1. Pick a YouTube video on a topic that interests you intensely, that really grabs you (whether or not you fully or even partially understand it). What matters is your curiosity, not your comprehension.
   • Let’s do this one for example: [岡田斗司夫ゼミ#279（2019.4）『攻殻機動隊』２話「SUPER SPARTAN」 徹底解説 前半 – YouTube] bit.ly/39AeA9B
2. Convert the YouTube video to audio. There are many (online) tools that can do this.
   • Here is just one of the many available: [YouTube to Mp3 Converter] ytmp3.cc/en13/
   • Audio version of video file: bit.ly/2YOUvZw
3. Split the audio file into 30-second segments, that is, multiple smaller audio files.
   • Example tool: [MP3 Splitter,MP3 Joiner,Audio Recorder,MP3 Recorder,MP3 Converter,MP3 WAV WMA Converter] bit.ly/2AP2mhp
   • One file gets splits into potentially dozens or hundreds of files: bit.ly/3fBKqG0
4. Upload these audio files to your smartphone/music player for use as immersion material.
5. Pick a small (30- to 90-second) segment of the video to focus on. You don’t need to turn the whole video into learning material: that’s both boring and overkill. Nothing’s that interesting.
6. If the video has accurate, human-generated subs attached to it, you can use a tool like this to strip them: 9xbuddy.org/ja
   • Note: Auto-generated (machine) subs are bad, avoid them.
   • So you’ll get files like this (SRT): bit.ly/2ARKDpJ
   • Or this(TXT): bit.ly/3hIcvgO
   • The problem with subs like this, especially (though not exclusively) in Asian languages is that diglossia is accepted as a matter of course in their sprachraums, meaning that a variable but relatively high degree of divergence between written and spoken language is presumed and accepted. This means that subtitles are more interpretations than true transcripts, rendering them decidedly less useful to you.
7. Otherwise (and this the way I recommend), get a language tutor or language exchange partner to transcribe your small segment of the video for you. These two sites are just some of the many available to you.
   • [italki: Learn a language online] bit.ly/3hPiW1N
   • [言語交換コミュニティ – 英語、フランス語、スペイン語を学ぶ-外国語学習] bit.ly/2Nee6wG
8. Pick some target text. Anything from one sentence to three paragraphs is fine. Make this the FRONT of an SRS card.
   • You could also pick the audio first and THEN pick the text. Prolly that way is more natural. It just kinda depends. It’s not a big deal. Either way works just fine, brah.
9. Upload an audio file that matches some or all of that target text to the BACK of an SRS card.
   • Find the audio file (the short clip) that matches the text (should be easy with audio files split every 30 seconds because there are approximately twice as many audio files as minutes of audio, so timestamp (in minutes) times two plus one should generally give you the right file).
10. Pick some text that matches that audio. Call it #textfinding
11. Find a word you don’t know (well) in that text. Call this your target word. Call it #wordfinding
12. Add a dictionary definition of the target word to the BACK of your card.
13. Hide the target word (create a cloze).
14. Repeat from the #wordfinding step.
15. Stop when you’ve done this for three words or get bored or tired, whichever comes first.
16. If you have the energy, go back to the #textfinding step.
17. Go do some immersion or SRS reps.

If some person or group of people is capable of successfully planning, seeing and executing every move in minute detail years ahead, with no significant errors or deviations whatsoever, that’s no longer an ordinary human, that’s a god of some kind.

For many years, I’ve really enjoyed conspiracy theories. They mimic my favorite type of fiction — science fiction that’s written in non-fiction style. Some people love fantasy tales, love stories or monster movies. I like tales that mimic reality really closely. It’s all fun and games to me. Call it urban mythology.

But, unfortunately, there are real consequences to this urban mythology. One easy example is the rampant anti-Semitism. And we all know where anti-Semitism leads. Not all conspiracy theories are anti-Semitic, but you only have to throw a stone to hit twelve that are.

Another example of the danger of conspiracy theory logic is the mistreatment of American and Canadian citizens of Japanese descent in the 1940s. These people had their property stolen (and never returned, by the way) and then got thrown into concentration camps right in the free world. When it was pointed out that there was literally not a single case of sabotage by Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians, a high-ranking US official claimed that the total absence of evidence of sabotage was itself evidence of a big, bad plan.

Wait, what?

So, the presence of evidence of sabotage necessitates stripping Nikkeijin (日系人, にっけいじん) of their rights, and so does the absence of evidence?
If A then B, and
if not A then also B?
That literally means that A has nothing to do with B. A does not determine B in any sense.

German-Americans were fine. They got to be generals: Eisenhower, Nimitz, Spaatz. Schmidt. Even Hitler’s nephew (yeah, same surname) joined the Navy to much fanfare. And those who didn’t join the military were unmolested as civilians — and this is a good thing. When it comes to basic human rights, everyone deserves nice things. [IIRC things weren’t such smooth sailing for ze German immigrants during WW1, especially if you were a Dachshund or showed any affinity for the heritage language].

But back to the topic at hand. Look. No “cabal” powerful enough to control all world events, is going to conveniently leave glaring visual clues that one brave, lonely dumba$$ on the Internet can then put into a viral YouTube video. Just…stop. Honestly.

Maybe the entire world is fake. Maybe we live in the Matrix. But even if that were true, then rules and logic of the “fake” Matrix world — rules like gravity, falsifiability and basic logic — would still matter. If everything is fake, then basic principles of logic and evidence are the first fallback, not the first thing we abandon. If nothing else, we should be neutral, not spinning up gigantic edifices of paranoiac thinking.

Street smarts still apply. So gravity is fake news? OK, cool. But don’t test it by jumping out the window. “They” are reading everything you write? OK, cool. But still don’t post about your personal life online. Vaccines cause autism? OK, cool. Vaccinate your kids anyway and maybe they can get the ’tism and be a reclusive programmer like me ; maybe they’ll develop an app to deprogram your gullible a$$ out of taking urban mythology narratives too seriously. It’s all good, brah.

Sorry, I know I’m losing focus. Let me just say this.

Saying that everything is a lie is not an excuse to go off the rails. If anything it demands that we become more focussed, more empirical, more experimental, more rational, more logical, more rigorous, more consistent, both more open to new ideas and more exacting in our standards for keeping those ideas.

How does this apply to learning Japanese? Easy.

AJATT is a red pill experience. School is fake — doesn’t work, wastes your time. Textbooks are fake — boring, waste of time. But that doesn’t mean we huddle up in a bunker and give up. It means we go out there and try all kinds of new stuff. You think your SRS format has problems? You don’t give up! You go full Darwinian. You set up multiple SRS decks, each with its own format, let them compete against each other and see which comes out the most successfull (hint: it’s MCDs/MXDs (Massive-Context Cloze Deletion Cards)).

