Stop trying to disagree with everything the author says
There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of an author of a book with those of the reader. That term is “idiot”. With apologies to Mr. S.M. Stirling .

Stop taking reading seriously
Seriousness leads to worry. Worry to impaired cognitive function, AKA stupidity. The act of reading doesn’t require you to be smart, but it does require you to be not-stupid .

PS: Yes, #9 is the most important.

So, apparently, a Batman movie came out last year and it was a big deal? Haha. No, I watched it and loved it. I wish Christopher Nolan were in charge of the recent Marvel Comics movies as well, because he did such a great jerb.

Growing up, iconoclastic as they were, I always preferred Marvel heroes to the DC ones (and the Brian Singer X-Men movies were great). But between the Chris Bale Batmans and (judging by the trailers) the new Superman/Man of Steel, DC are clearly winning hands down at the movies.

And, to be fair to DC, they were smart enough to have both Frank Miller and Alan Moore working with them in the 1980s, so… ¹

For me personally, Nolan’s work stands as art that is intellectually satisfying to my putatively ² adult mind, as well as being entertaining and just infinitely rewatchable; I watch Inception in Mandarin for fun about once a month. I also read that he brings in his projects on time and under budget so…yeah…smiles all around.

Anyway, this Batman movie had some good lines, so I transcribed some of them for your upliftment, edification and educational use.

You’ll note that I haven’t bothered put down the character names next to the lines because, honestly, I can’t be bothered and what really counts is that you have the words. It adds a lot of extra work without adding concomitant value. You like the new, lazy me, don’tcha? Yes, you do! Also, no sound clips this time. Again, laziness. Maybe when I get a Mandarin research assistant that’ll change.

Use a tool like MDBG dictionary or MoeDict to get the (character) readings and translations of words as necessary.

要看情況。
That depends.
甚麼情況？
On what?

這個不是車。
This isn’t a car.

你是誰？
Who are you?
我是誰不重要。我們的計劃才是重點。
It doesn’t matter who we are. What matters is our plan.
Lit: It doesn’t matter who I am.

你幹嘛不直接・・・殺了我？
Why didn’t you just…kill me?
你不害怕死亡；你求之不得。我得給你更殘酷的懲罰。
You don’t fear death; you welcome it. Your punishment must be more severe.
你要折磨我？
Torture?
對。不是你的身體。而是你的靈魂。
Yes. But not of your body. Of your soul.
我在哪兒？
Where am I?
家裡。我在這裡懂得了甚麼是絕望。你也會的。
Home. Where I learned the truth about despair. As will you.
得 děiㄉㄟˇ 副 應該、必須、需要。 如：「你總得讓我把話說完。」

要我不開槍，不殺人？我還是沒有辦法同意你的觀點！
About the whole no-guns thing…? I’m not sure I feel as strongly about it as you do.

它在哪兒？引爆器在哪兒？在哪兒？！它在哪兒？！告訴我引爆器在哪兒。然後，我會准許你去死。
Where is it? Where’s your trigger? Where is it?! Where is it?! Tell me where the trigger is. Then…you have my permission to die.
引爆器 = detonator

你回到這裡，是想和你的城市一起滅亡？
So, you came back to die with your city.
不。我回來阻止你！
No. I came back to stop you.

你已經給了他們一切！
You’ve given them everything!
不是一切。還不夠。
Not everything. Not yet.

抱歉。一直讓你失望。
Sorry to keep letting you down.

你的女朋友真酷啊。
I like your girlfriend, Mr. Wayne.

恐懼會讓你失敗。
Fear is why you fail.

還是不相信我？
Still don’t trust me, huh?

不這麼做，他們就會殺了我！
I had to find a way to stop them trying to kill me!
你犯了一個大錯。
You made a serious mistake.

你犯了一個大錯。
You made a serious mistake.
再大也沒有你犯的錯大。真遺憾。
Not as serious as yours, I fear.

不這麼做，他們就會殺了我！
I had to find a way to stop them trying to kill me!
你犯了一個大錯。
You made a serious mistake.
再大也沒有你犯的錯大。真遺憾。
Not as serious as yours, I fear.
#catwoman #batman #bane

• MoeDict/萌
• Source code:javascript:(function(){var%20w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else%20if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else%20if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("https://www.moedict.tw/#"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank");})()

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.” ~ Walter Elliot

You rarely get instant full victories, everybody knows that, even optimists.

But what almost no one knows is that you can and do and will get instant partial victories. All. The. Time.

And guess what? THEY COUNT! These count!

If you count them, that this. If you will let them count.

Life is full of these little wins. Every day, we’re winning.
The trouble with us is that sometimes we don’t let them count. Indeed, some of us never let it count.

The world is not being a jerk to you.
You are being a jerk to you.
The world is not being hard on you.
You are being hard on yourself.

You sit there, and you’re like “I only know one Japanese word.”

Well, isn’t that more than zero? That counts, buttface!

“Well, maybe I’m learning this Japanese word, but there are so many I don’t know.”

And?
Your point is?

Is this one word you’re learning right now, is it or is it not a part of the Japanese language?
And will knowing it mean that you know more Japanese now than you did earlier?
And those other words, are they or are they not also single words?

…

How many words are you supposed to learn at a time anyway? You have 2 hands, 2 eyes, 1 mouth, ~1000 minutes in a day (only a few hundred once you deduct “maintenance” activities).

“Well, maybe I’m learning this Japanese word, but there are so many I don’t know.”

So what you’re saying is this word doesn’t matter, right? Because there are so many thousands of others. OK. There are over 7 billion human beings alive today: many more than there are, ever have been or ever will be words in the Japanese language. Let’s go kill your parents. What? What, that’s less than 0.000000014% of the total population. 2 in 7 bill, bro. Don’t be so stingy! What’s 2 bucks to a billionaire, son?

See?

It counts.

There are more people than kanji in the world. Yet you would never kill a person because they “don’t count”. So why denigrate your learning progress because it goes one or two words or kanji at a time?

There is no such thing as large victories. The late Stephen Covey used to talk about the private victory that precedes the public victory. What he really meant was that there are no large victories. Just jillions of tiny ones that we lazily sum up and call a single, large victory.

