So, I read, watch and listen to a lot of what might very generally be called “advice”.

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?)

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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.

You remember the original Tortoises and Hares post, right? Well, I got this really insightful email about it from a virulently handsome man named Chris Espinoza, and I want to share it with you here; I’ve highlighted some of the uber amazing parts for your reading convenience:

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

Remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare? Well, that fable is bollocks. You see, they got the personalities backwards.

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 then 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 .

In response to this article on binging and purging, I got this really cool comment from Maya, one of AJATT’s best link-suppliers:

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

hatever your goals this year, you will fall off the horse at some point. Probably. Perhaps you already have.

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.

It’s New Year’s.

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 deserves your closest attention is neither your ultimate goal, nor your track record, nor your overall plan, but your next choice.

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.

I hate writing long articles. Which is funny, because a lot of the articles on this site are long. So, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I hate setting out write long articles (in fact, faced with the prospect of a long article, I’m liable to not write anything at all), and that my articles grow long organically. That, and I only ever prune them for logic (no, I really do — Don’t laugh! Don’t make that face! Wot iz tha’ face?), grammar and spelling, not for length. It’s not like there’s a page limit…

“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.

I know you have kids.
I know you have a job.
I know you’re busy.
I know your friends are making fun of you.
I know your spouse is giving you funny looks.
I know people make double-takes when they see you holding a Japanese book.
I know you live in the boonies and there are no Japanese people around.
I know you don’t have language midi-chlorians like me and AppleMilk.
I know. 我知，我知，我知。

So let me ask you:

Are you the world’s b***h?

What are you going to do?
Is this how you want to play? Does the world own you? Does it have you turning tricks for cigarettes?
Are you going to keep being the world’s b***h?
Or are you going to bite its **** _[hand?] off, spit it out, wipe the blood off your face (and maybe use some mouthwash…you’re going to want to disinfect things somehow), and start making decisions for yourself?

…Or are you going to keep being the world’s b***h?
Because that’s a decision you can make, too.
You can decide to have the world decide for you — it’ll gladly tell you what to wear, who to be, where to live, how to live, what to put into your mouth, what to put into your mind, what to expect, what not to expect, what to accept, what to believe, what to read, what to watch, what to listen to, when to wake up, when to go to sleep, when and how to use what vehicle to go where it tells you…
Either way, you decide.
B***h.

I’m not saying you should ignore other people and follow my instructions — banana smoothie-guzzling, Japanese-speaking, 26-year-old cat owners probably shouldn’t be high on your list of mentors.
I’m merely suggesting that you might consider following your own instructions for a change. Whatever those instructions may be. And maybe you can’t change everything overnight, but guess who ultimately suffers most if you continue being a you-know-what for the next 2, 5, 10 and 50 years?

Don’t you think you deserve better?
Aren’t you worthy of dignity?
Isn’t the real improvement of your condition worth the temporary inconvenience of minor pattern disruptions? Especially disruptions to patterns you don’t like that much anyhow?

Well, that was all very family-friendly.
I think I’ve been watching far too much Oz…

You know what? I’m sorry. I have no right to talk to you this way. You come here to be inspired, not abused. Let’s put this whole foul-mouthed post behind us, OK? Let’s say a prayer together. Everyone always says AJATT is a cult anyway — let’s prove them right; let’s be spiritual soldiers together.

Here it is. The Language Learner’s Prayer.

Oh Richard Dawkins,

Grant me the serenity to quit whining about not being a child, the courage to show people where they can put it, and the wisdom to know when to ignore them and focus on input, which apparently is most of the time. Because any of that would be better than being the world’s b***h.

In the name of Karl Popper,

EOF.

In “the literature” (a lot of it very good literature, like Talent Is Overrated and The Talent Code), it’s often said that, you know, we need to do “deliberate practice”, meaning stuff that’s actually a little hard and painful for us. Through deliberate practice, we grow. The reason pros get good and amateurs don’t is because they don’t do enough of this deliberate practice.

Apparently, the amateurs stay in their “comfort zone”, doing easy things, and so never grow. The pros, meanwhile, “stretch themselves”, by working effortfully in their “growth zone”; leaving their comfort zone makes them stronger, faster, longer, thicker and harder.

Um…How do I put this politely…

Bollocks.

OK, “bollocks” is a strong word. It’s just, the thing is that these ideas are well and good in principle, but in practice they only hurt people. In practice, they will not get anyone to independently do what they need to do to reach pwnage. In practice, they boil down to a re-affirmation of a pattern of behavior that I rather prejudicially like to call ASM: “Anglo-Saxon Masochism” _{(here we go again)} — what many often call the “Protestant/Calvinist work ethic”: no pain, no gain, bee arch; suffering breeds character, mofo.

Unfortunately, in the absence of violence, fear and/or coercion (preferably all three), these ideas aren’t going to help anyone.

Don’t get me wrong: if you have someone there in your life who’s constantly ready and willing to beat, scare or otherwise force you into working, then ASM will be effective. Very effective _{a few people may die or suffer nervous breakdowns, but we usually just call that “natural selection”}. Many of the very best-regarded sports teams, schools and military organizations use it all the time.

But I can’t work like that — not independently. And I know you can’t, either. And I don’t want to live with fear, violence and coercion. Indeed, as soon as the apparatus of violence/fear/coercion is removed, many (former) sportsmen and soldiers become, well, fat people with lots of funny stories to tell about the good old days. And many former students become, well, fat people who used to know calculus.

