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.

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…

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 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.

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.

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

(continued from Part 2)

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

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

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

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

The Secret (The Secret, The Secret…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

M: Hehe.

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

M: Ok.

Touch the language

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get a solid grounding in PLAY!

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

The playing around part is fundamental.

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

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

M: Ok, I feel more heartened.

K: Stepping off soapbox…

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

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

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

M: Thanks muchly!

*The End!*

If you were thirsty, would you deny yourself drink because you were thirsty?

If you needed a blood transfusion, would you deny yourself blood because you needed it?

Rhetorical questions.
You wouldn’t starve yourself to death to punish yourself for being an “innately hungry person”.
You wouldn’t dehydrate yourself to punish yourself for being “born with thirsty genes”.
You wouldn’t deny blood to someone because he showed “no signs of a talent for not needing blood transfusions”.

So why do we do this with languages and other large-scale habits and skills — indeed with long-term projects in general?
Why do we practice this mindless, illogical “mob triage” on ourselves ?

Surely the thirstiest man should get a drink?
Surely the hungriest child should get a bite to eat?
Surely the hot chick who’s bleeding to death should get the blood she needs because she will bleed to death otherwise?
Surely the thing that’s going to take the longest to do should enjoy as early a start and as many starts as possible? — kind of like how we stick the biggest suitcase into the trunk first, and then fit the small stuff around it…kind of like how we stick the rock into the jar first, and then fit the pebbles around it.

Sucking at something is a natural — but temporary — state. It can only become permanent if we choose to make it so. Once we starve the child to death, whatever food we throw at her thereafter shall be of no use.

If you still, relatively speaking, suck at a language, then feed yourself the language in a biologically appropriate (i.e. tasty i.e. fun) form until you are no longer hungry…until you no longer suck.

We often run away when we suck. But maybe that’s exactly when we should be staying. Just as no animal needs its parents’ attention more than when it’s a baby, you, a virtual (but very real) Japanese baby, need all the Japanese you can get right here, right now, right when you suck, precisely because you suck, because you are hungry, because you are weak, because you are vulnerable, because you were not born in Japan, because you were not raised in Japan, because your Japanese baby will die if you don’t feed her — regularly. Multiple times per day. You need Japanese and you need it badly. In fact, you need it more than a “real” Japanese person does: they’ve had their fill; they can wait. Many of you have gone the entire first 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years of your life, without Japanese. Enough is enough. Eat.

It’s one thing for a fully grown, healthy, strong, “well-fed” Japanese person, born and raised in Japan, to go hours and days and weeks and even months without Japanese. But that kind of neglect would kill a baby.

No group in society contributes less and takes more than babies[*]. Yet they get all that food, love and attention. Your Japanese — the Japanese baby inside of you — won’t give back to you for a long time yet; it’ll take and take and take…and all you’ll have to show for it is the enjoyment you get out of it. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore her until she’s “big enough”. If you wait until she’s big to start taking care of her, she’ll never get to be big. She’ll just die. She needs you now.

Feed the baby. Water the baby. Feed yourself Japanese.

Infanticide = very uncool. Stop killing babies.

• OL2L: YouTube – NMA 2010.05.22 動新聞 4人肉毒桿菌中毒 又傳豆乾惹禍
• YouTube – ファミ通TV　2010年5月14日配信

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

(continued from Part 1)

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

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

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

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

Cutting people off is underrated

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

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

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

K: I know exactly what you mean

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

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

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

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

M: 27.

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

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

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

M: Hehe.

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

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

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

M: lolz

K: Cutting people off…very underrated.

Don’t intellectualize language-learning

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

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

M: Yeah… I see your point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

M: Probably not.

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

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

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

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

Everything is in context

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

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

M: lolz

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

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

M: So true.

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

M: Ok, I guess not.

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

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

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

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

I learned Japanese by accident

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

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

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

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

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

M: Hehe.

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

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

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

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

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

You are already a success story

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

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

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

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

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

(to be continued…)

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

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

I always get sidetracked and fail

Maddie: Khatz…

Khatz: Yes, Maddiekins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

K: lol… Japanese voice actors are the stuff.

I’m an easy-out kinda person

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

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

K: Hehe. Me too

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

K: Definitely.

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

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

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

K: How come?

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

Language-learning was harder than anything else in school

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

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

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

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

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

M: None?

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

K: Oh yeah? What did they say?

M: Polyester.

K: ポリエステル

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

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

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

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

You’ve been abused

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

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

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

M: Ok.

K: You’ve been abused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just leave Japanese on

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

M: ‘Cause I don’t understand it?

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

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

M: lolz, yeah, no.

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

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

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

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

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

M: Yeah, I do the same.

K: Oh, you too?!

M: But I often “hear” text.

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

(to be continued…)

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

(Un?)fortunately, your brain, by way of the forgetting mechanism, is able to “heal” itself, erasing the effects of the bullets.

As it turns out, though, your brain is not an invincible healer. So, if you want to get “killed” or “maimed” by your L2 (i.e. become permanently and irrevocably unable to forget it) then all you need do is get yourself shot more and/or faster than your brain can heal you. You need to get shot so many times that you can’t heal. You need to overwhelm the healing mechanism.

When we talk about getting better at (remembering) a language, what we’re really talking about is losing the ability to forget it. We are actually “tattooing” our brains. I mean, just try to forget the language you’re using to read this. Go on, try. I’ll give you a whole week. Try. You haven’t “learned” the languages you’re now amazing at, you’ve had them carved into your brain: you think they’re decorations, but biologically they’re just…scars . (Given time they can heal, but it turns out that after a certain point it’s harder to forget a language than to learn it, if harder = takes longer).

Increase the frequency with which you get shot. We often call this “immersion”, although lately I’m preferring the term “contact”.  Increase the number of times per day you “touch” your L2. Increase the number of discrete points of time where you are exposed to your L2. Get more bullet wounds.

One way I do this with Cantonese, for example, is to have a batch file that automatically opens live Cantonese Internet radio once an hour every hour, no matter what I’m doing. If I’m not at home, my cats get to listen to it. All I have to do is feed my machine a little bit of electricity, and it works as a diligent, hands-free and nearly-infallible getter-of-things-done.

In addition to the frequency of bullet wounds, you’ll obviously want to increase their absolute quantity as well. Frequent bullet wounds will “hurt” you (just look at how all American English speakers have some exposure to Spanish, and thus feel more affinity towards the Spanish language than to more genetically related languages like Dutch, Frisian or German — then again, I suppose any behavior that brings you closer to Salma Hayek is a good idea ). But to really get yourself &$&$ed up, you’ll need to get hit by a large overall number of bullets as well.

Funnily enough though, increasing bullet quantity directly can be quite stressful for a lot of people a lot of the time. So just focus on the frequency, and the quantity will usually start to take care of itself.

Sorry for the graphic metaphor…Too much Counterstrike, rap music and action movies, I guess . Plus I just enjoy negative-sounding metaphors for positive activities — everything from drug abuse to cancer to, now, gun violence.

So how do you get yourself shot?

A lot of advice-givers, myself included, can seem to be telling you:

“What you’ve been doing SUCKS! You’re messing up! Do it THIS way!”

