Play the language-learning game long enough, and you will often hear (or read, as the case may be) people explaining — in great detail — what their level of ability in a given language is, what they can and cannot do. They may even ask you to do the same for them, that is, to give a detailed ranking or explanation of your ability in a certain language. Both seeing and doing this has always made me feel dirty. But for the longest time, I could never figure out why.

Now I know why.

It’s because it’s scheisswissen (Scheiss-Wissen: sh##-knowledge; not a real German word, I’m just using German because it’s cool to swear in, even if incorrectly). It’s the kind of knowledge that you don’t need. Not only that, but it’s actually the kind of “knowledge” that can harm you. In that sense, it’s not unlike the news. Knowing, watching and reading the news will only make you sad. Ask Jon Stewart; his body couldn’t take any more BS — he overdosed on scheisswissen (scheissewissen? I need a German expert to help me on this one) over nearly two decades of hosting The Daily Show.

Knowing where you are is junk knowledge. Junk knowledge is like junk calories except worse, because we already know junk calories are bad for us, whereas junk knowledge often carries that unearned patina of professionalism and objectivity. That’s what makes it so virulent: it’s poison dressed up as medicine.

Knowing where you are is knowing your position. You should not know your position. You should have too much momentum — that is, be too busy changing your position — to know what your position is. You should be moving so fast that you cannot see tell where you are because the darn scenery is just whizzing past you; you shouldn’t be able to read the metaphorical street signs.

Humility and arrogance both come from a sense of status. Status is based on stasis. Stasis means standing still. Relationship status. It’s all about not moving. This is bad. You should not have a sense of status. Never be too arrogant or too humble to learn. Never stand still.

Again, you should not — must not — ever know your position, only your momentum. You shouldn’t know how many Japanese words or meanings or kanji you know, only how many new ones you’re getting to know or re-know every day . Electrons get it: “given that quantum particles often move so fast, the electron may no longer be in the place it was when the photon originally bounced off it.” [What is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? | Science | The Guardian] ¹

Every moment you spend measuring or describing your position is one you could, should and must spend juicing up your momentum instead. Make your position unmeasurable by constantly rendering position readings invalid. Nobody can give you the street address of an aeroplane in flight. And the same should go for your progress in Japanese. No address, only a bearing/heading. Screw where you are; definitely screw where you’ve been; focus on where you’re going.

So, I have three older sisters, which means that I grew up in a house full of women. Why does Khatz act like a girl doing an impression of a guy? Now you know.

The youngest of my sisters, my little big sister (Oliver Twister!), hates tepid tea. On her personal 1~10 scale of injustice, tepid tea is at 11 with the Holocaust earning a respectable 9, right behind bad punctuation.

Whether or not you share my little big sister’s idiosyncratic sense of hate priorities (to her credit, maybe she feels so strongly about tepid tea because it’s such a tractable, avoidable, solvable-by-one-person problem), you know that tepid tea is just…wrong. Cartman wrong. Wroang!

So, as I write this, I’m staying at a hotel in an undisclosed country, collecting information and recordings for future secret AJATT projects (don’t worry, plenty of hookers and blow) and it was bed time, so I ordered room service: piping hot milk and some chocolate chip cookies off the children’s menu. Screw you; I’m grown-up enough to not need to act like a grown-up!

Anyway, the milk came and it was decidedly, stridently, gay pride parade-level flamboyantly…tepid.
(I’d get angry, but one doesn’t simply yell at the people who handle one’s food behind closed doors. That, and, the room service lady on the phone had a really sexy Russian accent: “but this is only meelk we hev; oh, you are vanting it hot, yes? Vill thet be all, ser?”
Yes. Yes, I am vanting it hot).

And that, I imagine, is what it can and does feel like to be at intermediate level sometimes: it feels worse than when you were an ice-cold noob. It feels worse than knowing nothing, perhaps because the fruit of the tree of knowledge has shown you the extent of your ignorance ¹. Inasmuch as the size of the circle of your knowledge has increased, so the circumference of that circle, which represents the edge of your knowledge and thus the ignorance of which you are self-aware, has also increased. In fact, the circumference of ignorance expands in size faster than (but in proportion to) the size of your circle of knowledge.

In other words, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Your knowledge has made you humble. Too humble. What is it that that Frenchman said? At first we hope too much, then too little? It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. And it makes you feel like, well, tepid tea.

The key is not to give in to this feeling. Just because you feel tepid, doesn’t mean that you are. OK, no, I mean…yeah, in a way you are tepid; you are; you’re not boiling, but you’re hotter than you’ve ever been before and it’s important that you recognize, accept and congratulate yourself for that. You are literally at the very top of your game thus far. How do I know? Well, because tepid tea is hotter than ice tea! You have never been this hot before. It’s an awkward temperature, to be sure, but that’s fine: you outgrow it by adding heat, not giving up.

Realize how much of a noob you used to be and how far you’ve come. You probably said things like “kanjis” and called it “the Japanese alphabet”. Realize how much you know. It almost seems like you where better when you were ice tea — a noob — but that’s an illusion. You feel subjectively worse, but you are objectively better. So keep on moving.

Language skill is a lot like antiques, fine wine and company stock in that rewards (=y-axis = gains) accrue disproportionately on the right-hand side, long into the game (= time = x-axis). “New antiques” tend not to sell so well, oxymoronic as they are.

But people treat languages like they’re freaking milk or something — as if they were going to spoil! As if Japanese were going to evaporate into thin air just because it’s not the late 1980s/early 1990s any more (that delightful period of the 20th century when many Americans sincerely believed that the movie Rising Sun was, in fact, a documentary). As if Mandarin were going to spontaneously combust just because the Huffington Post wrote a scathing article on the work environment at the (a?) FoxConn factory (I don’t know whether they actually did or not; this is just a random example).

The language isn’t going anywhere! It’s not running away. Think about it: an Oxford professor can write books in deliberately arcane English plus fake Scandinavian languages (come on now, we’re all adults here, OK? Elvish sounds just like Finnish and you and I both know it :P); he can then proceed to die a good 10 years before Khatzumoto is born and still have his books widely read — with no formal instruction for the readers — and have the intellectual property they represent earn his estate tens of millions of dollars posthumously.

For all the talk of how dynamic and mercurial language is, and it is at some level — the slang level — language is suprisingly stable and long-lived. And even some slang just never seems to go away. “Cool” is still a cool word. So, there’s no need to go do what I’ve seen some kids do, which is send me breathless, all-caps emails to the effect of:

• “KHATZ, I MUST KNOW JAPANESE NOW!!! i MUST TALK NOW!!! NO TIME FOR FOOLING AROUND AND GROWING NATURALLY!!!!!!!!” I NEED TO COMMUNICATE!!!”, or…
• “I NEED TO WORK FOR MY DAD’S THEATRE COMPANY IN JAPAN AS AN INTERPRETER!!! I TOOK JAPANESE 101!!! MY DAD PAID FOR IT AND NOW…”, or…
• “I NEED TO BE READING ACADEMIC MATERIAL!!!!”, or…

Or what? Or the world will end? Don’t you think that’s just a teeny bit dramatic? Did Japanese really just go from “interesting thing I’m kinda into” to “I’ll die unless I’m native level at it in the next 15 minutes”?

The other thing to realize is that this is not a linear process. It is a non-linear process. It is logarithmic at worst and probably (if experience is telling the truth) exponential. In fact, scratch that, it is exponential: it looks like the graph of y = x^3, with a little dip in the middle (more on that later; y=x^3 actually only goes flatline, but, whatever) vindicated further down the x-axis by a meteoric rise.

What this all means is that learning a language is profoundly, fundamentally unfair. At no time, at no point in the process, are you ever getting as good as you give. Of course, overall you will; overall, the quality and range and volume of your output shall be determined by the frequency of your input. But at any given moment, you are always either getting back much more than you give or much less than you give.

Tolkien, everybody’s favorite Oxford don, is dead — literally doing nothing but rotting in the ground. But his language skill, embodied in a persistent artifact that acts as his surrogate, continues to work for him and thus continues to get him more than he can ever again give. Life is unfair and that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, like the man (Joseph Ford, quoted by Richard Koch and James Gleick) said: “God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics…is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.”

Unfair is good. If life weren’t unfair, there couldn’t be cars or planes or levers, because there would be no way for you to get out more than you put in. Life is ultimately unfair in your favor, if, that is, you use your brain a little. Or, better yet, use someone else’s brain. Someone, somewhere, has probably already figured out a way to exploit some of the unfairness for you — you probably didn’t have to invent most — any? — of the technology you use.

SRS is one way to exploit the unfairness and get more than you give, because what SRS really does isn’t show you what to review (although it does do that), but not show you what you don’t need to review. Another way to take advantage of the unfair advantages that exist for you…is to stick around until they mature. Which they will. Of their own accord. An acorn doesn’t struggle to grow into an oak tree, it just stays alive long enough to let Nature take its course. That’s pretty much all you need to do.

If you want to reap large socio-economic rewards from a language, you need to stick around until reaping time: harvest time. You can’t reap jack if you leave before the harvest. You’ve just wasted time and energy and gotten nothing in return. ¹ Yet most people leave in spring. Almost everybody leaves in spring.

And not for bad reasons. People leave for a good reasons. People aren’t evil or lazy or stupid. Myopic, yes. Misinformed, yes. But not stupid, not lazy, not evil. There is a dip in the language acquisition process, the same dip that Seth Godin talks about in his book, “The Dip”. It’s a period where the apparent, extrinsic benefits of the process of getting used to language do not exceed the apparent, extrinsic detriments. It’s the intermediate period, a period that can seem to last forever. A period where you can’t feel any progress any more (even though it is still happening).