We who speak English natively — and are therefore participating in the same wider society — have probably had some degree of ASM culturally ingrained in us; we’ve been indoctrinated pretty well. That’s why you and I have had so much trouble doing things you otherwise want to do — like acquire some form of knowledge or skill, or produce some kind of product or performance.

OK, let’s review. Simplistic cultural generalizations aside, here’s the deal:

1. Because of our training, our default pattern is to use fear, coercion and violence on ourselves.
2. The idea of comfort zone, growth zone and panic zone is probably accurate.
3. But, because of (1), too many of us think our panic zone is our growth zone. Put another way, we suck at measuring the distance between the comfort zone and the growth zone. In fact, it turns outs that the comfort zone and the growth zone are incredibly close together. What you think is your comfort zone is probably your growth zone; sustainable “deliberate practice” is much easier and much more enjoyable than most people are currently led to believe. Yes, as simple as a cloze deletion or a sentence recognition card is, you are actually learning. In fact, just for kicks I would like to rename the zones, as follows:

• Comfort Zone → Boredom Zone
• Growth Zone → Enjoyment Zone (aka The True Comfort Zone)
• Panic Zone → Panic Zone (aka Pain Zone)

I don’t like this “no pain, no gain” crap. And we don’t need it. Comfort and growth are not mutually exclusive. Discomfort and growth are not the same thing — if they were, people with ill-fitting shoes would be the happiest, most successful, most productive in the world . Growth feels good. Or, at least, it can. Amateurs don’t fail to get good because they stay in their “comfort” zone, they fail to get good because either:

1. They stay in their “boredom” zone, and this leads them to put in less time, or
2. They never feel right about spending more time on the activity because it’s so much fun — I have friends who could be professional writers who actively choose to avoid writing because “it’s fun”, or
3. Constant reboiling and three-day monking. They do eventually put in enough time, but it’s dissipated over far too many years to reach “critical mass“. All human skill is depends on memory in some form. Think of this memory as, to mix metaphors, a puddle of radioactive material. We need to add to this puddle faster than decay or evaporation can do away with it.

Anyway…

So, how do we get to that true comfort = enjoyment = growth zone? How do we get so that we’re consistently doing something? I’d give you a complicated formula, but neither you nor I would remember it, and what good is a good idea that you can’t keep in your head, ready to use, right? So here is what I do:

Set appearance/situational/environmental goals rather than action/completion goals. Rather than setting a goal to do the right thing, set a goal to be in the right place. Set a goal to show up. No more. NO MORE. Don’t get clever. Don’t try to achieve. As soon as you start getting clever and adding stuff, your body will rebel.

You don’t have to run tomorrow morning. You just have to have your shoes on and be standing outside. You don’t have to eat healthy food, you just have to have (only) healthy food in your house. Once you’ve fulfilled the situational goal, you can go back inside to eat potato chips (oh, wait…none in the house — better run to the grocery store to get some) and watch Robot Chicken (oh wait, I only have Japanese versions…) if you want.

You may think just “being there”, standing outside with your shoes on, doesn’t do anything, and doesn’t achieve anything. And you’re right. But you’re also wrong. Because by being there you have done some incredibly profound scale-tipping — you have made it easier to do something, than to not do it. You have turned an uphill mountain hike into a playful, downward slide. You are now working with gravity, instead of against it.

This is how and why I “executed” and continue to execute my Japanese project so well. I never set a goal to even listen to a specific number of hours of Japanese. That’s far too mendokusai. Count? Are you joking? This isn’t effing Sesame Street. I simply set a goal to be in a position/location such that there was Japanese entering my eyes and ears. My goal was to either be in a room where Japanese sounds could be heard, or to have my headphones on and Japanese playing in them (my music player only had Japanese things on it, so this was cake).

This is also why it was actually easier for me to go “all Japanese” than “some Japanese” — “all Japanese” requires no management overhead whatsoever. The only “management” I did and do was shopping for more Japanese stuff. And we all love getting new stuff .

Can you see the difference?

Situational/environmental goals are actually very powerful. And people already recognize their negative power; they just don’t realize that they also have positive power. Do you know why your parents didn’t let you hang out with the bad kids? Not because you were actively going to do bad stuff, but because simply being with the bad kids was enough such that the situation would almost inevitably take itself in a bad direction, with or without your intervention and good intentions.

Don’t work to achieve something. Let the environment do the work for you.

Don’t do the right thing. Just be in the right place.

Don’t change yourself. Just change your surroundings. Your surroundings will then change you — always.

OK, let’s hit out some more examples:

• Bad goal: Do/finish something.
• Good goal: Be where things (really) get done.

• Bad goal: Listen to Japanese.
• Good goal: Have (only) Japanese to listen to.

• Bad (action) goal: Read Japanese.
• Good (situational) goal: Have (only) Japanese books to read. _{Every-freaking-where — bag, bookshelf, bedroom, bathroom, car.}

• Bad (action) goal: Do SRS reps.
• Good (situational) goal: Have (only) SRS window open.

• Bad (action) goal: Go somewhere.
• Good (situational) goal: Be in car.

• Bad (action) goal: Write book.
• Good (situational) goal: Be at desk with writing tools.

In short, set up the right system (this does require some effort, but very little — we have a lot of economic/technological infrastructure that makes this very easy for us), and then let the system’s inertia carry you all the way to your goal. The other cool thing is that you get you get an instant “win”, you don’t have to wait to get something “right” or “finished”, to feel good.

