In arithmetic, whenever we have an expression, we don’t just go left-to-right, and we don’t just run our calculations all willy-nilly. There is what is called the standard order of operations. These are the rules of engagement, the sine qua non, what the French call the without which not, of doing arithmetic.  One acronym for these rules is PEMDAS: parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction.

You’ve been doing arithmetic a long time, but you’ve probably only started SRSing relatively recently, SRS being a more recent invention than arithmetic. In SRSing we also have an order of operations AKA precedence rules AKA order of priority.

As with arithmetic, the SOOP (SRS order of priority) — yet another meaningless acronym — tells us what to do first, if there is any doubt. Unlike the arithmetic rules, the SOOP is not hard and fast. It’s just an arbitrary set of guidelines to make our lives easier and prevent the harried, type-A, OCDish behavior you sometimes see exhibited by people who are SRSing — behavior that leads them to burn out, give up, and curse this SRSing thing as “useless” or “not for me”.

So here it is, the SOOP, which can further be abbreviated as DADRA (how do I keep coming up with these?!): Don’t Add, Delete, Review, Add.

0. Don’t Add

• The zeroth rule. Not adding anything to your SRS deck is the most “important” activity, in that it takes precedence over all the others. If in doubt, don’t add anything to the SRS. Just don’t. Too hard to add? Don’t add it. Can’t be bothered? Don’t be. When something really needs to be added to the SRS, it won’t feel like a chore at all.

1. Delete

• The first rule. Delete. If in doubt, delete stuff. Delete. Delete. Deleted. Baleted. Let it go. There is perhaps nothing more threatening to your long-term SRSing prospects than bad cards. Nothing will drag down your repcount (reviewcount) more quickly and with more certainty, than the existence of large quantities of SRS cards you no longer give a care about. If in doubt, throw it out. Delete. Doesn’t matter if you would, could or should learn it. Delete it.
• What about “essential” language elements like individual kanji and/or kana and/or hangul, etc? Surely these can’t be deleted, right? Right? My original answer to that would have been a “yes, suck it up”. However, over time, my opinion has changed. I have found bad cards to be so destructive to SRSing that it is better to, yes, delete even cards containing essential, fundamental language elements. Call it “lazy processing”: you can always undelete, or re-add the cards later. If the language element is really that essential, you’ll be able to pick up the slack later.
• Important: I personally prefer to delete one card a time. I say, resist the impulse to “push the reset button” — delete entire decks and start from scratch, because this robs you of the opportunity to discover the properties of the cards you do like and are worth keeping. Also, it’s a bit of a binge-purge behavior, which is something you don’t want.

2. Review

• The second rule. Review cards. Do reps. It’s what we might call the most “normal”, “standard”, “vanilla” use of an SRS. Nothing much more to say here. Click. Show back. Set score. Next.

3. Add

• The third rule. If all else fails, add some new SRS cards. Add new cards. Why is this last? What the hockey puck is wrong with you, Khatzumoto? Surely, even you, up on your AJATT cloud, are aware that you can’t delete or review cards without having first added them? Yes, of course, that is true. Remember, the SOOP merely tells us precedence. It tells us what should precede what, what should go first, iff there is any question as to what to do. However, by definition, if there are no cards, then while “don’t add” (the zeroth rule) will work, the first and second rules will default down to this one. What matters is to know that if in doubt, adding cards is the least important thing you can do.

And we’re done. These are just random guidelines I came up with by myself. Yeah, I’m good-looking, but not omniscient. So I’d be happy to hear what you have to share, iff you’re good-looking as well.

Shallowly,

Khatzumoto

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

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

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

Here is my response:

@Maya

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

Delete even more.

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

Go to delete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, go break some eggs and make that omelette .

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

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

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

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

Khatz

Epilogue

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

Thanks to everyone for their advice!

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

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

Thanks to everyone for your advice/anecdotes/encouragement!

…

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

Everything felt fresh and simple <3

This is the fourth article in an ongoing series. To read this series from the beginning, go here.

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?

This is the third post in a continuing series on Why The Way We Read Sucks and How To Fix It. Go here to read the series from the beginning.

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 around the 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 keep books “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.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this post continues right where its predecessor left off. I enjoyed the mixed reaction to that previous post…it looks like maybe people who went through some flavour of the British school system have experiences closer to mine. Or, this may all just be a personal problem that I’ve overgeneralized. We’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?

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!

Another day, another kid named J.R. (different from the last!), all up in my email:

Hey Khatz,

Your method when applied to languages like Chinese and Japanese makes perfect sense but I am trying to learn Korean and Finnish.

My problem is with Finnish. A Finnish word can have up to 14 cases so do I need to make a sentence for each case?  If done that way, it seems like I could make it to 10,000 sentences quite easily, but the 10,000 wouldn’t be the same as say 10,000 in Japanese/Korean/Chinese.

Appreciate the feedback.

OK, first of all, I have a secret ^{(the secret, the secret)} to tell you. Come closer. Closer. ‘K, here we go:

There are no cases in Finnish.^*

Just make whatever sentences you need to make as things come out of your immersion environment. Just treat everything as if it were a different word. Focus on the difference in *meaning*, since that’s what actually counts.

Think about it in English — fundamentally, the difference between “I go to school” and “I went to school” isn’t one of tenses of the verb “to go” or whatever…the two words, “go” and “went”…the two sentences actually have different meanings. In theory, they are mutations of the same word. In practice, they are different words. “He eats the food”, “he ate the food” — these things are different.

Looked at this way, grammatical inflection ceases to be a burden, and instead becomes a tool for expressing oneself more precisely. You go from “Effing sonofa I have to learn all this effing mothereffing B.S.” to “SWEET! I can tell people what I will have done if I were to have been X; the future really is perfect!”.

So don’t think of the depth of variation of a single word. Pretend everything is flat. Treat everything as its own, independent word. Sometimes, it’s just easier this way. In practice, this does mean that every case will eventually be represented in your SRS, but not that you’ll necessarily have to decline or conjugate every single word that inflects — you are after all a human being; you know a pattern when you see it; you don’t need everything declared; you’re a gap-filling, pattern-matching machine. Do as much as you need to “get it”, and no more.

As for number of sentences, I doubt more than 10k will be necessary to reach a high level of proficiency. Remember that the sentences are just a tool/by-product for and of massive exposure to native materials.

For more, check out AntiMoon.com — Tomasz and the crew wrote about learning English, which is closer to what you’re trying to do in terms of certain language features.

Disclaimer: I haven’t actually tried to learn Finnish, but if I were to, this is exactly how I would do it. Starting with a phrasebook, I would just accept the sentences “as is”, and let the patterns present themselves to me over time. In any case the key is always to realize this: learning a language does not require pain, boredom or suffering.

^{_{*OK, maybe there are, but only because and as long as people keep saying so. They’re a theoretical construct that’s generally useful for analysis, and generally worth crap-all for praxis.}}

A funny thing happened on the way to my email:

Hey Khatz,

I’m currently using my SRS to practice sentences, but I’m having trouble keeping up with the workload. In your recommendations you say you should be able to write (copy out) each sentence.

Do you recommend copying out the sentence every time it shows up in your SRS? Or just the first time, or every time you miss it? Whats your stance on this. I’d be interested to know because at about 1 minute per card writing everything out, I tend to burn out pretty fast. Sorry if you’ve answered this somewhere on your site already, I couldn’t find it if you have.

