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

Hi Khatz!

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

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

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

Thanks for your answer!

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

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

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

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

I am kind of undisciplined.

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

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

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

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

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

Skin going all wrinkly and junk…

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

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

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

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

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

Another day, another email pregnant with possibilities for insight to help us all. Her name is B-star. And this is her story, in her own words. Heavily, heavily edited for spelling :

I’ve been studying Japanese for a looong time. Like most people, I sucked at it until i chanced upon your method. It works much better and I suck less.

Here is the dilemma: I’ve stopped. I have to urge myself to even watch a Japanese cartoon WITH SUBS, much less a raw cartoon.

This has been a problem throughout my life. I’m what u call a chronic procrastinator. A normal procrastinator puts things off till lata and tries to reason it out in their head. A chronic one puts it off until whenever and has no reason why.

I’ve explored my belief system à-la-Robbins, and I do have some sucky ones that I need to handle, but I was wondering what you had to say about procrastinating at my level.

Specifically, I wanted to ask you how you get through your “desert” moments when you don’t do anything you’re supposed to do. What do u tell yourself? How do u get back on track AND STAY ON TRACK (which is always harder to do)?

Hope you can help oh great one of the Japanese (that’s me sucking up to you so you’ll give me a life-changing answer. LoL)

LoL indeed, young B-star. LoL indeed. And good question, by the way. So here’s the answer: Maybe…probably…wait for it…:

Maybe you just don’t want to watch that particular anime that much. Maybe you’re just not into it any more…for now.

Ask yourself this question: “If I were fluent in Japanese, and I didn’t have to do anything for ‘learning’ or ’study’ reasons, would I be watching this right now?”.

If your answer is anything but an emphatic “of course, motherlover!”, then

1. Don’t bother watching that anime or whatever. Just effen don’t. That’s it.
2. Find something you do want to watch, that you would watch anyway simply for the sheer fun of it
   a) If you can’t think of anything, then get more stuff, and/or look through all the stuff you can get your hands on until something pulls and holds you in.

Sometimes stuff pulls you in but can’t hold you. Dump it. The media has to be worth watching in its own right. Recall what made you want to learn Japanese in the first place — you watched stuff because you wanted to watch it, and you stopped watching as soon as you were bored (this counts for reading, too by the way…and for video games — fortunately, most people don’t play video games ad boredomium [somebody, please, hook me up with the real Latin for this] so they typically don’t need warnings like this). I am saying do the same thing — keep switching stuff up (Massive Turnover) — just be sure the thing you switch into is Japanese, that’s all.

As Mark Twain is said to have once said:

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and…play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT turn Japanese into work. Don’t turn it into “study”; don’t turn it into 勉強 (a word that refers to scholastic study in Japanese, but actually carries the rather negative meaning of “coercion” in Chinese). Just play at it. PLAY. That’s why I keep telling people: don’t make all these rules about what is and is not OK for you to do in Japanese, or how Gokusen is over-coloured by the argot of juvenile delinquents or watching Love Hina will make you talk like a girl — it doesn’t matter, you need to learn all that vocabulary in order to truly be proficient in Japanese anyway, so whatever you watch is fine — as long as you’re enjoying it right now.

Write this on your liver: just because anything is OK to watch in Japanese, that doesn’t mean that everything is worth watching…to you that is. One person’s Star Trek is another person’s…well, I can’t imagine how any human being could fail to love Star Trek, but you get the idea.

Immersion Responsibility is a Two-Way Street

Anyway! Your only responsibility is to do stuff that’s actually in Japanese; the remainder of the responsibility rests entirely with the Japanese stuff — media — itself. The media has a responsibility to entertain you. You don’t have to find the value in it; it has to demonstrate its value to you by being so much fun that you don’t notice time going by — by sucking you in. It has to make you wish that eating and sleep and bodily hygiene could take care of themselves because they cut into your media time. And if it doesn’t do that or it stops doing that, then you “fire” it by changing to something else. You are the boss and there are no labor laws. Fire the mother. You do the work of setting up and showing up to the environment, but after that the environment must work for you.