There are no guarantees in terms of quantity and speed, but “little and often” is more than good enough in most situations. As I always say: no project ever dies of malnutrition, only of complete-and-absolute starvation. Most things fall through not because someone was doing too little, but because he wasn’t doing anything at all. Most people don’t fail at scheduling because of being bad at scheduling, but because they never even look at the schedules they so lovingly made.

Each of us is like a river. We want to take the proverbial path of least resistance. Trying to use our willpower all the time — trying to “do” and “finish” things — is like trying to get the cooperation of every molecule in the river at every turn: tiring. By changing our environment, we basically tweak the path in small, simple but significant ways. And then we can go back to being our lazy selves for the remaining ~99% of the time, sliding down a path that we have altered to lead us right where we want to go.

Be your river-like self. Don’t climb up to Japanese. Slide down into it. Don’t know how? Think something up, try something out. That 1300 grams of meat inside your skull isn’t for decoration and it isn’t for slogging; it’s there for making your life simpler, easier and happier .

If you identify and take care of the preconditions, then goal achievement can happen as a side-effect, as an afterthought — as if you weren’t even trying (and, in truth, you won’t be).

Anyway, that’s my two cents. You guys always give great feedback, so I’m excited to hear your stories and advice .

Spend some time around the old Internets, and you might start to hear a thing or two about how AJATT is “extreme”, Khatzumoto is “insane”, and “I want to learn Japanese but I don’t have time for that AJATT stuff; who does that guy think he is?! I have a right to watch reruns of Dawson’s Creek“.

Spend some time being alive, and you might get some kindly, herb tea-drinking, yoga-doing people say things to you like “slow down”, and “it doesn’t have to be so hardcore” and my all-time favorite of all time: “all in moderation“.

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“All in moderation”. Never has a phrase so bugged me. In all my life, never has an apparently reasonable-sounding piece of advice been so pregnant with mediocrity. It’s like a little perpetual-motion excuse factory. It’s the “get out of excellence free card” of life. It’s easily as bad as — perhaps worse than — the “you just have to be born with it” brand of stupidity.

A young kid wants to be an amazing golfer or mathematician or programmer, but a sinister alliance of parents, schoolteachers* and neighbors start saying things like “life isn’t all about success” and “she needs to be well-rounded and fit in with the other kids”, and “kids need to play in the mud and get bitten by ticks and catch a bit of Lyme disease now and then; that’s what childhood is about! Why, in my day…”

Let’s get a few things straight:

1. Life is about success. Don’t try to B.S. people and tell them it’s not. ESPECIALLY don’t try to B.S. children and tell them it’s not; it wastes valuable time, and forces them to spend good money later on repairing the damage. Half the reason personal development books even exist is to fix the forced “aim for the middle at all costs” brainwashing that so many kids are exposed to. The only question comes in what one defines as success. But to tell people that it is not about success is not merely to tell Santa-Clausian lies, but to commit a grave act of psychological abuse that will only hurt the listener later in life. See debt, wage slavery for details.

2. Even if you (not you — you’re a ravishingly good-looking person with piercing intelligence and impeccable taste in blogs (you read AJATT, don’t you?!) — I’m talking about the bumbling special needs cases who say things like “now, now, all in moderation”) are down for now, don’t be like alcoholics and try to pull everyone down with you.

3. I will take the childhood minus the tick-borne diseases, thank you very much

4. No one gives a flying fork about “your day”. “Our day” may have its weaknesses, but it is orders of magnitude better than “your day”. It would take obscene quantities of Larabars and Jelly Beans to get me to trade our day for your day.

Whenever someone wants to do something great, whenever someone wants to break free from the shackles of assumed wisdom, there always seems to be some idiot ready to whip out the “all in moderation” (AIM) card. Whenever someone’s aiming high, someone jealous of the would-be high-achiever will come out with this lupine idea in ovine vestments, and tell her to just AIM.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating going to extremes for the sake of going to extremes. I am not advocating hurting yourself — no good can come of one achieving oneself to death or injury. I am just saying this:

All in moderation.
Including moderation itself.

Most of the time, it’s fine to be moderate. But there are times, places and situations where one needs to be moderate about being moderate. There are times, places and situations where one needs to be thoroughly immoderate.

Things are such that we can only be immoderate about a few things. But it turns out that this immoderacy frequently makes for a better life for us and indeed the entire world. Remember friends, it was “moderate” in Europe 150 odd years ago to only bathe seasonally. It was “moderate” to perform surgery without washing hands. Yeah, that went well…

Native speakers — Japanese kids — never run away from Japanese; they never give up; they never make excuses; they never avoid; they never skip. They live an immoderately Japanese life. There is no stop; there is no break; there is no gap; there are no exceptions; it is never “a busy day”. No matter whether there are inside, outside, upstairs, downstairs, sick, well, happy, sad, tired, hyper, at home, on the road, bathing, walking, running…everything is in Japanese, all the time.

The same goes for native speakers of every language. That is why they own so hard. Not because it was how they were born, but because of how they have lived. Their language might as well be a force of nature. Most Japanese kids have been in a room without Japanese about as many times as they’ve been in a room without air. This is epic stuff, man! This is freaking…living with Baak Mei.

