“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons…if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”
Thomas Szasz

If an idea makes you afraid that no one will ever love you again, then it’s probably a good idea. Here’s a dirty little secret: Murderers get loved before, during and after the fact. Women falling in love with — and marrying — convicted murderers happens so often it’s no longer even newsworthy. There are Slavic people who think Hitler was a good guy. You could literally cause the deaths of millions and someone, somewhere will still love you.

Now, I want to go on record here and say that the official AJATT policy on murder is that it’s a bad thing, right up there with pins-and-needles and bleeding hangnails. And Starbucks shops that close too early, because WTF kind of coffee shop closes at 9pm? And genocide? Oh, don’t even get me started on genocide…that’s worse than immigrants.

What? They’re takin’ our jerbs.

But I also want to go on record and tell you that, if you could do something morally reprehensible and still be loved, don’t you think you could just do something weird and still be loved? Again, not necessarily by a specific person or group, but by some person and/or group of persons. Rhetorical question. You could.

You aren’t gonna die and only people who were inclined to hate you are gonna hate you anyway ¹, so please, play that anime, shadow them voices and visibly carry around Japanese books like you own the place, because you kinda do. You own your personal space. It’s your little moving kingdom. No one can take it away from you (Pauli Exclusion Principle, mate).

A lot of people are afraid of shadowing — embarrassed to be seen or heard doing it. But as I see it, the socio-economic prospects alone of the kind of people who would make fun of someone for learning things are so woefully abysmal that they inspire only pity. You should feel sorry — bitterly, tearfully, Bambi’s-mother-just-died sorry ² — for the kind of people who would make fun of you for shadowing. A few years from now, they’ll literally be begging you for help with Japanese and then they’ll be begging you for advice on how to learn Japanese, but by then you’ll be, like, I dunno, Nelly in Ride Wit Me. It’s a total non-issue.

Nobody you want to be like would make fun of you for practicing, even — especially — if your practice method looked and sounded weird. Because everybody you want to be like knows that looking like an ugly duckling now is just a swan precursor. The uglier the better. The people of the kind that you are becoming, that you are growing into, know that it’s all part of the game; they respect you; they support you; they’re hoping for you to succeed. For real, even if they’ve never met you, they wish you well. They don’t think you’re a wannabe ³ — in fact, they wish more people “wanted to be”. And somebody, some groupie, somewhere loves you or soon will .

That is all.

“…the yeoman work in any science…is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.”
~ Michio Kaku

Every so often, perhaps twice a year or so, some kid comes up to language bloggers like me and Ramses and Benny and tries to get us to mudwrestle I mean debate each other. And we generally refuse. And they’re like “why are you shutting down the debate, I just want to make sense of things; I want to understand why XYZ method works etc. etc.”.

Now, it may well be that all these kids want is to see a fight, a sort of Jerry Springer-esque voyeurism. But that would be an unfairly cynical view of things. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they honestly think a debate like this helps. Why, then, would we refuse?

Because we know it doesn’t help. We know it’s a waste of time. We know that not only will no good come of it, but that — in fact — a lot of bad might result. What, you don’t think we’ve had conversations and discussions with people before? You don’t think we know how that ends? In orgasms of enlightenment and insight? Paul Graham was right: the Internet is funnier than TV sitcoms.

But here’s the biggest, deepest reason we don’t debate. Because, in my humble opinion, nobody — not even Noam Avram Chomsky, perhaps the greatest living linguist — actually, definitively knows why any of this stuff works. We know some of what works and definitely that it works. But we don’t really know how or why. And we definitely don’t know everything. Nobody does. They try. But they don’t know. All they’ve got are hypotheses, theories, guesses. Don’t let their authority, erudition and gentility cow you into assuming that they do know, because they actually don’t, and they know they don’t: that’s why they keep studying it. After all, what would be the point in studying something you already had totally figured out? It would be about as stimulating as a conversation with an upper-middle-class person about their family problems.

Does that mean we’re all useless? Yes. It does. We’re useless for debating purposes. That time Daniel Everett (also a great linguist) debated Chomsky? Useless. From where I was standing, all it created was unnecessary mutual venom. Maybe they’re besties now; I don’t know . Fortunately, though, it turns out that that doesn’t matter. Because…

All that matters is whether or not the method works, not how much sense it makes. Many sensible things don’t work. Many ridiculous things do. Many true things make no sense. Indeed, that’s the whole point of science, and (as a scientist I read once pointed out), it’s the only thing that makes science worth a damn: science is only valuable when it’s counterintuitive. Anything our intuitions can tell us, we don’t need science for. It would be like boiling water on a stove and then immediately microwaving it…Redundant, confusing and maybe even destructive.