And this makes you feel like a schmuck, I mean, a jewelry, I mean…Anyway — so you get busy dutifully struggling to fit your square self into whatever new round hole your advice-giver has prepared.

OK…I’m not going to tell you what do, because the world is already full of that. I’m just going to tell you…I don’t think that that’s the point. I don’t think that it’s the intention of even the most energetic, enthusiastic advice-giver to make you feel like crap and get you frantically re-arranging your life in their image. Certainly it’s not my intention. Good advice is intended to make your life easier, not harder.

Here’s a simple two-step process you may or may not want to try.

1. Read/listen to advice. Mine. Other people’s. Whoever’s.
2. Do whatever the heck you want, whether or not it matches that advice.
   • A lot of the point of good advice is the forest, not the trees. Much of the point of good advice is simply to be exposed to it, rather than to painfully turn yourself into a carbon copy of it.
   • Now, it may well be that turning yourself into a carbon copy is the easiest, least painful, most effective path, or at least the path  that hits the sweet spot — that gives you a maximum of both ease and effectiveness — and if that is the case, then go for it. Imitation is how we learn.
   • But don’t freak out over minutiae. Minor deviations and improvements are normal and even desirable. The basic plan is: take the mold and change it to fit you, you needn’t fit yourself to it. When that Betty Crocker cookie recipe tells you to add two nanograms of rosemary and twirl around ten times while reciting the pledge of allegiance…tell Betty Crocker to get on her skates and truck the puck off: focus on the flour, sugar and Crisco.
   • (Wow, is that the taste of vomit in my mouth?)

…

…

…

OK, I’m over the Crisco now. Let me repeat myself: Of course, if it’s easier to just follow the advice, then do that. But chill.

Don’t be a harried, obedient zealot. Seriously — you’re going to die if you do that. Relax. Don’t be a whiny “if only I had the talent”/”maybe it’s possible for other people but not for me” person. Don’t be an emo-type “it’s all B.S.” person either…or do be these things…but do it quietly. Man who say it cannot be done needs to STFU, and other supposedly Chinese proverbs.

We often go to considerable lengths to protect children from this type of thing; we rarely even allow children to say these types of things. Well, adults are just children with bank accounts and large bodies. Negativity damages their fragile minds just as it does those of children. People who are going to freak out need to try to keep “the children” out of it — and that includes you freaking out at yourself.

By now, the dutiful part of you is all: “but…but…but…article 4, subsection (b), paragraph (iii) of AJATT says…”. Check this out: if you’ve read the advice then it will affect your decisions: you don’t need to worry about that. The point here is that you stop the breathless compliance and mental self-flagellation.

And I bet you’re getting frantic about this advice, too, aren’t you? You’re so earnest, the cuteness makes me giggle. The cyclical irony of giving you advice on how to take advice is not lost on me. “Lost” is lost on me…that show…I dunno, man…

Anyway, let’s review:

1. Read/listen or otherwise expose yourself to advice.
2. Do whatever the heck is most comfortable, workable, sustainable for you. “Obey”, “disobey”, remix — it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, your unique life, preferences and situation are going to call for some degree of very unique, perhaps even counter-intuitive, choice-making. You’re the DJ.

What we’re really talking about here is our making a practical, active distinction between “advice” and “orders”. Namely, that:

• With “advice”, no matter how strongly worded, no matter how handsome the giver (oh, stop!), you always have choice; you always retain the right to refuse and/or reinterpret.
• With “orders”, the presumption is that you have at some point put this right on hold. A lot of military, school and religious activity kind of falls here.

I give advice, not orders. I intend it to be taken as advice. So, do whatever you want. Refuse, accept and reinterpret at will. I would. I did.

I have made a breakthrough in my thinking lately in regards to this language acquisition business, and I am excited about it.

I was trying to understand what bothered me so much about the polyglots out there and also why I felt like my Chinese had stunted. The realization I came to corresponds with your difficulty with Chinese relative to Japanese, I think.

The problem was that I was obsessed with acquisition as an end. I felt like I had something to prove to myself, to my former teachers, to people I had argued with about language, and most of all to Chinese people themselves. I wanted to say, “See? Classes do suck. All you have to do is watch movies! Foreigners can learn Chinese quickly and easily!” Because of this, I tried to find the ultimate acquisition method. I looked at all those Chinese movies, TV shows and books as language acquisition tools. And that was the problem. I forgot that the end was not acquisition, but rather the enjoyment of things and people in that language.

I also started to conflate knowledge/eloquence with seeming like a native. My real ultimate desire is to seem like a Chinese person to Chinese people, to have them feel like I am a part of their social circle, someone they can relate to and have fun with. But I forgot about that. I just thought that if I could read enough books on enough subjects and know all the right words and know all the pop references, I would seem like a native. But in reality I already had enough knowledge and linguistic ability. The problem was attitude. I did not see myself as a Chinese person, but rather, and even worse, I saw myself in opposition to them. Chinese was something to conquer, not to enjoy. In the end, if you want to know Chinese, knowing a lot of stuff and being eloquent is not the key. You could ask someone in English, “Oh, how was class today?” and they could respond, “uh, you know, it was kinda boring, the teacher’s stupid, you know?” There is no linguistic virtuosity there, but I would feel like that person was American, or at least in tune with American sensibilities. Whereas, if I asked the same question to some people in China, they would perfectly recite something they had memorized from a TOEFL book and it just felt so foreign and distant from me.

I had a similar problem with myself in China. I was often with my American friend and Chinese people would always be absolutely blown away by his Chinese. People would be impressed with mine, but it was never the level of amazement that they would have for him. There wasn’t a huge gap between us in our knowledge of Chinese, so I couldn’t figure out where the difference was. I’ve figured out now that the difference was my attitude. I had some problems with Chinese culture, so I felt aversion to them in some ways, and I certainly didn’t want to be them. My friend, however, had developed a sense of Chinese identity, that he was Chinese (even though he is a blue eyed fair skinned American of European descent), and Chinese people sensed that. Some people even went so far as to ask if he was Chinese. Now that I think of it, occasionally, people had a similar reaction to me and I’ve realized those occasions occurred when I was loving some Chinese TV show and felt connected to the culture. Then I would go out and people would be amazed. Nothing had significantly changed about my linguistic knowledge, just the attitude. Unfortunately, these occasions were rare, because I spent most of my time hating Chinese people.

When babies and little kids learn their native languages, they’re not seeing linguistic acquisition as the end; they see it as a means. the end is far more interesting, far more relevant, far more about everything that matters to them. if it didn’t matter it might even be possible that acquisition wouldn’t even take place. They want other things — and acquisition occurs along the way. When I was in elementary/middle school and used to emulate certain things I heard people say, I wasn’t thinking “Now I’ll acquire this word.” I was thinking, “Now I’ll be funny, like this person.” Language, a medium, was just that: a thing I wanted because I wanted stuff that was in it. Somehow, I’ve lost track of that, to some extent, with Chinese.

So, as I move forward now, I am keeping two things in mind:

1. Acquisition is not the goal. Accessing fun stuff in the language is.
2. I want to BE Chinese, not just some weird foreign dude who can make himself understood in Chinese

So, all those arguments about the detail of the acquisition method are much less relevant than I thought before. I could talk about this forever, but I’ll wrap it up here.