Some people will tell you that you can only enjoy stuff in a foreign language once you’re fluent. That is some chicken-and-dinosaur-egg nonsense right there and I will tell you now — you can enjoy authentic “funbun” (For Native By Native — thanks to two young Chinese-acquiring studs for this word) stuff in a foreign language right from the get-go. If you simply stop turning it into work and trust your taste. You are in charge now. You decide what comes and what goes, and boring stuff always goes. It doesn’t matter if it has the same amount of Vitamin J as 50 bowls of rice; it doesn’t matter if it has traces of Nagase Tomoya’s urine on it — if it’s boring then it’s out. the. door.

In fact, you can make a game out of this. It’s kind of the “Aim to Fail” of media exposure — find Japanese to throw away. Or, put another way — focus on how much Japanese you discard. How much Japanese stuff do you “skim”, “sample” or “try”, only to throw away? Increase this number, increase the number of Japanese things you discard and the amount of cool stuff you hit will naturally increase as well. It’s all just probability games. As I’ve hinted at previously, I’ve been doing that throughout the month of May 2009 with Cantonese. My goal was to try (not necessarily watch from start to finish, but at least try — sample) 100 Cantonese movies. Now, I may or may not actually hit 100, but (1) that’s not the point, and (2) the reason I may end up not hitting 100 is because in all that randomness I found 3 or 4 movies that were so cool I wanted to watch them again and again and again.

Let me make one thing crystal clear: I. Do. Not. Read. Or. Watch. Things. Repeatedly. Out. Of. A. Sense. Of. Duty. I don’t do anything — the film [or book or song or game or whatever] does it to me. It just so happens that there are some films out there that are so well put-together, with lines so beautifully delivered, with plots so funny, with timing so perfect, that as soon as I hit the closing credits I find myself wanting to go back to the beginning. Having said that, if you do not want to repeat, then do not repeat. Just don’t; don’t even go there. Remember — your only responsibility is to the Japanese language as a whole, everything else is disposable; nothing is sacred. The canon is not closed.

Skim, Sample, Skip and (Sometimes) Stay: The Bookstore Principle

While we’re here, let me tell you a thing or two more about that 100 Cantonese Movies In One Month sub-project, and what I discovered while doing it for the first time.

Have you ever noticed how you seem to have more fun at the bookstore skimming books than at home with the books you bought? Well, it’s because, at the bookstore, you skim. You sample. You skip all the crap. Skim, sample, skip. You only stay when you find something you like.

The key to having as much fun at home as you do at the bookstore is to start behaving the same freaking way at home. Treat your bookshelf less like some oversized wooden embodiment of all that you want to be but aren’t, and more like a bookstore. And do this with everything — text, audio, video — everything. Only those lame indie-music-loving friends force you to listen to a track “because it’s good for you”. Them, and people in authority who are bad at being in authority, which would sometimes seem to include most people in authority. Real friends and equals leave you alone. I feel like I’m on a completely different subject…

A good movie or book or game or whatever is like a good friend. And a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend. And a good snippet of a good chapter of a good movie or book is like a good friend: you stay with them because you like them, not because you have to or should. Don’t stay with them out of some sense of obligation, don’t add more “shoulds” to your life and “should all over yourself”, as Antonius Robbinicus once so eloquently put it.

When something or someone is cool, she/it/he will make you want to spend more time with her/it/him. There will be no duty involved.

One never gets bogged down at a bookstore. One only gets sucked in. So why…why trudge through a boring anime or game or book? Because you “should”? Because other people are looking and you might look illiterate if you skip too many pages? Because you have to finish what you started? Fuhgeddabout it, man. Instead, remember this: there are no other people and there are no means and there is no rule except “have fun in Japanese”…if a book or a movie or even a person gets dumped along the way, then so be it. There’s plenty more where that came from.

Both Active and Passive

To go even further, what this means for us is that: “It’s in Japanese therefore it’s good for me” alone is not reason enough to watch something. It has to be fun AND in Japanese. As Rossini almost said, but didn’t:

“All Japanese is good, except the boring kind”.