And that’s a huge motivational killer, because people love the feeling of making progress; they love the feeling of a linear reward for a linear effort. But that’s not how the game works. Putting in 10% effort doesn’t always get you 10% results. Again, early in the game, you get more than you give. Mid-game, you give more than you get. And late game, possessed of powerful language skill, you get infinitely more than you give. But that mid-game can seem grim; it’s like the dark part of a trilogy; it’s like “The Empire Strikes Back”. Everything seems to pot and lose meaning and — WTF? — the main villain is your father?!?!

Ironically, people who learn languages for economic reasons almost all adopt “day trader” strategies that ultimately maximize loss and minimize gain. They’re in; they’re out. They’re at this language; they’re at that language; they’re worried sick, when are they gonna get good, oh this is terrible.

And this is why, ironically, people who learn languages for economic reasons tend to get the least economic benefit from them. It’s a vicious irony, but it doesn’t have to be the case, because getting used to a language is far more a matter of persistence — of lethargy — than intelligence. To repeat: all you need to do is stay. Stick around. Literally. Show up. At your “farm”.

Learning languages for economic reasons is like American football: you go long and deep, because the scoring happens in the end zone. So you can’t be upset that you’re on the fifty yard line and no scoring is happening because that’s simply not where it happens.

People will happily spend double-digit numbers of years learning a sport that could be taken away from them by one misstep, one unintentional injury. Or an intellectual skill that could become obsolete by the time they peak at it. At least it seems so. And we think this perfectly normal. Programming languages like COBOL and Pascal have largely come and gone in terms of use and importance, yet natural languages like Swahili and English and Japanese soldier on.

Natural languages last a long time; it takes a lot more than a mere change in “the times” to uproot them. It takes a heck of a lot more than a busted knee or the emergence of a new, hitherto non-existent language, to make a natural language disappear, either from the world or from your life. Even a weird disease like ALS was not enough to take Stephen Hawking’s language skill away from him. Even that guy with no arms and no legs or that super midget guy — both of whom give personal development talks — cash in (and, in all seriousness, I mean that respectfully) on language = speaking skills. We would be unable to benefit from the wisdom of their experience if they were unable to communicate it to us.

You know how you make a cup of tea, right? A cuppa. Because, that’s just how you roll, right? And you put a bunch of sugar in it, because that, too, is the manner in which you roll. Guess where all the sugar is? ²

At the bottom of the cup. There. I have officially told you nothing new.

Why, though, do you disbelieve this when it comes to getting used to languages? Why are you so anxious to get that sugar hit RIGHT THIS MINUTE that you start to doubt the very existence of sugar? The sugar’s there, yo. In the endzone.

The trick is to get lost in the process, to have so much fun that you don’t even want to look at the clock, that you forget all about the clock. And so the trick to being economically smart about the game is, in fact, to appear to be economically stupid about it. To quote Barbara Sher: “…greatness? It will come…you won’t notice it because you’ll be so busy having a good time”.

You’re going to be great. Your eggs are going to hatch like gangbusters. Just stay long enough for it to happen.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen

So, I’m a bit of recovering perfectionist. I’ve walked that terrible path; it still comes up here and there, especially if I latch on to some stupid feeling of having “something to prove”. But the overall tendency is always decreasing, always on the wane. Whatever. Enough confessional. The point is, I get to hear from a lot of people wanting to start over fresh, wanting to start kanji from 0, wanting to delete everything and reset and go back to the beginning.

And, this sounds like good idea, right? Any action’s better than no action, right? Sure. But it isn’t a good idea, and here’s the basic reason why: the whole “start over from 0” is the same pathology and has the same side-effects as that whole “New Year’s Resolution” nonsense.

Wiping the Slate Clean is Bulimic Behavior, Anorexic Action

That means it’s bad on two levels: practical and psychological. In fact, it even works a bit like an eating disorder ¹. With respect to a game like getting used to a language, it’s sort of like a behavioral version of anorexia and bulimia combined. There’s starvation (doing nothing), binging (on action), then more binging (on guilt), then more starvation (doing nothing) and finally a purge (wipe the slate clean!) before another binge (on action) and then starvation, and then…

Yeah, not quite a neat cycle, but you get the idea. Wiping the slate clean is just a purge. And on the other side of that purge is a binge. And on the other side of that binge…well…yeah — you get the picture.

You see, when you try to drown all your mistakes in a slate-cleaning flood, you also drown all your previous work, your previous progress. Starting clean is annihilation over evolution. Starting clean is like destroying the Universe every time something goes wrong. Yeah, it’s clean, but at what cost?

At the risk of making a vague and specious argumentum ad naturam, it seems to me that that’s not how Nature likes to work. Nature abhors vacuums and annihilation. Nature likes to reuse and repurpose (exapt), so that even apparent destruction isn’t destruction: it’s just transformation. Nature likes to grow and build gradually and by accretion. 0 and emptiness may sit well in math and physics, but not in biology.

↑ That up there is probably a load of B.S., but you’re probably used to that from me. And if you aren’t yet, you’re gonna be!

What Sucks About Starting Clean

When you start clean, you reject past failure, so fresh and so clean clean, but you also reject past successes. So there’s a lack of self-affirmation right there. When you start clean, you start believing in “timing” and waiting for “a good time” or “the right time”; this is the worst form of procrastination because it doesn’t even seem like procrastination — it just seems like scheduling.

Starting clean also creates extra work — busywork — because you spend a lot of time rebuilding the good that you destroyed along with the bad. You chucked out a baby with all that bathwater, and you need to make you a new baby from scratch.

It’s like you’re Sisyphus…except no one is punishing you: you’re the one punishing yourself. You’re self-Sisyphussing, as it were ². You’re the one forcing the boulder back down the hill, negating your progress, and all for dumb reasons like “there’s a nick on it”, or “that roll up wasn’t smooth”. All because of a ridiculous desire — a compulsion — to apply all your improvements retroactively, and thus fix control the past as well as the future ³.

Perhaps most ironic of all, because starting clean destroys both good and bad, it (ironically) often results in the repetition of previous mistakes — that’s why there’s a binge-purge cycle. As much as a clean start destroys, it doesn’t seem to destroy that cycling tendency.

Wiping the slate clean is like burning down a library to fix a typo. Now, it may well be that you feel like dragging Western Eurasia into a Dark Age, and the best nearby library over in Africa needs a good burn-down (too soon?). But there are other ways. You could fix that one book. Put out an errata. Print a new edition. There’s no need to burn down the library. It may feel “clean” to clear out all the typos like that, but…no.

Imagine that you’re feeling road trippy, so you decide to drive from Utah to Texas. Or New York to LA. I dunno. Screw you. New York to LA. You’ve been going a coupla days, and you discover you’ve been going the wrong way. So you drive back to New York. Clean slate. Start again. Another couple days, you’re lost again. What do you do? Well, you have this slate-wiping habit, so even though you’re in what you think is Alabama, you go back to NY, because you’ve messed up. So you go back to New York. And start again. Are you seeing how inefficient this is?

You know some Japanese. You know something. You’ve achieved something. You’ve created some amount of meaning. Don’t turn your back on that ⁴. I felt like an absolute chump when I only had a couple hundred kanji/hanzi to my name, and even when I was hovering around 500~1000. I wiped the slate clean many times. Things didn’t change until I stopped starting clean and started starting dirty…

How SRS Changed My Kanji Life By Letting Me Start Dirty, And How It Can Change Yours, Too

My own Japanese acquisition experience that became the basis of this site, particularly the kanji part (which was initially a huge stumbling block for me; I always wanted to be good at kanji but I started out sucky), did not take off until I accepted the dirt. And the core artifact enabling that acceptance was the SRS. The SRS said: “hey, kid, we’re gonna learn a ton of stuff, but it’s OK if you forget some”.

That was a huge revelation for me. It’s okay to forget some. I took that inch and ran a mile with it. It was okay for the process to be messy; it was okay to forget. And if that was okay, then it was probably also okay to start right from where I was. No need to take it from the top. I could start using this “SuperMemo” (the original software SRS) on new kanji and go back and enter old (already-learned) kanji later.

My kanji studies took off when I accepted dirt: the “dirt” of previous attempts, the “dirt” of my existing knowledge, and the “dirt” of my forgetfulness. Because SRS admitted and accepted imperfection. It “allowed” me to forget some so that I could remember most (in both relative and absolute terms). It freed my mind; it freed me from thinking in all-or-nothing, 0%/100% terms. It gave me permission to not be 100% while guaranteeing me an effortless 90~95%. SRS is not about perfection and native-like speech is not about perfection. Both are about extremely high-functioning imperfection.

Later on, when I developed and shifted to the “Lazy Kanji” method, I didn’t start clean. I didn’t go back and lazy-kanjify old kanji ⁵. I just started using it with new kanji.

Now, let’s take a look at what all this “starting dirty” stuff means for us. Let’s go through what happens when you start dirty…

What’s Awesome About Starting Dirty?

Starting dirty accepts the good you’ve done up until now. That’s a huge confidence boost. No, it’s more than that, it’s an affirmation of your entire life, of your very existence and thus your right to exist ⁶. Where starting clean says: “you’re a pile of excrement and your life up until now was a pile of excrement and here is a new, unsullied, unsoiled life for you and you’re going to get it right this time and DON’T MESS UP!”, starting dirty says: “You did good, kid. Let’s build on that.”

When starting dirty, any time is fine to start, because you’re dirty anyway! No need for the illusions of milestones and perfect times and arbitrary dates in the Gregorian calendar. You can start right where you are. As we say in Japanese: 思い立ったが吉日（おもいたったがきちじつ, omoitatta-ga-kichi-jitsu) — every day is a good day to start ⁷.

On the practical plane, starting dirty reuses, repurposes and recycles previous work, which saves time, effort and energy. Think about it: chickens don’t have nuggets; cows and pigs don’t have sausages. Yet these are some of the most popular animal foods there are.