Oh, just one more note about the polyglot thing. For some reason, these people claiming to speak 10 languages really bothered me. I couldn’t figure out why. Now I think I got it, it seems their goal is the acquisition of languages, rather than enjoying what’s in the language. Of course, they are enjoying the acquisition itself, but I don’t think that’s enough to be native-like. And that’s why I think they have just slightly above average results even though their methods might make sense. They still see themselves as Americans or Canadians or whatever studying something foreign. However, realizing this, I now might respect the claims of Benny the Irish polyglot more, for example. Maybe it is possible to speak Portuguese and make Brazilians think you are Brazilian in three months, because perhaps Benny believed himself to BE Brazilian for those three months.

I look forward to your feedback,

Chris

Who says “virulently handsome”? Anyway, both Chris and I are looking forward to hearing from you

In real life, human “tortoises” are laid-back, nonchalant, happy. Meanwhile, human “hares” are destructively disciplinarian, destructively obsessive, and destructively obsessed with quick results.

What happens is that the hares self-flagellate themselves to the point of burnout. Their very obsession with the “race” and “running” it better, faster and longer causes them to come to hate anything to do with “running” and thus avoid it at all costs (here, running = action; race = project).

That’s why hares are always resting and procrastinating instead of moving — it’s not arrogance, it’s self-preservation: hares are refugees from a war being waged by, on and within themselves. They’re not shirkers; they’re not lazy; they’re just trying to get a break from their own mental violence, their constant negative self-talk, their tantalusian expectations.

Hares, under the premise of “delayed gratification” often actually practice “zero gratification“: it’s just never good enough. Ever. They never give themselves the carrot — only the stick. Like Tantalus, they get neither the cool, refreshing water nor the sweet grapes of satisfaction. Only the grapes of, what, wrath? I dunno…

So hares procrastinate and appear to shirk. It’s perhaps a subconscious(?) way for them to hijack/sabotage their own system of cruelty and give themselves at least some carrots, water and sweet grapes between the beatings, hunger and thirst. Neil Fiore talks all about this in “The Now Habit”.

The tortoises, on the other hand, just play their way through the whole thing. They run the “race” not because they have to, but because it’s there. Tortoises screw around, putting one playful, jiggy foot in front of the other. They have so much fun that their victories are practically side-effects (which is a good thing, because moments of victory are far too short to be the be-all and end-all). Yea verily, let it be known that I kid you not — I learned Japanese almost by accident.

Kanji acquisition is a good example of the tortoise-hare dichotomy. Even going at just 10 kanji a day, every day, will have you acquiring 3650 kanji over the course of a year.

Conversely, hare-like attempts to force 100 kanji a day often lead to stress, fatigue and overload. The irony of trying to force too many kanji a day is that it often leads to zero-kanji days, zero-kanji months and even zero-kanji years.

Forced high speed often also leads to poorly remembered kanji — I have seen many people feel the need to start over again from scratch. Where’s the speed in that?

I’m not saying “don’t do 100 kanji a day”. If you can do 100 a day happily, then do. If not, then don’t. Find your sweet spot — everyone’s will be different. Find a number that you can hit every day, no matter how small, and then go with that.

During my US-based Japanese project, the so-called “hardcore” phase of AJATT, I was a tortoise. Japanese has always been a toy for me, just something I screw around with. My Chinese, however, has often been hare-like; it has often become a grim duty, something I should do and have to do fast and have to prove a point to the whole world about — more status symbol than self-contained game. And we all know how well status-symbol-seeking language-learners tend to do (see “English in Japan and Korea” for details).

In my experience, only when I act like a tortoise, do I succeed in long-term projects, Sinic or otherwise. As far as I know, only the tortoise model is sustainable. And that’s the key to anything long-term: sustainability — stamina. The tortoise only seems slower. But because she has a model that she actually sustains, you could say she gets to enjoy the metaphorical “compound interest” of her efforts.

Put away the whips and sticks. Relax. Just do one. Enjoy each step. Savor each bite. Become a tortoise and start winning. Remember, it only seems slower: you’ll get there sooner than you think, and well ahead of any hares — those kids all die of heart attacks, suicide and depression* anyway. Be mellow. Be like a grandparent (think about it: maybe it’s not the advanced age that makes grandparents mellow, but the mellowness that allows them to live to an advanced age). Be like a tortoise.

_{*I don’t know if people clinically die of depression, but…how many sad centenarians have you ever seen? I guess I should say “sadness”, if I’m going to be so vague and non-clinical…oh well .}

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (or so I’m told — ‘coz you never quite know with these Internet quotes, do you?)

In life, oftentimes, the real choice isn’t between success and popularity, but between success and immediate popularity. It’s a toughie. Tougher, in fact, than the actual success path (“a day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work” and all that). Which is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it .

To me, that’s the real meaning of “delayed gratification” — the lonely gap between when the old social grouping rejects you and you’re again gratified by the acceptance of some new group.

I think we all have the power to establish and maintain good habits, but when threatened with the withdrawal of the camaraderie, admiration or love of our peers, that’s the real fork in the path; that’s where we make or don’t make ourselves. I imagine it’s where people who did keep on keeping on came the closest to cracking.

We can console ourselves with the knowledge that real camarederie wouldn’t have turned sour so easily. Although, that can feel quite hollow in the face of what seems to be the end of the world. And it is the end of a world, just not the world.

Maybe all the noise that adults make about teenagers and peer pressure is really adults projecting their own challenges with social resistance. Who knows? Anyway, enough psychobabble from me; I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

My point is…if you can either insulate yourself from or completely break through social resistance, then you’re well on your way to becoming unstoppable. For good or ill.

So, if in doubt? Screw ‘em. They’re replaceable. As callous as that may sound, it’s really no more callous than the open derision of people making feeble attempts to put you in what they presume to be your place. A place that’s invariably insultingly low. If anything, breaking social resistance is an act of charity, an act of love for at least one person — you — which is more love than your would-be detractors are showing anyone at the moment in question.

Social resistance is…it’s almost like a prank. I’m speaking purely in a metaphorical sense, but it does seem as though it’s all this sort of Zen-like episode of Punk’d on a massive scale, and the joke is on you. Mmm…Punk’d isn’t really the most apropos comparison; I was just feeling nostalgic about that show.

What I mean is this: it’s almost as though social resistance is difficult-seeming and difficult-looking by design, because once you can ignore, deflect or otherwise transcend social resistance, everything is, relatively speaking, a walk in the cake.

Maybe mental state alters behavior, and behavior alters mental state. And maybe the behavior of rejecting social resistance has profound effects on one’s mental state. And maybe these effects bleed into other areas and help us be more effective. And maybe that’s why we sometimes over-esteem celebrities and other people who have succeeded in one field: since experts can seem superhumanly good, we assume that they’re all-round superhumans.

I remember one time, writing out for an English friend, some of the various alternates of the sword (劍) character: 劍・劒・劔・釼・剣 … and she went “you see, I’ll never be able to do that [you must be magically talented]“…and it was kind of mini-heartbreaking because my intent had been to prove that any fool can learn kanji, not that I knew kanji. Daniel Coyle of Das Le El The Talent Code calls this the “HSE/Holy [Crap] Effect”.

