And all books are volumes of this one book. And all pages are pages of this world book.

Now, there are billions of pages in this book. And you’re never going to read them all. Not. Ever.

You’re already skimming. You’re already skipping over. You’re already not reading all the pages of the book.

So stop freaking out about a couple…hundred…skipped pages in one volume. You skip entire volumes, after all. What’s a few more? Functionally, that’s what most pages are there for: to be skipped. You’re a skipping billionaire, and you’re here nickel-and-diming over a pittance? Don’t you have better = funner = more productive things to do with your time?

Reading is not all or nothing. It’s some or nothing. It’s easy or nothing.

So take it easy. Skip. Skim. You have the right. Yes, even (especially) if you’re still a noob. Skip to the fun-looking parts. Skip to the pages with pictures. Skip to the funnies (I ALWAYS did this when I was a kid…it doesn’t seem to have impaired my ability to read English…I dunno, maybe I’m illiterate and just don’t know it ).

Don’t save the best for last. Take the fun right now. Be a pro-active fun-seeker. If you don’t have fun now, today will be the beginning of the end as far as Japanese is concerned, believe you me.

Reading is skipping pages. Reading is skimming. Reading is not-reading.

Google JP (Japanese)
javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s='';;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if (d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open ('http://www.google.co.jp/search?q='+encodeURIComponent(s) +'&num=100&hl=ja&prmd=ivns&source=lnt&tbs=lr:lang_1ja&lr=lang_ja','_blank')})()

Google HK (Chinese)
javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s='';;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if (d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open ('http://www.google.com.hk/search?q='+encodeURIComponent(s) +'&num=100&hl=zh-TW&prmd=i&source=lnt&tbs=lr:lang_1zh-TW&lr=lang_zh-TW&sa=X&ei=IRRQTIuHOMHXcZyklbEB&ved=0CAgQpwU','_blank')})()

Google RealTime Search
javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s='';;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if (d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open ('http://www.google.co.jp/search?hl=ja&safe=off&tbs=mbl:1&num=100&q='+encodeURIComponent(s),'_blank')})()

If you were to wait until you could read to start thumbing through Japanese books, you’d die waiting. If you were to wait until you could  read to start owning Japanese books, you’d die waiting.

False: can’t read Japanese ∴ own no Japanese books.
True: own no Japanese books ∴ can’t read Japanese.

See these non-Chinese Hong Kongers? They’re waiting until the Hong Kong SAR government teaches them to read ¹, to buy Chinese books.

They’re waiting to death.

The Japanese government is one of the more hands-on bureaucracies in the world, and I wouldn’t trust them to teach garden variety Yamato kids, let alone ethnic minorities. The HKSAR administration is one of the most laissez-faire in the world; they’re not going to come save the day on this one; that’s not how they work; that’s not what they do ².

Literacy cannot precede reading material: (access to) reading material must precede literacy. Before you pwn books, you must first own books.

Lack of Japanese knowledge does not cause lack of Japanese books. Lack of Japanese books causes lack of Japanese knowledge. Inability to read Japanese does not cause lack of Japanese books. Lack of Japanese books causes inability to read Japanese. Illiteracy doesn’t cause lack of books. Lack of books causes illiteracy ³.

Before you have the books, not only are you not on the playing field, you don’t even know what the sport looks like. How are you supposed to win at a game you’ve never seen? ⁴

When you start actually owning Japanese books (and by “own”, what I really mean is, “have instant, 24-hour access to” — that means the books are in the restroom, in the living room, in the bedroom, in the backpack, in the briefcase, by the desk), you give yourself a fighting chance at literacy.

Before you pwn, you must first own. Let yourself win. Get the books before you can read them if you ever want to grow into being able to read them. ⁵

“But I can’t read them yet!”

Yeah…that’s the point. That’s why you have to have them.

If you want Japanese words to be in your head, first you have to let them into your house…and then into your hands…and then into your eyes…and then, finally, they make it inside the head on their own. ⁶

‘The ph– do you want to be illiterate for anyway? That game sucks. Ask those nice folks in Hong Kong. Not cool.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And it hit me that it may have been this article (about the differences and similarities between AI and cybernetics) by a guy called Paul Pangaro that got me thinking in the direction of lazy kanji. For curiosity’s sake, here are a couple of interesting quotes:

“information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity stored in a computer”

This quote in particular (from Humberto Maturana’s Biology of Cognition and Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living) really got me thinking [emphasis added]:

“Learning is not a process of accumulation of representations of the environment; it is a continuous process of transformation of behavior through continuous change in the capacity of the nervous system to synthesize it. Recall does not depend on the indefinite retention of a structural invariant that represents an entity (an idea, image or symbol), but on the functional ability of the system to create, when certain recurrent demands are given, a behavior that satisfies the recurrent demands or that the observer would class as a reenacting of a previous one.”

What does it mean to “know” a language? What does it mean to “know” a kanji? It’s a question of worldview, I guess. To put it a little simplistically, it’s a question of whether one sees things statically or dynamically. And it’s important that each of us gets somewhat clear on an answer to these questions, because that answer will decide whether life is tingly and fun, or toadly sucky.

If one defaults to one of the certification-seller-approved answers and decides that: “knowing” a language means being able to take boring, arbitrary, authority-presuming tests on it, administered by people you neither know nor like, then that’s fine, too — it’ll just…suck.

If one defaults to one of the school-approved answers and decides that: ”knowing” a language means doing insomnia-curing textbook assignments on it and avoiding FUNBUN (for-native by-native media) like the plague (or rationing out FUNBUN as a “reward” for “real learning”, as if FUNBUN were some kind of fattening dessert instead of the nutritious vegetable dish that it is), then that, too, is fine…it just kind of sucks.

Translated specifically into language-acquisition terms, Maturana seems to me to be saying: you don’t get good at a language, you get used to it — it’s a habit; it’s a relationship. It’s as if the language were a person. You don’t learn to “read”, you get used to text; you develop text reflexes. Not only is the language itself in flux, but we are in flux with respect to the language.

In the late 1970s, James Heisig freed us from stifling and ineffective ideas of what it means to know a kanji. To the extent that unquestioned, unfettered attachment to the RTK method threatens to itself become a new orthodoxy, the Lazy Kanji/SRS combination could be a new “mini-shift” in kanji perception: you don’t “know” kanji, you get used to them — just like your phone number. (So used to them, in fact, that you can read and write them in any situation you want or need to).

