You are always moving. You never stand still. You’re always either getting better or worse. Even “staying the same” requires input. You’re always either going uphill or downhill. Forward or backward. Progressing or regressing.

Entropy wants to take your Japanese away from you; however little or much you have, it wants it. No matter how much you have accumulated and assimilated, entropy will not hesitate to throw those memories away if they’re not constantly renewed, teased, touched.

Entropy is the flow of the river, and it wants to take you back over and under the waterfall of ignorance.

Entropy is the only thing that has the power to stop you. All you have to do to keep it from winning is touch some Japanese. Here. Now.

Fight the power. #SRS #immersion #exposure

“You wouldn’t expect to get a driver’s license by reciting the rules for building a car; it’s equally absurd to expect people to demonstrate that they know a language by reciting its rules. You prove that you know how to drive a car by driving; you prove that you know how to use the language by using it – by speaking, writing, reading, and understanding it.”
Suzette Elgin

Declarative knowledge is not the same as procedural knowledge. It’s not just different – it’s not even the same type of thing. It’s like comparing a sandwich you can eat and a recipe for a sandwich; they are not da same ting. We seem to think that the people who can recite sandwich recipes most accurately are also the best cooks. This is good enough as a first approximation, but we personally and collectively do ourselves incredible — and sometimes even irreparable — harm when we don’t correct such ideas on the basis of contradictory evidence.

“What seems to matter most is not how much practice you do, but how regularly”
The New Scientist October 31, 2015 issue

Critical frequency all the way, baby! Go for little and often. Go for wide standards; cover ground like a coat of grass. Take care of frequency and quantity’ll take care of itself!

“The free horse runs swifter than the one motivated by the whip or the carrot.”
Maria Montessori, quoted in “The Superman Syndrome”

If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. You don’t need a teacher to show you the way. You already have an internal guidance system — it’s called the boredom/interest scale. You are a natural learning machine. All you need do is prepare, maintain and expand an environment that allows you to learn more or less naturally. And guess what? School is the literal opposite of that.

“Without boundaries, we are lost. At either truly creative crave them and, if they don’t exist, construct them…we need to become] rats who build a labyrinth from which they will try to escape…one of the greatest myths of creativity [is] that constraints are something to be avoided. In fact…we may actually undermine creativity if we make things too easy or too comfortable for individuals of significant creative potential… This less-is-more phenomenon holds true not only for individuals but for entire nations. A good example is the ‘oil curse,’ aka the paradox of plenty. Nations rich in natural resources, especially oil, tend to stagnate culturally and intellectually, as even a brief visit to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait reveals. The citizens of these nations have everything so they create nothing.” [Emphasis added] The Geography of Genius: The Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

Timeboxing is your friend. Timeboxing is your best effing friend. You need more time, you need less time. Less time to overthink. Less time to overplan. When you are given too much time, you just waste it overthinking. The less time you have, the more action you’ll take. Overthinking is to life as water hyacinth is to a lake: it takes steadily takes over and chokes out all other life.

“Do X but also do Y”

has literally told you nothing. Because he hasn’t helped you make a decision (remember, in terms of its Latin etymology, to decide is to cut (decision/incision) and to kill (decide/homicide) — so decision always involves negation, subtraction); he has not helped you to cut out (however temporarily) other options.

You see, success in getting used to a language (among other things) does not come from moderate, milquetoast behavior. It comes from immoderate behavior — because even to do small, apparently mediocre things for a long time is immoderate (just think of how the time flies by while scrolling through Netflix and Twitter and PUBG and YouTube and all those other addictive thingies).

Like a well-balanced kanji or a Hokusai painting, it’s a question of negative space. Knives cut because of where they are not.

Pressure = Force / Area

The wider the area of the knife blade, the more blunt it is and the less well it can cut.

Similarly, hoses are powerful because of all the places they do not allow water to flow. By interdicting the flow, it becomes more powerful. Within reason, you don’t need more water pressure, just a narrower hole.

…That doesn’t sound dirty at all…

You don’t need more power. You don’t need to be smarter (I’m certainly not). You don’t need more force, just less area. You don’t need more time or energy, you just need to not do more. As Steve Jobs was fond of both pointing out and putting into action, subtraction is more powerful than addition.

Concentrate your forces — your time, your energy. Subtract your area of operations (your goals, etc.). Win you a beachhead. Just one. And use that one to win another. Just one. And then another.

Narrow the area of your focus. More area, less pressure. Less pressure, less breakthrough.

Don’t punch their older children — they may be strong enough to fight back and then you’ve got a multi-front war on your hands.

Convenience is not a “mere” improvement. Indeed, no improvement is “mere” anything, but this is especially true of convenience. Convenience isn’t just a nice-to-have (even though it, like, literally is, nice to have…pleasant to possess…good to get. Convenience isn’t something you put the word “just ” in front of.

Convenience is destiny.

“Blue LED lights previously installed at stations, bus stops, airports and various high danger zones around cities have been reported to induce a calming effect on people in the area, which helps to reduce crime, anti-social behaviour and suicide attempts.” [Preventing suicide at railway stations – Railway Technology] goo.gl/XKQp9L

“According to CityLab, Japanese railways have been attempting to stop train station suicides throughout their metropolitan areas for some years now, but the implementation is tricky. Tokyo is currently working towards their goal of installing preventative barricades in all 243 of their stations by 2023 – but the barriers are expensive to construct, and many train stations lack the infrastructure to support the barricades.  So until a more efficient solution is used, stations are relying on the calming effects of blue light as a means of dissuading potential suicide victims.” [Suicide Rates at Japanese Train Stations Have Plummeted by 84% Thanks to Simple Solution] goo.gl/V2V8aP

People do not do what is good. People don’t do what’s right People don’t do what’s wrong. People don’t do what’s helpful or harmful.