Thanks for your time,

J.R.

Great question. I’d been meaning to address this at some point . This is of course all assuming you’re doing the “classic”/”original”/”vanilla”/”recognition”-type sentences, where you are to read aloud and understand a sentence written in actual Japanese. For Japanese, I continue to use this type of sentence card myself because it’s so time-cheap. Anyway, to the point:

Writing out the sentence (or some part of it, e.g. the part you got wrong) each time you miss it is enough*. In fact, it’s ideal, I think. It’s the perfect balance between thinking (“which ones should I write?”) and effort (“I need to sit up with pen and paper and write this shizzle!”) and gain (“I know stuff!”).

Indeed, you may often find, as I do, that there is a strong correlation between ability to write out the sentence and ability to read it correctly. There may always be things you can read but not write, but there will be few/none that you can write but not read. For whatever reason or reasons, the act of writing out the parts you get wrong will impress them upon your memory a lot more than merely seeing them. Maybe it’s because the writing out forces you to focus a bit.

Anyway, have fun. If anyone else has tips for J.R., feel free to share .

_{*N.B.: Just so we’re clear, this post is about sentences. For kanji, you’re going to want to write everythaang out.}

This is the penultimate installment of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

You probably get from this blog that I take issue with school and what it does to people. One of the things that happens in school is people are often forced to compete against one another in games of dubious intrinsic significance and even more dubious post-scholastic significance. When schoolkids do cooperate, they do so only in superficial, preset ways — anyone who’s ever had the teacher pick your class groups knows the kind of thing I’m talking about. Why was the learning-disabled kid always in my group? Yes, I said “retard”. How else do you describe a white kid who doesn’t like rap music? ALL white kids of sound mind like rap music! What, you think I like it because I’m black? NO! I was raised in a white neighborhood in Africa: that’s just how stuff goes down, son [faux-gangsta hand gestures]!

Another thing many schools have is an aversion to technology that reduces work — calculators, spell-checkers…[except in cases where Casio or TI used copious quantities of hookers and blow to bribe the local school board into pushing graphing calcs on the students...hey, even teachers need their hookers and blow, plus there are worse things to push].

So I never felt it right to put down the various mass-sentence collection initiatives out there. And I still don’t. In fact, I think they’re a great thing in that they potentially reduce some gruntwork…To the extent they represent selfless, well-intentioned teamwork, I think they could well be a great thing.

But, they do not remove your responsibility to be selective. As the saying goes, you can delegate tasks but not responsibility. In fact, due to the quantity of pre-prepared sentences involved; the responsibility to be selective is only increased a thousandfold, no a myriadfold, no, as many folds as there are grains of sand in the eyelashes of all the camels in Japan, yazalami. Think about it — when you’re working by hand, you are limited by your time and ability to concentrate. But when the input’s already been done for you, the opportunities to fill your SRS with duds multiply by hundreds and maybe even thousands. So you must become a professional weeder.

For the purposes of SRSing, weeding/selectivity is a synonym for both “delete” and “do not insert in the first place” (although, the emphasis is on the “delete; there’s no need to bother avoiding mistakes if they can be corrected later for free). If you don’t like an item, throw it out. If an item looks at you wrong, throw it out. If you just can’t be bothered with an item…throw it out. If you feel “meaah”, throw it out. Even if you’re just a beginner but you sense there might be an error, throw it out. If your favorite sports team loses, throw it out. If you’re marching in the Army and you feel something funny, throw it out. Throw out sentences for cosmetic reasons. Don’t worry about false positives — there’s plenty more where those came from. You are precious; your enjoyment is precious; maybe even the process is precious, but the individual sentences are not.

Also…pre-mined sentences are definitely for outgrowing. Unless and until they start cutting sentence items with text and audio and video clips from authentic native sources. Funnily enough, this is starting to happen (this article has been in a half-written state for many months, so things change). iKnow are kinda sorta moving in this direction, and the new program subs2srs is a promising development.

Anyway, for now, it’s a fine, fine line. And you don’t need me to walk it for you; remember, I’m not a linguist or anything, I’m just the most handsome man on the entire Internet. So… have fun with it, and remember…the delete button is your friend.

Personally, I haven’t found pre-mined SRS items to carry enough of the je ne sais quoi weirdness that is the staple of my life…but this may be a temporary problem. Keep in mind that I am old man of sorts; I have my way of doing things now. It may just be the inertia of well-formed habit that keeps me doing things my way. Or it may in fact be the case that SRS cards that one makes oneself sit in the memory better, complete with the context in which the information was originally found — this lack of context definitely looms quite large. But, really, I don’t know.

Is the SRS alone enough? I want it to be. Fundamentally, I believe that every large problem can be solved through good systems…A good system gives us a way to connect tiny local actions into a larger global goal or solution. But in my experience with and observation of purely SRS-centric, low-immersion language learners, I have yet to see good results. I have seen people spin their wheels just dry-SRSing themselves into oblivion, avoiding immersion, with its rough edges and frequent lack of certainty, like a drunk salaryman on the train. I hesitate to hypothesize, but I think it’s safe to say that high-concentration, high-quantity exposure to engaging (=fun) native materials is a far better overall predictor of fluency than SRSing.

One thing that attracts me to SRSing is the feeling of quantitative progress. So I decided to find myself an easy way to get this feeling in areas other than SRSing. This month, I’m watching 100 unique Cantonese movies — not not counting repeats or other exposure materials such as the news, cartoons, regular TV shows, books and so on. I cut away boring parts ruthlessly. Some movies I repeat all day, some I sample, skip and skim through in one minute before discarding. But more on this in a future post.

As things stand right now, the immersion environment is still the foundation and center of the process. SRS acts like a glue and bridge. The SRS ensures that information from the environment is not lost, again acting as a sealing agent of sorts and a bridge into a more free-wheeling, on-the-fly enjoyment and use of the language [memorizing information can free up brain cycles you can then use for having more fun]. In any case, what’s real is the environment; the environment is the real world; real stuff by and for native users. If you run away from that, trying to escape to the comforting (?), sometimes familiarly school-like arms of your SRS, then you are, in a sense, running away from reality. Not to mention the fact that there are parts of every language that fall between the cracks of deliberate attempts to record and collect that language, but that are a very real everyday part of it. In no language does this seem more true than Japanese. Indeed, some Japanese people can seem intent on keeping you away from the language as it is actually used, but I imagine the same could be said of patronizing speakers of any language.

Or something. I am now theorizing. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Please don’t treat me like an authority, or imagine that I think I am one. The ultimate authority on your language process is you. Take advice, take in opinions, but know that in the present day and age, your best guide is your own process of play. Yes, play. Call it “trial and error”, if you want to feel more “grown-up” about it. But know that, really, it’s just play. Screwing around.

As an erudite forum critic of mine once pointed out that I don’t even follow my own advice. And it’s true: I don’t. Insofar as I am frequently making tweaks and changes to the sails of the ship in order to make better use of the winds of reality, I literally do not follow my own advice. Ultimately, there is no AJATT “system”, or at least I do not want there to be. I merely presented it as a system to make it easier to digest, to make it seem more concrete and less flaky, but what is ultimately more important than any detail of implementation is the idea that you can do this on your own, having fun, simply by becoming what you want to be Later by turning into it Right Here and Now — there are tools that can help you do this, but they’re all disposable, to be discarded the moment a truly superior alternative shows itself. Here, superiority is as much relative as it is absolute. A “superior” tool can’t just be objectively better, it must also fulfill certain subjective criteria.

