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

If and when you do fall off, get back on it like nothing happened. Redraw. New point.

Because the temptation will be to purge the binge or binge the purge. But the binge-purge cycle is as dangerous as it is unproductive.

When you’ve been inconsistent with a behavior you want to instill, the socially-trained response (“instinct”) is to punish yourself by giving yourself more to do — stricter rules, extra work, “catch up” work. A bit of self-flagellation, you know. A nice crack of the old flagellum. WHAPEW!

Basically, you say to yourself “OK, I’ve been binging on bad things for a while now, so let me purge for a little while and THEN go back to a normal flatline”.

But that just feeds the cycle. Because, you see, purging is just another form of binging. Purging is just binging on good. Which seems like a good enough idea, certainly the intent behind it is good, but the effect is to teach yourself that:

“Binging is how we solve problems”.

It’s kind of like racism. On the surface, white supremacists seem to hate darkies and Jews. But really what they’re saying is:

“Division, hate and violence is how we solve problems”.

So what happens is that white supremacists can end up scaring up, beating up and killing up almost as many white people (“race traitors”) as they do darkies and Juden and Irish and whomever the heck else. They even write books about crucifying “their own”. Their paradigm demands it. Any movement based on division, hate and violence tends to self-destruct in this way, because while its members may think that their hate has specificity, in truth they are operating under a more general principle that inevitably begins to dictate their actions and responses to anyone of any ethnicity in any adverse situation.

_{[Verily, if you look at something like the two "World" Wars, what you see is essentially Western European slander, hatred and violence, which had been successfully exported worldwide in the form of colonialism, finally coming home to roost. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a similar deal: the Romans had tried to put a firewall around Rome proper -- in fact, the whole Italian peninsula -- essentially saying "aw'right, lads -- we impose order through military conquest out there but not in 'ere". It worked well enough for a while. Eventually, though, a Gaius called Caesar came along and was like: "Roman, puh-leeze! Screw dat noise, I'ma conqua anda bringa da orda all over dis Appian muthafarquad!", because "military conquest is how we solve problems and impose order" was the real, core lesson of Roman politics. And the rest really is history. Live by the gladius, die by the gladius, if you will. Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena, baby...you know you loves it!]}

Similarly, binging and purging demands more binging and purging. Binge-purge is just a manifestation of a “binge meta-behavior”. _{The more I make up these words, the more I start sounding like Bucky Fuller — you know, insightful, but obviously self-educated because he uses all these neologisms and compound words that aren’t in mainstream academic literature. Maybe I should go to grad school and finally earn my professors’ unconditional love and respect…’Fill that surrogate dad-sized hole in my heart…}

_{You’re all: “Khatz, you’re nowhere near as cool as Bucky Fuller”. Well, neither are you, so SCREW OFF the bottle cap!}

_{Where was I…}

_{Oh yeah.} In fact, it’s more than a behavior — it’s a way of life. It’s almost like a conditioned reflex whereby as soon as you “hear the bell” of a certain type of situation, you almost unconsciously, involuntarily start binging and purging.

So we say: “one last purge(=’good’ binge), and then I’ll go back to flatline”. But flatline never comes. Just like the day you’re going to use all that cool stuff you have locked up in the attic…never comes.

Binge-purge, or, more accurately, “binge-binge” or “plus-binge-minus-binge” is like the Ring of Power in Lord of the Maori Actors with Ridiculously Manly Thighs and Dreadlocks. It cannot be used for good — at least not by you or me. It’s just that unwieldly. Once you pick it up and put it on, any valiant attempts to direct its power in space and time tend to fall flat.

Even using it against itself as some form of punishment, tends to fail. Generally speaking, the binge-binge cycle cannot be used to break itself any more than a tangled power cord can be used to untangle another tangled power cord. It cannot take you to your goals because the violence of the cycle will destroy you before you reach them — maybe not the very first time, but somewhere along the way.

Large individual goals are only healthily reached by consistency over time. By habit. Really, the only way to teach yourself this gradual behavior is by engaging in it. You can’t get yourself to be gradual and go at a manageable pace by removing the privilege of moving at this pace as soon as you slip up. Accept the slip-up as a natural part of the process. The way to get over those violent pendulum movements is to stop hitting the pendulum so violently…get a hold on it and guide it gently.

You will probably run off course a little bit this year, at some point. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Far from it. I hear aeroplanes spend the majority of their flying time technically off-course (is that true?). They just correct quickly and often.

Redraw. Correct. New point. New day. New nano-action. Continue. Yes, it is that easy. Yes, you can let go of punishment and still excel – what, you think I got my cats to come to me when I call them by beating them over the head? “OI! I’M TALKING TO YOU, MAMMAL! LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE FELINE, AND DESPAIR!”. Naw, dude. They hate Shelley.

Be nice to yourself. When you fall, just get up and keep walking. Make small corrections if necessary, but emotionally, let it be like nothing the heck happened. Like you meant to do it. It’s not like you killed someone (_{right?…right? wait, what? oh my…OK…No it’s NOT okay!}). Take the energy you were going to use for feeling guilty, and put it into moving forward.

Recently over on the le das Twitter, the great @papajohn and I have been having a ball using Chinglish with each other.

Below are some samples of our exchanges. John’s messages contained classified information, so I shan’t reproduce them here. Oh, I didn’t tell you? Yeah, we’re totally spies, dude. What, you didn’t think it was a little weird how invested we were in this whole language deal?

Aaah, screw it. I’ll reproduce the parts of papajohn’s communication that have no operational significance. Observe that John and I have generally used one language’s syntax with the other’s vocabulary, but we have stretches of full-on Chinese. We also switch across Mandarin and Cantonese, but that’s another story.

John’s Mandarin isn’t actually “transitional” — AFAIK, he’s a Mandarin princeling — but mine more or less is. Furthermore, we’re both native speakers of English _{[...oh wait, I forgot -- apparently, according to some people, I'm not ]} so…we have English thoughts _{[That doesn't sound dodgy...no siree]}, but we also have Chinese thoughts, having been raised Chinese since the age of twentysomething . A lot of, at least, my motivation, is to communicate directly to the heart and not just the head, so this sometimes becomes a factor in choosing which language gets to be the substrate or lexifier at any given time.

Too many smilies.

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@papajohn
I think I’m too 文字 focused. Worked great for 普通話, but I think treating 粵語 like some kind of 部落方言 would work better.

@ajatt (that’s me)
No ur absolutely 啱呀 雖然有文字 但係亦都有一個好大嘅部落方言/不立文字嘅element
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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@ajatt
Glad you enjoyed the link. It’s hard to tell how 有用 a link is to other people! I’m prone to 想ing that everyone but me 已經 知道ed about it
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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@papajohn
Amazon.cn hey? I’m a Dangdang man myself. Does this mean you’re riding the 簡體 train?

