1. Pick low-hanging fruit
2. Eat it
3. Grow stronger
4. Climb higher
5. Pick higher low-hanging fruit
6. Return to (2)

In arithmetic, whenever we have an expression, we don’t just go left-to-right, and we don’t just run our calculations all willy-nilly. There is what is called the standard order of operations. These are the rules of engagement, the sine qua non, what the French call the without which not, of doing arithmetic.  One acronym for these rules is PEMDAS: parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction.

You’ve been doing arithmetic a long time, but you’ve probably only started SRSing relatively recently, SRS being a more recent invention than arithmetic. In SRSing we also have an order of operations AKA precedence rules AKA order of priority.

As with arithmetic, the SOOP (SRS order of priority) — yet another meaningless acronym — tells us what to do first, if there is any doubt. Unlike the arithmetic rules, the SOOP is not hard and fast. It’s just an arbitrary set of guidelines to make our lives easier and prevent the harried, type-A, OCDish behavior you sometimes see exhibited by people who are SRSing — behavior that leads them to burn out, give up, and curse this SRSing thing as “useless” or “not for me”.

So here it is, the SOOP, which can further be abbreviated as DADRA (how do I keep coming up with these?!): Don’t Add, Delete, Review, Add.

0. Don’t Add

• The zeroth rule. Not adding anything to your SRS deck is the most “important” activity, in that it takes precedence over all the others. If in doubt, don’t add anything to the SRS. Just don’t. Too hard to add? Don’t add it. Can’t be bothered? Don’t be. When something really needs to be added to the SRS, it won’t feel like a chore at all.

1. Delete

• The first rule. Delete. If in doubt, delete stuff. Delete. Delete. Deleted. Baleted. Let it go. There is perhaps nothing more threatening to your long-term SRSing prospects than bad cards. Nothing will drag down your repcount (reviewcount) more quickly and with more certainty, than the existence of large quantities of SRS cards you no longer give a care about. If in doubt, throw it out. Delete. Doesn’t matter if you would, could or should learn it. Delete it.
• What about “essential” language elements like individual kanji and/or kana and/or hangul, etc? Surely these can’t be deleted, right? Right? My original answer to that would have been a “yes, suck it up”. However, over time, my opinion has changed. I have found bad cards to be so destructive to SRSing that it is better to, yes, delete even cards containing essential, fundamental language elements. Call it “lazy processing”: you can always undelete, or re-add the cards later. If the language element is really that essential, you’ll be able to pick up the slack later.
• Important: I personally prefer to delete one card a time. I say, resist the impulse to “push the reset button” — delete entire decks and start from scratch, because this robs you of the opportunity to discover the properties of the cards you do like and are worth keeping. Also, it’s a bit of a binge-purge behavior, which is something you don’t want.
• I virtually always do my deleting while reviewing. Remember, the SOOP tells us what matters most: it does not mean “do all of activity #n first before doing activity #n+1”. It just means: “if in doubt, if there is a conflict (of interests), default to the higher priority activity — activity #n”. So if you’re doing reviews but you get bored by one or more cards, and you’re not sure what to do, then just start deleting and don’t even bother stop until you hit a card that makes you want to do reviews.

2. Review

• The second rule. Review cards. Do reps. It’s what we might call the most “normal”, “standard”, “vanilla” use of an SRS. Nothing much more to say here. Click. Show back. Set score. Next.

3. Add

• The third rule. If all else fails, add some new SRS cards. Add new cards. Why is this last? What the hockey puck is wrong with you, Khatzumoto? Surely, even you, up on your AJATT cloud, are aware that you can’t delete or review cards without having first added them? Yes, of course, that is true. Remember, the SOOP merely tells us precedence. It tells us what should precede what, what should go first, iff there is any question as to what to do. However, by definition, if there are no cards, then while “don’t add” (the zeroth rule) will work, the first and second rules will default down to this one. What matters is to know that if in doubt, adding cards is the least important thing you can do.

And we’re done. These are just random guidelines I came up with by myself. Yeah, I’m good-looking, but not omniscient. So I’d be happy to hear what you have to share, iff you’re good-looking as well.

Shallowly,

Khatzumoto

This is the penultimate installment of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

You probably get from this blog that I take issue with school and what it does to people. One of the things that happens in school is people are often forced to compete against one another in games of dubious intrinsic significance and even more dubious post-scholastic significance. When schoolkids do cooperate, they do so only in superficial, preset ways — anyone who’s ever had the teacher pick your class groups knows the kind of thing I’m talking about. Why was the learning-disabled kid always in my group? Yes, I said “retard”. How else do you describe a white kid who doesn’t like rap music? ALL white kids of sound mind like rap music! What, you think I like it because I’m black? NO! I was raised in a white neighborhood in Africa: that’s just how stuff goes down, son [faux-gangsta hand gestures]!

Another thing many schools have is an aversion to technology that reduces work — calculators, spell-checkers…[except in cases where Casio or TI used copious quantities of hookers and blow to bribe the local school board into pushing graphing calcs on the students…hey, even teachers need their hookers and blow, plus there are worse things to push].

So I never felt it right to put down the various mass-sentence collection initiatives out there. And I still don’t. In fact, I think they’re a great thing in that they potentially reduce some gruntwork…To the extent they represent selfless, well-intentioned teamwork, I think they could well be a great thing.

But, they do not remove your responsibility to be selective. As the saying goes, you can delegate tasks but not responsibility. In fact, due to the quantity of pre-prepared sentences involved; the responsibility to be selective is only increased a thousandfold, no a myriadfold, no, as many folds as there are grains of sand in the eyelashes of all the camels in Japan, yazalami. Think about it — when you’re working by hand, you are limited by your time and ability to concentrate. But when the input’s already been done for you, the opportunities to fill your SRS with duds multiply by hundreds and maybe even thousands. So you must become a professional weeder.

For the purposes of SRSing, weeding/selectivity is a synonym for both “delete” and “do not insert in the first place” (although, the emphasis is on the “delete; there’s no need to bother avoiding mistakes if they can be corrected later for free). If you don’t like an item, throw it out. If an item looks at you wrong, throw it out. If you just can’t be bothered with an item…throw it out. If you feel “meaah”, throw it out. Even if you’re just a beginner but you sense there might be an error, throw it out. If your favorite sports team loses, throw it out. If you’re marching in the Army and you feel something funny, throw it out. Throw out sentences for cosmetic reasons. Don’t worry about false positives — there’s plenty more where those came from. You are precious; your enjoyment is precious; maybe even the process is precious, but the individual sentences are not.

Also…pre-mined sentences are definitely for outgrowing. Unless and until they start cutting sentence items with text and audio and video clips from authentic native sources. Funnily enough, this is starting to happen (this article has been in a half-written state for many months, so things change). iKnow are kinda sorta moving in this direction, and the new program subs2srs is a promising development.

Anyway, for now, it’s a fine, fine line. And you don’t need me to walk it for you; remember, I’m not a linguist or anything, I’m just the most handsome man on the entire Internet. So… have fun with it, and remember…the delete button is your friend.

