As time goes on, you might have outgrown wanting to be cool in the high school sense. You might have decided that your society sucked enough that you no longer cared if you became dead to it. But you still might carry some residual tendencies towards cynicism — so ingrained was the habit of being cynical.

So when a guy like Tony Robbins comes at you with that voice and that grin (that grin )…urging you to have a positive mental attitude, when Napoleon Hill tells you that “[w]hatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, when Mormon girls called Stacy _{[whose mother, I am reliably informed, has got it going on]} smile that Utah smile and offer you cookies, your knee-jerk reaction might be to go “yeah, right”, roll your eyes rather far back into your head, and proceed to dig up the dirt behind these “tricksters”. Anyone that happy has got to be hiding something, right? Or so our culture of mediocrity would have us believe.

And then there’s the (not necessarily inevitable) fact that having hope does carry the potential to set you up for disappointment — especially in the hands of a hope novice: one almost has to learn how to use hope correctly.

My personal solution to all this is to:

1. First, avoid both hope and dread — go for a flatline — and then,

2. Gently bias myself in a positive direction by simply doubting the possibility of failure. _{Sure, you don’t know if you’re going to succeed, but you don’t know if you’re going to fail either. Indeed, if you did know things with such certainty, you would be effen omniscient and you should be picking stocks or something. But you’re not. You don’t know. And since you don’t know either way, you might as well assume and act in favour of the positive. To quote Dr. Annette Goodheart (who?):}

_{“If we’re going to be miserable we might as well enjoy ourselves [and] laugh.”}

So, this sometimes air-headed and always hard-to-sustain “YEEEEEEAAAAH!!! I’M GONNA DO IT, BABY!!!!” idea, is replaced with a calmer, easier “well, I’m certainly not going to fail” orientation. A strange sort of acceptance of positive inevitability. Or something to that effect. This is kind of hard for me to put into words.

More concretely, in terms of acquiring a language, what I’m trying to say is: don’t force yourself to succeed or produce or demonstrate or even to persevere. Give that up. Instead, if it suits you, you might try taking a more laid-back approach of “well, I’m going to dig up some soil, and plant some seeds, and put in some fertilizer and water, and then see what happens”, “I’m going to sow, and see what I reap”. It’s not quite “wait and see”, since that might not get you anywhere, it’s more a “do and see“, an “act and see“.

Do your work and see what happens. Don’t try to force the results; they will come when they come. No matter what you do, at some level, results are always outside your full, direct control. But action never is. You can always do the right thing _{[and if you don’t know what the right thing is, then the right thing might be to go find out what the right thing is]}; you can always take the/a right action.

Always. No matter what situation you are in, there is always something you can do. In extreme cases, the the thing to do might be to get out of the current situation. In most cases, it’s as simple as open the book, turn on the TV, plug in the earphones.

Something. Anything.

So why did I get to thinking this? Well, I CAN WATCH AND UNDERSTAND VIRTUALLY ANYTHING ON HONG KONG TV NOW !(T+19 months) Violent triad movies, weird accents, regular TV news, parody news, phone prank shows, Korean-made documentaries about the history of noodles…bring it. In some cases I read the Chinese subs quite a bit for confirmation, but this simply shows how fast a reader I’ve become — I used to be unable to make it across even half a subpicture before it changed…now I can read it 1.5 ~ 2 times in that same brief time window. In short,  my input is almost a Jedi, though my output be at youngling level.

And the weird thing is…I was barely even trying. Not really. I mean, yeah, I have Cantonese TV and movies playing close to 24/7 in my house, and put a laptop in the kitchen so I can watch things like The Simpsons Movie _{(that’s right, son, there’s a Canto dub…Marge, Lisa, Bart and Flanders’ voices are dead on; Homer’s is “re-interpreted” slightly, but I never liked his original voice anyway)} while washing dishes, and I have Chinese comics in the restroom, and Chinese newspapers pasted all over my walls, and Chinese books permanently sitting in my manbag ready to go anywhere I do, and…yeah…and stuff. But once you get those things set up, it’s almost all just a matter of, how you say in the simple English…sitting back and watching. Once you do set up and maintain the right environment, all that’s left is to show up…to exist.

So…just do it already. But don’t wait and worry and weep and wail and gnash your teeth over results. Don’t act like a desperate stalker, always watching, always trying to get the phone number, always trying to get to second base, always asking Mummy if you’re there yet. Sitting by the door checking the clock every five seconds is not going to make the FedEx lady (yeah, my neighbourhood FedEx guy is a girl) come any quicker. Just be cool. The results will call you when they’re ready. They always call . You need only act; you need only plant; you need only keep walking — sooner or later _{[later than you would wish, but sooner than you would fear]} the destination will practically be forcing itself into your face.

If you can’t be motivated, don’t be _{[I can’t]}. If you can’t feel passion _{[I hate this word]}, don’t. Just be curious instead. Just keep sowing instead.

All this consulting and FAQing and emailing and commenting have taught me a thing or two. A lot of people have a lot of questions, particularly fine, detailed, low-level questions.

My personal preference up until now has been to write at a more abstract level, both in order to stay more universal and also in order to not bog people down with minutiae. Moreover, I hate being told what to do, and a lot of AJATT comes down to “just go out there by yourself and play”.

However, those action-level techniques do have a place and do have value. And, as you might expect, I’ve definitely accumulated my fair share of these over time.

One other thing that I’ve observed is that some people (at least claim to ) read through all the articles indexed over at the Table of Contents, but still come out confused as to what to do: “OK, so where do I start?” And, to be fair, I would probably be in the exact same position as them. There is enough information now on this site to fill hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand, pages of a normal book. There’s a lot to go through.

So, in my boundless magnanimity, in my universal love for humanity, in my mother-like kindness, I have taken it upon myself to use these fingers and this computer, to create magic, to create…a QRG.

QRG: an action-oriented, technique-focussed Quick Reference Guide to AJATT in the form of an ebook. How do you do the hirigana and the sentances and kanjis? How do you do the emersion? [sic]. How do you do use monolingual dictionaries? How do you sentence-pick? It’s AJATT condensed into a single package for AJATTeers at virtually every stage of the process, from beginners, to phase-transitioners to high-flyers looking for new games and challenges.

The guide itself is basically written up and ready to go, but before releasing it, I would love to part-take of your wisdom, your advice, your experiences, your requests, your suggestions. What do you need to know? What do you wish someone had told you? What would/do you as a user-reader want out of a guide like this?

Comments are wide open. Let your voice be heard, and cetera!

Hi Khatz!

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

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

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

Thanks for your answer!

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

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

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

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

I am kind of undisciplined.

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

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

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

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

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

Skin going all wrinkly and junk…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Mark Twain is said to have once said:

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

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

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

Immersion Responsibility is a Two-Way Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both Active and Passive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

To conclude:

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

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

“Hey Khatsumodo! Love teh method! Your righting iz rully motuvashonul! I’ve been running my Japanese OS for 4 hours now, but i don’t feel much change! Hehe. Lolz!”

“Hey! I really love all your talk about immersion! I don’t know kanji yet but I picked up a Japanese dictionary today but I couldn’t understand anything!!! Is this normal??? It’s too hard! Maybe I’m just not good at languages!!! Do I have to do Heisig? But how will I learn readings and grammar?”

I’ve been working with your method for almost six months now, and although I’m doing the things you talk about on your website, and putting a lot of time into stud*ying, it still seems like something’s not quite right.*

OK. Now’s it’s time for a little section of AJATT that I like to call “REALLY? With Khatzumoto”.

Really. What the heck did you think was really going to happen within hours of you changing your OS to Japanese? I mean, really!? Really! Did you think your hitherto dormant Japanese midichlorians would instantly fire up at the sight of kanji and you’d start having friggin’ Russel Crowe Beautiful Mind moments in Japanese with equations and primitives and radicals spinning through the air? Really!

And really. Did you really think that you were going to open up a dictionary on day 1, read that 何 means ある代表的な物･事をあげ､その他のいろいろな物･事を省略して一まとめにしてさす語, and then be nodding your head in satisfied comprehension? Really?!