If it’s boring, then don’t watch it. Switch to something else. Simple. Period. End of sentence. Case closed. “But I might learn something!”, you say — yes but you’ll probably die of boredom before you do. The truth is, you can learn something doing anything, so there’s no reason to go mentally chewing broken glass on the off chance that you might may could build some character.

Media is like Kleenex in that it’s really good to use and very hygienic, but once it’s been contaminated with snot (boredom), you throw it away. Only those stingy relatives you visit once a year force you to reuse dirty Kleenex. For your own health: throw away or put aside all boredom-contaminated media and get a new box of tissues. _{Good media’s actually re-usable, of course, so the Kleenex simile has holes in it. Not as big of holes as those in Stargate “we just travelled to another galaxy to meet a community of humans whose ancestors were abducted at the dawn of Earth civilization, but somehow we’re perfectly able to communicate complex technical instructions in life-and-death situations using a fully-fledged 20th-Century Standard American English vocabulary all without a Universal Translator or any other such magical device and oh look they have USB here, too” SG-1, though.}

This is such an important point that I’m going to repeat it: you actively move through media, constantly changing what you watch as soon as it gets boring, but at the same time, you passively wait for something to come out and grab you. When that thing does find you, you will know; there will be no doubt, because it’ll stop you in your tracks. And you’ll have a beautiful time together (indeed, time may well stop). And then you’ll get tired of it, and start moving again.

Tip: when something grabs you, you might want to find out who made it, and start looking for other work by the same creators. In my experience, if you like one piece of work by a certain creator, the chances are much higher than random that you’ll like her other work. For example, did you know that Trick, Ikebukuro West Gate Park, Handoc, Keizoku and Sushi Prince were all directed by the same guy (TSUTSUMI Yukihiko) ? These are all some of the coolest shows, Japanese or otherwise, ever made. So cool, that it would be worth acquiring a certain language just to be able to enjoy them fully.

Conclusion

To conclude:

1. If you’re bored it’s not your problem and it’s not Japanese’s problem — it’s the media’s problem. Change the show, not the person and not the language.
   • The reason you feel like all of Japanese sucks is because you have mixed the pure, clean spring water of fun Japanese stuff with the runny, cholera-infested turds of obligation. Purify the water — remove the obligation, so that you are left only with fun stuff, and Japanese itself will be fun for you again. _{As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I went through a stage when, for some inexplicable reason, I simply couldn’t bring myself to sit down with a book; I always ended up watching TV instead; this really bugged me — had I attained literacy just to never use it again? But when I sold off the 30-50% of my “bookstore” ( well, bookshelf) that I wasn’t interested in any more, suddenly reading became super fun again, and has been ever since. I continue to treat most books like disposable items to be processed — read or not read — and not some kind of proud decoration, and I continue to read heavily. Also, I skip the boring parts of books just like TV. DO NOT READ THE SPECIAL INSETS IN MANGA JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO! In the case of anime and movies — don’t feel like you have to follow every single moment. Remember, it has to bring you in. And it’s OK to stop sampling after even 30-45 seconds. Fire the media. You do not have to finish what you started.}
     
2. “Throw away” is a synonym for “change”. I can watch a movie 10 times, until suddenly, at the 11th viewing it’s like…mmmmyeah: it just starts chafing. Maybe 6 months later you’ll want to see it again. So it’s…not necessarily a matter of all-out disposal — especially with stuff that you’ve liked before — more one of switching things up. Often enough, I find that something I once didn’t feel at all excited about, has magically grown on me.
3. Tools for switching things up for free: LiveStation, YouTube, KeyHoleTV, NicoNico, the Internet, real-life Japanese friends.
4. Tools for switching things up for cheap: Japanese shops [i.e. shops for Japanese people], Netflix and other video rental options, TV where available.

Thus spake Khatzumoto! So it shall be written! So it shall be done! And now it’s your turn. How do you turn those dry “desert” moments into a sweet, tasty “dessert”? Please share .

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.

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

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

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

To which I responded as follows, but in Japanese:

My dearest, most precious T-star,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…

Have fun.

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

[P.S.

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

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

In high school, I was in the shooting club. That’s right, people. I spout all this peacenik-sounding “why can’t we all just get along” nonsense, but…I used to like guns. Too bad they get used for so much bad stuff. Maybe one day we can load them with software so they can only be used to shoot…cans and Basques </running joke> or something…Might make good paperweights.