People do what is convenient.

If you make something convenient, people will do it (more).

And if you make it inconvenient, people will stop doing it, or do it less. It doesn’t matter how important or unimportant the thing is. What matters is how convenient or inconvenient it is to do.

This is true of everything — even things where life is on the line. ARV drug compliance, train suicides, diet, friendships and life partnerships. All are led — not just “influenced” but truly and literally led — by convenience.

You are “people”. I am “people”. We are all, fundamentally the same. We are so genetically close it’s like incest up in here.

The differences — and they can get very big — lie primarily in our software, that is, our personal and cultural programming. So here’s a little feature to add to your mindware — your mental software: stop trying to do the right thing and start making the right thing convenient to do. Quit working on yourself and focus all your attention in tweaking your personal environment. Your environment will then work n you for you.

This is definitely something I’ve said before, but it HAS to be said again, because if it isn’t, you’ll forget it. Hitler and Goebbels knew this — they knew that we believe that which we are told most frequently. Probability and plausibility don’t really factor into it. It’s all about that frequency. What is told/heard frequently becomes easy– convenient — to recall. And what is convenient to recall, we assume to be true.

Whatever you make convenient will not just be easy but super easy, and what’s super easy get’s done. Convenience is destiny. If you want to change your destiny, change your conveniences.

Even then I knew he was wrong. And he still is wrong. But I didn’t quite have the words to tell him. To tell you the truth, I probably still don’t; I’m not very good with words. Since, however, words are just about the best tool we have, let’s see what we can do.

So here’s the thing.

We need teachers.
It’s school that we don’t need.

No technology will ever make guidance obsolete.

Even when true strong AI comes, we’ll need guidance on how to make the best use of it. And, ironically, of course, such AI will have been taught (directly and indirectly) and will itself be able to teach._{Which is super exciting! Imagine being able to have the best teachers in the world, in the form of artificially intelligent avatars, personally teaching you.}

The teacher as mere purveyor and gatekeeper of raw information is dead. But the teacher as guide, as sense, as master, as holder of wisdom — meta-information — will literally never die.

Teaching is dead.
Long live teaching.

Teachers used to mostly tell us what is and what to do. The teachers of the present and future can spend more of their time telling us what to ignore.

Let me explain.

Information, we have. How to best use that information is what we need guidance on. That’s also a form of information, but it’s information about information: meta-information. Interestingly enough, this is how AJATT works — it’s mostly information about how to learn Japanese, how to use the real Japanese that already exists out there in the world to become, linguistically, Japanese. You don’t find much Japanese here because lack of Japanese content is not the problem that the world needs fixed.

Teachers are like water. Good ones are essential for life. Bad ones are poisonous and must be avoided.

Even when we “self-teach”, we’re still in a teacher-student relationship. Not just with ourselves, but with the creators of the information and techniques we use: autodictatism is just a teacher-student relationship displaced in space and time. The relationship has been disembodied. Learning materials are surrogate teachers…that still need the teachers to create them.

When you learn from native materials, the creators of those materials — the actors, writers, editors — these are your teachers, too.

Perhaps there is a hidden lesson here (actually, I can see more than one, but let’s focus on just the one for now, so that we’re not out here like a Central European Power fighting a multiple-front war).

The hidden lesson is that one is the worst number of teachers. Even the greatest teacher, even AJATT_{I realize I just implied that AJATT is “the greatest teacher”; this was totally unintentional, but my ego is fragile enough that I’m not going to reword the statement in order to sound more humble}, could become limiting and tyrannical if it were your only source of information. Mandarin learning expert Jon Biesnecker once dubbed it, quite fittingly, “The Tyranny of a Single Source of Information”.

Teachers are like food. You need variety both for variety and to prevent boredom.

So we’ve saved teachers from the fire. But what about schools? Can schools be made to not suck?

Probably, yes. The rebel in me wants to say “no”, but the epistemologically fair-minded part of me is always open to nonzero probabilities.

Schools can definitely be made not to suck, but it’s a constant and ongoing process, not an overhaul or an event; continued non-suckage requires the constant vigilance of students and teachers alike.

And I mean real vigilance. Proactive, not reactive. It’s very intellectually demanding. One needs to be humble enough to improve things but also arrogant enough to stick to old traditions.

What do I mean?

Well, for example, it takes humility to admit that spaced repetition works and that we’ve all been idiots for ignoring it. But it also takes chutzpah to buck the vapid trend of valuing meta-skills only_{meta-skills are obviously valuable but they have to be built on foundation of real, raw, core skills} and realize that all learning is built on memorization: you can’t think critically when you don’t even know what to think about any more than you can rearrange furniture in an empty room — there’s nothing there to rearrange. Trying to think critically while ignorant is like trying to edit a blank page: literally impossible.

And that’s just one easy, relatively superficial example. There are many more — deeper — ones. One that comes to mind is the school’s organizational bias: an organization will tend to prioritize the whole over its parts, just like we value the whole of ourselves more than an an individual skin cell. This is really bad for learning. Except for a statistical minority for whom the system in its original form works perfectly, learning that isn’t customized (and/or doesn’t sincerely attempt customization) is just coercion.

