If you think [books are] expensive, try ignorance
Derek Bok, Bastardized by Khatzumoto

“there are golden houses in books and there are beautiful girls ¹ in books“ ²
Understanding Chinese Culture and Learning
Ting Wang
University of Canberra, Australia

Trying to get used to an L2 without buying books is like trying to go to college without buying books ³.

You’ll buy a big screen TV, but you won’t buy books?
You’ll buy nice clothes, but you won’t buy books?
You’ll buy a beer, but you won’t buy books?
You’ll get nice shampoo, but you won’t buy books?
You’ll go to the hair salon, but you won’t buy books?

Full stomach, nice shirt, empty head? Is that what’s “in” this year?

You’ll buy the books your school forces you to buy, but you won’t buy the books that you want? The books you’re mostly likely to read and re-read? The books that look cool to you? The books most likely to make you grow?

Books. The written transcript of the seminar.
Books. The wisdom of the world.
Them things that Hitler and QinShiHuangDi and every despot before, between and after them burned, and buried people for writing.
Those doohickeys that every potentate from Queen Elizabeth version 1.0 to the former CEO of Nike wouldn’t let you see.
That Africans kidnapped and enslaved in North America had their fingers torn off for even owning. ⁴
That the Korean ruling class actively prevented regular folk from enjoying.
That the Roman Catholic Church put a blanket death warrant on Martin Luther’s head for writing.
Written using symbols that were once reserved only for shamans, magicians and sorcerers.

Books. The difference between the people of  the book — the Jews who make the pop culture you enjoy ⁵– and the people who sit around whining and grousing and making up conspiracy theories about the people of the book. “Disproportionate representation”? Classic harvest-time c###blocking. Where were you at sowing time? Where were you when they were “disproportionately” creating and enjoying home libraries?

What would you think of a doctor who wouldn’t buy books about medicine?
What would you think of an investor who wouldn’t buy books about finance?
What would you think of an engineer who wouldn’t buy books about engineering.
What would you think of an athlete who wouldn’t buy books about her sport?
A nutritionist who wouldn’t buy books on nutrition?

You’d think them horriby naïve. You’d think they didn’t mean it. You’d think they that weren’t real players, and that they certainly couldn’t be very good ones.

So what about you?
Are you a real player?
Or are you holding out for waterproof teabags to go with your bookless literacy?
Come on, now.
Don’t be ghetto.

Buy the books already.

What do you suppose your literacy would work on, even if you magically received it?
You do realize that it’s a dynamic skill that grows or atrophies based on practice, right?
Without books, even if you suddenly became literate, you would instantly start becoming illiterate.

Don’t pray for rain without digging ditches.
Don’t pray for literacy without buying books.
That’s not faith; it’s just stupidity.

Speaking of faith…
Would you buy a lottery ticket?
Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t.
There are 10 types of people and all that.

Would you buy a lottery ticket if you were friends with the people who run the lottery, and they were always willing and able to throw you a bone, ’cause when you’re here, you’re family, badadbing ⁶? If you had that kind of influence over it?

Would you buy a stock if you knew — knew — beyond a shadow of a doubt ⁷ that it was going to go up?
And how much of this stock would it be worth it to buy? How much of this stock would it not be a waste of your money to buy? All things being equal ⁸, at what point is a stock that’s guaranteed to go up not a good investment?
The question is its own answer.

Now, what about books?
Are books anything like this hypothetical stock of ours?
Could anyone make a claim that strong?
Probably not. I don’t know.
But you could at least say this: books are as close to that stock as you’re likley to get on a regular basis…without earning a royal buggering from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The stock is you. You invest in it by buying and reading books. And you’re allowed as much insider trading as you want. No one can touch you.

Pound for pound, word for word, a typical book is the cheapest information you will ever buy.

Buy the books already.
They’ll do you a damn sight more good than beer and jeans.
Buy those books, and one of these days, the books will buy you jeans…and, if Chinese proverbs are to be believed, hookers and blow and houses covered in bling. Chinese proverb writers: pandering to the MTV Cribs demographic since 2500 BCE .

