Comments have been acting up on this post; they should be enabled now.

It being early January, common practice would dictate that right now I wish you a happy new year, but other people have probably done that already. Plus, it’s not like I would really mean it: because I wouldn’t. I hate holidays. And I hate how people who are usually mood-swingy jerks to you, will hug you on Christmas/New Year’s/Eve/Day as if nothing-the-heck-were-wrong. That kind of thing confuses me and makes me break out in Stockholm Syndrome rashes. I need consistency; if someone’s going to be a jerk to me, I need them to be jerk to me all the time. Friggin’…

But you know what I hate even more than holidays?

I hate the word “discipline”. Not because it’s only six letters away from being a four-letter word, which it is, but because…OK the number of letters doesn’t count. I hate — hated — the d-word because it has been misused and abused to death. When people say the word “discipline”, what they really mean is some sadomasochistic, pretty-woman-wearing-an-SS-uniform behavior that merely boils down to one word: submission. Submission to authority under threat of direct enforcement by physical or emotional violence. Do as we say, or we’ll beat you up and/or tear your reputation to pieces, that’s how most people experience the word “discipline”.

It wasn’t till I was in college, googling, that I discovered what “discipline” really means, or at least what it should mean. According to the quote attributed to Idon’tknowwhoandIcan’tbebotheredtogolookitup^[1]:

“Discipline is remembering what you want”.

Isn’t that much better than all this crap about pain and suffering and crucibles? Tha’ss right, son. This is implying something self-directed rather than self-inflicted. I mean, my gosh, who expects to get anyone — including themselves — inspired to do anything, with all this talk about freaking “no pain no gain” and “pain is left-wing ideas leaving the body” and…you get the idea.

Where was I? Yeah, dude. Discipline is remembering what you want. This doesn’t just make us feel warm and fuzzy and good^[2], it also gives us a concrete action step to work on. OK, brace yourself for some fake math and logical fallacies of equivocation:

If discipline is what it takes to turn dreams into goals into realities, and discipline is remembering what you want, then pretty much all you have to do to get from here to there, is remember what you want. Not remember where you are [this’ll just make you sad], not remember where you’re not [another recipe for sadness], but remember what you want.

How many of you have watched, I dunno, let’s dip as low into the pop culture barrel as possible — MTV Cribs, and been like: “I want one of those [gaudy swimming pools/big-screen TVs/STD-ridden groupies]”? Show of hands? OK, good. But then, how many of you, even two weeks later, remember the exact thing that you wanted? I bet pretty few. I bet you all still have a nebulous, amorphous, non-corporeal desire to be blinging it up in or on an air/land/sea vehicle of some kind, while total strangers mill around in the background and spend your money on controlled substances. But how many of you remember exactly the make and model and price of the thing or things you want? Have you gone shopping for them? Have you compared them to similar products? Have you looked into renting them to see if they’re really worth owning? Have you started saving money to acquire them? Can you get them used? Are they on some kind of written list in order of priority, with dates for acquisition^[3]? Probably not. And that’s why you’ll always be a schmuck watching Cribs — unless and until you actually start getting more concrete about this stuff; until you stop allowing yourself to forget.

Or something like that. I’m not so sure that I’m quite communicating this idea fully, but…oh well, I never am. Let me just say this. The Internet once told me:

“Many people overestimate what they can get done in a day, and underestimate what they can get done in a year”.

Just imagine how viciously you’re underestimating what you can get done this year, and in 2, 3, 5 and 10 years. It may seem like nothing; it may seem like you’re going nowhere, but the sum of those nothings is what it’s all about and it’s a lot of the philosophy of this blook: The journey of a thousand leagues, Grasshopper, not only begins with a single step, it also ends with a single step and, in fact, is entirely made up of single steps^[4]. Imagine if people refused to try to conceive children because “It’s just gonna be one cell! What’s the point?! Two days and all I have is zygote? Are you kidding me?!” Imagine if people stopped brushing their teeth because “they’re all just gonna get dirty again!” Imagine if people stopped climbing mountains after a couple of steps because “I’ve been at it for like fifteen minutes and I’m nowhere near the top!” — countless young, white males might still be alive today, screaming into microphones, making angry music^[5] for me to have angst to. But noooo….they had to climb a perfectly good mountain.

So, the whole so-called “discipline” problem can reduce itself to a memory problem. Thankfully, we needn’t entirely rely on ourselves for this. Many of us already have a personal secretary on our staff. He doesn’t eat food and he can go days and weeks without sleep. I refer, of course, to the PC^[6].

I don’t even know why I brought up Cribs; it says more about my character than yours. But anyway, many of you reading this are trying to learn a language. And the thing, as I have said once or twice before, about a language — in fact, any advanced skill — the real key is that you don’t need to get “good” at it; you just need to get “used” to it^[7]. It needs to just become a habit, a reflex for you. Let it get inside the muscles of your hands, face and mouth. And it’s the biggest no-brainer ever, because all you have to do is expose yourself. Expose yourself to “language radiation” until you not only get temporary radiation sickness, but actually develop the “cancer” of fluency in a language. Pretty grotesque example, huh? But if you think about it…the changes that are going to go on as you acquire a language, are going to be occurring at a cellular level — just like cancer…OK, so a lot things happen at a cellular level^[8], I know…whatever…you get the idea!

Software

And so, reminding yourself to work on your target language can be made equivalent to working on it. How? Have patience…all will be revealed.

