even walk to the car. People who look down on atoms as “too small to be worth the bother” aren’t going to make nuclear weapons.

Take what you have, wherever you find it. Have your tools at the ready. Have the mp3 player with you, have the manga in your bag, have the smartphone with all the menus set to Japanese. Your chances will come; they’re always coming. And they will be small. A 15-minute walk here, a 30-minute wait in line there. They’ll seem too small; they’ll seem too easy. Good. Take them. Let them be easy. Let life be easy.

When it comes to learning, I think people plan too much and do too little. All the time I get emails from people going: “Khatz, tell me what schedule I should have”; “Khatz, give me a day in the life of Khatz”. You don’t need a day in the life of effing Khatz. Screw that Khatz kid! And his schedule! And his couch!

All you need to know is that anything (and everything) you don’t have to do in English can be done in Japanese. Any (and every) moment that you don’t have to listen to English can be spent listening to Japanese. Any (and every) English book that you are not required to own or read can be replaced by a Japanese book. Any (and every) English song or data file…you get the idea. It really is that simple.

The habit of giving any spare moment to Japanese, wherever you may find it is much more valuable than any plan. A habit, good or bad, will wipe the floor with any plan. A habit, good or bad, will trump any resolution. So, if you must, treat Japanese like cigarettes. One at a time. 90 seconds of song here, 90 seconds of SRS there. Tiny snippets of Japanese. Frequency over quantity. Don’t try to put 60 cigarettes in your mouth all at once just because these “cigarettes” are good for you…enjoy them one at a time…enjoy those tasty bite-sized pieces.

Finally, relax. Don’t get worked up and overwhelmed. Just do more than nothing. That’s all you have to do. Whenever you feel down, out, wasted and/or confused just do…one. Just do more than nothing.

OL2L: ハリウッド・セレブ・ニュース: when I said “be a couch potato and read trash, just in Japanese“, I meant it.