Fundamental Universal Nature!

I feel that what you despise in the planner idea is more the “rigid” and too “prophetic” plan:
“a locked serie of expectations/outcomes/milestones that you set in a too approximately (and abstract) timed course of events”.
It basically multiplies “dreamt outcomes” by “dreamt planning in which they will be accomplished” which can only lead to a fantastic awaken and real frustration plan.

My 2 cent is just that there are bad and good plans (which are also the result of having good or bad goals. And we should also make a distinction between a goal and an objective).

Consider these 4 goals:
*I want to draw characters
*I want to become a great character artist
*I want to live of character design
*I want to draw anatomically correct characters

The 4 plans that you need to put into place are radically different, even though the object (drawing characters) is the same.
*in the first one, you fulfill your goal as soon as you take a pencil and start drawing stuff
*in the 3 others, your success relies on a combination of many parameter that are impossible to fulfill in a second. You have to buildup a strategy to get to it. Worse, the 2 and 3 are relying on external factors that are not entirely controllable only by yourself.
*You can create various plans for the 4th goal. Not all of them will fit you and you have to find a path (plan?) that you will find nice, interesting and fitting to your state of mind.
When i was in art school, we had these fuck*** drawing classes where we would look at these skeletons and try at once to draw them with the highest precision ever. One millimeter off and it was a wrong bad drawing. Welcome to the academic method. Then i bought a 100$ DVD course where a guy would give you 1 million proportion ratios to apply to make a “right” human body. Painful. Boring. Silly. It was the right path to vomit for me. After that i basically quit drawing out of total frustration.
It is only some months ago that i went back to it (after a 6 year stop), and this time i made my own plan. I would first try to understand the rough idea with completely unprecise chubby drawings, but that would allow me to get how things are working. Then i would just experiment with that for a while, having fun with these crazy drawings.
The second part of the plan would be to try to make funny poses with these potato drawings, even try to put them in a believable perspective. The goal was just to have fun and not to put coercitive rules in the success of my endeavour.
Then i would try to make a study of a tiny element that i could really be in control of. An eye for example. And i played with eyes A LOT. Trying to make tons of them, trying to create different expressions with them and so on.
To go back to our discussion, i feel that it should be all about
Having a doable goal that you like and which’s parameter are in your total reach
That you can start to work on NOW
Figure out a plan/strategy/scheme/rule/ that looks fun to you in all point
START TO MAKE THAT ###T NOW.

In the end, i don’t know what was the start of all that. I am just happy. And i love you all.
Yoann

However, when I hear Chinese people talking, or see Chinese writing,
all I can think is, I should be able to do that. I’v been learning
of and on for almost 2 years. I could be able to do that already.
I wish I could be talking with them or reading that writing and
just being apart of that environment. I wish I could interact with
the Chinese environment.

In other words, I start to feel like I’ve already conquered the
language way before I actually have simply because I’ve figured
out a really efficient path to getting there. This is a bit
demotivating because I feel like I’ve achieved the goal. However
I haven’t achieved the goal and this becomes apparent when I
am faced with the I.R.L. language I am faced with the truth of
my progress.

So what is happening is along the way, my reason for studying
changes from being able to use it, to knowing how to learn it.
A pseudo goal that I adopted in order to find the most efficient
path to goal achievement. Then I figure out how to learn it, test
my theory for a few months and when I see progress I have reached
the psuedo goal and get bored and want to quit. Then I quit and
some time down the road the real goal smacks me in the face again
when I bump into Chinese people speaking Chinese.

So the thing I take away from this what I also read on another
forum type site is that the desire to learn a language , at least
for some people like planner types maybe, isn’t constant. However the
fact that you would enjoy being fluent in the language could very well
be constant and so in some cases you have to just get in to a routine
so that even if you lose that drive at a certain point like half
way through RTK, you can just slog through. Making it routine
is important, and limiting other interests at the same time so you
don’t develop another obsession and have to strain to do the reps.
Having to fight the urge of something else to do the reps is what
makes someone hate reps imo.

I used to be a full out Planner, but now I’m just a Player who occasionally takes part in Planner activities. What do you think of Mnemonics, the Art of Memory and such? Surely, being able to quickly memorize large amounts of info is useful for language learning– to an extent.

When in Planner mode, I did some pretty crazy things: like making a bet with all of my peers that if I could memorize a list of 500 (Hiragana and meaning) in 5 days with only 5% margin error, they each would owe me a beer. And if I couldn’t, they could decide the punishment- whatever it may be. Scary… knowing my friends.

So, I verb-binged like a crazed planner for 5 days and sure enough, I won and got very very drunk. And probably killed some of those new brain cells.

I haven’t looked at those lists of verbs since then. Here are the results of such Memorization Binging with little follow-up:

Recognition: Extremely high. If you see or hear the verb somewhere, in all likelihood you will recognize it and know what it means. Which is awesome.

Use: Fairly low. Since the Mnemonic trick I used binds the verb and meaning to a place (THE JOURNEY METHOD. ANYONE CAN LEARN AND USE THIS. IT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO MEMORIZE LONG TEXTS MUCH FASTER THAN ROTE MEMORIZATION… CHECK IT OUT: www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTIM_05.htm), it’s very difficult for me to just pull out the verb from my mind, I need to remember the place. Which is weird when you’re trying to talk in Japanese. So pulling the correct verb out of 500 is difficult if not impossible, but once it is said by someone else (recognition here), the brain goes like “aaaahhh yeah.” and then for some reason it becomes much more ready for later use. I’m sure the ones that I use will be remembered and the least useful ones will f a d e a w a a ay…
A sense of being Awesome: show off. Respect from peers. Nerd Jealousy. Although players feel kickass every day because they are players, it’s also nice to feel kickass because your really did just kick ass.

But you couldn’t do intense goals like this every week, once a month (or two month… geez). It’s more about seeing how much you can put through the meat grinder. XD

So as for long term learning… Players rock… but if a player ever wanted to put on rocket powered rollerskates for a few days it won’t hurt them, as long as the goal is concrete has a fast deadline and the Planner reverts back to Player right after. And to be honest, such intense goals make you realize: Damn, this is really hard. I can’t learn everything this way. There’s got to be a better way than this. And yeah, it’s being a player.

Sorry for the long comment. But I really like this article, and believe pacing and the rare well-timed full sprint is great for language learning.

I wanna meet khatz someday to tell and show him how successful player I am. Ψ(｀∀´)Ψｹｹｹ