uberstuber, an AJATTeer whom many of you will know, linked me to this great article at Coding Horror called “Quantity Always Trumps Quality”.

It resonates with a lot of things you’ve seen mentioned here before. Namely, that people who become amazing at something — people who become the best in their field — aren’t prolific because they’re good: they’re good because they’re prolific. So basically, it’s not that you directly get good at something, you simply get really, really, used to it.

Too many (schooled) people, including me, are always trying to get things right the first time.  They’re going for high quality right off the bat. Anything else would be failure; anything else would be unacceptable. My favorite example right now is ice-skating. I’m always trying to rope friends into going ice-skating with me. And half of them always seem to be like “but I’m not good at it” — well, WTF, of course not; you only do it for an hour or two every 3-4 years! That’s why we’re GOING!

Anyway, there isn’t much more for me on the subject right now. Read the article and be inspired . And while you’re at, listen to Jerry Seinfeld’s advice, too.

Don’t Believe the Hype

A lot of people say a lot of nice things about me on this site. I’ve been called “insane” (I consider this a compliment), strong-willed, full of “willpower”, “obsessed”, determined, “Naruto-like”, even a “genius”. Sometimes it goes to my head and I start to believe that I might actually be a special person. But I know it’s not true.

Don’t believe the hype. I am none of these things. I’m just as unique as all the other n billion people in the world, which is to say not at all :D. For starters, did you know I wear dark boxers so the pooh stains don’t stand out? Where’s the genius in that? I’m writing this on a massive 8-foot-long beanbag lying almost vertical (look who can’t even get “vertical” and “horizontal” right!) because I’m too much of a bum to sit up. Where’s the determination in that? I have a really, really, really, hardcore peanut-eating habit — “just one mo’, baby!” Where’s the willpower in that? This isn’t me in my “off time”; this is me all the time. Forgetting to pay his power bill, wanting-to-write-more-manga, trying to train his cats in Confucian values, peanut-eating, pooh-stain Khatzumoto. This is the real freakin’ deal, and it’s neither smart, nor pretty, nor goal-oriented. I tell people “I have a lot of the same clothes”, but the fact is, I just don’t shower or change that often.

Pooh stains. No showers. Smells like victory.

So, why did I put together a method of learning Japanese that’s so…hardcore? So, extreme and “all the way”? So, willpowery-sounding?

Because it didn’t take any willpower.

What? WTF? Yeah. Permit me to elaborate.

Winnable Games

Lately, I’ve been doing some listening to David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I actually read the book in college, and tried to apply the method, but it didn’t really work for me. The reason, as it turns out, wasn’t the GTD wasn’t a good fit for me; my hunch tells me that virtually anyone who lives in a text-based society could benefit from GTD; the problem was that I had let some crucial, qualifying sections of GTD slip in my reading. I had seen the forest but missed some really important trees. This time around, I just listened to the audio in snippets (generally, not even in order), and applied as I went along. This, by the way, was one of the few times in my daily life where I was listening to recorded audio that wasn’t Cantonese or Japanese. But I digress. Anyway, David Allen said something really interesting in describing his method, something that really stuck with me. I can’t be bothered to go find the audio and transcribe it, so I’m going to phrase the para phrase the para paraphrase.

Basically, it goes like this. The world has gotten a bit complicated; lots of people no longer do manual/physical labor. Their work is mental. It is also — typically — large, fuzzy and unclear in scope. They don’t have the simple satisfaction of “making widgets”. They aren’t getting the “win” that comes built into the completion of a small physical task. Think about it — you put food in the microwave, you input the cooking time, you start the cooking, DONE — you win! Boom, boom, boom, boom, WIN!

And this doesn’t just apply to jobs, it applies to daily life. How do you win out of “Get taxes done”? “Learn Japanese”? “Finish manual translation”? “Write dissertation”.

The answer is you don’t. And this is why so many people procrastinate on these things and never get them done — or only get them done at the last minute, with lots of pain, weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and oaths to self of “never again!”, or “but I only work well under pressure!”.

