This is the third and probably final post in a multi-part series on Language and Society. Here is the first post.

Languagelust.

It is a disease.

It is contagious.

And you have it.

People who learn a language other than their original “native” language are like man-eating dogs and abusive husbands — once they’ve crossed the line, they’re very likely to cross it again. I know because I used to watch Oprah in the early 1990s, back when abusive relationships were all the rage, and expert guests _{invariably, psychiatrists} would say these kinds of things all the time. _{They’ve got PhDs, baby, you know theys is good for it.}

So, despite our love for our L2, we all aspire to go further. All of us who have extended ourselves beyond the language set of the society in which we were originally born and raised. We want it. More. More. More. We want that rush(?) again.

The problem is that this greed, followed blindly, can lead to a trail of tears, broken promises and half-eaten languages, which, as we know, aren’t very useful economically, and aren’t nearly as much fun as they could be. For one thing, it takes some time to be able to produce and consume an unbridled variety of comedy in a given language…I mean, I don’t know about you, but I want to laugh and cause laughter. And think of the limits on friendships when there is a language barrier; you can still have great friendships, but the signal is far, far weaker than it could be.

What to do?

I propose a simple “solution” of sorts. Scheduling. Due to the time spans involved, I haven’t quite fully “tested” this idea myself. But I can say that it is already, at this early stage, giving me that most precious of things — peace of mind, and the ability to focus on what and where I am right now.

As we discussed in the previous post in this series, there are a lot of forces and voices out there pushing us to learn the “right” language. And there’s also our own curiosity pulling us toward new horizons.

But those voices, forces and urges are best not acted upon in their raw form. They need to be channeled and managed and manipulated. Like beans, they need to be cooked. Raw, they will lead to burn-out, disappointment and half-buttockedness. We want ownage. And what gets ownage is diligence and discipline.

Oh, snap, he busted out the “d” words! Who does this guy think he is? Has Khatzumoto gone all cranky old man? Not quite, because the way we define diligence and discipline, or “D&D”, as we’re going to call them now, is different from the painful, sucky way the rest of the world typically uses these words.

[1] Diligence is, to borrow the words of Steve Martin: “effort over time to the exclusion of other pursuits”

[2] Discipline is, “remembering what you want”. Apparently the source of this quote is a guy called David Campbell. I’ve never heard of him, but his quote is awesome.

D&D is all about memory and exclusion. Now, I am a lazy, lazy, man. I want things done for me. I want to chill, and I generally do. That’s why scheduling languages in multi-year blocks is so powerful.

[1] First of all, it gives you permission to be diligent; it gives you permission to exclude; it gives you permission to be lazy; it tells you it’s okay to ignore other things because you’re going to get to them eventually, so you can just lose yourself in the _{(music, the moment)} thing you’re doing right here, right now. Thus we see that diligence is not “hard work”. Diligence is deliberate neglect; it is highly directed laziness. It is greed with a purpose — a deep, focussed greed, rather than a shallow, wavering, ADHD-addled one. Laser-greed.

[2] Secondly, it gives you the discipline you need, because it does the “remembering” for you. If you have your multi-year language schedule somewhere easily visible, you can see that “yes, I want language Z, but I also want language X, and I want it first! Thanks for reminding me, oh dear schedule of mine!”

[3] Thirdly, it turns destructive desires (“I wanna know EVERTHING!!!”) into constructive passions (“we’re doing this right now”), not by denial, but by regulation. This concept has had success in society at large.

Let me elaborate. I personally think that alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, Gilmore Girls and season 4 of Prison Break are things best kept far out of one’s life. But American history has dramatically demonstrated that enforcing this for/on other people does not work. Even though banning these things across the board seems like such a great idea (drunk driving alone offers proof that these things are not just personal choices that “don’t hurt anyone else”), prohibition of substances like alcohol has clearly tended to increase secondary negative externalities _{(you try reading the WSJ every day and not have this phrase crop up involuntarily! I’m not even sure if I’m using it correctly; it just comes out! “Hey Khatz, how was your day?”, “Dude, I was at Stacy’s house, and dude…secondary negative externalities everywhere“)} rather than decrease them.

Whether it’s pot or prostitution _{[I know you're having a WTF? moment right now]} the answer seems clear: either give the cat a litterbox, or the entire house becomes a litterbox. Either give your languages a place (a schedule), or they all try to take first place at once; they all want to be everywhere, all the time. And that is the very definition of stress – and not the good kind of stress, but the circular-hair-loss-and-ulcer kind.

So, we see that scheduling will take your D&D, and make it feel even more like R&R than usual.