The logic of an idea, and the effectiveness/veracity of that idea are mutually exclusive properties. They have nothing to do with each other. If sounding good and making sense were all that mattered, then Communism would work and women would respond to reason; neither of these things are true. Communism is comically bad at working: it can’t even keep people fed (in fact, Communism has a deliciously ironic history of causing major famines, arguably the very thing it was supposed to prevent — basic, 0-level, ground-floor human suffering). But it sounds awesome, sort of like having the Care Bears run a country. Sharing and caring and singing kumbaya around campfires? It’s kindergarten all over again — sign me up!

But then you’ll hear people say of Communism: “it would work if people would do it right”. Well, that’s even worse! An idea that needs everybody to be on board and acting perfectly in order to work is a bad idea. An idea that calls for any improvement of individual character, let alone the character of masses of individuals, in order to work, is a bad idea. That’s like a plane that won’t fly unless every passenger is also a highly trained, highly skilled pilot. That’s like saying: “the Internet would work just fine if only every computer in the world were turned on at the same time and running the exact same version and service pack of the exact same operating system”. Bad.

Methods should be like an AK-47: light and adaptable, robust and relentless. They should work even when they shouldn’t work, even when they’re broken and scratched all over and filled with sand and water. The method should work even when the entire outside world seems to be conspiring against it and FUBAR and SNAFU and tofu and pear-shaped. And that’s why immersion is so cool — you don’t even have to be in-country! All you need are working headphones and battery power to transform your 3-foot-radius personal world into Japan.

Whenever someone says “if only everyone thought/acted like this, the world would…”, my eyes want to…whatever a good joke about rolling is. I dunno. Swiss pastry. Work with me. If only everyone thought/acted like this? Well, they haven’t and they don’t and they won’t, so what’s the new plan, Stan? I bet you back when there were only two people in the world, they thought and acted differently. Good luck with that times 3.5 billion. You can’t even get individuals to be internally consistent (i.e. to think and act the same as their previous/future selves) over time: I went from being a gleeful Apple hater to having a Mac and 4 iPads (some were free, long story).

An idea that needs all external factors to be perfect in order to work is a bad idea. An idea that needs to be timed right is a bad idea. An idea that needs celestial bodies to form perfect geometric patterns is a bad idea. You want your idea, your method, your technique to work right now, with or without Bisquick, while half-naked European teenagers with unwashed dreadlocks are having screaming tantrums in your face (true story, I might tell you about it sometime). In your face, blud. In other words, despite whatever else is going on.

Away from guns and my right wing politics, back to science. Arguably, the whole point of science is to be surprising. The earth is spherical (“it’s an ellipsoid, Khatz, flatter at the poles” — yeah, shaddup!)? That’s weird. And it’s spinning? I notice myself spinning; I notice my car spinning; why wouldn’t I notice an entire planet spinning?! It clearly seems to be standing still — flat and stationary, thank you very much. And quarter-mile-long boats made of steel can float? Are you kidding me? And gigantic planes made of metal can fly? Not glide, but fly? With wings that don’t flap? Whaaaat? All of this is extremely counterintuitive. It can’t be true. It doesn’t make sense. Oh, you’re used to it now; we grew up in a world where these things are normal. But trust me, those ideas would get raped and left for dead in a debate. Aristotle would have unerotically asphyxiated those ideas. Repeatedly. Only experimentation has borne them out and made them mainstream.

The value of the work of, say, a Newton, wasn’t in telling us that apples fall (apparently that’s an apocryphal story anyway): We already knew apples fall! We had that one largely under control; your housepets know that apples fall. The value was in telling us that the same simple set of rules, the same gravity that works on Earth also works in the heavens. Or something to that effect, I dunno. Either way, that’s kinda weird — i.e. counterintuitive — if you think about it for more than a couple of minutes, because when you throw rocks into the air, they don’t keep moving in a straight line forever, nor do they start orbiting each other and stuff. So it would seem as though different rules apply. But, no, them laws of motion apply to everything from pebbles to planets and we can reduce that junk to equations that are so simple that the term “rocket science” is in reality quite woefully malapropos as a metaphor for something difficult.

So don’t reason it out too much (now, I realize that that sounds funny coming from someone who just spent a paragraph praising the work of someone who wrote a theoretical Latin book called Principia Mathematica ¹. But the point is that ultimately experiments bore out Newton’s work; to my knowledge, he didn’t win a flamewar about it on 4chan with superior sarcasm). And definitely don’t waste your time debatin’. Don’t argue, don’t complain, don’t explain. Run experiments instead. If you want to create light and insight instead of heat, then try stuff out and see how it works for you. All that matters is whether or not it works. Not why. Fun matters because fun gets done, and experiments can only work when (get this) something gets done. So have fun with it. Play. You can’t lose, you can only win or learn.

For the record, I think all language learning methods are in fact just…different facets of each other ². In the same way that sports cars and minivans are both just different types of car. At some level, Benny’s Fluent-In-3-Months systems is a sports car, optimized for speed; AJATT is an RV, fully loaded with practically your whole life in it, optimized for distance. A Ferrari…is not a misdesigned RV. Even a Lambo is not a Ferrari that’s been “built wrong”. Remember, metaphors break down quickly, so there’s more to it than that, but that’s one way of looking at it.

