Often enough, a comment puts it much better than I ever put it. This was one such situation. Handsome AJATTeer Pingfa brings us back to basics, urging us to focus on what we can do, on what we can control, on our point(s) of maximum power and traction.

There’s a quote I read once that I really like (big aphorism collector here). It goes something like: ordinary people try to do what they can’t do; the true hero simply does what he can do. Once you stop whining and complaining and worrying about what you can’t do, you realize that there’s far more that’s within your power than you give yourself credit for. You become resourceful, like MacGyver with his Bisquick. You don’t necessarily become MacGyver; he had his tools and you have yours (plus he’s fictional). But you do become like him, which is the point really.

How do you get where you want to go? By moving in that direction. How do you move in that direction? By using whatever means of locomotion are readily available to you at that particular place and time. Ancient people didn’t refuse to walk until horses had been tamed, or refuse to ride until cars had been invented. Stop wanting to know whether or not it works. It works. It’s working. Move already.

Pingfa on April 27, 2013 at 20:58:

The best way to do get over doubts about a language is to put aside the doubts and break down what you know you can do for sure.
You can learn words. That’s a guarantee. Maybe you won’t always understand the context, but it’s easy learning a word. Look it up, look it up again, win.

Even if you know absolutely nothing about the sentence structure, one thing anyone without a significant mental retardation is guaranteed to be able to do is learn a word. Learn all the words within a sentence and you can piece them together. Even if you know all the words within a sentence but don’t know the context of that specific sentence, there’ll be sentences you can piece together that further clarify those sentences.

So keep being exposed to words. Keep absorbing words, and eventually you will be able to piece those words together to form a coherent sentence. It’s like many pieces of a puzzle, once you’ve figured out how one piece fits with another and another piece fits with that, you’re on your way to making a bigass puzzle.

If on the other hand, if one has doubts not so much about their capability but about their motivation, I believe the best way to maintain motivation when you are lacking comprehension is to seek out media you enjoy as is without the need to understand it. Enjoy some pretty visuals. Watch dubs of movies you already know the dialogue to. Don’t concern yourself with learning if you don’t want to, put your feet up and enjoy the ride.

You might think at some point, ‘I really should learn more’, but that’s really not necessary to maintain exposure. As long as the language continues to surround you, you will solidify what you’ve learned even if you don’t actively learn any more.

The thing that did the most for my German, was watching all 7 seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 dubbed in German. People told me it was trash, and it wasn’t a real German TV show so it wouldn’t help, and all sorts of other bunk. It was dubbed in German for real Germans to watch.

It was really hard to understand all of it at the start, but I enjoyed it and I knew the characters from having watched it a bunch in English years ago, so I could frequently figure out what was going on. By the time I hit the end of the 7th season, I was understanding a LOT of the dialogue.

I had also been reading German Harry Potter while listening to the German Harry Potter audiobook, so that helped too. People also told me not to do that, because somehow I’d only learn the words for “magic wand” and “dragon”. Apparently they didn’t realize that 99.9% of the words in the book are not fantasy words, they were just regular German. And again, it was hard to understand at the start, but it got easier.

It worked, too. By the time I actually got to Germany, I understood pretty much everything I heard or read. Now I’m trying to duplicate the experience with Dutch, reading any Dutch book I feel like. Currently on my desk I have book 11 of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (translated to Dutch), a book about the rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains (in Dutch), The Da Vinci Code (in Dutch), a book on the history of Anarchism in Spain (in Dutch). Basically anything I could find that sounded interesting. I don’t actually own any textbooks about Dutch at all, nor do I plan to. Nothing boring allowed.

Today’s All-Star Comment is from McSalty, a guy who knows his way around the worlds of health and fitness. He’s noticed similarities between the ideas of critical frequency and certain easy, painless, awesome techniques that were apparently used in Soviet special forces strength training. Here he is in his own words:

The more experience I have with this whole “life” thing, the more and more I find completely unrelated subjects being bound by a common thread.

In the fitness and strength training world, a while back an ex-Soviet special forces trainer named Pavel [Tsatsouline] entered the scene and introduced a lot of concepts no one had heard of, and a lot of people experienced great results from putting them into practice.