Having said that, Lazy Kanji is actually built on the core RTK insights, namely that:

1. the component logic of kanji should be exploited to learn each character bottom-up, and each “family” of characters in order of increasing structural complexity.
2. each kanji represents a concept that transcends any one language, and this concept can be represented using a word or words in your native language or L1.

So, to me, it just represents a natural progression rather than a “revolution” or anything drastic like that. Heisig’s always going to be top dog in my book. He brought us so far. He broke the mold.

In any case, I think the ultimate lesson is this: screw doing things “the” right way. Your way doesn’t have to be “right” — it just has to work. Maybe we’ll add that to the “Three Laws of Language Acquisition”

Read Japanese. Read whatever the heck you want. The dumber the better. The brainier the better. The normaler the better. The only limits on reading should be time and interest. Not common sense, and definitely not respectability.  Invite anyone who takes exception to that to perform incestuous acts with the nearest family member at a tertiary location. How? Just keep reading.

You only get to live a few thousand days. Almost everyone in the world — even in less economically developed countries — will, in a lifetime, have more dollars than days. Think about that. You wouldn’t throw your precious dollars at people you don’t even know or like (you’d throw them at me, right?). But you’ll throw them your days? Irreplaceable, irrecoverable days? Just like that? You won’t even give strangers money to gamble with or buy drugs with or play at the video arcade with, but you’ll give them your time? Are you crazy?

If we amputate our own freedom to read, then we effectively amputate our freedom to think. And if we have no freedom to think, then, sweetie, we have nothing. Like I said, cut out your brain and give it to the Rulemaker. In fact, just kill yourself. If the rules have been decided already, then it really doesn’t matter whether you’re here or not.

Think for a moment why, in the United States of only 55,000 days ago, it was illegal for most African-Americans to read, be taught to read, or even know how to read.

Why would anyone go to the trouble of so drastically limiting another human being’s reading material [f(r)=0] if it weren’t perhaps one of the most precious things in the world?

And what do we call a person who would do that? We’d call them a slavemaster.

Anyone who tells you not to read any type of book is trying to be your slavemaster. Don’t let them. Don’t be a slave. Get off the mental plantation. Read whatever you want. There is no point in doing otherwise. There is no point in living otherwise: someone else is living for you; someone else has lived for you; it’s game mother fondling over ².

Whoever has veto power over your reading list does not decide the content of your mind — she owns your mind. Whoever owns your mind, owns you. Will you be a hip slave foreman (“look at me, I’m hip among slaves!”), or will you be free, doing what you want, when you want? Choices, choices. I hear there’s complementary room and board over at the plantation…

Of course, it’s not a real person. You can’t see or touch Japanese.

But she exists.

She exists just like Harry Potter exists.

You don’t learn a language, you get used to it. When someone is used to something, what do we call them? We call them an “expert”, we say they’re “good at” it. We say they’re familiar with the object in question.

Familiar. Like family.

So not only is the Japanese language a person, not only is she a friend, she’s also family. Adoptive family, since she has no DNA of her own per se…but family nonetheless. Now, it turns out that most of her close friends and family were born and raised in Japan. And most of her close friends have known her since they were babies.

But that’s nothing more than a coincidence of convenience; those people just happened to be in places where it was cheap and easy to hang out with Japanese a lot. In no way does it mean that Japanese couldn’t become friends — family — with you. Plenty of her family members aren’t Japanese at all — see TV for details. In fact, because so many books and audiovisual recordings of Japanese have been produced – Japan’s is one of the most “media-productive” societies in the world – you don’t even need to know her other friends in order to become friends with her. Just like you don’t have to have met J. K. Rowling in order to like Harry Potter. The abundance of Japanese media is our very own coincidence of convenience. If you don’t believe me, try getting Hindi manga. More speakers, sure, but (despite the movie industry) less manga.

Remember, though — even family can become estranged; even friends can become strangers. So Japanese is your friend, Japanese is your family. But guess what? If you really want to get close…if you want her to tell you all her secrets…if you want to be finishing her sentences before she even starts saying them…then you’re going to need to hang out…a lot. A…lot. You’ll become each other’s shadow, as they say.

If you want Japanese to trust you, you’re going to have to trust her and treat her well. Would you let a close friend, a member of your family, stand out in the cold, starving to death while you ate dinner inside? As if you were some sort of wicked fairytale stepmother? No, you’d invite her to the table, wouldn’t you? Invite Japanese to your dinner table. Let her sleep in your bed (like the Herlihy boy…lol). Go on errands with her. Hang out together. Become tight.

You don’t learn a language. You get used to it. And you can’t get used to something you’re always avoiding. You can’t get used to something you’re barely ever around. You can’t get used to something you only see once in a while when the guilt hits, like some kind of deadbeat dad. What, you think you can just send Japanese $5 on her birthday and everything’ll be cool?

You can’t really become friends if you don’t play and do silly things together. You can’t do serious things together before you do fun things together. And you can’t reasonably expect Japanese to do you big economic favors if she barely knows who you are.

You cannot just start out being serious with Japanese. You have to earn the right by goofing around first. So hang out. Play. Enjoy your nth childhood together. She loves being with her friends and family: she lives through them. And she’s always looking to make another friend. She’d love to have another baby sibling or child or whatever. It would make her day. Go on. Do something stupid together.

EOF

It’s a better alternative to bookmarks. Instead of storing those cool L2 sites you come across (e.g. via recommendations on the AJATT Twitter feed) in your bookmarks folder, where they will simply be forgotten, store them in the URL shuffler

The URL shuffler will pick a random page for you each time you click the “shuffle!”/”shuff!” link. Make the “shuffle!” link your homepage and you can flip through the web like flipping through TV channels. Shuffling gives a perfect balance of turnover (mixing) and conversion (actual visitation).

Note: like SRS cards, the websites are all added by you. This way you get a customized mix of just the websites you love.

Why include it in an SRS?

Because contact is the basis of content. There’ll be no fun SRS content without fun immersion. Instead of disciplining yourself to build the habit of visiting L2 websites, let URL shuffler handle it for you. Plus, you’re not bound to your main computer. Whether at home, school, wage slavery place, a friend’s house or on your iPad, you can enjoy the same rich variety of cool L2 web content.

How Do I Use It?

Use the supplied links and bookmarklets to add, remove and visit websites.

OK, so after all that talk, let me show you a few examples of the SRS cards I’ve been using with the Unified Reading Process (URP). Remember that the URP was designed (which seems a bit of a posh word for how simple a thing it is, but, there you go) by yours truly to solve problems with both (a) native-level languages and (b) sucky-(not-yet-native)-level languages.