Anyway, SRSing feels like it’s just now starting to take off…But, things are developing at an exciting pace. There may very soon come a day when a single product has all the tools in one box, everything you need for fluency in a language. But not yet. Not yet…Not freaking yet. I am many things, but I am not a Luddite; I honestly want everything to be in one box. But there is no such box. A lot of people with boxes want to tell you they have it. They don’t.

The SRS is easily one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. And this series has been about how to use an SRS. Abandoning the SRS altogether would be like, I dunno, throwing out one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. It’s like abandoning electric lights because “they’re too bright and they cut me” — yeah, if you stare directly into them at point blank range, then you’ll just end up seeing stars, and if you crack the glass and rub the tungsten filaments on your naked eyeballs, it might itch a bit. And if you pour the mercury into your evening after-dinner libation and drink it, then, you might turn into a white kid who doesn’t like rap music. But if take those same electric lights, and shine them on books, then you can read the best comics in the very dead of night.

An SRS will simply harm and blind you if you don’t use it sensibly; if you try to beat yourself with it, it’ll hurt. But, used correctly, i.e. with judicious attention to fun and immersion, it can help bring you, at the very least, literacy in Japanese or Chinese or whatever else, in far less time and with far less effort than you ever thought possible.

So use one. Just don’t be used by one.

In my eagerness to give people an easy series of steps to follow, I fear I may have done the world a disservice. I use the SRS; I have it do work for me that I would otherwise have to do [dynamically sorting 15,000 paper flashcards into dated boxes? are you kidding me?]; it is my secretary; it schedules my reviews so I don’t have to. I wouldn’t walk into any language unarmed with an SRS. But for too many people SRSing has become the main course. For too many people…following the instructions on this site ever more accurately has become the main course. The problem is not so much with the individual actions as with the overall subtext of submission. Which makes me wonder…

Why do we so carefully pick out clothes, food and TV channels…but not ideas? Surely we can all agree to like Subway sandwiches, but decide to use different fillings and not get too worked up over the presence or absence of olives? If you want to know if the SRS card format you’re thinking of will work…why not just go and try playing with different formats? Play. There is no “fail” in “play”. Don’t ask me whether stuff will work; I don’t know and I don’t care. Don’t look for my approval or anyone else’s. Think about it — if I or anyone else thought what you were suggesting doing were correct, we would be doing it ourselves. Discovery (frequently? only?) happens where you go against what everyone is saying, go against the grain and into new territory. Don’t be afraid; don’t explain yourself; don’t argue; just go.

Did you know that whenever you ask me whether not doing something will work or not, a puppy dies of cancer? Again, think about it — if I’d spent my time experimenting with what happened when I didn’t do something, then the site would be called “Various Experiments Involving The Selective Exclusion Of One Or More Parameters In Self-Directed Acquisition of Japanese Dot Com”. But it isn’t; I had no time for that. The only technique I used was maximizing enjoyable Japanese exposure time such that it asymptotically approached 24 hours/day. That’s the only style I am “qualified”, as it were, to give advice on.

So do your own thing. Listen to your feelings. As Southern California as that sounds, really listen. When something is boring, either make it un-boring, or just don’t effen do it; it’s that simple: Do = No. Listen to your “FUNDAR” (Fun Detection And Ranging). Respect your own preferences. Don’t do crap you don’t feel like doing just because someone else says to. Choose. Keep what works, lose what doesn’t, and have fun no matter what. You can get the task of acquiring proficiency in a language done, anyone can. But you don’t have to suffer boredom to do it.

The tools and methods I mentioned on this site were and are heavily customized to my unique preferences and situation. I still think they will work for many, perhaps even most people. But if they don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you have to give up; it doesn’t mean you have to eat Chocolate Frosted Whining Flakes for breakfast for the rest of your life; it doesn’t mean you have to make up a new theory about certain ethnic groups having fast-twitch muscles for language assimilation — it simply means that there’s a different path out there for you. Your task is to find or cut out that path. Only you can do this. And, no, the Whining Flakes will not give you energy for the journey, so you can leave them at home.

Remember: I did not use the SRS (or RTK, or whatever tool) because some Cosmic Law Written Down On Stone Tablets That I Done Picked Up On A Random Peninsularly-Situated Mountain In The Middle East required me to do so, I did it because it was, on balance, the simplest, laziest and funnest solution to a specific, persistent, overarching problem — memory decay. In other words, the tools filled a need. If you have no need, then you need no tool. In fact, I might as well tell you, I had originally thought of writing AJATT in a more gradual, oblique, “mysterious” way, where people would only be introduced to tools once they understood why they might need them. But it was easier to just lay it all out. In any case, if you don’t understand why things like SRS, RTK or RTH are useful, and you’re feeling oppressed by them, then do yourself a favor and don’t use them — no one’s forcing you to. A method cannot merely be quantitatively effective in order to “work”, it must also be qualitatively tolerable, or better yet, enjoyable. Go your own way, and you may discover methods you like better, that don’t involve these tools at all. Or you may struggle and stumble along and finally realize how cool these tools are. Or you may take a path somewhere down the middle, mixing and matching [I imagine a good number of people will fit in here].

Or something…I dunno…just quit asking me . Stop asking permission from people who never had the authority to give it to you in the first place; stop asking for directions from people who’ve never been there. In all likelihood, there are no directions and there is no road: you may just be the First. You’re on your own. Enjoy the freedom.

Thanks for reading, check back soon for the series finale.

Surusu stands for “Super Uber Ridiculously Useful SRS Utility”! Originally, my Mum had suggested the name be “Stupid Useless Ridiculously Unimpressive Software Utility”, but after much pondering, she finally changed her mind, explaining that: “I wouldn’t want to insult Windows ME by dignifying this piece of s[oftware] with the name ’software’. Also, you’re adopted.”

Anyway, really, it’s just the word “SRS” distorted to sound like a simple-to-spell word that’s pronouncable in any five-vowel language, with a repeating syllable that carries profound autological significance.

And now, Surusu is the new name of the SRS formerly known as KhatzuMemo. Finally, a URL you can actually type into a browser from memory! So tell all your friends: “y’all needs to gets you some Surusu, dawg, ya feel me?”, or “だからオマエこいつ無しじゃオマエ生きる意味が無えんだよオマエコノヤロー”, or something along those lines, as ethnically appropriate.

SuRuSu: The Greatest Spaced Repetition System of All Times. Stop making that face. How do you get there? It’s simple. Just go to: www.surusu.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…Laughing fits, maybe.

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

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

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

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

Like I’ve said before…the set of tools/methods described on this site…I don’t know why it all works; looking at and thinking about how people learn their native language, it just all seemed obvious to me. In other words, I knew what I needed to do to achieve fluency…but not much more.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio – keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (“Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19. Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon. But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane. In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle – you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet – feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized – movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

An AJATTeer who goes by the nickname AdShap shares his story [edited for spelling, punctuation and privacy...you know hwo it is wtih email]:

I’ve been using your methods for the past year and a half to learn Japanese, and have been for the past semester at law school. I’m the only student in the school who knows what an SRS is (I tried to inform a few close friends, but you know, people don’t like trying new things). Anyway, thanks for the great information, and keep up the great site. What you write does make a difference, so keep it up.