@ajatt
哈哈 梗唔係啦！只不過係因爲台灣嗰邊 除咗動畫之外 都冇歐美電影嘅國語配音版DVD可以買。 咁所以冇辧法囉～。仲有Amazon.cn好平添。大陸萬歲！呵呵

@papajohn
哦，明白了。大陸的配音是不是跟臺灣的有所不同？我一直覺得臺灣的配音很柔軟、可愛似的。大陸配音北方人多：）
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

John and I started doing this to save space on Twitter, because Chinese characters can communicate more information in less space. In 140 kanji, you don’t even have to be pithy; yous can writes yourself a whole mini-essay!

I wonder whether such a mixed approach to output (and maybe even input?) might not be a great way to ease into 使うing your target 言語anguage(?)

In the past, it would appear that a lot of 教育ducation systems around the 世界orld have favoured a cold-turkey approach to second-language/basilectal/dialectal learners of a target language. Barring cases of forcible acculturation, the intent behind this was good — the system designers didn’t want to further encourage or create dialects/pidgins/creoles, so they went straight for the goal.

However, I did recently read about some mixed-usage graded readers for children who are native speakers of the Ebonics dialect of English. If I recall correctly, the readers are initially mostly in Ebonics, and gradually introduce more and more acrolectal [is that even the right word?]/Standard English usage until they are written completely in Standard English. Apparently, they were really successful in getting kids reading acrolectal English with ease and fluency. _{[As it turns out, according to some linguists, Ebonics is not mere slang; it's actually an entirely self-contained logical-syntactical system, with a relationship to Standard English akin to that of Schwizerdütsch to Hochdeutsch].}

And that just seems to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, mixing is, of course, “impure”, heterogeneous, asymmetrical. And that kind of thing doesn’t appeal to the little zealot inside all of us, that binary part of us that wants everything just so. But at the same time, there’s just something very natural and organic and logical and workable-seeming about the whole idea.

Human beings, more often than not, need to be eased into things, I think. Put another way, there’s far less likely to be a rebound — much like an organ transplant rejection — if the transition is gradual rather than sudden. Accomodating this apparently natural tendency can seem like a sort of half-buttocked mishmash compromise (and it can end that way if the transition window stops moving), but ironically enough it can also lead to rain on wedding days, free rides when you’ve already paid, and true, permanent behavior change in a way that coercion often does not. Coercion produces resistance. Well-executed gradual change can bypass this resistance completely.

Frog in hot water. Frog in water that gradually gets hotter.

This gradualism thing, we are seeing, is true of children, and I think it may be even more true of adults. Not because adults are less malleable or resilient than kids or any other ageist crap like that, but because adults have the power to resist and escape. I’ve seen this with training my two cats, who are of different ages: it’s not actually “easier” to train kittens — they have short attention spans and less background knowledge — but kittens aren’t as strong as adult cats, so you can…you know…literally put them right where you want them. With adult cats, on the other hand, you kind of have to coax and negotiate and reason, otherwise you will get the scratch, motherlover.

Babies can’t turn off their immersion environment. Babies can’t build their own gaijin bubbles.

So, kids, 次回ext time you’re at a loss for 詞words…try mixing 言語anguages. Of course, you want to get to the stage where you use or can use just the one. But for now, treat it as a phase you’re going through.

To tell you the truth, I’ve already done this mixing before, but in analog form — when I was in college, I would take coursework notes in a hybrid kanji-katakana-Latin [in order of priority/abundance] shorthand, making and using words very loosely in a highly personalized, idiosyncratic sort of way; I’d often make up original kanji compounds on the spot.

When you think about it, until your vocabulary matures and fills out, you’re already a de facto “transitional user” of your target language. The only question is: do you now recognize and exploit this fact, or do you suppress it out of fear of the risk involved? As it is, with conventional methods, many people give up learning their target language and thus remain “transitional” for life anyhow. But acknowledging this “middle passage” through language-mixing may have the paradoxical effect of carrying more people through to full fluency than a strict language separation.

Anyway, food for thought. Anyone with information to share, go ahead and 發言launch words! Oh yeah — sorry for being autological; I know that annoys some people. Or maybe it’s my inner purist that’s annoyed. Yeah, it’s probably just me. Oh well…

It’s New Year’s.

So freaking what? It’s just another day. We all need to calm down a little. Even me telling you to calm down is probably just fueling the excitement, isn’t it?

Are you going to make a resolution? Good luck with that. I doubt you’ll even remember it by early March.

Screw resolutions. I’m going to show you how to actually get things done.

_{And while we’re ranting: I hate my writing. I hate this whole website. I even hate people who hate my writing because they remind me of all the hate I already have. If this site were a piece of paper, I’d have burned it long ago. Fortunately, the blog medium has largely prevented these perfectionistic tendencies coming out and destroying whatever little good some of you may gain from reading this.}

_{The reason I hate this mother is because it almost never comes out the way I’m thinking of it. There are these beautiful and rather tingly constructions in my mind and they come out so…bland. So tingleless.}

In “The Fork, The Choice and You“, I was trying to write something that it might perhaps be better to draw. So I went ahead and drew it.

Behold! The following paths of achievement (or lack thereof): the pothead, the planner and the player.

The Pothead Model

“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…whoa…yeah”.

Problems: Single, discrete point — a fantasy, a dream — which is a good start, but no path, no granularity, no action, no nothing.

The Planner Model

Problems: Has goal (point) and path (line), but the path lacks granularity and elasticity. It is conceptually beautiful and perfectly smooth, but unworkable except under perfect (i.e. rarely fulfilled) conditions. The planner’s inability to stay on the line is frequently a cause of stress, pain and ultimately failure.

At this time of year, society at large offers us the path of the planner. And those of us who take it tend to suffer so much that we fall off the graph. I submit to you that we should reject this model.

The Player Model

• The player has fun because it’s all a game.
• Unlike the planner, who has this perfect, smooth, continous line she’s trying to force herself onto, the player deals in tiny, discrete, individual points (AKA choices/forks). The player’s path is digital. Over time, she causes the points to form a trend, but there is no actual line.
• At every point, she makes a choice that is both fun and takes her closer to the goal.
• There are thousands of these points.
• The player has a goal but the focus is on the immediate next action.
• The player does not allow the goal to overwhelm her with its vertical or horizontal distance.
• The player does not allow “imperfections” and deviations to perturb her. She accepts deviations, and then corrects or even exploits them.
• The player may often actively seek new, advantageous deviations through playful experiments. She’s on for the ride.

