Comments on: Don’t Compare, Don’t Despair

By: Learning A Language Isn’t Hard, Taking Mental Beatings Is | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 08:37:27 +0000

[…] “Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.” ~ Hugh Macleod […]

By: Don’t Fight Your Parents: Parasitic Learning Over Antagonistic Competition | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 22:38:22 +0000

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

By: Competition is for the Weak and Lazy | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:01:06 +0000

[…] you’re with a group of people, in…I dunno…a Japanese class. Look at you go, comparing yourself to the others and despairing (or — perhaps worse — comparing yourself to the others and thinking you’re […]

By: Carl Gene Fordham

Carl Gene Fordham — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:07:09 +0000

As the Chinese say, 人比人气死人.

By: Their Freedom To Hate → Your Freedom To Become Great | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:12:23 +0000

[…] your own business. Live in and work on your own reality. Compare yourself to yourself. Series Navigation Read […]

By: Day 185 : The Fine Apps

Day 185 : The Fine Apps — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:35:54 +0000

[…] because I’m trying to catch up with my new RTK Anki deck. I’m 40% done with RTK!I saw a great post on AJATT. Number 3 on his post (“Only compare yourself to a baby who was born the same day you started […]

By: アメド

アメド — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 21:36:09 +0000

It’s been sometime since I posted on the AJATT Blog. I was just looking at the comments above and the one that said “14,000 sentences in 6 months” caught my eye. I used to be an srs addict(I loved adding so much cards at once and loved pre-mined ones). But as I kept learning Japanese over the years(I’ve been studying for 2 years now, man time goes by fast). But overtime I actually deleted all my decks and started fresh(this was the only time I actually made a big change to my srs pace) and it went for the best actually. I didn’t delete my RTK deck of course but I revamped my vocabulary deck and sentence deck. I recently purchased a powerful laptop and I am able to maintain my srs reps and immersion for long hours on end. What I’m trying to say here is: there is no need to compare yourself with others, there will always be people better than you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t gain the skill that they have. Heck, when I started there was so many people ahead of me and were better then me at Japanese. Now, I’m ahead of most people who have been studying for 4-5 years (because I studied intensively and immersed a lot).

Overall my srs decks are only 3 now and I have a solid pace for each of them. Since I’ve srsed a lot before I can handle a fairly large amounts of reps in less than 1 hour each day. That leaves immersion,reading,practicing and having fun as well. I learned that the srs should be used a base for learning but it shouldn’t take too much of your time. I used to srs 70% of the time and immerse only 30%. Now I only srs for 20-30% and immerse for 70-80%(reading,listening,etc) and yet I can srs close to 500-800 reps a day and do them all in less than 1 hr. I’ve masted the way I can learn and how it effects me. Everyone has a different way of handling and learning, so you have to find your own way. Remember, anyone can succeed in learning Japanese but there are very few who keep it up long enough to feel that success.

P.S. on a side note: if anyone is interested, I plan to start a website/twitter/facebook/youtube account for language learning and Japanese subtitling (this one I’m actually working with someone and we hope to create a group that subtitles Japanese/transcription). I’m aiming for the end of this year to have it up and running.
Lastly, keep learning, keep succeeding, keep having fun(can’t stress this one enough, if your not having fun, then why are you doing it?) and know that you can succeed

By: Miss Language Learning

Miss Language Learning — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:38:58 +0000

Meh I don’t know, but let’s stop talking about useless things.
Comparing yourself to others is never a good idea because you always end up feeling bad.

By: Three Years Later « 我輩はブリートである。

Three Years Later « 我輩はブリートである。 — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:39:40 +0000

[…] was actually gonna be one of the major points of this post, until I stalled and Khatz summed it up far more elegantly. I could go into further detail, but lemme simply say that I’ve found few better ways to kill […]

By: Chagami

Chagami — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:30:18 +0000

Why are people who are agreeing with this statement *Liking* it? O.o

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 02:44:17 +0000

very interesting :]

By: jumbocrunk

jumbocrunk — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:12:05 +0000

Lol, good one. No, I definitely think it isn’t needed on a site like this where conversation is generally really good , mature and there isn’t too much flaming or anything. AJATT isn’t youtube. People aren’t badly rating comments because they are stupid or spam, they are doing it because it disagrees with their own opinion.

By: ライトニング

ライトニング — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:23:56 +0000

I don’t really see a point in it. Is it really needed to know how people feel about your post? If a post is hidden due to low rating (most of the time they aren’t even bad posts) people will click show anyways.

By: Monochrome

Monochrome — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:38:16 +0000

You don’t… like it?

By: jumbocrunk

jumbocrunk — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:14:53 +0000

Katz, this ‘Like or Dislike’ function should go.

By: kalek

kalek — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:11:07 +0000

On the topic of running though RtK, they likely know less than they let on because they raced through it. I tried racing through it at first and finished pretty quickly, but had an awful time and basically didn’t remember the second half of the book. I actually restarted and went at a steady pace my second time through, and by the time I finished, I knew every one pretty well. I think by the time I ended, my average number of new kanji per day during that time period was 13.

On the topic of monolingual sentences, don’t worry too much about it. Just play with the dictionary. Look up definitions or words you already know or want to know. Make sentences of the definition if you find it interesting or helpful (I.e. If you enjoyed reading it), but don’t force yourself to make sentences of everything. Last, but not least, keep on deleting in your SRS, and keep on reading interesting material online. If you do these things the adding will increase on it’s own and eventually you’ll be adding 40+ sentences a day and all the reps to go along with that rate of adding with ease.

Remember, there will be plenty of time later for you to be good at using a monolingual dictionary and learning every word you come across. For now, 10 new monolingual sentences a day sounds great, and it’ll only get better.

By: ガイ

ガイ — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:32:42 +0000

thats just too wise khatz

By: 魔法少女☆かなたん

魔法少女☆かなたん — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 05:48:30 +0000

When I was first introduced to the idea of spaced repetition flashcards, I’ve encountered people who would say stuff about how they have 14,000 or something in 6 months. I was shocked, as I’ve never added them that quickly. While I’ve never quite felt my progress was inadequate or anything, seeing stuff like that makes me seem like a slacker in comparison. But in the end, I don’t need to impress people on teh interwebs with the large number of freeze dried, high sodium instant sentences I’ve acquired in large packs. They don’t matter.

I’m still winning anyway.

By: ベン

ベン — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:50:32 +0000

[Really need an edit button] I just realised my comment might not seem particularly relevant to this post... What I was trying to say was that we now have real data to support the fact that not only do different people learn at different speeds in the meta(wtf), but each person learns each bit of knowledge at different speeds - therefore there is even less reason to compare yourself to others! :D Also, I just watched this video(by the same guy) and he exemplifies what he was explaining in the TED talk(with data to back it up): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C7FH7El35w (Start at about 0:25:00, and I think you only need to watch for two or three minutes) if you're interested.

By: ライトニング

ライトニング — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:57:50 +0000

I’m 14 actually, And I’m just starting high school, well, tomorrow.
I started during November of 8th grade when I was 13, Leaving from Korean. Never looked back.
RTK took me about 4 months to complete, and I’ve been on sentences since. I’ve been a slight bit slow with sentences, but luckily I’m picking up the pace and today I got 30 from extreme sentence mining from some vlogs on youtube made by a 13 year old in japan, and ゼルだの伝説時のオカリナ３ＤＳ 😀