I mean, who wouldn’t have praise for Khatzumoto? Who? Who dare not…
OK, end of ego trip. But, that’s not even the coolest part of AdShap’s personal account. This is:

The SRS is amazing for law school. I had my doubts at first, but after the first semester it gave me top scores. While everyone scrambled towards the end of the semester spending countless hours cramming (cramming for law school exams usually takes place a week or 2 before exams, so maybe cramming is the wrong word), all I had to do was continue my reps and do some practice exams. Watching people create 100s of index cards by hand the week before just seemed like such a waste.

The thing about law school is that you will actually be using the information you learned after you graduate, but most of these people have already forgotten what they learned the past semester, while I have it strongly fixed in my mind as I go into the second semester. Also, since most courses build on each other, I have a serious advantage going into the next semester.

Yea, I start to realize that the less people that use an SRS, the more it makes the people who are using it succeed and look better. If everyone was using an SRS it was just increase competition, so I definitely don’t go around telling people about it.

I never once had to work all night, cram, lose sleep, or over-stress. As long as I kept up with my SRS at a normal pace every day I was fine. It mentally made me feel strong knowing I had such a powerful tool. Of course it worked for me in studying Japanese (I’m up to about 10,100 self-created cards and building) but I had my fears that it wouldn’t work in law school because professors like to say “don’t bother memorizing stuff: it won’t help you succeed in law school.” Shows how little they know! How can you apply what you learn if you don’t firmly know it first?

My first semester I had a writing course which unfortunately I couldn’t use it for since it was just for improving your writing skills. But the other 2 main courses I had, I ended up with about 2600 cards for the semester. This semester I have 4 normal classes in addition to the writing course, so I may end up around 5-6k cards this time around.

I noticed that with all the SRSing you really have to exercise your hands and body. I started to develop a little tendinitis before realizing this.

I use the Anki SRS system and have to say I love it. I think you mentioned you’ve used that as well on your site.

Anyway, good luck with your continuing Cantonese studying and your blog.

AdShap’s story got me thinking about this discussion on the SuperMemo website, on the issue of data vs. information vs. knowledge vs. wisdom. The author makes a very convincing case for the value of memorization and the dishonesty of the current “we don’t test rote memorization, we test reasoning” fad that’s got its fingers stuck in all the orifices of schooling in America and many other countries. That the SuperMemo article used flight as a metaphor is quite pertinent in light of recent aviation events (thanks beneficii!).

Update: AdShap very kindly shares a sample of his SRS items.

This is part 6 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I don’t know about y’all, but…OK, first of all, I don’t even use “y’all” in actual conversation, so I don’t know why I insisted on writing it just now. Just…bear with me.

I don’t know about you, but…I found memory decay to be the biggest problem for me in language acquisition. I would learn stuff, only to forget it. My brain was like a leaky bucket. The SRS more-or-less plugged the hole for me. I don’t know if I’d have become literate in Japanese without it. It changed my life.

But it does get tiring…finding stuff, adding it, doing reps. No one’s denying that. This doesn’t, however, mean (I don’t think), that it’s time to throw the SRS out; just that it would be wise to change one’s usage patterns.

There exists in English the phrase “to throw the baby out with the bathwater”. The concept of throwing out babies with the bathwater was invented by the ancient Greeks, who invented everything, including architecture, thinking and pederasty. The Greeks held throwing out the baby with the bath water to be the highest expression of nambla, and the quest of every Greek citizen (free male). Aristotle in his namblogues writes that: “After having me some fun with the little boy, I kick that Macedonian tail[1] to the curb….with the bathwater”.

A problem many of us have is that, when we’re fatigued and a situation seems hopeless, we throw our hands in the air and just give up all control, letting ourselves fall into a downward spiral of helplessness-fueled un-productivity and escapism. I go through this a lot, so I know, bro. The saying goes: “you can give up control, but you can never give up responsibility”. If that is indeed, the case, then, it behooves us to not give up control in the first place. Remember what the guy said – every person is self-made, but only those who succeed are willing to admit it. No one wants to be on the sharp end of a quote like that!

So, if we’re responsible for the situation anyway, and we’re going to have to answer for the situation anyway, and we’re going to bear all the consequences of our actions anyway, we might as well turn things to our advantage right from the beginning.

What I do is use the 80-20 rule. Like I said, I get tired, too. I can’t safely run on caffeine and amphetamines like Paul Erdos. But I still want to “get ahead”, as it were. My technique is to go find the minority of work I can do that’ll give me the majority of the results I desire. When it comes to SRSing, that minority of work is this:

Take an SRS holiday. But not a total holiday. Just stop doing SRS additions. Stop adding items. Just do reps [and even then, not necessarily all reps - you could just timebox a few minutes a day; part of the key is to avoid doing nothing at all, because the psychological inertia that results can be a bit of a beast to overcome]. The holiday can be as long as you want. I’ve just come off a Cantonese SRS addition holiday that lasted a good two weeks and change. And I feel great. I kept enjoying my environment – I kept watching the TV and the movies and listening to the music – and I kept reviewing things added in the past, I just didn’t bother to add anything, even stuff I thought interesting enough to add. Maybe it’s not a perfect situation, but I think it’s a healthy imperfect situation.

Many personal development books will tell you that looking for lost things is one of the single largest time-wasters of all, and (rightly) recommend having “a place for everything and everything in its place”. As I see it, losing a memory isn’t all too different from losing one’s keys, iPod or tax files. Think of all the time you’re going to have to spend essentially re-learning from scratch[2], versus the time you could have spent just refreshing. That’s your time, and it’s never coming back again. You might as well spend it well. You might was well avoid forgetting in the first place.

So next time everything seems to be going to pot, a war is being lost abroad, and a Liberal Communist Muslim black man is president…rather than throw your hands up in defeat, try to see if you can’t make rice pudding out of the rice.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 7

[2] Whatever people might say about a memory never truly being lost, if it’s irretrievable, then it’s the same as being lost (or even never having been), and the time burden to relearn is the same as if you’d known nothing. Then again, I’m not a neuroscience expert right now, so you may want to take my homespun wisdom cum grano salis there.

Hey all you boys and girls. Continuing our ongoing series of transcribed Japanese stuff, it happens that just as I was about to start doing it myself, I found that someone had already done it. Done what?

Transcribed all of 攻殼機動隊/Ghost in the Shell (GITS)! That’s right! All the movies [except Solid State Society] and of course all episodes of Stand Alone Complex. The dialog, baby. All of it. In Japanese! Exactly as spoken on-screen.

Those who have looked will know that Japanese/East Asian movies and TV shows that have same-language subs at all, let alone subs that exactly match dialog, are a rare and precious thing indeed. Like, I bet you’ll practically watch a mediocre show just because it has subs (depending on the language, I know I would). Some of the reasons for this are pretty decently summed up here.

GITS notably has no Japanese subs on any of its present DVD releases, despite easily being one of the densest, most literary (is that even the right word?) programs of any kind ever made. Japanese subs for GITS would have been nice. But, whatever, now we have this website — with copy-and-pastable text to boot! W00t.

So, yeah, enjoy. By the way, I would definitely recommend this kind of thing for sentence-picking. And if any of you are inclined to make sentence packs or SRS files for people, this kind of thing, i.e. Japanese by and for native speakers, would IMHO be the best for, like, the health of the world, and in terms of source material [since, as we all know, material made for learners often tends to be some combination of boring and unrealistic].