“Old wine in new bottles” is often used as an insult. But every creativity book I’ve read ⁸ says that that’s exactly what creativity is: a new combination of old/existing ideas ⁹. That applies to both little-c “creativity” and big-C “Creativity”. Think about it: Isaac Newton didn’t start by inventing Latin or fire or even numbers. He started dirty. That didn’t stop him doing something amazing — it enabled it. In his own words: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. That’s not humility: it’s fact. ¹⁰

Starting clean is annihilation. Annihilation is revolution by brute force (cf. French Revolution).
Starting dirty is evolution. Evolution is revolution by growth, by nature (cf. Canada, or growing from a child to an adult — at no point do we kill the human being and “start over”).

You’re Good Enough Just As You Are

There’s this idea that if you could just go back to the beginning, back to childhood even, and start over, knowing what you know now, everything would better ¹¹. No, it wouldn’t. Don’t wish to be a baby again. Being unable to walk, talk or even see properly? Are you kidding me?! There’s no joy in that. Rejoice in what you’ve learned up to this point. Build off it. Don’t wish for a virgin planet and an empty mind. Build off this wonderful foundation you’ve constructed already. Right here. Right now.

Even the things you’ve messed up have been learning experiences and that’s fine. The very idea of wanting to go back to the beginning but take your accumulated knowledge back with you, testifies to the fact that that knowledge is of great value; you have learned things of value; you have gained wisdom.

Like, we only know what plants and animals are poisonous because some of our ancestors took a hit for the team. Even if chemical analysis machines and animal experiments make suffering ¹² and accidental death unnecessary for future learning about poisons, the foundational base of toxicology knowledge owes itself to (occasionally fatal) human error ¹³. The same goes for flight and even space travel. And, again, that’s fine ¹⁴. We learned.

Fortunately, getting used to languages is not fatal. There, I said it; it’s a medical claim. Call the FDA; I don’t give a ####. LoL. Am I saying you should never start over? No. I’m saying that you want to: “[s]tart where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command“. And one of those tools is your accumulated experience. Not to mention accumulated effort.

OK, let’s review:

Starting clean

• annihilation over evolution
• wait for good time (procrastination, perfectionism)
• rejects past failure but also past successes
  • fundamentally, rejects self
• tendency to create extra work (as a result of rejecting what you’ve built up until now)
• (ironically) repeats previous mistakes, leading to binge-purge cycle
• Starting clean is like destroying the entire Universe every time something goes wrong, like burning a library to fix a typo

Starting dirty

• any time is fine — you’re dirty anyway; no need for the illusions of milestones and perfect times and “auspicious days”
• accepts what you’ve done up until now
  • by extension, accepts self
• reuses previous good work — thus saving effort and energy
• evolves; builds on the existing foundation; stands on the shoulder of giants
  • (sometimes that giant is what you’ve done up until now)

Wow, crappy post, huh ¹⁵? At least I take my own advice with the perfectionism .

The journey of getting used to a language is so psychologically long that it can’t merely be a means to an end. It must become an end in itself. It must become its own joy, its own reward. And this perspective, this mental state, doesn’t require too much imagination or discipline or training to reach. Anyone who’s been on a road trip with friends knows: the destination is almost incidental.

Important things deserve restatement. TV news repeats the same unimportant (but urgent and scary) crap to you all day. Well, this is much more important than the news, so:

“If you’re going to spend most of your time experiencing rather than accomplishing, then perhaps it makes sense to focus on the quality of your daily experiences and not merely on the heights of your accomplishments. ” | Steve Pavlina

“…if you’re not satisfied with the little successes, you’ll never be satisfied with the big successes.” ~ Anon. (quoted by Barbara Sher)

“Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn’t equate… Life is made of small pleasures…Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don’t have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don’t mean anything.” ~ Norman Lear

Nacest:

In my opinion the biggest obstacle while doing RTK is not the amount of colors or realizing that you must do it no-matter-what. It’s the approach. If you are anxious to complete the book soon, if you are keeping count of how many kanji are left, then you will have to suffer the pains of hell to really finish them. There’s a LOT of them. It’s a four digit number. Every kanji is a mere 0.04% of the total. It’s not gonna be a quick process, IF you await the end of it. It’s like boiling water: I don’t know about the other places, but in Italy they say that the water will take longer to boil if you stare at it expectantly. I’m amazed at how well this applies to your (khatzumoto’s) metaphor.

Just enjoy the trip. Forget about finishing the kanji. Do them every day, and get used to it. Feel the flavor of the chinese characters. Every one of them is extraordinarily beautiful. If you are a philosopher, you may even seek enlightenment in their ancient shapes. Eat them like they are a fourth (fifth?) meal in your day, necessary for your good health. While you do this, one day, when you are least expecting it (more or less) you will hit kanji #2042 (or 3007 if you want to). Then you will be unable to believe how fast you were. I know it because it happened to me, even though it took me 11 months to complete the book! (don’t worry, it will take you much less, I was just using too little impetus with the first 1000 kanji. I finished the second half in about a month (after finding this site, by the way))

True story: once, a journalist on a trip to Egypt met a desert Bedouin. The Bedouin was used to traveling huge distances in the Sahara with his camel, taking weeks at a time. When the journalist told him that in the West there were airplanes that could cover the same distances in a few hours, he answered, perplexed: “And then, what do you do with the rest of the time?”.

The time you spend while aiming at something, no matter how long it is, is still part of your life. There is no reason to not savor and enjoy it in relaxation like the rest of your days.

Incidentally, nacest’s Japanese is AMAZING now. Frankly, I think it’s better than mine ¹ and I get confused for a Japanese person all the time on the phone and sometimes in real life ² (“so, you’re from Okinawa, or…?”). Getting there is also your life. The journey is your life. That’s how big it is. Think of yourself as, I dunno, a roadie, a sailor, a traveller.

Which is not to say that you’re like Oswald Spengler’s Faustian man, doomed to not “get there” ³. Not at all. You will get there. Somehow. But in order to do so, you need to almost forget that there is a “there”. As far as you’re concerned, all that exists is your current point and your current direction.

Often enough, a comment puts it much better than I ever put it. This was one such situation. Handsome AJATTeer Pingfa brings us back to basics, urging us to focus on what we can do, on what we can control, on our point(s) of maximum power and traction.

There’s a quote I read once that I really like (big aphorism collector here). It goes something like: ordinary people try to do what they can’t do; the true hero simply does what he can do. Once you stop whining and complaining and worrying about what you can’t do, you realize that there’s far more that’s within your power than you give yourself credit for. You become resourceful, like MacGyver with his Bisquick. You don’t necessarily become MacGyver; he had his tools and you have yours (plus he’s fictional). But you do become like him, which is the point really.

How do you get where you want to go? By moving in that direction. How do you move in that direction? By using whatever means of locomotion are readily available to you at that particular place and time. Ancient people didn’t refuse to walk until horses had been tamed, or refuse to ride until cars had been invented. Stop wanting to know whether or not it works. It works. It’s working. Move already.

Pingfa on April 27, 2013 at 20:58:

The best way to do get over doubts about a language is to put aside the doubts and break down what you know you can do for sure.
You can learn words. That’s a guarantee. Maybe you won’t always understand the context, but it’s easy learning a word. Look it up, look it up again, win.

Even if you know absolutely nothing about the sentence structure, one thing anyone without a significant mental retardation is guaranteed to be able to do is learn a word. Learn all the words within a sentence and you can piece them together. Even if you know all the words within a sentence but don’t know the context of that specific sentence, there’ll be sentences you can piece together that further clarify those sentences.

So keep being exposed to words. Keep absorbing words, and eventually you will be able to piece those words together to form a coherent sentence. It’s like many pieces of a puzzle, once you’ve figured out how one piece fits with another and another piece fits with that, you’re on your way to making a bigass puzzle.

If on the other hand, if one has doubts not so much about their capability but about their motivation, I believe the best way to maintain motivation when you are lacking comprehension is to seek out media you enjoy as is without the need to understand it. Enjoy some pretty visuals. Watch dubs of movies you already know the dialogue to. Don’t concern yourself with learning if you don’t want to, put your feet up and enjoy the ride.

You might think at some point, ‘I really should learn more’, but that’s really not necessary to maintain exposure. As long as the language continues to surround you, you will solidify what you’ve learned even if you don’t actively learn any more.

“The practice of sungazing is dangerous. Looking directly at the sun for even brief periods of time may cause blindness or severe damage to the eye.” ~ Wick Her Pedia

We don’t look directly at the Sun — even during a total eclipse — without special equipment.

One of my favorite things to do is go to high or wide open places and look at stuff. I love looking at planes, helicopters, far-off buildings, women getting dressed inside said buildings wait…

No, don’t worry. I don’t even like women. Liking women is for poofters.

Wait…

OK, no, so, I was playing frisbee in the park the other day, frisbee play being interspersed with breaks to look at helicopters flying overhead. And it occurred to me how beautiful the day was and how much I was enjoying and benefitting from the sunlight (I take my Vitamin D intake very seriously). And it also occurred to me how, while I was enjoying the sun and it was (and is) directly or indirectly powering all life on Earth, I wasn’t looking at it. At all.

I was looking at what it shone upon; I was looking at discs and dogs and kids and couples making out. But I wasn’t looking at the Sun.

One doesn’t simply look at the Sun.

You enjoy the sun. You know it’s there. You’re unsure whether or not to capitalize it. You feel it. You’re bathed in its warmth — even at night.

But you don’t look at it. ¹

So, yeah, I love looking at stuff. Recently, I even purchased a “fieldscope” to aid in the purpose. The warning label on my fieldscope (which is optical geekspeak for a monocular/portable telescope) reads (in Japanese): Do not look at Sun, may cause loss of sight, you raving poof.