“The GoldenEye was a fictional electro-magnetic orbital weapon developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” [GoldenEye (weapon) | James Bond Wiki | Fandom] bit.ly/36rz6sF

You don’t like sex or video-games quite as much as you think you do.
These activities are not that intrinsically interesting (obviously, they are a little bit).
What really makes them seem fun is the focus with which they are performed.
If you want to be happy, focus.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “Khatz, you’re a tanned basement weaboo, you’re no poonslayer”.
And you would be right.

But my lack of experience is made up for by the depth of the insights I’m about to drop on you.

Dopamine is designed to trick you into making things seem funner than they actually are.
Dopamine rewards anticipation, not action.
Ask Bob Sapolsky. He’ll fill you in. Tell you all about it.

• [The Dopamine Seeking-Reward Loop | Psychology Today] bit.ly/2XDRFGj
• [Shopping, Dopamine, and Anticipation | Psychology Today] bit.ly/3bTQcQZ

Hijack the system and use it to enter flow instead.

You think you want pleasure.
What you actually want is a structure that can envelope you and allow you to engage in bounded self-abandonment.

Focus and clarity create flow, an almost complete state of self-abandonment.
Fun and happiness are directly proportional to time spent in the flow state.
You can induce flow more or less ex nihilo through total, unabashed, undiluted focus on a single, clear tactical goal.

Clarity, specificity, narrowness, doability, brevity. Sequences of winnable games. These are the ingredients of flow-inducing tactical goals.
Which is an overwrought way of saying: happiness.
It doesn’t mean you’re not also, say, hearing audio in your adopted language.
It means your focus is stable and singular.

The secret is this: always multiplex, never multitask.
Take input from multiple sources simultaneously, but give attention and output to one thing and only one thing at a time.
Focus on that one thing as if it were the most important thing in the Universe.

What about reading while watching TV? Isn’t that two things?
I mean, yeah, but no.
Depending on your constitution, it’s either
(1) just a special compound type of “one thing”, or
(2) two things, but with a rapid, binary, fun-driven, stable focus switch.

The point of focus, laserlike, like a GoldenEye EMP satellite, on a single thing, is not to take a puritanical stand on pleasure.
It’s actually super hedonistic. The idea is Promethean: stealing the fire of pleasure and spreading it throughout your life.

Just, pretend the GoldenEye system was more like SDI than it actually was.

Anything can be like video-games or multiplayer bedroom sports if you respect it enough to give it your undivided attention.

Focus. Timebox. Slay.

PS: Thích Nhất Hạnh has spent almost his entire career trying to teach this to noobs: focus induces happiness.
ティク・ナット・ハン
WIKI: bit.ly/2VdamOi
AMZN: amzn.to/3c0zIGM

Eckhart Tolle is, like, a German, non-celibate Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Their teachings are only superficially “spiritual”.
They come down to attention management (OMG that sounds dry).
Both will teach you how to be happy and productive.
エックハルト・トール amzn.to/3gjZskQ

1. Deliberate Overtraining.
2. Personal Taste Bordering on Activisim

Let’s talk about overtraining first.

Do you know why Kenyan long distance runners are so good? It’s not genes, I’m afraid. It’s because they have better mindsets, environments and training methods. Namely

1. Cost: running is a cheap sport. You can even do it without shoes.
2. Motivation/Mindset: Cost of living in Kenya being lower than it is in, say, Europe. So the money you can make running means more. A million dollars is good money anywhere in the world, even in Monaco (OK, barely in Monaco lol). But it’s especially good money in a country like Kenya.
3. Diet: The SDK (Speed Development Kit, Standard Diet of a Kenyan) is said to be good for running. Make of that what you will.
4. 80/20-style Training. (Book reference: [Amazon | 80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower (English Edition) [Kindle edition] by Fitzgerald, Matt, Johnson, Robert | Training | Kindleストア] amzn.to/3bltkdM)
5. Altitude. Most of Kenya’s population lives on high altitude plateaux. The areas where most runners grow up and live are at even higher altitude than that. A respiratory system trained on low oxygen concentrations is like a programmer trained on slow and weak computers — powerful and efficiient.
6. Infrastructure Issues: Many schoolchildren in rural areas run long distances to school in order to maximize sleep time while evading corporal punishment for tardiness. It’s a thing.

Using more kanji than you “need” or than is “common” is like training at high altitude. By using the maximum amount of kanji possible, you won’t freak out or be left illiterate when, say, you got to a temple in Japan (like 浅草寺 in 浅草) and you do see signs with words like 此れ and 此処,

There’s a difference between a kanji being rarely used and a kanji never being used. By definition, no kanji that exists is “never” used, only (at most) rarely used. Especially as a Heisig graduate, it takes virtually no extra effort to pick up a kanji as you pick up a new word, so why not go for it?

Just because you came to Japanese by choice rather than by accident of birth, that doesn’t mean you have to accept a subordinate socio-linguistic position in Japanese society. You can be at the top of the heap you want. Why be ignorant when you be knowledgeble?

OK, so, so far, that explains learning more kanji than the average bear, but what about why I use them so much in writing? Time to talk about activism and taste.

So I love kanji. I love them. I love seeing them. I love touching them. I love writing them. I love reading them. They are beautiful to me. One guy once joked that I’m aroused by them — I’m not, but I do I find them aesthetically pleasing. It’s like seeing Megan Fox in Transformers or Schuyler Fisk in Orange County, you’re not aroused, but you’re undeniably faced with a visually appealing image. Each kanji has a unique feel, a unique personality. Each kanji is a friend; she can talk to you and tell you a story.

Again, I love kanji. And I believe the actions taken by the Occupational Government in the 1940s (and by the Chinese Communist Government in the 1950s and 1960s) are literally the worst thing you can do that doesn’t involve harming people, harming animals or confiscating private property. It was cultural vandalism (and borderline civilizational suicide) to attempt to truncate, abbreviate and even destroy the kanji lexicon. I don’t force other people to use kanji like I do, but I’ll be damned — damned, I tell you — if I’m going to submit to the fiat of illegitimate governments (and the Communist Party is about as legitimate as my disastrously effeminate thighs) without a fight.

So by the time you’ve memorized the rule, you’ve already spotted an exception out in the wild [the only place that matters, by the way: only real usage matters — your grammar book and even (much as I love them) your dictionary can go straight to heck in a showdown with real usage].

Now you have three problems:

1. the time and energy you’ve already wasted learning a stupidly complex rule, and
2. the time and energy you’re about to waste trying to force the false, mechanical logic of the rule onto the organic logic of the “exception”. To say nothing of
3. the time and energy (your own and other people’s, this time) you’re going to waste misapplying the “rule” and causing confusion and frustration to reign throughout the land.

Language isn’t physics. You can’t plug a verb into a “conjugator function” as if it were some sort of variable and come out with the right answer. This ain’t no F=ma, my guy. But, whatever. You do you, boo.