If I were you, I would not be attached to any one “school of thought”. Because school sucks . Also, good ideas are like dust — they’re everywhere. All over the place. Every goose has at least some nice feathers. Pluck that junk. Use it to weave your own patchwork quilt, your own unique combination of other people’s ideas. Are quilts elegant and smooth? Maybe not. But they work and they’re cosy and personal. What? I like quilts!

As I’ve mentioned previously, I started off reading books like A. G. Hawke’s The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast. A book written by a former American Green Beret. American, as in “the monolingual laughingstock of the world”. Note that the book was not called “The Long and Deep Guide to Learning a Language So Well That People Think You Grew Up In The Country”, but that did not stop me; I had no ideological opposition to the work. I happilly used the techniques from that book, just for a longer period and focussing only on a single language. I drilled deeper and longer, but it didn’t matter to me who had made the drill or why and how he had used it. It was a good drill. It worked.

When two people debate (which is an adult euphemism for “say mean and snarky things to each other”), the best orator wins. Not the best idea. The best argument. If you want to know who the smartest is, have a debate. If you want to know what works, try stuff out. The truth does not matter; all that matters is what works. Because what works is “the” truth.

Debating will not reveal new, concrete truth. It will only rub old, abstract truth (and some lies) against each other and leave one or more people burned from the friction. Truth of the kind that you’re interested in emerges from tinkering. The truth that you’re looking for is discovered, not reasoned out.

PS: Personally, if I’m ever trying to get functional in a language fast, I’m going straight to Benny’s house for advice.

“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.”
African Proverb ¹

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” ~ Hillel the Elder

There you are. Immersing. Shadowing. Japanese books everywhere. Japanese sounds in your ear. And you’re starting to get a bit of negative attention. A bit of IRL trolling.

They’re against you. They’re making fun of you. They’re looking at you weird. They’re telling jokes, maybe laughing to themselves. Laughing at you. Laughing about you. Great. I get it. Whatever. But answer me just one question:

• Whose side are YOU on?
• What team are YOU playing for?
• Do you like you?

They count as one question . Trolls aren’t the problem. The answer to that question is the problem ².

No matter how long life is or isn’t, it’s too short to go around trying to make people like you. Most people will never even know that you existed. Those that do know won’t remember. Those that remember will seldom think of you.

You don’t go around forcing people to take money from you, do you?
So why go around forcing people to take your advice?

Your advice is worth its weight in gold, right? Time is money, right? So why are you spending both so lavishly on people who hate you and just want you to shut up so they can keep listening to themselves speak? 你黐線㗎? Have you gone mad? Have you gone Spartan? Why give the best who those who want and deserve it the least?

If your advice is truly valuable, keep it to yourself and reap the benefits. Be selfish with it. Be a jerk about your time and your advice. A big, fat jerk. People should be paying you to get either one.

Truly good advice should be like a truly good stock tip ¹: it should work whether or not other people agree with you on it; it should work whether or not forum trolls and IRL trolls know about it and cosign on it. If you need people to know about it and agree with you on it for it to work, then what you have is a cult. Not valuable advice.

Do you know why most women don’t go around begging for it? It’s the same reason so many don’t fight in wars or bars: because they’re not effing stupid. Take a page from the chick book. Milk that advice like a patent. Save it for the ones who prove worthy.

Who is “worthy”? Well, it’s people who:

1. Are desperately seeking or begging your advice, and/or
2. Are willing and able to pay for it.

Needing your advice does not automatically make someone “worthy” ². No doubt a lot of people “need” your advice, but if you simply give it to them, they’ll just:

1. ignore it, or
2. hurt themselves or
3. (worst of all) hurt you with their venom and ingratitude

All three of these failure modes waste your precious time and energy. People who need the advice most are often in the worst state to take it; they say that even drug addicts have to be actively looking to get better in order to be helpable. You can’t just…go help them. They have to come for it. You wouldn’t try to force-feed your cat; if he’s not hungry, he’s not hungry. Don’t force-feed your wisdom.

So do share those ideas, but only with people and in contexts ³ where they will be welcomed, where you will reap real material and psychic rewards from them (not the Special Olympics medal that is “winning” an Internet argument), where you’re not just spinning your wheels. All of which is a very long-winded way of saying: no flame wars for you .

Practical example time. If I have an IRL friend who comes and asks me for advice, I’ll give it; I’ll dish; I’ll spread my lips and share my bounty. But if I have an IRL friend who’s suffering, and struggling and could easily be saved by my advice but has not asked me for it (yet)? I keep that bounty on lock. I bite my tongue. No one wants your good advice unless they ask for it. I have ignored this heuristic before and it has…(drum roll)…never helped; they were harmed by it and I was harmed by it. They felt put upon and I felt…I dunno…just, icky. Unsolicited goodwill is worse than malice; at least you could have fun with malice, hahaha! It doesn’t matter how much they need it, they have to ask.