A welcome, if excessively homophobic warning. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be writing a stern letter of disapproval to the poofs at Vixen who manufacture the scope, and tell them to get their act together.

You need the sun. You love the sun. If you’re of English ancestry, you gladly risk chronic illness just to get some more of it. But even then, you don’t look at it.

Big goals are a lot like that. Big goals like, oh, native-like fluency.
Just as looking directly at the sun can cause visual blindness, looking directly at big goals can cause schlep blindness.

It’s nice to know that the big goal is there, but often it’s too big and shiny and 93 million miles away and overwhelming in its awesomeness to be gazed at directly, certainly without safety gear.

The big, central goal, the sun around which our actions presumably orbit, can overwhelm and disorient us with its size and power and magnitude. We wonder, rightfully, “how could we possibly get there from here?!”. It’s just too much to take in. Our minds, our bodies, cannot process it, cannot fathom it. We reel at the mere idea and coil up like a little centipede; we seek refuge in mindless TV, cigarettes and alcohol, because — despite their concomitant disadvantages — these escapes are so doable. They make sense. We can win at them.

The Sun is too bright to look at. It can literally, physically hurt to look directly at the big goal. Looking at the metaphorical sun can throw you into a dizzying tailspin of despair and avoidance.
So don’t. Look, that is. Enjoy the biggie ², but don’t look at it.
Focus back here.
This one word.
This one action.
This one click.
This is all that exists. This is all that matters.

Do not look directly at goal. May cause schlep blindness. Unless you have special tools (e.g. a lifetime calendar — analogous to eclipse-viewing glasses) and a specific reason, do not look at the Sun. You must not if you want to keep your mental vision intact and thus keep being able to see that paths and opportunities that are right in front of you, right underfoot. Call it the “Solar Principle” ³.

And this “Solar Principle” is probably why you’re better off not sharing your goals with people ⁴. Not necessarily because you can’t deal with it — although that’s often true ^^ — but because they can’t…handle the (whole) truth. So if you want their cooperation, or simply non-interference as the case may be, don’t blind the poor bastards.

Perhaps you now have the mental equipment to look directly at the psychological sun, but they don’t, and you’re hurting them by shining it in their faces ⁵. And this doesn’t make them bad people. They’re not “dream stealers”; they’re not “energy vampires”; they’re not “monsters”; they’re just…not ready to look right at the sun; it’s too much of a shock to their fragile systems and that’s fine; they can still enjoy the light and warmth. Work them through it, baby steps, like a frog in progressively warmer water, and before you know it, you can have them in a compound in Guyana committing mass suicide with you and their children…

Too soon?

No, but, seriously, like blinders on a racehorse, you can take yourself and other people to any extreme of excellence or lameness if you merely narrow the mental focus away from the debilitatingly magnitudinous core goal and towards productive, forward-moving, helpful minutiae ⁶. In other words: don’t even try to brush your teeth, just put the toothbrush in your mouth. Let the full truth be something that emerges — something you allow to emerge — rather than something you go out and declare.

It is neither possible nor necessary nor helpful to tell the whole truth. Not to yourself and certainly not to other people (who, I assure you, have immeasurably little interest in you and your life ⁷). It can’t be done. You don’t even know the names of the chemicals that are in your body. You don’t introduce yourself by your full, government name. When I ask you what time it is, you don’t give it to me in seconds, let alone nanoseconds. You probably even round up the minutes, you mendacious knave, you! ⁸ Many things are true, but that doesn’t mean they need be said, noted or acknowledged regularly if at all: ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.

In politics and espionage and stuff, they talk about things being on a “need-to-know” basis. Well, let me hit you with some knowledge, sister: when it comes to you and your goals, not only do people not need to know, they don’t even want to know; knowing would simply harm and annoy them. Don’t be fooled by the questions. It’s small-talk ⁹. No one actually wants to know; they want to feel important and included; they want the privilege of being privy, but this is a thirst for love, status and acceptance, not knowledge. If they truly wanted to know something, they would read a book, not ask you idle questions.

To recap: don’t look at the sun unless and until you have the equipment to do so, and don’t show it to other people until they do as well (but feel free to enjoy and share little rays of sunlight here and there). So, you’re not learning Japanese any more, you’re just here learning this one word. You’re just tinkering. Maybe the next word will be a Japanese one, too, but that’s neither here nor there.

Avert your eyes!

Thus spake Hangul Fangirl (‏@HangulFangirl):
“[Dear Khatzumoto,
You are handsome beyond comprehension. And also very slim. Your delicate, schoolgirl figure is an inspiration to us all.] How do you get past the feeling that you’re not progressing and end up forgetting to keep going? Self-study is hard for me :[[“

“…don’t believe a thought you think.” ~ T. Harv Eker

A lot of actual psychologists and proper New Age people have talked about these ideas in a much more detailed, accurate and elegant fashion than I am about to, so you might want to take their advice instead. All I can offer you is my personal, very anecdotal experience.

To be honest, I think my advice is crap; it’s just infinitely better than the mindless, unintentional defaulting to social convention that many people do, but then that’s not saying a lot, considering how wrong conventional wisdom can be.

For the record, there’s nothing automatically wrong with defaulting to social convention; we can’t be original in all things. The problem comes when that default setting doesn’t work or even causes harm. Which is definitely the case with languages. The problem isn’t so much that language classes suck as it is that they have no intention or mechanism of improving themselves; they are so blindly arrogant that they’re not even aware that they suck.

So, back to you, and the feeling you’re not progressing.

Feelings can be like having an emotional drama queen attention whore friend living inside you who thinks she’s clairvoyant. That’s…an awful lot of misogyny in one sentence.

Don’t feed the inner troll. Pay it no mind. It’ll run out of steam. It’s kinda like how paying attention to a baby or toddler sometimes makes them start crying or (if they’re already crying) makes them cry harder. I don’t have children or even younger siblings, so don’t take my childcare advice. But I’ve heard and observed that sometimes ignoring the kid helps them get over it, while getting attentive and freaked out simply escalates the emotion out of all proportion.

Sometimes your feelings are wrong and they need to STFU. Ignore them and move forward.

Almost by definition, your feelings are illogical. So, sometimes I find it helps to illogical-ize (?) your motivations, to NOT have a good reason for things you do. So your new reason is “coz I feel like it” or “coz it’s there”. You can’t argue with that because there’s nothing to argue with. It’s openly reckless. Reasonless. It’s like when you tell a guy his mother’s a whore and he goes “I know, right? She totally is — when can I pencil you in for an appointment? Oh, and she said to ask you to stop crying after the deed, because it’s a real turn-off.”.
No traction.

Some research I read about appears to show that people with no emotions (due to highly localized brain injuries and stuff) can’t make decisions. So perhaps the problem isn’t having emotions, but tuning into the wrong emotions.

Move the dial away from WAMIMAKINGPROGRESSFM. Tune into happiness and boredom and interest and happiness and curiosity and I don’t know if all those count as emotions, but they are mental states…

Scour your memory. Become aware of repeating patterns in terms of what gets you going, and look to amplify those patterns. It could be a certain type of situation or a certain type of media, or a certain auteur ¹. Mere “progress” pales in comparison to “oh sweet, this looks cool”.

“…if you’re not satisfied with the little successes, you’ll never be satisfied with the big successes.” ~ Anon. (quoted by Barbara Sher)

Being fluent in Korean is not going to make you happy if the process didn’t. Because you’ll be there and you’ll find something to hate about it. Something to put yourself down with.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but you only know Standard Korean, not a cool dialect.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…what about these other languages? Mandarin. Japanese. Mongolian.
Maybe you’re fluent in Korean, but…you can’t write like the best Korean author of all time.
There’s always a reason to feel bad, the key is not to play along.

If you want to win the long game, stop playing it.
Stop running the marathon and start sprinting instead.
Start running and playing and winning short games instead.

Don’t learn Korean.
Learn the chorus of this song.
Don’t learn Korean.
Play this movie. Don’t even watch it. Just play. It. Audibly.

Shameless plug: These tiny, (sub-)atomic, so-small-it’s-insulting activities are, incidentally, central to what Neutrino is about. Neutrino gets you hooked playing short games so you can, as Werner Heisenberg might have put it, forget about your position and focus on your momentum.

Play the short games.
Be sensitive to the little things. The tiny, winnable games. The small victories. Immerse yourself in them.
What does it matter whether or not you’re making progress? You don’t need to be making progress in Korean; you like it anyhow; you like it because it’s there. You’re winning right now. Not in some nebulous fluency future.

Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of learning languages: you can’t have any momentum if you’re busy worrying about your position.
The reason you seem to have no momentum in Korean is because you don’t, because you spend way too much time worrying about your position and whether it’s changing. How far could a car drive if its occupants stopped every five minutes, took out a tape measure and ran back to their point of origin to make sure they were progressing? You’re thinking: “that example’s belabored and stupid, Khatz”. Well, your constant freaking worrying’s belabored and stupid. You should be too busy moving forward to be worrying about this.

And if you were really serious about making progress in Korean, you would be making progress in Korean, not worrying and Twittering about it in English. What you’re doing right now is the equivalent of asking your friend, every five minutes: “Hey, bro! Are we friends? Are we bros? Are we besties?!”. Shut up and just be friends. Enjoy your time together. Enjoy the moment. Get lost in it.

Imagine being on a couch, making out with someone, and every two minutes they go: “hey, so are we making out?”, “what base is this?”. You would have to conclude that this person was crazy and/or uninterested. Korean…feels like that about you right now .