When ego-surfing, one criticism I sometimes read about this blook is that there’s a lot of general discussion and not many specific, detailed steps. Most of the time, I figure everyone has their own preferences in terms of how to get stuff done. I certainly don’t like to read people flapping lip about how they spent six months installing Ubuntu over the firmware for their cat’s litter box and then wrote a Ruby script to make it send status alerts to their iPhone^[9]. Also, I don’t like writing things that can go out of date very quickly. But, today, I shall make an exception. Today I’m going to discuss, with detailed examples, the software I use to implement automated “discipline” in my life. In this sense, I was inspired by Timothy Ferris; he’s thick on both theory and execution, and even though his bombastic prose rattles my subtle Japanese sensibilities^[10], I liked his book.

No more talk! Let’s go straight to action! I’m black! I’m equal parts dynamic and threatening and I do comic relief! I pity the fool who doesn’t read about this software:

• TimeSnapper (Classic): The future you is watching you. It is amazing what you will do or not do when you know you’ll have to answer for it, even if it’s just to yourself. I certainly don’t want evidence of superfluous English wickedness on my record! TimeSnapper takes a snapshot of your computer screen every X seconds throughout the day; at the end of the day you can play this back, like unto a movie. Be sure to change the settings so you don’t have gigabytes of data for just one day. A 25% JPEG quality snapshot every 60 seconds seems to be more than enough to keep me kosher, halal and Cantonese. Our memories can be subjective; we can tend to think that we worked harder and immersed deeper than we actually did. With TimeSnapper, you can see for yourself just what you were doing and when. If my experience is anything to go by, then I know you’ll be making the future you proud.

• LeechBlock: A Firefox plugin. If you’re not using Firefox, you probably should be . Those open source hippies have a thing or two going for them. The Pareto principle would suggest that a mere handful of non-target language sites suck the lion’s share of our time: In my case, these included Lifehacker, Gmail^[11], AJATT Stats and English Wikipedia; I blocked all of these. If necessary, you can block entire TLDs, like *.com and *.us, assuming the collateral damage from false positives isn’t too high. LeechBlock is highly flexible, allowing you to set up time-based blocking, daily time limits, and cetera!

• Karen’s Countdown Timer 2: Part of Karen’s Power Tools suite. In a sense, KCT2^[12] isn’t that different from Windows’ native Task Manager Scheduler, it’s just that it has a far simpler, friendlier, more flexible interface. Plus it’s free, so…go for it! Why I came to use KCT2 is because I found that two things were endangering my Cantonese immersion environment — [1] the first was forgetting to turn it back on after temporarily turning it off (e.g. to talk on the phone^[13]); [2] the second was simply going about my Strong Bad morning routine of Klingon blood rituals^[14] and forgetting to turn on the environment until, like, noon. This software takes care of both these situations. I schedule Cantonese radio to play every 60 minutes, Cantonese TV/movies to turn themselves on every 3 hours, and my favorite Chinese/Cantonese websites to open up daily/weekly/fortnightly at the times of day I tend to feel like reading each one, all automatically and without a nag-screen: this is what I mean when I talk about making the reminder (nearly) equivalent to the necessary action.

• Batch Files: (If you don’t know what these are, or are a little scared right now, you can safely ignore this part) Writing scripts to tell your computer to do a bunch of stuff comes naturally to Linux/Unix/*nix people, and if my college professors’ war stories are to be believed, command-line batch processing was at one point the default, natural state of computing. I guess times have changed and things have gone all GUI, but not necessarily for the better. I use batch files in conjunction with KCT2 to both set up and take down work environments for myself, and I have to say, it’s as if I’d been picking dust bunnies with my fingers when all this time I had a vacuum cleaner. Certainly, the mouse and monitor are a powerful [and in many cases, time-saving] combination, but many of us current Mac/Windows-style GUI-centric operating system users are guilty of under-using our computers’ ability to automate tasks. Highly recommended for those who feel comfortable doing it; in fact, you might get so into it that the limitations of Windows batch processing start giving you linuxlust. Thanks to InspectMyGadget for the guide.

Unfortunately, these tools are almost all Windows-based. Of course, I don’t use Windows myself; I run Ubuntu off a twig I picked up hiking one day. But, my, uh, friend does. If you know of similar or better tools for any platform, please feel free to share. Also, cautious but sincere thanks to English-language Lifehacker, where I found many of these tools, only to exit quietly as soon as my business was done.

てゆーかライフハッカーの日本語版も有るけど・・・

有るけど・・・

Note to non-geeks: this software is all very easy to use, I promise. I just act super-geeky to show off to other geeks; that’s how we roll. If you need help, check the software instructions or just ask here in the comments section, someone will almost certainly rescue you. Not me…I’ll be drinking cassis juice from a cup running Ubuntu-a-la dual boot.

Also, it may seem like overkill to have my computer essentially turn things on and off for me; after all, it’s just a few clicks here and there. But like Rohn said and I keep quoting:

“The things that are easy to do, are [also] easy not to do”.

Besides, over time, this could add up to thousands of clicks saved. The end.

[2] Admittedly, I do feel good and was fully aware that I would, now.

[3] The dates don’t have to be soon. They just have to be. This is not a “deadline” to be feared and dreaded. Much of the idea here is to impress it upon yourself that there will come an actual Monday when you will be on a beach somewhere, holding hands with a stunningly beautiful woman who absolutely insists that the doctor says it’s not contagious.

