“Come on, Khatz — who really keeps track of every single second?”

j.mp/nper5S

No one does. And I would never suggest you do ¹. What I mean is that we need to be aware of “real time” — the time we actually spend in physical contact with Japanese, and not “project time” — the amount of time we’ve been verbally claiming to be committed to getting used to Japanese. The only reason the 18 months of AJATT seem so magical is because, if time is money, then my bills were in larger denominations — more of my real time was in Japanese than most people thought possible or sane. I didn’t get used to Japanese in a short time, but it in a focused time, a concentrated time, a dense time.

When people come a-talkin’ about “years” of language X, what they’re really talking about is project time: they did not actually spend tens or hundreds of millions of seconds in contact with Japanese.  And often, so am I. It just so happens that my project time for Japanese was closer to real time than practically anyone else who bothers to write about these things.

There are about 31.6 million seconds in a year; that’s about 8770 hours. I sincerely doubt that most people who’ve been on a multi-year Japanese project have had even that much real time exposure. Do you know what that means? It means that most people who’ve been “studying Japanese for years” have, in truth, not even been exposed to it for a single year. So they have a heavy wallet full of pennies and they’re angry and bitter and going about saying that big money doesn’t exist coz look how effing heavy my wallet is and it still hasn’t bought me the ability to so much as read normal Japanese.

That’s all I’m saying. Keep real time straight. Not necessarily directly or quantitatively (through tracking and logging), but indirectly and qualitatively become aware of and exploit all those spare moments, all that dead time. Recruit your time, resources and electronics in the pursuit of getting used to Japanese. Ask yourself every moment what you’re doing and how you can Japanize it.

That’s all .

• It’s Not Time, It’s Choice | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/peidFu
• It’s Not Choice, It’s Environment | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/or7mmf

So where does the fun come from?
Wow, that sounds like…a line from an Oompa Loompa song.
Wait, no, so…back in topic.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his rap name, Mark Twain, once wrote:

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

People will climb mountains for sport, risking life and limb, but will be hard-pressed to wash their dishes.

Fun is all about choice. Fun comes from choice. Your choices. Your choices of things and people are what make Japanese fun.

So for you who have had your innocent, childlike souls crushed by years of indoctrination disguised as education, here is a systematic method, an Al Gore Rhythm, for discovering and generating fun.

1. Experimentation: Try out lots of stuff.
2. Rejection: Stop doing things you don’t want to do.
3. Acceptance: Keep doing things you do want to do.

There. It’s almost insultingly simple. But I know that a lot of you get royally tripped up on steps 2 and 3: You stop doing things you do want to do, and you keep doing things you don’t want to do. As Hajji from “The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest” used to say, “this is not good”.

The only reason you’re not having fun is because you either don’t try stuff, or because you reject whatever fun you do discover. Or both.

You’re not going to learn this language by suffering. You’re just going to burn out. And it won’t be the language’s fault, it’ll be your fault for being a freaking masochist. If you deliberately choose to do boring crap most of the time, don’t be surprised if you hate yourself and your life.

It’s time to outgrow pain. There is nothing to gain there. Remember, pain, like evil, makes you stupid, because it leads you to conflate suffering with progress. It makes you choose to hurt yourself by default. “This hurts so much, it must be good for me”. No.

Pain makes you stupid. Stop getting hurt. Start getting addicted. Experiment. Reject. Accept.

Boredom, like poison, is a matter of dosage. Some things are fun for 3 seconds, some for 3 minutes, some for 3 hours, some for 3 days. Do not exceed the dosage. Stop when you’ve had enough. Move on. Switch it up. Come back for more later. Or not.

I know I’m repeating myself. But you need it. Drop the whip. Pick up the honey.

Boredom is pain.

You don’t keep your hand on the hot stove because it “builds character”, you take it away before you really hurt yourself.

Boredom is pain.

Next time it starts to hurt, take your hand off the stove.

This is a gracious guest post by E Dub Kendo. In it, he introduces a sweet mod[ification] he made to lazy kanji cards to increase their effectiveness. Effectiveness and preference can and does vary by person. Nevertheless, I think this mod is a valuable improvement that definitely deserves to be part of AJATT “canon” .

Though I have no hard data, my hunch is that “Lazy Kanji natives”, i.e. people who go straight into lazy kanji with, say, less than 1000 characters’ worth of previous experience, will benefit most from this mod. Heisig did not pen RTK for naught — logical connections matter.

Due to a variety of factors involving chronic pain and fatigue, I found my kanji studies grinding to a halt around #700 in RTK. I just could not get motivated to keep going. Typing up stories, writing out kanji, and trying to remember keywords that meant the same thing despite having completely unrelated kanji was just too exhausting, and made my hands and wrists ache.

Then Khatzumoto-sempai came up with something that sounded like just the thing for me, Lazy Kanji, which turns the process of memorizing kanji into something more like repeatedly dialing a telephone number until it’s memorized. With renewed hope, I made an initial attempt at some Lazy Kanji cards.

However, what I quickly discovered was that it became too easy to forget about breaking the kanji up into its component parts and I was relying on rote memorization and visual memory. In other words, it was too slow, and even more painful than writing Heisig-novels. A little bit of thought fixed the problem though. A simple modification to the front of the cards could, with little effort, bring back all the benefits of Heisig’s mnemonics without nearly as much work.
So, here’s what the cards look like:

Front
党
The TEENAGER went to a _______ in the LITTLE HOUSE.
Back:
party

The task looks like this. First, write the kanji. Attempt to write it just from glancing at the sentence, if necessary, however, it’s alright to look at the kanji. That’s why its there on the front. Then, look at the kanji and say the keyword out loud. The keyword can be any synonym that carries that meaning. So party, gala, shindig, bonnaroo (joking) — would all be correct.

Grading [Anki scale]: If I get the keyword and I can write the kanji just from the sentence, I mark it “Very Easy”. If I have to glance at the kanji I mark it “Easy” or “Hard”, depending on my feeling about it. Missing the keyword entirely gets it marked “Wrong”.

Adding the fill-in-the-blank sentence does two main things:

1. First, it serves as a reminder to break the kanji up into its components, which is the strongest part of the Heisig method in my opinion.
2. Second, it works as a bit of “context”, providing a mental hook which is easy to grasp on to and gives the brain something familiar to grasp at while learning something that initially looks like random squiggles to it.
   But, because of the combination of SRS and blending writing and recognition, it is no longer necessary to use complex or wordy stories to memorize with. A simple sentence that links all the primitives together and to the keyword in some sort of logical structure is all that is necessary.

My deck, which contains all the kanji from RTK1, is a shared deck on Anki, and can be found by searching “Lazy Kanji + Mod”. Some of the “stories” are idiosyncratic to my strange tastes and sense of humor, but most of them are generic enough to be useful to anyone.