Why am I bringing this up? One of his books was called “The Naked Warrior“, and it was about strength training with no equipment. One of the primary themes in this book was a concept he called “greasing the groove.” Basically the notion is, if you want to get good at doing pullups, you shouldn’t train to make yourself stronger — you should just ‘practice’ doing pullups as often as possible, always stopping before fatigue.

So, instead of the traditional “Do three sets of pullups until failure,” Pavels approach was “Do 5 pullups every time you walk past the pullup bar in your house“. (If you can’t easily do 5 pullups, make it 3 pullups, or 1 pullup). The point was, you were always stopping before fatigue set in, so 30 minutes to an hour later you could easily do 5 pullups again. The result was, over the course of the day, you may end up doing 50-100 pullups, whereas if you did them all in one sitting you might only be able to crank out 30, and you’d be exhausted. This way you never even feel tired, and you’re skeptical that you’re even getting a workout.

The theory was, as opposed to breaking down and rebuilding muscle fibers, you’re actually conditioning your nervous system to GET USED TO doing pullups — essentially treating strength as a skill that needs practice, just like playing guitar. Guys who put this theory into practice, a month or two later were reporting amazing results like going from 10 to 20 pullups in a single set despite having never practiced doing more than 5 at any one time.

Ok, that may seem way tangential, but my point is I think you might really be onto something here. I’m actually really excited about this. I’m going to apply this to everything I want to get better at. Want to be a writer? For two minutes every hour, write something — anything. Want to start your own business? For two minutes every hour brainstorm new business ideas and how to flesh them out. Want to improve your public speaking? For two minutes every hour command an audience, even if only one person, or if you’re alone, dictate to an imaginary audience. Want to improve your posture? For two minutes every hour sit up, stand up, or walk with perfect posture. After a while, you get used to thinking of it often enough that it’s always on your mind. Put another way, if you remind yourself of your goals often enough, it keeps you on track to attain them. If your frequency of thought is high enough, your goals become your fixation, and it’s impossible to fall off the wagon. You’re building a house by placing one brick every hour instead of trying to do as much work as possible at one time and doing so inefficiently because you’re wearing yourself out.

But the two minutes thing is beautiful. Timeboxing in its most perfect incarnation. Timeboxing doesn’t work for me, because I know I’m just trying to con myself into working past the timebox. But this two minutes is a real two minutes. It completely alleviates any and all pressure to perform. As you said, it becomes a game. “Ooh, my next two minutes is coming up soon!” It embodies the “just do something – do anything” mindset, and gives a workable formula to fit in into your life. This strategy is absolute brilliance.

I have a book of Aesop’s fables — Korean on one page, and English opposite to it — which is perfect for this game. Each fable is usually under 10 sentences and completely self-contained, so I don’t have to interrupt myself and remember where I left off. It also leaves me feeling, “Oh… I’ll just read one more” — totally addictive. Another great resource I’ve found is signing up for a Twitter account, and ONLY following people who ‘tweet’ exclusively in your target language. Tweets are another example of something that’s self-contained, are entertaining since you’re peaking into the lives of people in your target culture, have that addictive “just one more” quality, and if you follow enough people you have a continuously updated stream of content in your target language.

McSalty

Today’s all-star comment is from きのこ, an active contributor of back in the recent day. The original post was about how to have fun all the time. Here she is in her own words:

“No sentences I have to type in. No, none, never. If it’s from a book or a movie and I have to pause and type it out, it’s not going to happen. If the word or phrase is that important, I figure I’ll meet it again somewhere more convenient.”

Logistics is (are?) a huge dealmaker/breaker. It’s not just about doing Japanese, it’s about making it convenient and doing it in convenient ways. Maybe not all languages can be treated this way just yet, but with the plethora of electronic materials available in Japanese — everything from the Hiragana Times to Tae Kim to MFSP —  きのこ‘s is a highly effective, workable and blood pressure-reducing heuristic.

The original post was about using the SRS to remember the best parts of the best examples of personal development literature.

Anyway, enjoy!

SRS Addict said,
November 24, 2009 @ 00:40 · Edit

This is a LONG comment, here it goes:
I find this post very interesting. Here’s why:

About 3 1/2 years ago I began to use the SRS program “Supermemo” (which I will refer to as “SM”). Since I began using SM, other programs have emerged that specialize in language study, but since I’ve been using SM for so long and have so much time invested in it, it is far too late to think about jumping ship. No doubt the other SRS programs out there work great, so don’t think that I’m knocking them. In the end, use SOMETHING: it’s better than nothing.