As an aside, let it also be noted that Ghibli’s 物の怪姫/Princess Mononoke also has exact subs on its Japanese DVD release. Just FYI.

And we’re done! Enjoy!

• Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG on YouTube.
• Script thereof

This is part 5 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I’ve mentioned timeboxing many times before; it’s just one of those things that’s so useful you want everyone to try it. Timeboxing seems to be very beneficially lopsided in that it’s super simple and super useful on the one hand, while also being difficult (although, like anything, probably not impossible) to abuse, since it is both flexible and inherently self-limiting.

Some people (one person) I know have suggested that timeboxing is only necessary because so many of us are so completely out of touch with our own feelings — and by “feelings”, I mean women and minorities — and preferences, having experienced so much forced activity from an early age. In Japanese, those people are usually called “hippies”. LoL. No, I definitely think that they (she) may be right; it’s a compelling idea, though kind of outside the scope of what I want to share here.

The actual mechanics of timeboxing are painfully simple. You simply limit an activity to a preset time of your choosing. All you need is a timer of some sort; I have a trusty pair of kitchen timers I use that are super easy to set and reset, with shortcut buttons for setting 10 minutes, 10 seconds, 1 minute, and cetera.

Timeboxing seems to be at the root of much of the mystery as to why people are able to do crap jobs for other people’s benefit but won’t even tidy their own bedrooms (as discussed here); many people get timeboxed in their daily lives at schools and offices, but few people ever take the controls for themselves.

OK, enough intellectually lazy social theory already. Let’s just discuss the benefits of timeboxing, for the uninitiated. This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the cool things timeboxing has done for me:

• Timeboxing helps you quit while you’re ahead — it’s fine to work to exhaustion sometimes, but always working on certain tasks to exhaustion will (subconsciously) plant in your mind the idea that the task is exhausting, which will make you not want to do it.
• In a related vein, timeboxing helps you make efficient use of energy. What I mean is, sometimes you don’t have the energy to go through 100 reps in one setting. But who says you have to? Maybe you only have the energy to do 120 seconds of reps. So timebox a 2-minute block!
• There are at least two basic types of procrastination. Timeboxing can help prevent both.
  • Evasive procrastination. This is where you simply don’t touch the task at all. Timeboxing can help you see past the fear and dread (in this sense, it’s actually getting you out of touch with your feeling), past the negative images of endless work, by giving things a concrete, relatively low time limit. You could say that timeboxing is a like an enzyme — a catalyst — bringing two substrates (you and your work) together, lowering the psychological “activation energy” needed to get the “chemical reaction” that is you working on task, to start up. This is the little biochemistry that I remember, so it may be wrong and/or outdated, hmm…
  • Working procrastination. This is where you’re doing the job, but you’re doing it slowly because you think it’s going to take a long time. It’s weird, people tend to work faster on a task the shorter they expect it to be: the effort they put in is inversely proportional to how much effort they think is needed; it must be an overactive self-preservation behavior — sort of a “why sprint in a marathon?” type thing. Anyway, timeboxing makes things shorter in both perception and actuality, and therefore helps you work faster.
• In concrete terms of SRSing, timeboxing has led me to play a number of different kinds of “racing” games.
  • In one version, I try to see how many reps I can do in 2 minutes; I sometimes repeat this game over and over, until suddenly I “run out” of reps!
  • In other versions, I try to complete the entire day’s set in 30 minutes, or get halfway in 15 minutes. Even if I don’t make it, the momentum/inertia keeps me going further…but sssssssssshhhh! Don’t tell my subconscious that; it’s not supposed to know.
  • Late update: I’m playing a new timeboxing game in which I have my SRS scheduled to automatically come up about once every 45-60 minutes, at which point I work on it for 1-2 minutes, sometimes longer if I feel like it, sometimes shorter. So, on days when I don’t have the strength to do all my SRSing in one sitting, I just split it up into tiny, unnoticeable chunks. What might have been a chore has now become a game, even a way to take a break from a different task. Sometimes I do actually have the strength and desire to do a whole day’s reps in one sitting, though…
• Indecision. I used to have major problems with indecision. Be it something big like buying a new major peripheral fer me computey, or choosing whut bloggin’ softweer to use fer me websoight, or something small like picking a treat at the convenience store. Then, between reading Steve Pavlina and figuring things out for myself, it dawned on me: if there’s room for you to be indecisive about a task, then the task itself may very well not matter that much. Think about it — you wouldn’t think twice about breathing air, or killing zombies[1], because it matters, you’ve got to breathe air otherwise a clown will die and your face will stick. But if you’re at a convenience store and you’re up in the air about whether to get soymilk or apple juice, maybe you should get neither. Or, maybe it doesn’t matter which one you get, it just matters that you get one in very finite amount of time and not give yourself an ulcer over it. More examples:
  • Picking omiyage (souvenirs) for friends back home; it’s easy to spend hours choosing a stupid souvenir. When we went to Korea last month, Momoko and I gave ourselves ~15 minutes to find a shop and 15 minutes to pick souvenirs for all our friends who knew we’d gone. Half an hour to do a task that could have been OCDed into a daylong ordeal of hesitation, regret and backtracking (“hey, maybe we should’ve gotten the thing at that shop we were at that’s now a 3-hour train ride from here?!”).
  • Picking an apartment. You could spend the rest of your life picking an apartment in Japan. After all, new properties are forever coming in and out of existence. This had been the solemn admonition of a Japanese friend back in the US, who, interestingly, was getting his MBA, learning to be an executive, and so was probably very much into decisiveness. Taking his advice, I knew some merciless decision-making was necessary. I made some hard conditions — (1) the apartment had to be a direct commute (no train changes) from my company at the time; (2) there had to be greenery nearby, (3) the rent had to be at or below a certain number, anything even 1 cent over was out, (4) the water pressure had to be good, because MY TURDS ARE BIG (5) the size had to be at or above a certain number of square meters, (6) it had to allow pets, and (7) I had to feel like going there — I figured that if I couldn’t be bothered to carry my feet someplace, there’s no way I’d want to live there. From that point on, all it took was a 10 minute phone conversation with the then-future-spouse to decide between the last two candidates. It took me 7 days to pick and move into my apartment when I first came to Japan. My colleagues were shocked: “give it more time”, they wailed, “give it a least a month or two”, they cajoled. All they could see was a fresh-faced, over-optimistic newbie who didn’t know what he was doing. All I could see was an invitation letter to do graduate work at Indecision University. I still live in that apartment, and I still like it. So do my two cats.

And it’s all thanks to timeboxing. So, sometimes a task doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes the sun goes round the moon — no it doesn’t, Vanessa Williams! Sometimes, it just matters that it be done and gotten over with. Most of the hand-wringing isn’t actually essential to the decision, nor does it actually optimize the final decision, it’s just a behavior many of us have fallen into to make ourselves and others feel better since we have this idea that “I took a long time and gave myself a lot of stress and emotional pain and engaged in much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in making this choice, ipso facto it must be an optimal choice, since the quality of a choice is directly proportional to the agony that went into it”.