You’ve clearly used this method to accomplish great things, so I’m trying to put my skepticism aside… I see how this would apply to something like cleaning the house, but I’m having trouble seeing how it can be applied to larger, more complicated and cognitively intensive tasks. For example, a 20-page paper for a college class.

If I could only work in spurts of 90-120 seconds, I might finish 2 or 3 sentences at a time. Sometimes I wouldn’t even finish one sentence. If I then had to switch, when I came back I’d have to spend most of the timebox figuring out where I left off in the argument and getting myself back in that train of thought. Then it would be time to switch again.

I guess I’m saying that while I see the benefits of frequent task-switching (novelty bringing more mental energy and interest), there are also costs. Some tasks just seem more suited to spending 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or even an hour immersed in focused work.

What do you think about that? Am I misunderstanding how the timeboxing method applies to tasks like writing a paper? Or are the some tasks that work better with timeboxing than others, and if so how should we decide when to make use of this technique?

Duh. If you write 2~3 sentences at a time enough times…the paper will write itself. How do you think I produced this entire website, which, at this writing, would fill a couple of Harry Potter-size books?

Admittedly, this website sucks. But that’s beside the point. It’s here.

There are no truly big atoms. There are no big tasks. Only long sequences of small tasks.

There is no such thing as “hard”: there are just things that need smaller chunks than you’re currently using.

“Don’t force output in L2. Just keep getting input. Don’t force yourself to go to the bathroom, just keep drinking water.”
Jamie Fan, Pensive Urinator

Sarah Silverman, Linguist

Language is peeing.
Jamie Fan of Twitter fame, a leading authority on the urinary arts, actually came up with this analogy.
To tell you the truth, I’m jealous, because I think it’s the best language acquisition metaphor ever invented. Ever.
It’s like a golden shower of insight…

Because of the…golden nuggets of wisdom it contains?
Wow. Crossed a few lines there.
That R Kelly, when will he learn, eh lads, eh?
Anyway, let’s look at:

Approximately ten reasons why learning a language is exactly, 100% like peeing.

1. No matter what you drink…
   • Mountain Dew (Anime)
   • Water (Unscripted natural conversation)
   • Milk (The Moë Sentence Pack)
   • Ambrosia (Comedy)
   • Protein shake (Star Trek)
   • Green smoothie (Evangelion)
   • Green smoothie with added vitamins (Rebuild of Evangelion)
   • Green smoothie with added vitamins, made and served by a maid dressed in short shorts, with blue hair that completely covers one of her eyes: if you’d been there with me and the lads that night in Akihabara…you’d understand. (The part in Rebuild of Evangelion where Shinji’s eyes go red and he roars: 「綾波を、返せ！」 )
   • Unfiltered gutter water (Textbooks) ¹

   …it’s all mostly made of water and it all comes out as pee. All FUNBUN ² Japanese is Japanese. Even “anime Japanese”.

2. You don’t know exactly when you’re going to pee, but if you keep drinking, you will pee.
• So stop freaking out about when you’ll get good or when you’ll start speaking. Everyone’s a little different! You’ll pee when you pee! Shut up and drink!
3. Worrying will get you nowhere. Just drink more. Keep drinking.
4. The more you drink, the more you pee. Volume(pee) ∝ Volume(drink).
5. Eventually, you won’t be able to help peeing: you won’t be able to help talking like a Japanese person. Eventually, it’ll be harder to not pee than to pee. Sweet, huh?
6. You always pee less than you drank: input and passive vocab will always outstrip output and active vocab. Input precedes and exceeds output. Never expect to drink a liter and pee out a liter. Volume(pee) < Volume(drink). You’re going to pee out less than you drink…
7. …and you’re not going to pee at all if you don’t drink. Nothing begets nothing. 0 begets 0. No drink, no pee. Drinking = input. Peeing = output. There is no output without input.
8. There is no output before input, either. Drink now. Drink first. Pee later. You have to drink before you pee. You can’t pee before you drink. You can’t “get fluent” at Japanese, then immerse. What, you think the language can understand your future promises (“oh, he’s going to pay me later; he said the cheque’s in the mail, so let’s give him an advance on the fluency”)? Darling, Japanese only knows what you’re doing for her right now. ³ “What have you done for me lately?” That’s what your Japanese perenially wants to know. You have to immerse in order to get fluent. Prior to getting fluent. Drink first. Pee later. Immersion first, fluency later.
9. Drink a lot at night (sleep immersion), and you might wet the bed (L2 dreams, L2 sleeptalking)
• HAHAHA! You bedwetting loser! ⁴
10. For added reliable, constant hydration (and thus peeing), you can go beyond just drinking and set up an intravenous drip for yourself  – (TV left permanently on, radio, automated immersion, multiplexing, small-but-radical(-and-persistent/stable) environmental changes)
11. Tasty drinks → more drinking → more peeing. So drink tasty drinks!
12. Conversely, drinks that taste gross → less drinking → dehydration → acute and chronic health problems (including impaired mental function) → death. Watching and reading boring Japanese will lead you to avoid all Japanese, which will lead to Japanese “dehydration“, which will lead to the death of your Japanese (baby).