Having worked through all the kanji making the cards, and hundreds of them in late stages of review, I can definitely say that Lazy Kanji is efficient and far more enjoyable than the more traditional method. While your grasp on the kanji will NOT be as strong initially as someone who worked through the book the normal way, over time it will balance out. That’s the power of the SRS combined with motor memory and adult logic.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Fists? ¹ Put ‘em up!

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

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

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

They’re waiting to death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But I can’t read them yet!”

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

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

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

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today’s All-Star Comment is from McSalty, a guy who knows his way around the worlds of health and fitness. He’s noticed similarities between the ideas of critical frequency and certain easy, painless, awesome techniques that were apparently used in Soviet special forces strength training. Here he is in his own words:

The more experience I have with this whole “life” thing, the more and more I find completely unrelated subjects being bound by a common thread.

In the fitness and strength training world, a while back an ex-Soviet special forces trainer named Pavel [Tsatsouline] entered the scene and introduced a lot of concepts no one had heard of, and a lot of people experienced great results from putting them into practice.

Why am I bringing this up? One of his books was called “The Naked Warrior“, and it was about strength training with no equipment. One of the primary themes in this book was a concept he called “greasing the groove.” Basically the notion is, if you want to get good at doing pullups, you shouldn’t train to make yourself stronger — you should just ‘practice’ doing pullups as often as possible, always stopping before fatigue.

So, instead of the traditional “Do three sets of pullups until failure,” Pavels approach was “Do 5 pullups every time you walk past the pullup bar in your house“. (If you can’t easily do 5 pullups, make it 3 pullups, or 1 pullup). The point was, you were always stopping before fatigue set in, so 30 minutes to an hour later you could easily do 5 pullups again. The result was, over the course of the day, you may end up doing 50-100 pullups, whereas if you did them all in one sitting you might only be able to crank out 30, and you’d be exhausted. This way you never even feel tired, and you’re skeptical that you’re even getting a workout.

The theory was, as opposed to breaking down and rebuilding muscle fibers, you’re actually conditioning your nervous system to GET USED TO doing pullups — essentially treating strength as a skill that needs practice, just like playing guitar. Guys who put this theory into practice, a month or two later were reporting amazing results like going from 10 to 20 pullups in a single set despite having never practiced doing more than 5 at any one time.

Ok, that may seem way tangential, but my point is I think you might really be onto something here. I’m actually really excited about this. I’m going to apply this to everything I want to get better at. Want to be a writer? For two minutes every hour, write something — anything. Want to start your own business? For two minutes every hour brainstorm new business ideas and how to flesh them out. Want to improve your public speaking? For two minutes every hour command an audience, even if only one person, or if you’re alone, dictate to an imaginary audience. Want to improve your posture? For two minutes every hour sit up, stand up, or walk with perfect posture. After a while, you get used to thinking of it often enough that it’s always on your mind. Put another way, if you remind yourself of your goals often enough, it keeps you on track to attain them. If your frequency of thought is high enough, your goals become your fixation, and it’s impossible to fall off the wagon. You’re building a house by placing one brick every hour instead of trying to do as much work as possible at one time and doing so inefficiently because you’re wearing yourself out.

But the two minutes thing is beautiful. Timeboxing in its most perfect incarnation. Timeboxing doesn’t work for me, because I know I’m just trying to con myself into working past the timebox. But this two minutes is a real two minutes. It completely alleviates any and all pressure to perform. As you said, it becomes a game. “Ooh, my next two minutes is coming up soon!” It embodies the “just do something – do anything” mindset, and gives a workable formula to fit in into your life. This strategy is absolute brilliance.

I have a book of Aesop’s fables — Korean on one page, and English opposite to it — which is perfect for this game. Each fable is usually under 10 sentences and completely self-contained, so I don’t have to interrupt myself and remember where I left off. It also leaves me feeling, “Oh… I’ll just read one more” — totally addictive. Another great resource I’ve found is signing up for a Twitter account, and ONLY following people who ‘tweet’ exclusively in your target language. Tweets are another example of something that’s self-contained, are entertaining since you’re peaking into the lives of people in your target culture, have that addictive “just one more” quality, and if you follow enough people you have a continuously updated stream of content in your target language.

McSalty

“Use it or lose it.”
~ Originator Unknown To Me

“If I do not practice for a day, I know it. If I do not practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I do not practice for three days, my audience knows it.”
~ Vladimir Horowitz

I have a hunch. I don’t have proof yet. That’s why I’m going to try it out first. Here it is:

The frequency of contact with your L2 matters more than the quantity.
Corollary: if you just focus on the frequency you can relax on quantity.
Caution: which is not to say that the quantity doesn’t matter at all…it just matters less

Example: back in late 2007, I spent an entire week here in Japan (Thanksgiving Break, essentially) hanging out only with Americans. We ate, walked, talked and slept together the whole time. No, not in that way.

These were eikaiwa types who seemed to make it their solemn duty to avoid Japanese as if it were an infectious disease. They wouldn’t try to speak it, read it, or even watch TV in it. They went out of their way to watch English-language TV, eat American food, and watch Hollywood movies in English with no Japanese subs or dubs. I know. One of them (a chick) totally freaked out when I switched the bilingual news to Japanese (even though no one but me was watching)!

Having said that, they were nice people and it was fun to be with them. Also, despite their English bubble, they did experience varying degrees of decay in their English skills (they constantly found themselves forgetting words…you know…more than usual), perhaps because of the truncated, “ESL English” lexicon they used so much of the time at work.

So Thanksgiving Break ends and I get back to my Japanese life. At the train station on the platform, I call my friend Emstar, who happens to be Japanese and monolingual. He says: “dude…you sound weird”. And I know I do. A week of galavanting about with the American crew was enough to harm my Japanese severely. It didn’t matter that we were in Japan. It didn’t matter how much — what quantity of — Japanese I had been exposed to before. The frequency had gone down to 0. And that was enough to cause damage.

The Japanese students I knew in college in the US also reported significant drops in their Japanese ability, particularly when it came to reading and writing.

Ishinosuke UWANO had the same thing happen to him, but on steroids. His Japanese contact frequency dropped to 0 and stayed there for 60 odd years. Result? Despite 20 years of pure, unadulterated AJATT (21 years if you count his time in the womb), 21 years of uninterrupted Japanese exposure, folks…184,086 hours (that’s 11 million minutes or 663 million seconds…half a billion seconds, people)…he basically lost it all. If you think about it, he’s not even Japanese any more — he’s a Ukrainian guy who knows a couple of Japanese words.

I’ve still only had 5 figures’ worth of Japanese exposure — about one tenth of the exposure volume that Uwano has had. But obviously, I’m all over him when it comes to Japanese. Methinks that can be said quite safely. Nevertheless, I have seen the damage that neglect can do. I saw it over Thanksgiving 2007. I saw it when I decided to make myself a little China in Japan — great for my Chinese…disastrous for my Japanese. And I’ve met my fair share of Chinese (college) kids struggling with their Japanese here.