Beyond immediate necessity, the player forgets about both the past and the future. There is no burden of regret, no crushingly grand aspirations (there are grand aspirations, she just doesn’t let them get in the way). The real question is: Right here, right now, what do we do next? What do we play next?
_{[By the way -- this idea of using time rather than being used by it is one suggested by Eckhart Tolle in his "The Power of Now" -- don't be deterred by all the shady quasi-religious hype; between the covers is actually one of the best books about focus and concentration ever written].}

Japanesewise the key is this: there are gaps. Gaps in your immersion. Gaps in your implementation. Gaps in…I dunno…your teeth? You may make mistakes, you may fall off the horse. Fine. Big deal. What matters is what you do next. Every moment is New Year’s. Every moment is a chance to reset. Every moment, pretend the entire world has just been recreated and redrawn from scratch.

It is a game. If you’re not having fun, it’s because you’re doing it wrong. Which is not to say that there’s only one right way — there isn’t. But if you’re bored, then the way you’re doing it clearly has problems. Make it fun. You will know when you’re having fun. Don’t, don’t, do not be anal retentive and start asking what “fun” is. You know what it is. And if you don’t, then you’re gone in a way far beyond my ability to help you . I officially refuse to define fun.

When you touch something hot, you feel pain: this is your body trying to save your hand from being hurt. Boredom is intellectual pain. Boredom is your body’s way of telling you to change the situation. Ignore it to your own detriment. If you try to just fight through the boredom, your brain is just going to puke it all up anyhow. Your brain is trying to help you out by telling you: “Hey!…Nothing’s getting remembered or learned right now”.

Be A Player: Poke Dots Into Reality. There Is No Line

As you read this website, I do not want you to follow my advice. I do not want you to take my advice. I want you to use my advice. You cannot be me, nor would you want to. You can be much better than that. Much better. You will be faced with situations that I never faced; you may have preferences that I do not. Follow my trend — I think I offer a good one — but pick your own points: there is no line.
_{[Case in point: my least favorite type of question is "how many kanji/sentences should I do per day"? As many as you pleasantly and consistently can. Stop asking to be commanded (ironically enough, if you were to stop asking to be commanded because of that last sentence, you would in fact be obeying a command...but anyhoo). Do what you want. Try a few "points" and see which ones work for you.]}

The planner’s path is goal-focussed. Contemporary personal development literature is awash in goalism. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s not working. When’s the last time a goal got someone to stop smoking? You can goal it up up the wazoo and nothing will change. The goal part is trivial. You can make up a goal half-asleep. I think we already set goals naturally — whenever we want something, that’s a goal. And don’t give me this “a goal is a dream with a deadline” crap, because if it’s a cool enough goal, there’s probably no way you’re going to know enough about the domain to set a real final deadline, so now you’ll just be scaring yourself with images of death (deadline).

Timeframes, yes; timeboxing, yes; deadlines, no. What you really need is (1) a new identity which can produce (2) simple guidelines _{(I’d say one guideline is enough, three is the max — you have to be able to recall them instantly)} for point-by-point behavior, “rules of engagement” if you will — the simple AJATT algorithm in “The Fork, The Choice and You” is a good example.

On the player’s path, each of those points/forks/choices is a chance to change the future — to alter reality itself in a small way. Be a player. I’m not saying “abandon all thought of goals” — never let ideology get in the way of something truly useful — but I am saying let it go; leave well enough alone; it’s not helping like you think it is. Stop massaging these great big “mission statements”; that crap is nothing but empty prose. Stop getting aroused, confused and intimidated by all these “goalistic rituals” that are taking over our society and start poking tiny, pin-sized holes into reality. No one fails for lack of a goal, only for a lack of dots. Dot, dot, dot, dot…………………………

Playing The Meta-Game of AJATT

A lot of what we call personal development was and is actually made for corporate and military training.  Stephen Covey? David Allen? Those boys are just manual writers for corporate soldiers, especially ones at or aiming for the “colonel” level. And maybe stuff like that works in large armies and corporations, who struggle just to communicate intentions and keep everyone singing from the same songsheet. But individuals and tiny groups aren’t like that.

We don’t have the sheer man-hours to waste writing impressive plans that are just going to be thrown out anyhow. But we can be nimble. We can be ad hoc. We can be point-by-point. We may appear to have less and be less, but we end up using it far better and thus accomplishing more and becoming more. We — individuals and tiny groups — can fail more because failure is cheaper for us; we can correct and exploit any situation — failure or otherwise — almost instantly.

Have you ever seen those big, round magnifying mirrors that chicks use to do their make-up? You know, the kind that show all your skin’s pores and tiny blemishes and make you depressed to be alive — even if you’re a guy who thought he was decent-looking? I finally understand why women use foundation — it’s the only thing that makes looking at yourself in one of those things bearable. Anyway, a large organization is like one of those. A large organization is like a huge magnifying device. And since a large organization magnifies everything, it also magnifies screw-ups.

A large org can make 10 million good things, but if it makes a mistake, it now has 10 million c-r-a-p things! Result? Large orgs (schools, companies, etc.) are defensive — they don’t try to be good, and they definitely don’t try to have fun, they just try to not-screw-up, not-make-misakes, follow-the-manual. This means that a large org has to suppress both success and failure for its own safety and indeed for the safety of the world at large. We couldn’t well afford to have elephants tripping up all over the place. When 10 million Firestone tires blow up, we have a freaking problem. And a giggly little: “Whoops! Haha – I meant to do that!“, will not cut it.

All of which explains why big companies keep buying up little ones — the little ones are able to think and twist and spin and pivot and maneuver and act and react and fail and deviate and correct and exploit far better and far faster. A big company is just happy to be alive and walking straight. A big company has to kill its creativity, because creativity is all these messy points and a big company wants — needs — a perfect, straight line. When working at full scale, a big company cannot safely and continuously invent and refine cool processes, it can only execute them. _{Even the great Sony purchases more of its technology than meets the consumer eye, despite having 100,000 incredibly smart employees and dedicated R&D labs.}

And that, my war-oriented friends, also explains why a regular army can essentially never win against guerilla tactics. The flexibility and speed of adaptation does not even compare. Guerilla tactics are why America has a President and not a Queen, why Mao came to rule China, why Vietnam is a single country, why I can live wherever I want in Kenya, why even Alexander the Great and Napoleon got royally pwned (in Afghanistan and Russia, respectively) and why an AJATTeer can absolutely d-e-s-t-r-o-y someone who depended on Japanese classes. Because even if the raw AJATT process weren’t better, the meta-process — make it fun, iterate lots, fail lots and tweak to win — is virtually indestructible.

