Desires and Decisions
Just to start, let me say this. I love confessing other people’s sins. You know how it is — other people are just so messed up! Other people have so much crap for me to be angry at them for. And it’s so much easier than dealing with my own stuff. I could go on for days about other people’s mistakes. In fact, I could write a whole website about it (hmmm?). Take some of my friends from Japan. They want to learn English: “Khatzumoto, teach me English”. But they spend all their time with other Japanese people, listen to Japanese music, read Japanese comics. Great for learning Japanese, absolutely useless for learning English. So I say to them, I say to my friends from Japan who want to learn English, “go to www.AntiMoon.com. Most of what I did was apply their English-learning techniques to Japanese. They know what they are talking about. It is very effective. Follow their instructions.”
Most of these friends of mine can get through the English on AntiMoon.com. Oh, they understand the English. But almost none of them do anything. Almost none of them ever download an SRS and start using example sentences. Even if I I download it for them, I swear they never use it beyond the first demonstration. They just go on with their lives, content with the idea that “English is so hard, man”. Content with buying random books about English. Content with writing shocking English. Content with doing things the way they’ve been doing them.
I know how they feel. Who wants to start something new, right? But still, I don’t get it. I mean, dang, man — what more do you want? The road has practically been laid out for you, you need but follow it! And so I used to lie there in bed, thinking “Dude, WTF?! Just do something! Learn it!! Stop whining about how it’s hard or about how school sucked or about how your dad should have accepted that posting to New York so you could have grown up speaking English or how your teacher was stupid or how English has more phonemes than letters and the whole writing system is a slimy, tangled morass of contradictions and exceptions to shaky rules and there are so many accents and dialects and sub-dialects and some people misspell on the Internet and what’s a Germanic language doing with this much Latin in it in the first place and ‘these sounds cannot be heard by the Japanese ear’ and AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”.
Other people are so messed up.
But then it hit me what the problem is. I know it’s a problem I have. I think it’s a problem we all have. It’s the difference between the people who achieve something and those who don’t. Before, I thought that the problem was that people’s desire was lacking, I even touched on it in a previous post, but perhaps that was inaccurate — or at least incomplete. Anyway, here is what I now think is the real problem.
You see, everyone has desire. Everyone wants to be good at something. Everyone wants to know a cool language, everyone wants mad kung-fu skills, computer-hacking skills…you name it. Everyone wants to be able to play a piano concerto with their eyes closed using only their big toe. So, the difference between those who do know a language, do have kung-fu/computer hacking skills — et cetera — and those who don’t must, in fact, be very small, and it is this: Those who have the skills didn’t just want to be good, they decided to be good. Want or decide — one is a wish, the other is a choice. One can get crushed, forgotten and swept away by the hectic business of everyday life; the other is inevitable — it sweeps everything out of its path, it crushes, avoids or otherwise overcomes obstacles. Like commercial breaks or uninvited missionaries, it’s always all up in your face.
So, if you want to be good, then good luck with that. If you’ve decided to be good, then gosh help anyone or anything that gets in your way!
How about you? Do you just want to be fluent in Japanese, or have you decided to be?
Anyway, enough soapboxing from me. It’s time to go back to wanting to kick rear like Bruce Lee…(sigh) those abs, man…those abs.
Read on:
Blogcheck: "Desires and Decisions" « bilingually | bilingualmente said,
May 16, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
[...] Posted by Lingo on May 16th, 2007 Another inspirational (and introspective) post by K-man on AJATT. Those who have the skills didn’t just want to be good, they decided to be good. Want or decide–one is a wish, the other is a choice. One can get crushed, forgotten and swept away by the hectic business of everyday life; the other is inevitable–it sweeps everything out of its path, it crushes, avoids or otherwise overcomes obstacles. [...]
uberstuber said,
May 17, 2007 @ 8:28 am
There is no try.
I think everybody runs into these kind of people, in all aspects of life. Yes it’s annoying, but all we can do is try.
Don’t let people discourage you, for all of the people who dismiss your advice there are those few who really are appreciative of your work.
がんばって！
JDog said,
May 19, 2007 @ 12:49 am
Sorry for this off-topic post, but since there is no place I know of to put generic posts, I thought I’d start here. Is there any way on AJATT to see the comments that YOU (the user) have posted and where they are? I get lost in trying to remember which posts I’ve commented on and where they got “filed” after they were taken out of the “Latest Stuff” section. Upon Googling I discovered a comments feed a while ago, but it looks like you made that unaccessible now, Khatz?
khatzumoto said,
May 20, 2007 @ 1:18 am
Thanks, uberstuber! I’ll stop losing sleep over it
.
khatzumoto said,
May 20, 2007 @ 1:19 am
Hey JDog: comments feed here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/comments/feed/
JDog said,
May 20, 2007 @ 10:53 am
Doh! OK, I was typing the URL in wrong. Thanks for the link.
All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » What It Takes To Be Great 2: AJATT and Malcolm McDowell’s Outliers…wait… said,
December 12, 2008 @ 10:46 pm
[...] 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.” [...]
Halcyon said,
January 13, 2009 @ 2:36 pm
People have so much more potential than they give themselves credit for and I’m generally amazed at how lazy and indifferent 80% of them are. First of all, I go to high school. As you know, traditional schooling neither fosters an appreciation for good education and rarely gives one. When I tell other kids that I don’t have cable TV they tell me “omg wtf do you do with your life?!” I used to respond to that question with “learn Japanese”, but judging from the blank stares that this incurred, I might have well have said “cull butterbur from the polyglot nation of San Francisco”. I’ve since switched to the more colloquial “learn ****” (which still comes across as a radical notion) .
So yes, this is more a rant of me being fed up with the anti-intellectual high school culture. But what frustrates me is that people don’t know what I and what you know. Instead they listen to teachers. Don’t even get me started about the education system.
Motivation to Learn | Dumb Otaku said,
February 26, 2009 @ 11:22 am
[...] specifically got to one post he made, desires and decisions, and while his post was a rehash of a lot of cliche’s, they are cliche’s because they [...]
Jonathan Mahoney said,
March 12, 2009 @ 4:47 am
That’s the spirit Halcyon. I was so close to dropping out of “school” because I wasn’t learning hardly anything. I ended up finishing it off because by the time they’d let me stop going I only have about a year left but, what an inefficient use of time. My children certainly won’t be going to public school, not in North America at least.
All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Unrealistic Expectations That You Need To Stop Having said,
May 25, 2009 @ 12:10 am
[...] not following her dreams, but barring severe physical disabilities, if you really wanted to, if it mattered enough to you, you could do it. Remember: most people drastically overestimate what they can get done in 2 days [...]
Francis said,
January 4, 2010 @ 7:01 am
You know the funny thing is, I think I only got this far into Japanese because I decided to declare it as my major my first year into college. After that, I never felt as discouraged or wanting to quit as my other classmates probably because I decided to commit four years to it and it just became something that I did, not HAAAAAAVE to do.