I am not advocating recklessness; I am, in fact, advocating pragmatism. Worrying about something does not make a decision better. Verily, I submit to you that wasting your time and life worrying about what Kwanzaa gift to get your friends in Japan is the ultimate recklessness. Now, sometimes…sometimes…it’s good to “sleep on something” for days, weeks, even months — for example, when I had to come out to my family about being gay, black, Jewish, and Republican on the same day — but most of the time it isn’t; most of the time, that’s just procrastination. Most of the time, you just need to collect relevant domain information as quickly as possible, mix some logic here, some gut feeling there, maybe get some advice (not orders…too many people are looking to be ordered around because that’s just so much easier — take advice, not orders) and just pick, just go. Realize that you don’t have the whole world on your shoulders, you’re not curing cancer and Superman is not going to die because of this, and just get on with life; you’ve got buttocks to scratch and chocolate soymilk to drink, don’t let things like “decision-making” get in the way of that.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 6

This is part 4 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I know how it is, bro[1]. You meet a sentence, you fall in love. You want to be with each other all the time. You laugh at each other’s jokes, you talk for hours, you make out for days (of reps?), you get married and have six children, but then one day, you discover that that sentence…has man hands.

What do you do? The only thing you can do.

Divorce. I mean delete! DELETE! Delete the sentence. Expect to have to delete sentences. I mean, think about it. Think about what not deleting sentences implies about your learning process – it implies that you make 100% perfect item entry decisions on the front end. But, statistically, that simply won’t be the case. Typos, bad judgment, bad writing and misunderstanding do creep in. Not to mention radical change of interests.

Expect to have to delete many of the items you enter. In fact, revel in it. Revel in the weeding. Get that sh…spiel – get that spiel out of the garden of your collection so that the true flowers can flourish. Get it out. Gone. Out. Out. Out. Dude, delete preemptively – you can always undelete…maybe. From now on this is your motto:

If in doubt, throw it out.

Wondering whether or not to delete this sentence? That’s an automatic delete right there; if you are genuinely wondering, if the thought of getting rid of that item occurred to you in a meaningful way and for any appreciable amount of time, then trash that noss. Anyway, don’t think too hard – when it’s time for deleting, you’ll know.

It is natural and normal to have to chuck stuff out, even a lot of stuff. It is only unnatural and abnormal to act as if everything’s OK when in fact your SRS collection is full of leeches and duds that are too obtuse or too obscure or too long or too irrelevant or too I-don’t-give-a-darn or actually just plain bad freaking writing. Trust me, I have been there.

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This concludes our subliminal message transmission.

Many people turn this SRSing thing into a numbers game, and they avoid deleting items because that seems like “falling back”. And, you know, it’s not about the numbers. And that’s coming from me, the biggest number-loving numberlover to ever walk the earth. I love the stats about myself. They’re cool to look at. But they are not the object of the game. Hello? Language, son. You know, ironically enough, deleting items – letting go of the numbers game – can actually give you better numbers and better real-world performance, minus the stress. Deleting dud items will make you want to do reps more, causing you to do more reps, etc. This is a concept I am just newly discovering for myself in this and other aspects of my life. Last month, I sold off like half of my library to Book-Off; now I have less books…but I’m reading more than ever because now all my books are ones that I genuinely want to read, not books I think I ought to read. My bookshelf is now a place of joyful, educational escape and growth, far more entertaining than randomly chosen TV[2]. Wow, the word “joyful” makes me sound like such a wuss. What I meant to say is: “it’s DOPE when I see all my kanjis on the dancefloor-slash-page lined up in meaningful strings, yo!”

And another thing! This deletion thing applies not only to item that are already in your SRS, but also to items that you were planning to put in. Perhaps you read a book and marked it up. Perhaps you collect interesting kanji or phrases in a notebook. But you can’t be bothered to go enter them. And you know what — there’s no need to feel guilty about that. What the heck, son — this language learning process wasn’t intended to turn your life into data entry clerkdom. But at the same time, you don’t want to waste all that precious marking up you did, right? The/a solution is this: throw away most of what you marked up — 95% or more, just fuhgeddabout it. Do go back through the things you marked up or collected, but for any given would-be item, if you don’t “feel it”, if you don’t feel “yeah, let’s go to the trouble of making an SRS item for this”, then don’t freaking bother. Don’t worry about not getting as much “bang for your buck” on each book or movie or whatever: remember, the beauty of learning sentences is that you actually pick up a lot of information simultaneously as it is (vocabulary, grammar, usage, prounciation, intonation, ryhthm), so chucking away some or even most sentences is not going to hurt you, since much of the information they contained can be picked up incidentally elsewhere. So “if in doubt, throw it out”, and “if borin’, don’t put it in“. I have notebook upon notebook of stuff I was going to enter that I never bothered too. And the language fairy still hasn’t struck me down with lightning. Remember that Pareto principle or whatever you call it — the majority of stuff simply isn’t worth bothering with in the first place, and this was never truer than with sentences.

Now that I think about it, it strikes me that this is what I really meant when I first used the term “sentence mining”. My intention wasn’t to establish a link with “data mining”, which involves directly amassing and storing huuuuge amounts of crud. No, I was shooting for acutal, physical, mining. Because in mining, say, diamonds, the object is, well, DIAMONDS. Gems. Valuable sheez. A lot of soil gets chucked away, all for a very, very, few clear, shiny rocks. Think how much (miningwise) useless soil gets thrown the heck away just for one diamond? I don’t know the numbers, but I imagine the imbalance is obscenely large. Similarly, you’re going to be “digging through” — watching and reading — vast quantities of Japanese and hitting only a very few “diamond sentences”, i.e. SRS entry-worthy sentences.  Having said all that, I still think the term “sentence picking” is much better: the berry-picking image is cooler, and there’s also this idea that a sentence that isn’t ripe now may become ripe later [theoretically, I guess this could be said of mining as well, but only on geological timescales...are you enjoying the sight of someone tangled up in his own metaphors like unto an earphone cord?].

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 5

P.S. Do not EVER, EVER, E-V-E-R take actual relationship advice from me…

P.P.S. See P.S. for details.

[2] I’m not one of those people who likes to put down new media. I like the work of folk like Neil Postman, it’s just that they’re a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit more nostalgic about 18^th century American life than seems altogether warranted. After all, that supposedly thoughtful, bookish society had slavery, no women’s suffrage, enforced illiteracy and a tenuous relationship with bathing. But I digress. The point is, I found myself reading incredibly little (and watching TV even though it was boring), particularly considering the fact that I had made a point of becoming literate in Japanese; this bothered me a lot and sent me into a flurry of worry about what kind of human being I was if I had literacy but was not using it beyond minor daily necessities.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

“Khatzumoto, where am I supposed to find [good] sentences?”

This question is the most annoying sh…spiel. In the world. Double-u Tee Eff. IN JAPANESE STUFF, 呆(you)け( egit)! It’s there. It’s all freaking there!

OK, wait, I’m calm. Deep. Breath. Hippie friends who light incense. I’m calm. It’s all good. This wasn’t meant to be a rant about people who very kindly come to read this site but don’t bother to also turn their brains on.

I guess it’s a legitimate question, if by “legitimate” you mean pharking stupi…wait, OK, calm…incense…yoga…puppies…blood…death — argh! No!