While we’re at it, here’s a fictional example schedule:

• 2005 — 2010: Japanese
• 2010 — 2015: Mandarin
• 2015 — 2020: Klingon
• 2020 — 2025: Cantonese
• 2025 — 2030: Teenage Slang
• 2035  — 2040: The Language Of Love

Et cetera. Why five years? It’s just a round number. Two highly-focussed years is enough to get good, but then we also want to leave time for actually using our good once we’ve gotten it. In any case, it’s just a number; it doesn’t matter too much. Keeping to the schedule religiously doesn’t matter either; there is room for alteration and transposition — as always, you are the boss.

In any case, as I’ve hinted at before, I’m not such a big fan of “trophy-collecting” style language learning. While I have the deepest respect for all the polyglots out there (and they all have cool ideas and techniques worthy of imitation) I do also think that many of them could benefit from sacrificing breadth for some more depth. The whole “learning N number of foreign languages but ultimately doing all my significant activities in English” thing seems to be missing the point — and I say this with full awareness of the hypocrisy it entails, given the current content base of this blog.

Any language that has enough people _{[that you care about]} and/or media _{[that you care about]} is worth sticking with for a long time. Not just for return on investment, but also for pure enjoyment. A language is for living in, not just passing through — more a home than a hotel. Move house if you want, but don’t just do it because everyone else is saying or doing so.

When you use Y-year scheduling blocks, even when Y is a number like three or five or ten, you start to realize that there is plenty of time in our lives to “get it all in”, or at least a lot of it in, and there’s no need to go breathlessly and desperately dilettanting from one hot language to another. It’s fine to remain calm.

We can still have fun; we can still be spontaneous; we just need to direct our ever-flowing fun and spontaneity into “cups” where they can steadily accumulate value for us, and also be easier to drink from.

For example, I have leanings towards couch potato behavior. I can sit there in my sweatpants, watching TV and movies for days on end. Doing this in English (as a native speaker) is just considered sloth. Doing this in Japanese is dedication; it is an act of intellectual heroism worthy of, like, a website. All I had to do was swivel my couch potato tap into the cup called Japanese.

The same behavior, reprehensible in one sphere/language, becomes a demonstration of discipline and diligence in another. This is the power of directing, channeling, managing our greed, our “flaws”: If possible, why bother overcome them, why bother destroy them, when we can just recycle, reuse and redirect them? _{Violent sociopath in one place is courageous soldier in another (I am again being very cruel to military people, but they’re tough enough to take it ).}

Thus concludes my two or three yen on the somewhat vague topic of “Language and Society” — for now, at least. Sorry for going so…preachy on you. Hopefully this has been somewhat useful. But you know what’s even more useful — your comments. Feel free to share any insight you have on this issue…I want to be enlightened, too .

This is the second post in a multi-part series on Language and Society. Here is the first post.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion… But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.’ If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases. [Emphasis added]

Warren of Buffett
Berkshire Hathaway 2005 Chairman’s Letter

OK, I’m again going beyond the depth of my experience here, but…what the heck. In for a 錢 in for a 圓…

Um…so, as we talked about in the previous post, a lot of people seem to want to learn languages for economic reasons.

And this makes perfect sense. There’s a strong correlation between language knowledge and economic power. Think: Johnson O’Connor’s research minus the “aptitude-testing” silliness.

The problem is that these same people go about their language “investment” activities in completely the wrong way. They’re the kind of people who were frantically learning Japanese in the 1980s, Pashto and Dari immediately after those rather inconveniently scheduled building demolitions in the fall of 2001, Arabic in 2002~2005, and Mandarin today. Scurrying like lemmings over whatever new cliff is presented them, never mind the fact that they weren’t done falling over the previous cliffs.

These are the same people who buy stocks when everyone else is buying them, and sell them when everyone else is selling them. Buy high, sell low. And whenever this plan fails, as it so often does, it becomes a perfect time to blame George Soros/the Jews/the Chinese/the Japanese/the Mexicans. It’s times like this that make things hard for people like George Soros’ close friend, Rabbi Alberto Matsuyama-Wang.

That joke failed. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is this:

Learning a language is a good investment. But not in the way that most people think. And certainly not on the timescales most people are thinking on.

To put it simply, learning a language is an investment requiring so much personal attention (you have to be there the whole time), money (your brain needs books and videos to feed on), and time (despite Pimsleur’s promises, with our current knowledge and technology, the process takes longer than ten days), that it is best looked upon not as an investment, nor even a clear-cut intellectual endeavour, but as a lifestyle. A way of living. Because:

1. If we don’t know the current “hot language” already, right when it is hot, then in order to meaningfully take advantage of its hotness – which will eventually cool down, as these things do – we are going to need the ability to travel back in time. Because, starting now, by the time we get to a good level, we’ll be just in time to miss the party.