Really?! Did you really think that just because in The Thirteenth Warrior Antonio Banderas learned Old Norse in five minutes one night while sitting around a campfire with red-headed guys called Sven, that you could simply put in a couple of hours more effort than him, watch a Miyazaki movie or two and BAM! next morning you’re writing the following year’s effen Naoki Prize winner and Kadokawa is on the phone talking about $50,000,000 advance for the sequel and Toho want distribution rights for the live action movie starring Ken Watanabe? I mean, really? REALLY? You realize Tom Cruise’s Japanese in Last Samurai sucked, right? Even after a multi-million dollar five-minute Hollywood crash course!

What were you thinking? What was going through your mind? Where did you expect to be, and who told you to expect to be there, and what gave you the impression that that was a reasonable expectation to have?

REALLY?!

I’ll tell you what you were thinking. I’ll tell you what was going through your mind. I’ll tell you where you’re going so horribly, catastrophically wrong. Let me tell you about the left turn you missed at Albuquerque.

There is a fallacy lodged in most people’s minds that tells them that “performance on the first trial is a good predictor of performance on the 10,000th”. Well, bollocks. It isn’t. If nothing else, at a purely mathematical level, depending on the definition of points, a single data point is an unacceptably small statistical sample on which to base any judgment about anything.

I’m not saying not to do sampling — we do it all the time; perhaps we even need it survive — when you take a sip from a cup to determine how hot the entire drink is, you are sampling. But this assumes that heat is evenly distributed throughout the liquid. When the cup is the size of a language, and every learning method is like a non-turntable microwave, then expect that a sip after two seconds of heating, generally, tells you jack squat. And this, by the way, is why the US has a 50%+ divorce rate, because most people in the US use a marvelously intricate, painstakingly delicate and utterly useless mate-sampling system called “dating”, to select partners for a completely different system called “life” (‡taken from my forthcoming book: Baseless Remarks About Complex Social Phenomena II)

But when we see a baby fall do we tell her to quit this walking thing while she’s ahead and let the “more athletic” Afro-Carribean babies do it? When we hear our baby ga-ga-goo-goo unintelligbly, do we have her euthanized because she sounds like a retard? When she drools, do we beat her senseless because that’s just gross?

Well, that’s what you would be doing to yourself if you were to give up at this point. You would be euthanizing the nascent Japanese version of yourself because he sucked the first time.

But adults “euthanize” themselves and each other all the time. If that new, magic Solution To The Problem they paid $200 for doesn’t work, adults will mercifully “kill” the nascent Japanese child inside them, with soothing appeals to “I’m too old for this” and “I just lack talent” and the all-time favorite — “I don’t have the time” — never having given her a real chance to grow. We adults are quick to accuse small children of impatience, when in fact we are the impatient ones and the children simply lack a sense of time altogether.

You could suck at tennis right now; you could be the worst kid there on your first day. But if you simply racked up enough trials to form a sufficient statistical sample, you could get really good, and if you went even further, you could go on to surpass Pete Sampras. Realistically, though, you won’t surpass Sampras because you’re a whiner who finds excuses for 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 and drastically underestimate what they can get done in 2 years.

But who wants to go that far? Screw it. Go on. Give up. Give in. Kill babies. You might as well. They’re ugly and hairless and useless anyway.

What’s that? You don’t want to be a baby-killer any more? OK, let’s help you work with that. Remember how Michael Jordan missed over 9000 shots in NBA games alone? Think about what that means — it means that this man missed more shots than most people take in their entire lives. This is the arithmetic of success: conduct so many trials that the number of errors you experience exceeds most people’s lifetime trialcounts. This is  the meaning of aiming to fail.

I read a great quote the other day:

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re about average.

No one in all of human history has been born comprehending the real text of any language on their first try. Why were you supposed to be the first? But at the same time, all who have continued, and put thousands and thousands of hours into it, have gone on not only to comprehend text but in many cases to create text themselves. I bet if I’d thrown you an English newspaper when you were two years old — after two solid years of constant exposure to English — you’d have been hard-pressed to even hold it the right way up.

All of which is a very longwinded way of saying: Push the continue button and play another round. The absolute worst thing you could do is not to fail, not to look stupid, but to run away from real Japanese. Stay. Stay. Stay. The Japanese Fairy does not visit those who flee. The Mastery Fairy hates baby-killers. The longer you stay, the more certain your victory; it’s that simple.

And this is why this thing has to be fun, because it will be relatively long and because it will be constant “failure”, of a sort. You can’t push your way through it, you have to find a way of making it pull you along. I leave you with the sage words of a young man named Ryan:

if your study of Japanese [hurts], YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG!

*Sincerest apologies to T-star for singling him out like this and lumping his very legitimate question with the other two — which aren’t real, in the sense of actually having been written by other people, but are very realistic in terms of reflecting a composite of actual emails I have received and I kid you not about the spelling — and sincerest thanks to him for being such a good sport about it! You, sir, are a gentleman and an AJATT hero!

Since the AJATT Consulting has received such a positive response over these past several months, and has been so much fun to do, I’ve decided to expand the service by offering several new, low-cost options, including live-chat, in addition to the original high-value bulk packs. For more details, visit the Consulting page of the AJATT Store.

Oh yeah, what else — you need this to be happy and popular. Buy it.

Also, look out for some cool new articles in the coming week , discussing some key issues facing all language-acquirers.

For what, indeed, are you waiting? Visit the AJATT Store to-day! Everyone’s doing it.

You probably get from this blog that I take issue with school and what it does to people. One of the things that happens in school is people are often forced to compete against one another in games of dubious intrinsic significance and even more dubious post-scholastic significance. When schoolkids do cooperate, they do so only in superficial, preset ways — anyone who’s ever had the teacher pick your class groups knows the kind of thing I’m talking about. Why was the learning-disabled kid always in my group? Yes, I said “retard”. How else do you describe a white kid who doesn’t like rap music? ALL white kids of sound mind like rap music! What, you think I like it because I’m black? NO! I was raised in a white neighborhood in Africa: that’s just how stuff goes down, son [faux-gangsta hand gestures]!

Another thing many schools have is an aversion to technology that reduces work — calculators, spell-checkers…[except in cases where Casio or TI used copious quantities of hookers and blow to bribe the local school board into pushing graphing calcs on the students…hey, even teachers need their hookers and blow, plus there are worse things to push].

So I never felt it right to put down the various mass-sentence collection initiatives out there. And I still don’t. In fact, I think they’re a great thing in that they potentially reduce some gruntwork…To the extent they represent selfless, well-intentioned teamwork, I think they could well be a great thing.

But, they do not remove your responsibility to be selective. As the saying goes, you can delegate tasks but not responsibility. In fact, due to the quantity of pre-prepared sentences involved; the responsibility to be selective is only increased a thousandfold, no a myriadfold, no, as many folds as there are grains of sand in the eyelashes of all the camels in Japan, yazalami. Think about it — when you’re working by hand, you are limited by your time and ability to concentrate. But when the input’s already been done for you, the opportunities to fill your SRS with duds multiply by hundreds and maybe even thousands. So you must become a professional weeder.

For the purposes of SRSing, weeding/selectivity is a synonym for both “delete” and “do not insert in the first place” (although, the emphasis is on the “delete; there’s no need to bother avoiding mistakes if they can be corrected later for free). If you don’t like an item, throw it out. If an item looks at you wrong, throw it out. If you just can’t be bothered with an item…throw it out. If you feel “meaah”, throw it out. Even if you’re just a beginner but you sense there might be an error, throw it out. If your favorite sports team loses, throw it out. If you’re marching in the Army and you feel something funny, throw it out. Throw out sentences for cosmetic reasons. Don’t worry about false positives — there’s plenty more where those came from. You are precious; your enjoyment is precious; maybe even the process is precious, but the individual sentences are not.

Also…pre-mined sentences are definitely for outgrowing. Unless and until they start cutting sentence items with text and audio and video clips from authentic native sources. Funnily enough, this is starting to happen (this article has been in a half-written state for many months, so things change). iKnow are kinda sorta moving in this direction, and the new program subs2srs is a promising development.

Anyway, for now, it’s a fine, fine line. And you don’t need me to walk it for you; remember, I’m not a linguist or anything, I’m just the most handsome man on the entire Internet. So… have fun with it, and remember…the delete button is your friend.

Personally, I haven’t found pre-mined SRS items to carry enough of the je ne sais quoi weirdness that is the staple of my life…but this may be a temporary problem. Keep in mind that I am old man of sorts; I have my way of doing things now. It may just be the inertia of well-formed habit that keeps me doing things my way. Or it may in fact be the case that SRS cards that one makes oneself sit in the memory better, complete with the context in which the information was originally found — this lack of context definitely looms quite large. But, really, I don’t know.