Anyway, I’ll never forget the words of the club master/coach/adult supervisor. Wait, back up, before I even get into that, it always struck me as kind of ironic how some of us kids in the shooting club had major beef with each other, but it never occurred to us to use the…OK, I won’t even go there. I promise. I’m through being controversial.

Where was I? Oh yes: I’ll never forget the words of the club master when he gave us advice on how to get good at shooting — i.e. increase our accuracy. Combined with all the (potentially very zen/yoga-sounding) advice on how to breathe, how much air to have in the lungs at the moment of firing, how to relax and focus and stuff, he told us this:

[The key with practice is to do it] little and often.

And, I’d like to think that this is what the overall AJATT practice philosophy is, at the level of execution: little and often. What is little? Lots of nice, small, manageable, winnable chunks. Why often? I don’t really know; neurologically speaking, Piotr Wozniak (creator of SuperMemo) suggests that the fundamental mechanisms underlying human memory are designed to prioritize frequently occurring natural phenomena. Fine muscular skills like shooting are probably no exception to this.

To go slightly deeper, what does “often” mean, really? Simply that the time between chunks should be as small as possible. OK, here comes the magic that is perhaps unique to the skill of language. Take those little chunks…and then decrease the time between them to 0 or near 0. At this point “often” becomes “all the time” and you have yourself and immersion program.

But now that “often” is 0, it can be easy to feel lost, like you’re swimming in a cesspool of your own ignorance. That’s where little games like timeboxing, SRSing and sentence-picking come in. Make yourself as many silly little games as you want…whatever entertains you and keeps you in the loop. Watching YouTube clips, watching short clips of several movies you like (this is the massive turnover idea — the turnover is massive but the pieces are small).

Most of us are adults, or at least pretend to be; almost all of us have some unavoidable exposure to languages other than the one we want to be learning. That’s fine. The key is to get back on the horse as soon as possible. Don’t let the water go cold, get the fire back burning hot and bright again the moment the wind dies down. We may not be able to erase the gaps, but we can minimize their length. Forget your guilt about whatever time you have let pass; it’s gone. All you need to do is focus on how you can get moving again, how you can get back on the right track (*Chris Farley arm movements*).

You don’t have to always be on the defensive: don’t stop at just trying to keep your little candle in the wind burning. Become a pyromaniac: set fire to the things around you. Go on the offensive — try interleaving your target language into your daily life even in situations that don’t welcome it with open arms; like weeds in concrete, let it come up through the cracks of even the toughest environments; let it soak in there like AIDS in a California bathhouse. Also…Basques <parsing error>?

…

I used to work cleaning buildings in college and walked to and from campus uphill both ways in 12-foot Rocky Mountain snow with the wind blowing in the opposite direction…we weren’t allowed headphones and it’s not like I could read on the side. But we were allowed overhead music. Guess who managed to get them to play Dragon Ash and other sterling Japanese bands? I took a road trip with my wife’s parents; they don’t speak Japanese — yet; I can’t ignore them for the whole trip (actually, they were always really supportive about the Japanese thing and would have gladly let me ignore them, but I didn’t want to) — what do you do? What do you do? I played Japanese music in the car, and not just any Japanese music, but Japanese music that sounded just like their favorite English bands (they like folky 1960s stuff like The Carpenters and The Doors, so I played them ゆず/Yuzu).

There’s always a crack, there’s always something short and sweet you can do. Find your own piece of little and often.

In a lot of AJATT posts I tend to give the impression, unintentionally, that I’m more courageous than I actually am. It’s what you might call a sin of abbreviation; I cut out most of the parts where I made mistakes and took wrong turns, focussing on telling people what worked and what went right. So, the legend is now ossifying, and it just seems like I had this Big Dream to own Japanese and I did Big Research and then made up a Big Plan and took Big Massive Action on it, executing to Big Completion, and then I wrote a Big Site and became a Big Man all in one straight line, looking neither to the left nor the right.

I’d like to believe that story, too, but it’s not how it actually went down.