Social resistance is like a matte painting of a formidable fence separating the worlds of those who do succeed (in many senses), and those who don’t. Once you realize the fence is fake, you simply walk off the set of the little Truman Show that had been going on and oh crap another pop culture reference. Thereafter, you may not become instantly unstoppable, but it will certainly take a heckuva lot more to faze you. By the way, “heckuva” sounds…Slavic if you read it a certain way.

So, it can pay to be a bit detached and solipsitic about it all. Like when your friends tells you about their drama and all you can do is laugh — you care for your friends, you’re just not taken in by the drama because you have the mental removal to watch it as farce. That kind of bemused detachment can be a great asset. And people may call you on it, and get upset at your lack of emotional abandon, but…more detachment will probably solve that as well.

The funny thing is, though, all of these ideas can be used to justify anything, good or bad. Then again, trains can be used for suicide, but we’re not outlawing them any time soon.

AJATT is often described as cultish. And it is, because I have carefully laid plans to whisk you all away to a compound in South America where we can watch anime and drink colored sugarwater. But really, what it is is that many paths, religious or secular, requiring significant investments of self, time and resources, are likely to at some point bring one into some level of conflict with common behaviors and levels of self-management that are considered “normal”.

Case in point: one or two of my Japanese friends sometimes make fun of me learning Chinese, yet these same kids — the same ones doing the mocking — also wish they knew Chinese, and even make half-hearted attempts (book purchases) in that general direction. Whenever we’re geeking out by my bookshelf, and things go quiet for a while, and the dust settles, they invariably sigh something we might loosely translate as: “dag, yo…I wonna know me some Chah-nese”.

If and when these conflicts occur, sometimes, compromise and negotation work. Other times, resolute boldness is called for. I don’t know which will be which for you. For example, I don’t object to people suggesting that my daily life be composed of a variety of activities. But I will happily walk, run and fly over, around and through people who think they have the authority to decide or even suggest the details (time, place and content) of those activities. Those are my “rules”, if you will. Yours may differ.

Let me give you a little story from the halcyon days of when AJATT was just me being me in Utah. My friends wanted us to watch Pulp Fiction together…in the living room. I like hanging out with people while not doing the same thing, so I was like…yeah, cool, whatever. I didn’t want to watch something in English, but I was willing to watch it with them, so I was going to read Japanese on my laptop while they watched. I often read and watch at the same time.

This compromise upset them. They wanted the movie to be watched in their way (laptopless) on their timetable (now). These were hardcore computer geeks; they knew about geeking out; they should have known better. In the end, after about 90 seconds of failed explanation, I simply went and did something else in Japanese. They got even more upset. About eighteen months later, one of the people who had been there apologized for the entire incident; in his own words, I had been right and he wrong; he hadn’t realized what I was trying to do; he now knew that I had needed to do what I did.

Rarely is all this drama an issue; usually, it doesn’t even come up. But sometimes you do have to choose between something you really want and like, and just being liked. Fortunately, when you choose the former, you do tend to get new likers. Either completely new people, or the same old people post-change-of-heart.

Do what you need to do. Do what makes you happy and comfortable. Getting the job done? Well, that counts as part of “comfort”. Sucking at Japanese made me uncomfortable. So, go become great at Japanese or whatever .

Just out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of when they started to fall behind in something and they eventually caught up by making it more fun/changing their style? I’m not doubting that this is the way to go; it’s just that I’d like a concrete example.

Lately I’ve fallen behind with my sentence reps (whereas I have no problem maintaining an immersion environment)… I think the problem is that I’ve come to look at the reps as “work/studying” (whereas as anime is always “recreational”)… even after deleting a decent chunk of sentences, the problem seems to persist. I’m currently almost a week behind in reps, and still can’t motivate myself to get around to doing them. I’ve obviously been doing something wrong, but I can’t figure out what.

Here is my response:

@Maya

Just one idea here (I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say):

Delete even more.

Don’t go to your SRS to do reps any more.

Go to delete.

Go for deletions. Deletions are your new “target metric”. Delete until you hit a sentence that you give a crap about. Then delete until you hit the next one like that.

You’re probably overloaded with “should-learn” sentences — “shoulders“, like I was in Cantonese. Or maybe you have cool sentences, but they lack the punch they had when you entered them. Those are now “shoulders”, too.

Get rid of anything even remotely sucky. Delete. Delete. Delete. Don’t worry. You obviously don’t need them. You’ve been off the SRS a whole week, right? That’s a sign. A big, freaking sign.

Delete boring things from your SRS, otherwise they will “delete” you — they will “make” you never want to touch that SRS again.

Basically, Maya, you great discoverer of all things Disney and Japanese, you have two choices.

a) Delete bad sentences, however many there may be, so that you can do at least *some* SRSing.
b) Never SRS again for the rest of your life.

Right now, you’re on a collision course with (b).

Don’t get rid of the whole deck in one go. A lot of people do that. I personally think that’s ill-advised. Delete. One by one. There will be some leftover items — “keepers“. The keepers will be the seeds of a renewed deck, a deck of keepers (mostly), a deck that makes you actually want to do reps. The keepers will have a pattern to them — format, length, source, content, whatever — that will guide you in acquiring more keepers.

If you’ve got a really sucky deck, you could end up literally halving your cardcount — I once did. In the extreme, you could end up with only 10% of your original deck. No biggie. Let it go. Fuhgeddaboutit. Remember what’s at stake. Sentences are interchangeable. Motivation to learn is not.

Let me share some of my Japanese sentence deck stats for today with you, to give you a quantitative perspective on the whole thing:

• Repcount: 135
• Added: 2 cards
• Deleted: 100 cards.
• Total: ~235 cards processed, ~42% deleted.

135 reps and 100 deletions is infinitely better than 0 reps and 0 deletions. Now let’s extrapolate — assuming about the exact same daily performance over the course of one week, that comes to nearly 1000 reps and 700 deletions. 1000 to 0. That’s not 1000 times better, M-star. That’s  “even more infinitely better” than 0 reps and 0 deletions.  ∞:0 ratio.

So, go break some eggs and make that omelette .

We all have such noble intentions with our sentences. We all want to be good kids; we want to do the right thing; we want to eat everything that’s given us. But being an obedient doormat and being an effective learner are not, repeat, not the same thing.

Know your “rights”. The right to enjoyment (= the right to veto boredom) is one that school — my favorite scapegoat for everything — would tend to try to discourage you from exercising, so we often forget that we even have it; we equate exercising it with being “lazy”, unproductive, irresponsible. But now you know to say no to uninteresting sentences.

You can keep being liberal about what enters your SRS deck, just be liberal about what leaves it, as well. Garbage in, garbage out.

Written from painful and rather embarrassing-to-share experience,

Khatz

Epilogue

Through the magic of deletion, Maya has since turned SRSing from a chore, back into a game and now lives a full, happy, besentenced life . In her own words:

Thanks to everyone for their advice!

To sum things up, I’ve gone through my deck and deleted ~450 or so cards that were boring/unpleasant/so easy that they had become useless. I’m not quite done yet; I can still realistically see myself deleting another 50-200 cards, but I think I’m getting much closer now.