I want to be a polyglot…kinda. No, I don’t want to be a polyglot. I want Chinese and Japanese and maybe a bit of English on the side. Maybe I want to mack on chicks in Spanish as well. I don’t know. But I do know that I’m not prepared to sacrifice the old for the new. I’m especially not prepared to sacrifice Japanese.

Most of the great Internet polyglots I’ve talked to accept decay and just practice back from it. I don’t want to accept decay. I hate having to make a “comeback”; that just feels like unnecessary repetition to me. I hate that “I used to know this” feeling; it’s not wistful, it’s just painful. As long as I’m alive, I want to be moving onward and upward, not regaining lost ground and glory. His name is Sisyphus and I have no interest in emulating him.

OK, so now what? Now that you’ve seen the shallow contents of my soul. Now what?

Here’s what it comes down to.

I used to subscribe to what you might call an absolute volume (critical mass) model of language acquistion. Basically, it goes like this:

Contact Volume → Critical Mass → Ownage.

And I still think that’s more or less true. But simply trying to log as many Japanese hours as possible is painful. And it’s not something I actually did. I was ultimately trying to log the J-hours. But the way I did it was to take any and every opportunity to touch Japanese. I never let dead time pass un-Japanized; I never let myself be apart from Japanese for any significant length of time. In other words, I maintained a very high (occasionally infinite) Japanese frequency.

You’ll recall that I once said that AJATT has two principal aims. (1) To tell you what I did, so you can do it as well, and (2) to give you stuff I wish I had had, so you can do better.  To that, we might do well to add a silent third aim: (0) To figure out what the heck it actually was that I did (and, as far as practicality and curiosity allow, why it worked) — in other words, to figure out some underlying principles.

“All Japanese All the Time” is a misnomer. I rarely hit 100% Japanese quantity (infinite frequency) for the day. Having said that, I did have the occasional 100% day, and I am watching a Chinese variety show as I type this, so…I like to think that I don’t mess around . Once, during the legendary “hardcore” AJATT phase, I went with a Japanese friend to watch an English movie;  she talked to me in Japanese the whole time, and when she wasn’t talking I was doing my reps. I like to think that I don’ t mess around.

“Always trying to to get some Japanese in there”. “Some Japanese all the Time”. “Always working to reduce the time between the last time I touched Japanese and the next time I touch Japanese”. These names are perhaps more accurate.

Absolute volume of contact with a language does matter, but not in the way I thought. In fact, I think we can basically ignore it. Iff, we can guarantee frequency. Uwano-san’s case shows us that even 180k hours of absolute exposure can amount to naught if the frequency drops to 0. Conversely, hourly or half-hourly exposure to Japanese…even just 2 minutes at a time…something tells me…could not only (of course) maintain ownage, but also produce it. For at least two reasons. (1) Frequency itself, and (2) run-on — people turn on the Japanese and accidentally leave it on.

So here is the new model I have in mind:

Critical Frequency → Ownage ↔ Maintenance.

Sorry if the arrows don’t make much sense. I’ll need to draw a real diagram. One of these days. Hehe.

Executive summary: if you just come in contact with Japanese often enough, you will not only get good at it, but you will stay that way. And you don’t have to worry much what you do “in-between”…as long as “in-between” is very, very short. I’m thinking on the order of 30~60 minutes. Example: 2 minutes of Japanese within every 1 hour block of the day…I think this may just be enough. I think this may just do it. But I’m not sure. I may be wrong.

It almost seems too easy, doesn’t it? But if life has taught me anything it’s that…people try too hard to do hard things. Indeed, it is people’s puritanical desire to do hard things that leads to failure and procrastination. The winners are those that choose “strategic laziness“. It’s sort of like the difference between religious fundamentalists who proclaim abstinence…right before they get pregnant and catch an STD all on the same day…versus people who plan out that part of their lives more…strategically: they may lack moral purity, but they also lack teenage pregnancy. Sorry for the racy example.

A language is like a cross between food, air and a pet. You can’t just binge on it once and call it a day. You need it there constantly, no, not constantly — very frequently — and when it does go, it needs to come back soon. Otherwise the skill dies.

Here are my serving suggestions for frequencies. These are all just guesstimates. My favorite one, the one I am using, is #2, the highlighted one:

1. 1~2 minutes per half hour
2. 2 minutes per hour
3. 4~5 minutes per 90 minutes
4. 10~15 minutes per 2 hours
5. 15~30 minutes per 3 hours
6. 30~60 minutes per 4 hours
7. 60~90 minutes per 6 hours
8. 90~180 minutes per 12 hours

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using what I call a “contact calendar” (AJATT+ users get a free sample) to help me keep track of my exposure frequency in this way. I only track Cantonese and Mandarin. I opted for the highest manageable (to me) frequency: 2 minutes per hour (or, more accurately, 2 minutes within each 1-hour block or “frame”, of which there are 24 in every day).

Keeping to this frequency is a lot easier than it sounds. Usually, I handle the exposure every hour on the hour. Often, even though I only mean to do 2 minutes, I get so sucked in that I stay well over 2 minutes (run-on); simple inertia also plays a role — I’ll just forget to turn it off. Nevertheless, I keep to the same frequency — 2 minutes/hour or 2 minutes within each 1 hour block — because quantity is not the goal here: frequency is.

If I want or need a large block of time to do something else, I might listen to Cantonese at the top of one frame (say, from 21:00 to 21:02), then do the something else, and then catch more Cantonese at the bottom of the next frame (say from 22:55 to 22:57). So there’s a lot of flexibility here. In case you’re wondering, at night, when I’m asleep, I just leave a talk podcast playing, through all 8 frames or so.

The weird thing is…it works. I can’t quite explain it, and I know my explanations suck anyway, but somehow it works. I think what may be happening is that Cantonese and Mandarin are never allowed to “go cold” in my mind; they’re never allowed to fade; they always stay in working memory(?); there’s always a Chinese echo in my head. It’s sort of like the Song Stuck In My Head Phenomenon (SSIMHP), but in a more general way.

So even though I could be exposed to only 48 minutes of Cantonese per day, in theory, the effect is the same as listening to it all day because of the frequency, just like how a movie looks like it’s always moving because the frames, which are nothing but still images, move frequently enough. If it helps at all, remember that atoms, even of solids, are more than 99% empty space. But, apparently, the distances between and within atoms are close enough to where they can interact with light and each other, electrically and otherwise, in such a way that we experience opacity and solidity. Or so I’m told…someone hit me if this is wrong.

The secret to losing at Japanese: giving up. Why? Because frequency drops to 0.

The secret to winning at Japanese: reduce the gap between the last time you touched Japanese and the next time you touch it.  Tip: for best results, make “next” = now. But if “next” can’t always be “now”, then make it darn soon. Like, less than an hour or so. Never let that water go cold. Never let the echo fade into silence. Never let the din in the head die.

I don’t know what I’m doing; I never do . But I’m excited about this new game. And I’m excited at the possibility of growing new skills while keeping old ones. In a way, not much has changed. But at the same time, I feel like everything has. There’s no more guilt about not being at 100% volume. Because the meaning and value of 100% has changed.