[4] Lord of the Rings could have been completed in a single flight, but then there would be almost no slaying Asian people, Arabs and incredibly well-muscled Polynesian men with dreadlocks. I don’t like minorities either, so, I’m cool with it. Always breathing the white man’s air. You give them an acting job and all the thanks you get is snarky bloggers??!! Somebody needs to let those darkies know that THIS IS, IN FACT, SPARTA!!!!! KILL ‘EM ALL AND TAKE THEIR LAND!!!!…Wait…

[5] SO HERE I YAAAAM! ALIVE AT LAAST! AND I’LL SAVOR EVERY MOMENT OF IT! SAVOR EVERY MOMENT OF IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT! BLAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGH! Life is so HARD!!!!!

[6] You thought I was talking about my imaginary friend, Dmitri. Nope. He’s a secret. Ssssh!

[7] In fact, the whole 10,000+ hours business indicates that these are in a sense one and the same.

[8] Speaking of which, part (not all, but part) of the reason academic linguistics still sucks so much is that it’s effectively being bottlenecked by neuroscience. AFAIK, the fundamental mechanisms and units at work with language are still not understood in such a way as to allow you to make neat and tidy predictions like in the physical sciences; it’s all a grey box, if you will. So…professional linguists who study language acquisition can still sometimes get their lunch eaten by anyone who’s actually learned a language and writes a blog about it, like Stephen Kaufmann. At least it seems that way to me.

[9] The pooh is runny. Runny.

I’m only making fun of it because I secretly want one. Oh, Captain Planet, I want an iPhone…Yes, I just prayed to Captain Planet. You may just be weirded out, but I feel dirty. The man has blue skin. Ewwww. Freakin…variant skin colours ruining my childhood.

[10] I’m serious. If you live in Japan long enough (a year is a good start), you start to become Japanese in little ways that are not clear to you until you re-establish contact with your previous culture; just ask Arudou Debito. Whenever I watch a Hollywood movie, I almost cringe when I see people enter a room with shoes, and I find myself wondering how someone can make a heartfelt apology without bowing. When Kenyans living in Japan speak Swahili, they connect their sentences with “さぁ”. Stuff like that. A couple of my Japanese friends only half-jokingly say that the writing style exemplified by Timothy Ferris “raises [their] blood pressure”. I lolled.

[11] Blocking Gmail forces me to check my email in Opera, which is slower than bullet time in The Matrix, causing me to do only as much email checking as need be done to keep democracy safe. And it’s looking like democracy didn’t need me that much.

[12] What? Are you going to type the whole thing out again?

[13] One time…I, like, made a Youtube video, and I didn’t turn off the Canto. I’m proud of that time.

[14] You think I’m joking to inject some “geek humour” and add more “personality” to my blook? I’m not joking. The blood of Qordos the Magnificent is transubstantiated into my morning Minute Maid cassis juice.

I’m serious.. I am that weird.

…

What’choo lookin’ at?

Howdy! Is not a word that I usually use.

By now you’ve probably heard about this already, but just in case you haven’t, let’s talk about it here. Malcolm McDowell, who once tried to destroy the galaxy so that he could re-enter an energy ribbon in space where he could experience Paradise for the r…

OK, not Malcolm McDowell. Malcolm Gladwell. Done gone written a book enbenamed Outliers: The Story of Success. About, basically, what makes the top people the top. What makes them the greatest of all times! What makes the l33t hax0rs of every field pwn so hard.

Executive summary: It isn’t talent. It’s time. 10,000 hours, to be exact. Where have you heard this before? Maybe, I dunno, a little blog by a random Kenyan boy…

I haven’t read the book yet; I’ll probably wait for the Janslation. But I’m already loving what I read about it in the The Guardian (via this post by Golem):

“If you put together the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and Bill Joy and Bill Gates, I think we get a more complete picture of the path to success. Joy, Gates and the Beatles are all undeniably talented…that “talent”, however, was something other than an innate aptitude for music or maths. It was desire.”

“a key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours — to the point where it is really hard to know where “natural ability” stops and the simple willingness to work [long and consistently] begins. “

But my favorite part is where he discusses a little boy band from northern England that was popular back when our Mums were young:

“The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962…All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers [emphasis added]…

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman says. “They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers — cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock’n'roll, a bit of jazz, too…when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

I don’t even like the Beatles; I find their music very hard to listen to. But, I cannot help but respect them for being so diligent. From this description, it seems that their acclaim was well deserved.

What all this is showing is that the path to success, to greatness, to excellence, to ownage in any field is so straightforward, so simple, as to be almost anticlimactic. What I love about Gladwell’s book and the ideas it contains, is how we are seeing the complete removal of all the magic, the mystery[1], the sickening hero-envy and the even more sickening hero-worship[2] that have, up until now, been associated with, you now, people who are l33t.

So if you want to be l33t at anything, you can. All you have to do is show up. If you want to be fluent in a language, cut off your wuss glands and just get on with being in the language. If you want to learn how to draw, get out some paper and start scribbling. If you want to know how to skate, go down to the rink and get on the ice.

And you will suck. For a long time[3]. You will be terrible. Children will be better than you. “Mere” toddlers will talk and skate and draw circles around you. But if you just keep going, you’ll get better. You just will. It’s that simple.

OK, fine, so, here I am saying how simple it is and “just do it”, and “cut off your wuss glands” [sounds ridiculously painful], but…if it’s so simple why are so many people still not succeeding? Why are there still so few people, you know, owning? And why does it feel so difficult?