So, while it is a single process, it does have two rather different motivations, and this produces two broad types of cards:

• (a) With native-level languages, one is trying to remember ideas through vocabulary.
• (b) With sucky-level languages, one is trying to remember vocabulary through ideas.

(b) is the type of thing we typically discuss here at AJATT. So, it uses the same types of SRS cards as we’ve been talking about all this time. No changes, no surprises. In this article, we’ll focus mostly (though not exclusively) on  type  (a)

But before we hit the example cards, let me answer a couple of your questions all nice like.

Do you use one massive deck for all of your SRSing, or switch off between decks?

Currently, I have a bunch of different decks. I think this is definitely the way to go, as:

1. Different subjects lend themselves to different types of SRS cards, and mixing them all together would just be jarring.
2. Splitting helps with performance management and analysis.
3. I switch subjects by mood. I mean, logic.
4. Surusu makes it very easy for me to switch between decks, both when adding and doing reps. You like that plug?

My current deck breakdown is:

• Japanese – the “original glazed” deck. It contains Japanese sentences.
• Kanji – Heisig-style kanji reviews. I still learn new kanji and reinforce old ones. You never stop learning, you just stop sucking.
• Math/Science/Engineering – very broad…basically anything technical or scientific goes here…I also have quite a few math cards
• Humanities– extremely broad; this has everything from legal stuff to funny internet quotes, to insight on random social issues. I even have the occasional piece of English vocabulary (like “anodyne”…didn’t know what that was…).
  • The English vocab thing is made even more ironic by the fact that one American blogger has decided that my accent is so weird and Christian-Baled up that I could not possibly be a native speaker of English…I guess those AJATT “method-acting” chickens have finally come home to roost and Japanese really is my native language now? Maybe I should just start cross-dressing…I always did enjoy hanging out in women’s restrooms with the freaking…couches and TVs and herbal tea and free massages from sporty Swedish women…
  • No?
  • The legal vocab is there because on rare but significant occasions, it helps me in Japan to be a bit more-eloquent-than-average – as if to demonstrate that “I-am-not-a-roll-over-play-dead-and-cry-myself-to-sleep gaijin, so if you try to brush me off with a spurious explanation you just made up, life will get difficult for you”…I know that sounds jerky, but even in Japan, once every 6~12 months or so, I find the need to project stubbornness and erudition at the same time. Of course, I’m bluffing because I’m not actually erudite or stubborn, but it works every time – people treat you differently when you signal that your crap threshold is low).
  • No, really, though…women’s restrooms are…the shiz.
• Original Ideas – I just throw my own original ideas in here…Everything from long-term projects, to Surusu feature concepts.
• Business – business vocabulary and good ideas from business books and blogs.
  • As a programmer, I was “raised” to look down on business people. After reading Johnson O’Connor’s vocabulary research (executive summary: there apparently exists a powerful correlation between vocabulary and social position), I started to realize that many “business”-type people used vocabulary that I didn’t actually know well enough to use myself. (I think Paul Graham also raised this point once, actually). It occurred to me that they were communicating things that may actually be of some value to me; they weren’t just dumb people in suits throwing buzzwords at each other. I mean, there’s that, too, but that’s not all there is to them.
• Cantonese – Cantonese sentence cards, using a format that I developed (again, a rather OTT word to describe something very simple) after my trip to Taiwan. Basically, it’s full of sentence cards. The format still uses sound, but is much less labor-intensive than some of the Canto cards I’ve previously shown. Look out for another Chinese Project Notes post on these.
• Personal Development – the main difference between this and the “Business” deck is that it is purely focused on inspiration, where the business deck is more about vocabulary and procedure. The purpose of this deck is to increase my self-efficacy (self-confidence?); it is pure “positiveness”. It contains quotes from PD books, affirmations, afformations…all that good stuff. I’M A GOOD PERSON! LoL.
• Mandarin – Mandarin sentences. Originally, a lot like the Japanese deck in format, but has since morphed to be more like the Cantonese deck because, me loves that sound. Chinese cards + sound = gold.
• Hangul – I just wanted to learn to read Hangul. All this contains is the alphabet. This is an extremely low-priority deck for me. It doesn’t even contain all the Hangul yet.
• Recipes – I brainwash myself with good recipes: this influences me to default to healthy food. I usually read recipes for ideas, but I never follow the recipe to the letter myself. I just take its main concepts and then put my own spin on it. A metaphor for all reading, perhaps?
• Unconfirmed/Questionable Cards – This contains mostly Cantonese cards I made by transcribing movies, where I have things I’m not sure about, but I don’t want to just throw the card away, so I save the card here in order to ask a native speaker when I get the chance.
• Pre-Dump– This just contains things I want to throw into the SRS, unprocessed, to maybe make “proper” cards for later.
  • It gets a LOT of deletion. I am not sentimental – that kind of feeling holds too many people back, as does too much hypothetical (counterfactual?) thinking: “what if…”, “maybe”….No…not fun or useful now = no right to be in the SRS.
  • When I’m at a loss for what to learn next, but want easy pickings, I just flip through this deck.
  • If sentence-picking is fishing, then this is fish-farming. Rather than go out to the sea of Japanese/Chinese media, I have my own tank I can pick from any time.
• Links to Websites – Can you see a pattern here? The SRS being used less and less for its traditional/original purpose, and more like a card management system. Anyway, since the SRS I use (Surusu) is web-based, I’ve started adding links to websites I would like to get into the habit of visiting. This, for me, basically means sites in Chinese and Japanese.
  • It’s easy to stumble upon a good site, but hard to find one when you’re looking for it. Also, simply throwing things into bookmarks doesn’t lead to sites getting seen, for me. Previously, I had been using a program to open sites randomly, but that got rather out of hand…websites opening left and right.
  • A more streamlined alternative to using Surusu for storing websites is WhatPage, a web-based, no-install browser homepage rotator. Unfortunately, they have a ridiculously low limit on the number of websites you can store. So if you know of any alternatives, please let me know.

How do you score your cards?

I just kind of play it by ear, to tell you the truth. I use the scoring principles outlined by Dr. Woz at SuperMemo. Namely:

• 0 = Blank. Total. Memory. Blank.
• 1 = Well in’ dat cute…but it’s WRONG! (Two Stupid Dogs…anyone? Anyone?)
• 2 = Slightly Wrong
• 3 = Just…Barely…Right…By The Enamel of the Teeth
• 4 = Correct…amundo.
• 5 = Psssh…Piece Of Cake, Be Arch, Why You Even Be Showing Me This, Motherlover? You’d Best Believe I Come Correct, Son. Perfect! Flawless victory! Correct and Fast and Easy.