Infinite frequency is unnecessary provided the frequency is high enough. That is the hunchpothesis. It’s like math versus engineering. Old AJATT immersion was math — infinity, perfection, analog, continuous, smooth, unbroken. New AJATT immersion is engineering — discrete, digital, pixel-based, good enough for all practical intents and purposes.

Use it or lose it. And it’s not how much you use it, but how often.

Maybe…Maybe…again, I don’t know for sure…but maybe. Maybe if the Japanese input frequency is high enough…if enough frames go by each day — one per hour — then the image might as well be moving. If the red dots are close enough together, they make a red line — as far as we humans are concerned. I am basically certain that the underlying idea is sound. The only question, then, is: how close is close enough? What is the critical frequency? We’ll just have to try and see what the results tell us…

Update: A Japanese website covers this post: 【コラム】必要以上!?のビジネス英語マスター術 (48) 英語学習で重要なのは時間ではなく頻度!? 信じてみたくなる”2分間学習” | 経営 | マイコミジャーナル

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

But she exists.

She exists just like Harry Potter exists.

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

Familiar. Like family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EOF

Belief

• What if I were Japanese?
• What if I had been born and raised in Japan?
• What if I were Jared in The Pretender and I had to fool people into believing I was Japanese, or else be killed?
• What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• What if it were possible to be native-like? How could I make it possible? What would a native do? What would a native be doing right now?
• What if I were smart enough?
• What if it didn’t even take smarts?
• What if I gave myself the chance?
• What if I gave myself the time?
• What if I refused to give up until I had won?
• What if I am a natural winner who just needs to step up to the plate to prove it?
• What unquestioned advantages do I have over other people? What resources and skills do I take for granted?
• How would a winner think of herself?

Immersion

• What if I could only speak Japanese?
• What if Japanese were my only language?
• What if I just turned Japanese on and left it on forever? What would happen?
• How can I add Japanese to this situation? How can I Japanize this situation?
• Is there a Japanese version of this?
• If I were a Japanese kid, what would I be doing now?
• What do Japanese kids do?
• What kinds of things would the bedroom, living room and backpack of a Japanese kid contain?
• What if I watched one Japanese movie (or the equivalent amount of Japanese TV) every day?
• How would a winner use the time, cash and equipment that I have at my disposal?
• How many Japanese movies has a Japanese kid watched by her twelfth birthday?
• How many Japanese books would a Japanese kid from a proper home own?
• How many minutes have I heard Japanese this past hour?
• How can I touch Japanese more frequently?
• What if I made it impossible for myself to not come into contact with Japanese?
• How can I make it so that Japanese just gets inserted into my life?
• How many minutes does a Japanese kid hear Japanese by her fifth birthday?
• Where and how can I get more Japanese books/movies/music?
• How can I make sure that I look at more Japanese websites?
• What kind of Japanese stuff can I put on my walls?
• Where’s my dead time? How can I Japanize it easily?
• How can I get Japanese into my life for free? Effortlessly? What and where are my “freebie” activities?
• What’s a time that I’m doing something manual but my eyes and ears are free?
• Where am I not listening to Japanese that I could be listening to Japanese?
• Where’s my empty wall space? What Japanese stuff could I put up there?
• What Japanese stuff can I put on my fridge? What about the toilet? What about the kitchen sink? What about the bathroom sink?
• How can I be useful to Japanese people? What can I give them? How can I make myself an asset to Japanese people? How can I make myself fun to be around? What can I help with in their lives?※
• Outside of Japan: What would a highly insulated Japanese immigrant be doing/watching/reading right now?
• Inside Japan: How do I get premium cable? Where can I put this TV so that it’s always on? Can I get a cheap mini-TV for the kitchen? Where’s the remote?
• What are some unexpected things that I can eat with chopsticks?
• What’s an easy and fun Japanese thing that I can do right now?
• What books and authors do I like in English? Is their stuff in Japanese? Where can I get it? Where can I read about it?
• Is there a Japanese embassy nearby?
• Is there a Book-Off nearby?
• Where can I get free or second-hand Japanese books?
• Are there Japanese people around needing to get rid of stuff?
• Are there any Japanese/Asian stores around?
• Is this helping me learn Japanese?
• How can I make this so that it helps me learn Japanese in some way?
• What can I do that at least helps?
• How can I make it so that this activity increases the probability that I will build and maintain Japanese fluency?
• How can I wangle and maneuver Japanese into my job?
• How can I get paid to learn and use Japanese (my way)?
• Where can I find recordings of single-digit age children speaking?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?
• Do I know more Japanese now than I did at breakfast-time?
• Do I know more Japanese now than I did at lunchtime?
• Do I know more Japanese now than I did before dinner?
• Have I logged free Japanese “flying hours” overnight?
• Am I little more used to Japanese now than I was when I went to bed last night?
• What language is playing for me first thing in the morning and last thing at night?
• When can I next get started on Japanese again? How soon? What’s something Japanese I can do?

Kanji

• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What does this remind me of?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Kana

• How long does it take a Japanese toddler to acquire these?
• Am I going to allow myself to be beaten by Japanese five-year-olds?
• Surely I can out-smart Japanese toddlers?
• What’s an easy and fun way to do this?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Sentences

• What would be funny to say?
• What have I heard that made me laugh?
• What are my favorite movie lines in English?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How can I make this fun?
• How can I make this easy?
• What are some cool Japanese quotes?
• SRS: Would I feel relieved if this card were deleted? Would it be a load off? Am I bovvered?
• SRS: What if I just tried X out? What would happen?
• Do I know more today than I did yesterday?

Output (Writing/Speaking)

• How are native kids doing who were born the day I started learning Japanese? Have I put it as many minutes as them? Have I logged the “flying hours”?
• What’s the shortest way to say this?
• What do Japanese kids say?
• Where’s that simple “kid vocabulary”?
• How would I explain this to a 5-year-old?
• What would a Japanese person say?
• What do I hear/read Japanese people say?
• Does this sound Japanese? Have I heard a Japanese person say/use this before?
• How can I say this using as few words as possible?
• How can I communicate 80% of this idea using just the words I already know?

※True story: In college I had a female friend from Japan who often took me out on her errands. Example: going to the garage to get her car fixed. She didn’t need me to speak English for her, but she says that my mere presence made her seem stronger — less vulnerable; she was concerned about being ripped off due to being both female and Asian.

Anyway, the plus side for me was, the whole time, in the car, we’re speaking Japanese.

Japanese people need you as much as you need them, especially when they’re far away from home. Don’t be afraid to be helpful. Think about it: I was able to help by just having a useful phenotype and a pulse…I do those things quite effortlessly.