Is the SRS alone enough? I want it to be. Fundamentally, I believe that every large problem can be solved through good systems…A good system gives us a way to connect tiny local actions into a larger global goal or solution. But in my experience with and observation of purely SRS-centric, low-immersion language learners, I have yet to see good results. I have seen people spin their wheels just dry-SRSing themselves into oblivion, avoiding immersion, with its rough edges and frequent lack of certainty, like a drunk salaryman on the train. I hesitate to hypothesize, but I think it’s safe to say that high-concentration, high-quantity exposure to engaging (=fun) native materials is a far better overall predictor of fluency than SRSing.

One thing that attracts me to SRSing is the feeling of quantitative progress. So I decided to find myself an easy way to get this feeling in areas other than SRSing. This month, I’m watching 100 unique Cantonese movies — not not counting repeats or other exposure materials such as the news, cartoons, regular TV shows, books and so on. I cut away boring parts ruthlessly. Some movies I repeat all day, some I sample, skip and skim through in one minute before discarding. But more on this in a future post.

As things stand right now, the immersion environment is still the foundation and center of the process. SRS acts like a glue and bridge. The SRS ensures that information from the environment is not lost, again acting as a sealing agent of sorts and a bridge into a more free-wheeling, on-the-fly enjoyment and use of the language [memorizing information can free up brain cycles you can then use for having more fun]. In any case, what’s real is the environment; the environment is the real world; real stuff by and for native users. If you run away from that, trying to escape to the comforting (?), sometimes familiarly school-like arms of your SRS, then you are, in a sense, running away from reality. Not to mention the fact that there are parts of every language that fall between the cracks of deliberate attempts to record and collect that language, but that are a very real everyday part of it. In no language does this seem more true than Japanese. Indeed, some Japanese people can seem intent on keeping you away from the language as it is actually used, but I imagine the same could be said of patronizing speakers of any language.

Or something. I am now theorizing. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Please don’t treat me like an authority, or imagine that I think I am one. The ultimate authority on your language process is you. Take advice, take in opinions, but know that in the present day and age, your best guide is your own process of play. Yes, play. Call it “trial and error”, if you want to feel more “grown-up” about it. But know that, really, it’s just play. Screwing around.

As an erudite forum critic of mine once pointed out that I don’t even follow my own advice. And it’s true: I don’t. Insofar as I am frequently making tweaks and changes to the sails of the ship in order to make better use of the winds of reality, I literally do not follow my own advice. Ultimately, there is no AJATT “system”, or at least I do not want there to be. I merely presented it as a system to make it easier to digest, to make it seem more concrete and less flaky, but what is ultimately more important than any detail of implementation is the idea that you can do this on your own, having fun, simply by becoming what you want to be Later by turning into it Right Here and Now — there are tools that can help you do this, but they’re all disposable, to be discarded the moment a truly superior alternative shows itself. Here, superiority is as much relative as it is absolute. A “superior” tool can’t just be objectively better, it must also fulfill certain subjective criteria.

Anyway, SRSing feels like it’s just now starting to take off…But, things are developing at an exciting pace. There may very soon come a day when a single product has all the tools in one box, everything you need for fluency in a language. But not yet. Not yet…Not freaking yet. I am many things, but I am not a Luddite; I honestly want everything to be in one box. But there is no such box. A lot of people with boxes want to tell you they have it. They don’t.

The SRS is easily one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. And this series has been about how to use an SRS. Abandoning the SRS altogether would be like, I dunno, throwing out one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. It’s like abandoning electric lights because “they’re too bright and they cut me” — yeah, if you stare directly into them at point blank range, then you’ll just end up seeing stars, and if you crack the glass and rub the tungsten filaments on your naked eyeballs, it might itch a bit. And if you pour the mercury into your evening after-dinner libation and drink it, then, you might turn into a white kid who doesn’t like rap music. But if take those same electric lights, and shine them on books, then you can read the best comics in the very dead of night.

An SRS will simply harm and blind you if you don’t use it sensibly; if you try to beat yourself with it, it’ll hurt. But, used correctly, i.e. with judicious attention to fun and immersion, it can help bring you, at the very least, literacy in Japanese or Chinese or whatever else, in far less time and with far less effort than you ever thought possible.

So use one. Just don’t be used by one.

In my eagerness to give people an easy series of steps to follow, I fear I may have done the world a disservice. I use the SRS; I have it do work for me that I would otherwise have to do [dynamically sorting 15,000 paper flashcards into dated boxes? are you kidding me?]; it is my secretary; it schedules my reviews so I don’t have to. I wouldn’t walk into any language unarmed with an SRS. But for too many people SRSing has become the main course. For too many people…following the instructions on this site ever more accurately has become the main course. The problem is not so much with the individual actions as with the overall subtext of submission. Which makes me wonder…

Why do we so carefully pick out clothes, food and TV channels…but not ideas? Surely we can all agree to like Subway sandwiches, but decide to use different fillings and not get too worked up over the presence or absence of olives? If you want to know if the SRS card format you’re thinking of will work…why not just go and try playing with different formats? Play. There is no “fail” in “play”. Don’t ask me whether stuff will work; I don’t know and I don’t care. Don’t look for my approval or anyone else’s. Think about it — if I or anyone else thought what you were suggesting doing were correct, we would be doing it ourselves. Discovery (frequently? only?) happens where you go against what everyone is saying, go against the grain and into new territory. Don’t be afraid; don’t explain yourself; don’t argue; just go.

Did you know that whenever you ask me whether not doing something will work or not, a puppy dies of cancer? Again, think about it — if I’d spent my time experimenting with what happened when I didn’t do something, then the site would be called “Various Experiments Involving The Selective Exclusion Of One Or More Parameters In Self-Directed Acquisition of Japanese Dot Com”. But it isn’t; I had no time for that. The only technique I used was maximizing enjoyable Japanese exposure time such that it asymptotically approached 24 hours/day. That’s the only style I am “qualified”, as it were, to give advice on.

So do your own thing. Listen to your feelings. As Southern California as that sounds, really listen. When something is boring, either make it un-boring, or just don’t effen do it; it’s that simple: Do = No. Listen to your “FUNDAR” (Fun Detection And Ranging). Respect your own preferences. Don’t do crap you don’t feel like doing just because someone else says to. Choose. Keep what works, lose what doesn’t, and have fun no matter what. You can get the task of acquiring proficiency in a language done, anyone can. But you don’t have to suffer boredom to do it.

The tools and methods I mentioned on this site were and are heavily customized to my unique preferences and situation. I still think they will work for many, perhaps even most people. But if they don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you have to give up; it doesn’t mean you have to eat Chocolate Frosted Whining Flakes for breakfast for the rest of your life; it doesn’t mean you have to make up a new theory about certain ethnic groups having fast-twitch muscles for language assimilation — it simply means that there’s a different path out there for you. Your task is to find or cut out that path. Only you can do this. And, no, the Whining Flakes will not give you energy for the journey, so you can leave them at home.

Remember: I did not use the SRS (or RTK, or whatever tool) because some Cosmic Law Written Down On Stone Tablets That I Done Picked Up On A Random Peninsularly-Situated Mountain In The Middle East required me to do so, I did it because it was, on balance, the simplest, laziest and funnest solution to a specific, persistent, overarching problem — memory decay. In other words, the tools filled a need. If you have no need, then you need no tool. In fact, I might as well tell you, I had originally thought of writing AJATT in a more gradual, oblique, “mysterious” way, where people would only be introduced to tools once they understood why they might need them. But it was easier to just lay it all out. In any case, if you don’t understand why things like SRS, RTK or RTH are useful, and you’re feeling oppressed by them, then do yourself a favor and don’t use them — no one’s forcing you to. A method cannot merely be quantitatively effective in order to “work”, it must also be qualitatively tolerable, or better yet, enjoyable. Go your own way, and you may discover methods you like better, that don’t involve these tools at all. Or you may struggle and stumble along and finally realize how cool these tools are. Or you may take a path somewhere down the middle, mixing and matching [I imagine a good number of people will fit in here].