So basically a card is either correct or incorrect, but then within that binaryness, the 0~5 scale gives uz a finer-grained way of explaining the correctness. 0~2 is all incorrect, 3~5 is correct; it’s all a matter of degree and the specifics don’t matter too too much. SRSing isn’t so ossified a field that these things are hard and fast yet.

We are living in a golden, lawless age where no one’s telling you what to do*: enjoy your freedom. In any case, once you decide what constitutes correctness and incorrectness for your cards, then scoring is smooth sailing. The key is that you recognize that most decisions are ultimately arbitrary, that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that you have the right to start making some of these arbitrary decisions. You are the rules. That’s my take on it.

Besides, I don’t like other people controlling my whys, whens, whats, with-whoms and hows, because they’re not very good at it .

*For example, some idiots went and decided that socks + slippers = lame, before I was even born. From birth, I have known that socks + slippers = a prudent foot-hygiene choice in any urban environment. But now, on top of making good decisions for myself, I’m beating off the social inertia of someone else’s ancient opinions. Is that what you want? Coz you’re asking for it! Don’t come asking me to make rules that don’t exist.

How would you grade something like a personal development quote card?

• If the quote is a cloze deletion, then I grade myself my ability to fill in the (one-word) blank, just like any other informational card.
• On the other hand, if the quote is in full view (no blanks), then I grade myself on the extent to which:
  1. I have internalized (i.e. am living) the content of the quote. So if, for example, I have been blowing a setback out of proportion, then a quote about setbacks would get a low score.
  2. The quote is boring me. So if it’s a quote that I’m not quite living up to, but that I have seen so much that it feels cliched, I’ll give it a big score anyhow to get it out of the way. Conversely, if the quote is feels very “fresh” to me, then it’ll get a somewhat lower score.

So many decks, do you go through them all every day?

I choose decks in order of fun/priority and I delete extensively. If I’m avoiding a deck, then I go on a deletion spree, and I keep deleting until the deck feels good again.

Also, while there are many decks, many of the decks contain only a handful of cards (80-20 rule) or are information-only decks, so…there are no reps to do as such.

So, no, I don’t necessarily touch every deck every day without fail . Rather than try to “work harder” to correct this, I instead tweak things to make it so that I want to touch the relevant decks — again, deletion is big here. Also, if, for whatever reason, time is short, then priority rules take over. Japanese is a top priority deck for me. Humanities is not.

Surusu does automated rep-capping and deck-switching for me, so a lot of the thought/selection/management burden is taken away.

Show us your cards, motherlover!: Actual Card Examples

Yeah, and it was your mother I was loving…jerkwad.

What? No…Um…OK card. The simplest way is to just give you a nice, pretty table, much like in “My First Sentence Pack”, except MFSP is even better.

To make things easier for myself, these cards do not have links to actual audio files (even where applicable). In a real, live SRS, they would…I just wanted to save myself a few steps since this article is so long already! … ‘Told you I was lazy

So are you offended by the “jerkwad” part or the advertising?

That’s about it. I look forward to your insight and feedback .

Today’s is a guest post by Maya, whom you may know as one of AJATT’s most prolific contributors of sweet links of the “reliving childhood joy” variety. Recently, she’s also enjoyed great SRS success with extensive one-by-one deletion of crappy cards.

Anyway, the being known as Maya has now graduated from simply being a good-looking Japanese learner with great taste in blogs, to a good-looking Japanese learner with great taste in blogs who does bribery and extortion . I’m not saying she threatened my family and offered me money for this post. I’m just saying…I have a PayPal account. So, without further ado, here’s a guest post from Maya herself about a new, free and friendly reading contest!

Maya:

Hey, you! Yes, YOU!

Do you remember what it was like being a kid? Those good ol’ days, when decisions were made by going “eeny-meeny-miney-moe”? When money problems were settled by the banker in Monopoly, and “old” referred to anyone over 20? When having a lunch box plastered with Power Rangers stickers made you the coolest kid in school, and a trip to Toys ‘R Us seemed way cooler than going to the mall?

Back then, everything you did in school had some connection to something fun. Y’know, those good ol’ days when “learning physics” really meant “watching ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ videos”, and math class involved as many pictures and drawings as it did numbers. Back when fifteen whole minutes of reading guaranteed you getting a big, sparkly sticker, thereby making you the superstar of your class.

This April, 2010, I (Maya) am inviting you to go back to those times – to get back into the “if it’s not fun, #’!#& it” mentality. I’m inviting you to join…

世界読書コンクール：L2 Reading Contest Ghetto Fun-Blasting Machine

That’s right – a reading contest. Here’s the scoop:

• The contest is web-based; everyone, regardless of location, is welcome and encouraged to join
• Contest starts April 1^st, 2010 and ends April 30^th, 2010 local time (whatever that is for you)
• Winner = whoever reads the largest number of pages
• One “page” = a page in a manga; a page in a book; a webpage; one newspaper article, etc
• Participants will be encouraged to give weekly updates of their progress (for extra drama), but only the end (monthly) results will be considered final
• Winners will be awarded sparkly e-stickers, along with the glory of looking cool on the Internet
• Non-winners will be awarded… not sparkly e-stickers
• All participants will get the chance to be inspired to do more reading in a month than they might have done otherwise
• Learners of languages other than Japanese are also welcome to join

That’s all. Participation is (of course) free, and dropping out halfway through is also allowed. If you’d like to join, please leave a comment either under this post or under the post in this link with your name (doesn’t have to be your real name) and the language(s) you will be reading in (for this contest, any reading done in your native language(s) will not count).

That’s about all. Let’s get the reading started!

That’s it. Let the fun begin. Feel free to send any questions/comments you have about the contest to Maya directly since…they’ll actually get answered that way .

Now that we’ve talked about the Unified Reading Process (check out the previous article in the series) in general, let’s take a little walk down Specificity Lane. The following advice probably applies to all kinds of books, but I’ve written it from the specific perspective of personal development/business books, which account for most of my reading right now.

_{Funnily enough, the methods I am going to share with you in this and future articles seem to be on their way to allowing me to read less and less of this type of book: since SRSing allows me to remember so much of what I’ve already read, there’s no need to buy any old (unoriginal, low-quality, or simply well-promoted) personal development book just for “review” or a “motivitational boost”.}

The personal development (PD) genre is as popular as it is despised…the reasons for that are interesting and warrant their own article. But for now, let’s keep to the topic at hand.