2. If fast money is the objective, then there are faster, easier, more straightforward ways of doing it than by acquiring a language. Every time we try to get people worked up into some throbbing sense of obligation to learn more languages, based on vague notions of “increasing globalization”, we are doing them a disservice.

As I’ve said before, the real reason to learn a language is because it’s there. This is how native speakers learn their language. And, ultimately, in most cases, it is native/native-level speakers that count the most as communication partners. There are exceptions to this, but none of them as useful or meaningful as we want. If one wants to get out of the “good enough for a gaijin” ghetto, then one needs to take on the native speaker’s level of commitment: all Japanese/whatever language, all the time, because this is simply who I am; it is a part of my personal identity.

Learning a language pays. But not so much in the myopic, injecting-cows-with-steroids (“they’re ready for slaughter in two weeks!”), resume-padding fashion that is, well, fashionable right now.

Knowledge of a language provides the fundamental tools and infrastructure for an endless variety of relationships, activities and interactions. Knowing the language of a country to a high level is akin to being able to breathe its air without a respirator; it’s that fundamental.

But this knowledge comes at a price (time, attention, cash), and it is a price so obvious and so high that most people cannot pay it. I know I can’t. Thus, we must figure out a way to make the language pay us. In principle, the only thing that can make a language worth learning is joy in the process itself. Unless one has incredible coercive powers over oneself (again, I certainly don’t), one is only going to go through with the language if one gets lost in the language.

Just as acting native-like is both the cause and effect of…becoming native-like, so learning a language must become an end in itself. The actual state of being in the process of acquiring a language must be its own reward. The reward must be the road itself.

So have fun, and know that it – this learning-a-language-to-pwnage-level-thing – does pay, literally. In ways that you can barely even imagine right now, it pays. But keep your head cool and level, because the world can seem to be full of hot-headed, day-trader-type language learners eager to tell you what you “should” be learning (“Japanese? That’s SO 20 years ago!”), eager to get you on their little dot lang bandwagon, so we can all head for the cliffs together.

Play for the long haul. I know that sounds negative (“hauling” things for a “long” time…there’s nothing nice-sounding about that ). But, when you think about it, this is great news. Knowledge of Japanese/whatever language, is an investment so powerful, so valuable, that if you keep it in your portfolio (i.e. keep pwning at it), it will still be paying you back 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years from now. Indeed, for the rest of your life. This is wonderful, wonderful news. It means you don’t have to flit about like a Ritalin-deprived butterfly every time a new fad comes in. It’s carte blanche to enjoy yourself right where you are right now, because the sky is not falling down, the bottom is not falling out, and no one but you is deciding on bedtime.

Just enjoy yourself. You have to; yes “have” to – this is your one and only “obligation” – to have a laugh and then have another and another. Play. It’s the only thing that will get you “through” this. Plus it’s tons of fun. So. Much. Fun.

The end. For now. Stay tuned for part three, coming two days from now.

_{P.S. Short-term, low-end, quick-and-dirty, let’s-learn-some-phrases-to-help-us-on-our-journey style learning has its place and has value. It’s just not what we’re talking about today.}

_{P.P.S. You AJATTeers are the very best-looking, smartest commenters in the world. You always bring up insightful points that I never even considered. So, as always, I look forward to hearing from you!}

This is the first post of a multi-part series on Language and Society (yes, I was deliberately looking for the dryest, most lifeless-sounding topic title ever ).

The largest problem that would-be language learners have faced, especially with Asian languages (though not exclusively so) has been simple lack of confidence. A lot of the writing you’ve seen on this site has been of the kind usually associated with personal development.

Why? Because that’s what people needed. People needed to believe in themselves, people needed to know that their age, ethnicity and “lack of discipline” [whatever the heck that means] were not an issue. People needed to turn their self-fulfilling prophecies upside down.

During all this, one “problem” I thought I had was lack of credibility. No one seemed to take what I was saying seriously. It was either fluff, or a prank, or outright chicanery. By “no one”, I really mean “some people who I gave more attention than they deserved”. Anyway…

Now, though, more often than not, the problem is reversed. People think too much of me. The Japanese companies I consulted for asked if I could interpret Korean for them (What? No!). People ask if they can interview me for books (What? Why?). And worst of all, people ask me how they can learn 500 (OK, 500 is exaggerating. Usually, it’s just like a trillion) languages at once.

