The archive has been scoured, the votes have been tallied and the verdict is in! Some were chosen by popularity, some based on my own personal biases, others using a combination of both, and they’re all summarized here for you to enjoy. Just like in 2011, some months (particularly August and September) had stronger showings than others, but since this list is split by month, they didn’t make it here 🙂
- January: Nothing Is Hard
- “There is no too hard, there is only too big.”
- February: If You Played Songs The Way You Read Books, You Would Hate Music
- “You don’t need to get good at reading to start skimming. If anything, the weaker your reading skill, the more you need to skip.”
- March: The Blessing of Forgetting
- “…don’t think of forgetting…as the opposite of learning but as merely a different form of learning. You don’t forget Japanese, you simply learn not-Japanese. You’re always learning. The only question is what.”
- April: Step Into the Sunlight, But Don’t Look Into the Sun
- “Do not look directly at goal. May cause schlep blindness…Like blinders on a racehorse, you can take yourself (and other people) to any extreme of excellence or lameness if you merely narrow your mental focus away from the debilitatingly magnitudinous core goal and towards productive, forward-moving, helpful minutiae.”
- May: It Counts If You Let It
- “…there are no large victories. Just jillions of tiny ones that we lazily sum up and call a single, large victory.”
- June: The Trouble With Heritage Languages
- “Blood is no advantage, because (wait for it)…there’s no language in your 「blood」. Nobody bleeds kanji.”
- July: Start Dirty: Why A Clean Slate Is Bad For You and What To Do About It
- Favor evolution over annihilation. In terms of your learning technique and process, let things be messy, organic and fluid. Allow some margin of error (not in terms of foreigner-like, non-native speech and writing habits, but in terms of:
- August: Mediocre Excellence, Or, Excellence By Mediocrity: How To Achieve Greatly By Doing Almost Nothing
- Brian Eno: “…beautiful things grow out of s##t.”
- September: Vocabulary Expansion: Circle of Concern, Circle of Control
- The very act of worrying about whether or not you’re (getting) good at Japanese actually makes you bad at Japanese.
- October: You Are Not, Never Have Been and Never Will Be The Right Age For Anything
- If you’re alive, you’re old enough. If you’re not dead, you’re young enough.
- November: How to Avoid The Two Biggest Mistakes That Almost All Language Learners Seem to Make
- Ask the Internet for small, specific references and pieces of information. Don’t ask it the Big Questions. Don’t ask it for permission or predictions. Run your own experiments then tell the Internet what happened.
- December: How To Compete Against Yourself: Don’t Do Your Best, Do Better Than Your Personal Average
- Stop trying to do your best. Stop trying to break world records. Break 0. Then break average (yours, not the world’s). Let the records break themselves.
What was your favorite AJATT post or quote from 2013? Let us all know! 😉 .