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
Frank Herbert

Do people conspire?
Yes.
Do governments lie?
On the daily.

So why is it even news to you that you’re small and weak, surrounded by forces you can’t control? Do you have no memory of being a child? Have you never been swimming in the ocean or looked up at the starlit sky or had a bipolar girlfriend or ?

Or done all those things with a bipolar girlfriend?
Things go cray cray fast.

Being small and weak is par for the course, my guy.
So is being powerless.
But being helpless? No, you are not helpless.

Remember the late great Dr. Stephen Covey’s concentric circles, in expanding order of diameter: circle of control, circle of influence, circle of concern.

You can only control the stuff in the first circle. The inner circle. The irony is that the more you do of that, the bigger its diameter gets. But if you try to work from the outside (from concern, which, by definition, all conspiracy theories are), you are in for a world of hurt (and a rapidly contracting circle of control). You can only push from the inside out.

Conspiracy theories are worse than useless. Worse than wrong. Worse than false. They’re unfalsifiable. At their worst (which is often) they’re self-enclosed, self-justifying, circular logic cults that can reject all confounding evidence as being part of the conspiracy. Again, when I want bad logic, I just go talk to bipolar women — or, as they’re called in Japanese: “women”.

HA! Locker room humor for the win!
(Please love me and pay attention to me).

Back on topic. If conspiracy theories are so bad and so useless, then why am I writing about them? Well because:
(1) a guy in a black suit came to my house and told me to, but (more importantly)
(2) I love them; I love conspiracy theories — as entertainment, as literature (but only when they’re not anti-Semitic; nothing shows lack of creativity and imagination than an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and I have no time for sloppy writing — I can watch Hollywood movies for that). Conspiracy theories are a sort of non-fiction-style science fiction. Sort of like SCP or lots of Whitley Strieber’s work or any and every word ever written by Jon Krakauer (burn!): it’s fiction, but it’s so damn good that it feels real. Conspiracy theories are literally our modern legends — our urban lore. Our myths. And
(3) Conspiracy thinking sometimes intrudes onto (into?) language-learning — right down to people genuinely thinking that Japanese was and is somehow intentionally “made difficult” in order to “prevent foreigners from learning it” (“why is ‘hot water’ お湯 (おゆ、oyu) and not 熱い水?!” — nonsense like that). Not true. Not a thing. But a dangerously bad idea that some people do have in their heads.

Conspiracy theories are myths (even when they turn out to be true, which they sometimes do). But that’s about all they are. They are not useful and are even damaging if taken seriously. They carry that hallmark of all pessimism — providing security and a sense of moral superiority through depressing explanations of the how the world works.

The truth is (yes, I know) that the real world is too complex to fit neatly into a story that some earnest guy who makes great online videos and documentaries can tell you. There are no neat boxes. There is no story. There is no adult supervision. There is no grand plan (although there are many plans). We have no idea what is going on. More can be explained by incompetence than malice.

Nobody but the old gods themselves (spoiler alert…oh, never mind) is smart enough and powerful enough to make intricate, mass-scale, long-term plans involving billions of uncooperative humans work forever. Have you ever tried to get five people to decide on what restaurant to go to for lunch? Yeah. That’s humans.

Again, some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true. Mass spying on innocent citizens of the world’s great democracies by their own governments was a conspiracy theory. It’s been proven to be a fact. But what good does knowing that do you? Literally sweet jack all. So you know that governments are spying…OK…congratulations? Do you want a horse to go with that windmill? Do you have nothing else in your life that you could be working on?

Circles, bro, circles.

Folks are going to keep making disaster porn and I’m going to keep enjoying (some of) it. But it’s important to recognize that while it is sometimes entertaining, it is often damaging, never useful and always unproductive.

And we haven’t even covered the worst part of conspiracy theories, and it is this: the worst part of conspiracy theories is that taking them seriously inculcates poor habits of thought — one ends up always looking for the “real” story, the “background”, the juicy details, “secret evidence” — when the truth is that much greatness can be achieved and many a problem solved in life by simply observing and acting on what is in plain sight. Seeing and doing the obvious is the most powerful and underrated thing in the world.

Examples of obvious-but-immensely powerful things:

• Native speakers are good at their native language…how many hours do they spend? OK, let’s try to approach their time figures and see how it goes. Stuff like that.
• Every second you spend in contact with the Japanese language will make your Japanese better. Every second you spend out of contact with it will make it worse.

You have been given enough to succeed. There is enough information already out there for you to make good decisions. Should you be prepared? Always. Be prudent. Maybe even be a little bit paranoid. But paranoia is like salt. More is not better. Never go full retard.

Success so big and bad that people think it and I am miraculous? I also have some experience with that.

Many parts of the spectrum have I seen and and considered.

The thing that most people either fail to realize (or are loathe to admit) about pessimism is that it’s comforting because it gives us certainty. But if you want to succeed in any field, including learning (=getting used to) a language, you need to become comfortable with radical uncertainty.

We are (I think) predisposed and (I know) conditioned to seek and even demand certainty. We crave it. Studies have shown that the public at large prefer a decisive person who is wrong to an indecisive person who is right. This is understandable, we all want to feel safe, but it is a mistake.

Embracing radical, fundamental, ongoing uncertainty is the key to success. I’m talking deep levels of uncertainty. Embrace it, like you embrace the fact that you’re 30 meters underwater with strangers when you’re diving. Drink it all in. Take out your regulator and just glug glug glug.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah — uncertainty.

When you’re comfortable with uncertainty, you can take consistent action without worrying about exactly where, when and how you will be rewarded for it.

If you want to even have a chance at specific success, you need to get comfortable with general action. You can’t do surgery before you’re a surgeon. You can’t be a sharpshooter until you’re first just a regular shooter. And that, in large part, means shooting a lot of bullets. A lot. More than you can count. More than seems natural. Until when? Until. As long as it takes.

What’s that? That’s too long? That’s too much uncertainty? Oh, I’m sorry, are you too happy, healthy and wealthy to get any happier, healthier or wealthier? Or are you too much of a sick, depressed loser to become less of a sick, depressed loser?

You’re never too dirty to take a bath, mate.

When will you get fluent? Nobody quite knows exactly. Not even you. Everybody — every body is bit different. All we know for certain is that you won’t get fluent by avoiding the language (that’s a guarantee), and that you’re highly unlikely to get fluent by doing boring things (that’s an heuristic).

You can’t directly control your results, but you can directly control your actions, and turn them to actions that are more likely to cause the results you want. And when you write it down and say it out loud as I just have, that kind of statement can seem so simple as to be barely worth writing or reading, but if life has taught me one thing (and it’s done at least that), it’s that nothing goes without saying. Everything needs to be explained (now, some things can’t be explained [the next time some jabroni, sorry, cognitively challenged individual of infinite worth, asks me to define what “fun” is, I will choke them to put them out of their own misery] and some things are made worse by explanations, but there you go).