But wait! Hold the phone! Simmer down now! Simma dahn nah! Shouldn’t they be more moderate? Shouldn’t they be AIMing? Shouldn’t they be mixing in other languages — you know, to get “well-rounded” so they don’t overspecialize? They need a balanced linguistic diet, right? Japanese is just one of the many languages of the world, right?

Native speakers are the yardstick by which all linguistic success is measured. They are the gold standard. If we want to be golden, would it not behoove us to set aside our pride and excuses, and take a good, hard look at how this gold is actually made?

For their immoderate skill, native speakers pay an immoderate price in time. Let’s say (being very generous), that it takes a native speaker 12~18 years to reach adult level. Call it 150,000 hours. If each hour were worth a dollar, that would be $150,000. We “adult-onset native speakers” are wanting to “buy” a “product” that costs “childhood native speakers” “$150,000″ in time.

Understandably, we don’t want to pay that much. But if we get a $150,000 product for $10,000 or even $20,000 or even $30,000, i.e. at about 10% of the full price, shouldn’t we be overjoyed? It’s like buying a brand new $200 flatscreen monitor for $20. It’s a good freaking deal. Gosh, buy two or three.

But the AIMers are telling you “don’t aim so much”, “you’re not a native speaker, so it’s okay to be and sound like an illiterate halfwit”. The AIMers want us to have native-level rights without native-level responsibilities. The AIMers want us to “be moderate” and attempt to “buy” a $150,000 skillset for less than $1000 — that’s now like trying to buy that brand new $200 flatscreener for a few cents — all because of some nebulous, moralistic truism that never got anyone anywhere. Now who’s being immoderate?

Be immoderate.
Sometimes, it’s the most moderate, sensible thing you could possibly do.

_{*A vanilla, English-speaking-background American friend of mine had two parents who had been missionaries in Finland and both spoke fluent Finnish. When they had their first daughter, they decided to raise her bilingually in English and Finnish. Long story short, it appears that the school district more or less forced the parents to stop teaching the daughter — and subsequent children — any Finnish. Way to go. Which all seems to go against a point a made earlier, but…you know…deal}

martial arts
noun
any of the traditional forms of Oriental [um...I think we were looking for a better word here] self-defense or combat that utilize physical skill and coordination.
From Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

We think too much.

But we also think too little.

The thing is we think at the wrong times and in the wrong places.

And we fail to think at other times and places.

Overall the over-thinking is the greatest problem for us right now.
Though under-thinking can be quite a bit of an issue, too.

What the heck am I talking about? Well, here it is. You see.

Language is a martial art.
Language is not like a martial art.
Language is a martial art.

But where’s the self-defense or combat? Well, I’ll save you the semantic hair-splitting of discussing the price of illiteracy in a text-centric society. The part we want to focus on is the:

“physical skill and coordination”.

You have been tricked.
You have been misled.
By your own skill. Your own genius. Your own amazingness.

Language is martial art. And you are master of at least one language (you’re reading it right now). When it comes to the language you’re reading right now, you’re wearing a belt blacker than Malcolm X’s soul.

And it is this black belt that is screwing you over.
Malcolm X is screwing with your mind.
Because you are now so amazing at the language you are reading right now — your English is so amazing…that you now think in it.

You THINK in a martial art. That’s like…that’s like reading so much machine code that you write people emails in binary. That’s you right now.

But here’s the deal. Language is not thinking. Not initially, at least.
It is a martial art.
It is about physical skill and coordination.

That language is also a (the) tool for intellectual discourse blinds us to the fact that its acquisition and use are not fundamentally intellectual exercises.

This is why even stupid people (← the shot…it is so cheap ) can have good language skills.
This is why kids can perfectly recite ancient texts.

Language is a martial art. A sport. It is about physical things. Physically showing up. Physically staying there. Physically experiencing. Physically acting.

Fundamentally, language comes down two things.

1.     Vibrations of the air. We usually call this “sound”.
2.     Sight. I couldn’t think of a cooler way to put it.

Sound and sight.

No thinking. No worrying. No deadlines. No pride. No shame. Just sound and sight.

What are the organs of sound and sight?
Ears and eyes and (later — having built up your ear and eye skills) mouth. There’s a reason we call a language a “tongue”, rather than a “mind”.

If you want to “own” a language, if you want to “become” a language, and even if you’re just a beginner and it all seems impossible, or you’re an intermediate and it all seems interminable, or your advanced and it all seems (what does it seem like? unimprovable?)…You don’t need fear, and you don’t need worry and you don’t even need complex, newfangled methods.

All you need are sight and sound. All you need are your ears and eyes.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t yet understand what you’re listening to. No one starts out knowing anything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t yet understand what you’re reading.

Just focus on what goes into your eyes and ears. Just make sure that to the greatest extent humanly possible, EVERYTHING that goes into your eyes and ears is in the language you want to acquire.

You don’t have to think, you just have to be.
You don’t have to listen, you just have to hear.
You don’t have to read, you just have to see.

So if you are in doubt, if you are in fear, if you are trapped in cyclical, compulsive thinking, if you just don’t know what to do, if you are confused by criticism and contradiction and conflicting advice, then stop using your mind – it clearly isn’t ready yet. Instead, just use your body.

This is what the immersion environment is about.
It is not about moderation; it is not about tricks.
At its core, it is about burning all the ships.
It is about the physical act of placing and keeping your body in the situation it needs to be in.
There’s a reason people spend all that time practicing katas (check out these wooden dummy “SRS” videos). There’s a reason people who spend all their time arguing instead never seem to get anywhere (hint: the Internets are full of these people).