Foreigners in Japan often complain that Japanese people just want them for their English skills. OK, fine, maybe so, but is that really so bad? You instantly have a quality that people want — that’s not something you can say about “back home”. Most of the time, actually, the English thing is just a pretext Japanese people use to hang out with you; because it’s just freaking embarrassing to say things like: “I like the cut of your jib, son — let’s be bosom buddies forever”. And if there’s one thing Japanese people don’t do, it’s “embarrassing”. In any case, a relationship has to start somewhere. Most (all?) love and friendship has its roots in the ground, in the practical and concrete (“he was there”); once it grows, then the leaves do end up in the air.

“I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” ~ Muhammad Ali

Pretend you are Japanese. Tell yourself you are Japanese.

Who you think you are matters more than who you actually are. Who you actually are only describes your immediate present position (P) — the sum of all your previous direction vectors. But who you think you are will determine your direction of motion, and your direction of motion over time will determine all your future positions ([P']).

Simple example: a car sitting at a traffic light 2 blocks from the Wal-Mart is in a great position to get to Wal-Mart. But if it suddenly tells itself that only geniuses can visit Wal-Mart, pulls a U-turn and heads home all dejected, then no matter how close it was, it’s not going to get an Always Low Great Value price on pistachio nuts. All because of a change in direction. Your “car” is always moving because time is always moving.

• Who you are = Position
• Who you think you are = Identity
• Identity = Direction
• Direction → New Positions
• New Position(s) = Actuality

It’s all a simple matter self-fulfilling prophecy. Auto-suggestion. You become it because you said so. Muhammad “I am the Greatest” Ali did this kind of thing all the time; we forget that he was actually kinda scrawny for his line of work. But then again, he never said he was bigger or stronger than George Foreman. He just said he was better-looking and would beat him.

You’re Japanese. What could be more natural than…doing stuff in Japanese? And you know what happens to people who do stuff in Japanese? They get in a position to do even more stuff in Japanese. Soon enough, like tar in a smoker’s lung, they get these pieces of Japanese left in their head. They’re scarred for life.

Go scar yourself . Go cause changes in the structure and contents of your brain. Everyone’s doing it. You don’t have to change your hardware. Just your software.

Then again, all this may not be necessary any longer. Back before this website existed, there were few places online that told you flat out: “you can and will do it”. The general attitude was so violently negative that I personally needed to swing the psychological pendulum in an equally extreme opposite direction. So maybe you don’t need do think this way any more.

But, what the heck…if you’re looking for some fun, you might as well. The cool thing is, you don’t even have to totally believe it for it to work; I don’t think any of us totally believe anything. You just have to believe it enough for your behavior to be affected. Pretend. What if it were true? What if you were Japanese? Give it a whirl. Go be Japanese. It’s fun. And legal.

The original post was about using the SRS to remember the best parts of the best examples of personal development literature.

Anyway, enjoy!

SRS Addict said,
November 24, 2009 @ 00:40 · Edit

This is a LONG comment, here it goes:
I find this post very interesting. Here’s why:

About 3 1/2 years ago I began to use the SRS program “Supermemo” (which I will refer to as “SM”). Since I began using SM, other programs have emerged that specialize in language study, but since I’ve been using SM for so long and have so much time invested in it, it is far too late to think about jumping ship. No doubt the other SRS programs out there work great, so don’t think that I’m knocking them. In the end, use SOMETHING: it’s better than nothing.

Anyways, I began to use SM about 3 years ago to retain Japanese vocabulary. Despite living in America, uncommon words that one does not use very often (such as “round-trip”) continued to remain in my memory, and it required very little thought to recall them. This feeling of satisfaction was very addictive, and I began to integrate more and more of my intellectual life with Supermemo.

I can now speak, read and write Japanese fluently. I passed the JLPT 2Q a couple of years ago without even going to Japan. And the reason that I’ve progressed this much has little to do with my abilities (I am really quite average, I think), but I believe that it is purely because Supermemo has helped to augment my abilities and to focus my efforts so that as little time and effort as possible is wasted (at least when that time and effort is being spent on Supermemo). Here is why:

Humans need a variety of food to remain healthy. Similarly, no SINGLE specific method will gain you fluency in a language. Language study requires a balance of different methods and inputs.

SM seems to have become my intellectual equivalent of a video game “save point.” While up until that time, I might have seen/read/heard many interesting or useful things, but until I “save” my intellectual progress, such information only occupies a temporary place in the mind. While SM is not the only thing I use, it is part of my ‘balanced diet.’

I began by putting Japanese sentences into SM, with the word I wanted to memorise written in English (It was easier than trying to describe the word in Japanese). This created context and usage hints. I would usually enter at least two flashcards for each word (like firing multiple bullets to ensure I hit the desired target), thus ensuring that unless I made a big mistake in structing the material (Poor word choice), the algorithms would ensure that I would remember the word in due time (After about a week or two it would stick very well in my mind).

This worked for vocabulary words, so I thought “Would this work for idiomatic expressions, also?” So I began to experiment, and as time went on, when the appropriate time to use such an idiom presented itself, it required as little time as it took to remember a simple vocabulary word. Now it was easy to rack up idioms (As well as 4-character idioms) in my head. Using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji volumes one and two (Although I went my own way with book two), I learned all of the ON yomi for the kanji, which made learning most vocabulary words much, much simpler (Most being a combination of two kanji using the ON yomi). In the end learning Japanese simply came down to shooting fish in a barrel, racking up more and more vocabulary that was easily accessable and would be forever retained using SM.

Japanese has now passed on from the “I need to study” phase to the “I speak it fluently” phase. If I were playing World of Warcraft, my Japanese character would be at level 80 (Although I do not play that game, as I want to defend my time from such bandits). I still add Japanese words to SM, but it is like killing low-level monsters at this point, although I would like to eventually take JLPT 1Q, the “final boss.”

But since Japanese is, for all intents and purposes, done, I am moving onto Chinese.
Knowing the kanji has helped out a great deal, and the ON yomi bears a strong enough resemblence to the actual Chinese reading of the character that it is helpful. But each language poses a different set of problems, and I am always experimenting with variations of methods to try to make it a step further in my Chinese progress. Like you mentioned, keeping a foreward thinking, open mind about how to do things helps to ensure progress. Once you find something that works, exploit it until it stops working or you find something better. Currently I’m experimenting with the flashcard format used by the web site “Smart.fm.” I’m trying to impliment it in SM to see if I learn words better than my present flashcard format for Chinese. You might want to give that site a try, if you haven’t already.
We soldier on.

About a year after I began using SM to learn Japanese, I began to expeirment with using SM on non-Japanese desirable knowledge. To learn something FOREVER required such a SMALL investment of time (Less than a minute for the next 30 years of retention). Therefore, one hour of “entertainment-consumption time” could be converted into “self-enrichment through knowledge” time; the long-lasting benefits are so obvious that it makes many other tasks and pursuits seem trivial by comparison (But one must find balance in life, you have to eat some candy every now and then). But rather than simply being a useful study tool, SM has opened up a new way of life for me, where tangible knowledge consumption and retention is well within the grasp of everyone, regardless of anything else. All that is required is a small amount of time and motivation.