When you accept that, you win. You’ve already won. But if you don’t accept it, you’re screwed, because nothing will ever be good enough. And when nothing is good enough, nothing is what you’ll get. Yeah? You like that? It’s a little pun I picked up from an Archie comic in the 1990s…

No.
Don’t go.
We’re not done yet.
Because I don’t think you get it yet.

Let’s take track and field. 5000m. Or, the marathon. Take the marathon. Hmm…I dunno, temperamentally, I’m more of a sprinter myself, but…whatever. Take any race in track and field. Any distance.

Guess what? It takes more than 1 step to win or even just finish the race. Even the short ones. Even the 100m dash. Even the indoor 60m dash. Even the long jump, which isn’t even a race, takes more than one step.

But which step counted? Which step won it? The last one, right? So, let’s just take out all the steps like we did your parents a few paragraphs ago and case closed, right? Trim the fat, skip the foreplay, straight to DVD and ownage, right?

Oh, what’s that?

All the steps counted? All the steps helped? All the steps brought you closer to the goal? At no point would it helpful to be go “I’ve taken all these steps but I’m still not done; this race is unfinishable!”?

Oh.

Nature, the Universe, “the Situation”, Snooki, whatever you wanna call it…is always…conspiring to help you. Trying to throw you a bone. But it only throws you cells because it doesn’t wanna crush you. And because people who can’t appreciate cells…I mean, would you give a grown dog to someone who was mean to puppies? Golden retriever puppies? That are so cute you just…nnnnrrrgh. Not pet owner material, right?

Events are like that. They have a way of not being events. Instead, they tend to drip out — BTW, Tuvok’s voice in Spanish “Star Trek: Voyager” is awesome — rather than coming in a torrent. And it’s just as well because people are pretty bad at handling a torrent; even a thirsty man doesn’t actually want to drink from a firehose. In fact, it would actually be rather cruel to violently hose down a dangerously thirsty person instead of giving them water in drinkable amounts. What’s that? Am I speaking from an experience I had one summer in Canada? Oh, no, no, no…

The whole system seems set up to almost always only give people what they can handle ¹. Or maybe it isn’t, but it’s cool and useful to think of it that way — in a Douglas Adams Feng Shui sorta way. It’s almost as if there’s a rule that says: if this joker can’t appreciate one Japanese word, then don’t give him any more. Now, a part of you is going: “I’d feel much more appreciative if I had 10,000 Japanese words”. No ya wouldn’t. You’d find something to hate about it. Just like most lottery winners find a way to replicate their exact pre-lottery problems but with bigger numbers.

Ironically, I learned a lot more kanji a lot faster when I abandoned my whole “100% retention or nothing”, “anything less than 25 new kanji a day is a sin punishable by death” attitude. When I let 1 new kanji count, or even 0 new kanji and just reps count, I almost always got that and more. It must have something to do with the winning feeling; it must be self-reinforcing and thus ultimately self-fulfilling.

…Just like the losing feeling — self-loathing.

Self-loathing can always find a way. Not because it’s intrinsically powerful but because we can empower it; we can inject it into any situation, into any condition, no matter how wonderful.
If only you knew how small millionaires feel next to billionaires ². Or billionaires next to deca-billionaires. Or RTK1 graduates next to RTK3 graduates. Or freshly minted PhDs next to tenured professors. Or Everest summitters next to K2 summitters because Everest is for tourists and posers and pansies — real playaz are on that K2 shiz, son.
There is always a way to not appreciate where you are and what you’re doing and where you’re going.
Now, going that way never helps, but it’s always available for you to take, if you choose to.

People are weird. Always complaining about “the pace of change”, and “things are happening so fast” and “I just need to slow down” and “we just met, why are you touching me like that?”. And then when they’re going slow enough, they’re too slow. Well, maybe things are happening at just the right pace and you need to get with the program. Enjoy the ride. Maybe every stoplight is a chance for you to chill, check out hot people, read a book (I once read a very dense political science tome cover to cover exclusively at stoplights).

Current cosmology tells us that our entire universe was once a cosmological singularity; that’s a fancypants way of saying it was really small. Infinitesimally small. Infinitesimally dense. But this universe…it didn’t give up like a little b###h. It didn’t quit. It didn’t whine about how the other universes had better constants. It just chugged along. Kept expanding. Apparently, it’s even expanding now. 15 billion years later, it’s still doing it’s SRS reps. Because, WTF, why not, right?

Now, take all that with a grain of salt because my knowledge of cosmology hovers around zero, and our collective knowledge of cosmology can change like an unstable woman (IS THERE ANY OTHER KIND? EH LADS? EH??)’s moods…lol…naw, woman and minorities are great. No, but…you get the idea.

Be grateful, you smelly orifice . Smile that goofy smile of yours. What you’re doing? It counts. It helps. It adds up. Every little bit. Every cell. Every molecule. Every photon. Counts. So keep adding. Keep helping.

You want a whole pizza. But you only seem to be getting it one slice, no, one bite, at a time. I feel your pain.
But how big is your mouth anyway?

Inside your own mind, be like a guy talking to other guys about his exploits with the ladies. If you made eye contact, you spat game at her. If you brushed hands, you made out. If you made out, you did it. If you did it, you did it 10 times…That’s a sucky example. But you get it, right? After all, how much dirt does it take to make a white shirt dirty? Not much, right? You can have a 99.9% surface area clean white shirt…but one stain and we say that that shirt is stained. Well, as soon as you stain the white shirt of reality with a bit of progress, you’re winning. Already.

It counts. It works. Let it count. Work it. Count it (mentally, if nothing else).
Don’t let’s turn this into a Scott Tenorman thing with your parents…

Well, through the magic of the AJATT Facebook page, Jamie is back, this time with her very own German success story (as well as a couple of awesome new analogies):

Hey Khatz,
[You have such gorgeous thighs, and I don't know how you do it. The ThighMaster may be a machine, but you are truly the master of thighs. Women love you and men respect you. It pains me to even shift the topic from you, but...]
I’ve been “immersing” myself in German since December 2011. At first, it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t understand much from films, videos, music, etc and my output was simply horrible.