It’s not that they suck; it’s not that the majority of humans are unfit to “think” and “ponder” and “lead” and be “masters of their own affairs”. It’s that they can’t win, or they can’t win soon, at “Get taxes done”? “Learn Japanese”? “Finish manual translation”? “Write dissertation”. Not being able to win soon is the same as not being able to win at all. And if human beings hate anything, it’s un-winnable games. Or, to phrase it more positively — humans love short, tangible, winnable games. If you give them these, you can get them to do anything. And I mean anything. Let’s take some examples (or, maybe just one):

Case Study: Custodial — Cleaning Everyone’s House But My Own

I worked as a custodian in college. “Custodian” was the nice word for “janitor”, which was the nice word for “cleaning boy”, which was the nice word for “filthy peasant”, which was the nice word for filthy peasants. I think the nice word for “custodian” these days is “facilities management engineer”. But I digress. My first custodial job was cleaning the university bookstore. I vacuumed that sucker nice and clean. The bookstore was friggin’ beaurifoo.

One day, I go home, to my college apartment, which was a messy heckhole. There, my earthy, rustic, country-music luhvin’ Texan roommate C-star (contemporaneous with The Other Other White Meat, by the way), who was not a clean-freak by any stretch of the imagination, but who was definitely a man of order, asked me this question: “you clean the bookstore, but you don’t clean your own house?”

Those words have haunted me to this day. I would clean the bookstore but I would not even clean my own home. What kind of human being was I? Was I just unfit to control my own destiny, doomed to be someone’s stooge? Is that the kind of human being I was? Is that the kind of human being most of us are?

My answer to that is an emphatic “no”.

OK, fine — but why didn’t I clean my apartment? I mean, I didn’t even like cleaning the bookstore. I mean, for crying out loud, I was waking up at 4:30 in the ante meridian marnin’ on a day other than Non-Denominational Winter Solstice Festival Day (you know that sleepless, childhood adrenaline rush that comes with NDWSF…yeah, I didn’t have that) to wear a stupid blue vest and clean my overpriced college bookstore, all for money which I would promptly use to buy overpriced textbooks — that I was never even going to read — from said store. Or pay rent for conveniently-close-to-the-bookstore lodgings. Talk about cyclical. And I couldn’t even clean my apartment? Why?

Because I couldn’t win at cleaning my apartment. There was no starting time; there was no ending time; there was no goal state. When would my apartment be clean? What would constitute “clean”liness? What conditions would need to be fulfilled such I could say “we’re done”. Well, it would have to perfect, wouldn’t it, because the opposite of dirty is perfectly clean, right? Which parts of my apartment? Were my roommates’ bedrooms in the deal? What about the fridge? The toilet? The back of the couch where all the clutter collected? The couch itself, under the cushion, where the remote and the Nintendo controllers liked to hide? What about my homework? And even if, by some act of Gates, I managed to get the apartment clean after hours, no, days, no, years, of work, how would I keep it clean? What if my roommates just messed it up in 5 minutes? How would I get it clean when I felt so bad for letting it get dirty? Did I mention homework? And classes? And flirting — I had flirting to do. And Ultimate Frisbee…In fact, screw cleaning the freaking apartment — let’s go flick some disc.

And so the apartment remained dirty. That and every other apartment I lived in thereafter. Oh, I wanted perfection; I wanted cleanliness; I wanted it baaaad, baby. But…I simply couldn’t see a path to it. However (and, while it seems obvious now, I never made the connection at the time), I always managed to at least get the place in shape for cleaning inspections. The cleaning inspections split the entire apartment into smallish jobs (sucky, but smallish), assigned each job to a roommate, and had a hard deadline. Cleaning inspection would end at the deadline. After inspection, enjoying a clean apartment, with no microwave grime, no table rings, and (most of all) no rancid, “there be cholera here” air about the toilet, I often found myself wishing cleaning inspections were conducted more often. But at the same time, I found myself worried at what this meant for me and many other people, because that wish of mine implied that I needed management and supervision. That I could not be master of my own affairs (do you get the feeling I’m in love with this phrase? Well, I am. IS THAT SO WRONG???)

Anyway, so my apartment never got clean except for inspection. But I continued to do my custodial work quite loyally. As obvious as it seems now, it never fully dawned on me that the fact that the custodial job had fixed, guaranteed start time, end time, tons of winnable subtasks, fun (I got to laugh and hang out with coworker-friends) and rewards ($$$!!) might have some motivational effect. It didn’t occur to me that my whole “let me just do my best in the time available, and if time runs out, well, screw it, it’s not like I won’t be cleaning again tomorrow” attitude had anything to do with it. It never occurred to me that the fact that I treated cleaning my house like some massive, Picasso’s-got-nothing-on-me, OCD-fuelled, lifelong magnum opus instead of just a job to be done piecemeal, quickly, painlessly and repeatedly, might be the issue here.