Personally, I haven’t found pre-mined SRS items to carry enough of the je ne sais quoi weirdness that is the staple of my life…but this may be a temporary problem. Keep in mind that I am old man of sorts; I have my way of doing things now. It may just be the inertia of well-formed habit that keeps me doing things my way. Or it may in fact be the case that SRS cards that one makes oneself sit in the memory better, complete with the context in which the information was originally found — this lack of context definitely looms quite large. But, really, I don’t know.

Is the SRS alone enough? I want it to be. Fundamentally, I believe that every large problem can be solved through good systems…A good system gives us a way to connect tiny local actions into a larger global goal or solution. But in my experience with and observation of purely SRS-centric, low-immersion language learners, I have yet to see good results. I have seen people spin their wheels just dry-SRSing themselves into oblivion, avoiding immersion, with its rough edges and frequent lack of certainty, like a drunk salaryman on the train. I hesitate to hypothesize, but I think it’s safe to say that high-concentration, high-quantity exposure to engaging (=fun) native materials is a far better overall predictor of fluency than SRSing.

One thing that attracts me to SRSing is the feeling of quantitative progress. So I decided to find myself an easy way to get this feeling in areas other than SRSing. This month, I’m watching 100 unique Cantonese movies — not not counting repeats or other exposure materials such as the news, cartoons, regular TV shows, books and so on. I cut away boring parts ruthlessly. Some movies I repeat all day, some I sample, skip and skim through in one minute before discarding. But more on this in a future post.

As things stand right now, the immersion environment is still the foundation and center of the process. SRS acts like a glue and bridge. The SRS ensures that information from the environment is not lost, again acting as a sealing agent of sorts and a bridge into a more free-wheeling, on-the-fly enjoyment and use of the language [memorizing information can free up brain cycles you can then use for having more fun]. In any case, what’s real is the environment; the environment is the real world; real stuff by and for native users. If you run away from that, trying to escape to the comforting (?), sometimes familiarly school-like arms of your SRS, then you are, in a sense, running away from reality. Not to mention the fact that there are parts of every language that fall between the cracks of deliberate attempts to record and collect that language, but that are a very real everyday part of it. In no language does this seem more true than Japanese. Indeed, some Japanese people can seem intent on keeping you away from the language as it is actually used, but I imagine the same could be said of patronizing speakers of any language.

Or something. I am now theorizing. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Please don’t treat me like an authority, or imagine that I think I am one. The ultimate authority on your language process is you. Take advice, take in opinions, but know that in the present day and age, your best guide is your own process of play. Yes, play. Call it “trial and error”, if you want to feel more “grown-up” about it. But know that, really, it’s just play. Screwing around.

As an erudite forum critic of mine once pointed out that I don’t even follow my own advice. And it’s true: I don’t. Insofar as I am frequently making tweaks and changes to the sails of the ship in order to make better use of the winds of reality, I literally do not follow my own advice. Ultimately, there is no AJATT “system”, or at least I do not want there to be. I merely presented it as a system to make it easier to digest, to make it seem more concrete and less flaky, but what is ultimately more important than any detail of implementation is the idea that you can do this on your own, having fun, simply by becoming what you want to be Later by turning into it Right Here and Now — there are tools that can help you do this, but they’re all disposable, to be discarded the moment a truly superior alternative shows itself. Here, superiority is as much relative as it is absolute. A “superior” tool can’t just be objectively better, it must also fulfill certain subjective criteria.

Anyway, SRSing feels like it’s just now starting to take off…But, things are developing at an exciting pace. There may very soon come a day when a single product has all the tools in one box, everything you need for fluency in a language. But not yet. Not yet…Not freaking yet. I am many things, but I am not a Luddite; I honestly want everything to be in one box. But there is no such box. A lot of people with boxes want to tell you they have it. They don’t.

The SRS is easily one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. And this series has been about how to use an SRS. Abandoning the SRS altogether would be like, I dunno, throwing out one of the greatest (and yet, least used) educational tools of the last 100-150 odd years. It’s like abandoning electric lights because “they’re too bright and they cut me” — yeah, if you stare directly into them at point blank range, then you’ll just end up seeing stars, and if you crack the glass and rub the tungsten filaments on your naked eyeballs, it might itch a bit. And if you pour the mercury into your evening after-dinner libation and drink it, then, you might turn into a white kid who doesn’t like rap music. But if take those same electric lights, and shine them on books, then you can read the best comics in the very dead of night.

An SRS will simply harm and blind you if you don’t use it sensibly; if you try to beat yourself with it, it’ll hurt. But, used correctly, i.e. with judicious attention to fun and immersion, it can help bring you, at the very least, literacy in Japanese or Chinese or whatever else, in far less time and with far less effort than you ever thought possible.

So use one. Just don’t be used by one.

In my eagerness to give people an easy series of steps to follow, I fear I may have done the world a disservice. I use the SRS; I have it do work for me that I would otherwise have to do [dynamically sorting 15,000 paper flashcards into dated boxes? are you kidding me?]; it is my secretary; it schedules my reviews so I don’t have to. I wouldn’t walk into any language unarmed with an SRS. But for too many people SRSing has become the main course. For too many people…following the instructions on this site ever more accurately has become the main course. The problem is not so much with the individual actions as with the overall subtext of submission. Which makes me wonder…

Why do we so carefully pick out clothes, food and TV channels…but not ideas? Surely we can all agree to like Subway sandwiches, but decide to use different fillings and not get too worked up over the presence or absence of olives? If you want to know if the SRS card format you’re thinking of will work…why not just go and try playing with different formats? Play. There is no “fail” in “play”. Don’t ask me whether stuff will work; I don’t know and I don’t care. Don’t look for my approval or anyone else’s. Think about it — if I or anyone else thought what you were suggesting doing were correct, we would be doing it ourselves. Discovery (frequently? only?) happens where you go against what everyone is saying, go against the grain and into new territory. Don’t be afraid; don’t explain yourself; don’t argue; just go.

Did you know that whenever you ask me whether not doing something will work or not, a puppy dies of cancer? Again, think about it — if I’d spent my time experimenting with what happened when I didn’t do something, then the site would be called “Various Experiments Involving The Selective Exclusion Of One Or More Parameters In Self-Directed Acquisition of Japanese Dot Com”. But it isn’t; I had no time for that. The only technique I used was maximizing enjoyable Japanese exposure time such that it asymptotically approached 24 hours/day. That’s the only style I am “qualified”, as it were, to give advice on.

So do your own thing. Listen to your feelings. As Southern California as that sounds, really listen. When something is boring, either make it un-boring, or just don’t effen do it; it’s that simple: Do = No. Listen to your “FUNDAR” (Fun Detection And Ranging). Respect your own preferences. Don’t do crap you don’t feel like doing just because someone else says to. Choose. Keep what works, lose what doesn’t, and have fun no matter what. You can get the task of acquiring proficiency in a language done, anyone can. But you don’t have to suffer boredom to do it.

The tools and methods I mentioned on this site were and are heavily customized to my unique preferences and situation. I still think they will work for many, perhaps even most people. But if they don’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you have to give up; it doesn’t mean you have to eat Chocolate Frosted Whining Flakes for breakfast for the rest of your life; it doesn’t mean you have to make up a new theory about certain ethnic groups having fast-twitch muscles for language assimilation — it simply means that there’s a different path out there for you. Your task is to find or cut out that path. Only you can do this. And, no, the Whining Flakes will not give you energy for the journey, so you can leave them at home.