This is also why school sucks for learning, because it kills your maneuverability in order to get you to follow someone else’s plan that’s easier to grade. Schools couldn’t give a pygmy shrew’s buttocks whether you learn or not; they’re just happy to be alive and walking straight. Schools just want you to look good, sit still and shut up so they can push you down the conveyor belt and yell out “next!”. They may not be intentionally callous, but they certainly end up being about as warm as Ann Coulter on a December evening in Minnesota _{(Minne-freaking-sota winters…oh my gosh…MOMMY, WHY DOES IT HURT MY LUNGS WHEN I BREATHE? And why do shrill, somewhat racist, slightly anti-Semitic women…turn me on? It’s like: “if you wanna get with me, Khatzumoto, you have to alter my fundamental beliefs about humanity! *Diagonal* *Finger* *Snap*!”)}. Good for the school. Not good for you.

So don’t treat AJATT like school and try to mold yourself to fit The Plan^TM, because even AJATT will suck if you do it like that. Mold the plan to fit you as you go along. I didn’t make this so you could be a cog in the machine, I made it so that you would own the machine, use the machine, customize the machine. You don’t need a license, just open the box and fiddle with it. _{[I think we'll see an explosion of learning and invention when more concrete and abstract "boxes" like this -- creation, discovery and execution processes -- are open for us to see. In that sense, and that sense alone, people's questions about AJATT minutiae are legitimate, if not necessarily important.]}

You know, I’m always amused that people are impressed that I learned Japanese without classes. I say, I want to meet the guy who did get fluent because of classes; that shiitake mushroom would impress me!!! If that guy writes a book or blook, listen to HIM! It never surprises me any more that people like Edison, the Wright Brothers and young William Kamkwamba had little or no formal education; it would surprise me if they did.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the basic idea. Kinda. Sorta. It still doesn’t read the way it actually looks in my mind, but hopefully this all makes things a little clearer. I don’t know if what I’m saying applies that widely. But it applied for self-directed learning/acquisition/becoming Japanese. If you have any questions or insights, feel free to share them with the whole gang.

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

What are you going to do next?

Ultimate goals are heavy; they weigh on the soul. They’re useful and everything, but you can’t have them in your head all the time because the difference between that ultimate goal and your current state can be quite heart-crushingly large.

Track records can be depressing. You’re just going to be seeing all you haven’t been doing. I wouldn’t say never look at these, but if you don’t keep your exposure down, it will make you sick.

Overall plans are similarly crushing. The thought, the sight of all that’s still left to do — that long, empty, open road — is not exciting.

Which leaves your next choice. Your immediate next action.
It’s just one thing.
It’s simple.
It’s practically instant gratification.

Let’s say your ultimate goal is Japanese fluency.
Your track record is spotty or non-existent.
Your overall plan is to follow something along the lines of AJATT/AntiMoon.

What is your next choice?
Simple: Do something. Anything. In Japanese. Anything counts.
ANYthing.
Any. Thing.

One simple choice. Through this one simple choice. you’re bringing yourself closer to the ultimate goal; you’re building a new, better track record and you’re following the overall plan.

That’s all there is to it.

When I say I am not smart, have no talent, and have no willpower, a lot of people think I’m being modest. Trust me. I am neither smart nor talented nor “disciplined”.

With Japanese, I just made simple, local choices. At every fork in the road, I chose Japanese. That is sum total of “the plan”. If there is truly no choice, then it’s obviously not a fork. But you would be surprised how many opportunities there are to fit Japanese in some crack somewhere somehow (because concurrency counts).

This is an incredibly dumb algorithm. It is so dumb that a computer could do it. Even a lazy, good-for-nothing boy from Kenya who forgets to shower all the time — such a boy could execute this algorithm.

Observe, a pseudocode implementation of the basic AJATT algorithm.

while ( breathing )
    if ( anyOpportunityExists )
        doJapanese(anything)
    else takeNextOpportunity(asap)

It’s that simple. Make the big plans if you want. Keep the logs if you want. But know that the forks in the road are where things actually get decided.

I got this really cool comment in response to this article where I urged people to calm down and focus on one language at a time:

Said Jimbo:

Surely, if a child can be raised natively in three languages, it would be just as possible and in fact easier as an adult to do the same thing? Surely one could simultaneously learn, say, Japanese, Chinese and…I dunno, French? Why just one at a time?

You know what? I have a feeling it could be done.

1. I just don’t know how, but
2. I do know that this frantic, type-A, “I HAVE TO DO THIS AND YOU’D BETTER TELL ME HOW OR ELSE THE WORLD IS GOING TO END” sort of breathless email that I occasionally get is going to cause more ulcers and heart attacks than language learning. There is such a thing perhaps as eustress and a healthy tension — I myself used to pretend that my life would depend on my ability to impersonate a Japanese person — but this isn’t that; this is panicking. This is headless chicken mode.
3. I am not always impressed by the multi-lingual people I meet, to tell you the truth (there are definitely exceptions, of course). They often have annoying gaps in their knowledge. They function in the languages, but, for example, they can’t handle a lot of nuances, subtle humor or cultural allusions. That bugs me. Now I have to talk to them in a truncated, flavorless, sanitized version of the language. It’s like drinking flat Sprite. Having said that, any level of language skill is still useful, and you can’t (indeed, don’t need to) be good at everything, it’s just not always that much fun to interact with.

What really ticks me off is how these “I HAVE TO KNOW ALL THESE LANGUAGES AT AN ACADEMIC LEVEL — STAT!” kids write as if it were my responsibility to sort out their lives, and I’d BETTER GET ON IT RIGHT NOW, MISTER! Maybe that’s just me being oversensitive. But they’re so pushy, it’s like “OK, stwop it! Stwop it! Mmm kay?”

With patience — not procrastination, but patience — humilty, and a relaxed, stable frame of mind, I think it could be done. I feel like it would require a deep love for the languages and a tortoise-like attitude — habitual plodding rather than binge-and-purge franticness (“bulimic learning”).

It would require letting go of any attachment to speedy results, and latching onto just doing little things, all day every day. And not caring that people thought you were crazy and going nowhere — which is already the case with self-directed learners of just one language.

In that sense, it’s not unlike learning one language, just triple the patience, triple the humility, triple the thick-skinnedness, and triple the materials costs.

The hare-like, business-oriented, NOW NOW NOW people are not demonstrating the mental stamina to disconnect from the idyllic end and focus on their daily habits. With their current attitude, they are going to crash and burn mentally from the lack of instant ultimate gratification long before even the lack of short- and mid-term monetary and social return starts to hit them. And then, to top it off, they’re going to go looking for someone or something other than themselves to blame, as if they were tricked into it(!)