Anyway, there’s more to say on this, but let’s leave it for another day .

And the phrase hit me in my dream: The A$$hole Equation (or, as I prefer to render it because it sounds cooler, “The A$$y Hole Equation” — similar to the Anti-Life Equation from the Marvel universe). And — this is all still in my dream — I resolved to write an AJATT article about the AHE. My dreams are just super productive like that, I guess lol (no, really…lots of programming problems get solved). Now, I don’t know that the AHE is really an equation in the strictest technical sense, but there are numbers involved. Let’s get into them.

At this writing, there are approximately 7.6 billion people alive in the world today. Furthermore, it is estimated that 100 billion is the total number of humans that have ever lived.

If just 1% of these people are a$$holes, that makes for 76 million living a-holes, 12 million of whom would be citizens of the People’s Republic of China.

If 20% of these people are a$$holes that means that there are 1.52 BILLION a$$holes worldwide, with the PRC supplying 240 million.

That’s a lot of a-holes. And they definitely punch above their weight insofar as they stay in our memories. But most people — the vast majority — are still awesome, non a-holes. The PRC supplies nearly a billion nice people and the rest of the world 5 billion nice people.

So, I hereby propose the a$$hole inequality:

n(a$$holes) << n(nicepeople)

A$$holes are always a minority. Always outnumbered.

Never let a-holes colour your view of entire populations. Hate them, but hate them individually, not collectively. Love the collective, hate individuals. A$$holes do not represent humanity or any country or region or town or people ¹. They only represent themselves; they only represent a$$holery itself. Whenever practical, murder them metaphorically by denying them residence in your mind and on your lips and thus (for all practical purposes) erasing their existence. In your personal universe (which is the one and only one you will spend your entire life in), they cease to exist. To quote the great Paul Graham:

“Turning the other cheek ² turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head. I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.” [Emphasis Added] [The Top Idea in Your Mind]

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think I probably shouldn’t be writing about this kind of thing, because my positions are deeply antisocial and specific to me (or at least my personality type). But hey, whatever, take advice, not orders.

Do what you can right now with what you have right now.

Do the best that you can do right now, not the best possible thing, not the best thing you have ever done, not the right thing, not the thing that will get you the least made fun of, not the thing that looks coolest to other people.

Just do the best and funnest thing you can think of and get done in the next 5 seconds.

The trick is to be making concrete, continuous progress. That means:

1. Doing one real, doable thing
2. right here right now, and then
3. returning to (1)

It does not mean batting 1.000. It does not mean endless deliberation, theorization or arguments to convince the world that you are on the right course — them be a waste of time and energy. It means showing up.

We do not have infinite time and energy. We don’t have so much that we can waste them. But we do, as it turns out, have just enough to do some good.

Don’t do your best. Do some good. Make some progress.

#timeboxing #SRS #immersion

What? Why?

Well, not for global brotherhood or being a “citizen of the world” or any other such internationalist bullshizzle.

For magic.

What? Magic? Yes. Magic.

You see, words are magic. Words are magic spells we cast for getting what we want from the Universe/other people. Yeah I said it. And I am standing by that statement, too. I’m standing by like an infomercial product operator. I’m standing by it like it’s Wesley Crusher. Metaphorical truth is just as important as literalism, and often moreso, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate that is, frankly, a bit of a philistine. Because if you’re going get pedantic, even movies don’t exist; all they are is rapid sequences of still images, and anyone who tells you other wise is literally lying.

Where were we? Oh yeah.

Language is magic. Words are magic. You cast spells on other people using The Word, using words. But when people don’t understand you(r language) very well (if at all), they default to saying “no” to you. Your spells don’t work. However, if and when you speak their language — speak the right magic words — the people suddenly light up and get friendly and (most importantly) cooperative.

The world is full of Consuelas who default to “no”. And East Asia has more people and Consuelas than even wherever Conseula is from. And East Japan, per capita at least, has more Consuelas than anywhere else in Japan or East Asia; it’s the Consuela capital of the world. If you can’t explain yourself in precise and accurate Japanese ¹, Japanese people will just say “no” to you. But if you can, (almost) every rule will be broken and every exception made to suit your preferences. Like magic. That is how Japan is. Not all the “no’s” will turn into “yeses”, but most of them will, especially the most important ones. And that is why you must learn Japanese. Because it will make your life fun and awesome and customized, just like a pimped out ride. And that is how it should be.

People aren’t saying “no” to you because that’s the real/correct answer. They’re saying it because that’s the easiest answer. You need to give them a way of giving you a better answer. Make it easy for them. The way you do that is by being able to ask, answer and understand the right questions in the right way. So we come full circle back to Tony Robbins: the quality of life is the quality of your questions (and the ability of your interlocutors to understand your questions).

“Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.”
Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

Don’t believe in AJATT. Don’t disbelieve in AJATT. Don’t even believe in yourself (although that’s generally a good thing, it’s just, like, you don’t have to force it). Just try stuff out. It doesn’t matter what you agree or disagree with. It doesn’t matter what you should do or can’t do or don’t have. All that matters is what works now. What’s doable now. What you have now. What you feel up to doing now. Plans are good but tinkering is better.

Hello,

I first found your site 5 years ago when I became interested in Japan, and it was my first introduction to the idea that you could learn a language without taking a class.

I didn’t stick with studying Japanese at the time, but the IDEA stuck with me forever.