Remember: I did not use the SRS (or RTK, or whatever tool) because some Cosmic Law Written Down On Stone Tablets That I Done Picked Up On A Random Peninsularly-Situated Mountain In The Middle East required me to do so, I did it because it was, on balance, the simplest, laziest and funnest solution to a specific, persistent, overarching problem — memory decay. In other words, the tools filled a need. If you have no need, then you need no tool. In fact, I might as well tell you, I had originally thought of writing AJATT in a more gradual, oblique, “mysterious” way, where people would only be introduced to tools once they understood why they might need them. But it was easier to just lay it all out. In any case, if you don’t understand why things like SRS, RTK or RTH are useful, and you’re feeling oppressed by them, then do yourself a favor and don’t use them — no one’s forcing you to. A method cannot merely be quantitatively effective in order to “work”, it must also be qualitatively tolerable, or better yet, enjoyable. Go your own way, and you may discover methods you like better, that don’t involve these tools at all. Or you may struggle and stumble along and finally realize how cool these tools are. Or you may take a path somewhere down the middle, mixing and matching [I imagine a good number of people will fit in here].

Or something…I dunno…just quit asking me . Stop asking permission from people who never had the authority to give it to you in the first place; stop asking for directions from people who’ve never been there. In all likelihood, there are no directions and there is no road: you may just be the First. You’re on your own. Enjoy the freedom.

Thanks for reading, check back soon for the series finale.

This is part 6 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I don’t know about y’all, but…OK, first of all, I don’t even use “y’all” in actual conversation, so I don’t know why I insisted on writing it just now. Just…bear with me.

I don’t know about you, but…I found memory decay to be the biggest problem for me in language acquisition. I would learn stuff, only to forget it. My brain was like a leaky bucket. The SRS more-or-less plugged the hole for me. I don’t know if I’d have become literate in Japanese without it. It changed my life.

But it does get tiring…finding stuff, adding it, doing reps. No one’s denying that. This doesn’t, however, mean (I don’t think), that it’s time to throw the SRS out; just that it would be wise to change one’s usage patterns.

There exists in English the phrase “to throw the baby out with the bathwater”. The concept of throwing out babies with the bathwater was invented by the ancient Greeks, who invented everything, including architecture, thinking and pederasty. The Greeks held throwing out the baby with the bath water to be the highest expression of nambla, and the quest of every Greek citizen (free male). Aristotle in his namblogues writes that: “After having me some fun with the little boy, I kick that Macedonian tail[1] to the curb….with the bathwater”.

A problem many of us have is that, when we’re fatigued and a situation seems hopeless, we throw our hands in the air and just give up all control, letting ourselves fall into a downward spiral of helplessness-fueled un-productivity and escapism. I go through this a lot, so I know, bro. The saying goes: “you can give up control, but you can never give up responsibility”. If that is indeed, the case, then, it behooves us to not give up control in the first place. Remember what the guy said – every person is self-made, but only those who succeed are willing to admit it. No one wants to be on the sharp end of a quote like that!

So, if we’re responsible for the situation anyway, and we’re going to have to answer for the situation anyway, and we’re going to bear all the consequences of our actions anyway, we might as well turn things to our advantage right from the beginning.

What I do is use the 80-20 rule. Like I said, I get tired, too. I can’t safely run on caffeine and amphetamines like Paul Erdos. But I still want to “get ahead”, as it were. My technique is to go find the minority of work I can do that’ll give me the majority of the results I desire. When it comes to SRSing, that minority of work is this:

Take an SRS holiday. But not a total holiday. Just stop doing SRS additions. Stop adding items. Just do reps [and even then, not necessarily all reps – you could just timebox a few minutes a day; part of the key is to avoid doing nothing at all, because the psychological inertia that results can be a bit of a beast to overcome]. The holiday can be as long as you want. I’ve just come off a Cantonese SRS addition holiday that lasted a good two weeks and change. And I feel great. I kept enjoying my environment – I kept watching the TV and the movies and listening to the music – and I kept reviewing things added in the past, I just didn’t bother to add anything, even stuff I thought interesting enough to add. Maybe it’s not a perfect situation, but I think it’s a healthy imperfect situation.

Many personal development books will tell you that looking for lost things is one of the single largest time-wasters of all, and (rightly) recommend having “a place for everything and everything in its place”. As I see it, losing a memory isn’t all too different from losing one’s keys, iPod or tax files. Think of all the time you’re going to have to spend essentially re-learning from scratch[2], versus the time you could have spent just refreshing. That’s your time, and it’s never coming back again. You might as well spend it well. You might was well avoid forgetting in the first place.

So next time everything seems to be going to pot, a war is being lost abroad, and a Liberal Communist Muslim black man is president…rather than throw your hands up in defeat, try to see if you can’t make rice pudding out of the rice.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 7

[1]And that Macedonian tail, grew up to rule the entire planet. Madness, you say? *Chuckle*. This is Sparta, mofo.

[2] Whatever people might say about a memory never truly being lost, if it’s irretrievable, then it’s the same as being lost (or even never having been), and the time burden to relearn is the same as if you’d known nothing. Then again, I’m not a neuroscience expert right now, so you may want to take my homespun wisdom cum grano salis there.

This is part 5 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I’ve mentioned timeboxing many times before; it’s just one of those things that’s so useful you want everyone to try it. Timeboxing seems to be very beneficially lopsided in that it’s super simple and super useful on the one hand, while also being difficult (although, like anything, probably not impossible) to abuse, since it is both flexible and inherently self-limiting.

Some people (one person) I know have suggested that timeboxing is only necessary because so many of us are so completely out of touch with our own feelings — and by “feelings”, I mean women and minorities — and preferences, having experienced so much forced activity from an early age. In Japanese, those people are usually called “hippies”. LoL. No, I definitely think that they (she) may be right; it’s a compelling idea, though kind of outside the scope of what I want to share here.

The actual mechanics of timeboxing are painfully simple. You simply limit an activity to a preset time of your choosing. All you need is a timer of some sort; I have a trusty pair of kitchen timers I use that are super easy to set and reset, with shortcut buttons for setting 10 minutes, 10 seconds, 1 minute, and cetera.

Timeboxing seems to be at the root of much of the mystery as to why people are able to do crap jobs for other people’s benefit but won’t even tidy their own bedrooms (as discussed here); many people get timeboxed in their daily lives at schools and offices, but few people ever take the controls for themselves.