As another commenter mentioned above, the process you describe is very similar to incremental reading, a feature advertised on the SM web site. Traditional reading is very much the equivilent of listening to a long speech by someone, and your ‘input’ is limited: Start, stop, or highlight. Incremental reading is basically a process of taking raw electronic reading material, extracting the useful information, and processing for long term retention (Making something into a flashcard is the end-goal of this process). It is the same as digesting food; take food in, extract neutritious parts, get rid of what you don’t need. Since the world has yet to go “fully digital” when it comes to reading material, it seems that we must suffer for a while without having “buy/borrow as a .txt document” as an option for our local libraries or book stores. On the bright side, books are very small compared to mp3s, and music is pirated very often. Therefore, the potential to download books that you buy is very possible, although spotty. For example, I purchased “Atlas Shrugged,” but found that reading it incrementally on SM was more fun than carrying the big book around with me. I was able to find Atlas Shrugged online with little trouble, now I’m currently reading it through SM.

Where traditional reading is more of a lecture, incremental reading is more of an organic dialgue. Granted, the text no longer retains its form, it gets “chopped up” rather quickly (Like clipping out parts of a magazine article that you like), but we want knowledge in our head, not pretty looking words on paper. This philosophy has made me enjoy reading much, much more. (I recommend you read more about incremental reading, it echos the sentiments expressed here. Also, I don’t want to write what has already been written).

But another expriment that I started about a year ago (That I believe conclusively works) was to see if semi-knowledge put into Supermemo could create subtle changes in my personality and thought-process. You mention putting inspirational quotes into Supermemo, and this is pretty much what I did, but I went about it in a different way. Everyone makes decisions based on principles. Someone might see someone else in need, if they are raised as a Christian, they might think “Do unto others…” so they decide to help that person out. Others might operate on a different principle, which would lead to a different action. The question was “could I take those different principles, put them into SM, and just like the idiomatic expressions, when that principle would come into play, would such principles come to mind, and give more options when making decisions?” I believe that the answer is ‘yes.’

For example, one could take key phrases from various philosophy or religious books (That are deemed useful and beneficial by the user, of course), put them into SM, and over time would have such views of the world at their disposal; whether or not they are adopted is up to the user. Therefore you do not have to adopt the philosophy to undersatnd it and have it at your disposal. For example, I have a number of quotes from Hitler in SM because his twisted mind demonstrates a certain cunning and manipulative evil, which it does good to recognize when seen elsewhere (Even in subtle ways).

So basically SM has become a tool with which I program myself. It has grown to encompass my entire life, and has become my primary means of retaining information about the world around me. I spend about one hour using SM every day. Right now I have about 33,000 active flashcards in my big flashcard “deck.”

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.
Do what you can.”
~ Sydney Smith

When I first came to Japan, I hated how people wouldn’t take a stand. In the West, you’re taught that you have to have an opinion and it has to be a strong one, and if you don’t have strong opinions, you’re weak, stupid or both. In my first few weeks and months here, I was shocked at how often people simply wouldn’t take sides on an issue; they wouldn’t take a stand. They were neither apathetic nor passionate. They were simply…impartial.

And it bugged the heck out of me. I’m all for being undecided, but not for being decidedly impartial. That just seems wishy-washy. I mean, people in the West love to say ridiculous things like: “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”; that used to mean something to me…now it feels more like a hollow, idiotic threat (“Oh, crap! I’d better hurry up stand for something!”).

As time has gone on, I’ve come to love Japanese impartiality (plus, I mean, it’s not like people are impartial on everything — I am being a bit simplistic here). And I’ve come to dislike opinionated people who think they know everything. Even when they’re right. Ironically, though, that itself as a form of…opinionatedness. So it’s not like I’ve become toadly acculturated. Because if I were toadly acculturated, if I really did 「以和為貴」 (value harmony), I’d be all: 「人それぞれですね」(“well, everybody’s different, and that’s mmm kay”)。

Anyway, back on topic. The point is: we plan and (attempt to) act with too much certainty – not in ourselves, but in the environment. We act as if the environment were full of certainty, as if we were cogs in a giant machine in which everything has already been decided. And that’s stifling. In many ways, we humans don’t like certainty. Boring jokes, boring people and boring movies are all called “predictable” – too certain.

We’ve all written to-do lists before…
…And then proceeded to do nothing that’s on the list.
Why?
Because we’re dumb?
No, because we’re smart.

Those lists of things to do (or, more accurately, the way we use them), rob us of the freedom to exercise our creativity. There’s too much certainty. Certainty of having to be stuck doing a specific thing in a specific place in a specific (read: boring) way. There’s this idea that there’s this One True Best Optimal Correct Method of Doing X, and our only job is to find it and then execute. If we find it, we succeed, if not, we just kind of suck.

But let’s take a step back here. You have to realize that your certainty is false. It feels real, but it doesn’t exist. Are you freaking Nostradamus? Can you tell the future? How do you even know – when you write the list – that those things actually need doing? I mean they probably need doing, but there’s no certainty. Heck, most of the time, you don’t even do the things on the list after about the second item, so why do you even bother write them in the first place?

We are oppressed by a false certainty – a false certainty of method, boredom and location.

So the first thing to do is free yourself of the notion that you know how, where or when anything should or will happen. Because you don’t.

Now we’re having fun. We’re unpredictable now. We’re like an early M. Night Shymylan movie, or a good-looking but mentally unstable woman, or homemade cookies. No one knows what the heck’s going to happen next.

But a part of you counter-rebels against this rebellion: “Isn’t that just irresponsible? I mean, we simply throw our hands up and let things go to the wind?! Isn’t the goal for us to work like clockwork, acting with perfect reliability and precision? OK, maybe not perfect, but isn’t it at least our goal to be somewhat reliable?”

There you go pulling words out of my mouth again.

The keyword is, indeed, “somewhat”.

So, that false certainty we discussed earlier might be described as a deterministic action model. A part of us knows that this model is flawed, but we still try to force it to work, and the result is usually analysis paralysis – we just don’t do…anything. We procrastinate; we spin our wheels; we stare into space; we go to Facebook; we check our email. Anything but deal with the lunacy of trying to make a deterministic action model work in a world where we can’t even predict next Tuesday’s weather with certainty.

Think about this for a moment – we can look into deep space, but we don’t know for sure whether or not your picnic next weekend is a go.

What I’m suggesting is that we embrace the holes in our knowledge, embrace our flaws, embrace our imperfect human nature (even as we strive to continuously improve), and adopt a more probabilistic action model.

Don’t try to get things done. That’s too hard. Too painful. Too annoying. Too prone to failure.

Don’t try to get things done.

But…

Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.

Don’t try to get things done. Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.
Don’t ask if you’re doing the right thing.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of having what you want to happen, happen.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of you getting what you want.

Don’t work with the certainties; it hurts too much; it’s too painful. Work on pushing up those probabilities.