[Sidenote: I also did the “accidental cleaning” that David Allen talks about. This is where you don’t intend to do a big cleaning job, but you end up doing it unintentionally; he used the fridge as his example, and I’ve definitely accidentally cleaned the fridge more than once in my life].

The Magic Equation aka Temporal Motivation Theory aka TMT: The Grand Unifiying Theory of Getting Stuff Done

I’ve been thinking and talking about bits and pieces of this article for quite a long time, with anyone who’ll listen, in any language I can explain it in. One of those pieces dropped out in the form of this article about keeping SRS items short, and a comment I added to said article. That comment led a reader named munashi to point out this newspaper piece summarizing a young chap named Piers “Brosnan Remington” Steel’s research. This, I might as well tell you, led me to wet my panties rather profusely. Quite simply, this guy’s research is the shizzle in the fizzle within and beyond the dizzle, with a cherry on top.

Because it deserves repeating, here’s the deal:

U = EV / ΓD

• U = Utility. How much ya wanna do it. How much fun it is.
• E = Expectancy. How much confidence you have you can get it done.
• V = Value. How important (and/or how sucky) it is.
• Γ = (Proneness to) distractions, based on environment, habits or whatever. Uppercase gamma, just to be cool.
• D = Delay. Deadline. Due date. How long you have to do it.

Get it? Are you excited as I am? Do you see why this Piers’ research is the shizzle in the fizzle within and beyond the dizzle, with a cherry on top? Dude, this is moè; this Akihabara maid café level excitement! No? OK, permit me to elaborate.

The higher U is (Khatzumoto! Stop perpetuating ethnic stereotypes of English usage!), the more likely you is (no, really, stop it!) to get the job done. So, the key here comes in getting that numerator (Expectancy x Value) high and keeping that denominator (Distraction x Delay) low.

In my not so humble opinion, just about all of personal development can be explained by this equation. That doesn’t mean that the PD industry is a waste of time; I happen to think it’s totally cool and useful. It just means that it all boils down to tweaking these parameters.

Things like The Secret (yes, I know it features that charlatan obaasan who thinks she has visions; and I know that the probability she’s for real is slightly less than…the probability that Julia Roberts will invite me to her house this weekend to lick her armpit hair — but don’t let that get in the way of this discussion!) are trying to get you to focus on doing stuff you want — this is tweaking the U directly.

Tony Robbins most frequently wants to get your confidence up; he wants to take your E parameter sky-high.

Brian Tracy, in works like Time Power and Eat That Frog!, is working on your V — getting you to do valuable tasks first and most.

Decreasing Γ is where stuff like Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s (yeah, I don’t know how to pronounce it either…freaking East Europeans bringing their names into my country…oh, wait, I’m foreign and long-named, too — never mind!) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience excels.

Timeboxing, a technique that Brian Tracy and his disciple Steve of the Pavlina discuss, is one of the most powerful tools for minimizing the D component, which, of course, drives up the power of the numerator, and by extension U. Other D-minimizing techniques include “salami-slicing”, “swiss-cheesing” and “oil-barrelling”, all of which are explained in Tracy’s Frog book up there.

You might say that AJATT works by increasing U (doing fun stuff in Japanese), by increasing E (confidence), by decreasing Γ (Japanese-only environment), and by decreasing D — reducing the process to a short, winnable game by way of SRS.

Environment + SRSing = Game

A while back, a reader named quendidil, whom many of you will know, talked about learning Japanese in general, and SRSing in particular, being addictive — especially when he had big, looming projects like final exams going on. Truth be told, I have experienced the exact same phenomenon.

And I totally don’t think that’s a bad thing. It is the potential “addictive” quality of the method of learning language that you’ll find on this site, that led me to learn Japanese to such a high level in such a relatively short amount of time.