Well, there are many reasons. One of them is the fact that that long part in the beginning where you suck, really is long and really does suck. And lots of people — especially adults — lose both hope and face there. This is why adults appear to succeed less than children: adults have the linguistic power to make elaborate excuses and the legal power to choose what to do where and when; kids don’t get that luxury. Britney Spears couldn’t tell her Mum to freck off and stop pimping her to Disney. Even if she could, she was going and that was final, young lady! Regardless of age, it’s hard to see how you’re going to one day be amazing when you clearly are so lame right now: the effort-versus-improvement ratio is just so low in the beginning. My way of coping with that feeling is this:

Forget your position, remember your velocity (at least, that’s what we’ll call it). Forget where you are. It doesn’t matter. All you need to focus on are the two components of “velocity”, in order of priority:

(1) The direction in which you are heading. In plain terms this means showing up: if you are a would-be skater, then actually get on the ice every day; if you are a would-be artist, then actually create art every day. Do something. Anything will do. No quotas, no rules, no plan, no system, no method, just do something. Skater? Don’t even have a goal to skate, just get on the ice with skates on. Want to be a drawing person? Draw a line on paper. Japanese? Turn on the TV. Don’t even try to pay attention, just turn it on. Runner? Put on your shoes, and step outside. Don’t even try to run.

(2) The speed at which you are getting there. Here, the unit of speed is the hour – the magnitude of time you spend each day. So what we effectively mean by speed is “average number of hours per day put in”. In other words, how quickly you are racking up those 10,000 hours.

And forget everything else. First, forget the past; forget it — it’s gone. Secondly, 99% of the time, you should pay no attention to how quickly you are or aren’t progressing; it’s fine — even good — to notice that you’re progressing, just ignore the rate of progress, because no matter how fast it is or isn’t, for most of us post-modern, television-raised kids, it will be longer than 23 minutes, which means it’ll be too slow and therefore too depressing = discouraging = makes you want to quit. Thirdly, more or less let go of the future: don’t worry about ETA (estimated time of arrival), i.e. when you will be good; don’t worry about POS (probability of success), i.e. whether you will ever get good — neither of these are useful pieces of information, and worrying about them won’t help you get there any quicker.

In short, what I do is just treat it like a job (clarification: on the ground, the physical actions that lead to becoming great are as simple as any menial job, but the mindset is a self-/curiosity-/interest-directed one, not one of resignation to victimhood and suffering, nor one of abdication of personal responsibility)…just punch in, punch out. Clock in, clock out. Put in the time. It’s a complete no-brainer — like flipping burgers or eating jelly beans or assembling widgets or sticking lego blocks together. Ever wonder why flight hours are often used as a measure of how good a pilot is? Because the pilot people knew this all along. If you just punch in, success, greatness, “ownage”…will all take care of themselves.

What we call “talent” is merely a phenomenon that naturally and inevitably occurs when someone has done something for a long time — so long that they can observe and manipulate patterns with a speed, accuracy and finesse that are impossible for the untrained eye/hand/mouth/foot. Don’t be intimidated — rack up those hours and you’ll be the man now dawg, too.

By the time you visibly, externally, publicly succeed, it’ll have been so inevitable for so long, so much a part of you and your daily life, so much a fait accompli, what the French call an “accomplished fact”, that only other people will be surprised. This happened to me with Japanese. I never set out to learn Japanese in a specific amount of time. At least initially. I merely said: “I’m going to act Japanese and I’m going to keep acting Japanese until it’s not acting any more”. I no longer cared how long it took, who died, whether Bush actually won the election the first time, I was just going to do it for as long as was necessary to get good.

In a sense, I succeeded because I gave up. I gave up trying to force and control the process. You see, what had happened before with, for example, my kanji study (pre-SRS), is that I would start, and then lose steam and give up for 3 to 6 months at a time. Then after several months I’d be like: “Mother of Bush! If I had been working on it all this time, even just 10 characters a day I would know like 1800 characters by now!!!” I felt worse than that guy who got shot by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President of the United States of America, in the face. I came to the point where I realized that any daily progress was better than no progress. Anything was better than zero. And it was such a low standard (”just do something“) it was such a “come on, man, just try one — it grows out of the ground, it can’t hurt you, maaan, come on, man, you’re black, I heard they do this all the time in Jamaica”[4], that it just naturally expanded to take over my life; I didn’t have to force it; I didn’t have to struggle.

My only goal at the daily level was to just be there (i.e. have listened to even 1 second of Japanese) — that was enough. I didn’t really compare myself to anyone or anything. At the daily level, I didn’t really wish or hope or yearn or despair; that would be as idiotically futile as trying to grow; most of the time, you don’t see kids clench their fists, close their eyes, and try to squeeze out a few inches on their leg bones…they just eat food, run around and sleep. Like a kid, I just…was. I ate my food (Japanese materials), ran around with my Japanese friends [when they weren’t too busy], played on the jungle gym (SRS), and fell asleep to a Japanese “lullaby” [the news]. Just being myself, in Japanese.

I wanted to remove that whole “if only I lived in Japan” excuse from the equation. That whole “yeah, if you really wanna learn it, you’ve got to visit the country, man” myth. Anyone who knows English teachers in Japan knows that “living in the country” doesn’t mean jack bollocks all squat[5]. Back in the day, I did not have the money (nor the knowledge of how to make money) to go to Japan, but I had access to Japanese audio, video, text and people. Could I not do something with these? I didn’t know for sure, but I had a hunch that something would happen after a lot of repetition[6], so I gave it a try. Ever noticed how kids watch the same few movies over and over again? Is this coincidence? Or are they trying to figure something out — without their even knowing it? Are kids trying to teach themselves their own language, in some way?

