Comments on: Don’t Have High Standards, Have Wide Standards

By: How To Compete Against Yourself: Don’t Do Your Best, Do Better Than Your Personal Average | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 12:37:43 +0000

[…] break average. Let the records break themselves. Don’t do your best. Don’t aim high. Aim upward. Inch forward. High will take care of itself. He’s a big boy […]

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 11:01:49 +0000

Gosto um bocado daqui, obrigada.

By: Stop With The Resolutions, Start With The Crack | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 11:50:32 +0000

[…] Your expectations are too high. […]

By: Speaking: You Don’t Have A Linguistic Problem, You Have A Humanity Problem | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 01:08:50 +0000

[…] you’ve got to work with right now. This is similar to though not quite exactly the same as lowering your standards. In any case, fundamentally, your L1 standards are already low; you just didn’t realize that […]

By: Do “Wide Standards” Apply To Immersion?: High Achievement Despite Low=Wide Standards | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:59:27 +0000

[…] Learn Languages the fast way on What is an SRS?James on Sun Tsu and Language Learninge_dub_kendo on Don’t Have High Standards, Have Wide StandardsHarry on DeletionsKen on Competition is for the Weak and Lazysly on How To Enjoy Movies You […]

By: e_dub_kendo

e_dub_kendo — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:05:15 +0000

yup thats how i see it also. just couldnt quite articulate it.

By: rigabamboo

rigabamboo — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 04:16:10 +0000

Hmm… well, the way I see it is, yes, immersion is different. You should do immersion always, but it doesn’t need to be always ACTIVE immersion. In fact, I think most of it is supposed to be passive. Active immersion would be something like studying kanji or reading a book in your L2 or closely watching a movie or closely listening to a podcast. This sort of action takes energy, so it should be done in short bursts that happen often, not long stretches. Passive immersion would be to have the movie/podcast/whatever going but not really paying attention to it. This requires no or almost no energy and should be happening as often as possible. So you could be doing passive immersion while you’re doing something else… napping, cleaning, exercising, homework, whatever.

So… yes, keep the immersion going, but make the active part of it small, easy things that you do often.

By: e_dub_kendo

e_dub_kendo — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:23:46 +0000

Khatz, just to clarify, this applies to the “study aspect” like doing SRS reps, etc, but given any 86,400 second period one should be striving to be in a Japanized environment for as many of those seconds as humanly possible right? I guess what I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter how many kanji you learn a day, as long as you learn some, or how many sentence reps you do, as long as you do some, . That totally makes sense to me. But is immersion different? I know that there have been times when I was tempted to get slack about immersion, to stay in English even after things I NEEDED to do in English were finished, but because I have deeply drilled into myself this instinct to constantly maximize Japanese exposure I have been able to overcome those temptations to get sucked into the 24 Hour NCIS marathon on USA that was playing in the other room, and etc. If I’d been taking a less hardcore approach, and expected less of myself in this regard, I can easily see days passing with very little time actually spent in Japanese. Basically doing a small “token” amount of immersion and then saying, well, as long as I do some each day that’s good and then tuning into the Family Guy re-runs (When in the hell is this gonna get a Japanese dub btw?). And, I think if my immersion fell apart like that, my SRSing and whatnot would follow quickly behind it. Generally, slippery slope arguments are fallacies, but in this case, the pull of English is so powerful it really does create a “slippery” condition, I believe, and we must be on guard. I feel like I haven’t worded this very clearly, but hopefully what I am trying to ask/address is coming through. Thanks.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:39:41 +0000

I agree, this is something I like to call being “consistently persistent”–you have to be like that starving pitbull that just got ahold of a nice, fresh steak: someone could pick you up and swing you around and you wouldn’t let go of it. Making small amounts of progress every day is more important than making a lot every now and then. Don’t ever do more than you can do every single day: what that means is that if you can’t sustain the rate at which you’re going, then slow down.

Cheers,
Andrew

By: Leonardo Boiko

Leonardo Boiko — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:19:54 +0000

Dunno about grass, but bacteria are undoubtly the most successful form of life under almost all criteria one can think of, and the reason for that is precisely that they have such wide standards. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html

By: Routine

Routine — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:49:40 +0000

Haha… I have the same problem in almost every sphere of my life… If I can’t be 100% perfect at something, right away, the usually I won’t do it at all. Just starting to really study Japanese was a huge achievement, for me, I guess, but I still have problems with lowering my standards. I still go about stuff the “all or nothing” way and I’m not really sure what to do about it :c

By: Aaron Tang

Aaron Tang — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:02:26 +0000

Again, brilliant. I always had unrealistic standards. I used to do it the typical Asian way, 600 Kanji a day (ok, thats an exaggeration, its more like 4444), but I realized that it was getting me nowhere! I would quit after day 2 only to restart 1 week later and quitting again 2 weeks later. Its like a vicious cycle which eventually gets you nowhere. This article will hopefully cure me of this detrimental habit of “aiming too high”. Maybe I should try “aiming wider”. Thanks

By: ライトニング

ライトニング — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:25:15 +0000

Very good post, I had this problem before, but luckily i’m out of it.
I’m all about easy goals now. I choose goals based on how I perform recently. Recently, i’ve been pulling ~20 sentences a day, so i set that as my goal because i know i can do it easily. However, If i don’t reach it, i’m fine, i don’t think much of it.
2 days ago i only did 4 sentences, but was totally cool with it, because I know if i usually do 20 a day, 1 small dip won’t hurt me at all.

By: Tag 263 : The Path to Fluency

Tag 263 : The Path to Fluency — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 20:35:30 +0000

[…] 1 new German sentences & 1 new Kanji. – Read 50 pages of “Animorphs: die Invasion”.Brilliant AJATT post about lowering your standards. Let me quote what I think summarizes the article:“High […]

By: Romuś

Romuś — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:51:57 +0000

I wish I could just turn a switch and be AJATT. Instead I try to make all this stuff, put some effort only to conclude, that taking it easy is the only thing that works after all. I do trial and error virtually always ending up with the exactly the same solutions as stated in here.
I know I should work on some vocabulary, check some dicts, but insted I watch HIMYM and I enjoy it and have no regrets whatsoever. The stuff I need will come but fun won’t have itself (@_@)

By: cmif

cmif — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:25:22 +0000

This is something I’ve just started to realize in other situations. I’ve always been so 100% or 0%
and anything in between is bad, its taken me ridiculous amount of time to make small changes to
that thinking. I’m getting so much more done like this.