Using an SRS reduces Japanese to a game: a very short, very winnable game. You are constantly winning. The reward isn’t months away — it’s right here and now. It’s practically a slot machine experience. Find kanji/sentence: win. Enter it into the SRS: win. “Bet” on your ability to remember it through a spaced, somewhat randomized repetition: win. Click, win, click, win, click win. No worrying about your memory because the SRS has got it all taken care of, scheduling things for you like a personal secretary.

And it’s not just the SRSing, the environment is a win, too. Put music/anime/video game/whatever on = win. You just have to plug in, turn on, and plug yourself in. Rake up your “flight hours” until they get into five figures. Every moment literally brings you closer. Every moment is its own victory. You get so busy winning you might forget that you’re getting more and more comfortable with real Japanese. Suddenly you can read huge tracts of real text without any trouble. Suddenly you can say stuff. Suddenly your Japanese friends of the opposite gender ask you to leave the room because they want to talk about their periods (this actually happened to me), and they know you’ll understand.

Keeping the Game Alive: Playing with Equation Parameters

But just because SRSing/AJATTing is intended to be fun and short, that doesn’t mean that, left untouched, it can’t get long and boring. It totally can. Just like playing even the funnest video game made by Funnites from the Planet Fun, while eating Fun-Flakes and drinking milk laced with fun nanomachines.

So, you need to help things along — to help keep U high.

Lowering D

Like I said, timeboxing has been my favorite tool for pumping up utility. I have two identical egg-timers in my household — one for the kitchen, and one at my desk. I use them all the time.

SRSing feels like a burden? Timebox it! Don’t wanna wash the dishes? Timebox it! 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you’re comfortable with. So, keeping it short, mimimzing D, is our secret weapon here. This is what cults and crappy jobs do — they give you tasks that are short, simple and rewarding, even if the only reward is that they end.

What should you do if you still feel like going on after the time limit is reached? Well, a well-chosen timeboxing time should, of course, make you feel like starting at the front end, and feel like continuing at the back end. My old answer to this would be “keep going!”, but now I’ m not so sure. Now I say “stop anyway, take a break, then do another short session”. Pushing yourself too hard, even with timeboxing, risks killing the golden-egg-laying goose. There are almost always more SRS reps to do and dishes to wash, so keep it to “many small sprints”. Keep starting many, many, times. And savor the “enjoyment dividend” — that “I could have gone on for more” feeling. Don’t use it up by continuing — that dividend is what’ll keep you coming back for more…Then again, I do sometimes continue (but still with a timer). Like many things, this is something you’ll just need to judge and tweak for yourself.

So, timeboxing keeps the game short and gives you a win. It teaches you to enjoy the journey — to enjoy the small, partial victory. And, in that way, it teaches you to enjoy life itself. Reaching major goals — finishing RTK1, getting a PhD, getting fluent in Japanese — these are few. But the small, simple, widget-making tasks that get us to those goals, are many. Enjoy the small tasks, and let the big things take care of themselves. Pick the game to play, then focus only on enjoying the game; forget the result; it’ll come when it comes.

Some people don’t like seemingly mindless factory metaphors. But I love them. Yeah, factory workers get pwned; yeah, you don’t like flipping burgers. But something about burger-flipping and widget-making is obviously effective, otherwise you and I simply would not be caught doing them for so long. I’m shooting in the dark here, but I think the developers of these undesirable jobs must have recognized that virtually all work can be divided into (or is naturally made up of) almost meaninglessly small tasks that are distant from the whole (and can even be split between people). This is how you get people to burn other human beings alive — a bomber pilot isn’t thinking “little Ahmed there is going to watch and hear his mother scream in pain as she is immolated”, no, to the pilot it’s “fly to target coordinates, match crosshairs, push button, confirm change”. There’s no meaning, no ethics, at that level of perspective. To see the meaning, the value and the ethics of an action, you have to go ask about the intentions and consequences of an action. You have to ask: “why are we doing this?”, and “what happened because we did it?” But at the action level, there is only now; there is no intention — it’s in the past; there are no consequences — they are in the future; there is just the action. This is why a lot of propaganda and misinformation work to prevent people from accurately considering intention before action, and consequences thereafter. Scary, huh? So use your powers for good, OK?