Anyways, I began to use SM about 3 years ago to retain Japanese vocabulary. Despite living in America, uncommon words that one does not use very often (such as “round-trip”) continued to remain in my memory, and it required very little thought to recall them. This feeling of satisfaction was very addictive, and I began to integrate more and more of my intellectual life with Supermemo.

I can now speak, read and write Japanese fluently. I passed the JLPT 2Q a couple of years ago without even going to Japan. And the reason that I’ve progressed this much has little to do with my abilities (I am really quite average, I think), but I believe that it is purely because Supermemo has helped to augment my abilities and to focus my efforts so that as little time and effort as possible is wasted (at least when that time and effort is being spent on Supermemo). Here is why:

Humans need a variety of food to remain healthy. Similarly, no SINGLE specific method will gain you fluency in a language. Language study requires a balance of different methods and inputs.

SM seems to have become my intellectual equivalent of a video game “save point.” While up until that time, I might have seen/read/heard many interesting or useful things, but until I “save” my intellectual progress, such information only occupies a temporary place in the mind. While SM is not the only thing I use, it is part of my ‘balanced diet.’

I began by putting Japanese sentences into SM, with the word I wanted to memorise written in English (It was easier than trying to describe the word in Japanese). This created context and usage hints. I would usually enter at least two flashcards for each word (like firing multiple bullets to ensure I hit the desired target), thus ensuring that unless I made a big mistake in structing the material (Poor word choice), the algorithms would ensure that I would remember the word in due time (After about a week or two it would stick very well in my mind).

This worked for vocabulary words, so I thought “Would this work for idiomatic expressions, also?” So I began to experiment, and as time went on, when the appropriate time to use such an idiom presented itself, it required as little time as it took to remember a simple vocabulary word. Now it was easy to rack up idioms (As well as 4-character idioms) in my head. Using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji volumes one and two (Although I went my own way with book two), I learned all of the ON yomi for the kanji, which made learning most vocabulary words much, much simpler (Most being a combination of two kanji using the ON yomi). In the end learning Japanese simply came down to shooting fish in a barrel, racking up more and more vocabulary that was easily accessable and would be forever retained using SM.

Japanese has now passed on from the “I need to study” phase to the “I speak it fluently” phase. If I were playing World of Warcraft, my Japanese character would be at level 80 (Although I do not play that game, as I want to defend my time from such bandits). I still add Japanese words to SM, but it is like killing low-level monsters at this point, although I would like to eventually take JLPT 1Q, the “final boss.”

But since Japanese is, for all intents and purposes, done, I am moving onto Chinese.
Knowing the kanji has helped out a great deal, and the ON yomi bears a strong enough resemblence to the actual Chinese reading of the character that it is helpful. But each language poses a different set of problems, and I am always experimenting with variations of methods to try to make it a step further in my Chinese progress. Like you mentioned, keeping a foreward thinking, open mind about how to do things helps to ensure progress. Once you find something that works, exploit it until it stops working or you find something better. Currently I’m experimenting with the flashcard format used by the web site “Smart.fm.” I’m trying to impliment it in SM to see if I learn words better than my present flashcard format for Chinese. You might want to give that site a try, if you haven’t already.
We soldier on.

About a year after I began using SM to learn Japanese, I began to expeirment with using SM on non-Japanese desirable knowledge. To learn something FOREVER required such a SMALL investment of time (Less than a minute for the next 30 years of retention). Therefore, one hour of “entertainment-consumption time” could be converted into “self-enrichment through knowledge” time; the long-lasting benefits are so obvious that it makes many other tasks and pursuits seem trivial by comparison (But one must find balance in life, you have to eat some candy every now and then). But rather than simply being a useful study tool, SM has opened up a new way of life for me, where tangible knowledge consumption and retention is well within the grasp of everyone, regardless of anything else. All that is required is a small amount of time and motivation.