Which brings me to a pertinent topic — economics. Economically, all this language study could potentially detract from time and monetary resources needed to invest in other activities and/or skills. Depending on one’s location, there could be considerable cost issues involved with acquiring the native materials necessary to simulate “growing up”. Again, these issues are multiplied by as many languages as there are in question.

Learning a language is going to cost a lot of time and some amount of money before it pays back anything other than enjoyment; for a long time, it has to be an end unto itself and not a means to anything but a good time. All these costs are typically hidden from us growing up in our native language(s), because they are incorporated into daily life — a kid growing up in Japan doesn’t buy a “Japanese” comic book, she just buys a comic book; she doesn’t hang out with “Japanese” people, she just hangs out with people; she doesn’t watch “Japanese” TV, she just watches TV — but these same costs become very clearly visible when we’re now recreating a childhood remotely and from scratch.

But it could be done. I’m quite sure of it. It is totally doable. It’s not really a matter of the raw capability of the human hardware, more one of PPL: patience, priorities and logistics: the patience to continue priority-investing in the exposure and infrastructure necessary to acquire a language, all for no immediately visible return, over an indeterminate timescale, against any and all significantly deleterious objections and interruptions from other people, because it’s going to take as long as it’s freaking going to take, and if you stop, you lose.

And once you’ve built your beautiful linguistic house, you don’t just let out a satisfied sigh, wipe your hands and walk away; you keep maintaining it lest the termites of memory decay* should eat into your wonderful imported Brazilian hardwood frame and bring the whole thing crashing down.

One doesn’t so much learn a language as one does become a person who habitually comes into contact with it. Can you establish and maintain robust, high-bandwith, long-lasting, simultaneous input streams across all the languages you want to learn? If so, then go for it!

I may be completely wrong in my caution; I may just be “projecting”; I would be happy — overjoyed — to be shown to have been too conservative. Either way — if you want to do something, don’t waste another moment of your time talking to people like me: the way to prove it…is to do it. In cases like this, you don’t win by being right, you’re right because you win.

_{*Since we’re belly-aching today, I might as well belly-ache you this: It really tugs on my tampon strings (what-the?!) when someone’s like “oh yeah, I know language X, I’m just a bit rusty”, and then proceeds to speak in such an incomprehensible accent and make so many fundamental grammatical errors, that you just want to move to the Netherlands and have yourself euthanized.}

_{I myself have lived in a few too many countries now, such that I have a unique tapestry (trainwreck) of an accent in English, but, I mean…I’m pretty tolerant of variation, so I think that my grievances actually carry even more weight than those of, say, an American who doesn’t own a passport and tells tourists from the UK that they: “need to learn English properly” (actually happened to a friend of a friend ).}

_Anyway!

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

“Too many pages, dawg”.

In Part 1 of this open-ended, multi-part series, I’d like to discuss with you, in my signature casual, opinionated, poorly-sourced and screw-you-if-you-disagree-with-me-because-I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong-mofo way…what the deal is with personal development. So…

What is the deal with personal development anyway?

Aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Is it worth your time?

No, really, though, aren’t they all a bunch of hacks?

Isn’t it stuff we all know already, anyhow?

Isn’t it “unscientific”?

Aren’t they just making money telling us what we want to hear?

Aren’t they just trying to sell us stuff?

And, perhaps most constructively:

How does a sane, “open-minded” person (just as an aside: “open-minded”, to me, means “people who agree with me, or are open to agreeing with me, or say things that I agree with, or am open to agreeing with”; I told you this was going to be hard-hitting stuff, man….I’m pointing a long, thick, juicy central digit in the general direction of feigned objectivity) navigate the treacherous waters of what is, admittedly, a comically B.S.-filled field.

If personal development is fugu, that poisonous, Japanese seafood delicacy, how do you get at the tasty meat without (sometimes literally) dying? That perhaps is the core question that this series will seek to answer. Along the way, in future posts, I may share some of my own guidelines, recommendations and disrecommendations.

I’ll tell you right now. I’m just one person. I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I don’t have the answers, period. I’m not saying this to be humble. I’m saying this because it makes me look good. I’m saying this so that even if I turn out to be wrong I can be like: “yeah, dude, I totally saw that coming”; I can act like I anticipated the whole deal and it was all part of the contingency plan.

Maybe I should start some of that editing…Anyway, without further ado:

My Story

Since this is all anecdotal anyway, perhaps it makes sense to share with you, the story of my journey towards rather carefully and selectively “embracing” personal development.

I grew up watching Blackadder, Animaniacs and Tiny Toons. We’re not just reminiscing about old TV shows here; this is important information. You see, what I’m trying to demonstrate is that I grew up soaked in irony. Indeed, I grew up so soaked in irony, that I didn’t even know what I was being ironic about: my exposure to irony tended to precede my exposure to the actual phenomenon in question. Think about it — Animaniacs and Tiny Toons had all those sarcastic references to Don Knotts. Yet but…how many kids growing up in the early 1990s actually knew who Don Knotts even was, really (perhaps that was part of the joke…I dunno)? Yet but ([I'm liking this new word]) we all yucked it up.

Bottom line; I used to think that personal development was all a bunch of crap. Grade A B.S. I had never really read any. I had never been exposed to any — not in a meaningful quantity. But I knew it was a bunch of crap. I ate blasé for breakfast, sarcasm for lunch and whatever passed for acerbic wit for dinner. Personal development, good or bad, is an inherently….naïve, innocent, hopeful field. There was no room for that in my life.

Let me be clear, though: personal development mostly is a bunch of crap. But the teeny, tiny little bit of good that is there is, arguably, too good to ignore. Too. Good. To. Ignore. Kind of like how air is mostly not oxygen, or how it’s the micronutrients (rather than macro-) in our food that really swing our health one way or another. Not quite the same level of importance to life, but you get the idea — value can sometimes be inversely proportional to size.

So, one day when I was about 14, I was watching televisory pictomatograms (yes, TV) with one of my sisters. Upon the tele-vision, Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don’t worry, I already knew Oprah was lame. I’m hip.

At one point, Oprah asks Arnold if he, an unknown young man from a small country in central Europe, had ever imagined himself being a Hollywood movie star. Arnold replies that he had always known he was going to be a star; he had always pictured himself being in Hollywood, being the dude. And you know he was being frank, because he’s Austrian. Sarcasm isn’t big in Austria (Austrians: “yeah it is!”).

My 14 year old self let out a triumphant: “yeeeeah, right”. To which my sister retorted: “No, [Khatzumoto], some people do have a clear vision of themselves”.