Or something…I dunno…just quit asking me . Stop asking permission from people who never had the authority to give it to you in the first place; stop asking for directions from people who’ve never been there. In all likelihood, there are no directions and there is no road: you may just be the First. You’re on your own. Enjoy the freedom.

Thanks for reading, check back soon for the series finale.

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

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

To which I responded as follows, but in Japanese:

My dearest, most precious T-star,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway…

Have fun.

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

[P.S.

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

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

Because the folks at Pimsleur have figured out a way to teach you Cantonese in ten days.

TEN DAYS! That’s less time than it takes to lose a guy! Screw this immersion crap! Get me one, no, two boxes of the ten day stuff! In fact, get one for all my friends!

And fries! And some diet pills to slim down with after the fries! From now on, I’ma “learn like a spy!” and “pass for a native”. Ten days, be arch!

See ya!

What does this mean? It means, to paraphrase Anthony, son of Robbins, that: massive failure is the key to success. Michael of Jordan said it himself:

The Ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Glóin, by any craft that we here possess. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Even some random guy from some random organization called International Business Machines said it:

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade.

Now, I’ve heard all these quotes so many times that they don’t really grab me any more when I read them, but let me illustrate using my favorite person — me — as an (yes, I am that narcissistic) example.

At this writing, my KhatzuMemo stats indicate that since New Year’s Day 2007, I have done about 58000 flashcard reps with a retention rate of about 91%, where retention = a rep score of 3 or above. Sounds respectable enough. But, you realize that what this means is that I have failed to correctly read and/or comprehend a Japanese sentence item at least 5200 times over the course of two years and change — can you imagine tagging those end to end to end to end in a video (that would make a pretty cool “lowlight reel”)?! More than five thousand failures. I’ve been wrong more times than there are stars in the sky visible to the naked eye [someone please check this]. I’m just saying: that’s a lot of fails. And if we (royal “we”) were to start counting from 2004, it would be about 100,000 reps with a similar 90-95% retention rate — that means something on the order of ten thousand failures. That’s ten thousand times I couldn’t correctly read or understand a sentence or phrase in Japanese: I am a failure.

And yet, I am very comfortable with both written and spoken Japanese. I can read, write, understand or say whatever I want or need to. I just got done doing all my taxes without a hitch. Clearly, this scale of failure helped. You’ll forgive the focus on SRSing, it’s just that it’s something that’s easy to measure and therefore compare quantitatively.

Robbins goes on to discuss the number of times Walter Elias Disney was rejected by banks when he wanted funding for some goofy idea about a studio making full-length cartoons, and the number of times Sylvester Stallone was rejected when peddling the script for some kind of adult-oriented movie involving interracial pairings of sweaty, half-naked men touching each other with leather gloves in front of excited crowds of people. Most people would have given up.

Of course, it goes beyond Hollywood…I have friends who won’t go ice-skating with me because they’re afraid of falling. They have fallen 0 times. 0 failures. They have never failed at skating. But they also can’t skate…at all. In fact, I imagine the best skaters have also fallen the most times.

Arguably, a lot of our fear of failure most likely stems from how schools punish it. Schools promote avoidance of failure. This is a recipe for mediocrity. No meaningful success seems to come without hearty doses of failure. Failure needs to be celebrated. It needs to be sought actively. Failure is what needs to be for dinner. I love blaming everything on school. But then, most of us did spent the greater part of our waking lives from toddlerhood to early adulthood either in school or in preparation to go to school or travelling to and from school or doing homework for school; schools have plenty to answer for; they can’t bait with compulsory attendance and then switch to learner-parent responsibility forever; they can’t keep waiting until someone gets killed and then feign shock at the “discovery” that they’re a breeding ground for violence (am I the only one who thinks that school shootings are actually surprisingly rare?) Off topic. Anyway…

So how can you start failing? I think the thing is simply to find something you can crank at. Find or build a mechanism that allows you to fail a lot. Perhaps three figures minimum, possibly and preferably 4, 5, 6, maybe even 7+. Chances are, this mechanism will also allow you to succeed — in fact, it’s more or less guaranteed to bring you success…eventually.

In life, whether it’s learning a language, building a blog, doing research, applying for jobs (if that’s your thing), trying to get good at shooting basketballs or even doing whatever it is people do to get into…romantic entanglements, many people — especially beginners — go for the surgical strike, because they’re so afraid of screwing up. There’s just one flaw with the surgical strike plan: only a surgeon can do surgery — only a highly trained expert with a matured skillset can even hope for a decent result on such paltry time resources. How do you get a matured skillset? By failing. Generally, it would seem that only someone who’s missed tons of shots gets to hit consistently. Also, at the risk of adding too many parenthetic asides, actual surgeons of the medical persuasion obviously deal in situations where, how you say in the simple English, failure is not cheap. Then again, I did see something once about robotic “practice patients” for medical students, so clearly there are efforts being made to make failure cheaper for them, implying that they are also, in essence, trying to fail into success.

As a beginner, trying to go for that surgical strike is akin to giving a newborn baby an NES controller and saying: “you have 15 minutes to beat Mario…or else you will never amount to anything, you lachrymatory ball of fat!”. It’s as if beginners were a novice sniper trying to hit a single target using their first and only bullet; that’s how most people right now tend to operate. But that’s only a viable option if you’re statistically a really good shot, which, almost by definition, a beginner is not [no statistics to go off of]. Unfortunately, failure to recognize the value of failure happens in sports all the time: too many people judge and are judged based on their first performance — how many egos have been crushed (not mine, but…people I know) because of using such a ridiculously small and downward-skewed sample? How many doors have been closed to figurative newborn babies? How many Michael Jordans get cut from high school teams?

In middle school, I can remember how in both P.E. classes and inter-school sports teams, the time, attention and resources were disproportionately concentrated on boys and girls who were hitting puberty at 11, and the rest of you kids with your slow-growing bodies could just bugger off, even though our parents were all paying the same tuition (the sports was not a business — no TV revenue or scholarships like NCAA, not even an effect on enrollment).

Now, why this middle school business still bugs me more than 10 years after the fact, is because the deafeningly loud silent lesson it taught was that effort didn’t matter and there was no such thing as meaningful development and improvement over time; only genetic predisposition mattered; only being 11 years old and having facial hair mattered. It was Gattaca Lite.

At some level, I can understand the school coaches’ problem — they needed to make a winning team as quickly as possible…but, again, that’s not really doing school any more, if only because nothing profound is being learned; that’s more of a professional/club thing where the focus is on execution. As a compromise, a dual sports system might work, with a “we’re gonna use you now” short-term competition-centered section for freakishly large children, and a “build your skills now for the future” long-term training-centered section for children who like sports but aren’t yet big enough to be “useful”. Kind of a “separate but equal”…waitaminute!! They did kind of try something like that by having multiple teams per age group, but the resource distribution was insulting; remember: everyone was paying the same overpriced tuition and the sports teams neither made money nor contributed to name-brand recognition…yet somehow the “lower” teams were invariably put on The Fields That The Groundskeeper Forgot, using equipment that had been oh-so-delicately aged to perfection by the finely tuned athletic machines of the Higher Teams. Where’s Linkin Park and a razor blade when you need them…

Anyway, in less violent/jocky terms, letting go of the surgical-strike philosophy means: don’t try to write a magnum opus if you can’t even write an opus. Don’t try to write a novel if you can’t even write a short story. Don’t try to run a marathon when you can’t even run around the block yet (whoops…got jocky again).

It doesn’t take too much perception to see that the key with failing this much is you need to make it cheap. Time-cheap, money-cheap, effort-cheap and emotion-cheap. So each round needs to be short, not cost a lot, not take too much energy, and not be too crushing to the old dignity [on the dignity, you may just have to let go of your pride; this has always been very hard for me to do, but if the goal is worth reaching, then in some cases it might be worth eating humble pie for; my pride is usually set to off when it comes to languages — I try to mentally revert to the state of a toddler, where curiosity supersedes pride]. Maybe this cheapness is another reason why small, short, winnable games are so good: A short game can be played many times –> many failures –> lots of success

According to the man himself in The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Moore, the best comics writer in the English language before me (why are you making that face?! wot iz that face?) — started out writing 4-page comic stories. Said he:

“I learned my craft doing very short stories, 3 or 4 pages each, which is an excellent way to learn writing of any sort.”