By way of note, for the uninitiated, an SRS is a smart electronic flashcard system.

OK, here we go!

Anyone can read a good PD book and be at least temporarily inspired to alter her behavior…but what about 7 days, 7 weeks, 7 months and 7 years later?

Perhaps you can’t always be surrounded by positive people, but you can at least have positive books. And that’s almost as good. The key is that contact with the information in these books be:

• Frequent or otherwise of a nature that will change your behavior for the better.
• But also not so frequent that you go numb to it (see: “quotes pasted on wall” for details).
• Available to you whenever pertinent situations arise — the good ideas you come across need to be immediately available to you in a form such that action is possible. Since, fundamentally, you can only act based on the information you have in your head, these ideas, this information, effectively also needs to be in your head if it’s to be of any value. When you’re dealing with a jerk, you’re unlikely to have your trusty, well-underlined copy of How To Deal With Jerks handy — but you still need to act.

Of course, there are some exceptions; we’re speaking very generally here.

One is reminded of that rather sinister-sounding quote by Lenin (?apparently?):

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth” .

Human beings’ judgment of the correctness of many ideas appears to be determined in large part by exposure count. Expose yourself to a quote, an idea, a product enough times, and it becomes part of your reality; it becomes part of your choice-set; it becomes “true”…regardless of actual veracity or quality.

It’s a lot like how advertising works — Coca-Cola doesn’t ceaselessly advertise that strange, corrosive beverage of theirs in order to tell you it exists — we all know it exists — they advertise it to you in order to alter your environment, your psychology, and therefore your choices. These frequent “nudges” seem to be what’s needed to push human beings over the edge.

I mean, you didn’t think all that money was being spent on advertising with no real idea whether it worked or not, did you?*

_{*I guess this did happen during the “Dot Com Boom” but…then again (at the risk of “interpreting the results to fit the theory”) while many of the Dot Coms spent a lot of $$ advertising, they didn’t continue the onslaught for years on end, plus they didn’t give their products and business models time to mature. Internet or no Internet, things like that still seem to take a few years. Not that I really know, but…}

A lot of the ideas we come into contact with in our daily lives are, at the very least, half-truths; they also tend to be of a negative, destructive, or otherwise unproductive nature. Turn on the news, a movie or a pop song, and you’re likely to be assaulted with a stream of incredibly repetetive, low-quality assumptions about life and human capability, wrapped in an immensely entertaining package, sort of like junk food for the mind: tastes great, widely condoned, kills, and it’s mostly high-fructose corn syrup anyway. Personal development books, at their best, are collections of better ideas, better techniques, better alternatives for working our lives. Better food for the mind. _{And if some people accuse you of mental orthorexia? Well, stupidity and blindly following the crowd tend to be their own “punishment” (said in menacing tone), in the long run.}

The more we can expose ourselves to these better ideas…the better. And in my brief experience on the topic, I’ve found that it’s not enough to just have vaguely remembered inklings of certain ideas — it seems like it’s important to re-view them somewhat more fully, more directly. Basically, “repetition is the mother of skill“, if you will. You can’t just have seen that Coke ad once. In fact, I read somewhere that a typical consumer needs to be exposed to an ad about 7 times before they actually make the purchase. Magic number, I know. But clearly, either way, what we’re dealing with is not an inherent property of advertising, but of the relationship between human beings, ideas and action.

So, rather than passively receiving other people’s advertising your messages, why not “advertise” to yourself the ideas that you like and find important? That’s the basic idea. If we want to change our habitual behavior, then it comes as no surprise that we may need some level of habitual expsosure to the behavior-changing ideas.

Another problem I found with not SRSing or otherwise broadly reviewing personal development books, was that my behavior and opinions would become completely biased in the direction of whichever author I was currently reading. Of course, there is some good in this. But the problem with being so totally saturated in one author’s world is that one inherits all her blindspots and biases as well. Much good can be gained, but much good also gets lost, ignored, or replaced by the bad-to-mediocre.

Intellectually, we all know that no single author is going to have the fullest, best answers on every issue. But recency can blind us to this in a practical sense. SRSing information allows your techniques and philosophy to remain a unique, well-balanced amalgam of all the good stuff you’ve been exposed to: your very own syncretic approach, taking the best from wherever you find it — like a mental file that is actually appended to, not just constantly overwritten.

But, at the end of the day, I don’t really know, it’s all really experimental . Maybe you can pick up on some of these ideas, and take them somewhere interesting.

I really hope this has helped you…it may just be me going off on a personal tangent. Anyway, let me know…gently …

In the next article in this series, we’ll cover some practical elements of this SRSing-beyond-pure-language-learning business (including demonstrating some actual SRS cards), as well as answer some pertinent questions. If you have anything you want answered, now’s the time to put it forward. It may or may not get dealt with, but, you never know until you try, right?

Please take all this advice cum grano salis. Take it for what it is — one star (don’t say “yeah, a supernova”, really…just don’t) in a galaxy of information about reading. Everyone has their pet-techniques, and everyone’s situation is different to some degree. As a wise young woman on the Internets once said:

“no method will ever be 100% perfect for anyone except its creator.”

All of this, this entire site, is just my personal…thing, so…don’t take it too seriously. You definitely want to try, pick and choose what works and what doesn’t for you. My own methods are constantly evolving, so in a sense you could say I end up disagreeing with myself now and then. And, if I disagree with me sometimes, so should you . A few months from now, I may not even be using any of the techniques I’m about to share with you. So, keep that in mind .

Why did I get into this reading technique thing anyway?

Well, It’s complicated. But only slightly so. Basically, I had two different sets of reading problems with (1) native-level languages, and (2) sucky-level languages. These two problem sets ended up being fixed with the same solution. And that’s what makes this article-series seem complicated: I’m really attempting to discuss two things at the same time. Confusing, I know. I’m a cruel, inconsiderate man — get used to it.

One thing common to both sets of problems is that, despite continuing efforts, electronic books are yet to reach the level of availability, let alone convenience, to allow one to go “all electronic”. My ultimate goal is 100% digitization, which would render a lot of this book-handling business obsolete.