Women are stupid. Even the president of Harvard said so. And you can’t argue with Harvard — it’s a top-tier university. So screw you.

Knowing that all the schooling, suffrage and Steinem was going to her head, I paid my sister’s remarks no serious attention (“Ha, women…better get a Y chromosome before you start running that mouth!”). But, somehow, the memory of her gentle, feminine words remained with me. I am, after all, half woman on my mother’s side.

By the way, last time I made jokes about women here, someone took it seriously. So I’m going to make things clear right here and now: I am not joking; I am actually a misogynist. Women reading this: Why are you even online? Is there no kitchen where you are? Does your husband/father know you’re reading unsupervised?

Now that we have that out of the way…

My sister’s words stayed with me…blah blah…To this day yaddah yaddah…But it’s not like I had acted on them.

Fast forward to college, and I started collecting inspiring quotes. Tons and tons of them. I became a magnet for pithy aphorisms encouraging diligence, perseverance, and general pursuit of ownage. As time has gone on, I’ve developed my own “lazy” style of goal achievement, that renders a lot of the stuff I used to read quite quaintly obsolete, but those things served their purpose when they did.

College in the US was the first time I had to actually study on a regular basis; my earlier, British-style school experience had all been about end-of-term exams, so you could goof around until the eleventh hour, at which point you would invariably pull a Frosted Flakes-fueled feat of short-term memory (“this is grrrrrrreat!” No? Not funny? No? Anyone? No?). Also, your parents would suddenly become incredibly religious. _{I kid you not — one time, when I was 13, my mother drove me to a convent (a massive facility full of women, so far so good), and there were these Maltese nuns and they started touching me (but they’re women, so it’s okay) and my Mum’s all: “pray upon this child by the laying upon of hands”, and I’m like “mother, ok, (1) you don’t believe in freaking anything — you’re so cynical you don’t even believe in cynicism — and (2) you are not and have never at any point in your life been Catholic — you don’t even like these people; you’ve been slagging off the Catholic church my entire life, always calling them mafiosi and…” and she’s like: “(shrug)”}.

The requirements of my new American environment led me to seek and find gems like Adam Robinson’s What Smart Students Know. I read many other books about studying, and they all had their moments, but WSSK definitely stood out the most. WSSK silently and wordlessly impressed upon me this most wonderful idea: that I could independently read a book about how to get something done, and use it to get that thing done better.

Meta-learning — learning about learning — was a huge revelation for me. They don’t teach meta-learning at schools. Not even at the handsomely-priced ones that I was sent to. Everything’s either “hard work” or “talent”. It’s either struggle or innate ability. WSSK showed me a third way. WSSK is, for all intents and purposes, a personal development book.

AJATT the process, as I executed it while at college, was not directly inspired by ideas in the personal development/human performance/self-help/whatever the heck we’re calling it movement; it was just a childish game I played and got amazing, socially-significant results with (“look, Mom! I watched all this TV and now I can speak Japanese!”). But, of course, as I have come to write AJATT the site, it’s become clear to me that there were a lot of ideas that I used or otherwise independently arrived at, that the personal development people have been talking about for years.

Somewhere in there, it occurred to me that (1) success with Japanese could perhaps be generalized, not just to other languages but to other areas of life, and (2) a lot of those people with the inspiring quotes had written entire books filled with their ideas. And this is what led me down the slippery path of collecting and applying ideas to increase happiness and productivity. Coz, gosh, heaven forbid one should actually make a direct, intelligent, conscious effort to improve one’s life.

What has personal development done for me, really? Apart from “just” help me get stuff done and feel better about myself? Well, I think it can actually be hard to clearly quantify what good personal development does. Because, at the end of the day, it is your actions that make the change — books, videos and seminars are just inert ink, bits and air vibrations. We all love a clear, unambiguous: “Tony Robbins saved me two million dollars” type testimonial, but real-life causality is a bit murkier; maybe a lot of contributing factors form a web, rather than a simple, linear, hopscotch-like A-then-B chain; you’re smart enough to know that.

So action takes the day in the end. Having said that, it is the ideas in personal development books that can encourage thoughts that encourage those actions in the first place. _{(Also, sometimes you have ideas that are “in-process”, and you don’t want to share them before they’ve reached maturity, because people’s idle comments can be unnecessarily distracting, and threaten the open-mindedness and patience that is necessary in experiments on one’s life — a good deal of what I’m doing falls into this category)}.

In any case, suffice it to say that PD’s done a lot for me, does a lot for me, and will continue to do a lot for me. I’d definitely say that personal development is why you have an AJATT site to enjoy — assuming you enjoy it, that is . Many adults have learned Japanese before me (in fact, I’ve met some of them), faster than me, funner than me, further than me, better than me. But few have had the confidence, consistency or follow-through to record and present their ideas and experiences to the world. And that’s a darn shame. The world always has room for another success story. In fact, there’s a neverending shortage. I love a good role model; I love a narrative I can aspire to: I was desperate for such a narrative back in the day. Hopefully, I can be a shining, well-lotioned example for you.

Where were we? Oh yeah…

The PD industry is full of crap. But you know what? So is the food service industry. Many children die of food-poisoning in the US because it is apparently acceptable to feed them crap, as in actual fecal matter. And not just any children — blond, white children — you know, the valuable kind, that actually contribute to society and make the world a better place to live. So, should we not abolish food? Right now? Today? I mean, it’s killing people. We can all take sterilized, nutritionally-balanced pills, and no children, valuable or ethnic, need ever die again. Aren’t those children’s lives worth the effort? We could save them, if we just abolished food for something better. Peer-reviewed, shrink-wrapped, “nutro-pills”^TM. Think about it.

Call straw-man all you like. Children are dying. And you’re letting them die.

But AJATT is a language blog. Why are we sitting here making yet more off-color jokes about white people _(clever) and writing outside of the blog’s core topic? Well, because, the sweet thing about PD books is that you can read them and then feed the ideas and techniques back into your language study. Language-learning method produces ideas; ideas feed language-learning method. Now, if that isn’t sexy, cyclical and self-referential, I don’t know what is. Positive feedback: taste the rainbow.

Thus concludes the first part of this series. Stay tuned for more baseless remarks about this complex social phenomenon.

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

So let me ask you:

Are you the world’s b***h?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is. The Language Learner’s Prayer.

Oh Richard Dawkins,

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

In the name of Karl Popper,

EOF.

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!

There’s so much I want to say on this topic. But it would take too long to put it all together, so I’m going to do what we always do here at AJATT — give it to you piecemeal.

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

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

Anyway, first, a little bit about:

The Sucky Way We Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why How We Read Sucks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um…How do I put this politely…

Bollocks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you see the difference?