If there is only Japanese stuff in your life, then you will only do Japanese stuff. And if you keep living like that, then the Japanese will eventually get in your head. And stay there. Whether you like it or not.

Have fun, have laughs, screw around. Just do it all in Japanese. That’s the only language there is for you to do anything in anyway, right? You’re using Characterizer right now, right?

I don’t quite know how to put this into words; I don’t quite know how to get his across to you; it’s all so clear in my head and so weaksauce on the monitor. But I can at least say this: when you take care of the physical, the mental eventually starts to take care of itself (and probably vice versa).

You don’t have to control all the variables in order to achieve control of the entire situation. Like a row of dominoes, you only have to topple one, to topple them all. All you have to do is put your body into Japanese — if you just keep your body there, Japanese will then put itself into your mind. I am repeating, restating and reiterating for a reason.

Control where your body is and what is experiencing, and the rest shall fall into place. Leave your mind alone for now. It’ll catch up with you later.

Thanks for reading this rant. If you want more (and better-written ) info, you can check out the three books that inspired this article:

• 達人のサイエンス/ Mastery
• 続ける力
• 読書力

So, I’m there on the Internet, minding my own business, when BAM! The series of tubes conspires to hit me with this:

Hey Khatz, your website has really inspired me. I’m 15 years old, and I love Japanese culture. I’ve always wanted to be fluent in Japanese, but felt that it was impossible. However, one day I came across your site. At first I was like, “Whoa, this guy must be some kind of genius! Fluency in 18 months? Wow!” But then I got to thinking. I realized that you are just a normal guy who found a great (wait no, the only) way to achieve fluency, which is by the immersion process.

So I thought, “What the heck, I’ll buy Heisig’s books and try my best to live the life of a Japanese child.” I hadn’t gotten far when people began to notice what I was doing. My friends told me I was “crazy”, my teacher’s said this method had never been “scientifically tested”, and even my own parents said that what I was doing was “absolutely worthless”. I need some encouragement, Khatz. How did you overcome what other people thought about “all japanese all the time?” Can you give me any tips?

WARNING: I am about to go all New Agey on you. I will snap out of it. Actually, I’m not really going New Agey,at all, it’s just going to sound like I am.

The words people say and things people do to you…could be thought of as having a numerically quantifiable emotional content. Just to sound New Age, let’s call this quantity “energy” (said in my best Southern California accent: “ENerrrgy”).

Keep in mind that I am not saying any of this actually exists. It doesn’t. Not to my knowledge. It’s just a thought model…a way of representing an idea. It has no real physical existence (except, I guess, at the level of electrochemical action in the brain, but…anyway, whatever…)

So let’s call this “energy” (*cringe*), E for short, to give this essay the appearance of mathematical rigor. Pseudoscience for the win, baby!

• E = emotional “energy”.
• -E = Resistance
• +E = Encouragement.
• 0E = Indifference

Now, it would seem that the answer is to shut out all the -E and overwhelm it with +E. Or, even force people who are giving you -E to change sign. Unfortunately, contemporary society as a whole is unlikely to start actively giving you positive encouragement, because it’s far too cool for that. As it happens, though, it’s cheaper and easier to change yourself than to wait for the whole society to change for you. Thus, rather than go all Transformers, expending oodles of priceless time and effort on the acquisition of +E (energon cubes!), we need only realize that:

All that matters is the absolute value of E, |E|.

So let’s say “you’re crazy and you suck and it’ll never work” is -100 E, and “you were born to be Japanese; you have preternaturally large reproductive organs; Japanese is your destiny“, is +100 E. Either way, |E| = 100.

So you need to turn into a monster; a monster that only gets stronger the more it is attacked. Become an omnivore. Even if you eat a plant-based diet . Eat all forms of “energy” (say it with me: “ENerrrgy”).

Let resistance fuel you — funnel that rage and despair into the productive accumulation of more Japanese knowledge. Let encouragement fuel you — grow yourself into the positive vision people have of you.

Either way, it’s all good. It’s all usable. You’re like a plant. People give you B.S., you use it as fertilizer; people give you sunshine, you photosynthesize. All you care about is |E|, and in fact, you may even get to the point where the only thing that bothers you is |E|=0. This point is called “being an attention whore, like Khatzumoto”.

Whatever you do, don’t argue. You will not win. And even if you do win, you won’t win. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” and all that. Besides, what honor is there in out-talking a retard? Yes, I said it: “women and minorities”! Every moment spent arguing with some schmuck, is a moment that would be far better spent on Japanese.

To be fair to your detractors, you are not exactly a shining example of success in your chosen language acquisition method…yet. But then again, how could you be — you’re just a “baby”. Unable to directly demonstrate the validity of what you’re saying, the typical instinct might be to go pull up some articles and shove them in everyone’s face with a triumphant “SEE?!!”. Resist the urge. You will still lose the argument. And your time. The same people who now bait with: “there’s no research to support your claims”, when shown good research, will then switch to: “So what? That research is bogus anyway! If this crap works so well, why isn’t everyone doing it?” _{[because they're too busy arguing?...痴線！]} . This arguing thing is not a winnable game.

Let your Japanese skill do all the talking, which it eventually will, thank you very much, because you’re doing some Japanese right now, right? Whatever trouble you may be facing now, it’s all just fuel. Any obstacles you face exist only to add dramatic flavor to a legend that has already been written — The Legend of How You Learned Japanese To Native-Level Fluency On Your Own.