Anyway, that’s all from me for now; I didn’t expect to resolve this question in one post and I don’t think I have. But hopefully you’ve gotten some use out of this rampage of metaphors . I leave you with the emphasis-added words of Norman Lear:

“Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn’t equate… Life is made of small pleasures…Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don’t have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don’t mean anything.” ~ Norman Lear

Tanks fer readin’. Do you have a special way of dealing with feelings of suckage? Enlighten us with your technique !

“Don’t force output in L2. Just keep getting input. Don’t force yourself to go to the bathroom, just keep drinking water.”
Jamie The Pensive Urinator

Sarah Silverman, Linguist

Language is peeing.
Jamie (yes that Jamie), of Twitter fame, a leading authority on the urinary arts, actually came up with this analogy.
To tell you the truth, I’m jealous, because I think it’s the best language acquisition metaphor ever invented. Ever.
It’s like a golden shower of insight…

Because of the…golden nuggets of wisdom it contains?
Wow. Crossed a few lines there.
That R Kelly, when will he learn, eh lads, eh?
Anyway, let’s look at:

Approximately ten reasons why learning a language is exactly, 100% like peeing.

1. No matter what you drink…
   • Mountain Dew (Anime)
   • Water (Unscripted natural conversation)
   • Milk (The Moë Sentence Pack)
   • Ambrosia (Comedy)
   • Protein shake (Star Trek)
   • Green smoothie (Evangelion)
   • Green smoothie with added vitamins (Rebuild of Evangelion)
   • Green smoothie with added vitamins, made and served by a maid dressed in short shorts, with blue hair that completely covers one of her eyes: if you’d been there with me and the lads that night in Akihabara…you’d understand. (The part in Rebuild of Evangelion where Shinji’s eyes go red and he roars: 「綾波を、返せ！」 )
   • Unfiltered gutter water (Textbooks) ¹

   …it’s all mostly made of water and it all comes out as pee. All FUNBUN ² Japanese is Japanese. Even “anime Japanese”.

2. You don’t know exactly when you’re going to pee, but if you keep drinking, you will pee.
   • So stop freaking out about when you’ll get good or when you’ll start speaking. Everyone’s a little different! You’ll pee when you pee! Shut up and drink!
3. Worrying will get you nowhere. Just drink more. Keep drinking.
4. The more you drink, the more you pee. Volume(pee) ∝ Volume(drink).
5. Eventually, you won’t be able to help peeing: you won’t be able to help talking like a Japanese person. Eventually, it’ll be harder to not pee than to pee. Sweet, huh?
6. You always pee less than you drank: input and passive vocab will always outstrip output and active vocab. Input precedes and exceeds output. Never expect to drink a liter and pee out a liter. Volume(pee) < Volume(drink). You’re going to pee out less than you drink…
7. …and you’re not going to pee at all if you don’t drink. Nothing begets nothing. 0 begets 0. No drink, no pee. Drinking = input. Peeing = output. There is no output without input.
8. There is no output before input, either. Drink now. Drink first. Pee later. You have to drink before you pee. You can’t pee before you drink. You can’t “get fluent” at Japanese, then immerse. What, you think the language can understand your future promises (“oh, he’s going to pay me later; he said the cheque’s in the mail, so let’s give him an advance on the fluency”)? Darling, Japanese only knows what you’re doing for her right now. ³ “What have you done for me lately?” That’s what your Japanese perenially wants to know. You have to immerse in order to get fluent. Prior to getting fluent. Drink first. Pee later. Immersion first, fluency later.
9. Drink a lot at night (sleep immersion), and you might wet the bed (L2 dreams, L2 sleeptalking)
   • HAHAHA! You bedwetting loser! ⁴
10. For added reliable, constant hydration (and thus peeing), you can go beyond just drinking and set up an intravenous drip for yourself  — (TV left permanently on, radio, automated immersion, multiplexing, small-but-radical(-and-persistent/stable) environmental changes)
11. Tasty drinks → more drinking → more peeing. So drink tasty drinks!
12. Conversely, drinks that taste gross → less drinking → dehydration → acute and chronic health problems (including impaired mental function) → death. Watching and reading boring Japanese will lead you to avoid all Japanese, which will lead to Japanese “dehydration“, which will lead to the death of your Japanese (baby).

People always want to know what your pee situation is. How thick is the stream? How long can you go? What color is it? People are so interested in comparing and contrasting and speeding up the peeing process.

But no one wants to hear about the drinking. People want to drink as little as possible and pee as much and as quickly as possible. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that — wanting the (apparently) impossible is how progress happens — but it’s a dumb thing to get stressed out about when…you could just drink more.

That’s it. The Pee Theory of Language Acquisition. So, relax and drink up . Your shower of golden wisdom will come! ⁵

PS: Many paths to enlightenment pass through the restroom. If any more micturative wisdom occurs to you, please share .

“If you’re going to spend most of your time experiencing rather than accomplishing, then perhaps it makes sense to focus on the quality of your daily experiences and not merely on the heights of your accomplishments. ” | Steve Pavlina

“The key to strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.” | Cavilo, The Vor Game

“…you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.” | Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re often told to go after what we want.

But what if what we want is far away? What if it’s not within our control? What then? Are we just SOL? Do we just give up?

Yes.

Kinda.

If you want to get what you want, stop trying to get what you want.

Confusing?

Stick with me for a bit.

If you desire certain effects, stop desiring them. If you love certain results, stop loving them. If you want to achieve something, some goal, some aspiration, then stop trying to achieve it.

Wanting to know Japanese, doesn’t get these ↓
漢字は、古代中国に発祥を持つ文字。中国語を表記するための伝統的な文字である。また古代において中国から日本へ伝えられ、その形態・機能を利用して日本語の表記にも使われている（これについては日本における漢字を参照）。人類史上、最も文字数が多い文字体系であり、その数は10万文字をはるかに超え他の文字体系を圧倒している。近代以降、異体字を整理したり使用頻度の少ない漢字の利用を制限しようとする動きは何度もあったが、現在でもその数は増え続けている。
into your head.

Wanting to get there doesn’t get you there. Trying to get there doesn’t get you there — it just gets you tired. Trying to reach just makes you pull muscles. Motion in the general direction of “there” by whatever means of locomotion is available…that’s all that gets you there. Motion causes a change of position.

If you want certain favorable effects, do not fall in love with those effects. Fall in love with their causes.

Now, there are good reasons for finding this logic suspect:

• False Causes
  • In the past, through malice or ignorance, we have come to believe in false causes. No, eating your vegetables will not turn you into a fighter jet like Michael Jackson in Moonwalker. I speak from painful experience.
• Means/Ends Confusion
  • It’s possible to get so wrapped up in means that the ends become confused or even forgotten. For more on such pathological obsession with process to the detriment of meaningful results, see “Japan, Employee Life In” for details
• Urban Living
  • Not growing stuff divorces us from opportunities to observe long-term causal chains in nature. This leads not just to an ignorance of such causal chains but to a thoroughgoing disbelief in their very existence. I wanted to use the word “thoroughgoing” at least once in my lifetime. And look at me now. All grown up.
• Bad Science
  • Deterministic proclamations from fields like evolutionary psychology and genetics, fields where talk too often outpaces actual hard knowledge, lead us to self-fulfilling beliefs that things are more fixed than they actually are. It used to be old men with beards in the sky. Now it’s molecules in cells. Conjecture and BS remain conjecture and BS, regardless of whether they come dressed up in cassocks or labcoats. Or jeans. Or sweatpants.
• Desire Works…Sometimes
  • Strong desire can often lead to massive action on causes. But it’s a bit of an unreliable vehicle. It’s too vague. Why bother with the hit-and-miss mind job of maximizing desire, when we can more directly and coolly play the cause card? Right? Right.

So you do need to think a bit to avoid certain pitfalls of the the cause-centered path…the path-centered path…the journey-centered journey. Fortunately for the intellectually lazy (yours truly included), you don’t need to think that hard. The common sense of the average toddler will do. It’s that unvarnished, unsocialized frankness that can say that the emperor is naked, caviar just tastes of salt, and only a fraction of classical music is actually any good. It’s your inner pipsqueak. Listen to that voice.

Back on topic. You can’t control too many effects. But, as it turns out, you don’t really need to. The trick is to control the causes. Grab a hold of those causes and never let go. Squeeze them. Milk them for all they’re worth. Max out the cause card.

You can’t control whether you’ll make any friends or not. But you can control the number of people you meet and how humane you are to them. That’s enough.

You can’t control whether or not you’ll win a Stanley Cup. ¹ But you can control the number of hours you spend on the ice, messing around with puck, net and cones. That’s enough.

You can’t fully control when exactly you’ll become awesome at Japanese…not in an immediate, satisfying way. But you can control how much and how often you expose yourself to Japanese. That’s more than enough.

You can’t control the results, but you can control the things that produce the results. And that’s more than enough. You get to control the journey, where most of the time is spent anyway. That’s freaking awesome. Imagine if you couldn’t control the journey? Imagine if you could only control the fleeting arrival moment. You could go anywhere you wanted, but you couldn’t choose how to get there. That would suck.

Hold on a sec, though. Stop the irrational optimism train before it runs over that gaggle of schoolchildren: what if your life sucks so much that you can’t even control the causes? Easy. Give up.

…and run up the causal chain. If you can’t control the causes, control the causes of the causes. Max out the causes of the causes. Max out quaternary causes and reap their effects, which are tertiary causes. OK, now you have tertiary causes. Max them out and reap secondary causes. Max out secondaries and reap primaries. Now you’re at primaries. Max these out and you’re at your precious effect destination.

“All Japanese all the time”. AJATT is all about maxing out the cause card. It’s too stupid and straightforward to fail. It’s based on the childlike realization that Japanese people, the people who are the best at Japanese, also spend the most time in contact with Japanese. In fact, the average Japanese person spends as many hours in contact with Japanese as she does breathing air.