OK, enough intellectually lazy social theory already. Let’s just discuss the benefits of timeboxing, for the uninitiated. This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the cool things timeboxing has done for me:

• Timeboxing helps you quit while you’re ahead — it’s fine to work to exhaustion sometimes, but always working on certain tasks to exhaustion will (subconsciously) plant in your mind the idea that the task is exhausting, which will make you not want to do it.
• In a related vein, timeboxing helps you make efficient use of energy. What I mean is, sometimes you don’t have the energy to go through 100 reps in one setting. But who says you have to? Maybe you only have the energy to do 120 seconds of reps. So timebox a 2-minute block!
• There are at least two basic types of procrastination. Timeboxing can help prevent both.
  • Evasive procrastination. This is where you simply don’t touch the task at all. Timeboxing can help you see past the fear and dread (in this sense, it’s actually getting you out of touch with your feeling), past the negative images of endless work, by giving things a concrete, relatively low time limit. You could say that timeboxing is a like an enzyme — a catalyst — bringing two substrates (you and your work) together, lowering the psychological “activation energy” needed to get the “chemical reaction” that is you working on task, to start up. This is the little biochemistry that I remember, so it may be wrong and/or outdated, hmm…
  • Working procrastination. This is where you’re doing the job, but you’re doing it slowly because you think it’s going to take a long time. It’s weird, people tend to work faster on a task the shorter they expect it to be: the effort they put in is inversely proportional to how much effort they think is needed; it must be an overactive self-preservation behavior — sort of a “why sprint in a marathon?” type thing. Anyway, timeboxing makes things shorter in both perception and actuality, and therefore helps you work faster.
• In concrete terms of SRSing, timeboxing has led me to play a number of different kinds of “racing” games.
  • In one version, I try to see how many reps I can do in 2 minutes; I sometimes repeat this game over and over, until suddenly I “run out” of reps!
  • In other versions, I try to complete the entire day’s set in 30 minutes, or get halfway in 15 minutes. Even if I don’t make it, the momentum/inertia keeps me going further…but sssssssssshhhh! Don’t tell my subconscious that; it’s not supposed to know.
  • Late update: I’m playing a new timeboxing game in which I have my SRS scheduled to automatically come up about once every 45-60 minutes, at which point I work on it for 1-2 minutes, sometimes longer if I feel like it, sometimes shorter. So, on days when I don’t have the strength to do all my SRSing in one sitting, I just split it up into tiny, unnoticeable chunks. What might have been a chore has now become a game, even a way to take a break from a different task. Sometimes I do actually have the strength and desire to do a whole day’s reps in one sitting, though…
• Indecision. I used to have major problems with indecision. Be it something big like buying a new major peripheral fer me computey, or choosing whut bloggin’ softweer to use fer me websoight, or something small like picking a treat at the convenience store. Then, between reading Steve Pavlina and figuring things out for myself, it dawned on me: if there’s room for you to be indecisive about a task, then the task itself may very well not matter that much. Think about it — you wouldn’t think twice about breathing air, or killing zombies, because it matters, you’ve got to breathe air otherwise a clown will die and your face will stick. But if you’re at a convenience store and you’re up in the air about whether to get soymilk or apple juice, maybe you should get neither. Or, maybe it doesn’t matter whichone you get, it just matters that you get one in very finite amount of time and not give yourself an ulcer over it. More examples:
  • Picking omiyage (souvenirs) for friends back home; it’s easy to spend hours choosing a stupid souvenir. When we went to Korea last month, Momoko and I gave ourselves ~15 minutes to find a shop and 15 minutes to pick souvenirs for all our friends who knew we’d gone. Half an hour to do a task that could have been OCDed into a daylong ordeal of hesitation, regret and backtracking (“hey, maybe we should’ve gotten the thing at that shop we were at that’s now a 3-hour train ride from here?!”).
  • Picking an apartment. You could spend the rest of your life picking an apartment in Japan. After all, new properties are forever coming in and out of existence. This had been the solemn admonition of a Japanese friend back in the US, who, interestingly, was getting his MBA, learning to be an executive, and so was probably very much into decisiveness. Taking his advice, I knew some merciless decision-making was necessary. I made some hard conditions:
    1. The apartment had to be a direct commute (no train changes) from my company at the time.
    2. There had to be greenery nearby.
    3. The rent had to be at or below a certain number, anything even 1 cent over was out.
    4. The water pressure had to be good, because MY TURDS ARE BIG
    5. The size had to be at or above a certain number of square meters
    6. It had to allow pets, and
    7. I had to feel like going there to look at — I figured that if I couldn’t be bothered to go take a look at a place, there’s no way I’d want to live there.
    • From that point on, all it took was a 10-minute phone conversation with the then-future-spouse to decide between the last two candidates. It took me 7 days to pick and move into my apartment when I first came to Japan. My colleagues were shocked: “give it more time”, they wailed, “give it a least a month or two”, they cajoled. All they could see was a fresh-faced, over-optimistic newbie who didn’t know what he was doing. All I could see was an invitation letter to do graduate work at Indecision University. I still live in that apartment, and I still like it. So do my two cats.

And it’s all thanks to timeboxing. So, sometimes a task doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes the sun goes round the moon — no it doesn’t, Vanessa Williams! Sometimes, it just matters that it be done and gotten over with. Most of the hand-wringing isn’t actually essential to the decision, nor does it actually optimize the final decision, it’s just a behavior many of us have fallen into to make ourselves and others feel better since we have this idea that “I took a long time and gave myself a lot of stress and emotional pain and engaged in much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in making this choice, ipso facto it must be an optimal choice, since the quality of a choice is directly proportional to the agony that went into it”.

I am not advocating recklessness; I am, in fact, advocating pragmatism. Worrying about something does not make a decision better. Verily, I submit to you that wasting your time and life worrying about what Kwanzaa gift to get your friends in Japan is the ultimate recklessness. Now, sometimes…sometimes…it’s good to “sleep on something” for days, weeks, even months — for example, when I had to come out to my family about being gay, black, Jewish, and Republican on the same day — but most of the time it isn’t; most of the time, that’s just procrastination. Most of the time, you just need to collect relevant domain information as quickly as possible, mix some logic here, some gut feeling there, maybe get some advice (not orders…too many people are looking to be ordered around because that’s just so much easier — take advice, not orders) and just pick, just go. Realize that you don’t have the whole world on your shoulders, you’re not curing cancer and Superman is not going to die because of this, and just get on with life; you’ve got buttocks to scratch and chocolate soymilk to drink, don’t let things like “decision-making” get in the way of that.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 6

Forgive me…I was watching Resident Biohazard III while writing this.

This is part 4 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

I know how it is, bro[1]. You meet a sentence, you fall in love. You want to be with each other all the time. You laugh at each other’s jokes, you talk for hours, you make out for days (of reps?), you get married and have six children, but then one day, you discover that that sentence…has man hands.

What do you do? The only thing you can do.

Divorce. I mean delete! DELETE! Delete the sentence. Expect to have to delete sentences. I mean, think about it. Think about what not deleting sentences implies about your learning process – it implies that you make 100% perfect item entry decisions on the front end. But, statistically, that simply won’t be the case. Typos, bad judgment, bad writing and misunderstanding do creep in. Not to mention radical change of interests.

Expect to have to delete many of the items you enter. In fact, revel in it. Revel in the weeding. Get that sh…spiel – get that spiel out of the garden of your collection so that the true flowers can flourish. Get it out. Gone. Out. Out. Out. Dude, delete preemptively – you can always undelete…maybe. From now on this is your motto:

If in doubt, throw it out.

Wondering whether or not to delete this sentence? That’s an automatic delete right there; if you are genuinely wondering, if the thought of getting rid of that item occurred to you in a meaningful way and for any appreciable amount of time, then trash that noss. Anyway, don’t think too hard – when it’s time for deleting, you’ll know.

It is natural and normal to have to chuck stuff out, even a lot of stuff. It is only unnatural and abnormal to act as if everything’s OK when in fact your SRS collection is full of leeches and duds that are too obtuse or too obscure or too long or too irrelevant or too I-don’t-give-a-darn or actually just plain bad freaking writing. Trust me, I have been there.