Next time you feel so overwhelmed in your quest to become fluent in Japanese, that you just sit there and do nothing, sit there and watch English-language shows on Hulu to try to drown out the guilt you’re tripping on (just like Maddie used to), stop yourself, wake up and smell the probabilistic coffee.

Watching a Japanese anime instead of running off to Hulu may not be as “perfect” as doing your SRS reps, but it demm </SouthAfricanAccent> well increases the probability of your actually learning Japanese, more than some English escapism ever could.

Doing just one SRS rep may not make it so that all your SRS reps get done, but it demm sure raises the probability that that will happen, more than sitting there doing nothing does. (The wording on this blog is getting weirder and weirder).

Ditto for listening to Japanese music while you read English-language documents..

Or doing your Japanese SRS reps on your iPad while you sit in on an English-language meeting.

It’s not perfect; it’s not certain. But the probability that you will (1) learn some Japanese now and (2) get back into doing more Japanese later is infinitely higher than it would be if you were doing nothing.

You catch my drift? If you can’t do the so-called right/perfect/correct thing, whatever you fantasize that thing to be, at least do something that helps. Something that moves you forward. Something that gets you in the ballpark. Something that’s somewhat right. Size doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Only ballpark. General direction. General area. All up in there (literally waving my right hand in vaguely circular, kinda conical way). That’s the basic idea. That’s AJATT immersion. It’s also what the situational goals thing is about.

Maybe you can’t do the 100% certain, perfect, ideal, Platonic thing that gets you The Desired Outcome. But if you do so many fun, easy, simple, short, quick, little things that The Desired Outcome has a 97% probability of happening, then, well…call it a win. It’s the difference between a deterministic algorithm that you don’t have the time or energy to execute, versus, small, short, simple, easy, lazy, ad hoc (=random) methods – probabilistic algorithms – that, while imperfect, will actually get done, because they’re so easy to run repeatedly.

100% * 0 action is still 0%.
0.485% * 200 tiny actions is 97%.
An action that has a 50% chance of not helping you with your Japanese (i.e. that has only half a chance of helping you with your Japanese), repeated enough times can still give you a 99.99% probability of success in Japanese.

OK, I’m getting a bit carried away here. Fake math facts, real math truth. You get the idea. You know who you are. Make your choice.

“Nothing” is the only too little; “not now” is the only too late.

EOF

PS: Paradoxically enough, I am finding that it’s important that you (1) abandon certainty in the environment, while simultaneously (2) embracing certainty in yourself. But we’ll leave the details of that for another time…

It sometimes seems like a lot of people get upset when:

1. I remind them that Heisig said it was OK to give yourself the keywords and story as a hint, and
2. I tell them to continue doing their kanji SRS reps until the kanji cards fully mature, i.e. until the intervals extend beyond their lifetime.

I mean, what am I supposed to say?

“Learn kanji in the most painful way possible and then quit before any of it sticks in your memory” ? :)

I’m just saying, dawg: if you have an answer of your own you like better already…then there’s no need to ask, right?

</rant>

I wanted to pull a Seth Godin and do a short one for a change

I did a lot of “experiments” growing corn (we called it maize, but…whatever). Every morning I would have breakfast with milk straight from our cow, tomatoes from our vegetable patch, guavas from our guava tree, eggs from our chickens. Sometimes I would actually milk the cow myself, but…I actually found milking really hard to do — I couldn’t seem to get the squeeze right. I was much more interested in the drinking part of the operation anyhow. And someone had to play with the rabbits.

I wouldn’t say I grew up on a farm, but…on the way to school, it almost seemed like there were as many people in cars as on horses.

Why am I already taking you down memory lane at my age? Why this whole…Mormon devotional speech routine with the stories of barns in Idaho and double-digit child families presided over by stern-but-loving fathers? You’ll see. Bear with me.

So, here in Japan, I again live in a semi-rural suburban area. Not nearly as rural as my place in Kenya, but certainly more rural than the 23 wards of Tokyo. There are acres of rice paddies just a few minutes down the road. Plenty of tractor-only or tractor-priority roads. Vending machines with vegetables and eggs fresh from the field.

This semi-rural place is about an hour out of Tokyo.

So yesterday, I go into Tokyo proper. You know, just to hang out. And I was doing my usual, I dunno…machinations. Calculating optimal subway routes in my head, getting really excited about having gotten on a train six minutes earlier than the original plan, and therefore put myself in a position to enjoy slower changeovers down the line. Momoko rolled her eyes at me: “yay, 6 minutes”.

And it hit me right there. To the extent that I was playing and “winning” at all these abiotic, artificial games, I was building and exercising at least one form of intelligence. I could feel that Flynn Effect . I could see how living in an information-rich urban environment could really raise one’s IQ. The city was making me smart.

On the way back from Tokyo, I saw a little train ad for a Berlitz summer crash course in English, marketed specifically at people who’ve been neglecting their English all year and want to really “skill up” and “level up” in a frantic, intensive burst of summer righteousness. “Learn 6 months of English in 5 days”…

Yeah, right.

The city makes you smart. The city makes everyone smart. But the countryside makes you wise.

You don’t have to live in a big city to be an urbanite. You just have to be removed from natural growth processes such as food production. Pretty much, if you don’t grow your own food, you are an urbanite. The majority of people who live in the more comfortable and convenient countries of the world, are urbanites. I am an urbanite, too. I just had the privilege of an extended rural experience a long time ago.

I submit to you that it is because so many of us live in urban environments, that we have trouble learning languages or doing any kind of sustained long-term project. We give up on our languages; we give up on our blogs; we give up on exercise; we give up on diets; we give up on New Year’s Resolutions by mid-February; we give up on reading Tolstoy. The words “long time” are anathema to us.

In urban environments, for the most part, we do not get to observe, ponder and participate in a wide range of organic (biotic) growth processes. In urban environments we do not move far; we do not see far (buildings block our field of vision), and thus we cease to think far and act for the long. We see no connection between the present and the distant future.

In urban environments, things do not get better with time — they get worse. Things do not grow, they decay. Things do not regenerate, they just die. We don’t really reuse things (although we occasionally pretend to get other people to reuse things for us and call it “recycling”). Your TV doesn’t grow into a big-screen TV. It gets old, becomes incompatible with the new TV standard, stops working, and gets thrown away. Certainly, it doesn’t appreciate in value. About the only thing that grows in an abiotic, urban environment is interest — but evidence abounds that few of us urbanites understand even this man-made growth process.

We are divorced from the cycle of life.