I’ve also decided to change the pace at which I add/learn sentences. When I started doing sentences, I wasn’t actually done with RTK; I was just impatient, and I figured that I could “pick up” the remaining kanji on the go. This never happened/isn’t likely to happen, and my incomplete knowledge of kanji is creating problems for me, so I want to go back and finish learning them properly. I’ll still add/learn sentences, but at a much slower rate (at least temporarily); I actually see this as a really good thing, because it will encourage me to only add a small quantity of really good sentences, instead of adding tons of nonsense, as I seem to have been doing the past while. Needless to say, my overall immersion environment won’t change.

Thanks to everyone for your advice/anecdotes/encouragement!

…

Today was my first day doing reps anew – I went through a hundred of ‘em in under half an hour. This definitely wouldn’t have been possible a couple weeks ago

Everything felt fresh and simple <3

If and when you do fall off, get back on it like nothing happened. Redraw. New point.

Because the temptation will be to purge the binge or binge the purge. But the binge-purge cycle is as dangerous as it is unproductive.

When you’ve been inconsistent with a behavior you want to instill, the socially-trained response (“instinct”) is to punish yourself by giving yourself more to do — stricter rules, extra work, “catch up” work. A bit of self-flagellation, you know. A nice crack of the old flagellum. WHAPEW!

Basically, you say to yourself “OK, I’ve been binging on bad things for a while now, so let me purge for a little while and THEN go back to a normal flatline”.

But that just feeds the cycle. Because, you see, purging is just another form of binging. Purging is just binging on good. Which seems like a good enough idea, certainly the intent behind it is good, but the effect is to teach yourself that:

“Binging is how we solve problems”.

It’s kind of like racism. On the surface, white supremacists seem to hate darkies and Jews. But really what they’re saying is:

“Division, hate and violence is how we solve problems”.

So what happens is that white supremacists can end up scaring up, beating up and killing up almost as many white people (“race traitors”) as they do darkies and Juden and Irish and whomever the heck else. They even write books about crucifying “their own”. Their paradigm demands it. Any movement based on division, hate and violence tends to self-destruct in this way, because while its members may think that their hate has specificity, in truth they are operating under a more general principle that inevitably begins to dictate their actions and responses to anyone of any ethnicity in any adverse situation.

_{[Verily, if you look at something like the two "World" Wars, what you see is essentially Western European slander, hatred and violence, which had been successfully exported worldwide in the form of colonialism, finally coming home to roost. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a similar deal: the Romans had tried to put a firewall around Rome proper -- in fact, the whole Italian peninsula -- essentially saying "aw'right, lads -- we impose order through military conquest out there but not in 'ere". It worked well enough for a while. Eventually, though, a Gaius called Caesar came along and was like: "Roman, puh-leeze! Screw dat noise, I'ma conqua anda bringa da orda all over dis Appian muthafarquad!", because "military conquest is how we solve problems and impose order" was the real, core lesson of Roman politics. And the rest really is history. Live by the gladius, die by the gladius, if you will. Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena, baby...you know you loves it!]}

Similarly, binging and purging demands more binging and purging. Binge-purge is just a manifestation of a “binge meta-behavior”. _{The more I make up these words, the more I start sounding like Bucky Fuller — you know, insightful, but obviously self-educated because he uses all these neologisms and compound words that aren’t in mainstream academic literature. Maybe I should go to grad school and finally earn my professors’ unconditional love and respect…’Fill that surrogate dad-sized hole in my heart…}

_{You’re all: “Khatz, you’re nowhere near as cool as Bucky Fuller”. Well, neither are you, so SCREW OFF the bottle cap!}

_{Where was I…}

_{Oh yeah.} In fact, it’s more than a behavior — it’s a way of life. It’s almost like a conditioned reflex whereby as soon as you “hear the bell” of a certain type of situation, you almost unconsciously, involuntarily start binging and purging.

So we say: “one last purge(=’good’ binge), and then I’ll go back to flatline”. But flatline never comes. Just like the day you’re going to use all that cool stuff you have locked up in the attic…never comes.

Binge-purge, or, more accurately, “binge-binge” or “plus-binge-minus-binge” is like the Ring of Power in Lord of the Maori Actors with Ridiculously Manly Thighs and Dreadlocks. It cannot be used for good — at least not by you or me. It’s just that unwieldly. Once you pick it up and put it on, any valiant attempts to direct its power in space and time tend to fall flat.

Even using it against itself as some form of punishment, tends to fail. Generally speaking, the binge-binge cycle cannot be used to break itself any more than a tangled power cord can be used to untangle another tangled power cord. It cannot take you to your goals because the violence of the cycle will destroy you before you reach them — maybe not the very first time, but somewhere along the way.

Large individual goals are only healthily reached by consistency over time. By habit. Really, the only way to teach yourself this gradual behavior is by engaging in it. You can’t get yourself to be gradual and go at a manageable pace by removing the privilege of moving at this pace as soon as you slip up. Accept the slip-up as a natural part of the process. The way to get over those violent pendulum movements is to stop hitting the pendulum so violently…get a hold on it and guide it gently.

You will probably run off course a little bit this year, at some point. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Far from it. I hear aeroplanes spend the majority of their flying time technically off-course (is that true?). They just correct quickly and often.

Redraw. Correct. New point. New day. New nano-action. Continue. Yes, it is that easy. Yes, you can let go of punishment and still excel – what, you think I got my cats to come to me when I call them by beating them over the head? “OI! I’M TALKING TO YOU, MAMMAL! LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE FELINE, AND DESPAIR!”. Naw, dude. They hate Shelley.

Be nice to yourself. When you fall, just get up and keep walking. Make small corrections if necessary, but emotionally, let it be like nothing the heck happened. Like you meant to do it. It’s not like you killed someone (_{right?…right? wait, what? oh my…OK…No it’s NOT okay!}). Take the energy you were going to use for feeling guilty, and put it into moving forward.

So freaking what? It’s just another day. We all need to calm down a little. Even me telling you to calm down is probably just fueling the excitement, isn’t it?

Are you going to make a resolution? Good luck with that. I doubt you’ll even remember it by early March.

Screw resolutions. I’m going to show you how to actually get things done.

_{And while we’re ranting: I hate my writing. I hate this whole website. I even hate people who hate my writing because they remind me of all the hate I already have. If this site were a piece of paper, I’d have burned it long ago. Fortunately, the blog medium has largely prevented these perfectionistic tendencies coming out and destroying whatever little good some of you may gain from reading this.}

_{The reason I hate this mother is because it almost never comes out the way I’m thinking of it. There are these beautiful and rather tingly constructions in my mind and they come out so…bland. So tingleless.}

In “The Fork, The Choice and You“, I was trying to write something that it might perhaps be better to draw. So I went ahead and drew it.

Behold! The following paths of achievement (or lack thereof): the pothead, the planner and the player.

The Pothead Model

“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…whoa…yeah”.

Problems: Single, discrete point — a fantasy, a dream — which is a good start, but no path, no granularity, no action, no nothing.