Doesn’t all that make me a blatant hypocrite? No ⁴. Why? Because…you came here. You asked by coming here. You solicited by staying here. If you didn’t like it, you’d be gone by now; one can’t even stay on to troll because this blog runs like a Communist country; trolls mysteriously disappear. Not even trolls, just people who don’t suck up enough go…missing . So, yeah.

Observe: those who came and left are served by the same work as those who came and stayed; I don’t write a new website for each beautiful person who comes here. So, I encourage you, yeah, give advice, but give it where it’s wanted and (if at all possible) in a way that saves you work and effort and heartache, where you’re not convincing but merely sharing and where, yeah, it’s a persistent artifact so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

And you don’t have to start a blog or write a book if you don’t want to. But, say you keep notes in text or audio or video form. Someone wants advice? Send ’em a copy of your notes (I actually used to do this; I had a pre-prepared email with links and notes in it; it was the AJATT before AJATT). Either way, make it…gosh…make it profitable for yourself: definitely emotionally (psychically) ⁵, and (if you’re so inclined, which I hope you are) financially as well. Not that you have to charge your friends, that can be awkward )." id="return-note-7231-6" href="#note-7231-6">⁶, but you could turn what you do for your friends into a product or whatever. Selling is good; money is good; those aren’t generally considered cool things to say, but they’re true: if money didn’t exist, we’d invent it oh wait, we did.

Which all sounds incredibly misanthropic, when it’s actually the exact opposite. Remember: most people, even — no, especially — the people who know you best and love you most, would be unwilling to give two bowel movements’ worth of stool…to hear about what you do or think; they want your love, not your opinions; they want compassion, not wisdom. I’ll betcha a million imaginary dollars that Stephen King’s family don’t read his books.

Such being the case, you’ll be far more valuable to and beloved by people as a listener than as a preacher. Most of the time. Am I being a hypocrite right now? Yes. But…again, the issue is not to shut up for the sake of shutting up, but to shut up unless and until the person, time and place demand it. In fact, a small but significant part of why I write here is so that I can shut up the rest of the time, and spare…I mean, it’s like forcing someone to have sex with you [=listen to your advice] just because you’re good at sex [=have good advice to give] and/or they’re going through a dry spell [=need it]. Not kosher. Not even…Reform Kosher ⁷.

And that’s why flame wars are so goofy, because you’ve got just givers and no willing receivers. No one, not even you — you know, the person who’s right, not that other idiot — goes into a flame war to listen or learn, only to “school”, to “teach” to “destroy”. They say that when the student is ready, the master will appear. Well, until the student gives consent, the master needs to keep his tongue in his mouth and STFU. Words that have no willing audience yet belong in a journal.

Anyway, that’s all from me for now . Would love to hear about your experiences… ⁸

“Do what you love and not be hated? Now you’re just being greedy!”
NAKATANI Akihiro

“Better, I think, to make a difference and run the risk of failing sometimes, of being made fun of, and yes, appearing arrogant. It’s far better than the alternative.”
Seth Godin

“You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
James M. Barrie

Being liked is not the most important thing in the world.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.

Not even God and Richard Dawkins, whether you believe in them or not, get liked by everyone.
If characters like God and Richard Dawkins don’t get unanimous praise…what chance do you have?

Allow yourself the freedom to be hated. Allow other people the freedom to hate you.

Which is not to say that you should let people get in your face/blog/home.
People who want to get in your face can talk to the police/secret service/security/hand/taze-me-brothers/delete button.

But you must allow them to exist. Out there. Sort of in the abstract.
You must allow them to hate you in their hearts.
You must allow them to speak ill of you in your absence.
You must allow them to look at you funny.
You must allow them to mutter under their breath.
You must allow them to laugh at you.
You must allow them to think you’re a weaboo, an idiot, a wannabe, someone who’s forgotten “who he is” and “where he’s from”.
You must allow them to think you’re a misguided idiot who will never get good at that language and even if he does WTF good will it do him?

Why? Because for a good reason?
No, because for selfish reasons.
Because setting them free will set you free.

Once you allow other people the freedom to hate you, you become free of the restrictions, distractions, distortions and contortions involved in trying to make them like you. You become unstoppable. It’s kind of scary, actually. The power.

Allow yourself the freedom to be hated.
Allow other people the freedom to hate you.

Here are the names of some people who tried to make perfect countries where everyone looked and thought about the same, where no one was allowed to hate them:

• Adolf “Godwin’s Law” Hitler
• Pol Pot
• Idi Amin
• Hendrik Verwoerd
• Jan Smuts
• Mao Zedong (after, like, season 50, when he jumped the shark)
• Lord Farquaad

It never went well and someone always had to come and clean up after them.