So, don’t worry too much about your results. In fact, most of the time, don’t even think about your results. Focus on your actions. Focus on your direction. Trite? Yes. True? Also yes.

Frankly, I would rather go hungry than participate in a meal that was cooked by someone who wasn’t giving the food the undivided attention of their hands. Like, I can understand watching YouTube while you cook — I do that all the time. But far king doing work on your laptop as you cook? Touching the body of an animal that died for this meal with your laptop hands? GTFOH. No. It’s wroang! Wroang! 間違ってるって！It ain’t raht, Billy.

But language isn’t like that. Language is too big, too messy, too organic, too complicated to be shoved into neat, sterile little boxes — that’s true of grammar, and it’s also true of time management (which isn’t to knock timeboxing; timeboxing is the shiznit; timeboxing is a tool for carving helpful order out of too much chaos, not for imposing too much order onto the natural “eu-chaos” that is an organic construct like language itself). Let your language practice/study/exposure permeate your entire day and life. You don’t need a special time for it.

Do you have a special time for breathing? No. You perhaps have a special time for doing breathing exercises — maybe it’s yoga, maybe it’s swimming, maybe it’s Maybelline. But you breathe all day every day. Languages are like air. Treat them like it. Let your language be your air. Let your target language be in and on everything you do, everything you see, everything you touch, everything you smell, everything you eat.

Languages are airborne infections. But your mental “immune system” — your brain’s ability to forget — will clear any new language away unless you overload it. So the trick with immersion isn’t so much to make it easy to learn as it is to make it impossible not to learn.

The whole world (including the Internet) is your textbook. Google image search is your dictionary. Every moment is a teachable moment. Every moment is learnable moment. There’s no special time for SRS reps — do them wherever and whenever you have a minute; treat your SRS decks like a hip flask and yourself like an alcoholic — just taking random swigs here and there (plus the occasional bender, but only when the impulse hits).

Immersion. As in water. Dive in. Drown in your target language. Don’t come back up for air until you’ve grown skills and gills.

See what I did there?

The other day, a good cishet male friend of mine, Dexter Kent (which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not his legal name; and he hasn’t told me what his preferred pronouns are, so, Phuket like Thailand, I’m goin’ in raw) asked me:

“Khatzumoto, no homo, but you are a beautiful man. Your eyes shine like balls of obsidian. Your thighs aren’t big; they’re just the right size — after all, you were just #bornthisway #bodypositivity #lovetheskinyourein #becauseyoureworthit…”

And he actually said the word “hashtag” each time, which, like, weird. Anyway, so he continued:

“But tell me, Oh Khatzumotian one, do you think it’s possible that a person could do all his immersion and all his reps and still not be fluent?”

Dexter is a perfectionist. A killer of SRS decks. A man guilty of deleting entire SRS decks (rather than single bad cards) multiple times. What he was really asking is: “what if I do everything right, everything I’m ‘post [supposed] to do; what if I eat Jhene Aiko’s booty like groceries, and I still don’t become fluent?”

And I told him: first of all, stop making facile rap references in our conversations. It leads to stereotyping. And then I preceded to channel the wisdom of our Lord and Savior, Sean Corey “Jay Z” Carter, consort to the Her Creolic Majesty the Queen Bee, and said this:

“If you’ve got a language problems, I don’t feel bad for you, son. But you don’t actually have any big problem(s). You just have tens of thousands of small ones. Don’t solve big problems. Solve small ones.”

Everybody has problems. Everybody. From Elon Musk to children who stay slumdogs and don’t become millionaires. Everybody has problems. Perhaps even very serious problems.

But nobody actually has big, giant, insoluble problems. Nobody. What they actually have is an abundance, a profusion, a proliferation of teeny, tiny little — and more or less soluble — problems.

Depending on how you count them, these problems number from the high five figures all the way to low eight figures. It just depends on how granular(ly?) you want to go.

Overwhelm comes when we use abstraction (abstract thought) — an ability that is not unique to but is highly developed in humans — against ourselves. All overwhelm is due to a bunching up, a rounding up our problems.

• I’ve got to get my life together
• I’ve got to learn this language
• I’ve got to be neater and cleaner
• I’ve got to wash these dishes
• I’ve got to do the laundry
• I’ve got to write to this person
• I’ve got to write to that person
• I’ve got to write to all these people
• I’ve got to get better at communication

No. Stop. Stop it. Get some help.

Slice. Salami. Your problems may be Xerxes’ Grand Army, but you need to filter them through the Pass of Thermopylae so that you’re only hitting one at a time. Let’s just forget that Thermopylae was actually a Persian victory: historical accuracy be damned straight to heck if it gets in the way of one of my silly metaphors. The point is, a tiny army held off a much larger one because the former thought of a way to negate the latter’s numerical advantage. The lesson is: don’t be an idiot and face your problems head on in a grand field battle. Harass and skirmish them like the wily guerrilla/lone sniper you are.

Guerilla. Small war. Your problems don’t nag you; you nag and nibble at your problems. You booby trap cars and run nighttime sneak attacks under cover of fun against your problems.

Sniper. Ingress. Action. Egress. One man (or woman). One mission. One rifle. One target. One round (hopefully)…at a time. Then you move on to the extraction point.

Do not solve any big problems any more. You are out of the Big Problem game. Retire your jersey. You’re never coming back. Solve teeny tiny problems. Learn the one word (phrase) that is in front of you right now. Nothing else. Here. Now. This problem. Nothing else exists. Nothing else matters.

It is good to think big. We can. We probably should. But remember that we can only act small. We have big brains, but tiny hands. Heavy brains, but light hands. Big lungs, but tiny hands. So think bigly, breathe deeply and do one small thing.

You do not have a big problems. You just have a huge number of tiny, easy problems. A gigantically (but not infinitely) long string of fun, small, easy problems. And what do we call that? A game.

Now go play.

Not long ago, I was in the kitchen and I noticed that someone had left a bunch of lightly cooked meat (intended as catfood) in an uncovered Ziploc container; this alone is enough to set me on edge; I don’t like food being left uncovered, especially meat.

So, being an adult, I looked for a cover to cover it. And I couldn’t freaking find one. At this point, I was ready to go into full wrath mode — I’m not what you’d call a nice man — but then I calmed down and found some saran wrap to cover the meat with instead.

It strikes me that this is what you need to do every day in your language game. Things go wrong all the time. You don’t have the exact tools you want or wish you had. Things break. The key is to be less like a spaceship and more like an insect: be a cockroach rather than a Space Shuttle or an aircraft carrier.