You can’t be born in Japan. You can’t have Japanese parents. You can’t control who your parents were. You can’t control how or where they raised you.

But none of that matters. That’s first quarter stuff. Don’t waste your time trying to control the first quarter from the second. Play the game now. Realize that you’re a member of the global elite. You have literacy, electricity and home comforts. I know you do, because you’re reading this.

You can cast aside the false causes (first quarter excuses) and pick up the real cause card. You can spend all your available (“free”) time in contact with Japanese. You can Japanize anything and any moment and any place that can be Japanized. You can max out the Japanese fluency cause card. You can rip these remaining three quarters a new one.

Because there are always three quarters available .

In a cause-effect universe, precursors are just about omnipotent. And guess what? In all likelihood, you already control more precursors than you need to to reach your destination…

So, now, giving up on something far too early, which is when most people give up, becomes not a question of “lacking moral fiber”, but one of poor arithmetic. You’re pronouncing your own death from dehydration when you have unfettered access to a fridgeful of water two feet away. It’s just unnecessarily premature. You can always give up later. You have all of the time you’ll be dead, practically all of eternity, in which to give up.

Before you worry about what you can’t do, do everything, and I mean everything, that you can do. Before you worry about the resources and abilities you don’t have, first exhaust the resources and options that are immediately at your disposal. You haven’t “paid your dues” ² as it were, until your cause card — time, energy and productive thought invested in practice, in things that cause desired effects — is maxed out.

中國人嘅姓係放喺前面嘅。
zung1 gwok3 jan4 ge3 sing3 hai6 fong3 hai2 cin4 min6 ge3
Chinese names go surname first.
Source: CantoDict

There it is ↑ . The most important sentence in the entire Cantonese language…slash…dialect.

But why? It’s so simpo! It’s so basic!

Yes. It is.

And that’s exactly the point. This sentence is:

1. Simple
2. Basic
3. (Surprisingly) quite reusable, and
4. Almost impossible to circumlocute succinctly and unambiguously

“Nonnative speakers usually don’t have a good sense of which kinds of words or phrases are the most useful or common. As a result, they (unintentionally) learn lots of uncommon words and never get around to learning basic words.” ~ Robert Nagle

If you’ve ever tried to speak a “remedial native language“ ¹, after a certain intermediate point, you’ll find that it’s not the big things that trip you up. It’s the little things. It’s the small stuff. Prepositions. Tiny verbs for physical actions. Relative descriptions, demonstrative pronouns. You’ll find that you can read the newspaper, but you can’t explain how to tie your shoelaces or play ultimate frisbee or tag or hide-and-seek.

“But Khatzumoto,” you protest, “I’m not a pedophile; I don’t need to know how to play children’s playground games; this GPS ankle bracelet was just for a minor drug violation”.

It’s OK. I believe you. But…how do I put this:

• Your ability to explain new and/or complex ideas well, is predicated upon your ability to express simple ideas: Ironically, the newer or more complex an idea, the more it requires reference to simple, childlike, playground metaphors.
• A lot of the conversations we have in ordinary daily life (like asking which train route would be the best to take given certain conditions (price, time, occupancy etc.), or telling a funny story about a recent incident) can:
  • be very complex structurally — nested referencing, multiple simultaneous actors, shifting of narrative perspective (external situation, inner monologue), and
  • require the use of uncircumlocutable words — words that do not readily lend themselves to tidy circumlocution.

“Japanese people have no clue what is difficult for English speakers. Really, with just a lot of book study, I think anyone can learn grammatically correct Japanese by memorizing sentence patterns from textbooks. ‘Pub talking’ in a natural way — that’s the hard part.” ~ Cathryn Mataga

As long as you know the vocabulary, reading an academic paper, newspaper or physics textbook is actually really easy. Person and tense rarely change; most of the sentences are straightforward and declarative “X said Y”, “Q is R”, “A because B”; they are written from a single perspective (“impartial observer”) from which they almost never shift; variables are deliberately limited.

I submit to you that, unless you actively intervene and actively learn “simple” words, you’ll find yourself able to discuss anesthetic with your dentist (and its effect on your duodenum) before you can explain what that drunk guy was doing on the other side of the train.

Don’t assume you know it because it’s simple. Don’t assume you’ll have access to it because you know the individual words. It’s not just the combinations — it’s the permutations as well. Memorize that noise. Memorize those permutations. Memorize those strings. Use MCDs or some other high-redundancy method. Get them firmly into your head — into your active memory. Make them second nature.

Love the small stuff. Learn the small stuff. Mastery isn’t doing the big things well. Even monkeys fall from trees; even masters trip up on the big things. Mastery is doing the little things, the small things, the “easy” things — effortlessly, automatically, “perfectly”. Mastery is mastering the basics.

““One day I was trying to tell him this is how you button your shirt,” he said, switching into Cantonese. “But then I couldn’t say it in English, so I had to ring up a friend and ask.”” ~ A Chinese speaker

And there came upon the email of Khatzumoto a letter long of length, correct of spelling and accurate of punctuation. And it was good. The emailer’s pseudonym was, is and ever shall be…Farley.

Khatzumoto, hi!

First, I want to start out by saying how much I have enjoyed the site and how helpful it has been to me. I’m sure you get a lot of questions, but I have an issue that I’ve not seen addressed on your site, AntiMoon, or similar websites, and it’s giving me quite a hangup.

First some background: I’m 27, native English speaker (U.S. born), trying to learn Spanish from zero. First foreign language I’ve seriously studied. I’ve been studying about a year and have not progressed as far as I would like. I do some writing by trade, and in my personal life I’ve been told I’m funny. So when it comes to language, issues of nuance, metaphor, timing, phrasing, inflection, etc. are important to me.

I have been watching some American movies and TV shows in my target language, using them to practice my listening comprehension, using shows I already know so that I already know the basics of the plot. (For the record, I watch humor – think Simpsons – or drama/arthouse type flicks.) Herein lies the problem. I know some of these so well (okay, mostly just the Simpsons) that I know lines verbatim, and when I see them translated, I get very hung up on why they were translated the way that they were if they were not translated verbatim — does that sentence structure not exist? does saying it more literally not sound as good? why that word order? is this a bad translation? is this a phrase that can’t be translated well?

Even with native materials I have this problem — was that an eloquent turn of phrase or just bad writing? My inner radar is gone, and it’s very disorienting. It’s also making it very hard to “let go” of English because I feel like I need it as an anchor. (By looking up a Spanish word in a bilingual dictionary so I can try to figure out all the exact implications and shades of the meaning, for example.)

I’ve tried to think back to how I acquired said radar in the first place, and I don’t really know. I certainly had some helpful formal instruction in writing, but for the most part no one sat me down and said, this kind of thing is corny while this is poetic, this is funny, this is smart, this is stupid, this is formal, etc. I’m sure it can be directly traced to my massive input – I have been a voracious reader since childhood, and I’ve watched many humorous programs over and over – and I’m sure you’re going to tell me that’s what the remedy is.

But this just makes me feel overwhelmed. I think of how many years it’s taken me to get to where I am in English – two decades of lots of reading! – and it just feels hopeless and impossible. I don’t want to win a Pulitzer for writing in Spanish, but I do want to be able to be me, to keep my voice, both in conversation and in writing – and that includes being funny and handy with a turn of phrase.

So could you comment on this? I can definitely understand — and have experienced — how input can help with acquiring an inner sense of grammar (what makes “I is” sound horrible, for example) but the higher levels are giving me trouble. I think the writing on your site is funny, and you’ve said in one of your posts that you were in a comedy troop. Are you funny in Japanese?

Farley, for a funny guy, you don’t sound you’re having a lot of fun . Remember, you’re from a wealthy country. The wealthiest. You are a native speaker of its language. You don’t need to learn other languages. You don’t need to know Spanish. Life in the hispanosphere will continue whether or not you learn the thick, soft native tongue of Salma Hayek.

Realize that you’re doing this for fun. All the talk about multicultural this and global that is just a bunch of smoke language-lovers blow up people’s butts to make it seem as if what they’re doing is important. I am guilty of it, too. The real reason to learn a language is because it’s there. It is pure play. Real socio-economic need does arise if, say, you decided to move to a Spanish-speaking country for a long time. But even then, ironically, the fastest path, and the one that looks the longest, is to learn Spanish as if you didn’t have to.

OK, now to the core of your email. Humor. Think of humor as a high-order function that requires base infrastructure to exist in the first place. Kind of like how Internet access requires electricity, a computing device, literacy and a working network connection.

You don’t have that base infrastructure yet, therefore Internet access is still out of the question for you. Think about puns — you can only get puns if you first know the words that are being punned. “Cunning Linguist” only sounds funny when you know…about that activity women claim to enjoy (shopping? idle gossip? no? sexist comment? what?).

A joke in language is a somersault. You are trying to pull somersaults…but you can’t even walk yet. Which is not to say that you will never be able to pull them, it just means, you do need to build basic coordination and motor skills before you start busting the sweet ninja moves.

You need to be positive to the point of arrogance in your thoughts (“I am Spanish”), but short, simple and straightforward in your actions (“this sentence; this book; this show; here; now; this moment; this second; fun”). You need to be: Humble, but not diffident. Eager, but not harried. Determined, but not self-destructive. Like my good man Makoto Itou likes to say: “festina lente“. Hurry slowly.

You will get the jokes; you will be funny: you will find your voice. I found mine in Japanese. In fact, I found my Japanese voice so well that non-native users of Japanese hate my Japanese, just like non-native users of English hate my English. In both cases, you have a collection of otherwise simple ideas wrapped in a convoluted morass of criss-crossing running jokes based on things happening “off-screen” — random cultural background — that you have to already know about in order to even understand it, let alone enjoy it. And that is as it should be: I wouldn’t want to write Japanese that gaijin enjoy (even if I did, I couldn’t — not enough infrastructure to work with). _{Nor would I want to write the kind of English that the Education Ministry here in Tokyo seems to find fit to print in its approved textbooks.}

You will get there. But to get there, you need to let go of both your starting point (English) and your goal (Spanish) and just focus on the road — doing Spanish things here and now. Let go of the wall of the rink, and forget about the other side. Just skate on the ice you’re on now. That means, it may well be high-time for you to go monolingual.