For your own personal life to be good, it’s important that you be a bit of a benevolent dictator in terms of information control, just like an athlete needs to remain supremely self-confident at all times.

But take a page from the Dutch playbook ¹. For a people to be good, for a country to be good, for the world at large to be good — for everything outside your personal bubble to be good — it’s very important that idiots-that-aren’t-you be given a long leash.
Because while most of those idiots are just that — idiots — a few of them might do something truly amazing.
As a matter of fact, to the world at large, you might actually be one of those idiots, in the middle of doing an amazing thing.

Let unspoken, unactioned hate and misunderstanding run rampant.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.
Hating yourself, is.
Hating yourself and realizing that The 4400 is never coming back.
These are the worst two things in the world .

Mind your own business. Live in and work on your own reality. Compare yourself to yourself.

A lot of us could benefit from journaling more. A lot of what we say is actually only for our own personal consumption and satisfaction. It may need to be externalized, but not necessarily to other people.

Next time you see yourself on the precipice of a flame war with someone over whose Japanese method is better — whether in real life or online — open up a text editor write to yourself first. You may find that that will do. No one wants your free wisdom. It may be the best stuff in the world, but no one cares. Stop trying so hard to make swine appreciate your pearls. You’re wasting your life away. Start finding some grateful, paying, human customers . And, as far as possible, make them ask before you give the advice away.

What does it matter whether people agree or disagree with you? Their opinions are irrelevant either way. You’re not trying to be liked or disliked, you’re trying to acquire a language: the only meaningful way you can prove your correctness…is by actually doing it. I mean, it’s nice to be agreed with by random strangers (although I’ve personally found that having someone who agrees with you on an idea but refuses to act on it can be more annoying than having someone who all-out thinks you’re sick, wrong and crazy)…but it’s not worth fighting for or anything like that.

If in doubt, don’t be a hero. Don’t be eloquent. Just shut up and win already. And if you must talk back…keep it between you and your journal.

I’m not saying to be a “good person”. I’m not saying to be kind. I’m not saying “don’t disagree with people”. Do disagree. Be a jerk. Be abusive. Launch expletive-filled ad hominem attacks and counterattacks. Make those caustic comebacks and witty one liners. Take those idiots to school.

…But do it in your journal.

Be aggressive in private (if you must — and I’ll admit, with all the trolling on these Internets, I do sometimes feel like I must!), so you can focus on being expressive in public. That way, you come out looking golden. You come out thinking clearly. You come out appearing to transcend the feces-flinging forum fauna* ¹. In short, you win. All because your feces gets hurled where people can’t see it . And when you think about it, isn’t that where feces belongs?

If you have to limit your reading to what is considered respectable, you might as well physically remove your brain and personally hand it to whoever’s making those respectability rules ¹. Because that’s kind of what you’re doing already. And while you’re at it, have the Rulemaker come over to your house and pick out your clothes and thoughts, too.

Read Japanese. Read whatever the heck you want. The dumber the better. The brainier the better. The normaler the better. The only limits on reading should be time and interest. Not common sense, and definitely not respectability.  Invite anyone who takes exception to that to perform incestuous acts with the nearest family member at a tertiary location. How? Just keep reading.

You only get to live a few thousand days. Almost everyone in the world — even in less economically developed countries — will, in a lifetime, have more dollars than days. Think about that. You wouldn’t throw your precious dollars at people you don’t even know or like (you’d throw them at me, right?). But you’ll throw them your days? Irreplaceable, irrecoverable days? Just like that? You won’t even give strangers money to gamble with or buy drugs with or play at the video arcade with, but you’ll give them your time? Are you crazy?

If we amputate our own freedom to read, then we effectively amputate our freedom to think. And if we have no freedom to think, then, sweetie, we have nothing. Like I said, cut out your brain and give it to the Rulemaker. In fact, just kill yourself. If the rules have been decided already, then it really doesn’t matter whether you’re here or not.

Think for a moment why, in the United States of only 55,000 days ago, it was illegal for most African-Americans to read, be taught to read, or even know how to read.

Why would anyone go to the trouble of so drastically limiting another human being’s reading material [f(r)=0] if it weren’t perhaps one of the most precious things in the world?

And what do we call a person who would do that? We’d call them a slavemaster.

Anyone who tells you not to read any type of book is trying to be your slavemaster. Don’t let them. Don’t be a slave. Get off the mental plantation. Read whatever you want. There is no point in doing otherwise. There is no point in living otherwise: someone else is living for you; someone else has lived for you; it’s game mother fondling over ².

Whoever has veto power over your reading list does not decide the content of your mind — she owns your mind. Whoever owns your mind, owns you. Will you be a hip slave foreman (“look at me, I’m hip among slaves!”), or will you be free, doing what you want, when you want? Choices, choices. I hear there’s complementary room and board over at the plantation…

“Internet arguments are like the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you’re still a retard.”
~ Source Unknown…to me.