Cockroaches are gross, no one’s arguing that. But they get living done very well. Really well. Crazy well. You kind of need to be OK with living on, near and from the metaphorical floor — using whatever tools you find lying around. This isn’t to say you don’t have grand ambitions, but it’s more important to not be fragile, to not be brittle. Your grand ambitions, which are a great thing to have, always need to be channeled into decidedly un-grand, un-showbizy, un-showy, pedestrian behavior, like a crawling arthropod — even (in fact, especially) if you want truly grand results and not just the appearance of grand results.

Only Tom Cruise sprints everywhere all the time, and even then, only in movies. In real life, we amble and scurry. In real life, lions and cheetahs sleep 18 hours a day (this is analogous to your passive input time). That is how real nature works — it’s nothing like National Geographic or David Attenborough documentaries, the sports highlights of the natural world.

Don’t be fragile. Don’t be brittle. Don’t be a prima donna (like I unfortunately tend to be about so much in life). One line of stray computer code could easily destroy a spacecraft (I’m looking at you, every other Mars probe [Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, maybe even a couple of Russian ones as well] and Ariane 5 rocket) in quite spectacular, even explosive, fashion; I was literally ready to go to war over a Ziploc lid.

Make no mistake: I’m not here to tell you to be a better person or any of that crap; I’m not that guy. What I am saying is this: go with your next best bad idea. Bend before you break. Become a lemonade factory — all sweet and sticky, just the way them cock-a-roaches like it!

Like saran wrap on a Ziploc bag; it bugs the crap out of me, but it gets the job done. #giterdun? Sorta. Kinda. But better.

You see, the kind of people who are attracted to things like, oh I dunno, the Japanese language, tend to be sensitive, detail-oriented nutjobs. People like me. The irony is that we need to attenuate our sensitivity in order to succeed at this and in life in general: it doesn’t need to be shut down completely, but — like fine china — it should only be brought out for special occasions.

The road to mastery, to excellence, is built on (at least apparent) mediocrity and compromise. The only thing you need to do near-perfectly is not give up, not die, not quit the game. Everything else, meh, just kinda wing it. The trick to boiling water is to add more heat than you’re losing, not to have the “best heat”. Don’t do your best; that’s unsustainable; you can’t set world records every day — just do.

Do what? Something, anything — but preferably small and easy — that helps. Don’t fight your nature. Don’t fight nature in general. Embrace it. Embrace her. Dance with her. Just dance in a helpful direction — but don’t force her there like a cartoon villain, instead, glide there effortlessly. Smooooove. JB Smooooooove. What’s that? We’re doing something productive? I had no idea, darling.

If you feel productive or righteous, you’re doing it wrong. You want your “work” to be almost accidental. Almost incidental. Almost a side-effect. You weren’t trying to learn Japanese: you just watched too darn much TV and it stuck.

Modern life is full of people advocating force. Let’s call these people “Clausewitz’s Bastards” (a little like “Voltaire’s Bastards”, which is the actual title of a pretty decent book [check out the respective English and Japanese versions]). These are the people who took von Clausewitz’s On War all too seriously. First of all, it’s a treatise on war written by a man from a country that literally destroyed itself through war; I mean, like, it’s like if Siad Biarre had written a book called How Not Become A Failed State and motherlovers were quoting that noise a century and a half later like, literally, W the actual F?

Actually, it’s worse. It’s like if Siad Barre had unironically written and published a book called On Statecraft in 1980 and cats were still reading and quoting that nonsense to this day. Does not compute. Saddam Hussein’s 1985 bestseller: On How To Run a Successful Constitutional Monarchy. Uh, I’m sorry, what?

Now, am I saying that your national origin — or even a history of personal failure — determines the kinds of books you’re allowed to write? Of course not ¹. I am saying…don’t look to Prince for advice on responsible drug use? I dunno. Sometimes people give bad advice and you can see how bad it is just by the results they got from following their own advice. And I feel like the preceding sentence may come back to bite me someday (lol) but I’m not gonna sit here and Cardinal Richelieu [it’s a verb now] every six lines I write, so, yeah.

The best that can be said about On War is that it might help if you fight a conventional war against a conventional enemy — but as soon as you face even the vapors of unconventionality, you’re basically toast.  It’s sorta like your friend who knows martial arts moves, but can only use them if you attack him at the exact angle and speed that he learned in his dojo (道場、どうじょう、doujou) exercises. He’s brittle.

Clausewitz and especially his bastards, which basically includes all of us who endured compulsory schooling, are brittle, brutal, linear thinkers.

Nature isn’t linear. It doesn’t just add or just multiply: it compounds. It’s cyclical; it’s logarithmic; it’s exponential; it’s fractal; it’s flexible — but it’s basically never linear. No straight lines. So, linear thinking will not help and indeed will harm you a great deal when applied to dynamic(al?) systems. Brutal, linear, Clausewitzian thinking is like blitzkrieg against Russia: you think you’re winning and then winter hands you your a$$ on a platter, like: “here ya go, one ess”.

With linear thinking, you enter well-dressed and in straight lines, like a handsome Napoleonic column, but leave in tatters. With cockroach thinking, you look like a loser, but you’re undoubtedly a winner where it counts — a winner where and when it matters most. The metaphor breaks down if you overthink it, but hopefully you get the point.

And the point here is…

Nothing that lasts is built on brute force. Alexander and Genghis were amazing, kind of, but none of what they built lasted. Not to narrow your action repertoire or anything, but in the long run, I am finding, only guile and subtlety really “work”. You can’t beat yourself into submission on any permanent basis ² (it will generally end poorly and backfire just as violently as it started), you’ve got to coax yourself, invite yourself, create that desire. You don’t need big boats and big guns, just a big heart and a big mind. Your big heart graciously accepts imperfection; your big mind playfully imbibes and creates new ideas.

Throughout history, guerrillas have beat regular armies with alarming regularity even though regulars are capable of applying more force. Think about it for a moment. Isn’t that cray?!

European military advisers weaned on Clausewitz made the KMT (who had more manpower, better hardware, control of all industry and major cities, international legitimacy and ample foreign support) lose to Mao’s Communist guerrillas thanks to said Clausewitzian Bastards’ force-based, rock-em-sock-em, pitch-battle-centric advice that clearly didn’t work for crap). See Bevin “I’m a Good Writer and Analyst But a Bit Too Much of An Apologist for the Confederate States of America” Alexander’s lucid and insightful How Great Generals Win, for more. [I love his writing, but his thinly veiled boner for the South needs work — perhaps some thick sweatpants to cover it up or something — because it leads to some disappointingly emotional and tendentious sections in an otherwise rational, fair and balanced book].

Davids beat Goliaths on the daily — Malcolm Gladwell has an entire book about it (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants). Not because of “righteousness” or any nonsense like that, but because of plugging into nature. A lot like, well, roaches.

Guerrillas, like roaches, fight “little war”. They do little things. And yet, time and time again, they are the small hinge that swings big doors of national destiny. When you give up on looking cool and start caring about getting good results, the arthropods will have answers for you.