Anyway, let’s wrap up. Remember that the pathetic-seeming things you’re doing right here and now in your vegan pizza-stained sweatpants[7] are the very steps that make up the journey to greatness and therefore are essentially equal to success itself[8]. They are the private victory that necessarily precedes the public victory. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

“Why all this deference to [Bill Gates] and [The Beatles] and [Tiger Woods]? Suppose they were [l33t], did they wear out [l33tness]?…As great a stake depends on your private act today as followed their public and renowned steps. [You can own, too, be-arch]”.

So keep going. Keep sucking for now. Don’t worry: it’s working…

[2] During the Olympics this year, I told Momoko (mi esposa), only half-jokingly, that viewers should be legally required to first watch all the thousands of hours of practice that athletes put in, before being given the privilege to watch any actual competition. Then, even Michael Phelps would just be a young man who swims a lot. No one’s performance would really be a surprise [”well of course he can swim fast, my gosh, if I swam that much I ‘d be all over that podium; all this fool ever does is swim!”, would cry the spectators], and there would be far less B.S., athlete-worship and dodgy racial theories. But then, the dodgy racial theory sports book industry might come crashing down, and all those authors might be forced to do proper research…and we wouldn’t want that.

Seriously, though, without denigrating anything the work of people like Phelps, the reason people make so much noise out about him and other athletes stems from a desire — a need — on the part of the mass media industry to manufacture stars, heroes, and people to sell sugar water. Furthermore, white people rather badly needed a homeboy to fill the gaping void Lance Armstrong left, because…damn. Hey, I understand. Like, for me, Star Wars is basically the story of how James Earl Jones led Samuel L. Jackson to his death and then double-crossed Billy Dee Williams. Also, there was a kindly little Japanese man with a skin disease, and a massive space station exploded. Two…massive space stations. Way to go, James Earl Jones.

Back on the topic of watching practices as a prerequisite for watching real performances…I’d love to sit it on the rehearsals of great performers like Michael Jackson.

[3] Yes, longer than the 5-minute montage. Longer than the whole movie. Longer than many movies in a row. There’s no drama and easy-to-see improvement in real life. Just punching in and out. It’s invisible to you, just like growing taller. You’re only aware of it indirectly — either other people tell you, or you look back over time.

[4] I know…WTF?

[5] The same goes for Mormon missionaries — yes, a good number actually plug in, get really good and grow up to be Kent Gilbert — but plenty of them suck; they have no interest in Japan or Japanese and just wanted to get over this two year hump and back to courting girls called Emily Sorenson. Their pronunciation makes babies’ ears bleed and they are illiterate, which means that if you say anything remotely non-biblical to them, like “solar system”, they will crash faster than Windows 95. I know. I went to a Mormon university and even programmed at the Missionary Training Center. In general, a lot of Mormon missionaries aren’t so much good at languages as they are better-than-most-Americans, which is good enough for government work (NSA, CIA, TLA) but not good enough to even read a newspaper. Which is fine, I guess, because it seems that when the American intelligence community needs information about another country, they just make it up anyway (”I dunno, dude…they’re brown people, right? Just say they were planning to bomb something, I dunno…we need this NIE out today, man, come on…”). Oooo…someone’s getting his phone tapped today.

Having said that, I still love Mormons: kindest, sweetest people ever…girls called Emily Sorenson are always baking cookies…Mmm. Sugar, refined flour, Crisco.

[6] Ever notice how you’re often easily able to remember the chorus of a pop song word for word, but not so much the other verses? Hmm…I wonder if it has anything to do with the chorus getting repeated anything from 3 to 10 times more than any other part of the song, naturally leading to 3 to 10 times the exposure. I’m just saying, man…I’m just saying.

[7] The uniform of champions!

[8] Take climbing a mountain. Which step matters most? The first? The last? That one right in the middle? The odd-numbered ones? Weren’t they all necessary?

This “burn-out” issue [as discussed here, here and here] is really interesting. Now, all you wusses out there — you know I’m just having fun with you; I don’t actually think you’re wusspots, I just think that you’re morally inferior to me.

BACK UP! You were NOT supposed to see that right there. We’re all special and…

OK, never mind. But, seriously, you know I’m just screwing with you. I think the world does people a disservice in two ways. First, it tells them it’s normal and OK not to have fun for the majority of one’s life. Second, it tells them that it’s OK to feel and act helpless in the face of all this. The result is this disgusting push to mediocrity. But we don’t have to accept boredom, nor do we have to accept weaksauce and being, I dunno…less than we can be? We should join the Army and die? Really, I don’t know, I’m just as lost and vague on this as most people are.

Anyway, after that paragraph of nothing, let’s get to the point.

Let me tell you why you might need a break from Japanese. It is not because of the inherent structure of your brain or some other lamo reason. After all, there are people who have essentially spent their entire lives in a single language and never “needed a break”. The reason, I think, most people need a break from Japanese is because they’re always struggling, always reaching, always try to get somewhere. Always looking at where they aren’t, where they should be, where they could be, where they want to be. If you learn to let go of this and just be Japanese — be, in Japanese — then you will never need a break. If you merely accept Japanese or whatever your L2 is, as the primary reality of your life, as reality itself, then you will never feel the need to escape from it. It is only your thoughts that are tiring you. If you stop having tiring thoughts, you stop feeling tired.