Use your powers — these tools — to fulfill your dreams and make happy smilies. Want to write that book? Break it down into pieces (”widgets”) so small that you don’t even realize you’re writing it until it’s too late and the book is written! That kind of happened with me and this site. If I’d set out to write it all nice and in order and crap, it never would have gotten done. But just one itty bitty post at a time, as it came to me, as I felt like it, and before I knew it I had, like, stuff written. The same thing goes for daily repetitions, or for the acquisition of any detailed skill or knowledge (language being but one example), or for the accomplishment of any large thing. It all comes down to little moments.

You can play with the other parameters, too. It’s just a matter of figuring out stuff for yourself, or looking at tweaks that other people have come up with.

Keeping the Game Alive: Self-Abuse Ruins Everything, So Be Nice To You

Hmm…somehow I got sidetracked into ethics and employment. That’s not really the point of this post. What I’m trying to say is: “use that equation to help you figure out ways to get stuff done”.

There is one other thing I’d like to share, still on the subject of “keeping the game alive”. It is this: stop berating yourself for not being done yet. Stop berating yourself for not have started sooner. Stop worrying about finishing. Stop trying to finish. The truth is, you CAN’T “finish” a task; it is physically impossible to do so… You can START a task. You can START a task many times. That you can do. But “finishing” isn’t something you do, it’s something you experience — it’s a result, an effect caused only by starting so many times that one of those starts happpens to be the “last start”.

I don’t think this is quite covered in TMT, but it’s crucial if you want to avoid negating TMT benefits. And it is part of the reason that doing Mandarin became a chore for me — and why I switched to doing Cantonese. Of course I actively like Cantonese, but there were other issues involved, to. When doing Mandarin, I kept telling myself things like “if only you’d known X before”, “if only you’d done Y before”, “wow, you suck, you can’t even follow the news yet?”, “why aren’t you fluent YET?”. My whole deal was about what I couldn’t do. Every time I learned something new, I didn’t congratulate myself for making progress, I put myself down for having made progress so “late”. All the TMT application in the world can’t save someone who’s doing this to themselves. So, learn from my mistakes: don’t do that. Just focus on doing and enjoying what you’re doing right now. The 10,000 sentences, the n000 kanji, they’ll all come, but you can’t force them. So fuhgeddabout it — you don’t need to worry about them. Just focus on the one you’re one now. Just focus on this step, here, now. You’re exactly where you need to be.

Why I bring this up now is because, for a while there, I started doing this with Cantonese, too. “Dude, you’ve been doing Cantonese since November 15, 2007, and you STILL don’t X?”. I stopped just enjoying “being” and started freaking out about missing fake goals — goals that I had never actually set.

Realizing that I was repeating an error, I quit the mental self-flagellation and now I’m back to just enjoying myself. I think of what I can do, what I have achieved and what I am doing. For one thing, it occurred to me that I watch Stephen Chow movies and GET JOKES — verbal jokes! Dude, methinks that’s a big freaking deal. Treat yourself like a baby — always looking out for the tiniest achievements to praise. You’ll be surprised by how far you’ve come, if you actually take a look back and start to give yourself some credit.

So, remember: just do your part here and now. You did all the worrying and planning back when you decided to get your equipment, buy movies, buy music, get an SRS, get RTK, get sentences and use this method. Now you’re executing. And that’s all that matters, you don’t need to do anything but focus on execution. All you care about is how to make this widget that’s right in front of you. Maybe you’ll figure out some tweaks to the process, but that will come to you naturally, with time, as you get used to widget-making; you don’t need to pay it any active thought or concern. You’re just doing this one thing. One kanji in. One sentence in. One page in. One definition in. One repetition in. Repeat…

In Closing

Remember, these are all just tools. Not philosophies, not ideologies. Even the philosophies are just mental tools. Use them as long as they are both fun and effective. They’re your toys, you play with them; they serve you — not the other way around. So try it, use it, keep it lose it, whatever. Remember, you’re always supposed to be having fun, and you’re always supposed to be in control. So, in truth there’s nothing you’re supposed to do: there’s just what you want and ways to get it.

Anyway, this article is getting far to long and probably should be split up, but I wanted to try my hand at throwing a long ball. Maybe I’ll write more about this stuff another time.

Laters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do 1 rep. Just one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

And what do we say about all these Africans?

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

Really?

Really?

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

Right…

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

What am I trying to get at? Well…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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