+1

>If only there was a way of … I dunno … automatically recalling these lessons whenever I find myself stressed/depressed with a million self-imposed things to do and not doing a single thing.

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It’s not perfect, but…it’s a step in that direction.

I loved this post. You wouldn’t believe how timely this is.

I just spent the last 4 hours fighting procrastination and analysis-paralysis over a holiday trip i’m planning. Oh, and I’m at work, so I’m meant to be working too !

This post was exactly what I needed.

My only problem – and I’m sure you face this too – is that even through I learn this lesson over and over again, I keep making this same mistake of seeking the perfect to-do list for things. If only there was a way of … I dunno … automatically recalling these lessons whenever I find myself stressed/depressed with a million self-imposed things to do and not doing a single thing. Life would be so sweeeet if that was the case.

Gav

This weekend I went to a talk in Japanese and I understood about *half* of it, which is kind of amazing considering I haven’t even touched my SRS in a month or two (and I’m only through about 1000 kanji, and about 0 sentences). I’m really only reliable at watching TV.

I think listening works so well because once you get used to the ‘flow’ of how Japanese sounds, you can split up the continuous stream of sound into words, and that plus a *very* little vocabulary is like 80% of the way to comprehension. If you can pick out 3 words in a sentence, you pretty much know what they’re saying.

I used to be suspicious that someone could pick up any amount of a language in 18 months, but now I wholly believe it: in college I studied another language but only maybe an hour a day — it’s easy to put in far more than that, if you’re having fun.

I’ve heard you say this in a gajillion different posts, a gajillion different tweets, in a gajillion different ways. But this time, this little mathematical analogy it really struck a chord.
Thank you ^-^

OL2L: A Japanese website on “tricking”

Knowing that your plans, no matter how perfect are going to go wrong at some point is a huge step towards actually achieving your goals. It’s the reason why we timebox and it’s the reason why Kaizen works. When you break the tasks up into seemingly meaninglessly small tasks you actually end up achieving your goal much faster than you thought you would.

Really learning Japanese is more about getting into the habit of doing something in Japanese every day and doing at least one rep every day than it is about the perfect plan, or the perfect methedology or even the perfect immersion environment. Like you’re always saying: As long as you’re progressing, *you’re progressing.* You are constantly moving more and more towards fluency.

Persistence is king.