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This concludes our subliminal message transmission.

Many people turn this SRSing thing into a numbers game, and they avoid deleting items because that seems like “falling back”. And, you know, it’s not about the numbers. And that’s coming from me, the biggest number-loving numberlover to ever walk the earth. I love the stats about myself. They’re cool to look at. But they are not the object of the game. Hello? Language, son. You know, ironically enough, deleting items – letting go of the numbers game – can actually give you better numbers and better real-world performance, minus the stress. Deleting dud items will make you want to do reps more, causing you to do more reps, etc. This is a concept I am just newly discovering for myself in this and other aspects of my life. Last month, I sold off like half of my library to Book-Off; now I have less books…but I’m reading more than ever because now all my books are ones that I genuinely want to read, not books I think I ought to read. My bookshelf is now a place of joyful, educational escape and growth, far more entertaining than randomly chosen TV[2]. Wow, the word “joyful” makes me sound like such a wuss. What I meant to say is: “it’s DOPE when I see all my kanjis on the dancefloor-slash-page lined up in meaningful strings, yo!”

And another thing! This deletion thing applies not only to item that are already in your SRS, but also to items that you were planning to put in. Perhaps you read a book and marked it up. Perhaps you collect interesting kanji or phrases in a notebook. But you can’t be bothered to go enter them. And you know what — there’s no need to feel guilty about that. What the heck, son — this language learning process wasn’t intended to turn your life into data entry clerkdom. But at the same time, you don’t want to waste all that precious marking up you did, right? The/a solution is this: throw away most of what you marked up — 95% or more, just fuhgeddabout it. Do go back through the things you marked up or collected, but for any given would-be item, if you don’t “feel it”, if you don’t feel “yeah, let’s go to the trouble of making an SRS item for this”, then don’t freaking bother. Don’t worry about not getting as much “bang for your buck” on each book or movie or whatever: remember, the beauty of learning sentences is that you actually pick up a lot of information simultaneously as it is (vocabulary, grammar, usage, prounciation, intonation, ryhthm), so chucking away some or even most sentences is not going to hurt you, since much of the information they contained can be picked up incidentally elsewhere. So “if in doubt, throw it out”, and “if borin’, don’t put it in“. I have notebook upon notebook of stuff I was going to enter that I never bothered too. And the language fairy still hasn’t struck me down with lightning. Remember that Pareto principle or whatever you call it — the majority of stuff simply isn’t worth bothering with in the first place, and this was never truer than with sentences.

Now that I think about it, it strikes me that this is what I really meant when I first used the term “sentence mining”. My intention wasn’t to establish a link with “data mining”, which involves directly amassing and storing huuuuge amounts of crud. No, I was shooting for acutal, physical, mining. Because in mining, say, diamonds, the object is, well, DIAMONDS. Gems. Valuable sheez. A lot of soil gets chucked away, all for a very, very, few clear, shiny rocks. Think how much (miningwise) useless soil gets thrown the heck away just for one diamond? I don’t know the numbers, but I imagine the imbalance is obscenely large. Similarly, you’re going to be “digging through” — watching and reading — vast quantities of Japanese and hitting only a very few “diamond sentences”, i.e. SRS entry-worthy sentences.  Having said all that, I still think the term “sentence picking” is much better: the berry-picking image is cooler, and there’s also this idea that a sentence that isn’t ripe now may become ripe later [theoretically, I guess this could be said of mining as well, but only on geological timescales…are you enjoying the sight of someone tangled up in his own metaphors like unto an earphone cord?].

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 5

P.S. Do not EVER, EVER, E-V-E-R take actual relationship advice from me…

P.P.S. See P.S. for details.

[1]And I mean that the way black people say it, ‘coz I think it’s more meaningful.

[2] I’m not one of those people who likes to put down new media. I like the work of folk like Neil Postman, it’s just that they’re a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit more nostalgic about 18^th century American life than seems altogether warranted. After all, that supposedly thoughtful, bookish society had slavery, no women’s suffrage, enforced illiteracy and a tenuous relationship with bathing. But I digress. The point is, I found myself reading incredibly little (and watching TV even though it was boring), particularly considering the fact that I had made a point of becoming literate in Japanese; this bothered me a lot and sent me into a flurry of worry about what kind of human being I was if I had literacy but was not using it beyond minor daily necessities.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

“Khatzumoto, where am I supposed to find [good] sentences?”

This question is the most annoying sh…spiel. In the world. Double-u Tee Eff. IN JAPANESE STUFF, 呆(you)け( egit)! It’s there. It’s all freaking there!

OK, wait, I’m calm. Deep. Breath. Hippie friends who light incense. I’m calm. It’s all good. This wasn’t meant to be a rant about people who very kindly come to read this site but don’t bother to also turn their brains on.

I guess it’s a legitimate question, if by “legitimate” you mean pharking stupi…wait, OK, calm…incense…yoga…puppies…blood…death — argh! No!

What I’m trying to say is this. Don’t go looking for sentences. “What? Whaddyamean?”. That’s right, don’t go looking for them. [By the way, this is especially-though-not-exclusively aimed at people who have more than about 100-500 (ballpark figures) sentences in their SRS, rather than complete sentence beginners — complete beginners should be kanjiing it up or something anyhow — plus, when you’re first starting out, you’re just taking what you can and it all seems good, but very soon you get to a level where you can choose; it is at this level that you will spend the rest of your life and that’s why its crucial that you be selective]. So, yeah:

Do not look for sentences, let them find you instead.

“What the faux-Eastern philosophy are you talking about, かっちゃん(Khatzumoto)?”, say you. Look, I’m not trying to be deep here; I’m just telling it how it is. When that sentence is ripe and ready and wants to be found, it’ll come find you. It’ll be there. You’ll want that sentence so bad that there shall be no クエスチョン(question), no doubt, no uncertainty, no tergiversation about cracking open your SRS and putting that mother in. I’m sure you’ve all had this experience before; all I’ m suggesting you do is make this experience a pre-condition for entry into your SRS collections. It’s your SRS collection after all, so you be the bouncer. You don’t have to let items in because they’re “good for you”, any more than you have to let people into your house because it’d be “good for you”. Let in the ones you like, the rest can stay out…there’s an immigration joke in there somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to go looking for it. All I know is, those foreigners keep taking all our women and jobs.

Anyway, what’s really cool about this “you call me” pre-condition is that it seems to bias you toward watching and reading stuff that you actually care enough about to pick sentences from, which is really win-win. Doing more fun things leads to more time in target language which of course leads to fluency sooner; more fun items lead to more desire to SRS [within limits], which leads to more fluency sooner. You get more, all ironically attained by doing “less”, in a sense.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 4!

This is part 2 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

At the risk of repeating myself, while sentences seem central to the so-called AJATT method, and while they represent a move away from the so-called “traditional” vocabulary-and-grammar approach, I don’t see them as the so-called core per se. The actual process as I saw and implement(ed) it centered around having fun. FUN.