But after 3 months of immersion and SRS Vanilla sentences, I was able to hold basic IM chats and write emails in German with German and Austrian people. 99.9% of the Germans and Austrians thought that I was a language “Genie” ¹ and said that it was amazing that I learned German so “quickly” without any tutors or classes. I still believe that input (reading and listening) is still more important than output (writing and speaking) but once in a while I practice output.

I like writing German emails with my friends from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and I’ve had about 5-7 voice conversations over Skype in German. It wasn’t hard for me to understand what the native German speakers were saying. and most recently during Spring break 2013 in New York City, I heard a couple talking to each other in German and I just approached them by asking them in German: “Are you from Germany?” (kommen Sie aus Deutschland?) My brave action allowed us to have a short but good conversation — all in German. The couple said my German was very good especially considering “the short amount of time” I spent learning it, and not once did they try to switch the conversation to English.

So, how did all this “magic” happen? It ain’t magic. It’s just listening and/or watching to >90 minutes of audio in German during my waking hours and playing audio throughout my sleeping hours and making and doing SRS reps from time to time.

It’s about making it fun, doable, and practical to one’s OWN schedule. I learned Spanish from 2nd grade – 10th grade, but my Spanish input and output was NEVER was good as my German. The more I think about it, some of this AJATT stuff is really foolproof. “You are what you eat” and “You speak what you hear”…DUH!!

• You are what you eat.
• You write what you read.
• You speak what you hear.

“The practice of sungazing is dangerous. Looking directly at the sun for even brief periods of time may cause blindness or severe damage to the eye.” ~ Wick Her Pedia

We don’t look directly at the Sun — even during a total eclipse — without special equipment.

One of my favorite things to do is go to high or wide open places and look at stuff. I love looking at planes, helicopters, far-off buildings, women getting dressed inside said buildings wait…

No, don’t worry. I don’t even like women. Liking women is for poofters.

Wait…

OK, no, so, I was playing frisbee in the park the other day, frisbee play being interspersed with breaks to look at helicopters flying overhead. And it occurred to me how beautiful the day was and how much I was enjoying and benefitting from the sunlight (I take my Vitamin D intake very seriously). And it also occurred to me how, while I was enjoying the sun and it was (and is) directly or indirectly powering all life on Earth, I wasn’t looking at it. At all.

I was looking at what it shone upon; I was looking at discs and dogs and kids and couples making out. But I wasn’t looking at the Sun.

One doesn’t simply look at the Sun.

You enjoy the sun. You know it’s there. You’re unsure whether or not to capitalize it. You feel it. You’re bathed in its warmth — even at night.

But you don’t look at it. ¹

So, yeah, I love looking at stuff. Recently, I even purchased a “fieldscope” to aid in the purpose. The warning label on my fieldscope (which is optical geekspeak for a monocular/portable telescope) reads (in Japanese): Do not look at Sun, may cause loss of sight, you raving poof.

A welcome, if excessively homophobic warning. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be writing a stern letter of disapproval to the poofs at Vixen who manufacture the scope, and tell them to get their act together.

You need the sun. You love the sun. If you’re of English ancestry, you gladly risk chronic illness just to get some more of it. But even then, you don’t look at it.

Big goals are a lot like that. Big goals like, oh, native-like fluency.
Just as looking directly at the sun can cause visual blindness, looking directly at big goals can cause schlep blindness.

It’s nice to know that the big goal is there, but often it’s too big and shiny and 93 million miles away and overwhelming in its awesomeness to be gazed at directly, certainly without safety gear.

The big, central goal, the sun around which our actions presumably orbit, can overwhelm and disorient us with its size and power and magnitude. We wonder, rightfully, “how could we possibly get there from here?!”. It’s just too much to take in. Our minds, our bodies, cannot process it, cannot fathom it. We reel at the mere idea and coil up like a little centipede; we seek refuge in mindless TV, cigarettes and alcohol, because — despite their concomitant disadvantages — these escapes are so doable. They make sense. We can win at them.

The Sun is too bright to look at. It can literally, physically hurt to look directly at the big goal. Looking at the metaphorical sun can throw you into a dizzying tailspin of despair and avoidance.
So don’t. Look, that is. Enjoy the biggie ², but don’t look at it.
Focus back here.
This one word.
This one action.
This one click.
This is all that exists. This is all that matters.

Do not look directly at goal. May cause schlep blindness. Unless you have special tools (e.g. a lifetime calendar — analogous to eclipse-viewing glasses) and a specific reason, do not look at the Sun. You must not if you want to keep your mental vision intact and thus keep being able to see that paths and opportunities that are right in front of you, right underfoot. Call it the “Solar Principle” ³.

And this “Solar Principle” is probably why you’re better off not sharing your goals with people ⁴. Not necessarily because you can’t deal with it — although that’s often true ^^ — but because they can’t…handle the (whole) truth. So if you want their cooperation, or simply non-interference as the case may be, don’t blind the poor bastards.

Perhaps you now have the mental equipment to look directly at the psychological sun, but they don’t, and you’re hurting them by shining it in their faces ⁵. And this doesn’t make them bad people. They’re not “dream stealers”; they’re not “energy vampires”; they’re not “monsters”; they’re just…not ready to look right at the sun; it’s too much of a shock to their fragile systems and that’s fine; they can still enjoy the light and warmth. Work them through it, baby steps, like a frog in progressively warmer water, and before you know it, you can have them in a compound in Guyana committing mass suicide with you and their children…

Too soon?

No, but, seriously, like blinders on a racehorse, you can take yourself and other people to any extreme of excellence or lameness if you merely narrow the mental focus away from the debilitatingly magnitudinous core goal and towards productive, forward-moving, helpful minutiae ⁶. In other words: don’t even try to brush your teeth, just put the toothbrush in your mouth. Let the full truth be something that emerges — something you allow to emerge — rather than something you go out and declare.