• An oak tree grows tall, strong and majestic, deepening its roots…the older, the better. Sometimes it talks to hobbits .
• An old TV becomes sodaigomi (oversized garbage). Dead weight. Bulk.  It gets thrown in the dumpster, to be replaced with something new — the newer, the better. Just like those fad diets and New Year’s resolutions…

Since urban environments rarely give us the privilege of observing natural improvement over time, it becomes hard, even impossible to believe that such a thing exists. That’s why so many of you can come to AJATT.com and be like “pull the other one, Khatzumoto”.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Francis Bacon…Bits

The urban environment, being largely unnatural (or, if you prefer, unlike most of the rest of nature — because you could argue that everything we do is “natural”) is largely devoid of lessons and metaphors to help us understand nature. This doesn’t seem to be a problem, but of course it is, because we (our bodies) are a 100% natural, organic…biotic system. You are not powered by AA batteries…yet.

Because we do not understand nature, we do not understand ourselves. We try to act on ourselves without understanding ourselves; we try to act as if we were machines. And it almost never works. Oftentimes it even damages and/or kills us.

There’s a lot of open space in rural areas. So the farmer sees far. Perhaps as an indirect result of this, she also thinks far. And she can act in the now for the far.

Have you ever seen a farmer handling seed? Have you seen the reverence? The care? The conscientious storage? The excited acquisition? Even though they’re nothing but seeds; they’re tiny; they frequently look nothing like the finished product.

But the farmer loves seeds. She loves them because she can see beyond the present; she has seen growth before and she understands that she will see it again: all she has to do is do her part. She’ll till the field and never once complain that “I’ve been tilling for 3 weeks and nothing has happened”, because she understands that things have their season. She understands that things grow and mature of their own accord — if only they are nourished. She understands that things can take a positive form quite unlike their present form as a result of her actions long before the transformation.

The farmer understands that:

1. Things take time, but
2. You cannot be idle during that time
3. You have to do your part so that nature can do its part

Sidenote: When I say “understand” I do not mean “know about”. In this context, I’m using “understand” to refer to internalized, procedural knowledge rather than declarative knowledge. Successful lionesses clearly “understand” how hunting works, even though they may suck at verbalizing about it.

The farmer lives on timescales of seasons and years and generations. The farmer may have inherited the land from her ancestors, and she will pass it down to her descendants, and they to theirs. Years and decades are not an unimaginable eternity to the farmer. Heck, (assuming no hormones, which is perhaps a statistically unrealistic assumption in the current US, but a fair one in the part of the world I’m from) it can take a couple of years for your cow to even start producing milk.

The urbanite detests lengths of time. The urbanite hates small things. The urbanite loathes beginnings. The urbanite uses “back to square one” as an insult. To the urbanite, spending his life in various types of squares, the first square of something is a terrible place to be. Unless an urban institution makes him do otherwise (and even then), the urbanite lives in the eternal present and immediate future, and acts for results and gain in the present and immediate future. He may go to college for four years, but only for the paper, and he’ll cram the whole time there. He lives in, on and for conclusions. His is a world of ends and results, not means and processes.

Just about everything for the urbanite comes finalized. The urbanite’s food often comes to him pre-packaged and pre-cooked; his clothes come to him ready-made. The only natural growth and change he regularly sees are, again, decay processes — the food he eats turns into either feces or a substrate for mold. His electronic devices become obsolete and turn into trash. His car wears out. Fashions become “so last year”. Jokes become stale.

Almost nothing in the urban environment is telling you that “things get bigger and better with time as a direct consequence of your actions starting from when they are small and nearly invisible”. The urbanite has no time for that kind of delay and verbosity.

Almost nothing in the urban environment is telling you that “you are a co-creator with nature: you do your part and nature does its part”. In the urban environment, nature only destroys — weeds grow in your concrete; pests invade your house; rust forms on your car; and heaven forbid that water — the solvent of life — should get on your electronics. In the urban environment, if it’s not new, fresh and done, then it is, literally and figuratively, stale and crap.

So when a Khatzumoto tells an urbanite — one with the urban mindset: “you’re getting better with time, you just can’t see it yet”, an urbanite smells snake oil. After all, how can things get better with time? How can the invisible become visible? How can important processes happen beyond human knowledge and intervention? It just doesn’t seem emotionally possible. The urban mindset doesn’t allow a person to understand natural growth.

To be sure, nature destroys in rural environments, too. But it builds far more.

The critical period hypothesis must be an urban invention. It seems like it would require an urban mind — someone living an urban life — to decide that a brain and body that contain more accumulated knowledge than they have ever previously contained, are a pile of crap simply because they have reached an arbitrarily decided age. Even that word “age”. In verb form, it seems to only get treated like a good thing when referring to wine and cheese.

Urbanites have a hubris and a sense of urgency about them that can be useful (throwing things away can be good sometimes)…except when it makes people counterproductively impatient. You can game and force and crash course and cram for an abiotic test. But you can’t do that with real, natural language (yet). You can work with nature — you can get nature to help you — but it appears that you can’t break nature’s rules and really win.

Farmers have a resignation to nature (their most important work partner) that can seem like fatalism, except when it’s correct and produces consistent, continuous, forward-looking behavior and desired results.

Urbanites are smart.
Farmers are wise.

And that’s why smart people like you have been having trouble learning Japanese. Not because you’re dumb, but because you’re smart. And folksy idiots like me have learned it quite well, not because we’re idiot savants, but because we understand and follow nature’s rules. At least in this part of our lives.

Next time you want to know how to learn a language, don’t come to this website. Get a popcorn kernel, put it in some soil, and water it every day. Grow a plant from seed. It will teach you everything you need to know. And while you’re at it, go somewhere high. Very high. Somewhere you can see far. Maybe there’s a tower in your town. Go up there and look down.

To win, you do need to show up. But that’s about all you need to do. You show up; nature does the rest. Arsonists know how to learn languages: you light matches, but fires burn by themselves.

Don’t work to reach goals, work to create conditions and environments.
Don’t work to achieve something. Let the environment do the work for you.
Don’t change yourself. Just change your surroundings. Your surroundings will then change you — always.

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. ¹

Similarly, binging and purging demands more binging and purging. Binge-purge is just a manifestation of a “binge meta-behavior”. ²

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 ³. 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 ⁴. Take the energy you were going to use for feeling guilty, and put it into moving forward.

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：）
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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…

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.

Big Dream, but nothing gets done. Not a single, bleeping thing. Potheads are also known as pipe dreamers.

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.

There is a harsh, rigid, continuous plan. Every deviation from this plan leads to harder sanctions and self-flagellation. In most cases, the sheer physical and emotional plan causes the planner to quit altogether. Planners are also known as perfectionists.

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 in it for the ride.

To repeat the text in the diagram (just in case):

• There is a simple, overarching guideline but no plan too precious to be adjusted or scrapped.
• No limits on modus operandi whatsoever (except to exclude the boring, the ineffective and the generally crap).
• Every moment is new — discrete, digital.
• Every moment is a rest.
• Every day is New Year’s.
• Every t is 0.
• Deviation is accepted, corrected and exploited.
• Beneficial deviation is even actively sought out through experimentation = play.
• Like a small child, the question at each point is “OK, what do we play next?!”.
• There are no “shoulds”, there are no “should haves”. Players are also known as gamers.

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? ¹

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 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.

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!

“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.