The Planner Model

Problems: Has goal (point) and path (line), but the path lacks granularity and elasticity. It is conceptually beautiful and perfectly smooth, but unworkable except under perfect (i.e. rarely fulfilled) conditions. The planner’s inability to stay on the line is frequently a cause of stress, pain and ultimately failure.

At this time of year, society at large offers us the path of the planner. And those of us who take it tend to suffer so much that we fall off the graph. I submit to you that we should reject this model.

The Player Model

• The player has fun because it’s all a game.
• Unlike the planner, who has this perfect, smooth, continous line she’s trying to force herself onto, the player deals in tiny, discrete, individual points (AKA choices/forks). The player’s path is digital. Over time, she causes the points to form a trend, but there is no actual line.
• At every point, she makes a choice that is both fun and takes her closer to the goal.
• There are thousands of these points.
• The player has a goal but the focus is on the immediate next action.
• The player does not allow the goal to overwhelm her with its vertical or horizontal distance.
• The player does not allow “imperfections” and deviations to perturb her. She accepts deviations, and then corrects or even exploits them.
• The player may often actively seek new, advantageous deviations through playful experiments. She’s on for the ride.

Beyond immediate necessity, the player forgets about both the past and the future. There is no burden of regret, no crushingly grand aspirations (there are grand aspirations, she just doesn’t let them get in the way). The real question is: Right here, right now, what do we do next? What do we play next?
_{[By the way -- this idea of using time rather than being used by it is one suggested by Eckhart Tolle in his "The Power of Now" -- don't be deterred by all the shady quasi-religious hype; between the covers is actually one of the best books about focus and concentration ever written].}

Japanesewise the key is this: there are gaps. Gaps in your immersion. Gaps in your implementation. Gaps in…I dunno…your teeth? You may make mistakes, you may fall off the horse. Fine. Big deal. What matters is what you do next. Every moment is New Year’s. Every moment is a chance to reset. Every moment, pretend the entire world has just been recreated and redrawn from scratch.

It is a game. If you’re not having fun, it’s because you’re doing it wrong. Which is not to say that there’s only one right way — there isn’t. But if you’re bored, then the way you’re doing it clearly has problems. Make it fun. You will know when you’re having fun. Don’t, don’t, do not be anal retentive and start asking what “fun” is. You know what it is. And if you don’t, then you’re gone in a way far beyond my ability to help you . I officially refuse to define fun.

When you touch something hot, you feel pain: this is your body trying to save your hand from being hurt. Boredom is intellectual pain. Boredom is your body’s way of telling you to change the situation. Ignore it to your own detriment. If you try to just fight through the boredom, your brain is just going to puke it all up anyhow. Your brain is trying to help you out by telling you: “Hey!…Nothing’s getting remembered or learned right now”.

Be A Player: Poke Dots Into Reality. There Is No Line

As you read this website, I do not want you to follow my advice. I do not want you to take my advice. I want you to use my advice. You cannot be me, nor would you want to. You can be much better than that. Much better. You will be faced with situations that I never faced; you may have preferences that I do not. Follow my trend — I think I offer a good one — but pick your own points: there is no line.
_{[Case in point: my least favorite type of question is "how many kanji/sentences should I do per day"? As many as you pleasantly and consistently can. Stop asking to be commanded (ironically enough, if you were to stop asking to be commanded because of that last sentence, you would in fact be obeying a command...but anyhoo). Do what you want. Try a few "points" and see which ones work for you.]}

The planner’s path is goal-focussed. Contemporary personal development literature is awash in goalism. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s not working. When’s the last time a goal got someone to stop smoking? You can goal it up up the wazoo and nothing will change. The goal part is trivial. You can make up a goal half-asleep. I think we already set goals naturally — whenever we want something, that’s a goal. And don’t give me this “a goal is a dream with a deadline” crap, because if it’s a cool enough goal, there’s probably no way you’re going to know enough about the domain to set a real final deadline, so now you’ll just be scaring yourself with images of death (deadline).

Timeframes, yes; timeboxing, yes; deadlines, no. What you really need is (1) a new identity which can produce (2) simple guidelines _{(I’d say one guideline is enough, three is the max — you have to be able to recall them instantly)} for point-by-point behavior, “rules of engagement” if you will — the simple AJATT algorithm in “The Fork, The Choice and You” is a good example.

On the player’s path, each of those points/forks/choices is a chance to change the future — to alter reality itself in a small way. Be a player. I’m not saying “abandon all thought of goals” — never let ideology get in the way of something truly useful — but I am saying let it go; leave well enough alone; it’s not helping like you think it is. Stop massaging these great big “mission statements”; that crap is nothing but empty prose. Stop getting aroused, confused and intimidated by all these “goalistic rituals” that are taking over our society and start poking tiny, pin-sized holes into reality. No one fails for lack of a goal, only for a lack of dots. Dot, dot, dot, dot…………………………

Playing The Meta-Game of AJATT

A lot of what we call personal development was and is actually made for corporate and military training.  Stephen Covey? David Allen? Those boys are just manual writers for corporate soldiers, especially ones at or aiming for the “colonel” level. And maybe stuff like that works in large armies and corporations, who struggle just to communicate intentions and keep everyone singing from the same songsheet. But individuals and tiny groups aren’t like that.

We don’t have the sheer man-hours to waste writing impressive plans that are just going to be thrown out anyhow. But we can be nimble. We can be ad hoc. We can be point-by-point. We may appear to have less and be less, but we end up using it far better and thus accomplishing more and becoming more. We — individuals and tiny groups — can fail more because failure is cheaper for us; we can correct and exploit any situation — failure or otherwise — almost instantly.

Have you ever seen those big, round magnifying mirrors that chicks use to do their make-up? You know, the kind that show all your skin’s pores and tiny blemishes and make you depressed to be alive — even if you’re a guy who thought he was decent-looking? I finally understand why women use foundation — it’s the only thing that makes looking at yourself in one of those things bearable. Anyway, a large organization is like one of those. A large organization is like a huge magnifying device. And since a large organization magnifies everything, it also magnifies screw-ups.

A large org can make 10 million good things, but if it makes a mistake, it now has 10 million c-r-a-p things! Result? Large orgs (schools, companies, etc.) are defensive — they don’t try to be good, and they definitely don’t try to have fun, they just try to not-screw-up, not-make-misakes, follow-the-manual. This means that a large org has to suppress both success and failure for its own safety and indeed for the safety of the world at large. We couldn’t well afford to have elephants tripping up all over the place. When 10 million Firestone tires blow up, we have a freaking problem. And a giggly little: “Whoops! Haha – I meant to do that!“, will not cut it.

All of which explains why big companies keep buying up little ones — the little ones are able to think and twist and spin and pivot and maneuver and act and react and fail and deviate and correct and exploit far better and far faster. A big company is just happy to be alive and walking straight. A big company has to kill its creativity, because creativity is all these messy points and a big company wants — needs — a perfect, straight line. When working at full scale, a big company cannot safely and continuously invent and refine cool processes, it can only execute them. _{Even the great Sony purchases more of its technology than meets the consumer eye, despite having 100,000 incredibly smart employees and dedicated R&D labs.}

And that, my war-oriented friends, also explains why a regular army can essentially never win against guerilla tactics. The flexibility and speed of adaptation does not even compare. Guerilla tactics are why America has a President and not a Queen, why Mao came to rule China, why Vietnam is a single country, why I can live wherever I want in Kenya, why even Alexander the Great and Napoleon got royally pwned (in Afghanistan and Russia, respectively) and why an AJATTeer can absolutely d-e-s-t-r-o-y someone who depended on Japanese classes. Because even if the raw AJATT process weren’t better, the meta-process — make it fun, iterate lots, fail lots and tweak to win — is virtually indestructible.