Well, now it’s 2017 and okay, I’m not yet fluent in Japanese. But I feel like I’m getting there. Also, I’m writing you this note from my 30th floor luxury hotel room in [a major Japanese city that does not rhyme with “Bapporo”], where I get to live and work for 6 months. I chat to people in Japanese and they’re all shocked that I can speak it at all, plus I think my pronunciation is really good because I’ve been watching and listening to anime in Japanese for the past 5 years.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. 頑張ってください！

People who know a language aren’t “talented”, just tenacious.

Eat those persistence flakes for breakfast so you can enjoy victory for dinner

Snack on tenacity bars and you’ll be a “ten” at whatever you focus on .

Hey, I never promised I wouldn’t be goofy .

Persistence beats intelligence. Tenacity beats talent. In fact, we can go even further than that: what we variously (and rather intellectually lazily) call talent and intelligence are merely the crystallized results of persistence and tenacity. Persistence and tenacity are water and cold, when they turn into ice, we call these talent and intelligence.

Don’t go looking for ice. Get some water and some cold.

Don’t wish for steam. Get some water and heat.

But it also kinda does work and it’s why people keep paying and going there even though it sucks Asperger’s.

Here’s why.

Recently (at the time of this writing), I broke a personal rule I made many years ago and attended not one but two seminars (a couple of weeks apart), for the purpose of learning non-physical skills. One was a one-day seminar. The other was a three-day seminar.

They were both awesome — learned a lot, loved ’em. Awesome. But also tiring and long and lame and boring for much of the time. ¹

So why was I there? Why do I — we — do this to ourselves?

Here are the reasons:

Community

Studying can be lonely and isolating — even to an introvert. It’s one thing to know you have a “tribe” of fellow learners, it’s another altogether to be in the same room with them. It feels wonderful to be surrounded by your siblings-in-arms, your intellectual kin. It is deeply freeing.

Security

Intellectual pursuits aren’t just lonely and isolating, they’re also strangely disconcerting. To expose yourself to new knowledge is to expose yourself to your own ignorance — SRSes show you what you suck at and hide what you’re good at. And this leads to doubt. Not only do we wonder whether we’re making any progress, we also wonder whether this is the direction in which we should be going at all. A bit of doubt here and there is fine, but too much can be disorienting. School, boring as it is, gives you an anchor point, and makes you secure in what you are doing by taking your freedom to do something else off the table. Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice never rears its ugly head: you have no choice. It’s lesson time, playa.

School gives you an unassailable sense of legitimacy; it gives you permission to do the activity at hand to the exclusion of all others. Permission to ignore everything else and focus on just this. This is powerful. It’s the power of a timebox but on a larger scale.

In other words, school gives you the security that comes from having made a…

Commitment

AJATT-style autodidactic study is often characterized by an emphasis on “ながら勉強” (ながらべんきょう = nagara benkyou ²), that is, study that is performed while (nagara) doing something else. So hearing Japanese while you walk/sleep/wash dishes, or doing your SRS reps while doing something else. And this awesome. And often overlooked by most adults. For one thing, it absolutely nukes all the “but I ain’t gaht tahm ta study Japanese, Kheatz” ³ excuses at which your typical adult excels. So there ain’t nothing wrong with that nagara, bro.

But these seminars taught me something, and that is this — there is also great value in blocking out specific times and locations at which a specific subject shall be studied. A Japanese blogger and author I once read (can’t find him now but his stuff is somewhere in my SRS) said that (and I paraphrase): “Dreams only become real when they crystalize into goals. And goals only become real when they crystalize into schedule items. And schedule items only become real when they have a start time, an end time, concrete content and a location.”

School Sucks

If you think about it, that’s literally all school is: blocking out specific times and locations at which a specific subject shall be studied. School is nothing but these blocks. It’s a multi-month, multi-year sequence of these temporal-spatial-content Lego blocks (no offense to Lego; Lego rocks).

Now, these blocks are deeply flawed. Indeed, school itself is deeply flawed — for reasons that John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and many others could tell you in their books. But a lot of it comes down to this: whether it’s school or a seminar, we are all different; every single human being on Earth is literally and totally unique ⁴; we all move at different paces at different times. But school and its classes always move at more or less the same pace, in order to keep things running on schedule. This means that most of us, most of the time, in school, are either bored or confused. Things are either going over our heads or under them.

But School Works (Kinda)

And yet, to some extent, school works. Why?

Because school raises the baseline; it raises the average by raising the bottom (平均底上げ (へいきんそこあげ)). It takes us from “coulda/woulda/shoulda/gonna study X” to “studyING X”. It moves us from the future tense and the subjunctive mood to the present continuous tense. It takes us, in other words, from zero to one. And one is infinitely more than zero.

And that is why we continue to send ourselves and our children through the factory/gulag that is school. Because it does kinda sorta work. It is better than nothing.

How You Can Make School Work For You Without Actually Going to School

But we can and could do better. “Better than nothing” is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Humanity never got anywhere by settling for less. Bill McKibben be damned; screw him and his curmudgeonly sourpuss nonsense.

We can have our cake and eat it, too. We can steal fire from the gods and have fireplaces and space heaters.

How to steal the Promethean fire of school without actually going there and dealing with its boring, tiring, soul-crushing B.S.? Easy. Do some blocking of your own. Nothing too dramatic or extreme — don’t overload yourself or make commitments which you lack the desire, inclination or ability to keep. But say, for example: “every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10:30am to 10:55am, I will do 2000 points’ worth of Japanese reps on Surusu ⁵“ ⁶. Simple. Easy. Put it in your calendar, badabing badaboom.