Even Moore-sensei’s early stories were likely unbefitting what we’ve come to expect of the Alan Moore legend. Knowing what we now know it would probably be easy to see or trick ourselves into seeing, the Moore mojo unfolding, but if we were to look at them “blind”, my gut tells me we’d be somewhat rather unimpressed. Anyway, my point is, he had something he could crank. He had something he could fail at over and over and over again. He had a mechanism he could grind himself on until he got to razor-sharp perfection. He practiced with 4-page stories but matured into a graphic novelist just as you practice with phrases, sentences and pages as you gradually grow into a fully-fledged reader of your L2.

Mojo is made rather than born. I remember one time, I was at a gaijin friend’s house, arranging Internet service for him over the phone in Japanese, and then I hung up, and he and his roommates, having heard the entire exchange, decided that I had a “talent” for the language. And, frankly, I think I do, too; in fact, if you ignore minor details like how I once turned my entire life into a Japanese camp and spent all my disposable income on Japanese materials and severed any human relationship that significantly conflicted with doing Japanese and ate cake with chopsticks and slept with headphones on just-to-make-sure, then…yes…it was pure talent.

*Not a positive example, but this massive failure business, by the way, is why spam works. Spam has found a mechanism that allows it to fail on a massive scale, this mechanism is called: “email is fast and free, motherlovers”, and what a wonderful mechanism it is. Can you imagine the indignity of paying for email? Forget them apples. Now, most people aren’t going to buy into those…how can we be delicate about this…”organ enhancement” medications they sell in spam, even if I, I mean, my friend, needed them, which he doesn’t, but IF he did, he wouldn’t buy them. But someone somewhere always does. When you send out, what, a million emails a day — 365 million emails a year, son — you’re bound to get someone to bite, as long as the probability isn’t 0 (and in life, the probability is almost never 0 or 1), then you are guaranteed that you’ll get someone to buy your spam product even if I, I mean, my friend, were just buying those pills as a joke and didn’t really need them and was just testing the system. For our theoretical spammer, even if 99.99% of these 365 million theoretical emails fail, that’s still 365,000 theoretical customers in the bag. That’s 365,000 people willing to pay ca$h money for the pills they need to (theoretically) bliss her out with their weapon of mass expulsion.

All this talk about massive failure = success…is exciting when we’re talking about it here in the squeaky-clean, theoretical Lalaland we can create for ourselves in the brief window of time where we’re reading and writing a post, but back in the real world, when you actually fail you don’t necessarily feel so good; we’re not trained to be excited by that sort of thing. And perhaps it’s for the best that we aren’t — what a bitter, Greek-tragedy-on-steroids irony it would be to instantly dislike or fail to recognize the success you had worked for. My personal solution is to largely ignore the immediate failure-point at hand, and get excited about the overall process-function [of failing massively]; that’s how I stay excited and keep going. Individual failure-points are easy to feel bad about; as soon as they pass, ignore them. Let go of them and focus on the next round. You don’t think MS are still having crying fits and sleepless nights over “Microsoft Bob“, do you?

…Laughing fits, maybe.

Having said all that, AntiMoon’s advice to “shut up before you hurt yourself” (which morphed into my advice to “shut up until it comes out correct and naturally by itself”) still holds. Personal developmenty advice of the kind that is the subject of this post can seem to run into contradictions because it’s so broadly applicable that nobody bothers to provide more rigid domain definition; suffice it to say that significant exceptions and counter-examples of virtually every principle exist; they may be rare, but they do exist; try not to go emo when you run into one. Think of these ideas as one of many tools in your toolbox; they work really well in some cases and not so well in others.

Anyway, enough talk! 問答無用! Time for you and I both to hurry up and get failing. And when people tell you to stop it because it won’t work and you’re crazy, as they probably will, you can think of Thomas Watson’s words:

[Dude.] A [homie] flattened by an opponent can get up again. A [homie] flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Oh yeah — I would love to read your suggestions for little games to fail at, or links to similar discussions, so please feel free to share them.

And so, no matter how organized(-looking) I got on the outside, I always knew: “Khatzumoto, you’re not The Man; you done ain’t got nothin’, homeboy. You can’t even keep your dishes under control.” I knew….Oh, I knew.

I knew…

In life, we are often terribly concerned with outcomes. We’re always trying to get somewhere…Sometimes that makes sense. And things like intermediate goals can be very useful. But often, if the goal is too far away, or the task is cyclical, perhaps it makes less sense to focus on where we’re going, and more sense to focus on how we’re getting there.

“Outcomeism” and “resultism” often lead to short-sightedness, stress and even ethical lapses. Result-orientedness is not a bad thing at all, many areas need more of it — Japan’s overworked adults need it injected intravenously right now — but many areas also need less of it. I submit to you that more often than not, our real concern should not be outcomes or goals or products but processes. (Bruce Schneier in the hizzouse).

In simple mathematical terms, instead of aiming for a number, a value, a point like 0, or 1, or 100, such as:

• Number of dishes in sink = 0
• Exam score = 100
• P(Japanese fluency) = 1

Perhaps we should aim instead to construct a (continuous) function, a trend…a habit.

Rather than try to get your sink empty, try to build a livable system that ensures a net reduction over time in the number of dishes in your sink. Such that the net difference in the number of dishes between two reasonably distant points in time, t[i] and t[j], is negative.

Rather than try to ace this one exam through a caffeine-aided, Herculean feat of short-term memory, try to find a process that allows you to not only ace any exam, with just a little work every day [SRS], but also ace life in terms of actually remembering the information you are paying so much money for (in terms of books or school fees or whatever).

Rather than try to become fluent in a language, try to build a process that increases over time the quantity of language X that you can comprehend and produce. Or, put another away, build a process that decreases your ignorance of language X over time (why the negative rewording? Because this turns an uphill “mountain-climbing” style process into a downhill “sleigh ride” one — and insofar as there is a real forward momentum/inertia involved in most of the processes that matter to us, the downhill/snowballing metaphor is actually more accurate than the mountain one…too/many/slashes).

The problem with our point-centric way of achieving goals and dreams and whatever-word-is-now-most-fashionable-for-”the prize”…is just that — it’s a “point”. It’s a single moment. Ipso facto, everything other than that point, every moment not spent at that point is a moment of failure. Every moment your sink is not empty, is a moment of filth and squalor. Anything that isn’t overtly and directly connected to acing the exam becomes a waste of time. Every second you are not fluent in Japanese, you are a n00b. Every day that isn’t your birthday sucks. Every day that isn’t your wedding day isn’t happy.

These are not happy feelings to be carrying around. This is a sucky way to live. Especially since the time outside the success point constitutes the majority of your life.

There is a better way. There is a way to ace without being anal, to succeed without suffering. Why not turn your masochistic uphill struggle into a playground slide? Just like at kindergarten! Steve Pavlina talked about it on his site, and Neil Fiore said it in the Now Habit: stop trying to finish tasks, focus on starting them instead…start enough times and the finishing will all take care of itself.

When everything is a function, then life turns from a struggle into a slide…In a sense, it is a more productive interpretation of “go with the flow“: first build the flow - decide on tiny actions that put your function going in the right direction - then go with it.

So did I solve the dishes problem? I’d like to think so. I simply wash n (right now, n = 5) number of dishes, then dry and put away m number of dishes (right now, m = n) every time I’m around the sink and have a couple of minutes free. With the task of dishes, I prefer going for a number rather than going for a time as in timeboxing, because, well…the number of dishes matters more to me than the time it takes to do them; I like the feeling of controlling the speed and I don’t have to be interrupted by the end of the timebox.

I feel kind of embarrassed literally sharing my dirty household secrets like this. Housework gets no respect. And here in the Japans, most men aren’t even involved in it*; especially men with womanspouses (mine’s a feminist, so…I’m…basically…whipped, I mean, domesticated, I mean, happily involved in a relationship of equals…there’ll be all this awkward laughter when she reads this…). But…it is a real life problem that mattered to me; it required a solution, and I think I’ve solved it. It’s been said that orderly surroundings both reflect and produce orderly thinking. I wanted order; I’ve wanted it for a long time. But I didn’t want to spend or feel like I was spending all my time maintaining it. In that sense, I am happy with this process, and I think it contains lessons that can be applied elsewhere.