It is neither possible nor necessary nor helpful to tell the whole truth. Not to yourself and certainly not to other people (who, I assure you, have immeasurably little interest in you and your life ⁷). It can’t be done. You don’t even know the names of the chemicals that are in your body. You don’t introduce yourself by your full, government name. When I ask you what time it is, you don’t give it to me in seconds, let alone nanoseconds. You probably even round up the minutes, you mendacious knave, you! ⁸ Many things are true, but that doesn’t mean they need be said, noted or acknowledged regularly if at all: ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.

In politics and espionage and stuff, they talk about things being on a “need-to-know” basis. Well, let me hit you with some knowledge, sister: when it comes to you and your goals, not only do people not need to know, they don’t even want to know; knowing would simply harm and annoy them. Don’t be fooled by the questions. It’s small-talk ⁹. No one actually wants to know; they want to feel important and included; they want the privilege of being privy, but this is a thirst for love, status and acceptance, not knowledge. If they truly wanted to know something, they would read a book, not ask you idle questions.

To recap: don’t look at the sun unless and until you have the equipment to do so, and don’t show it to other people until they do as well (but feel free to enjoy and share little rays of sunlight here and there). So, you’re not learning Japanese any more, you’re just here learning this one word. You’re just tinkering. Maybe the next word will be a Japanese one, too, but that’s neither here nor there.

Avert your eyes!

Thus spake Hangul Fangirl (‏@HangulFangirl):
“[Dear Khatzumoto,
You are handsome beyond comprehension. And also very slim. Your delicate, schoolgirl figure is an inspiration to us all.]
How do you get past the feeling that you’re not progressing and end up forgetting to keep going? Self-study is hard for me :[["

"...don't believe a thought you think." ~ T. Harv Eker

A lot of actual psychologists and proper New Age people have talked about these ideas in a much more detailed, accurate and elegant fashion than I am about to, so you might want to take their advice instead. All I can offer you is my personal, very anecdotal experience.

To be honest, I think my advice is crap; it's just infinitely better than the mindless, unintentional defaulting to social convention that many people do, but then that's not saying a lot, considering how wrong conventional wisdom can be.

For the record, there's nothing automatically wrong with defaulting to social convention; we can't be original in all things. The problem comes when that default setting doesn't work or even causes harm. Which is definitely the case with languages. The problem isn't so much that language classes suck as it is that they have no intention or mechanism of improving themselves; they are so blindly arrogant that they're not even aware that they suck.

So, back to you, and the feeling you're not progressing.

Feelings can be like having an emotional drama queen attention whore friend living inside you who thinks she's clairvoyant.

Don't feed the inner troll. Pay it no mind. It'll run out of steam. It's kinda like how paying attention to a baby or toddler sometimes makes them start crying or (if they're already crying) makes them cry harder. I don't have children or even younger siblings, so don't take my childcare advice. But I've heard and observed that sometimes ignoring the kid helps them get over it, while getting attentive and freaked out simply escalates the emotion out of all proportion.

Sometimes your feelings are wrong and they need to STFU. Ignore them and move forward.

Almost by definition, your feelings are illogical. So, sometimes I find it helps to illogical-ize (?) your motivations, to NOT have a good reason for things you do. So your new reason is "coz I feel like it" or "coz it's there". You can't argue with that because there's nothing to argue with. It's openly reckless. Reasonless. It's like when you tell a guy his mother's a whore and he goes "I know, right? She totally is -- when can I pencil you in for an appointment? Oh, and she said to ask you to stop crying after the deed, because it's a real turn-off.".
No traction.

Some research I read about appears to show that people with no emotions (due to highly localized brain injuries and stuff) can't make decisions. So perhaps the problem isn't having emotions, but tuning into the wrong emotions.

Move the dial away from WAMIMAKINGPROGRESSFM. Tune into happiness and boredom and interest and happiness and curiosity and I don't know if all those count as emotions, but they are mental states...

Scour your memory. Become aware of repeating patterns in terms of what gets you going, and look to amplify those patterns. It could be a certain type of situation or a certain type of media, or a certain auteur ¹. Mere “progress” pales in comparison to “oh sweet, this looks cool”.

“…if you’re not satisfied with the little successes, you’ll never be satisfied with the big successes.” ~ Anon. (quoted by Barbara Sher)

Being fluent in Korean is not going to make you happy if the process didn’t. Because you’ll be there and you’ll find something to hate about it. Something to put yourself down with.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but you only know Standard Korean, not a cool dialect.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…what about these other languages? Mandarin. Japanese. Mongolian.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…you can’t write like the best Korean author of all time.
There’s always a reason to feel bad, the key is not to play along.

If you want to win the long game, stop playing it.
Stop running the marathon and start sprinting instead.
Start running and playing and winning short games instead.

Don’t learn Korean.
Learn the chorus of this song.
Don’t learn Korean.
Play this movie. Don’t even watch it. Just play. It. Audibly.

Shameless plug: These tiny, (sub-)atomic, so-small-it’s-insulting activities are, incidentally, central to what Neutrino is about. Neutrino gets you hooked playing short games so you can, as Werner Heisenberg might have put it, forget about your position and focus on your momentum.

Play the short games.
Be sensitive to the little things. The tiny, winnable games. The small victories. Immerse yourself in them.
What does it matter whether or not you’re making progress? You don’t need to be making progress in Korean; you like it anyhow; you like it because it’s there. You’re winning right now. Not in some nebulous fluency future.

Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of learning languages: you can’t have any momentum if you’re busy worrying about your position.
The reason you seem to have no momentum in Korean is because you don’t, because you spend way too much time worrying about your position and whether it’s changing. How far could a car drive if its occupants stopped every five minutes, took out a tape measure and ran back to their destination to make sure they were progressing? You’re thinking: “that example’s belabored and stupid, Khatz”. Well, your constant freaking worrying’s belabored and stupid. You should be too busy moving forward to be worrying about this.

And if you were really serious about making progress in Korean, you would be making progress in Korean, not worrying and Twittering about it in English. What you’re doing right now is the equivalent of asking your friend, every five minutes: “Hey, bro! Are we friends? Are we bros? Are we besties?!”. Shut up and just be friends. Enjoy your time together. Enjoy the moment. Get lost in it.