“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
~ Dale Carnegie? Prolly…not sure…can’t be bothered to check.

“Don’t argue with idiots. You might catch stupid.”
~ Khatzumoto (I love this guy!)

In the doctrines of the AJATT cult…oh…wait…baby steps…baby steps. Here on AJATT (a secular and totally above-board site with no present or future intentions to use mind control on you in order to secure both bling and the favors of womenfolk) there are two types of “not-being-a-hero”.

1. Type 1: Doing easy things. No boring materials. No SRS binge/purge.
2. Type 2: Not trying to be effing Black Jack.

Today we shall discuss the latter type — type 2.

Executive summary: don’t be a hero.

When you’re watching TV, and you see someone suffering from a treatable form of blindness, do you get up from the sofa, board your motor vehicle, drive to their house and proceed to operate on their eyes? You know, to heal them?

No. Why? Because either

(a) You’re not an eye surgeon, or

(b) You are an eye surgeon, but it’s not your problem, so screw it. Besides, those stingy motherlovers probably wouldn’t pay you any money. Forget that. You didn’t spend 7 years and 6 figures on med school just to perform free surgery on ungrateful — and unwilling (!) — patients.

So, but, then, so…why…when someone has mental blindness — when someone can’t see your vision — why are you suddenly an expert? Where do you suddenly get all this expertise? Why do you have to heal them? What, you read bit of Tony Robbins and Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Bandler and suddenly you’re ready to take the scalpel to their mind’s eye? I mean, seriously — do you go around giving people pap smears because you read all about it in Cosmo?

You are not a mental eye surgeon. Stop trying to heal the mentally blind. Even if you were mental eye surgeon, you don’t have their consent.

Maybe people around you are all: “you’re [insert non-East Asian ethnic group], what business have you learning [Japanese]??!?! Do you think you’re better than us? Are you too good for our native language?”.

The correct answer to all those toolish questions is “yes”.

• “What business do you have learning Japanese?” — Yes.
• “Do you think you’re better than us?” — Yes[, I am better than anyone provincial and bigoted enough to ask a question as retarded, I mean, special needs, as that].
• “Are you too good for our native language?” — Yes[, I am too sexy to be with just one language. My eyes, fingers and tongue like to wander. You, my friend, are just going to have to grow some groin hair and get used it, because the pimping cannot be stopped; it can only be contained].

OK I’m being facetious. And ribald. I’m growing into potty humor (not going very well so far). My point is, our fictional heckler is sick. Sick in the head. Sick in the mental eyes. He can’t see your vision. But you know what? You’re not a surgeon. And even if you were…screw it. Fuggedaboutit. Mentally blind people were here before you’re born, and they’ll be here after you die. Don’t you see? They like being blind! It works well for them.

Let reality, the greatest surgeon of all, heal the hecklers. The fact is that anyone who plays with Japanese often enough will eventually get used to it. That’s just…that’s just simple arithmetic; that’s just how nature works. Now, the mentally sighted can see this fact quite clearly. The mentally blind and myopic cannot. Don’t try to fix their eyes; you don’t have the skill — and even if you did, they’re not paying you enough. In fact, I imagine they’re not paying you anything.

Seriously, though, think about it for a second — people should be paying you money to set them right; if they aren’t, then you should take your time and skill and use it elsewhere. Life is too short to not get repaid for good deeds . Besides, treating patients against their will is just going to get you sued for malpractice. Plus they’d probably kick and scream so much that you’d end up getting stabbed somewhere, and then maybe you would be needing eye surgery.

Don’t fight. Don’t argue. Don’t do it. It won’t work and they’re not paying you for the time. Work on building a new reality, and let that reality heal them (hands-free — no intervention from you required)!

That is all.

PS: I was just kidding about the mind control cult/womenfolk/bling thing. I will get round to that eventually; I just have to build up to it more gradually…

PPS: Haha…I mean…

PPPS: …

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (or so I’m told — ‘coz you never quite know with these Internet quotes, do you?)

In life, oftentimes, the real choice isn’t between success and popularity, but between success and immediate popularity. It’s a toughie. Tougher, in fact, than the actual success path (“a day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work” and all that). Which is both good and bad, depending on how you look at it .

To me, that’s the real meaning of “delayed gratification” — the lonely gap between when the old social grouping rejects you and you’re again gratified by the acceptance of some new group.

I think we all have the power to establish and maintain good habits, but when threatened with the withdrawal of the camaraderie, admiration or love of our peers, that’s the real fork in the path; that’s where we make or don’t make ourselves. I imagine it’s where people who did keep on keeping on came the closest to cracking.

We can console ourselves with the knowledge that real camarederie wouldn’t have turned sour so easily. Although, that can feel quite hollow in the face of what seems to be the end of the world. And it is the end of a world, just not the world.