Again, don’t go crazy. We’re trying to steal the fire, not get burned by it.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have realized that having “blocked” time still lends itself to nagara studying — but instead of just saying we’re gonna nagara when we have time, we’re nagaraing with the benefit of an anchor in the form of blocked study time.

As for me, I feel that I’ve got the seminar thing figured out. The fire has been stolen and it is mine now. Going forward, I intend to use timeblocks to do things like read specific books that I bought eons ago and always “mean to but never get round to” reading, among other cool projects. ⁷

But more on that later. That’s about all from me for now.

What’s your experience been with this kind of thing?

Let’s unpack this. ¹

The word “native” comes from the Old French natif, which comes from the Latin nātīvus, which itself comes from nātus (also Latin), the past participle of nāscī, to be born.

“Native” means:

1. Being such by birth.
2. Existing in or belonging to one by nature; innate.

But you weren’t born speaking any language at all. And no human language exists or belongs in you by nature — all that exists is the ability to imitate (and, eventually, understand) sounds and symbols. So that takes care of that. A language isn’t “native” to you any more than a selfie of you is “native” to your SD card.

So if none of us has a native language, then what do we have?

I thought you’d never ask.

The languages you know (i.e. can use) are like sports teams in the Premier League. Some get better than others and some stay better than others — sometimes for your whole life. But that’s not because they were “first” (England isn’t the best at football or cricket; VisiCalc isn’t the best at spreadsheets; most of the early PC manufacturers don’t even exist any more), it’s because they play and continue to play best. If they don’t play well, they get kicked out of the Premier League — language skill can deteriorate, evaporate and even disappear completely, like the freaking Aral Sea (RIP). Languages from the lower divisions can also rise up. In other words, there is flux, and this flux is constant; the system only seems stable or permanent because of repetition, feedback loops and other stuff we may or may not get into.

In more concrete terms, what does it mean, then, for a language (or dialect or accent) to “play” best?

Simple. Critical frequency (which, if you remember, evolved from the idea of critical mass #physicsShoutOut).

That’s right. Sports metaphors get tired quickly, so we’re moving back to maths and nuclear physics, a much richer source of cognitive shortcuts and tools of understanding, at least for our purposes. Now, as you know, I don’t know much about anything, and I’m not very smart, so I’m going to abuse the terminology of those fields, but it’s for a good cause, so forgive me in advance lol.

Every language, dialect, sociolect, accent, idiolect…every “lect”, regardless of whether or not you are used to it, is like a mathematical function, f(e・b).

• e = environment
• b = behavior

Your skill (or lack thereof) with a language is a continuous function ² of your environment and behavior. There is no magical singularity ³ called “birth” ⁴ that either gives you “native” language ability or takes it away. All that matters is your local, immediate, three-foot-radius environment and behavior.

What does this mean? It means that if you change the inputs to the function, then the outputs will change ⁵. That’s why even Queen Elizabeth II’s accent has changed since her twenties — she sounds less posh than she used to; her environment, her society, no longer rewards Received Pronunciation to the same extent that it used to, so her behavior has changed, subtly, but (to the attentive) noticeably. It’s why Patrick Stewart can’t even seem to do a proper impression of his “native” Yorkshire (?) accent any more; the man was plumber — a literal “biuwdah” [builder] at the beginning of his adult life — but has spent so much time acting like a gentleman that he has become one.

Inputs and outputs. Environments and behaviors. This also means that everything you do counts. Everything you do matters. If you do nothing (zero inputs), you get nothing. If you do something, you get something. If you do something big, deep and/or long enough, you get some big, deep and long outputs. It’s not quite that linear, at least in terms of perception (hence intermediate angst), but it really is that simple. Too simple, in my humble opinion, to require a blog to explain it.

But you know what? The things that go without saying seem to need the most saying. And the things that are easy to do are easy not to do. So let’s keep saying and doing them.

No language or sub-language belongs to you — except the ones you earn — and continue to earn! And you can, if you control your environment and behavior — if you pay the price — [l]earn any language. So every language (or, perhaps more accurately, any language), potentially, belongs to you. You own it. It’s yours. Take it. Time is money. You pay for it ⁶ by spending time with it.

You don’t learn a language, you get used to it. You don’t learn a language, you earn a language. You earn it by behaving in ways that make it keep entering your head. There is no language aristocracy. Nobody is born into a language the way some people are born not needing sunblock. No. We’re all on the same playing field. It’s a true democracy. A “democracy of habit”, as Twyla Tharp famously put it. No. No, it’s better than a mere democracy. It’s a meritocracy. Perhaps the purest meritocracy we have at this scale. And in this meritocracy, you vote and are rewarded by how you spend your time. Your skill is only a function of how you spend your time.

You don’t earn the right to enjoy FUNBUN (for-native by-native) Japanese by being good at Japanese, you get good at Japanese by spending time with FUNBUN Japanese. And everybody has to do this. Everybody has to pay the price — and keep paying it forever, on subscription — there are no freebies.

So stop worrying about who came out of what vag where (lol). Start worrying about about your TV and your SRS.