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In fact, this whole thing is so all about fun that something with “fun” in it was one of the original domain name candidates. (When you see a word too many times, doesn’t it start to sound weird?) I don’t know why I picked something as long and unwieldy as alljapaneseallthetime, but there you go. FUN. FUN is so central to this that for a while there I was toying with making it like the closing line of every blog post, kind of like how Tony Robbins goes: “live with passion”, and Steve Pavlina goes: “live consciously” and Captain Planet goes: “the power is yours”, and Catholic priests go: “don’t cry, it’s just the special way Daddy loves you”. Get this etched into your head:

No fun = No good.

No, really. If it is not fun, stop now. STOP. STOP!!!

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Stop and either change to something else or figure out a way to make it fun. When you get down to it, this is something that may require getting back in touch with your feelings. I know, sounds gay. And by “gay”, I mean black people and Jews. Many schooled people have grown numb to their own desires, interests and lifestyle patterns – that’ll happen after years of being forced to do boring things with a roomful of other prisoners. You’re so used to “no pain no gain” and just pressing through. Stop. That crap works when other people are forcing you to do something, but it just won’t fly – not for long, anyway – when you’re in charge.

If you’re bored/tired, stop entering items. If you’re bored/tired, stop doing reps. If you’re bored/tired stop reading that book or watching that movie. WTF, man, what are you doing? Watching a movie that’s boring you, are you insane? Stop, OK? Mmmm kay? This is not a failure. This doesn’t mean SRSing “doesn’t work” or “isn’t for you” and it doesn’t mean that you’re “lazy” or “undisciplined”. It just means there are limits to your concentration, limits to how long you can run that little head-engine of yours in SRS gear. Very real limits. Lower than you wish. But don’t worry, after some rest, you’ll be ready again. Stay in the language, just do something else.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 3!

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on smoother SRSing.

Word! Alliteration, son! It’s in the air and the power is yours!

…That was awkward.

So, anyway, a lot of people have been going insane in the membrane with SRS stress. Some have even gone on to write weird introductions to blog posts (go figure, eh?)…And some people (including me) even get tense when they study.

I know what you’re thinking: “Khatzumoto gets tense?! Dag, yo, I thought that only happened to pretty white kids with problems“. Me, too man. Me, too.

So, yeah, I had this tension, and I know other people have it as well. Thus, I wrote up some tips for you to help SRSing go more smoothly and happilyly. Checkerachyo!!

The SRS is a servant not a master. That’s right; SRS were developed to serve you. To help you. To free you from the burden of relearning forgotten things, and scheduling your own reviews.

Unfortunately, however, most of us have been to school, which means we’re used to being slaves. That’s right, I said it: school is a form of slavery — a very lite form, low in calories and sodium — but a form nonetheless. People tell you what to wear, what to read, where to be, when to talk, what to talk about, what words to use, when to shut up, when to eat, when to stand, when to sit down, when to move, when to sit still, when to pee, when to pooh, and can enforce their will through physical violence, emotional battery and even legal measures: it’s slavery…or at the very least prison. “Slavery” might be a bit hyperbolic, but it’s not far off the mark (?).

Anyway! The thing about slavery is that, like the elephant in this oft-repeated anecdote, the real enslaving is not physical but mental. You can unlock someone’s handcuffs but if her mind is still in chains you might as well not bother…type thing. You can take a man out of the ghetto but you can’t take the trackers out of a BitTorrent file yada yada. The same thing happens with a lot of prison inmates: these men, and they are often men, would do anything to bust out of that prison while they were in it, but once they get out, they’re so unused to their freedom that many consciously or unconsciously choose to return to jail — I don’t know whether this is actually true or not, but it was in Shawshank Redemption, so it’s gotta be true. Wow, I love blogging…no one to dock you points for not quoting proper sources.

Mmm, and so, many AJATTeers put themselves in the position of slave to their SRS. They try to turn AJATT into school all over again. And it’s not just their fault, nor even school’s fault, nor is it the fault of “society”. No, kids, the culprit here is Khatzumoto. I’m the one who started AJATT off in the direction of 10,000 sentences, so much so that some sites even call this the “10,000 sentences method“[1]. Having said that, there are at least two good (?) reasons why I did it:

(i) Sentences, even 10,000 of them, are a clear, concise, quantifiable thing to aim for. It’s something you can sort of “see”; it’s a tangible goal; it’s all nice and pre-reified; the SRS even records stats and crap for you. In short, it’s almost everything that our current education system sets up as valuable.

(ii) Before writing AJATT, I had shared the methods I was using for learning Japanese; whenever someone was interested I would just tell them what I was doing, or maybe shoot them a quick email. One thing I noticed was that people seemed very reticent about adopting the SRS. I felt then and continue to feel now that the SRS was key, in terms of allowing me to acquire and sustain literacy in Japanese in such a relatively short time with so relatively little effort. So, I purposely went in strong on SRS promotion.

And the people loved it. And they went collecting sentences like their lives depended on it. At the time, this didn’t bother me at all. There were hints that something bad was going on, but at the time it just seemed like healthy enthusiasm. I didn’t even begin to realize a tragedy was underway until I was myself suffering emotionally in my Chinese Project — despite apparently using the same methods as I had in Japanese — methods that had given me so much success and joy. [The truth is that I was trying to ram Mandarin Chinese into my brain through massive, deliberate, dry, joyless sentence collection; I just bought books full of Japanese-Chinese sentences and tried to cram then in. While this is probably physically possible, it is also more boring than Baroque music…yeah, I said it: Baroque music is boring and your mother was a woman! Wanna fight, stitch?]. What really brought the situation front and center to my attention, though, was the extensive, lucid and inspiring writing about this that’s been going on at the blog of Feed Me Japanese (especially this article). That site is the reason I’m writing this today, and in a sense I am re-appropriating Khalid’s message, which is Swahili for “stealing his ideas in broad daylight but it’s all good coz the words are different”…hehe. Khalid really hits the metal object on the head with this one:

“The implication for people who are searching for these sentence collections is that there is an ‘ideal’ set of sentences and if you drill those in your head, you’ll know Japanese. […] But, unless I’m missing something, Khatzumoto didn’t have sentence collections, he collected sentences from everything he saw and read in Japanese[2]. 10,000 sentences was a natural product of what he did, not the purpose.”

OK, so one root cause of the sentence-collection-binging phenomenon was my own initial focus on sentences[3]. Nevertheless, there is still a clue as to what AJATT is truly all about, and it lies in the title of the site: “all Japanese all the time”. At its core, this method was and is about a mental change of identity and a physical change of lifestyle. Everything else was merely to aid that and perhaps increase efficiency without killing fun.

You probably think I’m insane anyway so this shouldn’t weird you out too much — I very frequently imagined myself as a Japanese-raised child. Not “haha, it’s like being a Japanese child”. No, I pretended to BE Japanese. Metaphor, not simile. BUT, this wasn’t about wanting to find a new identity for myself — a place to “belong”, nyah nyah nyah nyah touchy-feely California stuff — too many people confuse it for that; they worry that are or they will somehow “lose themselves”[4]. No. There was a very real, very hardcore, very un-touchy, un-feely reason for all this role-playing. It is something we all know intuitively but which only relatively recently came to me in the form of words. And the cheat code to R.L. iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis:

Adults act according to their identity rather than their ability.