Random Closing Aside

So, functions and lines rather than points. Did you ever notice how people, when they’re scolding you for not doing something, often go: “would it kill you to wash one dish!?”? Or how, when you’ve been neglecting a project or a language for a long time and it’s starting to die on you, that it’s usually not the case that you were doing too little work on the project, but that you were doing zero work on the project?

I have. So…the idea of “processes over results” is deeply connected with the idea of just doing something, just moving forward.

Overall, very simple stuff, but…it was earthshaking for me in terms of the improvement in quality of life. Hopefully it will be for you, too. And if you have any other dishwashing tips, send them to me!

*One wonderful exception is my college roommate, T-star. That boy can cook! But my other guy friends who are Japanese have basically never seen the inside of their family kitchens. It’s a good life; except for the 26-hour workday with unpaid overtime part. Take one for the team, Tanaka-kun!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

実はネ、拙者を含めて多くの外国人がホザいて来た「ニッポンの人種差別」というのは、事実無根の愚痴に過ぎない。「『外人』は差別用語」だの「人に見られている」だの弱音を吐くより、先ずは全面的に自分達の日本語能力をレベルアップした方が遥かに得策。他人の国に住んでるのにその言葉をちゃんと学ぼうともしない我々外人＝差別用語を語る資格の無い、迷惑的な存在だけだ。せやから、理不尽な主張を抜かす前に責任を取りましょう。何よりもここは日本で、国の主は日本国民（俺らも税金払ってんだけどね（笑））。そんなに辛い想いをしてるなら、他に200カ国ぐらいの国家がそこら辺に轉がってるし・・・

っちゅう事を、僕とYouTubeのTkyoSamが英語圏の皆さんに、今回のビデオを通して伝えたいと思った譯。殘念ながら内容は英語のみなんだけど、まあ、ターゲット層も英語圏の奴らだから或る程度合理的な選択かと存じまする！因みに、ワイは「植物中心食生活」（←関係ねえだろうがよ！^_^）のお陰で結構減量してるので、興味のある方は是非ご覧あれ！・・・やっぱり無いか・・・

Not really. In fact, not at all. In fact, people need to shut the truck up, learn Japanese (especially reading and writing), and stop overanalyzing every interaction they have in Japan like some kind of sociopathic girlfriend. As much fun as it is to try to demonize Japan, certain highly vocal countries which shall remain nameless have more racism between the cracks of their pinkie fingernails than Japan does in all 120 odd million of its bodies put together. We all need to give the people of the J-land a break (they’re busy at it is), and learn to have the finesse — I’m one to talk — to discern “racism” from misunderstanding from culture from just being a jerk. If you must hate something, hate individuals.

That’s the basic idea of the video was very kindly put up by TkyoSam. TkyoSam’s like “Konnichiwa, motherlover! I want sushi!”, and I’m like “No! I implement Fuhrman! Look how I’ve regained my girlish figure!” and he’s like “Like I give a truck! You don’t have to eat, just come! We’re recording video!”.

So we’re there, getting around like 寿司 on a 回転, recording a video while I eat peanuts out of my bag…Anyway, yeah — here ya go. Two parts.

And to the housing thing, let me add, you will never ever be prevented from living in nice places or from making PILES of dough in this country. And isn’t that what really matters? There’s really nothing to complain about. I mean, what, are we babies that need everyone around us to smile and applaud whenever we expel waste (グー！)? Is that it (for the record, I would actually like that, but this is early 21st century Japan, where most people simply have-no-time-for-you)? Extreme example…but it hints at something: namely, that what most people are really missing may be a loving family environment.

Remember: no likey = no havey to stayey. There are about 200 countries in the world, no use getting itchy haemmorrhoids over 1 [that’s smaller than California!].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intermediate Goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you know, I often project the image of a raving anti-Semite. But actually I hate people who are intolerant of other ethnicities. And the Basques.

The Basques.

Why is there a “q”? Why do they get the “special” language? Why is there Basque Freemason writing on the back of the American $5 bill?

Made you look!…Haha…too much Internet for you!

I’d like to Basque in the glory of this topic the whole day, but we have a book review to do, so let’s get started. The book is The Way of Brain Success: 猶太人の頭の中. The author is one Andrew J. Sutter. The Japanese translation is by his wife, 中村起子/NAKAMURA Kiko.

猶太人の頭の中

• Title: ユダヤ人の頭のなか / ユダヤジンノアタマノナカ
• Format: Non-fiction, Paperback
• Author: Andrew J. Sutter
• Furigana: Negatory.
• Genre: Personal development.
• Veracity: Non-Fiction
• Color: Black and white
• Illustrations: Essentially, none.
• YesAsia

Structurally, this book is quite interesting…it was written in English by the author (who’s Jewish, so…we have a good chance that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to “Jewish stuff”), but always with the intention of publication in Japanese; AFAIK, there is no English version bar Sutter’s original manuscript. TWOBS was intended from the start to be a Japanese book, and the translation was so good that it led one Japanese customer on Amazon.JP to comment that “it’s like it’s not even a translation”…if he knew the path to its publication, he would understand why he felt that way. So, in terms of style and audience, this is a purely Japanese book.

While the government of Japan refused to partake in the anti-Semitism that was terribly en vogue in let’s just say certain parts of Europe in the 1940s (and, well, frankly…even today on certain European island nations beginning with B and ending in ritain — at least at my high school), Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style judaeophobic books do exist here, unfortunately. Before everyone goes freaking out, there are also more level-headed books, like 加瀬 英明/KASE Hideaki’s ユダヤの力/YUDAYA NO CHIKARA. But the crappy books needed to be answered and Sutter was just the chap to do it.

But first, let’s get into:

Why Khatzumoto was even interested in a topic as ripe for grief, libel, slander, misunderstanding, simple crudeness, scapegoatery, scapesheepery and appalling violence, as Jewish science, I mean, success?

For the answer to that question, you need look no further than my undergraduate experiences.

Experience number one. It was a computer science class in the computer science building with the best computer science professor in the world (Iowa, represent!). Outside, summer. Inside, dark. Room, dimly lit. Whiteboard, white but hard to see. Professor, really interesting as always. And he, that man, my sensei, said something that is probably common knowledge for everyone else, but hit me like lightning. He said that the source of the worldly success enjoyed by the Jews of Europe in the past 250 or so years, lies in the fact that the Jewish men of Europe could all do something that almost all the gentiles could not: read. Indeed, another name for the Jews is “the people of the book”. Also, “the people of the Nobel prize”.

Experience number two. When I was a kid, I used to read and watch TV simultaneously. Often, I’d be reading two or sometimes even three books and watching the ‘levision. It felt entirely natural to me but a lot of people got on my case about it (Them: “Pick one!”, Me: “No!”). Then, in 2004 I’m at a college friend’s family house and her dad is in the kitchen with magazine on the table a novel in hand and a documentary on the telly and it was like everything was warm and fuzzy because finally someone understood me and it turns out he’s Jewish which tangentially connects it to this post.

Indeed, these college experiences helped set the stage for my literacy “revelation”, which I very verbosely shared with you here. I got interested in how the Jews as a people — with exceptions, of course — had risen, literally from the ghetto, to success in so many fields. How they dealt with every ridiculous obstacle that was placed in their way. Can’t own land? Learn a trade. Trade guilds won’t let you in? Deal with money. No access to reliable customers? Provide consumer financial services for high-risk clients. WASP law firms won’t let you in or make you partner? Make your own and win crappy cases until the whole legal world knows you’re the best. Your country kicks you out because they say your science is different? Go and be Einstein somewhere else. Columbia University won’t allow you to attend because they have a “Jewish quota” (WTF?). Go to MIT and become Richard Feynman anyway (smooth move, Columbia).

I bet the same idiots who whine about affirmative action now (can of worms! can of worms!) would have whined about “Jews winning all the university places” back when the Ivy League was busy rejecting Richard Feynman and anyone else who looked too smart and had a German-sounding name. Mediocre members of a majority ethnic group loooooove flapping lip about how some minority is ruining it for them; it happens in the US with ethnic minorities; it happens in Kenya with Desis; it happens in Malaysia with ethnic Chinese (my Malay friends are going to beat me up over this). Funnily enough, though, the smart kids of all ethnicities never whine: when you’re the best, you’re the freaking best.