• “Art is a vast democracy of habit.” [10 Powerful Lessons from Twyla Tharp’s “The Creative Habit” via @writerspotlight] goo.gl/YmjSkH
• “It’s the most acclaimed and skilled people who work the hardest to maintain those skills.  The greatest (and highest paid) athletes, like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, practice harder, longer, and better than their rivals.  ” [An Artist’s Bookshelf – “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp] goo.gl/g5kfDK
• “The secret to meaningful progress at anything is showing up” [Creativity is Not a Trait. It’s a Habit – The Mission – Medium] goo.gl/KqXU8C

It’s maths, not magic. Arithmetic, not alchemy ¹. Arithmetic always works, anywhere in the Universe. And even street kids — who never got to enjoy things like a home to be ashamed of and books to avoid reading and a school to hate — can do arithmetic.

Let’s review.

1. Can you learn one word?
2. Can you learn another word before you forget the last one?
3. Then you, my friend, can learn a language.

You can learn a language. Any language. To the highest levels of proficiency. You can be the one telling native speakers what’s up (a lot of native speakers aren’t that good at their own languages; if you keep improving, you will outdo them).

You can learn any language to fluency. It’s a mathematical inevitability. It’s practically an industrial process, with some organic parts to keep it fun, that is, “psychologically ergonomic”, because neither your butt nor your brain is made up of right angles, planes, straight lines and other perfect Euclidean forms. Blah blah fractals blah blah Mandelbrot set blah freaking blah you get the idea.

When a dog attacks a human being, that dog is likely to get put down. Why? Because we figure that if s/he crosses the line once, s/he’ll cross it again. Well, you are a dog ². If you cross the word line once, you can cross it again — if you let yourself. If you can learn one word, you can learn a thousand. And ten thousand. The process is identical. In fact, it’s better than identical — it actually gets easier over time, because you can use the words you already know to learn new ones. How awesome is that?

Pretty effin ossome. So stop euthanizing yourself. Start showing up. Let yourself live to cross the line again and again and again…

• 「最も悩む局面が、最も面白い」 ¹
• “The parts of the game [situations] where you worry the most are actually the most fun and interesting parts”.
• 最も＝もっとも
• 悩む＝なやむ
• 局面＝きょくめん ²
• 面白い＝おもしろい

“The parts of the game where you worry the most are actually the most fun and interesting parts”. Now, on the face of it, this sounds very un-AJATTy, being as it is that our Prime Directive here is to “have fun”. It sounds like masochism, and not just the all-for-show, binge-in-private, wishy-washy, pseudo-Darwinian, Anglo-Saxon kind (ASM), but some of that hardcore, under-the-table, suffer-in-silence Yamato Japanese stuff ³.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

Wroang!

Yoshi Habs’ insight, the way I read it, that is, the way it hit me, actually relates to intermediate angst. And it’s basically saying this: the fact that you still have a lot of phrases to learn in order to reach the stage of “not sucking” ⁴ means that you need never be bored.

Being an intermediate learner, therefore, should not be a source of consternation, but rather one of relief. The relief of ALWAYS HAVING SOMETHING TO DO. You always have a newspaper headline you could be MCDing. You always have a YouTube video you could be watching. You always have a word you could be looking up — and it doesn’t matter what word it is; you can pick any one.

Retired people wish they had your problems. People at the top of their game ⁵ miss having your problems; they don’t miss sucking, but they do miss the purity, simplicity and clarity of purpose that you now enjoy (assuming, of course, that you are currently at some intermediate level). Because not only do you have a direction, a purpose, but you also have degrees of freedom. If you’re learning Japanese, virtually any and every direction you pick that contains Japanese ⁶ is good, will send you up, will help you improve. Seriously. Anything.

And that’s why enjoyment matters, because enjoyment leads to repetition. Repetition leads to continuation (habit). And continuation leads to unlimited power (muahahahaaa) #ItouMakoto. It’s a pretty sweet deal. Yoga said all these things in the prequel, but they got edited out so there’d be more Jar-Jar scenes #choices.

That’s all for now. More later!

Focus on yourself. Focus on 改善 (kaizen). Don’t look outside yourself for competition or comparison. You already have the best (psychologically healthiest, most perfectly calibrated, most fun, most interesting and most fulfilling) opponent of all; you already have a competitor: you yesterday.

• 「如何に深く考えるか」よりも、「如何に上手く見切るか」
• [I think that there are many times when] it’s more important to just give up and let go gracefully than it is to think deeply
• 如何に＝いかに
• 深い＝ふかい
• 考える＝かんがえる
• 上手い＝うまい
• 見切る＝みきる
• “to abandon;  to give up;  → みかぎる【見限る】 to sell at a loss;  to sell off” [見切る · Tangorin Japanese Dictionary] goo.gl/sNnCeU
• “みきる【見切る】 ⇒みきり(見切り) 1 〔見限る〕give up ((on)); abandon; ((文)) forsake; ((口)) ditch 2 〔安く売る〕sell a thing at a loss; sell off” [見切るの英語・英訳 – goo辞書 英和和英] goo.gl/1UgAiH

Is Yoshihabs preaching fatalism here? Is that what it’s come to? No. Not at all. He’s talking about timeboxing. Sometimes, you think and think and think and think and still can’t come to a decision. So what do you do? Well, if you’re smart and sensitive person, you curl up into a ball and fester in a state of permanent indecision that morphs into a multi-year bout of clinical depression. But if you’re even smarter and wiser than that, you cut your losses and make a decision anyhow. The GOAT of shogi does not waste his time overthinking. Which is not to say that he doesn’t think at all. He just doesn’t get lost in a thought quagmire. He doesn’t get embroiled in mental Vietnam/Afghanistan. He gets the heck out and moves the heck on.