One day your friends will be begging you to translate Japanese for them. Until that day, shut them out with your headphones and drown them out with Japanese music, if and when they get too rowdy. Besides, it’s not like you understand English anyway.

Anyway, that’s all from me.

How do you other AJATTeers deal with social resistance? Share!

Energy…now that I think about it, “intensity” would probably have been far more appropriate. Oh, well.

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

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

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

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

My personal solution to all this is to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something. Anything.

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Khatz!

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now, and I love it! I try to follow your method as much as possible, but I am not 100% immersed in Spanish (yeah, I am learning Spanish instead of Japanese) as I am kind of undisciplined. But your method is still helping me a lot!

I was wondering about what you think about a phenomenon I “discovered” lately. Here in Germany, there are a whole bunch of American people I know who speak German very little or with an extremly heavy accent. Alright, maybe the problem is that there are a lot of folks in Germany trying to learn English, so they try to practice their English on them. But another example, yesterday night I saw a Turkish TV show (yeah, I am Turkish but live in Germany) with a woman from Sweden, who had married a Turk and now stayed in Turkey. Even though she was in Turkey for a few years or so (I think) she spoke Turkish with an obviously foreign touch (accent and word order). There are not so many people learning Swedish in Turkey to excuse that!

So I was wondering, what do you think about that? What’s the reason that there are people being 100% immersed in a language, and still not attaining that “native fluency” in that language (maybe never in their lives)?

Thanks for your answer!

Here’s my Khatzumoto attempt at an answer. It’s really an extension of ideas previously covered here by me, and here by AntiMoon, and summarized in the words of Kató Lomb as recorded in her Polyglot: How I Learn Languages.

The fact that a linguistic microclimate is more important than a linguistic macroclimate is proven by many of our older émigré compatriots. No matter where they live, they can’t acquire the foreign language properly even after 10–15 years’ residence, simply because they have built a Hungarian wall around themselves and their children, bridge partners, or even business partners. [Emphasis added]

A large part of the answer may simply be, well, is, the fact that many people who seem “100% immersed” aren’t really immersed. Period. They illustrate the simple truth that just because you’re near the water, that doesn’t mean you’re taking a bath — one must actually enter the tub. You will find that these people continue to mostly/only read books, watch movies, work with and talk to people in their primary/native language. There are many Western men married to Japanese women, with Japanese-speaking Eurasian children, who know no Japanese beyond the basics. Many first-generation Chinese immigrants in the US may have lived there for decades, yet can barely speak English. There are Western men who have lived in Korea and Arabia for 10+ years who can neither speak nor read these phonetic scripts. What happened to the kanji excuse? They have all physically walled themselves in.

But their wall is also psychological. You see, it turns out that pride is another factor. Many adults feel silly making the sounds of the new language. And they are so invested in their current identity, that they will cling to their current intonation — whether or not it be appropriate to their new language — as a way of “feeling themselves”. They are afraid of making the sounds of the new language and being made fun of. Ironically, their strong foreign accents are the silliest-sounding thing of all — as you’ve no doubt experienced, someone who at least tries to sound Turkish when speaking Turkish, or French when speaking French, or Japanese when speaking Japanese, is much more pleasant to the ear.

I am kind of undisciplined.

Discipline really isn’t the issue per se. Not in the way we usually think of it: “making ourselves do boring, painful, mind-numbing crap we don’t really want to do in the hope of some future reward”. This process shouldn’t need discipline. Or, more accurately, it is impossible to use so-called “discipline” and “willpower” on a project of this length. Discipline is too scarce a resource for anyone to attempt to use it over any significant period of time. Any project that requires sustained self-directed effort for more than several hours or days is not one where you want can use self-coercion.

Instead, you want to combine fun (attraction) with inertia. In your case, it might go something like (1) Find fun stuff to do in Spanish. (2) Remove Turkish/German from your life to create inertia. This is analogous to removing all unhealthy food from your home, then replacing it with food that is both tasty and healthy. The result is that you will eat this healthy food (1) just because it’s there, and continue to eat it because (2) it tastes good. “Food” must fulfill the conditions of abundance, variety, desirability, and availability, if it is to be eaten. If you are to “eat” Spanish (i.e. healthy food), you need to have lots of Spanish that’s so tasty you eat it merely for the pleasure of eating it, not because it’s Spanish and often not even out of hunger.

By the way, I personally subscribe to the idea of discipline as “remembering what you want”. This is a totally different animal from all these masochistic attempts at inflicting suffering upon oneself. This re-definition of discipline essentially carries us in the direction of remaining in touch with the joy and curiosity that led us to fall in love with a language in the first place.

So don’t try to use traditional discipline. As long as you are a normal, healthy living organism with a drive for self-preservation, any attempt to hurt yourself will inevitably fall flat. Don’t suppress “human nature”, use it. I happen to love sitting around watching movies and reading comics, so I simply transfer these activities into other languages, and what were once bad habits suddenly become highly educational activities worthy of remuneration, praise and websites.

While hiding in the linguistic microclimate of the native language will not help, any attempt to force oneself out of it is destined to meet with violent resistance and ultimately failure (indeed, the only way force will work is if it’s initiated and maintained externally, and that gets you into all kinds of issues of [child] abuse and human rights and ethnic cleansing and all that good stuff). If in doubt, observe real toddlers — there is no shame, no doubt and no boredom, only adventure. Fill that bathtub with toys, jump in, and before you know it, you won’t even want to get out.