There’s a Kung-Fu joke in here somewhere where I call you “Gokiburi” instead of “Grasshopper”, but I cannot for the life of me be bothered to dig it up right now.

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” so said Prometheus, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875).

For AJATT purposes, I would change that to read: “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from timeboxing“, or, more generally, “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from obeying the principle of proportionality“. The principle of proportionality is more or less the central dogma of John Lewis Gaddis‘ thesis in his more-than-awesome book “On Grand Strategy“, an audio review (by me!) of which you can find here at this link.

Let’s not beat around the bush like a 1970s blue movie: I get overwhelmed easily. Very easily. Painfully easily. I used to think it was just me, but lately I’m beginning to think it’s quite widespread, if not common. It’s definitely not just me. The personal is universal, and all that.

Think of the people — often women, because I love me some casual misogyny lol — whom we describe as drama queens. These people are real. These people exist. These people treat the soiling of a decorative towel with the same gravity as finding out that someone has molested their child — indeed, sometimes, they seem treat them in inverse proportion. These people violate the principle of proportionality on the daily: that is why they’re mad; that is why we mock and dislike them.

So, back to me, I feel overwhelm really easily: I am the drama queen that I mock ¹. Like a tyrant, a mad caesar, I try to command myself to be instantly awesome, to have it all done and perfect right now in fact yesterday or else I’m going to cry and throw a tantrum, motherlover. But when I get that way, I say to myself “remember you are human; even caesar must budget”. There’s a rich history behind that phrase, but I really super duper can’t be bothered to explain it to you myself so I’m going to have someone else explain it to you for me:

“After every major military victory in ancient Rome, a “triumph,” as it was called, was celebrated in Rome. It was a ceremonial procession granted to victorious generals…The victorious general who drove throughout the streets of Rome in the chariot, decorated with gold and ivory, was followed by his troops and preceded by his most glamorous prisoners and spoils, taken in war. The triumph for the victorious general offered extraordinary opportunities for self-publicity and therefore popularity with the people of Rome. The victorious general was seen as, in some way, divine, representing the god Jupiter…One of the most interesting parts of the triumph was that behind the victorious general in the chariot stood a slave, holding a golden crown over his head, and whispering to him throughout the procession, ‘[Memento te hominem esse (remember you are human)]’…reminding him that he is a man even when he is triumphing.”

[In Ancient Rome, a slave would continuously whisper ‘Remember you are mortal’ in the ears of victorious generals as they were paraded through the streets after coming home, triumphant, from battle] [Emphasis Added]

Dr. Mary Beard, of SPQR fame, even has a whole-a$$ book about it:[Amazon.com: The Roman Triumph (9780674032187): Mary Beard: Books]

Even caesar must budget. Even Rome must budget her time, her energies, her resources, her gold, her men. Everybody is a balling on a budget — even if they don’t realize it yet — the only difference is where the decimal point goes. Some budgets are bigger than others, but they are all finite.

Our modern analogue to Roman military power is the United States and its armed forces — easily the most powerful in known human history. But even these are not immune to the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. Even the American military can lose, would lose, will lose, has lost when it(s civilian leadership) has failed to apportion its goals according to its resources. Even America(‘s military) has to focus, has to narrow down its working target list. Even America must budget.

What is true of the world’s mightiest fighting force, a million men strong, pricier than the ten nearest combined, is darn well true of us as individuals as well. In many essential ways, the folly and wisdom of organizations is just the folly and wisdom of individuals writ large.

The genocidal bigots of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party may have been right ² — the Teutons may well have been the master race — but even master races have to obey higher laws — again, the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. You can’t just stand around wearing Hugo Boss outfits and flossing about how masterful you are while committing all the textbook errors of Eurasian warcraft.

Even so-called “geniuses” (assuming they exist at all), are subject to these higher laws, are created and destroyed by them. In a very real, direct and brutal (if still highly metaphorical) sense, these laws are our “gods” — everybody, of all religions and none, submits to them and more or less knows that they must submit to them. And if they don’t know, they are “punished”, not for their “sins”, but by them.

Even master races must budget. Budget time, budget money, budget resources, and (most importantly) budget mental and physical energy. Hubris comes for us all, like a cougar in tasteful lingerie, offering drama-free, no-strings-attached…interaction. Be not tempted. You will never be too good for the fundamentals. You will never be too good for the basics. You will never be too good to need to practice Japanese. Nobody is.

I say “even” a lot, don’t I?

We’ve brought up the concept of “sin”. We don’t want to get too moral, though. For best results, strategic calculations should be conducted amorally. The less we moralize, the clearer we think and the better we do. Generally, we want to be amoral in our ratiocination but not in our implementation. ³

So focus. Narrow down. Be here now. Do one and only one thing (even when you multiplex). Wash one dish. One. One thing. One target. Don’t get caught up in wars so long that some of the people now fighting them were not even born when they started. Don’t invade France and Russia at the same time, in fact, don’t invade Russia, period (lol), there is clearly nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by doing so. Don’t be that dog, dawg: you know how some dogs will try to fit gigantic sticks into tiny doorways? Well, that’s us when we don’t focus: we try to fit multiple things into singular moments.

You don’t need to be a “genius” — just marginally smarter than your average dog.

You are, were and will always be human. When you were a child, you were just human. When you did that awesome thing ten years ago, you were human. You are human now. Should you live be ten thousand years old and own your own planet, you will still be human. Still bound, still finite, still fallible. So you need not be nostalgic for a past when you were great, or yearning for a future when you will be great. You need not feel regret for some counterfactual whereby you could have been great. You need not blame yourself for your failings and failures. You are here, now. Live here, now. Work here, now. Play here, now.

You can be, do, have and learn it all. But you can only be, do have and learn one thing right now.

You are real and you are powerful. Your ideas are infinite. Your mind is infinite. But your hands are finite. Ya only got two (hopefully). And only one even writes (typically). So…act like it. Narrow it down. You can do it all, but you can’t do it all now. You can only do one thing now ⁴. Eliminate. Focus. Repeat.

• Absentee Father (Deadbeat Dead): Showing up too rarely
• Murderous Mother (Susan Smith): Present, but violent and cruel and doing everything wrong.

These metaphors are both really dark, but, you already know I’m into that. And if you didn’t know, then now you know. One of my Czech friends from Ohio, Kacy, once said to me (and I paraphrase): “Khatz, you don’t swear, but you actually do worse, because instead of swearing you say all these dark, horrible things and use scary and gross metaphors”. And Kacy was right; Kacy is almost always right. Also, I do swear, I just save it for special occasions because I don’t do it very well; I sound less like Chris Rock and more like a 12-year-old who’s not comfortable dropping eff bombs

So where were we? Oh yeah — homicidal mothers.