Imagine being on a couch, making out with someone, and every two minutes they go: “hey, so are we making out?”, “what base is this?”. You would have to conclude that this person was crazy and/or uninterested. Korean…feels like that about you right now .

Anyway, that’s all from me for now; I didn’t expect to resolve this question in one post and I don’t think I have. But hopefully you’ve gotten some use out of this rampage of metaphors . I leave you with the emphasis-added words of Norman Lear:

“Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn’t equate… Life is made of small pleasures…Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don’t have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don’t mean anything.” ~ Norman Lear

Tanks fer readin’. Do you have a special way of dealing with feelings of suckage? Enlighten us with your technique !

• Off = no skewing, will give you a statistically balanced mix of old and new cards.
• New = will skew exclusively towards new(er) cards — those recently added to the deck.
• Old = will skew towards old(er) cards — cards that were added a long time ago and/or have been waiting a long time for their rep ¹.

…we may be the sons of whomsoever we will. Households there are of noblest intellects; choose the one into which you wish to be adopted; you will inherit not merely their name, but even their property… ~ Seneca

A child doesn’t compare himself to his parents. He’s glad to leech off and learn from them. Learn from your sempais — the people who’ve played the game deeper and/or longer than you have so far. Don’t compare, don’t despair.

No child ever looks at his parents and goes: “Oh, expletive! They can walk and talk and sing and make money and I can’t and I suck, why do I even bother try?”. Even in the most competitive, “Type A” family, siblings may compete with each other but no one seriously competes with their parents.

So I play a lot of frisbee and ice hockey with people who are better than me. I’m almost always the bottom of the pack in terms of speed and skill. Once in a while though, I play pick-up with kids who haven’t had as much experience as me and they think I’m amazing. They think I’m poetry in motion. They think I’m the Lord of the Dance.

And I love the adulation. You think I’m an attention whore now? Thou hast yet to see whoredom.

But you know what? It’s all relative. I’m no prodigy, nor do I suck. Ultimately, there are no prodigies; there are no sucky people. Our results are merely a near-perfect reflection of the frequency and absolute quantity of our practice and maintenance activities. That’s all the 10k hours idea boils down to. Output is directly proportional to input. Painfully simple stuff.

In fact, as Scott Adams once suggested, instead of playing games, 90-some-percent of the time, we could merely exchange slips of paper with our practice stats on them and call it a day:

“I’ve spent a ridiculous number of hours playing pool, mostly as a kid. I’m not proud of that fact. Almost any other activity would have been more useful. As a result of my wasted youth, years later I can beat 99% of the public at eight-ball. But I can’t enjoy that sort of so-called victory. It doesn’t feel like “winning” anything.

It feels as meaningful as if my opponent and I had kept logs of the hours we each had spent playing pool over our lifetimes and simply compared. It feels redundant to play the actual games.”

But playing is fun, so we play.

Be grateful for your sempais. Be grateful for people whose skill level is higher than yours. That’s right, they’re not better than you. Their skill level is higher than your skill level. Their skill level is not who they are and your skill level is not who you are. They are and you are.

Your sempais are your parents in a very literal sense. They’ve been through more of life, i.e more of the microcosm of life that is your chosen sport (physical or intellectual) than you have so far, and have much to teach you, even — mostly? — by mere exposure. We call our schools our nourishing mothers — our alma maters — when really schools are nothing of the such. If anything at school nourishes at all, it’s not the institution: it’s the people and ideas you’re exposed to while there.

Don’t fight your “parents”. Use them. Benefit from them. Call it “Opportunistic Confucianism” . Absorb some of what they say. Absorb even more of what they do. Don’t compare. Don’t despair. Eventually, you get to move out of the “house” and say, perhaps justifiably, that it was all you. And it was all you, in a way, because good parents can take you far, but it takes a “good” kid — a smart kid — to know how to let them, to be alert enough to use all that parental goodwill.

Your heroes are your parents. Enjoy living in their “house” and enjoy moving out .

Let me be frank. I am a user. I use the crap out of parents, biological or otherwise; I consider them all “mine”. Why? Because they want to be “used”. Altruistic people and hyper-competitive people are on the same page in terms of opposing this idea, in that they quite mistakenly assume that all life is a zero-sum game, that your gain must come at someone else’s loss. It never occurs to them that some people like parenting in certain ways. Some people like offering rides, some people like feeding you, some people like offering abstract SRS advice.

Personal example: I don’t like interpreting for people and I basically don’t, even for good friends; I find it tiresome. I refuse. But I do enjoy doing stuff like introducing people to SRS and how to use it. It’s a give-fish versus teach-to-fish thing. When it comes to teaching fishing, I wish someone would use me .

Take your spoon out of your bowl of pride flakes and you’ll find a world filled with “parents” able and eager to “raise” you. They’ll correct your mistakes; they’ll show you techniques; they’ll supply you with gear; sometimes they’ll even do stuff for you. And they’ll enjoy doing it because every parent enjoys a grateful, receptive kid — the act of rearing such a child is its own reward.

Strange sentiments for a childless man who refuses to follow orders and instructions…
Look at me exhorting the virtues of the elders and seniors. Clearly, I’ve been living in East Asia too long …

Tip: always be careful when reading or listening to the words of someone who sees himself like this…

So, in early 2010, almost exactly three years ago, I quite literally took matters into my own hands. I went over to Amazon Japan and purchased what was then the best consumer IC recorder money could buy ¹ — because, frankly, you deserve the best sound quality possible. But that shiz I mean device was too big and obvious, so I got a…whatchamacallit, a hidden lapel microphone as well, to attach to the recorder. And then I went about my life.

…And magic happened.

Now, after almost three years of secretly violating people’s trust ², accumulating, compiling and editing raw “footage” (does that word work for audio?), the first volume of “AJATT.talk: The Secret Khatzumoto Recordings” is here. Have you ever wondered what I — or indeed any other speaker of raw, real-life, unscripted Japanese — sound like in real life, going about daily business, flirting with the dental assistant while she takes a mold of my teeth, ordering pizza, hanging out at home on the tatami mat with friends who shoulda known better than to refuse to appear on video with me (the bastards), getting my cellphone PIN reset by Softbank tech support, buying banana soymilk at the convenience store?