Skin going all wrinkly and junk…

There is a natural tendency to view this in-the-bathroom-but-barely-even-getting-wet phenomenon as something negative, as yet another example of how you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. _{I don’t buy that at all, and I hate how we’re always just trying to find excuses to euthanize old dogs. While we’re at it, why don’t we just go Logan’s Run and murder everyone when they turn 30, since they’re never going to amount to anything anyhow? If the dog’s not learning, it’s not the dog’s fault — it’s the trainer’s fault!} I take a different view altogether. That foreigners can go years in a country virtually unscathed by the local language, is, I think, an example of the triumph of the human will . It shows just how powerful our ability to shape our personal environment — our microclimate — is; it shows how we can resist seemingly overwhelming counteractive forces; it is a feat that should perhaps even be celebrated…OK, maybe not that far.

Anyway, for us who actually want to learn a certain language, all we have to do is run this process in reverse. Stop resisting the target language, and become more receptive to it. Receive it. Accept it. Become it. If a Japanese person can create a Little Japan in Kansas (as some of my friends from Japan have), then…an American person can do the same. It’s that simple.

I leave you with this quote, apparently from some guy called Paulo Coelho:

We wouldn’t worry nearly as much about what others thought of us if we recognize how seldom they do.

Thanks for reading. I am sure there’s much more to add on this issue — if  you have any insights, please feel free to share.

I get it all the time now.

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

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

I’ve been working with your method for almost six months now, and although I’m doing the things you talk about on your website, and putting a lot of time into stud*ying, it still seems like something’s not quite right.*

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

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

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

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

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

REALLY?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I read a great quote the other day:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been working with your method for almost six months now, and although I’m doing the things you talk about on your website, and putting a lot of time into studying, it still seems like something’s not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, and it seems like everyday after I’ve finished my reps i have a feeling like there’s “something not quite right” and “I wish I could ask Khatzumoto x…” Well, I guess I have made progress in this six months, I mean, I certainly can write more kanji than I could; I can use a J-J dictionary, even if its still a bit clunky, and I’ve probably read more now than I had in the previous year I had been in Japan, but I can’t help feeling that this method isn’t working as well as it could be. Or maybe, I’m not working as well as I could be.

The other reason I’m looking for a bit of guidance is that, now having come into the belief that “classes suck,” I’m considering turning down a chance to attend to the “most prestigious/famous/well-known/full of academic wankers” Japanese school…in favor of taking a job here (doing sound engineering) and continuing to study AJATT style. Basically, I’ve got a lot riding on your belief that I can do it on my own, but maybe I need a little help getting myself to that point.

To which I responded as follows, but in Japanese:

My dearest, most precious T-star,

The situation you’re in right now is what you might call the “uncanny valley” (yes, this is an extension of the original usage of this term, but it makes sense here). Meaning that you’re at this point where you’re not a beginner and you’re not advanced; you’re in a “half-boiled”, in-between stage.

Have you ever eaten a half-boiled potato? Have you noticed how they almost taste worse than raw ones? In the uncanny valley stage, it’s common to feel like a half-boiled potato — to think that “Dude, I’ve been boiling all this time — am I EVER going to soften up and taste good?! Or, am I just driving up the gas bill or what?! What the truck, already?!” In fact, people who depend on school to learn a language almost never graduate from being a half-boiled potato, although many of them are convinced they’re the tastiest freedom fries this side of the Romulan Empire. That is, until they actually meet with their target language in its unadulterated form, at which point they decide that either they themselves are stupid or the target language is stupid (funnily enough, no one ever seems to find a problem with learning methods).

It’s not like you can’t read characters, but you still can’t breeze through them effortlessly. It’s not like you can’t say stuff, but you frequently find yourself tongue-tied. When you’re intermediate, it’s almost always like that. That’s what sucks about being intermediate.

And to make things worse, you’ve somewhat forgotten about “having fun” and discovery and the sheer beauty of the sound of Japanese, and become obsessed with “competition,” “progress,” “goals”, sentences, retention rates.

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill for breaking out of this valley. Well, no…there is, but it is simply this: “continue”. Even though you are definitely improving during this stage, it’s normal to feel like you can’t see the results, so there is no need to worry or give up.

Why is it like that when you’re an intermediate learner? I have a hard time understanding it myself, but let me venture a “Khatzumoto hypothesis”. Be aware that I’m just throwing out ideas, and I’m not sure if any of this is actually correct or not. With that disclaimer in mind…

It seems to me that all intellectual improvement actually progresses at a roughly linear rate. In monetary terms, it would be like increasing your savings by exactly $10 every day with (almost) no interest. So then, what happens is, even though the absolute rate of improvement doesn’t change, the relative rate inevitably declines to very near zero — to the point that it is completely imperceptible on small time scales.

Let me illustrate: when $10 one day becomes $20 the next day, you get all excited, like: “Whoa! It’s doubled!” But when $10,010 becomes $10,020, you paradoxically feel all let down instead, like: “What the chump change! Still not enough to do jack shWindows ME.” You have four orders of magnitude more money, yet you feel worse rather than better.