This is how it works. Where deadbeat dad language learners are simply absent, murderous mother language learners are present in crucially wrong ways. It’s true that showing up at all is better than not showing up, except it in the cases where it isn’t. First, let’s look at some more specific types and cases of bad maternal parenting, and then figure out what lessons and analogs we can pull from them:

• Type: “Abusive head trauma (AHT), commonly known as shaken baby syndrome (SBS)” [Abusive head trauma – Wikipedia] goo.gl/YD0Rud
• Case: “Susan Smith…was sentenced to life in prison…for murdering her two children, three-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander…The case gained international attention because of Smith’s false claim that an African-American man had kidnapped her sons during a carjacking.” [Susan Smith – Wikipedia] goo.gl/j7Lcp9
• Case: “Maria Plenkina, 21, deserted her child over her her third birthday in Kirov, Russia…the mother had locked the door on her daughter, turning off the water so she could not even drink, according to the Russian Investigative Committee.” [‘Evil’ Russian mother, 21, left her three-year-old daughter to die of starvation alone | Daily Mail Online] goo.gl/GqyPt9

Learning L2 grammar in your L1 is like shaking a baby to teach it a lesson. It doesn’t work and may actually harm or kill the recipient of the “treatment”. Exposing yourself to boring L2 materials is like drowning your babies — Susan Smith style. And not buying books is like cutting off the water and simply hoping things take care of themselves (“let them drink soda!”) — call it the Plenkina Manoeuver.

The moral of the story is: don’t do those things. Don’t be a malicious mother to your language baby. Say “no” to infanticide (and, indeed, filicide).

• Only learn L2 grammar in your L2 (before that, just observe the patterns without seeking or really letting yourself be told any “rules”, because I guarantee you those “rules” will only scare, scar, annoy and confuse you).
• Stop doing boring things as soon as you realize they’re boring. Switch it up. Change the content (what) and/or structure (how) of what you’re doing (hint: the how nearly always matters more than the what — not all the time, but nearly all the time). And you don’t have to stop forever — swimming is fun and good for you, just stay safe (unbored) and come back alive.
• Buy L2 books. Err on the side of overbuying. Your wallet will hate me now, but love me later.

“…for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength” [Mosiah 4] ¹
goo.gl/oDRXko

Japanese doesn’t require us to be superhuman. She only wants us to show up. We don’t have to know everything about her, just the next thing. Learning is nothing but a process of connecting what you don’t know to what you do know. So you never have to make any of these giant leaps ². You’re always taking baby steps — not just at the beginning, but the whole time, the whole way ³. This is why I can look you right in the eye and say that learning Japanese is easy — because you only do easy things. At no point is a difficult, heroic act demanded of you. And nothing is easier than going one step (+1) from where you are (i).

• i is everything you already know.
• +1 is the closest thing to i that you don’t know.

Don’t be a great learner, just a frequent learner. Become a regular at the bar, and everybody will know your name. Visit Japanese frequently, and you’ll know all the frequent nouns..and verbs…and just, you know, phrases; I was trying to be clever here, just let it go lol.

You grow like a tree. And you can grow mighty freaking big. But you’re always there. You don’t grow by jumping from seed to shoot but by simply stretching your current shape out a little further. You don’t teleport, you just amble.

“But that’ll take forever!”, you say.

No. It won’t. It definitely seems that way now. But compounding and snowball effects eventually start to kick in. The irony, though, is that in order for you to reach the point that they do kick in, you need to live, play, act and enjoy yourself as if their existence didn’t matter to you. It’s kind of like how cats and butterflies don’t alight on the laps and noses of people who seem too eager or desperate for them to do so. You’ve got to, paradoxically, care enough to make progress but not care if you’re making progress. A watched pot doesn’t boil and all that. It’s a really weird back and forth with interesting parallels in the the field of seduction.

Don’t go looking for a teleporter. Just start walking and keep walking, and you’ll be there before you even realize it. You’ll one day just be kind of awesome and you won’t be quite sure how exactly it happened, and you won’t even fully believe it yourself. But your environment will force you to realize that you’re a bit of a bada$$ .

• Card Content: The subject matter of your cards sucks — you’re not into it.
• Card Structure: Your cards are too long (or, in some cases, too short).
  • Other than for learning elements of a writing system, one-word cards are bad.
  • Overlong, one-page cards are also bad.
  • Cards with more than one possible correct answer are also bad: ambiguity is good and important in life, but not in individual SRS cards.
  • Finally, drugs are bad, mmm kay?
• Session Structure: Your SRS sessions are too long or spaced out too far apart.

1. Baal, give me strength. German is a beautiful language. What is so wrong with German that the thought that we’d be speaking it (if the wrong public school thug had been Prime Minister of Britain) is a threat? Fundamentally, English is German. Oh no, a different European dialect, hide yo’ wife, hide yo’ kids, kill me now!
   • It’s such an empty threat, it’s like when parents “punish” an introvert by sending him to his room where he has a computer and Internet access not speaking from experience or anything.
2. Conquering imperial powers have forbidden the acquisition of their language and culture as often as they’ve forced it. Back in the first millennium CE, Arab elites didn’t want foreigners to convert to Islam because that would dilute both their exclusivity and their tax base ¹. Similarly, the Dutch made it illegal to teach Dutch in Indonesia.
3. If you want to hunt lions successfully, you’re going to need to become a lion expert. All else being equal, you’ll do a lot better against an opponent that you understand fully than one of whom you know little or (worse) nothing ². And you’ll understand a people a whole lot better if you can speak their language than if you can’t. American elites did not understand the Vietnamese, who they were, or what they truly wanted — and paid dearly for that ignorance in blood, gold and goodwill; Vietnam’s popular leaders were proud, hardy nationalists first and last — Communists by convenience, not conviction. So, the more you hate a group of people, the more time you should spend learning their language and culture.

A part of me would like to take this opportunity to slide down my pants and take an intellectual dump on the man, but that would be immature. He had some good ideas, maybe even great ones.

But he also had some very damaging ones. Why were these ideas damaging? Not so much because they are and were bad (which can be argued either way) but more due to the fact they have become so ascendant — Freudianism isn’t just mainstream, it’s essentially the only game in town; it is the default; it is vanilla; it is the great and abominable Church.

In recent decades, cognitive behavioral therapy has been getting more play, but Freudianism remains the bedrock of (especially popular) psychology as it stands today. If Freudianism is Anheuser-Busch, everything else is a micro-brewery.

To my mind, the most damaging meme that Freudianism has promulgated is the idea that childhood experiences (particularly trauma) are not merely powerful or influential but definitive. It’s good old Greek tragedy-style fatalism wrapped in scientific, pseudo-scientific and authoritative robes.

And so you find otherwise sensitive and intelligent people spending their teens and twenties (and, increasingly beyond) fussing and complaining and blabbing on and on about what their ancestors (parents, of course, included) did wrong. How they messed errything up:

“I’m this way because when I was a kid me Mum didn’t give me enough hugs.”