People always want to know what your pee situation is. How thick is the stream? How long can you go? What color is it? People are so interested in comparing and contrasting and speeding up the peeing process.

But no one wants to hear about the drinking. People want to drink as little as possible and pee as much and as quickly as possible. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that — wanting the (apparently) impossible is how progress happens — but it’s a dumb thing to get stressed out about when…you could just drink more.

That’s it. The Pee Theory of Language Acquisition. So, relax and drink up . Your shower of golden wisdom will come! ⁵

PS: Many paths to enlightenment pass through the restroom. If any more micturative wisdom occurs to you, please share .

I was a few chapters into my Minna No Nihongo advanced textbook and I showed to my native Japanese stretch-class friends while on the subway ride home. I take a weekly Japanese stretch class so that I have a chance for real Japanese practice and it is also really good for your body! I showed them the Unit Test at the end of the first few chapters…and they were getting the answers wrong.

I then calmly closed my textbook and I wished it well. That event essentially proved the most important pieces of your nonsense/brilliance were CORRECT. My Japanese friends know Japanese. Whatever that book was giving me was not of real use. I would have clung to those type of low-immersion, high-tedium Japanese-reminiscent language textbooks FOREVER if I didn’t actually find a few pure diamonds on your site.

Twp weeks of immersion and fun have pushed my Japanese speaking comfort level further than years of boring and unnatural textbooks and addiction to external valuations through test scores and other unnecessary benchmarks

…

I am writing you as I listen to the news in Japanese. By changing my iTunes language to Japanese, I was able to access the Japanese podcast section (which is free) and download 760 25-minute Japanese podcasts and I listen ALL. DAY. LONG. Even while reading Japanese manga. Not to mention that new podcasts come out every day (other than just news) so that things never get stale.

End result: After 2 weeks of your immersion (and 3 1/2 years of being unable to continue a Japanese conversation for more than 2 sentences), I bumped into a Japanese native who lives on my floor. I just moved here last month and my building is about 30% Japanese. So we started talking in the hallway in Japanese. After a few minutes, he asked me if I was married to a Japanese woman or if I had lived in Japan –

I almost pooped my pants! I was so da[r]n shocked!

Thank you, Khatzumoto.
.

~ Lou W

Has AJATT helped you? What’s your success story? Share. It will make us all smiley and happy. It may even keep a kid off drugs. Will it keep me off hookers and blow? No, but it might save that next kid. Share your success story. Save a life.

Let me know

Khatz

There’s a bit of a backlog in the Surusu cloze card queue. Fear not, it should resolve itself over the next 96~168 hours. Your data are fine, sitting pretty

Sorry for the delay. Surusu’s getting popular, so it’s looking like time for her to move out and get her own place (a faster, dedicated server). More on that later…

1. The Prime Directive: Have fun.

2. The Promise: Show up.

3. The Triple Path:

• Don’t learn: get used to.
• Don’t improve: suck less.
• Don’t binge: nibble often.