Anyway, here are some issues that were unique to each set of problems:

Problem Set 1: Native-Level Languages

• Too many books in possession — major life decisions are starting to be made aroundthe welfare of the books that are supposed to be getting read or re-read at some point, but aren’t.
  • Books are getting “lost in the sea”, hidden under and behind other books.
• Reading a bit, but wanting to read much more, and also suck the most value out of each book.
• A lot of good half-read books that warrant more reading (full of potentially good information), but that have been side-tracked by other books.
• Forgetting the content of fully-read books, leading to a desire to keepbooks “for future reference/re-reading”, even though there are already…too many books in the house, and the world.
  • I especially had the desire to have the content of personal development books more readily available in my head, in my life, where it could more readily affect my behavior. This basically lead me to start SRSing quotes. More on that later…
• Guilt about skipping pages.

Problem Set 2: Sucky-Level Languages

• Have books, keep getting more, but not reading any of them because the reading is too painful
• Too many stops (“better SRS this; no pain no gain, be arch”).
• Too much guilt about skipping.
• Trying to catch everything and getting bored/tired out.

Two different sets of reading problems united by a single solution. Hence, the Unified Reading Process.

URP: The Unified Reading Process

The unified reading process (this sounds so…Proctor & Gamble…I love it) I currently use for each book is:

1. Buy
2. Read & Dog-ear
3. Stack
4. Un-dog-ear & Enter quotes into SRS
5. Either:

• (a) Discard (give away, resell) || OR ||
• (b) Keep & Reprocess from step (2)

In the case of native-level languages, I tend to discard — i.e. give away to friends or resell. In the case of sucky-level languages, I tend to keep and reprocess. This has less to do with the languages themselves, and more with the fact that the very nature of things means that the more proficient one is at a given language the more likely one is to have a surplus of books in it.

The key to discarding is to not force yourself to instantly make a permanent decision (while still retaining that defining characteristic of real decisions: clarity). Instead, split the decision into two clear, instant parts. In my case, I have a temporary “to discard” box with a deadline on it. Once the deadline is reached or the box becomes full, then the permanent discarding happens. So a book could be waiting there in the temporary bin for a month or more. Plenty of time to reconsider any decision.

Anyway, as you can see, it’s a really simple process. Here are just some of the benefits:

• Books are always more or less in a clear state: Unread, In-process, or Read. This leads to less ambiguity, and therefore easier management.
• Books turn into pieces of clearly memorized knowledge rather than just space-consuming things that are “good to have”, or things that you read once and kind of remember, but need to read again to “brush up”.
• You get to do a lot of reading without the long-term burden of physically owning/moving/storing a lot of books.

Low Conversion, Revisited (skip this part if you want)

At the risk of repeating myself, the keyphrase throughout the process is low conversion. By “conversion”, I mean the fraction of the book in question that gets:

1. Read closely, and/or
2. Converted into SRS cards.

Only a fraction of the pages of a book get read closely, in detail. Only a fraction of these pages get dog-eared. Only a fraction of the content of a fraction of the dog-eared pages gets entered into the SRS. Fraction. Fraction. Fraction.

No matter how much you own or suck at the language, conversion is low by nature. In fact, ironically enough, the more you suck at a language, the lower your conversion will probably be (for one thing, there’s only so much you’ll be able to read well…and then there’s the other extreme, where your conversion goes low because you already have so much prior knowledge). You see, conversion takes work. And there is only so much work that you can do. Far less than you wish you could. But that’s okay, because humans are smart; you could argue that we’re built to be lazy and low-conversion.

Even people who intend to have high conversion end up with low conversion. In fact, the more pressure you put on yourself to convert, the more likely you are to (eventually, unconsciously) rebel and end up with 0% conversion. Zero conversion is fine if the book sucked that much, but it’s not so fine when the book is otherwise good — well-written, and about a topic you’re interested in.

The way to deal with sucky books is simple — throw them away as soon as the suck is clear; get rid of them. My problem was that I was having trouble approaching the books I liked, books I had chosen, books I knew were good; I wasn’t even picking them up any more. And the root of the problem was my attempt to have high conversion.

Anyhoo, that’s all for now. But the series continues!

Next Article: Why SRS Personal Development Books?

Wherein are discussed the reasons for and benefits of subjecting personal development books to the Unified Reading Process.

Anyway, let’s go straight to the action! As promised…how to fix the problems with the sucky way we read.

Perhaps the most important principle is this:

SKIP More Than You Read. Skip MORE Than You Read.

Many people are aware that some skipping is a useful and valid reading technique. But most people are not aware of just how useful and in just what proportions they should be skipping. They think of skipping/skimming as side-dish.

Yes, you read it right, you want to skip MORE than you read. Your reading style needs to go from “reading with some skipping” to “skipping with some reading”. Skipping is the new main course. Skipping is the primary activity.

“But I won’t get the most out of the book”. Hehehe. Silly rabbit. First of all, you realize how many books there are in the world, right? And you realize more books are coming out every day, right? And you realize you’re not reading those because you’re busy slogging through this clearly past-its-prime-in-terms-of-both-information-and-entertainment-value book you’re so dutifully dragging your eyes through right now, right?

I mean, just because you pay for cable, does that mean you sit and watch only one channel per week, never switching until you’re “done”, in order to “get the most out of it” and “get your money’s worth”? I didn’t think so.

Play a little math (or, if you prefer, maths) game with me. Let’s say there are two boys — call them Akira and Tetsuo. Let’s say Akira now reads two 300-page books a month. 24 books, 7000+ pages a year. One book every two weeks — a little low, but not unreasonable in today’s world. And let’s say Tetsuo, using “skimming with some reading”, reads three 300-page books a day, for 328,000 pages a year.

“Objection, your Khatzumotoness — with skimming you only actually read 10~20% of the book!”
Sustained.
OK, so, docile, plodding Akira has 100% “read” read all 7000 pages of his 24 books, while Tetsuo has clocked in 32,000~64000 fully-read pages spread out across 1000+ books — average it out in the middle and call it 49,000 pages.

7000 pages versus 49,000 pages. Who has read more? Given that a minority of pages of a book hold a majority of the infotainment value who has learned more? Who’s more of an expert? Who can see more sides of the issue? Who has had the most fun?

And that’s what this is all about — fun. Reading the parts you like of the books you like, and leaving the rest out because life is short. Dude, you’re already skipping anyway simply by choosing to read one book over another. You might as well skip in an even more productive way.

Do you really think Akira’s half-asleep, semi-comatose, boredom-and-duty-and-just-get-me-outta-here-mode brain is taking in more information than Tetsuo’s alert, active, bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed, fun-and-flow-mode brain? (I really need to go get some new adjectives…）

Do you really think that there’s just one or two really good books in the world, and if you only read these two, you’ll never ever need to do any more reading again?