As another commenter mentioned above, the process you describe is very similar to incremental reading, a feature advertised on the SM web site. Traditional reading is very much the equivilent of listening to a long speech by someone, and your ‘input’ is limited: Start, stop, or highlight. Incremental reading is basically a process of taking raw electronic reading material, extracting the useful information, and processing for long term retention (Making something into a flashcard is the end-goal of this process). It is the same as digesting food; take food in, extract neutritious parts, get rid of what you don’t need. Since the world has yet to go “fully digital” when it comes to reading material, it seems that we must suffer for a while without having “buy/borrow as a .txt document” as an option for our local libraries or book stores. On the bright side, books are very small compared to mp3s, and music is pirated very often. Therefore, the potential to download books that you buy is very possible, although spotty. For example, I purchased “Atlas Shrugged,” but found that reading it incrementally on SM was more fun than carrying the big book around with me. I was able to find Atlas Shrugged online with little trouble, now I’m currently reading it through SM.

Where traditional reading is more of a lecture, incremental reading is more of an organic dialgue. Granted, the text no longer retains its form, it gets “chopped up” rather quickly (Like clipping out parts of a magazine article that you like), but we want knowledge in our head, not pretty looking words on paper. This philosophy has made me enjoy reading much, much more. (I recommend you read more about incremental reading, it echos the sentiments expressed here. Also, I don’t want to write what has already been written).

But another expriment that I started about a year ago (That I believe conclusively works) was to see if semi-knowledge put into Supermemo could create subtle changes in my personality and thought-process. You mention putting inspirational quotes into Supermemo, and this is pretty much what I did, but I went about it in a different way. Everyone makes decisions based on principles. Someone might see someone else in need, if they are raised as a Christian, they might think “Do unto others…” so they decide to help that person out. Others might operate on a different principle, which would lead to a different action. The question was “could I take those different principles, put them into SM, and just like the idiomatic expressions, when that principle would come into play, would such principles come to mind, and give more options when making decisions?” I believe that the answer is ‘yes.’

For example, one could take key phrases from various philosophy or religious books (That are deemed useful and beneficial by the user, of course), put them into SM, and over time would have such views of the world at their disposal; whether or not they are adopted is up to the user. Therefore you do not have to adopt the philosophy to undersatnd it and have it at your disposal. For example, I have a number of quotes from Hitler in SM because his twisted mind demonstrates a certain cunning and manipulative evil, which it does good to recognize when seen elsewhere (Even in subtle ways).

So basically SM has become a tool with which I program myself. It has grown to encompass my entire life, and has become my primary means of retaining information about the world around me. I spend about one hour using SM every day. Right now I have about 33,000 active flashcards in my big flashcard “deck.”

So, this was a comment made by a handsome AJATTeer named Jonathan, left on this post about having fun; he discusses the coolness of SRS. Here he is in his own words (emphases added):

Obviously, people (adults) were becoming fluent in second/third/nth languages LONG before the invention of SRS, or even flashcards. And the general consensus among learners who use an SRS is that you also have to do non-SRS stuff (informal reading/listening/immersion) in addition to your daily reps. So really, an SRS is neither necessary nor sufficient for L2 acquisition.

Does it make the process faster or more efficient? I’m not sure. I tend to think so, both because of the scientifically well-established effectiveness of spaced repetition for long-term memorization, and just plain old common sense (although the latter is infamously questionable in my case )

For my part, I love SRS’ing. It sounds weird, but I can’t wait to get up each morning, get my coffee, and do my reps. I get a huge sense of accomplishment from watching Mnemosyne’s “Scheduled” and “Not memorised” counters drop from two or three digits to zero every day, and that makes it fun. So it’s fun, and it’s in Japanese, and… hey! Don’t I recognize that formula from somewhere?

It’s fun in much the same way that RPGs are fun (YMMV), particularly RPGs involving lots of micro-management like Pokemon or Final Fantasy Tactics. Adding items, grading my performance, keeping track of statistics… it’s a form of instant gratification, in a process where delayed gratification is the name of the game. I like numbers and structure; that’s just how my brain is oriented. It’s not a choice, it’s a lifestyle! But it’s largely what keeps me going in my quest for fluency; if I didn’t have some kind of objective indicator of how much progress I’ve made and what I’ve learned so far, it would be all too easy to succumb to the old “when the heck am I going to get good, I haven’t learned a single thing in months, I’m sitting here pretending to read these strange symbols that I’ll never actually understand and I should just give up” trap. (Okay, maybe it needs a shorter name.)

Anyway, I’m not the sort of person who buys into ideas like “kids are magical” or “East Asians are magical”, but I’m very much the sort of person who is quick to self-doubt. The SRS keeps me motivated and encouraged (not to mention organized and accountable), and that alone makes it indispensable in my opinion.