How do you score a card when you had it totally right on first instinct, but then you second-guessed yourself and decided that you were probably thinking of something else and that you didn’t really know the word, only to find out that your initial instinct was right after all? In one sense, you were immediately, instinctively right. In another sense, you failed completely, because in the end you wouldn’t have said/written anything out of fear that it was wrong.

Mariah@How To Score Reps In Surusu

One thing that’s always bugged me with this is, what do you rank it if you have to use the hint? For example, if you can’t remember it at all and then read the hint and get it completely correct, would you still rate it as a zero? Or if you partially remember it but then fully remember it after reading the hint, would you rank it a one? Because I feel like I might be grading myself too harshly by doing this…

Time wasted on decisions is the worst kind. Not only does it waste time ¹, but it weakens the body. Notice how virtually none of us these days do manual labor, yet at the end of the day, we are often as tired as if we’d been lifting 90-pound roof tiles. That there is the very real, physical — somatic — cost of worrying, of fretting, of being unable to make decisions quickly.

Being able to make decisions is great. The more decisions you’re allowed to make, the freer you are. But a decision can and will also become toxic if allowed to remain “in the body”, “in the system”, as it were, for too long.

OK, enough shady pop philosophy. Here’s an SRS scoring heuristic to make your decisions faster = life easier.

It’s simple.

• If you’re stuck between two scores, say a 4 and a 5, take the high ground: give yourself the higher score.
• If you’re stuck between many (i.e. three or more) scores, say: a 2, a 3 and a 4, move to the middle: give yourself the midpoint score.

Let’s review:

• Two? Take the top.
• Many? Move to middle.

GLOAF. Give your body and mind a rest. Don’t wear it down by letting petty decisions, like the SRS score on one card, sit and stew. No stewing. Score and move on.

PS: What if “many” is an even number (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4)? No problem. All that means is that your midpoint score is two scores. So do it in two moves, which is to say:

1. move to the middle (e.g. 2,3), and then,
2. take the top (e.g. 3).

PPS: In most cases of confusion or uncertainty, I would just go for the (overall) midpoint score, which happens to be a 3 in Surusu. Think of it as your default.

“By doing less, and focussing on the one thing that counts, you’re actually doing more.”
Momoko

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance”
Bruce Lee

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Leonardo da Vinci

Giving less of a care.

Nowadays, “care” is a good word.
“I cyare about yew”, says that art teacher who gives the easy A’s, tells random stories and is too nice to tell anyone that their pictures are crap.

But originally, “care” meant “worry”. It meant “fret”. It meant “brood”. It was a bad thing. We still hold onto this original meaning in some set phrases, such as when children are jealously (and rather incorrectly) described as being “without a care in the world”.

GTD. Getting Things Done.
David Allen is a better man than me. He’s handsome. He’s funny. He does more for the world with his left pinkie than I ever have or will. That’s why, if he read this blog (which he won’t, but if he did), he wouldn’t be offended when I say that GTD, as much as it has helped, has also done a massive disservice to mankind.

GTD is a massive disservice to mankind.

David of the Allen wouldn’t be offended by that statement because David Allen himself knows that GTD is a disservice to mankind. He admits it openly. In the opening moments of the audio lecture version of GTD (which I once had on heavy rotation), Allen admits that the real way to solve the issue is actually to do less stuff.. To not do stuff. To leave things undone. To eliminate. To give less of a fucare.

But, he says, you little bastards aren’t going to do that; you aren’t going to simplify your lives; you aren’t going to eliminate. So here is GTD, a tool to help you capture and manage it all.

As I understand it, GTD is essentially a living, breathing, thoroughgoing rejection of the Pareto principle and all the rewards that the Pareto principle could bring.

Most of what you do, think and have doesn’t matter.

Secretly, you know this. That’s why you have so much resistance to doing it, or even thinking of doing it.

Somewhere deep, deep inside us, we know what matters. We know what needs to be done. And we know what isn’t it. That’s why we drag our feet so much about so much stuff, because it is busywork. Because it’s irrelevant.