What I’m trying to say is this. Don’t go looking for sentences. “What? Whaddyamean?”. That’s right, don’t go looking for them. [By the way, this is especially-though-not-exclusively aimed at people who have more than about 100-500 (ballpark figures) sentences in their SRS, rather than complete sentence beginners -- complete beginners should be kanjiing it up or something anyhow -- plus, when you're first starting out, you're just taking what you can and it all seems good, but very soon you get to a level where you can choose; it is at this level that you will spend the rest of your life and that's why its crucial that you be selective]. So, yeah:

Do not look for sentences, let them find you instead.

“What the faux-Eastern philosophy are you talking about, かっちゃん(Khatzumoto)?”, say you. Look, I’m not trying to be deep here; I’m just telling it how it is. When that sentence is ripe and ready and wants to be found, it’ll come find you. It’ll be there. You’ll want that sentence so bad that there shall be no クエスチョン(question), no doubt, no uncertainty, no tergiversation about cracking open your SRS and putting that mother in. I’m sure you’ve all had this experience before; all I’ m suggesting you do is make this experience a pre-condition for entry into your SRS collections. It’s your SRS collection after all, so you be the bouncer. You don’t have to let items in because they’re “good for you”, any more than you have to let people into your house because it’d be “good for you”. Let in the ones you like, the rest can stay out…there’s an immigration joke in there somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to go looking for it. All I know is, those foreigners keep taking all our women and jobs.

Anyway, what’s really cool about this “you call me” pre-condition is that it seems to bias you toward watching and reading stuff that you actually care enough about to pick sentences from, which is really win-win. Doing more fun things leads to more time in target language which of course leads to fluency sooner; more fun items lead to more desire to SRS [within limits], which leads to more fluency sooner. You get more, all ironically attained by doing “less”, in a sense.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 4!

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

At the risk of repeating myself, while sentences seem central to the so-called AJATT method, and while they represent a move away from the so-called “traditional” vocabulary-and-grammar approach, I don’t see them as the so-called core per se. The actual process as I saw and implement(ed) it centered around having fun. FUN.

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In fact, this whole thing is so all about fun that something with “fun” in it was one of the original domain name candidates. (When you see a word too many times, doesn’t it start to sound weird?) I don’t know why I picked something as long and unwieldy as alljapaneseallthetime, but there you go. FUN. FUN is so central to this that for a while there I was toying with making it like the closing line of every blog post, kind of like how Tony Robbins goes: “live with passion”, and Steve Pavlina goes: “live consciously” and Captain Planet goes: “the power is yours”, and Catholic priests go: “don’t cry, it’s just the special way Daddy loves you”. Get this etched into your head:

No fun = No good.

No, really. If it is not fun, stop now. STOP. STOP!!!

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Stop and either change to something else or figure out a way to make it fun. When you get down to it, this is something that may require getting back in touch with your feelings. I know, sounds gay. And by “gay”, I mean black people and Jews. Many schooled people have grown numb to their own desires, interests and lifestyle patterns – that’ll happen after years of being forced to do boring things with a roomful of other prisoners. You’re so used to “no pain no gain” and just pressing through. Stop. That crap works when other people are forcing you to do something, but it just won’t fly – not for long, anyway – when you’re in charge.

If you’re bored/tired, stop entering items. If you’re bored/tired, stop doing reps. If you’re bored/tired stop reading that book or watching that movie. WTF, man, what are you doing? Watching a movie that’s boring you, are you insane? Stop, OK? Mmmm kay? This is not a failure. This doesn’t mean SRSing “doesn’t work” or “isn’t for you” and it doesn’t mean that you’re “lazy” or “undisciplined”. It just means there are limits to your concentration, limits to how long you can run that little head-engine of yours in SRS gear. Very real limits. Lower than you wish. But don’t worry, after some rest, you’ll be ready again. Stay in the language, just do something else.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 3!

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

Word! Alliteration, son! It’s in the air and the power is yours!

…That was awkward.

So, anyway, a lot of people have been going insane in the membrane with SRS stress. Some have even gone on to write weird introductions to blog posts (go figure, eh?)…And some people (including me) even get tense when they study.

I know what you’re thinking: “Khatzumoto gets tense?! Dag, yo, I thought that only happened to pretty white kids with problems“. Me, too man. Me, too.

So, yeah, I had this tension, and I know other people have it as well. Thus, I wrote up some tips for you to help SRSing go more smoothly and happilyly. Checkerachyo!!

The SRS is a servant not a master. That’s right; SRS were developed to serve you. To help you. To free you from the burden of relearning forgotten things, and scheduling your own reviews.

Unfortunately, however, most of us have been to school, which means we’re used to being slaves. That’s right, I said it: school is a form of slavery — a very lite form, low in calories and sodium — but a form nonetheless. People tell you what to wear, what to read, where to be, when to talk, what to talk about, what words to use, when to shut up, when to eat, when to stand, when to sit down, when to move, when to sit still, when to pee, when to pooh, and can enforce their will through physical violence, emotional battery and even legal measures: it’s slavery…or at the very least prison. “Slavery” might be a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not far off the mark (?).

Anyway! The thing about slavery is that, like the elephant in this oft-repeated anecdote, the real enslaving is not physical but mental. You can unlock someone’s handcuffs but if her mind is still in chains you might as well not bother…type thing. You can take a man out of the ghetto but you can’t take the trackers out of a BitTorrent file yada yada. The same thing happens with a lot of prison inmates: these men, and they are often men, would do anything to bust out of that prison while they were in it, but once they get out, they’re so unused to their freedom that many consciously or unconsciously choose to return to jail — I don’t know whether this is actually true or not, but it was in Shawshank Redemption, so it’s gotta be true. Wow, I love blogging…no one to dock you points for not quoting proper sources.

Mmm, and so, many AJATTeers put themselves in the position of slave to their SRS. They try to turn AJATT into school all over again. And it’s not just their fault, nor even school’s fault, nor is it the fault of “society”. No, kids, the culprit here is Khatzumoto. I’m the one who started AJATT off in the direction of 10,000 sentences, so much so that some sites even call this the “10,000 sentences method“[1]. Having said that, there are at least two good (?) reasons why I did it:

(i) Sentences, even 10,000 of them, are a clear, concise, quantifiable thing to aim for. It’s something you can sort of “see”; it’s a tangible goal; it’s all nice and pre-reified; the SRS even records stats and crap for you. In short, it’s almost everything that our current education system sets up as valuable.

(ii) Before writing AJATT, I had shared the methods I was using for learning Japanese; whenever someone was interested I would just tell them what I was doing, or maybe shoot them a quick email. One thing I noticed was that people seemed very reticent about adopting the SRS. I felt then and continue to feel now that the SRS was key, in terms of allowing me to acquire and sustain literacy in Japanese in such a relatively short time with so relatively little effort. So, I purposely went in strong on SRS promotion.

And the people loved it. And they went collecting sentences like their lives depended on it. At the time, this didn’t bother me at all. There were hints that something bad was going on, but at the time it just seemed like healthy enthusiasm. I didn’t even begin to realize a tragedy was underway until I was myself suffering emotionally in my Chinese Project — despite apparently using the same methods as I had in Japanese — methods that had given me so much success and joy. [The truth is that I was trying to ram Mandarin Chinese into my brain through massive, deliberate, dry, joyless sentence collection; I just bought books full of Japanese-Chinese sentences and tried to cram then in. While this is probably physically possible, it is also more boring than Baroque music...yeah, I said it: Baroque music is boring and your mother was a woman! Wanna fight, stitch?]. What really brought the situation front and center to my attention, though, was the extensive, lucid and inspiring writing about this that’s been going on at the blog of Feed Me Japanese (especially this article). That site is the reason I’m writing this today, and in a sense I am re-appropriating Khalid’s message, which is Swahili for “stealing his ideas in broad daylight but it’s all good coz the words are different”…hehe. Khalid really hits the metal object on the head with this one:

“The implication for people who are searching for these sentence collections is that there is an ‘ideal’ set of sentences and if you drill those in your head, you’ll know Japanese. [...] But, unless I’m missing something, Khatzumoto didn’t have sentence collections, he collected sentences from everything he saw and read in Japanese[2]. 10,000 sentences was a natural product of what he did, not the purpose.”