Well, wonder no more, because now you’re about to know.

AJATT.talk: The Secret Khatzumoto Recordings gets you the following:

• 17 tracks of secretly recorded audio, including but not limited to Khatzumoto (sssh….ssshh…it’s OK, baby; daddy’s just talking about himself in the third person) :
  • Flirting with the dental assistant while getting a mold taken for fillings screw you needing fillings doesn’t make me a bad person
    • Harry Flores: “I do feel kinda stalkerish listening to these…it’s fun though…really interesting! (Love the dentist one )”
  • Buying candy at the convenience store while visibly wearing a bra (I am not making this up)
  • Ordering vegetarian pizza over the phone because…I like doing that.
  • Talking trash with his friends, everything from Taylor Swift’s lack of ethnic ambiguity to…cellphone provider policies of
  • Reading Japanese books out loud (朗読) for fun
  • Buying an air ticket to Taiwan
  • Getting passwords reset by tech support reps who may or may not have been recording me for quality assurance purposes. Oh, the irony, beeches! The delicious irony of it all! Who’s on top now?! Huh?! Who’s top now?!
  • …And much more more!
• All tracks are in Japanese
• Each track comes with a full English explanation of the entire situation, as well as background and related information, so you know exactly what’s happening, who’s saying what and why.
• There’s even a transcription of one of those corporate call center voice menus with the fast-talking women (“to kill yourself, press ’1′”), so that you can actually know what they’re saying for once in your life
• Things would be awesome enough if all you got were those audio tracks. But no. It doesn’t stop there. You also get $217.11 ³ worth of freebies! Wait…please…stop salivating on your keyboard. I haven’t even started describing them yet:
  • Free EXCLUSIVE Bonus: Rare video of Khatz speaking Japanese with controversial and reclusive YouTube superstar, model and singer AppleMilk1988 (Emily Connor). In it, we discuss and promote the Midi-chlorian theory of Japanese: practice is nothing, congenital talent is everything. Francis Galton was right: AppleMilk1988 and I are magical. We we have the secret sauce: we were basically born knowing Japanese.
    • Drewskie: “Always a pleasure to see Khatz flex his muscles.”
    • 黒澤譲: “Where can I get some of those Japanese Midi-chlorians?”
  • Free Bonus: My First Sentence Pack, 2013 Edition — revised, edited and beautifully reformatted for a new decade
  • Free Bonus: The Science-Fiction Sentence Pack (Volume 3 of the “Forbidden Japanese” series)
  • Free Bonus: The MCD Quickstart Guide — to help you get the most of your sentence packs by turning them into MCDs, the most effortless, versatile and hyper-powerful and effortless (yeah, twice) SRS technique to date.
    • How To Do MCD Reps
    • How To Create MCD Cards in Surusu
  • 1 Free month of AJATT Plus
    • Premium content
    • Japanese translations of AJATT content
    • Free previews future products
    • The only troll-free Japanese language forum in the Universe
    • Automatically recurring for your convenience
    • You can quit any time — even right after your purchase — and still enjoy your free month of access
• No DRM. All 100% DRM-free. No DRM whatsoever: You are a good person. I trust you. I know you’re not going to screw me over. I believe you should and must have the right to remix (copy and paste, etc.) information for your personal, educational use. I believe that information is for fiddling with, not just looking at. I believe that you, a paying customer, should and must not be treated like a freaking criminal and subjected to ludicrous, draconian restrictions on how you manipulate data you paid for for you own consumption. This product is easy to manipulate digitally for your personal, educational use, so that you can get the maximum possible value out of it.

But enough talk about talk. Get your copy of AJATT.talk: The Secret Khatzumoto Recordings now!

• Timebomb pricing: Out of the kindness of my heart, there is no limit to the number of copies of AJATT.talk: The Secret Khatzumoto Recordings that will be made available. However, the price will go up every 15 minutes, like an upward-ticking timebomb, so the longer you wait, the more it costs. ⁴ The sooner you get yours, the less you pay. The sooner you act, the better a deal you get. That is the AJATT way: early adopters are always richly rewarded.
• What the…Why? Well, the video and sentence pack bonuses alone are worth more than the main package — $217.11, to be exact. Plus, frankly, since these are secret recordings ⁵, I’d rather as few people as possible got their hands on them. The fewer people have access to these, the better. I don’t want this stuff just going around…like that mother of yours.
• What?
• 100% Refund Guarantee: Oh yeah — I’m a perfect and flawless being, but I know that not everyone has my level of refinement and taste, so if, for whatever reason, you don’t like the package, you’re always welcome to a full refund. No hassle, no questions. Just be like: “You know I love you, AJATT.talk and I just want to be friends”.

“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.”
African Proverb ¹

There you are. Immersing. Shadowing. Japanese books everywhere. Japanese sounds in your ear. And you’re starting to get a bit of negative attention. A bit of IRL trolling.

They’re against you. They’re making fun of you. They’re looking at you weird. They’re telling jokes, maybe laughing to themselves. Laughing at you. Laughing about you. Great. I get it. Whatever. But answer me just one question:

• Whose side are YOU on?
• What team are YOU playing for?
• Do you like you?

They count as one question . Trolls aren’t the problem. The answer to that question is the problem ².

No matter how long life is or isn’t, it’s too short to go around trying to make people like you. Most people will never even know that you existed. Those that do know won’t remember. Those that remember will seldom think of you.

Live, direct human contact is not essential to getting used to a language. ¹ It’s useful and definitely desirable, even preferable. But far from essential.

People are wonderful. I love people. I live in a massive metropolis. My parents are people. My sisters are people. I grew up with people. I even speak Humanese. One time, I got a massage from a massage chair. That ###t sucked. It was terrible. It was torture. Worst. Massage. Ever. A true First World Problem.

But people get busy and impatient. People have exams to take and jerbs to use Facebook at and alcohol to drink.
Conversely (SAT word!), recorded people — recordings of people — are powerful and tireless human surrogates. The machines of today are not the machines of our — well, my — childhood. They work it harder, better, faster and stronger. They are far sturdier and more reliable than the consumer electronics of even 20 years ago. We no longer replace our machines because they break; we replace them because our friends make fun of us for having an old machine.