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

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

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

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

OK, let’s hit out some more examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other day, a handsome young AJATTeer (and South Park fan) named MGV sent me this handsome email:

On your site, which is awesome, you mention that you should spend 18-24 hours a day doing something/anything in Japanese. I’m in high school, grade 10. I have school Monday-Friday. I worked it out on a piece of paper, and the most time I can spend listening to Japanese is about 10 hours, and I was a little generous.

Anyways, I was hoping you might have some suggestions on how to listen to more Japanese each day. I don’t like to make excuses, but I’m wondering how often you had college classes. In other words, how did you find the time to “get used” to Japanese.

It’s not just with listening, at most I can review about 5-15 kanji a day. At that rate it will take ages get through the kanji phase.

Life is very busy, and school is just terrible for Japanese, since everything is in English (the E word!) and it’s loud and hard to have your headphones on in, and also, the worst, school issues hours of homework!

Sorry to ramble, you may have heard it all before. It just seems like learning to understand this language is gonna take a lot longer than it has to.

If you have any suggestions, please please please write them to me or post them in some immersion article or something.

Khatzumoto’s one-line answer:

Just focus on the time you do control, rather than on what you don’t.

The government and your legal guardians practically force you to be in school, but no one’s forcing you to watch English TV in your free time, and no one else but you controls the contents of your iPod, and no one’s got a gun to your head telling you to read English websites.

Control what you can control. No one reasonably expects any more of you. Do all you can when you can. And you’ll be surprised by how much you do progress and do get done.

Limits are not always a disadvantage. What seems like friction can actually be traction — just as professional runners use spiked shoes that actually get stuck into the ground (which would seem to suck) to give them more power to push off. In fact, people with all the time in the world can be very unproductive, unless they start to give themselves some self-made traction.

All your friction can be traction. All your friction can be a gift — a brand new pair of shoes . Limits are your friend.

Think of Japanese less as something to “get through” and more as something to “be”. Japanese is just who you are. As long as you’re doing even the smallest thing in Japanese, there’s nowhere you need to be other than where you are. The thing with AJATT is that you’re not directly forcing growth, you’re just ensuring good “nutrition”, knowing that growth will naturally take care of itself.

One inch counts. One kanji counts. One minute counts. Try holding your breath for one or two minutes (ok, don’t), and you’ll quickly see that it is a very long time.

P.S. When I was kanjiing hard core, I found my daily upper limit was 25 new characters per day (plus about 100 reviews), no matter how much time I had.

P.P.S. SRSing your school subject material could help you save time. The key is to make sure the format of your SRS cards is as good as possible a  reflection of your exam style.

P.P.P.S. Anyone with any suggestions — especially people who’ve faced and solved a similar problem — please feel free to share your advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously, I get emails like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do I Learn 500 Languages At Once?!

You tell me.

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

And there came upon the email of Khatzumoto a letter long of length, correct of spelling and accurate of punctuation. And it was good. The emailer’s pseudonym was, is and ever shall be…Farley.

Khatzumoto, hi!

First, I want to start out by saying how much I have enjoyed the site and how helpful it has been to me. I’m sure you get a lot of questions, but I have an issue that I’ve not seen addressed on your site, AntiMoon, or similar websites, and it’s giving me quite a hangup.

First some background: I’m 27, native English speaker (U.S. born), trying to learn Spanish from zero. First foreign language I’ve seriously studied. I’ve been studying about a year and have not progressed as far as I would like. I do some writing by trade, and in my personal life I’ve been told I’m funny. So when it comes to language, issues of nuance, metaphor, timing, phrasing, inflection, etc. are important to me.

I have been watching some American movies and TV shows in my target language, using them to practice my listening comprehension, using shows I already know so that I already know the basics of the plot. (For the record, I watch humor – think Simpsons – or drama/arthouse type flicks.) Herein lies the problem. I know some of these so well (okay, mostly just the Simpsons) that I know lines verbatim, and when I see them translated, I get very hung up on why they were translated the way that they were if they were not translated verbatim — does that sentence structure not exist? does saying it more literally not sound as good? why that word order? is this a bad translation? is this a phrase that can’t be translated well?

Even with native materials I have this problem — was that an eloquent turn of phrase or just bad writing? My inner radar is gone, and it’s very disorienting. It’s also making it very hard to “let go” of English because I feel like I need it as an anchor. (By looking up a Spanish word in a bilingual dictionary so I can try to figure out all the exact implications and shades of the meaning, for example.)

I’ve tried to think back to how I acquired said radar in the first place, and I don’t really know. I certainly had some helpful formal instruction in writing, but for the most part no one sat me down and said, this kind of thing is corny while this is poetic, this is funny, this is smart, this is stupid, this is formal, etc. I’m sure it can be directly traced to my massive input – I have been a voracious reader since childhood, and I’ve watched many humorous programs over and over – and I’m sure you’re going to tell me that’s what the remedy is.

But this just makes me feel overwhelmed. I think of how many years it’s taken me to get to where I am in English – two decades of lots of reading! – and it just feels hopeless and impossible. I don’t want to win a Pulitzer for writing in Spanish, but I do want to be able to be me, to keep my voice, both in conversation and in writing – and that includes being funny and handy with a turn of phrase.

So could you comment on this? I can definitely understand — and have experienced — how input can help with acquiring an inner sense of grammar (what makes “I is” sound horrible, for example) but the higher levels are giving me trouble. I think the writing on your site is funny, and you’ve said in one of your posts that you were in a comedy troop. Are you funny in Japanese?

Farley, for a funny guy, you don’t sound you’re having a lot of fun . Remember, you’re from a wealthy country. The wealthiest. You are a native speaker of its language. You don’t need to learn other languages. You don’t need to know Spanish. Life in the hispanosphere will continue whether or not you learn the thick, soft native tongue of Salma Hayek.

Realize that you’re doing this for fun. All the talk about multicultural this and global that is just a bunch of smoke language-lovers blow up people’s butts to make it seem as if what they’re doing is important. I am guilty of it, too. The real reason to learn a language is because it’s there. It is pure play. Real socio-economic need does arise if, say, you decided to move to a Spanish-speaking country for a long time. But even then, ironically, the fastest path, and the one that looks the longest, is to learn Spanish as if you didn’t have to.

OK, now to the core of your email. Humor. Think of humor as a high-order function that requires base infrastructure to exist in the first place. Kind of like how Internet access requires electricity, a computing device, literacy and a working network connection.

You don’t have that base infrastructure yet, therefore Internet access is still out of the question for you. Think about puns — you can only get puns if you first know the words that are being punned. “Cunning Linguist” only sounds funny when you know…about that activity women claim to enjoy (shopping? idle gossip? no? sexist comment? what?).