OK, so one root cause of the sentence-collection-binging phenomenon was my own initial focus on sentences[3]. Nevertheless, there is still a clue as to what AJATT is truly all about, and it lies in the title of the site: “all Japanese all the time”. At its core, this method was and is about a mental change of identity and a physical change of lifestyle. Everything else was merely to aid that and perhaps increase efficiency without killing fun.

You probably think I’m insane anyway so this shouldn’t weird you out too much — I very frequently imagined myself as a Japanese-raised child. Not “haha, it’s like being a Japanese child”. No, I pretended to BE Japanese. Metaphor, not simile. BUT, this wasn’t about wanting to find a new identity for myself — a place to “belong”, nyah nyah nyah nyah touchy-feely California stuff — too many people confuse it for that; they worry that are or they will somehow “lose themselves”[4]. No. There was a very real, very hardcore, very un-touchy, un-feely reason for all this role-playing. It is something we all know intuitively but which only relatively recently came to me in the form of words. And the cheat code to R.L. iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis:

Adults act according to their identity rather than their ability.

In the vernacular — people achieve what they think they can achieve rather than what they are actually capable of achieving. Now, a Japanese child is expected to achieve fluency in written and spoken Japanese as a matter of course, no matter how much she may currently suck at it. It is for this reason that I chose the identity of a Japanese child when learning Japanese hardcore. Japanese language skill is expected of Japanese people the way boyish humor is expected of Adam Sandler. I merely availed myself of a hearty piece of this Pygmalion Effect-type phenomenon. I turned myself and my life into a self-fulfilling prophecy of Japanese fluency.

Which is all well and good, but imagine if that had been front-and-center when AJATT was first launched. I don’t think it would have worked; it’s just a little too ethereal, I think. Too…esoteric? Too abstract? Or maybe I’m not giving myself and other people enough credit. I dunno…concrete methods just seem more comforting, more obvious, more ripe for action. But, this idea of “don’t learn Japanese — become Japanese — be Japanese[5]“; this is central to the method/methods discussed on this site. The target language is no longer something you do, it is something you are; it’s practically the air you breathe. There is no spoon. I’m sure there are more efficient/effective ways out there, but I haven’t really seen them yet.

Anyway, don’t be taken in by any hints you may get (even from me) about discipline and consistency and commitment and all those other lame-a$$ abstract nouns[6]. When you get down to it, this method is all about having fun and just being…just chilling. I didn’t “work hard”; I didn’t really “sacrifice” to learn Japanese; I made a lifestyle choice and let the consequences of that choice run their natural course, because Japanese fluency is an inevitable result of a real and sustained Japanese environment; once you get your ducks in a row most of it is simply coasting. Dude, most of the time all I did was listen to Rip Slyme, shop on Amazon.jp and download stuff online; you’re not supposed to spend 24 hours a day attached to your SRS deck like unto an umbilical chord. No…What, do you want to be bored to tears? Do you think you’re supposed to be bored to tears? Well let me lay it down here once and for all:

If it is not fun, then it is not of AJATT.

I know. I know it’s hard to let go of work and pain and struggling. But you need to let go. For your own good — for the good of your Japanese — you must let go. I want you to go out and get an addiction. Get several. Get addicted to an artist or show or video game or chat site or book series or movie in Japanese/whatever your target language is. Momoko’s Japanese really started booming when she got hooked on Trick and Gintama. She does them aaaaalll the time; she’s got the anime of the drama of the manga of the website of the book; the jokes she tells are Trick jokes; the food she eats is stuff she’s seen the characters on Trick eat; and the other day she even had the temerity to tell me to go dye my hair silver since: “you already have a natural perm”. Hmm…

Back in the day, I, too, was “hooked” on all sorts of things — Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dragon Ash, Rip Slyme — all in Japanese of course. Go get hooked. So hooked that your enjoyment of what you do understand (however little that may be) eclipses all your anxiety about “ohhh, this is so hard”, “ohhhh, but there’s so much I don’t know yet”, “ohhh, will I ever get done?”, “ohhhh, but I’m too old and not Asian enough!”, “and so on and so forth!”.

You’re Japanese, remember? Act like it, この(mother)野郎(lover)！

Of course continue to use your SRS. I mean, duh, who wants to forget stuff, right? Just be sure to use it rather than be used by it. Rule of thumb: it’s like watching TV — when it gets bahrin’, yah change th’ channel.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 2!

[2] Yeah! Of course, as long as I felt like it…:)

[3] A more fundamental root cause may lie in the fact that I don’t actually know why AJATT works. Not really. Like I kind of have these ideas — a bit of Krashen here, a bit of AntiMoon there, my own childhood experiences of both loss and acquisition of language, intense casual observation of other people’s children before the parents get weirded out — but it’s all very vague, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend to you that I know it all and have it all figured out. And then again, I don’t really care thaaat much why it all works, like, it’d be cool to know, but mostly I just care how I can best go about doing this. I figure my peepz Pinker, Krashen and Chomsky can go work out the whys for me while I sit here eating peanuts and watching Evangelion…gotta get my geli on, you know. Yeah…so…not knowing why…

[4] Which is goofy! You are not who you are just because of the nationality and location of the uterus you grew in, nor because of the media you watch and listen to. You’re you, and if all those things were to disappear tomorrow, you would still be you. Put another way — what’s to stop being a native-level user of Japanese from being just as much a part of your identity as your liking Green Day [it's always kids you who like Green Day that have this identity fetish]? The fact that you were over the age of 12 when you started it? Come on, man…

[5] And if someone comes and accuses you of being Blasian or Wasian or Asian-but-too-Asian, tell him his mother’s a woman!

[6] You know, for a while, this site used to bug me. What I mean is, it felt like it was two sites in one. One site was happy and friendly, and the other site was violently macho and in-your-face and people would be all “This is madness!”, and then I’d be all: “This is AJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATT!”). I had trouble reconciling these two sides. Fortunately, I have realized the magic glue. And it is this: fun. I guess I knew it all along, but at the same time, I didn’t know.

Have fun. In Japanese. If you’re having fun, the dedication will take care of itself. Notice when you’re bored and act quickly to get back to fun.

A lot of people seem to need something like this, so I’m posting it. This is a file containing kanji characters, keywords and stories for people using Heisig sensei’s the Remembering the Kanji system in conjunction with an SRS or whatever.

The file is taken from the Remembering the Kanji Yahoo Group. It was not prepared by me and I didn’t get permission to put it up (had trouble reaching the creator). If you are the creator of the file and want it taken down, please let me know…I just figured it would be useful to put these up here in a more public place.

Anyway, to the file!

• Kanji-Keyword File

More useful files can be found up in that RTK Yahoo Group, so I recommend you join.