And by people, I generally mean college students, usually engineers, who are somehow forgetting that engineering is all about intelligent compromises, and are trying to be all things to all people.

Seriously, I get emails like this:

“I am going to China for study abroad, but my girlfriend is Japanese, and I want to be able to function at native-level Chinese while in China for the next 2 years, but then also be perfect in Japanese before I meet my girlfriend’s parents; I might also want to get a job in Japan, so I need to have great technical writing, did I mention that…

I know you’ve talked about focus and the 80-20 rule, but I don’t really think that applies here, because I HAVE to know Chinese and Japanese perfectly right now today in order to get the scholarship also my dad runs a theater company and I need to interpret for him in Japanese 10 days from now, so I need your advice on how to get my skills up really fast”

[Fictional quote based on two actual emails. These are real "requirements"]

So, how do you learn a billion languages at once? REALLY FAR KING FAST?!

The short answer is: I. Have. No. Freaking. Idea. So. Don’t. Ask Me.

The medium-length answer is: if you’re at the level where you need to be asking me advice on the issue, then, Houston we have a problem.

And the long answer is: What gave you the impression that I knew how do this? All I’ve written about is complete saturation in a single language. If I knew how to learn a kajillion languages at once, then why would I even have bothered exile English from my life? Wouldn’t I have just relegated Japanese to some magically productive 20-minute-per-day timeslot, and then suddenly woken up one morning fluent?

I don’t want to deny the possibility of learning several languages at the same time. That would be wrong of me. I am open to the idea. I simply have no clue how one could go about it.

Let me repeat: I am open to the possibility of learning several languages at the same time. When you find out how to do it, I mean really native-level do it, please put out a book or website or movie that gives all the details. Because I’ll be all over it.

Let me reiterate: I want to know how to know all the languages in the world, too.

But if you’re coming to this website and asking me how to do it, then you are demonstrating a fatal lack of knowledge, initiative and English reading comprehension. Because at no point have I actively advertised, advocated or even encouraged learning multiple languages at the same time.

The language-laddering thing seems like an exception, but the laddering is really about how to keep your L2, while also doing your best to get at an L3, but with the full awareness that this is being done to the detriment of the L3 (if continued past when you could go monolingual, such as how I continue to ladder Japanese through Chinese even though monolingual Chinese dictionaries would be more convenient and effective).

The whole using a random, unfamiliar language as a break thing is even more clear-cut: it is simply a tool to keep your L2 by removing any excuse to make contact with your L1, because we all know that your L1 is a habit that has a very powerful “gravitational pull”, and once you get too close to it, getting away again may require a lot of force.

Anyway, at its core, all this “how do I learn tons of languages at the same time” advice-asking, demonstrates a clear inability to do that most important of things, namely: make real decisions.

In both Sino-Japanese and Latin, the word “decide” literally means to “cut off” (決斷・裁斷). The “de” is a prefix that indicates removal — out of, away from. The “cide” part is the “cut off”. It’s the same “cide” as in “homicide”, “infanticide”, “patricide”, and “West Cide”.

Every decision, even a good decision, necessarily involves loss. If you give up smoking, you gain clean lungs, but you lose, well, smoking. If you give up drinking, you gain a clear mind, but you lose, well, excuses for fondling young men and women who are neither interested nor willing.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t make win-win decisions. I make these all the time, and I love them. It doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too — pretty much anyone who’s ever bought cake has had their cake and eaten it too.

It just means that we’re going to have to be a little more creative than asking people who don’t know. A key attribute of good decision-making is asking advice from people who are actually somehow in a position to give you good advice. I am not such a person.

Perhaps decisions in language-learning are a matter of that time-scope-quality (TSQ) triangle at work. In commercial software engineering projects, the customer gets to control two of the “corners” that represent universal project attributes, but the software maker must be allowed control of the third.