As Sutter explains, culture is everything (not genetics: Sutter says the evidence just isn’t there). The Jews built a religious culture founded on literacy and encouraging of learning: learning itself was considered worship. Sutter describes a traditional ceremony in which children were given honey as a reward in conjunction with some activity involving reading or memorizing parts of a certain religious text; the aim of the ceremony was literally to teach them that learning is sweet (reminds me of how I used to eat Jelly Bellies after each Chinese SRS rep); in terms of behaviorism, this is so many types of right it’s not even funny. So, when the Haskalah came and restrictions on secular activity were loosened, it was a matter of shifting the focus of that prodigious intellectual activity from the finer details of religious jurisprudence to whatever presented itself in the world outside. Not to mention the fact that the ever-present danger of being “asked to leave” led the Jews as a group to seek a portable, long-lasting, borderless asset — more valuable than land, cattle or bling and quite impossible to steal: knowledge.

Sutter and Kase both recount various interesting fables passed down in the Jewish community, illustrating the value of brain over brawn in even the direst of situations. There’s one about a Jew who is brought to a magistrate in some European country in medieval times, accused of murdering a gentile’s child. The magistrate is a raving anti-Semite, but is also a gentleman, and so likes to give the appearance of fairness; he announces to the Jewish guy: “Look here, Greenbaum; I’m a fair man. Since there were no eyewitnesses and DNA forensic evidence tests haven’t been invented yet, let that God of yours decide your fate. In this hat are two pieces of paper, one says ‘guilty’ and the other ‘not guilty’. You pick. The paper shall be your fate”. Greenbaum knows that the magistrate reads too many shady conspiracy parchments, and is a thoroughgoing Jew-hater, and realizes that both pieces of paper say “guilty”; but there’s no way he could slander the town magistrate and live. Seemingly resigned to his fate, he mutters a prayer, reaches into the hat…pulls out a piece of paper…and eats it. Everyone goes into shock; his family is all screaming: “What are you Jewing?! Jew CRAYzay!”. And then he tells the magistrate: “the paper I didn’t pick is still there; you can check against it”. Greenbaum lives. Intellectual muscle saves the day. The end.

Another Jewish fable for children (this time from Kase) tells of a ship, again in dayes of olde. On it were two merchants and a scholar. The two merchants sell i-Parchments, designer clothes, bling and all manner of other luxury merchandise. They’ve been on the ship a few days, and the topic of conversation comes to the scholar and what he sells. The scholar tells the merchants he sells the most valuable merchandise in all the world, better than bling, designer clothes and i-Parchments. The other merchants are curious but puzzled. Bored, they ask around the ship, looking for the scholar’s merchandise. Eventually they realize that the scholar has no merchandise, and they’re like: “that Greenbaum kid is an egit”. Days later a storm hits, the ship sinks and almost everyone dies. The merchants and the scholar float ashore, stranded in a strange new land. With no insurance and all their merchandise gone, the merchants become beggars. The scholar goes into town and becomes a consultant for the king, makes a lot of gold and eventually uses his wealth to help his former fellow passengers back on their feet. Once again, the day is saved thanks to intellectual muscle.

Contrast this attitude to knowledge and its acquisition, with how many other cultures treat geeks and geekery. Think how most gaijin act towards Japanese-learning fellow gaijin. They call them names (”geeks”, “weebos”). They tell them to “stop pretending to read”. Tell them “they can do that at home”. They tell them to “stop acting Japanese”. Jock culture and sports heroes are lionized — and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, it’s just that too many people forget that most sportspeople are in fact interchangeable pawns (always one injury away from being thrown away like so many used Kleenex) in a wider game played and run by the aforementioned geeks. Everybody wanting to be a gladiator when it would be safer and easier and far more profitable to be a stable owner instead…

Fortunately for me, my mother listened to TONS of Barbara Streisand when I was a child. What does that have to do with anything? Nothing whatsoever. But she was always going on and on and on about the value of knowledge this and Barbara Streisand that and no one can take knowledge away from you and are you even listening and put down the Game Boy and this is my favorite Barbara song.

My Japanese journey (and, even the Chinese one) had its fair share of opposition, but the early microculture of my nuclear family, the fact that our home was reader-friendly — this set a good example. Growing up it all seemed quite normal. But as an adult, I have met a few people who treat me like a freak who “reads all the time”; interestingly enough, their social station somewhat reflects this attitude to “booklurnin!”. It’s not like I’m an intellecual juggernaut (I want to be :D)…and it’s not like economics is everything — knowledge is valuable in and of itself. But, let’s be coldly realistic for a second: most manual labor is as unremunerative as it is taxing; while it is very valuable to society, quite frankly it is not valued by society at all. At all. On the other hand, intellectual labor is almost the total opposite — thinking up ways to do less (”laziness”, of a sort) wins extra credit. At least it seems like that to me.

Currently, all intellectual life depends on literacy. Not, I think, because straight text is a superior medium (quite the opposite), but because it’s been around longer, boasts the highest quality and quantity of content, and has been chosen as the primary medium of intellectual discourse in the society we live in (of course, oral-centric intellectual cultures have existed — Celtic civilization and Ancient Greece are good examples). Today, a good-sized bookstore or library (link to pictures of 誠品/Chengpin, a really nice bookstore in Taipei…I spent a whole night reading at their 24-hour branch …) simply has more and better information in it than the most premo premium cable. Thus, to cut yourself off from literacy is to cut yourself off from text is to cut yourself off from the bulk of intellectual activity and from the highest-quality information in the world. As a foreigner in a bibliocentric country like Japan, this means you are restricted to one of three roles: (1) sheltered expat, (2) cultural ambassador, (3) exploited manual labor. There is no middle ground.

The moral of the story is: don’t be a schlemiel; learn to read and keep reading — it’s fun and there’s a future in it. And get this book for the full story, because anything I say must be tainted and watered down quite a bit. Anyway, the massive worldwide Basque blogging conspiracy won’t let me make this post any longer, so…goodbye for now.

One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio - keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…

And it all seems like a bunch of voodoo, especially to people who’ve spent the greater part of their waking lives in school, in a mostly abiotic urban or suburban environment, playing short-term memory games [online preview], prohibited from observing and participating in natural growth and learning processes. People like you and me. Perhaps if you and I grew plants more regularly, we would know that advice like: “just add soil, sunlight and water and this seed will one day grow into a long, thick, hard plant” is quite sound. We would know that growth often involves a period of continuous high investment for nearly zero visible returns, but that it cannot happen without this investment.

A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.

I haven’t actually read Krashen in a while and I can’t be bothered to go back and check, but, as I recall, he suggests input be fun, freely available in large quantity, and, yes, comprehensible in an i+1 way. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. What I’m saying is that the “comprehensible” part is just a way to make it more “fun”, so it’s more a bonus option than necessarily a hard requirement. The hard requirements are the input x fun x large quantity. Or something like that? I don’t want to get too wrapped up in theory since I don’t know what I’m talking about anyway…Besides, Dr. Krashen is probably down with this already.

So, the two main reasons why the “listen to it, just listen, 10,000 hours” advice was so controversial are because (1) there is no instant gratification, and (2) no one in academia was pushing it that hard, so it seemed unfounded. Both of these concerns are entirely valid: why believe some random guy on the Internet when you see no proof and no one authoritative-looking seems to be saying the same thing? It would be perfectly reasonable to doubt the guy.

The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (”Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:

“what makes it so difficult to learn foreign words when we are constantly learning new ones in our native language.”

Paulちゃん came to the realization that:

“Simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.”

And the way to build those neural structures is…?:

“by lots of listening-songs and movies are great!”

In fact…

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that…”

Listening, listening, listening. Lots and lots of listening. Like, hundreds and thousands of hours of listening.  Some classes are already working with this, not allowing students to say a word of their L2 until they have listened to at least 800 hours of it. My personal take on it is to let output come when it comes, which is after some “critical mass” of a given set of inputs is reached. If you hear something enough times, you’ll eventually be able to say it aloud quite effortlessly, whether or not you try to remember it; it’s true of commercials, it’s true of TV theme songs, and it’s true of “foreign” language.