It’s said that humor is about betraying expectations. “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s corns” (<— not funny)….that type of thing. As you have already realized, you don’t yet know enough to even have expectations, let alone build and break them. That’s all.

You can’t be funny in Spanish before you know good amounts of it any more than you can make an order at a restaurant by screaming out of your car window on the way there. Which is not to say that you will never get to the restaurant. Just that, for your own benefit, you want to get in a roadworthy vehicle, drive attentively and keep going until you get there…and know that a few red lights _{(apparent “learning plateaux” — in truth, these are just periods of time where your progress goes invisible, not non-existent)} here and there are not the end of the world.

Certainly, it took you a long time to get to where you are in English. But a lot of that time was (1) unproductive and (2) at a point in your life when you had lower mental capacity. You have more mental capacity now, not less. But you probably also have years of bad ideas and unreasonable expectations of input versus results. Ironically, you’re probably less patient now than when you were a child with a “short attention span” _{[perhaps our attention spans never change and it’s just that we change how we behave when the time runs out? I dunno…]} In any case, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes because you will be enjoying yourself the whole time anyway. Right? Who cares how long the road trip is if Salma Hayek’s going to be there the whole time?…Or something like that.

So be patient. Keep being Spanish. It’s really that simple. It really is. Focus on what you can control directly. You can’t directly control when you become a Castillian Chris Rock. But you can directly control the expansion (and contraction) of your passive vocabulary. Expand your vocabulary. Expand your knowledge. Work faithfully, calmly and enjoyably on each brick and you’ll soon find yourself a nice little lego castle.

If you keep going, you’ll almost certainly make it. But if you stop and give up, you never will. It’s Spanish, dude. All European languages are really just dialects of each other anyway _{[here’s a fight-starter]}. You’re practically there already .

For more and better advice, from a real expert, go talk to Ra-Moses, Prince of SpanishOnly. He’s the man now, dawg.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Do you even like “The Simpsons”? It seems as though it has you doing more neurotic thinking than actual laughing. You need to start having fun if you’re wanting to avoid being that sad paradox — an unhappy funny person. Hint: if you’re getting worked up about it, then you’re doing it wrong.

Maybe you need some serious South Park-level potty humor to rid you of all pretensions of (to?) seriousness. Yeah, watch South Park in Spanish. Back in the day, I watched a ton of it in Japanese and was getting compliments on how natural my expressions were (e.g.: “マジかよ？！”) right from day one.

Finally, your take-home points:

• Let your metric of success be how much fun you’re having, not how much perfect verbal acrobatics you can pull right this instant.
• Focus on native-like process, rather than native-like results. The results will come from the process. Gosh, I get tense just reading your email .
• The coolest part about learning a language by having fun/like a native is that you get to do all that cool stuff that classes usually look down on and treat as a “supplement” to “real” study _{[because we all know that you’re not really learning until you’re having trouble staying awake and all your school shirts have drool stains from the uncontrollable fits of napping that boring classes send you into but I digress]}. You get to eat dessert as your main course all day every day! Ice-cream for breakfast! Don’t go ruin it by mentally abusing yourself over your temporary suckage. Think of all the cool stuff you get to do as “study”! For crying out loud, you’re watching cartoons! You can be a kid again! This is awesome beyond compare. Cowabunga, my friend.
• If you know more today than yesterday, then you’re winning. Looked at in this sense, the race really is only against yourself.
• Trust your materials implicitly. You have to. You have no place judging the quality of Spanish-dubbed media; you simply do not have the equipment (yet); you are not at that level (yet), so the rule is: if it was made for native speakers, then it’s good enough for you. End of story. There is one — and only one — question on which you are qualified to pass judgment, and that is: “am I enjoying this?”.
• You can’t tell jokes before you can get them. If you do, it’s either a mistake or an accident.
• You cannot analyze before you have anything to analyze with — it’s like trying to use a pencil sharpener when you don’t have an actual pencil to sharpen: you just end up cutting yourself. This is a major problem in the current educational culture of the West _{[we’re painting with big brushes today*. Deal ]} — premature analysis. Always with the trying to make pots without clay. Be the Spanish, be physical, learn your katas. You have to do before you can fully understand.
• Timebox or otherwise limit your dictionary lookups so that you can get lots of quick “wins”, as well as nip compulsive behavior in the bud.
• Bilingual dictionaries are lying to you. They will never give you the full, true story. Would you tell a Spanish speaker to go digging through her espanol-ingles dictionary to find the “true” meaning of English words? Might as well tell her that El Nino is Spanish for “the Nino”.
• Last but not least: “Don’t use words to learn the meaning of sentences, use sentences to learn the meaning of words“. Greatest quote ever. Not by me, by the way.

If any of you good-looking AJATTeers has any tips for Farley, please feel free to share . You always put things much more succinctly than I do. Also, disclaimer: I do not know Spanish.

_{*I don’t know about you, but I smell another installment in the Baseless Remarks About Compex Social Phenomena series}

In a lot of AJATT posts I tend to give the impression, unintentionally, that I’m more courageous than I actually am. It’s what you might call a sin of abbreviation; I cut out most of the parts where I made mistakes and took wrong turns, focussing on telling people what worked and what went right. So, the legend is now ossifying, and it just seems like I had this Big Dream to own Japanese and I did Big Research and then made up a Big Plan and took Big Massive Action on it, executing to Big Completion, and then I wrote a Big Site and became a Big Man all in one straight line, looking neither to the left nor the right.

I’d like to believe that story, too, but it’s not how it actually went down.

First of all Big Dreams, Big Goals…these things are scary…hey — let’s start capitalizing all our nouns, like in German…No? OK…No.

Big Dreams are scary. People will laugh at you; they take a long time to achieve; they can even seem impossible. There’s a little voice inside you going “dude, maybe he could do it, but you?”, “maybe you could do it back then, but things are different now, son!”

I am working on Chinese now, laddering through Japanese. I get lots of praise and congratulation on and off the Internet for the Japanese Project and its success. But this praise can kind of go to one’s head. Not in the sense that one becomes arrogant and egotistical — I was already arrogant and egotistical. Rather, one gets a sense of entitlement. One starts to think that it should be one’s right to simply sail through any language or similar endeavor and it should just be a walk in the cake. Also, Basques.

But it’s not like that. I still have to put on my proverbial pants one leg at a time. I still go through one SRS rep at a time. I still learn one sentence at a time. Real physical limits apply; I’m not Dr. Manhattan, walking around with superhuman language powers in a perpetual state of semi-nudity who the heck does he think he is anyway?! And this can be discouraging, because it’s easy to talk on big time scales — months and years — and talk about long-term residents in a country having the “social responsibility” to learn the local language; it’s easy to talk like a Big Man, who’s Seen It All, but ultimately you still execute at the same time scales as Everyone Else and you still don’t really know What Lies Ahead, or even if you do, it’s hard to feel motivated by it when it’s so far away. Like David Allen says, no matter how Big you get, it all still comes down to, what, answer emails, attend meetings and make phone calls…you are still tied to Real Life and simple, “numbnut” tasks. You still live through minutiae.

Long story short: You want to “own” at your target language, you want to be native level, but you also want something to show for it well before the 10,000 hours and sentences are up, right?

Right. And me telling you “just suck it up”, is not helping, right? Right. I know it doesn’t help because I told myself and it didn’t work. Which is why I am suggesting you also use:

Intermediate Goals.

Within your overarching goal of complete command of a language, you want to have little Baby Goals. Larger than the baby steps, but smaller than the Big Goal of Major Ownage.

When I was starting to learn Japanese hardcore, my first goal was just to be able to freely conduct basic daily communication. For that, I primarily used the ideas contained in A. G. Hawke’s “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast“, eventually taking them to a positive extreme.

After I got there, my next goal was just to be able to talk with my Japanese friends about whatever I wanted. And also watch comedy shows (I wanted to know what my friends were laughing so hard about) and tell jokes. I got there.

Then my goal was to be able to function as an adult in business/government/specialist situations, just like my Japanese friends. I got there.

And then my goal was to be able to function completely like a native speaker, with no barrier, no difference, no gap between me and whoever I was talking to. To communicate with such razor-sharp precision that everything I said or did not say carried intentional meaning; I wanted to be the puppeteer with Japanese words as my puppets. And now my current goal is an extension of this, mainly focused on speed and writing.

I’ve frequently discussed using ultra-short-term goals on the level of hours, minutes and seconds. And long-term goals on the level of several months and beyond. But it has occurred to me that intermediate/mid-term goals (circa 3 weeks ~ 3 months), which I have basically neglected to discuss, are just as important and useful, in pulling one forward. It has occurred to me that I had used them myself to achieve success, but had forgotten to share the idea here.

So, if the pressure of “10,000” and “Native-Level Fluency” is getting to you, if you’re feeling some “cognitive dissonance” [certain members of my family hate this phrase] from the constant reminder that native-user media gives you that you are Not There Yet, then perhaps you could try setting some intermediate goals. Examples:

• Set a 1-month goal for number of hours of listening.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of pages or words or characters read (generally, I find these measures easier to deal with than whole books, since I often switch books before finishing).
• For 1-3 months, focus your energy on mastering a specific area of your target language, like TV news, or a certain anime, or other topic — whatever interests you.
• Set a 1-month goal for number of sentences or reps…be careful not to get carried away.