Don’t overthink. Set a cut-off point. Let life go on (it will anyway, but you need to let it go on for yourself as well, innit). Make the game winnable, that is, make it finite; give it many internal end-points ¹ and “save-points”. Let there be an end to your fussin’, and let yourself be the one to decide that end: give yourself that authority.

OK, so, just so we’re on the same page, this is the book we’re talking about: [大局観 自分と闘って負けない心 (角川oneテーマ21) | 羽生 善治 |本 | 通販 | Amazon], and the unofficial English title we’re giving it is The Big Picture: How to Face Yourself and Win.

Go back up through the series if you need a refresher on what we’re even talking about. Cool? Cool.

Right. Brass tacks time!

• 将棋であれ、スポーツであれ、ビジネスであれ、「勝負にはミスが付き物」と言っていいと思う。勿論、誰だってミスをする積もりなど微塵も無いけれど、パーフェクトなパフォーマンスを実現するのは至難の業だ。《中略》「今日の将棋は完璧だった、ミスも無く、百点満点のパーフォーマンスだった」と思える事は、私には殆ど無い。一、二年に一度、あるかどうかだ。
• Whether in shogi, sports, or business, I think that making mistakes is a normal part of any game. Of course, nobody deliberately intends to make mistakes, but perfect performance is virtually impossible…It virtually never happens that I can think “I played a 100% perfect game of shogi today and made zero mistakes”, except for maybe once every couple of years, if that.
• 将棋＝しょうぎ
• 勿論＝もちろん
• 微塵＝みじん
• 至難の業＝しなんのわざ
• 百点満点＝ひゃくてんまんてん
• 中略＝ちゅうりゃく
• 思う＝おもう
• 無い＝ない
• 殆ど＝ほとんど

It’s one thing for your mate, Todd, the pothead with a hoarding problem and illegitimate children he never sees (lol) to tell you to chill and that “making mistakes is…normal”; it’s another thing altogether for the greatest shogi player of all time to say it. ¹ You’d think that a 9×9 board would be small enough of a world that you could reliably experience some perfection, but it isn’t and you don’t — not even if you’re the GOAT. Not even if you’re the Japanese GOAT of a Japanese game. No perfection soup for you!

You cannot dependably produce perfection, but you can dependably produce improvement. And I only keep telling you this because I need to hear it myself; it’s a lesson I keep “teaching” because it’s a lesson I need to keep learning. If perfectionism is a disease, then…you know, I mean, first of all, ewww gross (lol). Secondly, it needs to be handled with ruthless efficiency — failing to prevent it or leaving it untreated is even grosser than having it, just like failing to clean dirty toilets is even grosser than having them dirty. ²

Aaaand, that’s all for now. I was gonna go longer, but I figure it’s better to keep these parts short and frequent, rather than force you to wait indeterminate amounts of time for one big, long, dump ³.

Take care and bye for now!

• 負けたくなければ勝負をしない事。
• If you don’t want to lose, don’t play.
• 負ける＝まける
• 勝負＝しょうぶ
• 事＝こと

The only way to guarantee not losing at a game is to not play it in the first place ¹. But then, of course, you lose something else. The joy of playing. The camaraderie. Any and all chances of winning…

Now, it probably isn’t apparent right here and now, because this quote has been liberated from its original context ² but what it’s saying is this: shogi’s GOAT has freed himself from the need to not lose. He is free of desperation. He has accepted that loss is a part of the equation also. But this has not stopped him from being the GOAT. In fact, the relaxation, the calmness and sense of ease that this state of mind produces may, paradoxically, have helped him become the GOAT. It’s like a Greek tragedy in reverse: the things you do instead of caring about winning actually make you a winner.

This idea reminds me of the book Organize Tomorrow Today (OTT), which, despite its title, literally is not a book about personal organization or time management. You know how some books have awesome titles but then are just kind of “meh” inside? This book is the polar opposite of that. In many ways, relative to its quality, it’s possibly the worst-titled book in the history of human writing. And yet, I cannot myself think of a title that would do it justice ³. Anyway, in OTT, they talk about how both professional sportsmen (whom they’ve worked with as personal consultants) and professional regular adults (ditto), and even children, will do their best when they focus exclusively on the things they can control.

The irony is that ignoring the things we cannot control actually gives us more (not complete, but more) control over them than focussing on them does. And, if you’ve been paying attention more than I have (not a hard thing to do, BTW), then you’ll have realized that this is exactly what the late Stephen Covey was talking about it in 7 Habits with his concentric Circles of, respectively, Control (green), Influence (yellow) and Concern (red)).

Don’t run red lights. Or even yellow ones. It’s not impressive and it doesn’t make you a baller. At best, it merely puts you at risk of great suffering. Focus on your circle of control.

You know, I used to think all them Greek tragedies were stupid and negative and fatalistic and ignan’t — and maybe they are — but maybe they were actually trying to teach us something, and I’m only just now finally waking up to the lesson. After all, it’s not just in a Sophocles screenplay that the things you do to prevent bad thing X happening (e.g. your son murdering you and screwing your wife, who is also his Mom, because she’s literally a MILF) actually produce bad thing X: in water, being and acting afraid produces the very results that people who haven’t yet learned how to handle themselves in water are afraid of. Perhaps Sophocles and his colleagues in the Ancient Greek entertainment industry wanted us to learn about self-fulfilling prophecies and self-efficacy and directing our mental focus in productive directions.