Live human beings will flake on you like Kellogg’s. They will dump you like a high-fiber deuce. Your TV (well, laptop ) won’t. Your iPod won’t. Recordings of humans will be there for you. All day. All night. Every day. 24/7/365. When’s the last time your friends were willing to infinitely loop the same cool line or joke to you? When’s the last time your friends’ conversations came with subtitles? When’s the last time your friends were willing to tell you a bedtime story all night every night?

Make friends with your digital media devices. Thank them. They will teach you a language.

Like The Most Interesting Man in the World, despite living in Japan, I don’t always speak to live Japanese people. But when I do, I get mistaken for someone who grew up here.

Such is the power of media.

If you have access to people who speak the language but you’re avoiding them out of shyness, don’t. Go. Hang out. Be social. It’s fun and it’s good for you. But if you don’t have access to people, don’t let that be a mental block for you. You’ll be fine.

In terms of Japanese fluency, media got me here ². My friends did not, not directly (they did indirectly; they were my biggest media suppliers ³; they complimented me constantly when we were hanging out and raised my self-confidence). They loved me. Their parents loved me. I know they did. I know they do. But too often they were too busy to be Khatz’s surrogate mommy/big brother. Having been raised in Japan, they were already predisposed to…using time-inefficient study methods ( zing!). Plus they were going to college in a second language, so they spent a lot of time hittin’ them books.

When I got over the incipient feelings of abandonment and realized that it was my responsibility to get good at Japanese, that the power lay in my hands — despite any apparent obstacles, (and that since (when we hung out) I did a lot of listening anyway, TV would be just as good as live people), then my linguistic life changed.

In getting used to a language, the presence of human beings is an asset, but their absence is not a liability. Not a dealbreaker. ⁴

Media will get you there. Recordings will get you there. No humans necessary.

“Your only principle…should be to have no principles.” ~ Robert Greene

SRS changed my life. I love SRS. Read Nutshell, and you’ll find that a third of the material (at this writing) is about SRSing. But as much of an SRS Flatlander as I am, I know, intellectually, that not everyone has to love it or need it. That’s why when an AJATTeer named Chuck Z (whose intellectual close friends get to call him The Real CZ — providing it’s with dignity) intimated that he was learning without an SRS — in a comment on a post about going your own way, no less — I had to hear his story.

SRS is a bit like a rice cooker — used correctly, it guarantees you good results — good rice — on a consistent basis with very little effort on your part. This is especially true when using a “psychoergonomic” SRS — like Surusu — that presents your stats to you in such a way that you can’t feel guilty or overwhelmed. Yeah. Sexy, I know. But it is possible to cook rice without a rice cooker; we ate rice without rice cookers for most of history, and many people swear by the manual way.

As Bob Proctor once said: “It’s not a matter of what’s right or wrong; it’s what works“. More than one thing can work. Rice can be cooked with or without a rice cooker and both ways are “right” and neither way is wrong. Ultimately, what matters is that you have some delicious rice to eat, not how you cooked it.

Anyway, here he is in his own words: The Real CZ, everybody!:

I believe that some language learners treat SRS like people treat the Bible. There are great aspects about both of these things, but if you happen to say something negative about either one, prepare to have people down your throat for going against them.

Once upon a time, I used to be a believer in Anki. However, after time, I felt like Anki was hindering my progress rather than helping it. I started using it in the summer of 2009, when I had just started out learning languages. I came across AJATT as trying to learn by textbooks bored me. I knew that I needed a different way to learn so that I would start learning regularly instead of trying to do exercises in a textbook.

For the first few months, I enjoyed using Anki. It helped me solidify the basics of the language and the very common words. However, I had reached that “intermediate stage,” that stage which seems like you’re on it for eternity. Adding 30 cards a day didn’t seem like it was helping any more. Instead of being the V8 engine that propelled me to the intermediate stage, it became that 1.3L engine with 70 horse power that was keeping me back.

Once you reach the intermediate stage in a language, it becomes so much easier to retain information compared to when you are a beginner. Once I reached the intermediate stage in Korean, I stopped using Anki and changed my method, which has helped me improve at a faster rate than I would have using Anki.

Let me explain why I believe this. I was using Anki when Khatzumoto was pushing the 10,000 sentences method. Let’s say I was adding 20 new sentences per day, all of them with one or two new words and some of them with a new grammar point. Let’s say I was learning 30 new words per day and five new grammar points. It might take me well over an hour to find suitable sentences to add to the SRS, create the cards and review them.

On the other hand, in that same hour, I could have read 500 sentences, looked up 100 words and be introduced to 8 grammar points that I still needed to get more used to. If you try to be “perfect” on those sentences, you spend a lot of time trying to be as correct as possible. However, by simply reading, you come across a lot more words and structures. You may only retain 60% of those words after the first time, but 60% out of 100 words with less effort → 100% of 30 words with more effort.

I treat vocabulary like friendships. You can meet a lot of people, but you won’t know everything about them after one “meeting”. For example, those 60 words that you learned will be reinforced if you keep reading (and listening) a lot. Those other 40 words still have a “connection”. When you look them up again, you’ll be like “Oh yeah, now I remember seeing this word a couple of times before”. It will be easier to remember those words after looking them up a few times.

Some words may only need to be looked up once or twice, others eight to nine times. I know SRS thumpers are probably like “AHA! WE GOT YOU NOW!” However, I still always had leeches when I reviewed sentences in Anki, and those sentences would contain those words that I would have needed to look up eight to nine times anyway.

To reinforce these words, intensive and extensive reading both help. Intensive reading is a natural SRS, as you will see the same vocab and structures over and over again while looking up words. However, it’s very boring unless you’re an upper intermediate learner (B2). Looking up 70% of the words on a page for the first half of the book does suck. However, I have done it for a book and it really helped me.

I also use extensive reading, where I don’t look anything up. That is also like a natural SRS as you are seeing many words and structures in a short period of time, allowing your brain the solidify the knowledge you have already learned.