Maybe all the noise that adults make about teenagers and peer pressure is really adults projecting their own challenges with social resistance. Who knows? Anyway, enough psychobabble from me; I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

My point is…if you can either insulate yourself from or completely break through social resistance, then you’re well on your way to becoming unstoppable. For good or ill.

So, if in doubt? Screw ’em. They’re replaceable. As callous as that may sound, it’s really no more callous than the open derision of people making feeble attempts to put you in what they presume to be your place. A place that’s invariably insultingly low. If anything, breaking social resistance is an act of charity, an act of love for at least one person — you — which is more love than your would-be detractors are showing anyone at the moment in question.

Social resistance is…it’s almost like a prank. I’m speaking purely in a metaphorical sense, but it does seem as though it’s all this sort of Zen-like episode of Punk’d on a massive scale, and the joke is on you. Mmm…Punk’d isn’t really the most apropos comparison; I was just feeling nostalgic about that show.

What I mean is this: it’s almost as though social resistance is difficult-seeming and difficult-looking by design, because once you can ignore, deflect or otherwise transcend social resistance, everything is, relatively speaking, a walk in the cake.

Maybe mental state alters behavior, and behavior alters mental state. And maybe the behavior of rejecting social resistance has profound effects on one’s mental state. And maybe these effects bleed into other areas and help us be more effective. And maybe that’s why we sometimes over-esteem celebrities and other people who have succeeded in one field: since experts can seem superhumanly good, we assume that they’re all-round superhumans.

I remember one time, writing out for an English friend, some of the various alternates of the sword (劍) character: 劍・劒・劔・釼・剣 … and she went “you see, I’ll never be able to do that [you must be magically talented]”…and it was kind of mini-heartbreaking because my intent had been to prove that any fool can learn kanji, not that I knew kanji. Daniel Coyle of Das Le El The Talent Code calls this the “HSE/Holy [Crap] Effect”.

Social resistance is like a matte painting of a formidable fence separating the worlds of those who do succeed (in many senses), and those who don’t. Once you realize the fence is fake, you simply walk off the set of the little Truman Show that had been going on and oh crap another pop culture reference. Thereafter, you may not become instantly unstoppable, but it will certainly take a heckuva lot more to faze you. By the way, “heckuva” sounds…Slavic if you read it a certain way.

So, it can pay to be a bit detached and solipsitic about it all. Like when your friends tells you about their drama and all you can do is laugh — you care for your friends, you’re just not taken in by the drama because you have the mental removal to watch it as farce. That kind of bemused detachment can be a great asset. And people may call you on it, and get upset at your lack of emotional abandon, but…more detachment will probably solve that as well.

The funny thing is, though, all of these ideas can be used to justify anything, good or bad. Then again, trains can be used for suicide, but we’re not outlawing them any time soon.

AJATT is often described as cultish. And it is, because I have carefully laid plans to whisk you all away to a compound in South America where we can watch anime and drink colored sugarwater. But really, what it is is that many paths, religious or secular, requiring significant investments of self, time and resources, are likely to at some point bring one into some level of conflict with common behaviors and levels of self-management that are considered “normal”.

Case in point: one or two of my Japanese friends sometimes make fun of me learning Chinese, yet these same kids — the same ones doing the mocking — also wish they knew Chinese, and even make half-hearted attempts (book purchases) in that general direction. Whenever we’re geeking out by my bookshelf, and things go quiet for a while, and the dust settles, they invariably sigh something we might loosely translate as: “dag, yo…I wonna know me some Chah-nese”.

If and when these conflicts occur, sometimes, compromise and negotation work. Other times, resolute boldness is called for. I don’t know which will be which for you. For example, I don’t object to people suggesting that my daily life be composed of a variety of activities. But I will happily walk, run and fly over, around and through people who think they have the authority to decide or even suggest the details (time, place and content) of those activities. Those are my “rules”, if you will. Yours may differ.

Let me give you a little story from the halcyon days of when AJATT was just me being me in Utah. My friends wanted us to watch Pulp Fiction together…in the living room. I like hanging out with people while not doing the same thing, so I was like…yeah, cool, whatever. I didn’t want to watch something in English, but I was willing to watch it with them, so I was going to read Japanese on my laptop while they watched. I often read and watch at the same time.

This compromise upset them. They wanted the movie to be watched in their way (laptopless) on their timetable (now). These were hardcore computer geeks; they knew about geeking out; they should have known better. In the end, after about 90 seconds of failed explanation, I simply went and did something else in Japanese. They got even more upset. About eighteen months later, one of the people who had been there apologized for the entire incident; in his own words, I had been right and he wrong; he hadn’t realized what I was trying to do; he now knew that I had needed to do what I did.

Rarely is all this drama an issue; usually, it doesn’t even come up. But sometimes you do have to choose between something you really want and like, and just being liked. Fortunately, when you choose the former, you do tend to get new likers. Either completely new people, or the same old people post-change-of-heart.