Games involve winning and losing. If you don’t want to lose, don’t play. If you want to win, play against yourself. Come correct. Come prepared to lose and improve: paradoxically, this will make you a winner. Take that home and smoke it. It’s good for shogi, it’s good for SRSing, and it’s good for life in general.

チェケラッチョー！ (Yes, that’s actually how you say “check it out, y’all” in katakana).

Hip-hop of one form or another is by far my favorite type of music. I won’t waste your time here going into a full history — that’s what books like Hip-Hop Family Tree are for.

Japanese rap history goes as far back as the late 1980s (recorded rap music itself is regarded as having started in 1979 with the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, but there were obviously precursors in New York’s street scene and precursors to that with something called “toasting” that came over from night clubs (“discotheques”) in Jamaica, so ¹…).

EAST END×YURI’s “DA.YO.NE” was the first real domestic rap hit in Japan. That was the early 1990s. It’s been long enough now that Japanese hip-hop has accumulated some legends, established some traditions, and had its ups and downs ². Things have definitely been looking up, though, since Aklo’s Red Pill came out and basically single-handedly KILL-la-KILLed the industry, giving it a booster shot that turned into a tide that’s raised all the ships in the harbour and I don’t actually know what I’m talking about when I use maritime metaphors but I’m going to keep doing it anyhow.

That’s a lot of intro just to tell you about one rap lyric that I really liked. It’s from a Japanese cover of the Juicy J song “Shell-Shocked” (which, I am only just now finding out, was on the soundtrack of the Megan Fox TMNT film, which explains all the references to ninjas and cowabungas; all this time, I was under the mistaken impression that the Japanese coverers (Cream, Jazee Minor and Takuma the Great) were just bilingual 90s kids who were parodying perceptions (their own and other people’s) of Japaneseness.

‘Guess I was wrong, innit? Inside all of us is a little English professor who reads way too much into everything. Mine seems to have taken over bigly.

Now, often, when English language songs get translated too literally into Japanese, you get this sort of overwrought Indo-European phrasing intruding on a relatively terse language. So you get too many words crammed into too little space. The classic example of this is the Japanese version of the My Favorite Things from The Sound of Surgery Destroying Julie Andrews’ Voice ³, where it’s all:

• “そーれが私ぃの好きなー事おおおおおおおおお！”
• (そおれがわたしいのすきいなあことおおおおお）

In this version here ([(314) The Sound of Music – My Favorite Things (Japanese) – YouTube]), they actually go “みんな大好き マイ フェイヴォリット シングス”, which is stupid for different reasons. People like M-Flo (“I get around like 寿司 on a 回転”) manage to pull off code-switching with style and verve, that is, in a way that doesn’t unintentionally induce laughter or derision; this “みんな大好き マイ フェイヴォリット シングス” business, on the other hand, just feels like lazy translation.

By the way, many Hollywood films, perhaps due to licensing issues, actually have multiple Japanese dub and subtitle versions (one for TV, another for theatrical release, yet another for VHS/DVD ⁴). So, even though this isn’t the そーれが私ぃの好きなー事おおおおおおおおお！ version of The Sound of Music, don’t mean that it don’t exist lol.

Anyhoo, back to the Shell Shocked cover by Cream, Jazee Minor and Takuma the Great; here is the lyric that got me smiling, laughing and singing along:

• “ねぇセンセー 、お願い、教えて、僕らだけ何で普通じゃない
• んですか？センセー 、お願い、教えて、勝つのは誰？ 兎と亀”
• “Sensei, please tell me! Why are me and my crew are so abnormally awesome?
• Sensei, please tell me! Who will win, the hare or the tortoise one?”
• センセー→先生＝せんせい
• 勝つ＝かつ
• 兎＝うさぎ
• 亀＝かめ
• 僕等＝ぼくら
• 教える＝おしえる

Believe it or not, I am not very good at expressing myself verbally, and don’t know any music jargon, so it’s hard for me to explain why I like this part of this song so much. Suffice it to say that it works not despite but because of the phrasing, which, like the rhyme scheme, is pleasingly intricate; I love how he slips that dangling んですか in there. This isn’t some old school Beastie Boy stuff ⁵; this is post-Rakimian ⁶, high-quality noise.

There are other really cool parts of this song. The constant ninja references. The “TOE-KEE-YOOOO, 摩天楼 (まてんろう）! I kill it!”. But more on those some other time. Maybe. I dunno. Whatever.

Here’s a pertinent question — where on Buddha’s blue Earth can you even find this cover song we’ve been talking about for so many paragraphs? I’m glad you asked. The answer to that question is…it used to live on YouTube but I can’t find it there any more — perhaps due to a takedown request? So, just for you, and just for educational and review purposes, I’ve gone ahead and uploaded an mp3 of it right here:

As Strong Bad of Homestar Runner might say — don’t say I never did nuffin for da peoples. Speaking of which, Rip Slyme, easily the GOATs of Japanese hip-hop, actually have an officially sanctioned Japanese version of “Shell-Shocked”(「内緒でお願いします」). So, clearly, it’s a great time to be alive. Now I’m left wondering whether there’s something about Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J songs that screams “please create covers and localized versions of me worldwide”; I refer of course to the almost surreal global response to “Black and Yellow”. Good times. Anyway, more later!