In the vernacular — people achieve what they think they can achieve rather than what they are actually capable of achieving. Now, a Japanese child is expected to achieve fluency in written and spoken Japanese as a matter of course, no matter how much she may currently suck at it. It is for this reason that I chose the identity of a Japanese child when learning Japanese hardcore. Japanese language skill is expected of Japanese people the way boyish humor is expected of Adam Sandler. I merely availed myself of a hearty piece of this Pygmalion Effect-type phenomenon. I turned myself and my life into a self-fulfilling prophecy of Japanese fluency.

Which is all well and good, but imagine if that had been front-and-center when AJATT was first launched. I don’t think it would have worked; it’s just a little too ethereal, I think. Too…esoteric? Too abstract? Or maybe I’m not giving myself and other people enough credit. I dunno…concrete methods just seem more comforting, more obvious, more ripe for action. But, this idea of “don’t learn Japanese — become Japanese — be Japanese[5]”; this is central to the method/methods discussed on this site. The target language is no longer something you do, it is something you are; it’s practically the air you breathe. There is no spoon. I’m sure there are more efficient/effective ways out there, but I haven’t really seen them yet.

Anyway, don’t be taken in by any hints you may get (even from me) about discipline and consistency and commitment and all those other lame-a$$ abstract nouns[6]. When you get down to it, this method is all about having fun and just being…just chilling. I didn’t “work hard”; I didn’t really “sacrifice” to learn Japanese; I made a lifestyle choice and let the consequences of that choice run their natural course, because Japanese fluency is an inevitable result of a real and sustained Japanese environment; once you get your ducks in a row most of it is simply coasting. Dude, most of the time all I did was listen to Rip Slyme, shop on Amazon.jp and download stuff online; you’re not supposed to spend 24 hours a day attached to your SRS deck like unto an umbilical chord. No…What, do you want to be bored to tears? Do you think you’re supposed to be bored to tears? Well let me lay it down here once and for all:

If it is not fun, then it is not of AJATT.

I know. I know it’s hard to let go of work and pain and struggling. But you need to let go. For your own good — for the good of your Japanese — you must let go. I want you to go out and get an addiction. Get several. Get addicted to an artist or show or video game or chat site or book series or movie in Japanese/whatever your target language is. Momoko’s Japanese really started booming when she got hooked on Trick and Gintama. She does them aaaaalll the time; she’s got the anime of the drama of the manga of the website of the book; the jokes she tells are Trick jokes; the food she eats is stuff she’s seen the characters on Trick eat; and the other day she even had the temerity to tell me to go dye my hair silver since: “you already have a natural perm”. Hmm…

Back in the day, I, too, was “hooked” on all sorts of things — Stargate SG-1, Star Trek, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Dragon Ash, Rip Slyme — all in Japanese of course. Go get hooked. So hooked that your enjoyment of what you do understand (however little that may be) eclipses all your anxiety about “ohhh, this is so hard”, “ohhhh, but there’s so much I don’t know yet”, “ohhh, will I ever get done?”, “ohhhh, but I’m too old and not Asian enough!”, “and so on and so forth!”.

You’re Japanese, remember? Act like it, この(mother)野郎(lover)！

Of course continue to use your SRS. I mean, duh, who wants to forget stuff, right? Just be sure to use it rather than be used by it. Rule of thumb: it’s like watching TV — when it gets bahrin’, yah change th’ channel.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for the next installment: part 2!

[1]I don’t have a problem with that as such…collecting sentences is a major “active activity” of the process, but the major “passive-activity” (and the primary activity in terms of total time) is not sentence collection but merely being in and enjoying a location-independent immersion environment — i.e. making a little Japan/whatever, wherever you are. One simply can’t be in sentence-collecting mode 24/7 or even 18/7 or even 12/7: 1/7 or 2/7 (3+/7 on a really, really good day and) is probably tops in terms of many people’s ability to concentrate and give active attention to something, at least it is for me.

[2] Yeah! Of course, as long as I felt like it…:)

[3] A more fundamental root cause may lie in the fact that I don’t actually know why AJATT works. Not really. Like I kind of have these ideas — a bit of Krashen here, a bit of AntiMoon there, my own childhood experiences of both loss and acquisition of language, intense casual observation of other people’s children before the parents get weirded out — but it’s all very vague, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend to you that I know it all and have it all figured out. And then again, I don’t really care thaaat much why it all works, like, it’d be cool to know, but mostly I just care how I can best go about doing this. I figure my peepz Pinker, Krashen and Chomsky can go work out the whys for me while I sit here eating peanuts and watching Evangelion…gotta get my geli on, you know. Yeah…so…not knowing why…

[4] Which is goofy! You are not who you are just because of the nationality and location of the uterus you grew in, nor because of the media you watch and listen to. You’re you, and if all those things were to disappear tomorrow, you would still be you. Put another way — what’s to stop being a native-level user of Japanese from being just as much a part of your identity as your liking Green Day [it’s always kids you who like Green Day that have this identity fetish]? The fact that you were over the age of 12 when you started it? Come on, man…

[5] And if someone comes and accuses you of being Blasian or Wasian or Asian-but-too-Asian, tell him his mother’s a woman!

[6] You know, for a while, this site used to bug me. What I mean is, it felt like it was two sites in one. One site was happy and friendly, and the other site was violently macho and in-your-face and people would be all “This is madness!”, and then I’d be all: “This is AJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATT!”). I had trouble reconciling these two sides. Fortunately, I have realized the magic glue. And it is this: fun. I guess I knew it all along, but at the same time, I didn’t know.

Have fun. In Japanese. If you’re having fun, the dedication will take care of itself. Notice when you’re bored and act quickly to get back to fun.

First of all, an admission of guilt.

I have misled you.

In some of my SRS item examples, I have shown some reeeeeeeearry long sentences.

Wait, hold on, Kung Fu Hustle is on, and its the final fight against the Axe Gang and the frog guy. BRB…

…I love when he kicks the guys and it makes a bell-ringing sound…

K, I’m back. Yeah, so it’s all my fault. Part of it has to do with the fact that Japanese has the structural power to handle the creation of very long sentences. Since it doesn’t require the repetition and restatement of pronouns (what one might call “subjects” in English), it can create multiple, clause-length modifiers for a single “subject”, without confusing the reader. Or something like that, I dunno — I read this in a book about Japanese (a Japanese one, of course).

So, like, at some level, I thought it would be good for me to put long sentences in the SRS. Also, I probably wanted to show off that I could handle it, you know, prove how leet I was — I don’t like doing this as much as it may seem, but this is a website about how you can get reeeeeeeearry good at Japanese, so some amount of “demonstration” is probably a necessity.

Anyway, I was wrong.

Shorter Items

SRS sentence items. Yes they should be sentences, but you must kiss. That’s right, make out more. Get the tongue in there and…NO! I mean KISS: Keep It Short and Sweet. Sentences, yes; books, no. Break up long sentences if you must, I find that commas, pronouns, and particles/prepositions generally represent a good breaking point. If there is no clean, natural breaking point, then perhaps just break by length. Either way, you may or may not want to use ellipsis marks (…, ・・・) to mark your break. You might also consider incuding the original, full-length sentence in the answer section, for reference.