In my hardcore Japanese phase, I didn’t take breaks. Not consciously. Partly because of my moral superiority and saint-like nature and Naruto-like drive. And partly because (1) I sucked at scheduling and getting myself to “do thing T on day D of any given week W”; I really did. And, well, do. (2) Knowing my own character, I knew that if I gave myself an English centimeter, I would take an English kilometer; in fact, I would take several English kilometers. Dude, I would take light year. One thing would just lead to another and before you know it I’d have been one of those guys in a forum talking about how: “Ah done tried immerse me in some Jyapnaze wonce…hehe. That shiz is impossible”. (3) The fact of living in America and being a college student naturally forced me to leave my Japanese bubble at least some of the time anyhow, so why should I go out of my way to throw gasoline on the English fire threatening my precious wooden Japanese house? There’s a joke in there somewhere about the KKK circling Malcolm X’s childhood home, but…I don’t think it’s worth picking up.

OK, so, what if this still isn’t enough for you? What if you still feel the need for a break? I have the suggestion of a lifetime for you and it is this:

Take a break.

In Korean.

Or whatever L3 is for you. Take a break from L2 in an L3.  Important: do not try to learn L3; it’s not for learning…it’s for…breaking to; it’s for resting; it’s for not learning. That’s the idea here, at least.

So, if you’re a native English speaker doing AJATT for Japanese, and you’re feeling “combusted”, feeling “extinguished”, feeling “burned out”, then take a break into Korean…or Hindi…or Spanish, or anything, as long as it’s a language that you suck at, that you know considerably less of than L2. Let’s call this language L3.

Why? At least seven reasons. DJ, break it down!

(1) It’ll be amusing. Languages you don’t know sound like amusing gibberish.

(2) You will realize how amazing you actually are at L2. Learning by immersing in native materials has the one downside that it can make you blind to just how good you’re getting, since you’re always comparing yourself to native speakers, you’re always seeing the delta between your current self and the destination — while rarely getting a chance to see the delta between yourself and the starting point. Often, all it takes to feel energized and confident again is to see how far you’ve come. Before going to Korea, I listened to some RTHK podcasts for Cantonese-speaking learners of Korean [sequel here]. And I realized that my-Cantonese-OWNED, relatively speaking: I could follow almost all of what they were saying, and of course I could read and everything. Conversely, Korean was a total blank. Korean was like…WTF? Circles? TF?

(3) If you’re in a frame of mind that requires a break, then this same frame of mind will be refreshed by a break to L3, but will also be unable to stay in L3 too long, since:

(4) L3 lacks the familiarity, the draw-you-into-a-downward-spiral capability, of L1. Returning to L1 is more than simply watching one program or listening to one song. Returning to L1 is to plug back into the whole matrix, the whole web of materials, relationships and interconnections that you have made in your years of L1 experience. As such, it is a dangerous thing.

(5) A flirtation with L3 can restore in you the sense of curiosity and wonder that brought you to learn L2 in the first place. Anyone who’s learning an L2 feels a “need” to do it, but this “need” is not as strong as the “need” to breathe. Really it’s a “want”, right? It’s fulfilling a “wouldn’t it be cool, if…” I know I make an effort to get people feeling uncomfortable with illiteracy in Sino-Japanese; I think illiteracy is inexcusable. But, you know, really, this language thing is generally fulfilling a desire of ours, a dream; we’re explorers — like Dora, not Christopher all-your-base-are-belong-to-me-now-I-kill-you-AND-your-couch Columbus. Dude, why am I talking about Columbus? Oh yeah, curiosity, wonder — if you’ve lost this in the sea of obligation and “gotta do more reps” and measurement and execution, then a trip to L3 can give this back to you. What’s more you get to take this 元氣 (juvenile energy?) back to your L2 journey.

(6) Most people learning an L2 have interest in further language-learning. “Interest” is too tame a word — it’s closer to greed, LUST, YEEEARNING! Unfortunately, I often see this interest take an unproductive turn — people “learning” multiple languages simultaneously but really just “sucking” at all of them. To be fair, I speak mostly of myself here: there appear to be people who get the MSLA (multiple simultaneous language acquisition) thing working well, but focussing on one thing at a time is much faster and in the end much funner — you get results sooner, leading to a big boost in confidence, and more rapid economic benefits.

Trying to do too much at once tends to drag and lead nowhere — as the saying goes, “the hunter who chases two rabbits catches neither” [by the way, in my experience, there is next to 0 financial return for “kind of” knowing a language, but as soon as you really know a language, you’ll be having to turn opportunities down: this seems to be true regardless of the size of user base, such that thoroughly-learned Icelandic shall tend to serve you better economically than broken Mandarin, although then again if you are in the country where a certain language is spoken, even a minimal knowledge of it is obviously far better than total ignorance. Anyway, rather than have your mental and financial energies divided between two languages, better to acquire one first and then use it a mental and financial hook for the second: emotionally, this decision can be painful — but methinks you’re better off making it than suffering the consequences of evading it]. So, breaking to an L3 is potentially a constructive outlet for the wanderlust that plagues so many of us.

(7) Best of all, when you come back to L2, you will feel like a champ. You’ll be like: “HOLY CRAP! Look at all the stuff I understand!!!” Basically, the sojourn in the truly foreign L3 will make L2 seem totally like home. When I was in Korea, I might as well have been born and raised in Hong Kong because Cantonese sounded like the soothing lullabies of my mother, cooing me to sleep all: “乖呀，乖呀小寶寶，唔使驚呀”[ “ssssh….hush now…you’re safe…it’s Cantonese, motherlover,…no more circles…ssssh…”]. If learning L2 is like running uphill, then switching to L3 is like running uphill with a 50kg backpack: put that thing on for a while — when you finally take it off, life will seem a whole lot easier.