I also use a method which I call the “Half-Assed Intensive Reading (HAIR)”. It’s the best of both worlds between intensive and extensive reading. With the HAIR method, I look up words that either show up multiple times or if it’s the only unknown word in a sentence I don’t know. You can still read about 80% of the material you would have if you had done extensive reading. You won’t be learning as much vocabulary as you would through intensive reading, but it’s a much more manageable load and since those are the important words in the story, they will be reinforced as you keep reading. You can apply this method to web articles, provided that you regularly read articles about the same topic (ex: entertainment, sports, politics) as much as you can.

I use all three methods of reading, depending on the situation and my mood. I‘m not going to do intensive reading while reading a paperback novel 95% of the time. If it’s a short article on the internet with a few unknown words, I will do intensive reading. If it’s an article where I can only understand 60% of it due to it being something I don’t read regularly, I’ll use the HAIR method.

Just because I don’t use SRS, it doesn’t mean that I don’t follow any of Khatzumoto’s advice. Whenever I’m not reading the Wall Street Journal, crunching numbers in excel, looking up 10-K reports of companies due to being a finance major, I apply Khatzumoto’s other advice. I try to keep my environment “foreign” as much as I can. I am learning Korean, Japanese and Mandarin right now, with Korean being my main focus and the other two being “dabbling languages” that I keep in contact with every day. I have many Korean books around the house and I usually bring one with me to school. I visit a lot of Korean websites when I’m done with the stuff I have to do in English. I watch Korean dramas a loooooooot. I mean a lot. I listen to Korean music all of the time.

I also use Khatzumoto’s other advice, such as working in small chunks (15 minutes a lot throughout the day, or even several 15 minute chunks back-to-back) while doing relaxing things in Korean in between. For example, I may do intensive reading of an interesting article for 30 minutes, coming across many new words and some new sentence structures, spend some time listening to a couple of Epik High songs, and then go find some more articles to read that are interesting and use the HAIR method for 30 minutes. Then I may go watch an episode of a Korean drama. Then I’ll probably do some finance stuff for a little while before going back to Korean.

To conclude this post, I believe it’s good to try someone advice, but if it doesn’t work out for you, discard it or adapt it. Anki just didn’t work for me. Anki may help you and that’s great. However, AJATT isn’t the medieval Catholic Church and Khatzumoto isn’t going to banish me because I don’t worship SRS. SRS made me dislike learning languages, which is why I didn’t make much progress until I ditched it once and for all in late 2011. I started learning more effectively without the SRS and actually started surrounding myself with the language every day, as much as I could in late 2011.

Seeing as how I’ll be entering the world of finance in the future, I can’t say that I can be “fluent in Korean 18 months” because of needing to spend so much of my future time working with statistics and researching companies, but I believe my method will help me attain fluency (C1) within a couple of years in Korean and reach the B2 level or so in Japanese and Mandarin by then. Like Khatzumoto said in his article, it’s just advice. Don’t treat AJATT as a holy scripture. Treat it as an idea factory and try them and continue using the ideas that work for you.

“Much mischief results from our taking a moral position on matters which are not basically moral matters at all.” ~ Maxwell Maltz

“More defeats and failures are due to mental blindness than to moral deviations.” ~ Raymond Holliwell

「不管白貓黑貓，能抓到老鼠就是好貓」 “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a white cat or a black cat; a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” ~ Deng XiaoPing ¹

“Dude. Enough quotes already.” ~ Imaginary Quote Complaint Guy

Within the narrow sphere of learning (getting used to) a language…

…any plan that requires you to become a better person in order to work is a bad plan.

Now, this may sound strange coming from someone who reads so much personal development (“self help”) literature and says such self improvementy things on his Twitter, and tells you to believe in yourself. But the more I read and the more I live, the more I’m convinced that it’s true. Looking back, anything I’ve ever done that worked fabulously, did so because I chose a better process. I never rose to the occasion, I simply boarded an elevator. The elevator did the rising: I was just there.

Don’t improve yourself. Stop trying to become a better person. It won’t work; it’s not worth it and you don’t need to. Perhaps you are bad person ². But even if you are, you’re still good enough. Not good. Good enough. Adequate. You’ll do. Just like how any decent stainless steel fork is good enough as a fork. Is it sterling silver? Can it make phone calls? No. But can you eat food with it and do anything that a fork needs to do? Most certainly. It’s even a respectable weapon. I don’t think this fork needs to sit around hating itself because it’s not silver.

The proverbial hole will take any shape and you’re any shape. You don’t improve yourself. You improve your processes. A better process, or method or sequence of choices and environment settings. You’ll stay the same. All your flaws will still be there, visible under the microscope you insist on looking through. But you’ll get amazing results. And it won’t be luck and it won’t be chance and it won’t be magic. It’ll be good processes. Good systems.

And the best part is, you don’t even have to make your own system. You can just buy, borrow or remix other people’s. That’s the beauty of something like Neutrino; you don’t become a better person; you don’t become more “disciplined” in the common sense of the word; you start here, you shuffle an atom‘s distance over there. That’s it. Start where you are, work with what you’ve got. Repeat. End of story.

Let’s let Earl Nightingale get a word in edgeways here:

“The problem is that our mind comes as standard equipment at birth. It’s free. And things that are given to us for nothing, we place little value on. Things that we pay money for, we value.

The paradox is that exactly the reverse is true. Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free — our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence…All these priceless possessions are free.

But the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time.” [Emphasis added]

You haven’t dropped the ball: you are the ball. Without you, there is no game. $500,000 will get you a Rolls Royce Phantom or a particularly nice watch; it can’t even get you a prosthetic pinkie ³ that works as well as a so-called “regular one”. You come with built-in machinery that learns languages and heals itself; Siri can’t even reliably do computer stuff for you. ⁴

And you’re prepared to call yourself a loser and a failure and a bad person because what? Over what? Because you missed a move in someone else’s game? Really? You’re going to throw your king — you — under a bus to save a pawn…from a different game on a different board with a different chess-set?

Good move.

Method over morality. You don’t suck. Your processes suck. Don’t improve yourself. Improve your processes. Do not become a better person. Stay the way you are. Just make slightly better choices each time. ⁵