Right now (June 2008), I have an absolute hard upper limit of 10 characters on my Chinese sentence items, with most items being 6-8 characters long. It’s a bit more fluid for Japanese, but a hard upper limit 30 characters (kanji-kana mix), with most items being 10-15 characters long, seems about right. Earlier in your journey, you might want to go for even shorter Japanese sentences, in the 5-10 character range.

Remember: a long sentence is nothing but a bunch of short sentences stuck together. And even if a sentence looks simple, sometimes you need to make it even simpler for yourself.

Here are some examples, mostly from Momoko (source sentence and resultant sentence only shown):

• Source Sentence: 「マハティールとアブドラの対立は激しさを増し、マハティールは５月１９日、自分が３０年かけて作ってきたＵＭＮＯを脫退し「アブドラが辭めないかぎり復黨しない」と捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Resultant Sentence:「捨てぜりふを発した。」
• Quoted From: Tanaka News, 國父の深謀

• Source Sentence: 「中村によると、我々の現代社會は『準備社會』だ。」
• Resultant Sentence:「現代社會は『準備社會』だ。」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 『「もう、今を犠牲にするのはやめよう」という彼らの感覚は、必ずしも「今さえ良ければそれでイイ」という投げ槍な剎那主義と同じではない筈だ』
• Resultant Sentence:「必ずしも・・・投げ槍な剎那主義と同じではない」
• Quoted From: スロー・イズ・ビューティフル―遅さとしての文化

• Source Sentence: 「 21世紀初期，先進機械人的發展步伐越來越快，其中日本更是機械人科技的領導者。」
• Resultant Sentence:「先進機械人的發展步伐・・・」
• Resultant Sentence:「發展步伐越來越快」
• Resultant Sentence:「其中日本更是・・・領導者。」
• Quoted From: 2077日本鎖國

• Source Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見ると、岩の割れ目の中から泣き聲が聞こえて來ます」
• Resultant Sentence:「アンパンマンが島に下りて見る」
• Resultant Sentence:「泣き聲が聞こえて來ます」
• Quoted From: アンパンマンとあおばひめ

Delete (or Edit)

Sucky sentence items. They’re different for everyone. But everyone has them. You’ll know them when you see them. You’ll feel it. The dread. I see you looking at that sentence item. Yeah, you struggled to find it. Yeah, you entered it. Yeah, it seems important to know. But you know what? You’ve gone your entire life up to now not knowing that sentence; if it really matters, it’ll come up again. Right now, all it’s doing is sucking up your time and energy. Remember, you want to get QUANTITY of repetitions here. An item that’s sucky is a weed — feeding off the nutrients intended for all the other sentences. Delete it. Edit it if you really feel like it. But if editing feels like a waste of time, and for me it often does, then deletion is definitely the way to go.

Think of deletion as pruning or weeding — cleaning out a minority of overly burdensome items so that the majority can flourish. With sentence items, utilitarianism really works: the greatest good for the greatest number.

Length is not the only reason to delete a sentence item. Sentence items you just don’t quite “get”, or that you’re afraid might be wrong or awkward, also make good candidates for deletion.

This is Supposed to be Fun

Remember, sentences is not S&M. If it hurts, then it’s bad. No means no. Doing sentences should be like…popping bubblewrap. Requiring conscious effort, while being relatively easy and SUPER satisfying. Not to mention begging for repetition in an almost addictive way (addiction’s not the problem — it’s the object of addiction that matters). Doing sentences should make you feel like doing other sentences. If it doesn’t, then be aware that the fault probably lies neither with you nor with the language in question, but in individual items causing you dread. Get rid of them like you did your ’80s clothes.

A few days ago, a reader of this site sent me this email:

The problem I’m having is that it takes me an awfully long time to add these sentences. Even when I just copy and paste them from the Yahoo dictionary into a Word document for later transferral to Mnemosyne – it takes ages! I use the Rikaichan Firefox extension to learn the readings before I can type up the kana answers to the sentences and then I add in the English translation because I’m not up to Japanese-Japanese interpretations yet.

So, I was wondering, do you know of any techniques to speed up this process — is there any program you use that makes formatting all the data an easier process? Do you enter all your question and answer sentences straight into your flash card program?

As enjoyable, effective and simple the 10,000 sentences method must be – the work thus far of adding all these sentences is horribly boring and repetitive and slow. So, any suggestions?

With the length of time I’ve been doing Japanese sentences, a lot of the process has become unconscious to me. And somehow, I never get bored with it, nor find it slow and repetitive repetitive. So, a while ago, I would have told this kid to suck it up. But, now that I’m on the Chinese project, I have tasted this, this, “boredom” thing people speak of. But I have found out a way to overcome the boredom, restore fun to sentence-collecting, and bring balance to the Force. Here is my advice for making your study more enjoyable:

1. We’ve been calling the process “sentence-mining”. Looking back, it was fun sort of coining a new, cool-sounding phrase, but unfortunately, it’s a misnomer. Mining is so industrial, so rough, like carpet-bombing and massive smoke stacks. So not Toyota Prius. A better name would be sentence-picking, or even clause-picking or phrase-picking (since you don’t necessarily have to pick an entire sentence). Picking. You know, like berries — you go for the big, red/purple juicy, ripe, sweet ones. Mmmm…Remember, selectivity is key. Your goal is not to collect every sentence to which you have access, your goal is to collect sentences that are interesting to you. Think of it like baseball cards or stamps: unlike Pokemons, you don’t have to get them all. You only want the cool ones. Only pick sentences that are interesting to you at that moment. Only pick sentences that contain something you REALLY, ACTIVELY want to learn immediately. Not something you think you “should” learn. Not something that you think you “have to” learn. But something you really really really want to learn RIGHT NOW. RIGHT HERE. Those are the sentences you should pick to enter into your SRS. There are too many sentences even in a single dictionary for you to pick them all. Only pick the ones you care about right then. And feel free to change your mind — maybe yesterday, you wanted to learn that sentence, but today you can’t be bothered. Throw it out, find something cooler, and enter that cooler sentence into your SRS.

I can hear the complaints already: “but Khatzumoto, if I only learn what I want to know, how will I learn what I need to know???”. Trust me. By learning what you want to know, what you need to know will come naturally. I mean it. You can go through the entire process only learning things you want to learn and still succeed: I did. In fact, the best path to success I know is the path of most enjoyment. It may not be the shortest path, but it will definitely feel like it. Boredom can only kill your will to learn, and endanger the very success you are seeking.

2. Unless you habitually automatically import files into your SRS, you are probably doing your entries by hand. So, to reduce your workload, remove as many intermediate processes as you can. As far as possible enter directly into your SRS. Writing things in notebooks or compiling Word files for later addition has its place, but it does get really boring and it creates extra work for you since you have to go back and look at those notebooks or whatever later: Look at it this way: if a sentence is important enough for you to learn, then it’s important enough to go straight into your SRS (the reverse is also true — if you can’t be bothered to put that sentence into the SRS, then it wasn’t worth it in the first place), without any intermediate steps. Removing intermediate steps also reduces the probability of errors creeping in during those inter-step transfers (typing in, extra copy-and-pasting, etc.)

3. Use online or software dictionaries. Sentence-picking is not a typing exercise. Reduce your typing load as far as possible. Software dictionaries allow you to copy and paste: this will save you oodles of time which you can put towards learning more sentences (that you want to learn), and ultimately help you get better in less time.