In kidhood, like all male children of sound mind, I enjoyed kung-fu movies and fighting games. I still do. When I was 15, I wanted to go to a monastery and train in martial arts like Jin KAZAMA/風間仁 from Tekken/鉄拳, so I could have fire come out of my punches by the time I was 19. Things have changed a bit. I took refuge from the over-macho-ness of sports by jumping onto the “intense training required for sporting excellence = a risky investment of time and resources, with a brief payback window, an ever-present threat of injury and overdependence on factors outside one’s control…plus after all that work everyone is just gonna say you have magical fast-twitch muscles anyway” bandwagon. But also, something deeper happened. I was drawn into the words and texts in which these kung-fu ideas had been expressed. And it dawned on me that the ability to comprehend and manipulate the language of kung-fu movies (Cantonese), or indeed any language, was a skill easily as personally rewarding, economically valuable, and plain out freakin’ cool, as being able to catch flies with chopsticks like Kwai Chang Kane. In short, language is kung-fu; your weapons are your books and computers and media players, your skill is built into your body, your “opponents” are the people you listen to, read, talk to and write to. And you can get into fights with anyone you want without anyone ever getting injured. Like Sulzberger said:

“Language is a skill, it’s not like learning a fact. If you want to be a weight lifter, you’ve got to develop the muscle - you can’t learn weightlifting from a book. To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue…”

Once in a while, just to feel cool…I sit in cross-legged dignity, pick up my mouse like unto a katana with slow-motion reverence (I even make the sounds)…place it on my beanbag…jiggle and click the link to open up a movie or a book or my SRS. Try it. Better yet - feel it. Sports and martial arts only seem cool because they’re so well fetishized - movies, merchandising, instant replays. Arguably, learning a language is just as deserving of respect, time and attention…Don’t ask me where I’m going with this because I don’t know either. Suffice it to say that you should feel free to have a healthy respect for the work you’re doing in building your language muscles.

You can see the full article on Sulzberger here.

1. Look at a grammar book if you want, but don’t worry about the rules — you can even ignore the rules if you want — just focus on the example sentences. This has been mentioned on other good language blogs.

2. Avoid learning about what you can’t do…this will only confuse you. Examples of incorrect usage tend to be especially damaging. In my observation of a lot of people (including myself), telling someone not to say something a certain way tends to make them say it that way even more, sort of like a “don’t think of pink elephants shooting up heroine” thing.

That’s it. Any complaints? Bring it! I’ll have Nigel over here release the hounds…

Look…ok?…It was late; we were talking; the camera’s on; I have strange quirks and gestures from my childhood (”Mommy loves you! It’s not your fault!”). Then 龍 is all “come on, dawg…I don’t have any make-up on, don’t put me in the video”, so then I cut him out, and there’s no background music and you have no idea how long it took just to make this one sucky video but I’ll keep improving and now you can stop asking me whether I can actually speak Japanese the end.

And now…I’m going to go eat fruit.

And yes, this counts as “Khatzumoto: The Movie”. There! Are you feeling anticlimactic now? “Khatzumoto: The Grainy 8-Minute One-Cut YouTube Video”. The joy…

When I tell people how I acquire (acquired) Japanese and Cantonese, the first question many immediately ask is: “but what about grammar”?!?! Yeah, what about that…

At the end of last year, over the holiday season, I was in a car with a Japanese friend, and we got onto the subject of Why Khatzumoto Owns So Hard At Japanese[1]: “Ah never done did study no grammah; jist ah few thowsan sen’ences”, said I. And she was all: “What? But you speak so grammatically! This is madness! ” And then I was like: “Woman, this is SPARTAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!”

All my conversations go like this.

So, how was I able to speak correct Japanese and write correct Cantonese without ever having formally studied their grammar? Indeed, without ever having formally studied either language?

Because grammar doesn’t exist.

I see some of you just choked on your herb tea, so let me say it again slowly: Grammar. Does. Not. Exist.

“HERESY! It does too exist! There are books about it and we learn about it in school and…and…”

There are books about a lot of things, darling. Doesn’t make them real. You see, grammar is an abstraction. Like fixed electronic orbits[2], the equator, and layers of the protocol stack. None of these things exist; they are make-believe. Or, to put it more gently, they exist because we say they do; they are thought-things, idea-objects…imaginary.

Grammar and all its little babies: conjugations, declensions, endings - it’s all made up. There is no set-in-stone connection between words like 行く (”to go”) becoming 行った (”went”); they are two separate words that describe two separate things. We only join them together conceptually as conjugated forms of the same verb because we thought it would make things easier.

And this is why we made up the abstraction of grammar. In fact, it’s why any abstraction gets made up - to make things easier. The world is complicated. An abstraction, when used correctly, makes everything simpler; it gives us neat boxes to put everything in. You wouldn’t want a world without abstraction; you could never, for example, talk about a species of animal or about “chairs” as an overarching type of furniture; you could only talk about…individual animals and seating apparatus. The problem, kids, is that abstraction can be misunderstood and thereby misused, such that it actually makes the world more complicated.

Misunderstanding is the source of all abstraction heartache. Our abstractions are often so powerful and useful that we take them to be literal, physical fact[3]. From here comes misuse.

Misuse. A hammer is good for hitting nails, but when you try to eat food with it…you may end up having a longer day than you ever wished for. Let me go even further - a hammer is good for hitting nails, but if you go up to a star (as in, a celestial object) and try to hit it because “there be iron in thar and I want to get my hits in early, you know, strike it well it’s hot” well, it’s just going to be too hot and your hammer will probably melt - unless you have those magical experimental shields that let you pull a Picard (Riker? Janeway?) Maneuver right the heck through a star.

Similarly, the thing with the abstraction of grammar may be less a matter of intrinsic suckage and more a matter of situational suckage; there is a time and place to learn grammar, and that time and place are not when you don’t know the language and not outside the language in question. Only learn “grammar” in the target language. It will only truly make sense then anyway. And, you’ll have figured almost all of it out through patterns and inference anyway…Remember what Stephen son of Krashen said — learning a language is different from learning about a language.

The abstraction of grammar fails language learners because it’s not abstract enough; it’s not simple enough. Abstraction is supposed to reduce confusion and detail; grammar study tends to only increase these. Perhaps part of the problem is that the thing to be abstracted - human language - is just so…human(?) So alive and fractally complex? So mutable? Reducing it to a few simple rules was probably optimistic at best and arrogant at worst? Perhaps…I don’t know. Anyway, you’re better off just taking the parts of a language as they come. Don’t try to force an ill-fitting, arbitrarily-created, observed-after-the-fact pattern onto a situation that doesn’t merit it.

Back to the verb example: the parts of a verb are only parts of the same verb because we say they are. In my experience, you’re better off more or less treating (learning) them as separate words. After all, they have different meanings, spellings and sounds: that fits any reasonable definition of a separate word that I can think of. Yes, they are connected, but you’re better off figuring out these connections for yourself (which you will) through observation anyway. Learning them before the fact will only hurt you and the forest critters. Next term you’re speaking the 日本語 Japanese, ask your Japanese friends whether a verb is transitive or not “これ、他動詞？自動詞？早く教えろよ、お前コノヤローお前”; they’ll make uncomfortable faces and kind of shrug and change the subject because they don’t know…and don’t need to; they just use it correctly. One day walking through Paris I want you to be like: “You there! What’s the pluperfect passive subjunctive of…?”

Just one more thing to add. Another problem with having grammar as an entry-point for language study is that it creates possibilities, most of which are possibilities for error. When given a grammatical explanation, it’s often represented sort of a tree of possibilities with all kinds of node-like things - stems and endings and stuff and some poorly expressed rules to be instantly “programmed” into your brain which will then run computations to churn out sentences like some kind of primitive logic engine…or something like that. Not only is this too freaking slow, but invariably people misuse the tree and make illegal combinations (ungrammatical statements). Again, better to just accept how things are said in a language as-is just because; let a certain way of saying something be right just because it’s right; this leaves far less room for error: there will be no logical lapses or due to misapplication of a rule.

Patterns - repetitions of some overarching phenomenon - do exist; grammar tries and fails to abstract these patterns. The way to master the fictional language patterns we refer to as “grammar” is by experiencing them in real life; in their natural habitat, used in sentences and phrases by real native speakers. Anything else, is, to borrow the PG-13 words of John “PapaJohn” Biesnecker from Yuehan: like trying to become an expert in bed by taking sex-ed classes.

…I guess it could happen…

Next time, instead of getting a description of the taste of durien, why not just eat it…Mmmm…durien all over yo’ clothes.

[2] Not an expert on this so…someone call me on it if I’m wrong.

[3] Then again, if the physical world itself isn’t real, then…