First of all Big Dreams, Big Goals…these things are scary…hey — let’s start capitalizing all our nouns, like in German…No? OK…No.

Big Dreams are scary. People will laugh at you; they take a long time to achieve; they can even seem impossible. There’s a little voice inside you going “dude, maybe he could do it, but you?”, “maybe you could do it back then, but things are different now, son!”

I am working on Chinese now, laddering through Japanese. I get lots of praise and congratulation on and off the Internet for the Japanese Project and its success. But this praise can kind of go to one’s head. Not in the sense that one becomes arrogant and egotistical — I was already arrogant and egotistical. Rather, one gets a sense of entitlement. One starts to think that it should be one’s right to simply sail through any language or similar endeavor and it should just be a walk in the cake. Also, Basques.

But it’s not like that. I still have to put on my proverbial pants one leg at a time. I still go through one SRS rep at a time. I still learn one sentence at a time. Real physical limits apply; I’m not Dr. Manhattan, walking around with superhuman language powers in a perpetual state of semi-nudity who the heck does he think he is anyway?! And this can be discouraging, because it’s easy to talk on big time scales — months and years — and talk about long-term residents in a country having the “social responsibility” to learn the local language; it’s easy to talk like a Big Man, who’s Seen It All, but ultimately you still execute at the same time scales as Everyone Else and you still don’t really know What Lies Ahead, or even if you do, it’s hard to feel motivated by it when it’s so far away. Like David Allen says, no matter how Big you get, it all still comes down to, what, answer emails, attend meetings and make phone calls…you are still tied to Real Life and simple, “numbnut” tasks. You still live through minutiae.

Long story short: You want to “own” at your target language, you want to be native level, but you also want something to show for it well before the 10,000 hours and sentences are up, right?

Right. And me telling you “just suck it up”, is not helping, right? Right. I know it doesn’t help because I told myself and it didn’t work. Which is why I am suggesting you also use:

Intermediate Goals.

Within your overarching goal of complete command of a language, you want to have little Baby Goals. Larger than the baby steps, but smaller than the Big Goal of Major Ownage.

When I was starting to learn Japanese hardcore, my first goal was just to be able to freely conduct basic daily communication. For that, I primarily used the ideas contained in A. G. Hawke’s “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast“, eventually taking them to a positive extreme.

After I got there, my next goal was just to be able to talk with my Japanese friends about whatever I wanted. And also watch comedy shows (I wanted to know what my friends were laughing so hard about) and tell jokes. I got there.

Then my goal was to be able to function as an adult in business/government/specialist situations, just like my Japanese friends. I got there.

And then my goal was to be able to function completely like a native speaker, with no barrier, no difference, no gap between me and whoever I was talking to. To communicate with such razor-sharp precision that everything I said or did not say carried intentional meaning; I wanted to be the puppeteer with Japanese words as my puppets. And now my current goal is an extension of this, mainly focused on speed and writing.

I’ve frequently discussed using ultra-short-term goals on the level of hours, minutes and seconds. And long-term goals on the level of several months and beyond. But it has occurred to me that intermediate/mid-term goals (circa 3 weeks ~ 3 months), which I have basically neglected to discuss, are just as important and useful, in pulling one forward. It has occurred to me that I had used them myself to achieve success, but had forgotten to share the idea here.

So, if the pressure of “10,000″ and “Native-Level Fluency” is getting to you, if you’re feeling some “cognitive dissonance” [certain members of my family hate this phrase] from the constant reminder that native-user media gives you that you are Not There Yet, then perhaps you could try setting some intermediate goals. Examples:

• Set a 1-month goal for number of hours of listening.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of pages or words or characters read (generally, I find these measures easier to deal with than whole books, since I often switch books before finishing).
• For 1-3 months, focus your energy on mastering a specific area of your target language, like TV news, or a certain anime, or other topic — whatever interests you.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of sentences or reps…be careful not to get carried away.

Anything that gives a feeling of achievement and also brings one closer to the Larger Prize of “Major Ownage”. That graph is just kind of a rough guesstimate of what happens. Anyway, feel free to share your own experiences and suggestions…