It is like a 50kg backpack, but not nearly as sucky — in fact, it’s actually a lot of fun (see point # 1, above) — so, yeah, try it out! Make your break destination an L3! The break doesn’t have to be long, or complicated; it doesn’t even have to be total. I once watched a Thai movie (Ong Bak!) with Japanese subtitles, and the process left me feeling like a dog having the base of her tail scratched; I really felt like…vegan cookies dipped in soymilk; it was delicious and gave me a lot of confidence in my Japanese, which looked amazing when seen next to my zero Thai knowledge.

Anyway, try it. Go to the red, Krypotonian sun of L3; then return to the yellow, Terran sun of L2 with superhuman comprehension abilities.

I wonder if there’s Prison Break in Polish…

This post began as a footnote to one of my own remarks here, where I said that:

Even “burn-out” is, IMHO, almost always bogus - you’re not “burned out”, you’re just “being lame”: you need to get more creative about the immersion process.

Looking back, “creative” was the wrong word. “Active” might be more appropriate. Now what do I mean by “active”? In my case I mean just turn up the “sheer quantity” dial on your immersion. What this often meant for me was tons of “weeding out”. I would get Japanese/Cantonese stuff: movies, music, comics, whatever. And watch/read them. And if, after 10 to 120 seconds I did not like it, I would simply delete/throw away and move on…sort of like channel-surfing — just jumping from one thing to the next, until I found something that drew me in. In fact, I do this even now. Remember, the only “obligation” with immersion is the language. Everything. Else. Is. Negotiable. No one said you have to read that particular book or watch that particular program. Even if you were enjoying it 5 minutes before, the instant it gets boring, it needs to go.

What are the chances you would enjoy a randomly selected piece of media in your native language? Slim, right? Maybe, what, 1%? 10%? The same goes for the language you’re trying to immerse in. So just weed the mothers out. I mean, think of great shows like Family Guy, or South Park — if you had to watch them all day every day, even they would get old, and even CSPAN might start to look attractive.

Judging from my personal experience, I think when most people say or think they’re “bored” or “burned out” with a language due to a lack of basic fluency, it’s not really the language that’s bugging them, nor is it their apparent lack of fluency: it’s the materials they’ve got in the language. The solution to this problem is (very American): more. More stuff. More quantity. More acquisition. More sampling. More weeding. More throwing away. More putting aside. More deleting. More replacing. More turnover. More. More. More.

This intense sampling will do at least three things — (1) it’ll keep you feeling busy and active, while (2) being immersed, and (3) you’ll start to figure out what you like, there will be a core of shows, actors, writers, musicians whose work you will enjoy: you can start to use this core for further exploration — find other stuff by the same screenwriter/director/author/band. Example: the guy who directed Trick also directed Ikebukuro West Gate Park (IWGP); the screenwriter from IWGP also wrote Tiger and Dragon. Quality tends to group. If you liked one Stephen Chow movie, you’re likely to enjoy his others.

And this is why, I think, people blame sucking as a reason to stop immersing and therefore continue sucking. From my observation, there are at least three things that early beginners do wrong, that unnecessarily and inevitably lead to a sense of “burn-out”:

(1) They listen to the target language dutifully but indiscriminately. This may seem diligent, but the fact is even babies have taste. Even a near-languageless baby would rather watch, say, Teletubbies, than reruns of Matlock [except a possessed baby?]. You have taste, too. Even in a language you don’t know or only know a very little of, there a things you would rather watch. The key is to find these things.

(2) When they do find something they like, they repeat it beyond enjoyment. It is beautiful and honorable to repeat only as long as something is being enjoyed. I never have and never will re-watch movies because I have to, only because I want to. When your skin/emotions start to chafe, please cease use and consult your media library.

(3) They do not yet know what they like. Most people who have basic fluency also happen to have spent long enough on the language to start gravitating to what they like, if only unconsciously. I am suggesting you make this a conscious process of “取捨選択”/しゅしゃせんたく: consciously taking in vast amounts of stuff, throwing out what is chaff to you and leaving the wheat. And there is always a lot of chaff. The good news is that even the chaff [in the little time you watch/hear/read it] gives you information, teaches you something, serves a purpose. Just don’t hold on to it for too long: it will hurt you, bore you and trick you into thinking that “this language that is as yet a mystery to me” bores you, when in fact it’s just those particular materials that are boring you.

(PS) All of which is another reason why watching L2 dubs of stuff you do like from L1 can be such a great starting point.

Don’t think you’re not “good enough” yet at the language to be picky. You are always good enough to be picky. There are things you will be able to appreciate more later when you are fluent, just like there are Japanese rappers whom I appreciate more now that I can fully understand the depth of their wordplay, than I did before. But I have no regrets about having ignored them earlier in the process, back when I was less proficient.

Your personal taste is always valid. Even if it is merely a noob taste; it is your taste right now, and that is all that matters. When I was 9 years old, I thought Tiny Toons was the height of satire and self-referential humor. So I watched it. Now I think it’s goofy. And that’s fine. I grew up, my tastes grew up. Same with you. And you’re going to be doing some mad-fast growing up. So just…keep acquiring materials, keep selecting, keep doing 取捨選択. Massive acquisition, massive rejection, massive turnover. Think of all materials in a language as existing to be cut through, leaving only materials that you like. You are a sculptor, carving out the subset of L2 that appeals to you. We’re not talking about euthanizing baby seals here, we’re talking about getting rid of crud, so feel free to be brutal.