This is also why school sucks for learning, because it kills your maneuverability in order to get you to follow someone else’s plan that’s easier to grade. Schools couldn’t give a pygmy shrew’s buttocks whether you learn or not; they’re just happy to be alive and walking straight. Schools just want you to look good, sit still and shut up so they can push you down the conveyor belt and yell out “next!”. They may not be intentionally callous, but they certainly end up being about as warm as Ann Coulter on a December evening in Minnesota _{(Minne-freaking-sota winters…oh my gosh…MOMMY, WHY DOES IT HURT MY LUNGS WHEN I BREATHE? And why do shrill, somewhat racist, slightly anti-Semitic women…turn me on? It’s like: “if you wanna get with me, Khatzumoto, you have to alter my fundamental beliefs about humanity! *Diagonal* *Finger* *Snap*!”)}. Good for the school. Not good for you.

So don’t treat AJATT like school and try to mold yourself to fit The Plan^TM, because even AJATT will suck if you do it like that. Mold the plan to fit you as you go along. I didn’t make this so you could be a cog in the machine, I made it so that you would own the machine, use the machine, customize the machine. You don’t need a license, just open the box and fiddle with it. _{[I think we'll see an explosion of learning and invention when more concrete and abstract "boxes" like this -- creation, discovery and execution processes -- are open for us to see. In that sense, and that sense alone, people's questions about AJATT minutiae are legitimate, if not necessarily important.]}

You know, I’m always amused that people are impressed that I learned Japanese without classes. I say, I want to meet the guy who did get fluent because of classes; that shiitake mushroom would impress me!!! If that guy writes a book or blook, listen to HIM! It never surprises me any more that people like Edison, the Wright Brothers and young William Kamkwamba had little or no formal education; it would surprise me if they did.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the basic idea. Kinda. Sorta. It still doesn’t read the way it actually looks in my mind, but hopefully this all makes things a little clearer. I don’t know if what I’m saying applies that widely. But it applied for self-directed learning/acquisition/becoming Japanese. If you have any questions or insights, feel free to share them with the whole gang.

What are you going to do next?

Ultimate goals are heavy; they weigh on the soul. They’re useful and everything, but you can’t have them in your head all the time because the difference between that ultimate goal and your current state can be quite heart-crushingly large.

Track records can be depressing. You’re just going to be seeing all you haven’t been doing. I wouldn’t say never look at these, but if you don’t keep your exposure down, it will make you sick.

Overall plans are similarly crushing. The thought, the sight of all that’s still left to do — that long, empty, open road — is not exciting.

Which leaves your next choice. Your immediate next action.
It’s just one thing.
It’s simple.
It’s practically instant gratification.

Let’s say your ultimate goal is Japanese fluency.
Your track record is spotty or non-existent.
Your overall plan is to follow something along the lines of AJATT/AntiMoon.

What is your next choice?
Simple: Do something. Anything. In Japanese. Anything counts.
ANYthing.
Any. Thing.

One simple choice. Through this one simple choice. you’re bringing yourself closer to the ultimate goal; you’re building a new, better track record and you’re following the overall plan.

That’s all there is to it.

When I say I am not smart, have no talent, and have no willpower, a lot of people think I’m being modest. Trust me. I am neither smart nor talented nor “disciplined”.

With Japanese, I just made simple, local choices. At every fork in the road, I chose Japanese. That is sum total of “the plan”. If there is truly no choice, then it’s obviously not a fork. But you would be surprised how many opportunities there are to fit Japanese in some crack somewhere somehow (because concurrency counts).

This is an incredibly dumb algorithm. It is so dumb that a computer could do it. Even a lazy, good-for-nothing boy from Kenya who forgets to shower all the time — such a boy could execute this algorithm.

Observe, a pseudocode implementation of the basic AJATT algorithm.

while ( breathing )
    if ( anyOpportunityExists )
        doJapanese(anything)
    else takeNextOpportunity(asap)

It’s that simple. Make the big plans if you want. Keep the logs if you want. But know that the forks in the road are where things actually get decided.

“Too many pages, dawg”.

In Part 1 of this open-ended, multi-part series, I’d like to discuss with you, in my signature casual, opinionated, poorly-sourced and screw-you-if-you-disagree-with-me-because-I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong-mofo way…what the deal is with personal development. So…

What is the deal with personal development anyway?

Aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Is it worth your time?

No, really, though, aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Isn’t it stuff we all know already, anyhow?

Isn’t it “unscientific”?

Aren’t they just making money telling us what we want to hear?

Aren’t they just trying to sell us stuff?

And, perhaps most constructively:

How does a sane, “open-minded” person (just as an aside: “open-minded”, to me, means “people who agree with me, or are open to agreeing with me, or say things that I agree with, or am open to agreeing with”; I told you this was going to be hard-hitting stuff, man….I’m pointing a long, thick, juicy central digit in the general direction of feigned objectivity) navigate the treacherous waters of what is, admittedly, a comically B.S.-filled field.

If personal development is fugu, that poisonous, Japanese seafood delicacy, how do you get at the tasty meat without (sometimes literally) dying? That perhaps is the core question that this series will seek to answer. Along the way, in future posts, I may share some of my own guidelines, recommendations and disrecommendations.

I’ll tell you right now. I’m just one person. I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I don’t have the answers, period. I’m not saying this to be humble. I’m saying this because it makes me look good. I’m saying this so that even if I turn out to be wrong I can be like: “yeah, dude, I totally saw that coming”; I can act like I anticipated the whole deal and it was all part of the contingency plan.

Maybe I should start some of that editing…Anyway, without further ado:

My Story

Since this is all anecdotal anyway, perhaps it makes sense to share with you, the story of my journey towards rather carefully and selectively “embracing” personal development.

I grew up watching Blackadder, Animaniacs and Tiny Toons. We’re not just reminiscing about old TV shows here; this is important information. You see, what I’m trying to demonstrate is that I grew up soaked in irony. Indeed, I grew up so soaked in irony, that I didn’t even know what I was being ironic about: my exposure to irony tended to precede my exposure to the actual phenomenon in question. Think about it — Animaniacs and Tiny Toons had all those sarcastic references to Don Knotts. Yet but…how many kids growing up in the early 1990s actually knew who Don Knotts even was, really (perhaps that was part of the joke…I dunno)? Yet but ([I'm liking this new word]) we all yucked it up.

Bottom line; I used to think that personal development was all a bunch of crap. Grade A B.S. I had never really read any. I had never been exposed to any — not in a meaningful quantity. But I knew it was a bunch of crap. I ate blasé for breakfast, sarcasm for lunch and whatever passed for acerbic wit for dinner. Personal development, good or bad, is an inherently….naïve, innocent, hopeful field. There was no room for that in my life.