Tetsuo, by having fun and reclaiming his right to make real, significant decisions about his time and life, has managed to read more in one year than Akira does in seven. Tetsuo reads as much every 18 months as Akira does every decade. If knowledge is indeed power, who’s the one rising to power — and not just the cheesy “power over other people” kind, but the meaningful, “power in and over oneself” kind?

Avoid Marking/Highlighting/Stickers, etc.

• It’s laborious.
• You waste valuable time making thousands of tiny decisions like: “wait, is this important enough to mark?”
• It leads to page clutter. Even with the best of intentions, a page can soon become so underlined and highlighted that the unmarked stuff stands out more.
• It’s irreversible. This doesn’t just lower the resale value of your books (which is not something you necessarily need care about, since the information contained in the book should exceed its cash price anyhow) — it also makes it harder to tell where and whether or not you are “done” when it comes to “post-processing”, post-reading activities like entering small parts of the book into an SRS.
• You can get wrapped up in an escalating “battle of infinites” – always trying to find bigger, badder ways to make things stand out because you highlighted something you thought was important but actually this other thing is even more important, and all the marking’s getting in the way and…cetera…
• It requires too much equipment and too many hands — it’s bad enough that you have to handle a paper book, now you have to have the right writing implements, too?!
• Instead of marking by pen, just dog-ear the page. Dog-earing is quick, reversible and requires no extra equipment.

Accept Low Conversion

• Conversion = the percentage of a book read that is closely and/or SRSed. That is to say, “converted” from inert text into close reading and/or SRS cards.
• Only read the parts you really like of the books you really like.
  
• Only SRS the quotes you really like of the parts you really like of the books you really like.
• There is no “should”. The only “should” is the reading itself. What to read is all up to you.
• Ironically enough, a certain level of acceptance of failure is necessary for success. Once you let go of aiming for 100% success 100% of the time, you can start swinging like crazy and knocking out 95s and 90s.
• Accept that most of the book isn’t worth reading.
• Accept that most of what’s worth reading isn’t worth dog-earing.
• Accept that most of what’s worth dog-earing isn’t worth entering into an SRS.
• Accept that at least 5% and as much us 25~50% of the little that does get entered into the SRS, sucks and should be deleted. 25~50% is high, but for people who have not been in the habit of regular SRS card-culling, it is a perfectly normal number.

Generally, I dog-ear about 20% of the pages of a book. And I only pick up SRS items from a fraction (5%~50%) of the pages I do dog-ear. And each page generally only contains one sentence worth the trouble of SRSing.

Many things may seem or even be “worth” knowing, but they also have to be worth the TROUBLE of getting entered. So, if you’re SRSing even one sentence per book, then you’re doing more than okay…

Low conversion, meng.

Extensive Timebox Use

• We tend to have incredibly warped time perception of two general types — one optimistic, the other pessimistic. Both types lead to inaction.
• Over-optimism: We think we have all the time in the world when we don’t.
• Over-pessimism: We think we have no time at all, when we have plenty.
• Timeboxing helps us realize both how much and how little time we have. It cures both inaction-by-optimism and inaction-by pessimism.
• My favorite timebox size is 10 minutes. But I do make use of 2- and 3-minute timeboxes when my ability to focus is especially shot. It’s a great way to ease into deep concentration.
• There are only 1440 minutes in a day, and you’ll be awake for maybe 960 of them, and able to do active work for, at best, 480 of those. Think about it.

Throw Books Away

• Selling counts .
• Be honest — are you really ever going to look at that book again? I know you “should”, but do you want to? Come on, homeslice…we’re all adults here; there’s no need to beat around the bu… — get rid of it. What matters is the ideas in your head, not the flattened pieces of dead tree.
• Treat books as a disposable item. Again, the information needs to be in your head, ready to use. Not on Wikipedia, not on a bright-yellow-highlighted page in some funny book in some neglected corner of some overflowing bookshelf somewhere. In your head. Here. Now.
• A few bad apples ruin everything. Keeping books you don’t really like will, in my experience, lead you to read less overall.
• Do you own your books or are you being owned by them? When major life decisions are being made around the books’ welfare, this is a sign of problems.
• Of course, if you’re still building up a collection of, say, foreign language books, then “buy and hold” makes more sense .

Read Books Like You Read Websites

Our relationship with websites is much healthier, overall, than that with books. We seem to have much better reading practices online. People shift websites without any qualms.

No one would ever accuse you of “not really having read website X” just because you didn’t read every-single-word on it. I know I sometimes make fun of people who haven’t read all of this site, but, I’m just a jerk like that .

If in doubt, use your Internet reading habits as a reference.

Always Touch, But Don’t Always Touch Down

Unless the book sucks intensely, or the table of contents indicates a clear lack of relevance, more or less every page gets a look, but only a minority of pages get a close reading.

Interestingly, this puts some responsibility on authors to ensure that their work can get its point across very quickly. Lately, here in Japan, non-fiction authors [I only really read non-fiction in any quantity; I figure I can make up my own lies if I need to ] are getting really good at this — far better than their American counterparts.

In fact, I recently read some 40~60-year-old Japanese non-fiction books [you know I keeps it old skool] full of massive paragraphs and virtually no typographical variation whatsoever…and coming from reading more recent stuff, it was jarring, to say the least. Like: “Dude…bold type…use it sometimes”.

But If We Don’t Force People, They Won’t Learn Anything!!!

Yes, people are lazy. I am lazy. But they’re also curious. You don’t need duty/obligation to force or compel you to look up things you don’t know…Curiosity and Fun will do all the “forcing” you need. Your curiosity will draw you to know more, to learn more.

If they’re anything like me, then many people have become so stressed out by their existing reading practices, that It’s no longer a choice between reading 100% and reading 10~20%, but a choice between reading 100% and reading 0%. Or, more accurately, it’s a choice between:

1. Trying to read 100% and invariably losing steam after 10%, or
2. Actively accepting that only 10~20% of the pages of a book are even worth reading in the first place, and moving on, using that knowledge to our advantage.

But What About Books That Really Do Need 100% Coverage?

All that we’ve said about low conversion basically applies to books that need 100% coverage, too. You skim and skip more than you read, you just do it over more times — either by repeating multiple skip-heavy “passes” over the book, or by stabbing little non-linear, randomly sampled, Swiss-cheese holes into the book, or some combination of both.

Here’s what that Swiss-cheesing looks like in relation to other reading styles. Notice how The Ideal #1 almost always collapses into the bitter conclusion of #2; #3 and #4 are two enjoyable alternatives to what, for many, tends to turn reading into an exercise in suffering.