But elimination, decisiveness, thinking about whether or not things matter, these aren’t memes ¹ that are good for slaves to have. So you won’t find these ideas promoted too hard in schools or even to regular employees in businesses. The party line is that you should obediently do everything that’s set out before you and more. And don’t get me wrong…that is a good thing.
Just not for you.

I’ve seen this in my own life, in things big and small.
Here’s a petty example:

When I try to fit everything I can think of possibly ever maybe needing into my manbag — an iPhone, an Android tablet, a Pocket WiFi unit, a battery charger, a notebook…I forget the things that matter most: things like my headphones. My sweet, sweet, beautiful, cordless Bluetooth headphones. I can’t wear most headphones: they hurt my ears; they keep falling out; the bass sucks; the wires get all up in my bidniss (is that a word?). But these guys…these guys are my friend.

All my manbag needs is a wallet, an iPhone and some headphones. Three things. Everything else is replaceable. Everything else can be substituted.

It’s like that Mormon object lesson with the pebbles, the rock and the jar. Try to fit in all the pebbles and there’s no room for the rock. Stick the rock in first, and the pebbles will fall in place around the rock, fitting themselves in the cracks.

Another petty example:

At the end of 2011, I emptied my real life (paper) GTD-style inbox.
Into a trash bag.
A lot of the crap in there had been in there since 2010. Some even earlier.
Now, what does this mean?
It means that sleeping dogs can be allowed to lie. It means that things — even important-looking things (and paper documents have an incredible self-importance about them) — can be left alone. Untouched. Undealt with. Unsorted. Forever. And nothing bad will happen. In fact, only good will happen.

When you try to do everything — or even just make and maintain lists of everything – via GTD or otherwise — you probably will get more done. You’ll have checklists with lots of stuff ticked off. But…But. All the crap you get done probably won’t matter that much. You’re likely to get everything done but what matters most. You will run yourself ragged with minutiae. And you’ll be a good slave, but that’s all you’ll ever be.

The one thing that is most important to a slave is to figure out how not to be a slave. All a slave’s available resources — time, money, words, attention — should be spent on this important thing. GTD and its ilk teach (despite the best of intentions) you how to do everything but what matters. Because when you try to do ² everything, “what matters” has to take a massive hit for the team.

No doubt GTD includes some indirect elimination somewhere, but that’s just the problem: it merely includes elimination when it needs to be elimination. Elimination can’t be a token ethnic minority character or even a loyal sidekick; elimination needs to be the protagonist. Elimination needs to be the default behavior. By default, just don’t do it. Give less of a fucare. Unfortunately, GTD by default is all about listing it all! List it all! And manage it all! So you can be free. No…you just spend your life juggling lists. List limbo.

Most things do not need to get done. Ever. Some things do need to get done. But usually like one or two things. Everything else can be left alone or done half-buttockedly. And, yes, it’ll be imperfect. But it’ll be imperfect even if you have a heart attack trying to do it all. No doubt there are exceptions, but you’re not a surgeon and I’m not curing cancer, so let’s not kid ourselves.

“But…but…”

But what?

“But what if bankers and electricians and train conductors and surgeons just start doing as they please, all willy-nilly?!”
It’s always people who are neither bankers nor electricians nor conductors nor surgeons who ask questions like this. You push paper, OK? Calm down.

SAITO Hitori, one of Japan’s richest men (and her highest individual taxpayer) puts it best:
“Human beings are perfect at 78%. There is no 100% for humans. 78% is human perfection.”

Things are going to be imperfect either way, but one way is fun and the other way sucks.

The point of hockey — of just about any game — is to score goals. The goal of the game is…goals. If what you’re doing doesn’t help you score, you might as well rest. Get off the ice. Sit it out. Chillax. Swallow some Pocari Sweat. It’ll be far more helpful than whatever busywork the world at large is trying to rope and guilt you into doing. It might even save your life — most (as in 90%-ish most) hockey injuries happen near the ends of periods, when people are most tired.

Important things are better done badly than not at all.
Unimportant things are better not done at all than done well.
Most things are unimportant.
Most things don’t need to be done.