Let me be clear, though: personal development mostly is a bunch of crap. But the teeny, tiny little bit of good that is there is, arguably, too good to ignore. Too. Good. To. Ignore. Kind of like how air is mostly not oxygen, or how it’s the micronutrients (rather than macro-) in our food that really swing our health one way or another. Not quite the same level of importance to life, but you get the idea — value can sometimes be inversely proportional to size.

So, one day when I was about 14, I was watching televisory pictomatograms (yes, TV) with one of my sisters. Upon the tele-vision, Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don’t worry, I already knew Oprah was lame. I’m hip.

At one point, Oprah asks Arnold if he, an unknown young man from a small country in central Europe, had ever imagined himself being a Hollywood movie star. Arnold replies that he had always known he was going to be a star; he had always pictured himself being in Hollywood, being the dude. And you know he was being frank, because he’s Austrian. Sarcasm isn’t big in Austria (Austrians: “yeah it is!”).

My 14 year old self let out a triumphant: “yeeeeah, right”. To which my sister retorted: “No, [Khatzumoto], some people do have a clear vision of themselves”.

Women are stupid. Even the president of Harvard said so. And you can’t argue with Harvard — it’s a top-tier university. So screw you.

Knowing that all the schooling, suffrage and Steinem was going to her head, I paid my sister’s remarks no serious attention (“Ha, women…better get a Y chromosome before you start running that mouth!”). But, somehow, the memory of her gentle, feminine words remained with me. I am, after all, half woman on my mother’s side.

By the way, last time I made jokes about women here, someone took it seriously. So I’m going to make things clear right here and now: I am not joking; I am actually a misogynist. Women reading this: Why are you even online? Is there no kitchen where you are? Does your husband/father know you’re reading unsupervised?

Now that we have that out of the way…

My sister’s words stayed with me…blah blah…To this day yaddah yaddah…But it’s not like I had acted on them.

Fast forward to college, and I started collecting inspiring quotes. Tons and tons of them. I became a magnet for pithy aphorisms encouraging diligence, perseverance, and general pursuit of ownage. As time has gone on, I’ve developed my own “lazy” style of goal achievement, that renders a lot of the stuff I used to read quite quaintly obsolete, but those things served their purpose when they did.

College in the US was the first time I had to actually study on a regular basis; my earlier, British-style school experience had all been about end-of-term exams, so you could goof around until the eleventh hour, at which point you would invariably pull a Frosted Flakes-fueled feat of short-term memory (“this is grrrrrrreat!” No? Not funny? No? Anyone? No?). Also, your parents would suddenly become incredibly religious. _{I kid you not — one time, when I was 13, my mother drove me to a convent (a massive facility full of women, so far so good), and there were these Maltese nuns and they started touching me (but they’re women, so it’s okay) and my Mum’s all: “pray upon this child by the laying upon of hands”, and I’m like “mother, ok, (1) you don’t believe in freaking anything — you’re so cynical you don’t even believe in cynicism — and (2) you are not and have never at any point in your life been Catholic — you don’t even like these people; you’ve been slagging off the Catholic church my entire life, always calling them mafiosi and…” and she’s like: “(shrug)”}.

The requirements of my new American environment led me to seek and find gems like Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know. I read many other books about studying, and they all had their moments, but WSSK definitely stood out the most. WSSK silently and wordlessly impressed upon me this most wonderful idea: that I could independently read a book about how to get something done, and use it to get that thing done better.

Meta-learning — learning about learning — was a huge revelation for me. They don’t teach meta-learning at schools. Not even at the handsomely-priced ones that I was sent to. Everything’s either “hard work” or “talent”. It’s either struggle or innate ability. WSSK showed me a third way. WSSK is, for all intents and purposes, a personal development book.

AJATT the process, as I executed it while at college, was not directly inspired by ideas in the personal development/human performance/self-help/whatever the heck we’re calling it movement; it was just a childish game I played and got amazing, socially-significant results with (“look, Mom! I watched all this TV and now I can speak Japanese!”). But, of course, as I have come to write AJATT the site, it’s become clear to me that there were a lot of ideas that I used or otherwise independently arrived at, that the personal development people have been talking about for years.

Somewhere in there, it occurred to me that (1) success with Japanese could perhaps be generalized, not just to other languages but to other areas of life, and (2) a lot of those people with the inspiring quotes had written entire books filled with their ideas. And this is what led me down the slippery path of collecting and applying ideas to increase happiness and productivity. Coz, gosh, heaven forbid one should actually make a direct, intelligent, conscious effort to improve one’s life.

What has personal development done for me, really? Apart from “just” help me get stuff done and feel better about myself? Well, I think it can actually be hard to clearly quantify what good personal development does. Because, at the end of the day, it is your actions that make the change — books, videos and seminars are just inert ink, bits and air vibrations. We all love a clear, unambiguous: “Tony Robbins saved me two million dollars” type testimonial, but real-life causality is a bit murkier; maybe a lot of contributing factors form a web, rather than a simple, linear, hopscotch-like A-then-B chain; you’re smart enough to know that.

So action takes the day in the end. Having said that, it is the ideas in personal development books that can encourage thoughts that encourage those actions in the first place. _{(Also, sometimes you have ideas that are “in-process”, and you don’t want to share them before they’ve reached maturity, because people’s idle comments can be unnecessarily distracting, and threaten the open-mindedness and patience that is necessary in experiments on one’s life — a good deal of what I’m doing falls into this category)}.

In any case, suffice it to say that PD’s done a lot for me, does a lot for me, and will continue to do a lot for me. I’d definitely say that personal development is why you have an AJATT site to enjoy — assuming you enjoy it, that is . Many adults have learned Japanese before me (in fact, I’ve met some of them), faster than me, funner than me, further than me, better than me. But few have had the confidence, consistency or follow-through to record and present their ideas and experiences to the world. And that’s a darn shame. The world always has room for another success story. In fact, there’s a neverending shortage. I love a good role model; I love a narrative I can aspire to: I was desperate for such a narrative back in the day. Hopefully, I can be a shining, well-lotioned example for you.

Where were we? Oh yeah…

The PD industry is full of crap. But you know what? So is the food service industry. Many children die of food-poisoning in the US because it is apparently acceptable to feed them crap, as in actual fecal matter. And not just any children — blond, white children — you know, the valuable kind, that actually contribute to society and make the world a better place to live. So, should we not abolish food? Right now? Today? I mean, it’s killing people. We can all take sterilized, nutritionally-balanced pills, and no children, valuable or ethnic, need ever die again. Aren’t those children’s lives worth the effort? We could save them, if we just abolished food for something better. Peer-reviewed, shrink-wrapped, “nutro-pills”^TM. Think about it.

Call straw-man all you like. Children are dying. And you’re letting them die.

But AJATT is a language blog. Why are we sitting here making yet more off-color jokes about white people _(clever) and writing outside of the blog’s core topic? Well, because, the sweet thing about PD books is that you can read them and then feed the ideas and techniques back into your language study. Language-learning method produces ideas; ideas feed language-learning method. Now, if that isn’t sexy, cyclical and self-referential, I don’t know what is. Positive feedback: taste the rainbow.

Thus concludes the first part of this series. Stay tuned for more baseless remarks about this complex social phenomenon.