There’s a really cool proverb from China, apparently taken from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In Japanese, you can read it as: “読書百遍義自ら見る” (ﾄﾞｸｼｮﾋｬｯﾍﾟﾝｷﾞｵﾉｽﾞｶﾗｱﾗﾜﾙ). In the language of Mordor, one says: “any book will make sense after a hundred readings”.  And any book swiss-cheesed enough, we might add, will eventually see the abyssal darkness of 100% coverage, if that’s what you really want and need.

A book, or rather, our experience of a book, can change quite radically upon multiple readings/passes. In any case, the key, I think, is many fast readings/passes rather than one slow reading/pass.

But What About Fiction? Come On, Homie?

Royal we have never cared much for fiction, but you can do all this with fiction, too, if you want — I have (all the novel-lovers are having little heart attacks right now…calm down; the world isn’t falling apart).

Fiction is the most arrogant supergenre out there; it’s so full of itself; it seems to think that it always deserves dutiful, close, linear reading. More often than not, it just doesn’t. A lot of fiction is so boring that the “adventure” you can get yourself into by swiss-chessing it is actually its own reward — it improves the story. There, I said it. Bring it, fiction!

Of course, if your preference dictates a more “traditional” approach, then be my guest. I mean, good grief, it’s not like I live with you and am in a position to force you to change .

Next Article: The Unified Reading Process

All you detailed-oriented lasses and man-lasses out there, get a change of panties ready!

In the next article in this series, we’re going to look at the process I currently use (I like to call it the “Unified Reading Process” or URP, for reasons to be revealed later, but mostly because I like to make up rather easy-to-mock acronyms), that ties all these ideas together into a bit of a mini-system you can use if you want. So…stay tuned!

As with everything on this site, the advice here is just based on my personal experience. I’m not an expert. Take what works, leave what doesn’t — the overall principles matter more than the minutiae of technique. Your mileage may vary and all that (then again, I am quite confident that it won’t vary by that much — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it, eh lads, eh?).

Also, an interesting thing happened. While I originally intended this advice to be specifically directed towards languages we suck at (i.e. early- and mid-stage foreign languages), I soon found that it applied just as well to reading languages where we have native-level skill. Yay!

Anyway, first, a little bit about:

The Sucky Way We Read

By “how we read”, I mean “how we are taught to read in school”. Fortunately for me, growing up, I did a lot (indeed, most) of my reading entirely outside of the school framework, so for a long time I wasn’t “infected” as much by the school disease — at the very least, I was asymptomatic for many years.

But over time, it did get to me as well. So much so that I had to reach back into my childhood and reflect on what I had been doing outside of school, why it was so much fun, and why it worked so well, in order to get my then-stalled reading habits back on track _{(in the early years of my adult life, I went through a stage where I was basically not doing any reading, despite having a strong desire to read and a history of reading)}.

The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there.

The above is a style of reading that is, on the surface, well -suited to an early-stage student. After all, does someone who can barely read or who barely knows the subject matter at hand, really have the ability to decide where and what to skip? (Actually my answer to that is “yes”, but, school’s answer tends to be a resounding “no”).

Why How We Read Sucks

My guess is that the core reason why this reading style came about in the first place is because, at one time, in many parts of the world, there simply weren’t that many books, period. So, reading one book a year was fine, since you only owned one book and maybe had access to a few more. Oftentimes, the books in question were these massive, dense, metaphor-laden sacred texts, which probably do lend themselves to a special style of reading _{(then again, judging by how few people of any religious persuasion actually read sacred texts, perhaps these too could benefit from techniques like those I’m intending to share).}

Of course, things have changed. A lot. At least in terms of the number of books available. But in most schools and classes, the reign of tyranny of a single source of information continues. Moreover, the semi-compulsive behavior of reading (or, attempting to read) every-single-word-on-every-single-page-so-you-get-exactly-what-was-said-and-don’t-miss-a-single-thing is exacerbated by the earnest student’s fear of “missing” something that might be “on the test”. In fact, many tests are designed to reward this one-tree-matters-more-than-the-entire-forest type of reading.

There’s just no sense of priority; everything becomes equally important. It’s as if the Pareto Principle never existed. Indeed, some people might argue that that was the point: it is said that most school systems in the world today are based on a design that aims to produce compliant, docile factory workers — people who unquestioningly obey pre-made decisions, not people who make them. Those who go on to be managers get let in on the secret that most decisions are arbitrary, but people lower down on the ladder are to be left in the dark, believing that the pre-made decisions are absolute, based on the perfect or near-perfect knowledge of their elders and betters (“experts”, “superiors”), and carrying all the weight of divine decree.

OK, social engineering, blah blah whatever. Let’s not get too worked up. The deeper problem is that to force yourself to read everything is to force yourself out of your growth/true-comfort zone and into either your boredom zone or your panic zone (both of which are places where you are just going to…wait for the pun…”zone out”).

This leads to stress. Stress makes you forgetful: short-term memory gets pwned. No short term memory → no long-term memory. No long-term memory → no learning new information. No new information → less intelligent choices, far less brilliant flashes of insight. Less intelligent choices → more stupid choices. In short, the way school typically teaches us to read, makes us stupid. As in, Republican Gilmore Girls the end of Prison Break running out of cheap jokes stupid. The phrase “dumbing down” starts to take on a whole new meaning..

And now that we’re done complaining and making sweeping judgments and dubious historical references, it’s time to talk about how to fix the problem! But for that, dear children of the AJATT, ye shall have to wait for the very forthcoming sequel to this article — part deux! Wherein shall be demonstrated reading techniques that can help you have more fun reading any language, including Japanese.

Look up definitions of words you already know.

You heard me.

LOOK

UP

WORDS

YOU

ALREADY

KNOW

In Japanese, that would be super, duper, uber, simple, kantan, remedial words. I refer to:

• 此処(here)
• 食べる(eat)
• 飲む(drink)
• 男(man)
• 女(woman)
• 行く(to go)
• 来る(to come)
• 大きい(big)
• 小さい(small)
• お前(you)
• の(“of”)
• ママ(Mama)
• は ([topic marker])
• 氈鹿(goat antelope) — what, you didn’t know this one?
• だ(is)
• よ([emphasis marker])
• ええっ？(huh?)
• 何？(what?)
• 殺す(kill)
• ぞ([emphasis marker])
• この(this)
• 野郎(rascal)

I think you get the message. So, all you cats worrying about “goin’ monolingual”, start with words you already know. No chance of misunderstanding there, right? Right. Good. End transmission.