Do what you need to do. Do what makes you happy and comfortable. Getting the job done? Well, that counts as part of “comfort”. Sucking at Japanese made me uncomfortable. So, go become great at Japanese or whatever .

So, I’m there on the Internet, minding my own business, when BAM! The series of tubes conspires to hit me with this:

Hey Khatz, your website has really inspired me. I’m 15 years old, and I love Japanese culture. I’ve always wanted to be fluent in Japanese, but felt that it was impossible. However, one day I came across your site. At first I was like, “Whoa, this guy must be some kind of genius! Fluency in 18 months? Wow!” But then I got to thinking. I realized that you are just a normal guy who found a great (wait no, the only) way to achieve fluency, which is by the immersion process.

So I thought, “What the heck, I’ll buy Heisig’s books and try my best to live the life of a Japanese child.” I hadn’t gotten far when people began to notice what I was doing. My friends told me I was “crazy”, my teacher’s said this method had never been “scientifically tested”, and even my own parents said that what I was doing was “absolutely worthless”. I need some encouragement, Khatz. How did you overcome what other people thought about “all japanese all the time?” Can you give me any tips?

WARNING: I am about to go all New Agey on you. I will snap out of it. Actually, I’m not really going New Agey,at all, it’s just going to sound like I am.

The words people say and things people do to you…could be thought of as having a numerically quantifiable emotional content. Just to sound New Age, let’s call this quantity “energy” (said in my best Southern California accent: “ENerrrgy”).

Keep in mind that I am not saying any of this actually exists. It doesn’t. Not to my knowledge. It’s just a thought model…a way of representing an idea. It has no real physical existence (except, I guess, at the level of electrochemical action in the brain, but…anyway, whatever…)

So let’s call this “energy” (*cringe*), E for short, to give this essay the appearance of mathematical rigor. Pseudoscience for the win, baby!

• E = emotional “energy”.
• -E = Resistance
• +E = Encouragement.
• 0E = Indifference

Now, it would seem that the answer is to shut out all the -E and overwhelm it with +E. Or, even force people who are giving you -E to change sign. Unfortunately, contemporary society as a whole is unlikely to start actively giving you positive encouragement, because it’s far too cool for that. As it happens, though, it’s cheaper and easier to change yourself than to wait for the whole society to change for you. Thus, rather than go all Transformers, expending oodles of priceless time and effort on the acquisition of +E (energon cubes!), we need only realize that:

All that matters is the absolute value of E, |E|.

So let’s say “you’re crazy and you suck and it’ll never work” is -100 E, and “you were born to be Japanese; you have preternaturally large reproductive organs; Japanese is your destiny“, is +100 E. Either way, |E| = 100.

So you need to turn into a monster; a monster that only gets stronger the more it is attacked. Become an omnivore. Even if you eat a plant-based diet :D. Eat all forms of “energy” (say it with me: “ENerrrgy”).

Let resistance fuel you — funnel that rage and despair into the productive accumulation of more Japanese knowledge. Let encouragement fuel you — grow yourself into the positive vision people have of you.

Either way, it’s all good. It’s all usable. You’re like a plant. People give you B.S., you use it as fertilizer; people give you sunshine, you photosynthesize. All you care about is |E|, and in fact, you may even get to the point where the only thing that bothers you is |E|=0. This point is called “being an attention whore, like Khatzumoto”.

Whatever you do, don’t argue. You will not win. And even if you do win, you won’t win. “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” and all that. Besides, what honor is there in out-talking a retard? Yes, I said it: “women and minorities”! Every moment spent arguing with some schmuck, is a moment that would be far better spent on Japanese.

To be fair to your detractors, you are not exactly a shining example of success in your chosen language acquisition method…yet. But then again, how could you be — you’re just a “baby”. Unable to directly demonstrate the validity of what you’re saying, the typical instinct might be to go pull up some articles and shove them in everyone’s face with a triumphant “SEE?!!”. Resist the urge. You will still lose the argument. And your time. The same people who now bait with: “there’s no research to support your claims”, when shown good research, will then switch to: “So what? That research is bogus anyway! If this crap works so well, why isn’t everyone doing it?” _{[because they’re too busy arguing?…痴線！]} . This arguing thing is not a winnable game.

Let your Japanese skill do all the talking, which it eventually will, thank you very much, because you’re doing some Japanese right now, right? Whatever trouble you may be facing now, it’s all just fuel. Any obstacles you face exist only to add dramatic flavor to a legend that has already been written — The Legend of How You Learned Japanese To Native-Level Fluency On Your Own.

One day your friends will be begging you to translate Japanese for them. Until that day, shut them out with your headphones and drown them out with Japanese music, if and when they get too rowdy. Besides, it’s not like you understand English anyway.

Anyway, that’s all from me.

How do you other AJATTeers deal with social resistance? Share!

Energy…now that I think about it, “intensity” would probably have been far more appropriate. Oh, well.