Eri on September 28, 2011 at 07:38:

I think counting things in hours at least is more sensible; seconds can give an impression of more than it actually is (“I’ve studied for a million seconds!” “But that’s only like, 228 hours…”)
/so-should-we-track-and-log-every-second-of-japanese

Why do I kind of insist or…persist…in counting language exposure time in seconds? Because it’s a cheap win. It’s like timeboxing. It usurps the delay component of Piers Steel’s Temporal Motivation Theory equation. Or rather, it recruits the delay component in our favor by suppressing it, therefore driving up utility.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry…I stare at that equation practically every day ¹. What I’m saying is, a second is so short that it virtually erases and motivation to procrastinate. You’re like “a second? SURE!”.

Trying to rack up an hour feels like work. Screw that. Racking up seconds is a game that is easy to win and, yes, makes you feel good. Sure, a million seconds is “only” 278 hours…But that’s fine. Why? Because it’s accurate. A million seconds is an accurate (if sweet-sounding) measure  of exposure time — it is real time — whereas “2 years” is almost always a vague, meaningless lie.

きのこ on September 19, 2011 at 11:20

“Come on, Khatz — who really keeps track of every single second?”
j.mp/nper5S

No one does. And I would never suggest you do ¹. What I mean is that we need to be aware of “real time” — the time we actually spend in physical contact with Japanese, and not “project time” — the amount of time we’ve been verbally claiming to be committed to getting used to Japanese. The only reason the 18 months of AJATT seem so magical is because, if time is money, then my bills were in larger denominations — more of my real time was in Japanese than most people thought possible or sane. I didn’t get used to Japanese in a short time, but it in a focused time, a concentrated time, a dense time.

When people come a-talkin’ about “years” of language X, what they’re really talking about is project time: they did not actually spend tens or hundreds of millions of seconds in contact with Japanese.  And often, so am I. It just so happens that my project time for Japanese was closer to real time than practically anyone else who bothers to write about these things.

There are about 31.6 million seconds in a year; that’s about 8770 hours. I sincerely doubt that most people who’ve been on a multi-year Japanese project have had even that much real time exposure. Do you know what that means? It means that most people who’ve been “studying Japanese for years” have, in truth, not even been exposed to it for a single year. So they have a heavy wallet full of pennies and they’re angry and bitter and going about saying that big money doesn’t exist coz look how effing heavy my wallet is and it still hasn’t bought me the ability to so much as read normal Japanese.

That’s all I’m saying. Keep real time straight. Not necessarily directly or quantitatively (through tracking and logging), but indirectly and qualitatively become aware of and exploit all those spare moments, all that dead time. Recruit your time, resources and electronics in the pursuit of getting used to Japanese. Ask yourself every moment what you’re doing and how you can Japanize it.

That’s all .

• It’s Not Time, It’s Choice | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/peidFu
• It’s Not Choice, It’s Environment | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/or7mmf

Measuring language “study” time in years is like trying to count mixed cash by weighing it. Hello? Denominations…

Counting language acquisition in years makes us think that we’ve been playing way harder than we actually have.

It’s not the years, it’s the minutes. It’s the seconds.

You can’t compare a stack of dollar bills to a stack of Benjamins and call them the same, playa.

Don’t tell me how many “years” you’ve been at the language.
Tell me how many seconds.
That’s seconds on task. Seconds on the bike, whether pedaling or coasting.

And, no, the time you spent being emo but not doing anything does not count.

Recently, I met this one girl. She’s really cute. And she knows Japanese. Fluently. Native-level fluently. After only studying it four years. She talks circles around people who studied it for four years in college.

Why is this girl so good at Japanese?

Because she spent 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a years studying Japanese. She has spent 40,000 hours listening to Japanese. Her name is Didi.

The people who went to college spent 5 class hours a week, plus perhaps 1-2 hours out of class per hour in class, for 52 weeks a year. That comes to 2000-4000 hours a year, being generous. This is an order of magnitude less than Didi.

Didi is just shy of four and a half years old.

Don’t ever talk to me about how kids are magical until you spend 40,000 hours listening to your target language.

Don’t ever talk to me about how you’ve spent 4 years studying Japanese when really you’ve only spent 3-6 months, counting by hours.

Don’t ever blame on something as nebulous and BS-ological as talent, what can much more easily be explained mathematics.

Put in your hours. And you will be rewarded. It’s that simple. It is a poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and innumeracy to expect to have even passable Japanese WITH AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LESS EFFORT than even a typical Japanese toddler has put in.

For the record, I have logged about 20,000 hours of listening since June 2004. And my vocab is easily far larger than Didi’s (sorry, Didi! you’re still my friend!). So chalk another one up for adult learners.

Adults can do it. You can do it. Japanese — any language. But you need to step up to the plate; you need to show up; you need to not have the temerity to think that 1000 classroom hours and some homework is an acceptable level of effort. Because it isn’t. Come back with 5 figures, and then we can talk, literally 8) .

Steve Kaufmann does a much better job explaining it than I have. If, as he says (and I think he is absolutely right) most vocabulary is learned incidentally rather than deliberately, then it is crucial that we give the vocabulary lots of chances — lots of “incidents”, lots of hours of input — to hit us, and thereby be learned.

This is not fluff. This is not theory. This is cold, hard, listen to effen Japanese in 5-figure+ quantities if you want to get good at it. That’s all you have to do. But you do have to do it. As Jim Rohn suggests, success is easy; the things that you need to do to succeed are easy. But the reason so many fail is because: “The things that are easy to do are also easy not to do”.

Language is easy. There may or may not be difficult problems in life, but language is not one of them; get it out of your head that it is.

Now get listening!