Motherlover, what? No, playa, you’re just a jerk. Don’t bring your mama into this.

Even a childless (childfree? lol) man like me can see this: We are the ancestors of future generations. We are the ancestors of our own future selves. And do you know what I’ve done lately for my descendants (future me included)? Sweet jack-all. Because I’m preoccupied with just being and living in the moment as well as chilling, maxing and relaxing.

So, like, what, not only am I supposed to be a paragon of achievement, but I’m also supposed to be an ideal parent and caretaker? At the same time?

Motherlover, what?

When you realize how busy the average person (i.e. you) is with the business of living, you also realize the preposterous impossibility of the demands that Freudianism makes on us in order to satisfy the supposed criteria of ideal, “trauma-free” parenting (including good self-parenting). Just thinking of the burden is enough to wear you out.

You yourself couldn’t be the perfect parent the Freudianism has made you wish your parents were, so why do you demand so much of your parents?

Fortunately, there exists a forgotten (but, lately — in Japan especially — increasingly visible) contemporary of Freud with a better, realer, more actionable, rational and intelligent approach to life and the pursuit of happiness. His name? Alfred Adler. These are just two of the rather awesome books about his ideas floating around right now (the original is Japanese and now there’s an English translation, so, really, I’m only showing you one book right now, but there more; I own them, love them and have even read them lol):

• [Amazon.co.jp： 嫌われる勇気 eBook: 岸見 一郎, 古賀 史健: Kindleストア] amzn.to/2U2umCL
• [Amazon | The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness | Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga | Interpersonal Relations] amzn.to/2TYtKhz

The 20th century was one where we repeatedly bet the farm on the wrong Austrians ¹. We chose Hitler and Freud instead of Adler and von Mises. But the 21st century doesn’t have to be that way. We get a do-over. We can reach back and pick better heroes, better guides. This time, we can pick the right Austrians ².

Stop blaming your ancestors, stop cataloguing their errors and indiscretions, and start being a better ancestor yourself. Whatever you wish they had done — including (but not limited to) teach you Japanese — do it yourself now.

Invincible opponents only exist in our nightmares. They are the stuff of imagination. No real opponent is invincible. And so that means that for any opponent to defeat you, not only must they do significant things right, but you must also do significant things wrong. Both these things have to maintain.

No nation ever fell purely due to external causes. There was always something inside, some set of flaws. This is liberating — you are free from fear, free from any sense of inferiority. But also sobering — you’re on the hook to win. Freedom comes at the price of responsibility, I guess.

No human language is closed off to you because it’s just too much for your mind and muscles. Will it take time? Hail yeah. But that’s true for all learners; everybody sings for their supper; everybody pays the toll to enter and remain in Languageland. Besides, time’s going to pass anyway. So the real question becomes how you want to orient yourself, how you orient your sails to catch the gusty winds of time as you traverse the ocean of existence. Or something like that.

You can’t control the opponent’s thoughts or actions, but you can control essentially all of your own. Don’t be perfect, just screw up less on the things that matter.

The “opponent” may be a person, project or task. Even an idea. It can be quite metaphorical. The lesson remains the same; concrete ideas scale into the abstract and vice versa — that’s part of what’s so cool about being a human in this universe.

Every language has “weak points”: words and phrases that are easy for you to memorize. These are what you “attack”. You win there and use your newly acquired “weapons” to attack even juicier targets; you always aim for ones that are weak, but because you’re growing stronger, your definition of “weak” also evolves. And it all works to your advantage, like a snowball, like how those dastardly Communists took over mainland China. Communism sucks, but they did win. Winners win for reasons and it behooves us to learn and imitate them.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Winston “The Slightly Better of Two Very Bad Options” Churchill

It doesn’t matter, said Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to Wyclef Jean that one time in that one song in the rapidly fading twilight of the 20th century.

Don’t beat yourself up. It doesn’t matter how much Japanese you didn’t (or, indeed, did) expose yourself to yesterday. Would it have helped if you had done more? Of course it would. But it doesn’t matter, because you would still need to some more exposure today if you want to keep your Japanese baby alive.

You fed the baby yesterday? Great. Feed her today.

Japanese people are just the people who started practicing Japanese and never stopped. And that’s you, too. You may or may not yet be a 日本人 (にほんじん, Japanese person) — indeed, you may or may not want to be — but you’re already a 日本語人 (にほんごじん, Japanophone) for life — should you choose to accept the mission.

Did you wash the dishes yesterday? Did you brush your teeth last night? Good girl. That won’t stop them getting dirty and needing washing again today, though. So get on that.

This is a forever war. You will be fighting until you draw your last breath, soldier. That is the only way to win. Permanent (high-frequency) engagement. Your memory is a puddle and the sun is always shining. Forgetting is evaporation. You need to add water to keep it from drying up. Water metaphors abound. So don’t get butthurt over the outcome of one battle, one skirmish, one sortie. Come again. Strike again. Engage again. Shoot again. Play again. Win again.

So enjoy yourself and play something fun!

• Buy them from Audible Japan or Audiobook.jp
  • [Audible (オーディブル)：本は、聴こう。｜ボイスブック・オーディオブック配信・サービス｜Audible.co.jp] goo.gl/1G7oKE
  • [忙しいあなたも、耳は意外とヒマしてる – audiobook.jp] audiobook.jp/
    • BTW, I strongly recommend audiobook.jp over Audible if only because Audible Japan is still maturing as a service. Audible is just growing pains galore and many dumb, byzantine rules — like that you have to not only have Japanese plastic (dumb, but fair enough) but remove all overseas plastic, expired or otherwise, from your Amazon Japan account (playa, what?). Literally, I kid you not, they seem more interested in their rules than in making money; it’s almost like dealing with a comically intricate government bureaucracy; like, I still buy books there, but do so shibushibu (grudgingly and almost under duress lol).
• Search for “ラジオドラマ” (radio drama, radio plays) on YouTube: [ラジオドラマ – YouTube] goo.gl/PhhjPs

You have to fight right now. But you don’t have to win right now. Not right this second.

You don’t have to become the god emperor of Japanese right this moment. There’s no way of tidying your room so well that it never needs tidying again. You could brush your teeth for three hours straight today (…shouldn’t take a DDS degree to realize that this is a bad idea…) and they would still need brushing tomorrow.

There is no final boss, no conclusive battle, no last stand. There is no girl to get, no princess to rescue — you male chauvinist patriarchal cishet bastard, you (lol)! All there is, is another day, another hour, another minute, another second, another reset, another skirmish. And that’s beautiful. No drama, just fun and games — strategy.

All you need to do and all you can do are the same thing: make some progress. Gain some ground. Skirmish. Reset.

To quote Marianne Williamson: “The top of one mountain is always the bottom of another.”