In fact, there may be a biological reason for this. It’s been said that humans are quite sensitive to acceleration (change in speed), but have a very poor grasp of fixed speed…The thing is, you don’t even need a biologist to lay it all out for you. Anyone who’s flown on a plane with or without snakes has experienced this first-hand. On a passenger plane flying from Los Angeles to Tokyo, the most exciting (terrifying?) part is the acceleration during takeoff. When you’re up in the air traveling over the Pacific Ocean, though, the speed feels no different than it would if you were riding in the family Ford Taurus. Even though the plane is moving the fastest during the middle of the flight (at about Mach 0.8 — that’s almost the speed of sound, be arch!), it’s always the middle of the flight that is the most boring part. We are faced with the most amazing of ironies: the fastest part of the flight seems the slowest.

My point being, learn to distinguish between “speed” and “acceleration” already!

You’ve been adding to your Japanese knowledge bank word by word, and your “savings” will keep growing word by word. It’s just that you’ve gotten to where it’s hard to feel your growth — more accurately, it’s hard to feel your acceleration, because you are essentially not accelerating; you are moving at constant velocity. But you are growing. You are flying. And if you just keep flying, you’ll eventually land in Tokyo. So K-E-E-P F-L-Y-I-N-G, O-K-A-Y? Stay in the air.

At the same time, simply being told to “continue” despite mind-numbing boredom isn’t exactly going to psyche you up or boost morale, or even result in learning. Indeed, there’s one more thing you’re going to need to follow through with this kind of self-study program.

That is, to “lose yourself in it”. In other words, completely forget the “self,” forget the reason you’re studying Japanese, forget what other people think — everything — and immerse yourself wholly in “having fun” — call it intellectual hedonism if you want. Forget why you are doing Japanese. Do Japanese because you are Japanese. Do Japanese because Japanese is fun. Do Japanese because it’s there. Do Japanese because it’s what you would be doing anyway (think about it — you’re learning Japanese so you can do stuff in Japanese, so you might was well do stuff in Japanese, because that’s what the Japanese is for in the first place! The cause is the effect is the cause. The means is the end is the means.)

Beware especially of caring what other people think. And stop comparing yourself to other people, starting today [not that you are, but...various forces can sometimes bias people towards feeling the need to prove themselves to the world]. No good can come of it. As anyone who has spent time observing children — regular, garden-variety children who grow into regular, garden-variety adults — understands, each person grows according to their own unique schedule. Some children can already talk up a storm by the age of 2, while some don’t get beyond baby gibberish until they are 4. Some girls have their menarche when they’re 8 years old and some have to wait for it until they’re 16.

When babies learn to walk, they don’t have everybody and their dog giving them advice on posture, telling them “you don’t need to learn to walk any more because we have cars, electric wheelchairs and Segways”, telling them “only Japanese babies can walk, because they have a lower center of gravity and live close to sea level”. They are largely left alone; they grow when they grow. You need to make it so that you are left alone, too.

I could fill a whole website with stories of how slow I am on the uptake. Slow, that is, if you were to insist on comparing me to other people. For example, my voice didn’t break until I was almost 17. Pretty late when compared to all the hairy English kids I was surrounded by at the time. Years late. But, ultimately, these variations are nothing to work oneself up over. And there will come a day when no one but you even remembers this time. Today, no one ever comes to me and goes: “Whatever, Khatzumoto, you talk a good game, but I heard your voice didn’t even break until you were 17, Mr. pre-op castrato!” In fact, As long as I don’t bring it up, no one is any the wiser. Babies walking, toddlers speaking, girls menstruating, boys’ voices changing — everyone gets there at their own pace.

So why not scrap this whole “self” vs. “others” thing and get down to having some serious fun. That might sound stupid at first, but if you go ahead and approach it that way, your brain will naturally work better, as it tends to do when you’re enjoying something (or whatever the brain does…I dunno…I just use it), ensuring substantial improvement. You will learn far more having fun than not having fun. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that you will only learn when having fun.

Rather than asking “Mommy, are we there yet?” the whole way through this road trip called acquiring Japanese, start doing stuff like singing songs, playing on your PSP, reading manga or enjoying the scenery. It’ll make the time pass by so quickly that you’ll almost be upset when you “get there”. You will actually feel this loss…this void…this nostalgia for when attaining proficiency was such a wonderful, clear-cut destination for you.

Long journeys are not the only places where we can experience the phenomenon of the-middle-seeming-worse-than-the-beginning. When you get a haircut, your head is messier mid-way than when you first entered the barber shop. When you tidy a room, there soon comes a point in the tidying where the place is more chaotic than when you started. And these are the only examples that come to mind right now…feel that depth of life experience!

Some people might write all this off as “obvious” or “self-evident”…but it is these obvious things that are the easiest to forget. Often, the more something “goes without saying”, the more it seems to need saying.

Anyway…

Have fun.

It’s been a long time since I was an mid-journey acquirer of Japanese, though I am one of Cantonese now. Let she who is with intermediate experience also cast a commentary stone this way and give T-star some more advice.

[P.S.

but I can’t help feeling that this method isn’t working as well as it could be. Or maybe, I’m not working as well as I could be.

Just what is it that would need to happen in order for you to stop feeling this way? I have a feeling of my own: nothing short of being Perfect Right Now would satisfy this desire. And the only way that that's going to happen, is if you continue. In the absence of overwhelming external force, the only thing that's going to get you to continue is the pull-in power of fun. So you might as well go have fun ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Laughing fits, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I knew…

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

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

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

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

Perhaps we should aim instead to construct a trend…a habit…a series of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny, unimpressive points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Closing Aside

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

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

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

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