Anything that gives a feeling of achievement and also brings one closer to the Larger Prize of “Major Ownage”. That graph is just kind of a rough guesstimate of what happens. Anyway, feel free to share your own experiences and suggestions…

A good number of people have contacted me or written elsewhere about how using the methods described on this site led to burnout for them. No fun. Too tiring. Can’t continue.

There are two types of burnout that typically occur. Kanji burnout and sentences burnout. Both can be dealt with by application of the same techniques. But I’ll address them separately.

Well, here’s my first question. I am going through Remembering the Kanji. (For the third time, but hey, third times the charm, right!? ) But, I am only working on this right now. Of course, I am listening to Japanese all the time, but I am not doing sentences or anything else. I feel that my Japanese learning is suffering from this. So, would you suggest I do sentences while doing RTK or wait until I’m done? Considering that speaking and understanding are more of an immediate need, but overall fluency is the main goal.

Second question is just a very general one. What do you do to avoid burnout. I’ve been doing your method for about a month now and sometimes (ok a lot of times) RTK is so freakin hard I just feel like it’s such a chore. I listen to Japanese all the time and my brain starts to feel tired after a few hours. I don’t want to lose that pleasure feeling I have from learning Japanese. So, how do you keep at it without it turning into a chore? What do you tell yourself? What tricks do you use? I know you suggest doing things that interest you, which is what I do (well, except for RTK, that doesn’t interest me, but…) but I still feel burnt out.

That was an email I got from a reader named L-star recently. Let’s take it step by step.

1. Reality check. While using the Heisig method may “only” involve learning the meaning and writing of kanji, let me suggest that this is in fact a big, hairy deal. It may feel lame “only” knowing meaning and writing, but it MATTERS; it makes a difference. Those kanji have-to-be-learned; there is no way over them, under them or around them, only a way through them. They need to be learned and the best time is here, the best place is NOW. Not knowing them is a state known as illiteracy. End. Of. Story. Don’t fall for the temptation to do something else “and kanji on the side”. Get those basic kanji down NOW; you’ll thank me later.

2. Put the fun back in it. Do your kanji stories rhyme? Are they violent and funny and full of potty humor and screaming and sassiness? If not, then are you TRYING to bore yourself? Because you might as well be. Don’t think of 女 just as “a pictograph of a woman”, think of it as a woman with a HUUUGE bust sticking out to the left. Don’t think of 晶 as just being “brilliant”, think of a character from Dragon Ball Z making a chi-bomb with the power of three suns (日) and screaming “KAME HAME HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”. Don’t think of 人 in 倫 as “person”, think of it as Oprah, or Bruce Lee, or Eric Cartman.

3. Colors. While we’re on the subject of fun, realize that the adult world is black and white and monochromatic and dull. What happened to paints and smiles and visual excitement? It’s time to go back to the roots: it’s time to go back to kindergarten. Get some color in there. Go out and get some non-toxic crayola crayons right now (they have these “twistable” ones that come in a hard plastic casing and don’t go breaking or making a mess like the ones we had when we were kids). Draw pictures of your kanji stories for fun. Maybe you could draw little cards with people on them, related to the kanji. And then put these cards on your wall (hey! free Japanese posters!). Do it! It doesn’t have to look “good”, it just has to be fun.

[Edit: once in a while, you get a comment that blows out the actual article in terms of quality. This was one such comment from the man who goes by the handle nacest. I wanted more people to see it, so I’ve copied it up here]:

I think that you could have done better in the “kanji burnout” part.

In my opinion the biggest obstacle while doing RTK is not the amount of colors or realizing that you must do it no-matter-what. It’s the approach. If you are anxious to complete the book soon, if you are keeping count of how many kanji are left, then you will have to suffer the pains of hell to really finish them. There’s a LOT of them. It’s a four digit number. Every kanji is a mere 0.04% of the total. It’s not gonna be a quick process, IF you await the end of it. It’s like boiling water: I don’t know about the other places, but in Italy they say that the water will take longer to boil if you stare at it expectantly. I’m amazed at how well this applies to your (khatzumoto’s) metaphor.

Just enjoy the trip. Forget about finishing the kanji. Do them every day, and get used to it. Feel the flavor of the chinese characters. Every one of them is extraordinarily beautiful. If you are a philosopher, you may even seek enlightenment in their ancient shapes. Eat them like they are a fourth (fifth?) meal in your day, necessary for your good health. While you do this, one day, when you are least expecting it (more or less) you will hit kanji #2042 (or 3007 if you want to). Then you will be unable to believe how fast you were. I know it because it happened to me, even though it took me 11 months to complete the book! (don’t worry, it will take you much less, I was just using too little impetus with the first 1000 kanji. I finished the second half in about a month (after finding this site, by the way))

True story: once, a journalist on a trip to Egypt met a desert Bedouin. The Bedouin was used to traveling huge distances in the Sahara with his camel, taking weeks at a time. When the journalist told him that in the West there were airplanes that could cover the same distances in a few hours, he answered, perplexed: “And then, what do you do with the rest of the time?”.

The time you spend while aiming at something, no matter how long it is, is still part of your life. There is no reason to not savor and enjoy it in relaxation like the rest of your days.

1. Look forward. If you quit now, you’ll regret it in 6 months; it’s that simple. And you’ll have to pick up the pieces all over again, because you’ll have fallen back. You might be like this one German guy I knew, who knew all his kana and some basic vocab and then forget it ALL through neglect. If you quit now, you-will-regret-it. You don’t want to be that guy telling his friends and family and guests about how “yeeeah, I used to know me some Japanese”…do you? Not that you should dwell on the negative: focus on the positive (#6 — Remember the Dream).

2. Look back. When you’re always trying to learn more, it’s easy to forget to appreciate how much you ALREADY know. Look at you! Look how far you’ve come! Look at all you know. Take a look around. Remember how you used to suck? There was a time you knew nothing. Every legend started from zero, and so did yours. You came this far. You can go further. Just keep on keeping on.

3. Log it. Logging can be a great help; it gives you something to look back on, a sense of achievement. And helps you keep going because it creates at least one thing you have to report to — you have to do something worth putting into your log otherwise you’ll lose “face”. One caveat though — keep the logging simple such that it doesn’t become a burden. A plaintext Notepad file with timestamps and one or two comments on recent progress, ideas, experiences or impressions is more than enough. You want to spend as much time as possible making history rather than recording it, so stick to the highlights. It may not seem like much but you’ll be surprised by how good it feels to go back over it. Momoko taught me how to do this.

4. Get more stuff. I’m sorry to bust out the consumerism card here, but if you think that a couple of books and CDs are enough to get you fluent in Japanese, you are, as they say in Tokyo, quite mistaken. What I mean is…You need MORE stuff. MORE input. MORE videos, MORE music. You’re trying to simulate an entire country here, remember? You’re giving yourself the Japanese childhood that you happened to miss out on. You need more stimulation. You need to hear and read all kinds of stuff that interests you. It will cost some money, BUT…it’s money far better spent than on some stupid, boring classes where you wouldn’t have learned anything anyway oh crap I said that out loud again. Plus, getting new stuff is fun. I don’t know about you, but I get a kick out of the idea that every time I buy a manga it’s an investment in my education — and, in fact, it really is.

5. Chill. It’s my fault for getting people all worked up about sentences. Your aim in life is not to dart around with your eyes and ears open catching sentences like a whale catching krill. I mean, that’ll kind of happen anyway but there’s no need to force it. CHILL. Just let the music play, run the movie, leave the TV on, skim the comics, put up the posters and just chill. When a sentence needs to be learned, it’ll call YOU. It’ll come for YOU. You collect sentences because you WANT to; you have to want the individual sentence; this project is too big and too long for anything to be a chore. You surf the web in Japanese, when something comes along that’s interesting, you pick the sentence, if not, leave it. Just enjoy BEING “Japanese”. Of course ethnically and culturally you’re not actually Japanese, BUT — what would you be like, what would you know and do, if you had been born and raised in Japan? Reading manga, watching TV and movies, listening to music in Japanese, right? Talking once you were able…being affected by trends in speech. Just enjoy yourself IN Japanese. Be yourself, IN Japanese. Don’t “do” so much. Just “be”. Just float in this world of Japanese or whatever your target language is. The sentences will come; you don’t have to struggle for them. If you just keep your immersion environment going and relax about it, your curiosity will carry you the rest of the way. Just lay back and enjoy the sounds.

Let me put it into numbers for you — typically, it’s about 2-4 hours a day of actively working on the language [SRS reviews and new entries], 2-4 hours of handling business in another language out of necessity, and 16-18 hours of just having text and sounds come into your life without “working” on them as such (tasks can overlap). Everyone’s daily routine is a bit different, but that’s the basic pattern.

6. Remember the dream. There you are. Speaking Japanese as if you were born and raised in Japan. Blazing through Japanese books. Flying through manga like a butterfly. Stinging like a bee with witty comebacks to your friends. Remember the dream. Remember why you wanted to learn this language in the first place. And use the dream to guide you now — you want to learn Japanese in order to enjoy yourself and get things done in Japanese, right? Guess what the way to do that is? That’s right: By ENJOYING yourself and getting things done in Japanese. Imagine yourself regaling your friends with your NAGASE Tomoya impression. Imagine yourself reading 200 books a year in Japanese. Imagine yourself curled up on that beanbag reading all 6 volumes of Akira in one sitting. Imagine yourself talking rapid-fire on the telephone in Japanese. Picture yourself writing kanji like you own the place, the strokes freely flowing from your mind and out of your hand: yes, any and every kanji you need to, from memory. Picture yourself laughing and sharing obscure pop culture references with a group of people. Never let go of the dream. No matter how little it seems you know now, always be dreaming the dream.

That’s it for now. Smile and have fun.