You don’t have a kajillion things to do. You only have one thing to do. Decide on that one thing. That one thing should be so important, so valuable, that if it were the only thing you did the entire day (or what’s left of it), your day would still be a roaring success. That’s the kind of imbalance I’m talking about.

Bar causing other people harm, it doesn’t matter what else you do if you score.

The Pareto principle tells us ³ that life is beautifully imbalanced. A vital few things are incredibly important, and a trivial many are neither here nor there. In any group of ten things, there is almost always one that is by itself worth more than the other nine put together. We want to exploit this imbalance.

I hate it when people criticize me or my ideas. While my twisted, passive-aggressive, quasi-gentlemanly pride has generally kept me out of flame wars, in my heart of hearts I’m always like: “DON’T QUESTION ME!!!! NO! YOU DON’T GET IT!” So it actually pains me to call out GTD like this because I like David Allen; I enjoy his work; I think he’s really insightful.

Andbut ⁴ the man is better than the system.  The system –GTD — needs more work. They system needs to get in bed with (the ideas of) Pareto and Parkinson and Koch and Gawande. Pareto and Koch to eviscerate the waste, Parkinson to compress the time and Gawande to keep the checklist-making at that sweet spot where it’s useful but not overwhelming.

Anyway!

Let’s bring it home for Japanese.
A lot of you basementfags fine, upstanding denizens of the Japanophilic regions of the Internet care way too much.
And what for?
What on or off earth for?
You’re going to die and be eaten by maggots, yet you persist in forcing yourself to manually enter the boring, unnatural content of some book of sentence patterns — every single one! — because you think it’s “good for you”? Because you “have to finish what you started”? Because you “should”?

You’re afraid of using Lazy Kanji because it’s not “hard enough”?

WTF?

Are you sick?
Do you like pain?

Coz…yeah…no.
Stop it.
Don’t GTD.
GLOAF.

Give less of a care. You only have so many to give anyhow. You only have so many fucares to give. Don’t go wasting them on pointless crap. Use them where they matter most, on the people who matter most. Or…do go wasting them on pointless crap, but know that you’ll be fresh out of fucares when it comes to things that actually matter.

You wouldn’t buy a tub of ice-cream, scoop the ice cream out, set it aside somewhere else and try to eat the packaging the ice-cream…hold on…I’m gonna go buy some Häagen-Dazs…OK I’m back…and then try to eat the p…dang, this is good…and then try to eat the packaging the ice-cream came in, would you? That would be madness. That would be Sparta. It would take time and energy and give you stomach trouble and gross you out.

The ice-cream of life — the important bits — is hidden in packaging. It’s wrapped in layers and layers and layers of packaging — busywork, distraction, indecision, guilt, waste, triviality. In fact, there’s more packaging than ice-cream. But don’t be fooled. Don’t eat the packaging. Just eat the ice-cream.

When you try to learn every word or sentence possible, what matters most — getting used to Japanese — suffers. When you refuse to delete cards because “you entered them” and “you need to know” what’s on them, you effectively delete all your cards, because you start to avoid the SRS altogether. When you try to do a gazillion reps in one sitting, what matters most — doing reps at all — suffers.

Don’t let the trivial many things you could do overpower the vital few that matter.
The list of things you could possibly do is not a democracy. It’s an oligarchy. There is no equality in the list; there is only rampant inequality.

Success is not measured by the number of things that get done. Success is not measured by the proportion of things that get done ⁵. I used to think it was. It’s not. Because only one or two of them matter to begin with. Only one or two are even worth doing. And if only one or two are even worth doing, then there’s no need to list all of them. No need. Only list enough to get you some candidates to look at…like 3 or 5 or 10. Then pick the one that matters most and run with that.

I don’t know the rules of chess. But I know that you don’t win at it by mowing down as many pawns as possible. Screw the pawns. Take that king. Screw the pebbles. Go for the rock. Handle the rock. Get the rock in first and screw everything else. Boom. Headshot.

Be stingy — economical — with your time and worry ⁶.
Save your fucares.
Start GLOAF today! ⁷

“Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
~ Alfred North Proactiv Clearasil Whitehead