You aren’t drawn to English stuff because of the magical beauty of your native language. You are drawn to English stuff because you already know where to find the good stuff, from years of experience. No one gets tempted away from immersion in L2, by sucky material in L1. So I am saying this — keep spending time in L2 finding, sifting for the good stuff in L2. And that means lots of taking in accompanied by lots of discarding. Do you hate that L2 show? Throw it away. Do you “vaaaaaguely sort of like” that L2 show? or feel like you “should” like it or that that might be “good for you”? Still not good enough — throw it away; keeping things out of obligation is a nasty habit; get used to interpreting “could learn to like” as “don’t like”; people who have gotten good at keeping their homes clutter-free apply the same basic principle: you don’t keep stuff you might could use, keep stuff you do use. Are you in love with this L2 show? Good. Keep it.

You might conceptualize ($10 word!) yourself as a little “fun factory” that takes in vast amounts of media as a raw materials, keeps the good ones to produce enjoyment, and throws out the crappy ones as waste. Do not be alarmed by how much you have to throw away, just keep getting new stuff. Throwing away crappy stuff is only a good thing: it opens up physical, electronic and mental space for good stuff to take its place.

That concludes this post-sized footnote. Anyone with good selection strategies, feel free to share.

The title of this post is a misnomer: I don’t know that you can both immerse yourself and avoid alienating your friends/family/roommates. But, you can help soften the blow somewhat. These are fun activities you can do with non-immersing people around you, who, as you may already be observing, can sometimes have very strange reactions to your immersion. I don’t get it — I’ve seen otherwise very cool guys become sobbing, emotional wrecks over me saying that I can’t go to a movie with them because it’s in English. Yeah…your guy friends become clingy, bipolar, high-maintenance wusspots. “Bros before hos”? Pssssh…my “bros” don’t make out with me!

Anyway…

1. Music videos

In Japanese, these are called “PV” (promotional videos); “MV” (music videos) in Chinese. Watch lots of music videos. There’s just something about the combination of music and visuals that can hold people’s attention for a really long time. People who would otherwise whine about you doing immersion in another language, somehow just get drawn in by music videos. So use them.

2. Watch L2 video with L1 subtitles

L1 would be English for most of you here, and L2 Japanese. Generally, I’m wary of the use of subs because they tend to create an illusion of comprehension, as well as (more importantly) distract from listening; I know plenty of rabid anime fans who’ve watched thousands of hours of subbed anime but don’t actually know Japanese.

But, for someone who’s not working on the language with you, watching L2 stuff can be a chore…unless and until you sub it up. So, when you have friends who don’t know, the subs don’t have to go.

3. Just Plain Music

Hey, it’s the universal language, right? Pick a style that everyone enjoys and play it up. Everyone will love Rip Slyme.

4. Food

Make people a meal. With all that stuff in their mouth they won’t be able to whine and complain about you doing immersion. You can look up the recipe in Japanese and then execute. This means you get to learn food words, too! Snap!

5. The Enemy Within? Compromising with Yourself

I, too, am still partially human. I have seen the temptation in your heart. After all, MAD TV is good for you, right? Laughter’s the best medicine, right? So watching MAD TV is nothing less than a medical necessity, right? I mean, there’s a cancer called sadness and the only cure is more cowbell, uh, comedy…right? And there’s no Daily Show in Japanese so this is all there is to go on, right?

Cut the crap.

Stop making up lame-donkey, righteous-seeming excuses to slip back into your native language. 99.9% of the reasons for not immersing are bogus. Even “burn-out” is, IMHO, almost always bogus — you’re not “burned out”, you’re just “being lame”: you need to get more creative about the immersion process. Anyone who has the mental togetherness to pronounce themselves “burned out” is simply a whiner; when you’re really burned out you’ll be trembling uncontrollably and frothing at the mouth, so chill. Find new friends, find new materials. Currently I am constantly feeding myself a stream of new Cantonese content — new videos every day, a new batch of books every few weeks, new friends every week [mostly Skype — by the way, do you like how I talk about people as if they were a commodity?…maybe I’m the cancer of sadness]. No one’s going to turn the soil for you, so you’ve got to keep it fresh.

Two techniques I use to deal with the desire to slip back into English. Credit for the first must go to Timothy Ferris.

i) Put your computer on standby or lock the workstation or whatever. Then plan and write down the next thing you’re going to do on your computer before you do it. Then do it. When you’re done, put your computer back on standby/lock and repeat. In any case, never approach a computer, especially a computer with an Internet connection, without a written agenda . This does a number of things:

a) Prevents accidentally slipping into random surfing about domestic violence by women [apparently, women are…freaking hardcore]. While it is kind of cool to be so well-read on Erin Pizzey’s research, there are other things that needed and need my attention.

b) Requires you to think about the most important thing to do, and helps you do it.　Often, the most important thing to do may be to get away from that screen for a change and read a book instead, or go play outside [armed with your trusty mp3 player, of course!]

c) Prevents you actively doing stupid, time-wasting things. Before implementing this, I would often click around my computer looking for amusement, and invariably that amusement would amount to meaningless googling or compulsive email-checking. There’s something about writing down what you’re going to do, before you do it, that just raises your accountability to yourself. I don’t know about you, but I’m embarrassed to have “surf random English websites” on my “record” as it were. So embarrassed — I know that Cantonese is my priority — that I stay immersed, i.e. away from English.

ii) 0.1% of the time, there is a legitimate reason for me to be reading English. The book Eat to Live, for example — there is no Japanese translation yet [showtime, Khatzumoto?], and I was reading this book for genuine, immediate, actionable medical reasons. At times like these, I play Japanese/Cantonese music or videos, while reading the English — very quickly.

And that concludes my tips! How have you dealt with keeping yourself immersed, and wusspotage from people close to you? Do share!