So, if you have ten days (time), to learn perfect-sounding Japanese (quality), then be prepared for a smaller range (scope). Similarly, if you want perfect Japanese (quality) with massive range (scope), then be prepared to relax on the time-to-completion aspect. Finally, if you want massive range (scope) in a short time, then be prepared to forfeit any guarantee of quality (most short-term language-learning tools and methods seem to cluster around short-time, wide-scope, low-quality). Anyway…

A lot of the people trying to learn a bunch of languages at the same time are doing so for economic reasons. This is stupid. Look at the current Forbes billionaire list. You will be hard-pressed to find polyglots there. Does this mean we should give up on all languages and focus only on English? No. There are Mexicans, Indians, Germans, Swedes, Japanese, Saudis, Chileans and Italians on this list. Most of these people are monoglots — diglots at best. But I can assure you that all these people either have very large vocabularies, or are related to someone who did. Unlike, say, authors and professors, they may not be engaged in the business of directly demonstrating their large vocabularies, but trust me (actually, don’t trust me — I’m just repeating the results of the work of a guy called Johnson O’Connor — trust him), they have them and they use them. The Forbes list might as well be a list of well-read, clear, eloquent communicators and their close relatives [not that they're quite on the list, but, for example, President Bush the Elder was well-spoken enough that he could compensate for Bush the Younger's...rusticness].

Some people may say “oh, but that’s the Forbes list; it’s a small sample, therefore it’s irrelevant”. I say, it’s precisely because it’s the Forbes list that it’s relevant. That’s like saying “short people can’t play basketball, and can’t dunk, and don’t bring up Spudd Webb OR Mugsy Bogues OR Allen Iverson, because that they’re irrelevant”. No, it is because Spudd Webb, a short man (5′7″) by any standard, not only participated in, but won the NBA dunking competition, that any petty excuses about height and basketball ability are just that — petty, petty, excuses. If Spud Webb were not a highly successful player in the best basketball league in the world, then his case would be far less meaningful. Similarly, if we’re going to talk about economic success, then anything we say would be meaningless if it didn’t reflect itself on something like the Forbes list, the high-score table of the economic video game.

The NBA and the Forbes List are odd things. The world seems to have very unproductive, mixed feelings about these rankings of the most successful people in a particular game. Put simply, there is some admiration, but it is mixed with a poisonous envy of “lucky” _{[as if all they had been doing was tweaking their MySpace and having endless petty arguments online, when suddenly...]} people, and a drive to dismiss them as “irrelevant” to “real” life.

For whatever reason, people want these things kept at arm’s length. I say, don’t avert your eyes from the best in any particular game. Don’t try to make excuses for why you’re not on any particular high-score list (yet ). Don’t treat amazing things as if they’re happening in another galaxy where you have no place and to which you have no right — everything in the world is happening on this same little, watery rock, populated by other humans who are nothing but your cousins, slightly removed.

Instead, try to emulate — copy the good. Try to find how you, too, can join the best. It doesn’t help to deny that something matters to you if it clearly does matter to you. Dishonest dismissal will get us nowhere. You don’t need to let go of jealousy because it’s “morally right”; let go of jealousy because it’s simply more productive, effective and fun when you do.

Anyhoo, let me get to the point: A single language learned really, really well (i.e. huge vocabulary) is infinitely more powerful than a plurality of languages learned badly. All the meaningful economic indicators appear to demonstrate this. High-quality, wide scope, for all available free time. That means serious fun-having. I am not stating this as a rock-solid fact; I have no rock-solid facts for you; it’s just a pattern.

Back to the Forbes list. Microsoft, Oracle and IKEA do business in dozens of countries and territories. Does Bill Gates know Japanese? No. Do all Microsoft Japan employees know English? No. Does at least Steve Ballmer or Paul Allen know, I dunno, at least Mandarin? Again, no. Larry Ellison has that Japanese house, but does he know Spanish? No. J.K. Rowling isn’t even on the list, but surely she knows some Japanese since her books sell so well in Ja…No. Does Angela Merkel speak French since she has such an important role in Eur…No.

Is there a handful of Microsoft employees who know every single language in which Microsoft does business? You wish. Multinational organizations, like clothes, are bound together only two pieces at a time. Bilinguals are the human joints that span the world, not polyglots.

So, for economic purposes, with a language, the key is: Depth over breadth. Depth before breadth. Depth defeats breadth. Depth. Depth. Depth.

What if you’re just learning a zillion languages for fun? Go for it! By all means. Screw around. But screwing around means stop getting worked up and sending frantic emails for advice on how you can become a one-man United Nations, capable of massive ownage at all times in all things in all places with all people in all languages.

And who knows? If you stop having panic attacks, stop using so much violent self-coercion, stop inventing painful obligations that don’t really exist, then you might just figure out some cool, fun way to learn a bunch of languages at once. Until then, I eagerly await my free copy of your book. I don’t want to pull you down. I don’t want to tell you that what you want to do is impossible — people told me it was impossible to do what I did. So you go on out there and start baking some humble pie to feed me and the rest of the world when you come prove us wrong!

How Do I Learn 500 Languages At Once?!

You tell me.

Stay tuned for part two, coming two days from now.