A joke in language is a somersault. You are trying to pull somersaults…but you can’t even walk yet. Which is not to say that you will never be able to pull them, it just means, you do need to build basic coordination and motor skills before you start busting the sweet ninja moves.

You need to be positive to the point of arrogance in your thoughts (“I am Spanish”), but short, simple and straightforward in your actions (“this sentence; this book; this show; here; now; this moment; this second; fun”). You need to be: Humble, but not diffident. Eager, but not harried. Determined, but not self-destructive. Like my good man Makoto Itou likes to say: “festina lente“. Hurry slowly.

You will get the jokes; you will be funny: you will find your voice. I found mine in Japanese. In fact, I found my Japanese voice so well that non-native users of Japanese hate my Japanese, just like non-native users of English hate my English. In both cases, you have a collection of otherwise simple ideas wrapped in a convoluted morass of criss-crossing running jokes based on things happening “off-screen” — random cultural background — that you have to already know about in order to even understand it, let alone enjoy it. And that is as it should be: I wouldn’t want to write Japanese that gaijin enjoy (even if I did, I couldn’t — not enough infrastructure to work with). _{Nor would I want to write the kind of English that the Education Ministry here in Tokyo seems to find fit to print in its approved textbooks.}

You will get there. But to get there, you need to let go of both your starting point (English) and your goal (Spanish) and just focus on the road — doing Spanish things here and now. Let go of the wall of the rink, and forget about the other side. Just skate on the ice you’re on now. That means, it may well be high-time for you to go monolingual.

It’s said that humor is about betraying expectations. “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s corns” (<— not funny)….that type of thing. As you have already realized, you don’t yet know enough to even have expectations, let alone build and break them. That’s all.

You can’t be funny in Spanish before you know good amounts of it any more than you can make an order at a restaurant by screaming out of your car window on the way there. Which is not to say that you will never get to the restaurant. Just that, for your own benefit, you want to get in a roadworthy vehicle, drive attentively and keep going until you get there…and know that a few red lights _{(apparent “learning plateaux” — in truth, these are just periods of time where your progress goes invisible, not non-existent)} here and there are not the end of the world.

Certainly, it took you a long time to get to where you are in English. But a lot of that time was (1) unproductive and (2) at a point in your life when you had lower mental capacity. You have more mental capacity now, not less. But you probably also have years of bad ideas and unreasonable expectations of input versus results. Ironically, you’re probably less patient now than when you were a child with a “short attention span” _{[perhaps our attention spans never change and it's just that we change how we behave when the time runs out? I dunno...]} In any case, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes because you will be enjoying yourself the whole time anyway. Right? Who cares how long the road trip is if Salma Hayek’s going to be there the whole time?…Or something like that.

So be patient. Keep being Spanish. It’s really that simple. It really is. Focus on what you can control directly. You can’t directly control when you become a Castillian Chris Rock. But you can directly control the expansion (and contraction) of your passive vocabulary. Expand your vocabulary. Expand your knowledge. Work faithfully, calmly and enjoyably on each brick and you’ll soon find yourself a nice little lego castle.

If you keep going, you’ll almost certainly make it. But if you stop and give up, you never will. It’s Spanish, dude. All European languages are really just dialects of each other anyway _{[here's a fight-starter]}. You’re practically there already .

For more and better advice, from a real expert, go talk to Ra-Moses, Prince of SpanishOnly. He’s the man now, dawg.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Do you even like “The Simpsons”? It seems as though it has you doing more neurotic thinking than actual laughing. You need to start having fun if you’re wanting to avoid being that sad paradox — an unhappy funny person. Hint: if you’re getting worked up about it, then you’re doing it wrong.

Maybe you need some serious South Park-level potty humor to rid you of all pretensions of (to?) seriousness. Yeah, watch South Park in Spanish. Back in the day, I watched a ton of it in Japanese and was getting compliments on how natural my expressions were (e.g.: “マジかよ？！”) right from day one.

Finally, your take-home points:

• Let your metric of success be how much fun you’re having, not how much perfect verbal acrobatics you can pull right this instant.
• Focus on native-like process, rather than native-like results. The results will come from the process. Gosh, I get tense just reading your email .
• The coolest part about learning a language by having fun/like a native is that you get to do all that cool stuff that classes usually look down on and treat as a “supplement” to “real” study _{[because we all know that you're not really learning until you're having trouble staying awake and all your school shirts have drool stains from the uncontrollable fits of napping that boring classes send you into but I digress]}. You get to eat dessert as your main course all day every day! Ice-cream for breakfast! Don’t go ruin it by mentally abusing yourself over your temporary suckage. Think of all the cool stuff you get to do as “study”! For crying out loud, you’re watching cartoons! You can be a kid again! This is awesome beyond compare. Cowabunga, my friend.
• If you know more today than yesterday, then you’re winning. Looked at in this sense, the race really is only against yourself.
• Trust your materials implicitly. You have to. You have no place judging the quality of Spanish-dubbed media; you simply do not have the equipment (yet); you are not at that level (yet), so the rule is: if it was made for native speakers, then it’s good enough for you. End of story. There is one — and only one — question on which you are qualified to pass judgment, and that is: “am I enjoying this?”.
• You can’t tell jokes before you can get them. If you do, it’s either a mistake or an accident.
• You cannot analyze before you have anything to analyze with — it’s like trying to use a pencil sharpener when you don’t have an actual pencil to sharpen: you just end up cutting yourself. This is a major problem in the current educational culture of the West _{[we're painting with big brushes today*. Deal ]} — premature analysis. Always with the trying to make pots without clay. Be the Spanish, be physical, learn your katas. You have to do before you can fully understand.
• Timebox or otherwise limit your dictionary lookups so that you can get lots of quick “wins”, as well as nip compulsive behavior in the bud.
• Bilingual dictionaries are lying to you. They will never give you the full, true story. Would you tell a Spanish speaker to go digging through her espanol-ingles dictionary to find the “true” meaning of English words? Might as well tell her that El Nino is Spanish for “the Nino”.
• Last but not least: “Don’t use words to learn the meaning of sentences, use sentences to learn the meaning of words“. Greatest quote ever. Not by me, by the way.

If any of you good-looking AJATTeers has any tips for Farley, please feel free to share . You always put things much more succinctly than I do. Also, disclaimer: I do not know Spanish.

_{*I don’t know about you, but I smell another installment in the Baseless Remarks About Compex Social Phenomena series}

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.}

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

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

B

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

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

Let’s get a few things straight:

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

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

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

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

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

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

All in moderation.
Including moderation itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ]