This is part 5 of a multipart series that is boldly freaking going where no series has gone before. Go here to read the series from the start. And here to read the previous installment.

OK, so after all that talk, let me show you a few examples of the SRS cards I’ve been using with the Unified Reading Process (URP). Remember that the URP was designed (which seems a bit of a posh word for how simple a thing it is, but, there you go) by yours truly to solve problems with both (a) native-level languages and (b) sucky-(not-yet-native)-level languages.

So, while it is a single process, it does have two rather different motivations, and this produces two broad types of cards:

• (a) With native-level languages, one is trying to remember ideas through vocabulary.
• (b) With sucky-level languages, one is trying to remember vocabulary through ideas.

(b) is the type of thing we typically discuss here at AJATT. So, it uses the same types of SRS cards as we’ve been talking about all this time. No changes, no surprises. In this article, we’ll focus mostly (though not exclusively) on  type  (a)

But before we hit the example cards, let me answer a couple of your questions all nice like.

Do you use one massive deck for all of your SRSing, or switch off between decks?

Currently, I have a bunch of different decks. I think this is definitely the way to go, as:

1. Different subjects lend themselves to different types of SRS cards, and mixing them all together would just be jarring.
2. Splitting helps with performance management and analysis.
3. I switch subjects by mood. I mean, logic.
4. Surusu makes it very easy for me to switch between decks, both when adding and doing reps. You like that plug?

My current deck breakdown is:

• Japanese – the “original glazed” deck. It contains Japanese sentences.
• Kanji – Heisig-style kanji reviews. I still learn new kanji and reinforce old ones. You never stop learning, you just stop sucking.
• Math/Science/Engineering – very broad…basically anything technical or scientific goes here…I also have quite a few math cards
• Humanities– extremely broad; this has everything from legal stuff to funny internet quotes, to insight on random social issues. I even have the occasional piece of English vocabulary (like “anodyne”…didn’t know what that was…).
  • The English vocab thing is made even more ironic by the fact that one American blogger has decided that my accent is so weird and Christian-Baled up that I could not possibly be a native speaker of English…I guess those AJATT “method-acting” chickens have finally come home to roost and Japanese really is my native language now? Maybe I should just start cross-dressing…I always did enjoy hanging out in women’s restrooms with the freaking…couches and TVs and herbal tea and free massages from sporty Swedish women…
  • No?
  • The legal vocab is there because on rare but significant occasions, it helps me in Japan to be a bit more-eloquent-than-average – as if to demonstrate that “I-am-not-a-roll-over-play-dead-and-cry-myself-to-sleep gaijin, so if you try to brush me off with a spurious explanation you just made up, life will get difficult for you”…I know that sounds jerky, but even in Japan, once every 6~12 months or so, I find the need to project stubbornness and erudition at the same time. Of course, I’m bluffing because I’m not actually erudite or stubborn, but it works every time – people treat you differently when you signal that your crap threshold is low).
  • No, really, though…women’s restrooms are…the shiz.
• Original Ideas – I just throw my own original ideas in here…Everything from long-term projects, to Surusu feature concepts.
• Business – business vocabulary and good ideas from business books and blogs.
  • As a programmer, I was “raised” to look down on business people. After reading Johnson O’Connor’s vocabulary research (executive summary: there apparently exists a powerful correlation between vocabulary and social position), I started to realize that many “business”-type people used vocabulary that I didn’t actually know well enough to use myself. (I think Paul Graham also raised this point once, actually). It occurred to me that they were communicating things that may actually be of some value to me; they weren’t just dumb people in suits throwing buzzwords at each other. I mean, there’s that, too, but that’s not all there is to them.
• Cantonese – Cantonese sentence cards, using a format that I developed (again, a rather OTT word to describe something very simple) after my trip to Taiwan. Basically, it’s full of sentence cards. The format still uses sound, but is much less labor-intensive than some of the Canto cards I’ve previously shown. Look out for another Chinese Project Notes post on these.
• Personal Development – the main difference between this and the “Business” deck is that it is purely focused on inspiration, where the business deck is more about vocabulary and procedure. The purpose of this deck is to increase my self-efficacy (self-confidence?); it is pure “positiveness”. It contains quotes from PD books, affirmations, afformations…all that good stuff. I’M A GOOD PERSON! LoL.
• Mandarin – Mandarin sentences. Originally, a lot like the Japanese deck in format, but has since morphed to be more like the Cantonese deck because, me loves that sound. Chinese cards + sound = gold.
• Hangul – I just wanted to learn to read Hangul. All this contains is the alphabet. This is an extremely low-priority deck for me. It doesn’t even contain all the Hangul yet.
• Recipes – I brainwash myself with good recipes: this influences me to default to healthy food. I usually read recipes for ideas, but I never follow the recipe to the letter myself. I just take its main concepts and then put my own spin on it. A metaphor for all reading, perhaps?
• Unconfirmed/Questionable Cards – This contains mostly Cantonese cards I made by transcribing movies, where I have things I’m not sure about, but I don’t want to just throw the card away, so I save the card here in order to ask a native speaker when I get the chance.
• Pre-Dump– This just contains things I want to throw into the SRS, unprocessed, to maybe make “proper” cards for later.
  • It gets a LOT of deletion. I am not sentimental – that kind of feeling holds too many people back, as does too much hypothetical (counterfactual?) thinking: “what if…”, “maybe”….No…not fun or useful now = no right to be in the SRS.
  • When I’m at a loss for what to learn next, but want easy pickings, I just flip through this deck.
  • If sentence-picking is fishing, then this is fish-farming. Rather than go out to the sea of Japanese/Chinese media, I have my own tank I can pick from any time.
• Links to Websites – Can you see a pattern here? The SRS being used less and less for its traditional/original purpose, and more like a card management system. Anyway, since the SRS I use (Surusu) is web-based, I’ve started adding links to websites I would like to get into the habit of visiting. This, for me, basically means sites in Chinese and Japanese.
  • It’s easy to stumble upon a good site, but hard to find one when you’re looking for it. Also, simply throwing things into bookmarks doesn’t lead to sites getting seen, for me. Previously, I had been using a program to open sites randomly, but that got rather out of hand…websites opening left and right.
  • A more streamlined alternative to using Surusu for storing websites is WhatPage, a web-based, no-install browser homepage rotator. Unfortunately, they have a ridiculously low limit on the number of websites you can store. So if you know of any alternatives, please let me know.

How do you score your cards?

I just kind of play it by ear, to tell you the truth. I use the scoring principles outlined by Dr. Woz at SuperMemo. Namely:

• 0 = Blank. Total. Memory. Blank.
• 1 = Well in’ dat cute…but it’s WRONG! (Two Stupid Dogs…anyone? Anyone?)
• 2 = Slightly Wrong
• 3 = Just…Barely…Right…By The Enamel of the Teeth
• 4 = Correct…amundo.
• 5 = Psssh…Piece Of Cake, Be Arch, Why You Even Be Showing Me This, Motherlover? You’d Best Believe I Come Correct, Son. Perfect! Flawless victory! Correct and Fast and Easy.

So basically a card is either correct or incorrect, but then within that binaryness, the 0~5 scale gives uz a finer-grained way of explaining the correctness. 0~2 is all incorrect, 3~5 is correct; it’s all a matter of degree and the specifics don’t matter too too much. SRSing isn’t so ossified a field that these things are hard and fast yet.

We are living in a golden, lawless age where no one’s telling you what to do*: enjoy your freedom. In any case, once you decide what constitutes correctness and incorrectness for your cards, then scoring is smooth sailing. The key is that you recognize that most decisions are ultimately arbitrary, that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that you have the right to start making some of these arbitrary decisions. You are the rules. That’s my take on it.

Besides, I don’t like other people controlling my whys, whens, whats, with-whoms and hows, because they’re not very good at it .

*For example, some idiots went and decided that socks + slippers = lame, before I was even born. From birth, I have known that socks + slippers = a prudent foot-hygiene choice in any urban environment. But now, on top of making good decisions for myself, I’m beating off the social inertia of someone else’s ancient opinions. Is that what you want? Coz you’re asking for it! Don’t come asking me to make rules that don’t exist.

How would you grade something like a personal development quote card?

• If the quote is a cloze deletion, then I grade myself my ability to fill in the (one-word) blank, just like any other informational card.
• On the other hand, if the quote is in full view (no blanks), then I grade myself on the extent to which:
  1. I have internalized (i.e. am living) the content of the quote. So if, for example, I have been blowing a setback out of proportion, then a quote about setbacks would get a low score.
  2. The quote is boring me. So if it’s a quote that I’m not quite living up to, but that I have seen so much that it feels cliched, I’ll give it a big score anyhow to get it out of the way. Conversely, if the quote is feels very “fresh” to me, then it’ll get a somewhat lower score.

So many decks, do you go through them all every day?

I choose decks in order of fun/priority and I delete extensively. If I’m avoiding a deck, then I go on a deletion spree, and I keep deleting until the deck feels good again.

Also, while there are many decks, many of the decks contain only a handful of cards (80-20 rule) or are information-only decks, so…there are no reps to do as such.

So, no, I don’t necessarily touch every deck every day without fail . Rather than try to “work harder” to correct this, I instead tweak things to make it so that I want to touch the relevant decks — again, deletion is big here. Also, if, for whatever reason, time is short, then priority rules take over. Japanese is a top priority deck for me. Humanities is not.

Surusu does automated rep-capping and deck-switching for me, so a lot of the thought/selection/management burden is taken away.

Show us your cards, motherlover!: Actual Card Examples

Yeah, and it was your mother I was loving…jerkwad.

What? No…Um…OK card. The simplest way is to just give you a nice, pretty table, much like in “My First Sentence Pack”, except MFSP is even better.

To make things easier for myself, these cards do not have links to actual audio files (even where applicable). In a real, live SRS, they would…I just wanted to save myself a few steps since this article is so long already! … ‘Told you I was lazy 8)

So are you offended by the “jerkwad” part or the advertising?

That’s about it. I look forward to your insight and feedback .

This is the fourth article in an ongoing series. To read this series from the beginning, go here.

Now that we’ve talked about the Unified Reading Process (check out the previous article in the series) in general, let’s take a little walk down Specificity Lane. The following advice probably applies to all kinds of books, but I’ve written it from the specific perspective of personal development/business books, which account for most of my reading right now.

_{Funnily enough, the methods I am going to share with you in this and future articles seem to be on their way to allowing me to read less and less of this type of book: since SRSing allows me to remember so much of what I’ve already read, there’s no need to buy any old (unoriginal, low-quality, or simply well-promoted) personal development book just for “review” or a “motivitational boost”.}

The personal development (PD) genre is as popular as it is despised…the reasons for that are interesting and warrant their own article. But for now, let’s keep to the topic at hand.

By way of note, for the uninitiated, an SRS is a smart electronic flashcard system.

OK, here we go!

Anyone can read a good PD book and be at least temporarily inspired to alter her behavior…but what about 7 days, 7 weeks, 7 months and 7 years later?

Perhaps you can’t always be surrounded by positive people, but you can at least have positive books. And that’s almost as good. The key is that contact with the information in these books be:

• Frequent or otherwise of a nature that will change your behavior for the better.
• But also not so frequent that you go numb to it (see: “quotes pasted on wall” for details).
• Available to you whenever pertinent situations arise — the good ideas you come across need to be immediately available to you in a form such that action is possible. Since, fundamentally, you can only act based on the information you have in your head, these ideas, this information, effectively also needs to be in your head if it’s to be of any value. When you’re dealing with a jerk, you’re unlikely to have your trusty, well-underlined copy of How To Deal With Jerks handy — but you still need to act.

Of course, there are some exceptions; we’re speaking very generally here.

One is reminded of that rather sinister-sounding quote by Lenin (?apparently?):

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth” .

Human beings’ judgment of the correctness of many ideas appears to be determined in large part by exposure count. Expose yourself to a quote, an idea, a product enough times, and it becomes part of your reality; it becomes part of your choice-set; it becomes “true”…regardless of actual veracity or quality.

It’s a lot like how advertising works — Coca-Cola doesn’t ceaselessly advertise that strange, corrosive beverage of theirs in order to tell you it exists — we all know it exists — they advertise it to you in order to alter your environment, your psychology, and therefore your choices. These frequent “nudges” seem to be what’s needed to push human beings over the edge.

I mean, you didn’t think all that money was being spent on advertising with no real idea whether it worked or not, did you?*

_{*I guess this did happen during the “Dot Com Boom” but…then again (at the risk of “interpreting the results to fit the theory”) while many of the Dot Coms spent a lot of $$ advertising, they didn’t continue the onslaught for years on end, plus they didn’t give their products and business models time to mature. Internet or no Internet, things like that still seem to take a few years. Not that I really know, but…}

A lot of the ideas we come into contact with in our daily lives are, at the very least, half-truths; they also tend to be of a negative, destructive, or otherwise unproductive nature. Turn on the news, a movie or a pop song, and you’re likely to be assaulted with a stream of incredibly repetetive, low-quality assumptions about life and human capability, wrapped in an immensely entertaining package, sort of like junk food for the mind: tastes great, widely condoned, kills, and it’s mostly high-fructose corn syrup anyway. Personal development books, at their best, are collections of better ideas, better techniques, better alternatives for working our lives. Better food for the mind. _{And if some people accuse you of mental orthorexia? Well, stupidity and blindly following the crowd tend to be their own “punishment” (said in menacing tone), in the long run.}

The more we can expose ourselves to these better ideas…the better. And in my brief experience on the topic, I’ve found that it’s not enough to just have vaguely remembered inklings of certain ideas — it seems like it’s important to re-view them somewhat more fully, more directly. Basically, “repetition is the mother of skill“, if you will. You can’t just have seen that Coke ad once. In fact, I read somewhere that a typical consumer needs to be exposed to an ad about 7 times before they actually make the purchase. Magic number, I know. But clearly, either way, what we’re dealing with is not an inherent property of advertising, but of the relationship between human beings, ideas and action.

So, rather than passively receiving other people’s advertising your messages, why not “advertise” to yourself the ideas that you like and find important? That’s the basic idea. If we want to change our habitual behavior, then it comes as no surprise that we may need some level of habitual expsosure to the behavior-changing ideas.

Another problem I found with not SRSing or otherwise broadly reviewing personal development books, was that my behavior and opinions would become completely biased in the direction of whichever author I was currently reading. Of course, there is some good in this. But the problem with being so totally saturated in one author’s world is that one inherits all her blindspots and biases as well. Much good can be gained, but much good also gets lost, ignored, or replaced by the bad-to-mediocre.

Intellectually, we all know that no single author is going to have the fullest, best answers on every issue. But recency can blind us to this in a practical sense. SRSing information allows your techniques and philosophy to remain a unique, well-balanced amalgam of all the good stuff you’ve been exposed to: your very own syncretic approach, taking the best from wherever you find it — like a mental file that is actually appended to, not just constantly overwritten.

But, at the end of the day, I don’t really know, it’s all really experimental . Maybe you can pick up on some of these ideas, and take them somewhere interesting.

I really hope this has helped you…it may just be me going off on a personal tangent. Anyway, let me know…gently …

In the next article in this series, we’ll cover some practical elements of this SRSing-beyond-pure-language-learning business (including demonstrating some actual SRS cards), as well as answer some pertinent questions. If you have anything you want answered, now’s the time to put it forward. It may or may not get dealt with, but, you never know until you try, right?

This is the third post in a continuing series on Why The Way We Read Sucks and How To Fix It. Go here to read the series from the beginning.

Please take all this advice cum grano salis. Take it for what it is — one star (don’t say “yeah, a supernova”, really…just don’t) in a galaxy of information about reading. Everyone has their pet-techniques, and everyone’s situation is different to some degree. As a wise young woman on the Internets once said:

“no method will ever be 100% perfect for anyone except its creator.”

All of this, this entire site, is just my personal…thing, so…don’t take it too seriously. You definitely want to try, pick and choose what works and what doesn’t for you. My own methods are constantly evolving, so in a sense you could say I end up disagreeing with myself now and then. And, if I disagree with me sometimes, so should you . A few months from now, I may not even be using any of the techniques I’m about to share with you. So, keep that in mind .

Why did I get into this reading technique thing anyway?

Well, It’s complicated. But only slightly so. Basically, I had two different sets of reading problems with (1) native-level languages, and (2) sucky-level languages. These two problem sets ended up being fixed with the same solution. And that’s what makes this article-series seem complicated: I’m really attempting to discuss two things at the same time. Confusing, I know. I’m a cruel, inconsiderate man — get used to it.

One thing common to both sets of problems is that, despite continuing efforts, electronic books are yet to reach the level of availability, let alone convenience, to allow one to go “all electronic”. My ultimate goal is 100% digitization, which would render a lot of this book-handling business obsolete.

Anyway, here are some issues that were unique to each set of problems:

Problem Set 1: Native-Level Languages

• Too many books in possession — major life decisions are starting to be made aroundthe welfare of the books that are supposed to be getting read or re-read at some point, but aren’t.
  • Books are getting “lost in the sea”, hidden under and behind other books.
• Reading a bit, but wanting to read much more, and also suck the most value out of each book.
• A lot of good half-read books that warrant more reading (full of potentially good information), but that have been side-tracked by other books.
• Forgetting the content of fully-read books, leading to a desire to keepbooks “for future reference/re-reading”, even though there are already…too many books in the house, and the world.
  • I especially had the desire to have the content of personal development books more readily available in my head, in my life, where it could more readily affect my behavior. This basically lead me to start SRSing quotes. More on that later…
• Guilt about skipping pages.

Problem Set 2: Sucky-Level Languages

• Have books, keep getting more, but not reading any of them because the reading is too painful
• Too many stops (“better SRS this; no pain no gain, be arch”).
• Too much guilt about skipping.
• Trying to catch everything and getting bored/tired out.

Two different sets of reading problems united by a single solution. Hence, the Unified Reading Process.

URP: The Unified Reading Process

The unified reading process (this sounds so…Proctor & Gamble…I love it) I currently use for each book is:

1. Buy
2. Read & Dog-ear
3. Stack
4. Un-dog-ear & Enter quotes into SRS
5. Either:

• (a) Discard (give away, resell) || OR ||
• (b) Keep & Reprocess from step (2)

In the case of native-level languages, I tend to discard — i.e. give away to friends or resell. In the case of sucky-level languages, I tend to keep and reprocess. This has less to do with the languages themselves, and more with the fact that the very nature of things means that the more proficient one is at a given language the more likely one is to have a surplus of books in it.

The key to discarding is to not force yourself to instantly make a permanent decision (while still retaining that defining characteristic of real decisions: clarity). Instead, split the decision into two clear, instant parts. In my case, I have a temporary “to discard” box with a deadline on it. Once the deadline is reached or the box becomes full, then the permanent discarding happens. So a book could be waiting there in the temporary bin for a month or more. Plenty of time to reconsider any decision.

Anyway, as you can see, it’s a really simple process. Here are just some of the benefits:

• Books are always more or less in a clear state: Unread, In-process, or Read. This leads to less ambiguity, and therefore easier management.
• Books turn into pieces of clearly memorized knowledge rather than just space-consuming things that are “good to have”, or things that you read once and kind of remember, but need to read again to “brush up”.
• You get to do a lot of reading without the long-term burden of physically owning/moving/storing a lot of books.

Low Conversion, Revisited (skip this part if you want)

At the risk of repeating myself, the keyphrase throughout the process is low conversion. By “conversion”, I mean the fraction of the book in question that gets:

1. Read closely, and/or
2. Converted into SRS cards.

Only a fraction of the pages of a book get read closely, in detail. Only a fraction of these pages get dog-eared. Only a fraction of the content of a fraction of the dog-eared pages gets entered into the SRS. Fraction. Fraction. Fraction.

No matter how much you own or suck at the language, conversion is low by nature. In fact, ironically enough, the more you suck at a language, the lower your conversion will probably be (for one thing, there’s only so much you’ll be able to read well…and then there’s the other extreme, where your conversion goes low because you already have so much prior knowledge). You see, conversion takes work. And there is only so much work that you can do. Far less than you wish you could. But that’s okay, because humans are smart; you could argue that we’re built to be lazy and low-conversion.

Even people who intend to have high conversion end up with low conversion. In fact, the more pressure you put on yourself to convert, the more likely you are to (eventually, unconsciously) rebel and end up with 0% conversion. Zero conversion is fine if the book sucked that much, but it’s not so fine when the book is otherwise good — well-written, and about a topic you’re interested in.

The way to deal with sucky books is simple — throw them away as soon as the suck is clear; get rid of them. My problem was that I was having trouble approaching the books I liked, books I had chosen, books I knew were good; I wasn’t even picking them up any more. And the root of the problem was my attempt to have high conversion.

Anyhoo, that’s all for now. But the series continues!

Next Article: Why SRS Personal Development Books?

Wherein are discussed the reasons for and benefits of subjecting personal development books to the Unified Reading Process.

There’s so much I want to say on this topic. But it would take too long to put it all together, so I’m going to do what we always do here at AJATT — give it to you piecemeal.

As with everything on this site, the advice here is just based on my personal experience. I’m not an expert. Take what works, leave what doesn’t — the overall principles matter more than the minutiae of technique. Your mileage may vary and all that (then again, I am quite confident that it won’t vary by that much — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it, eh lads, eh?).

Also, an interesting thing happened. While I originally intended this advice to be specifically directed towards languages we suck at (i.e. early- and mid-stage foreign languages), I soon found that it applied just as well to reading languages where we have native-level skill. Yay!

Anyway, first, a little bit about:

The Sucky Way We Read

By “how we read”, I mean “how we are taught to read in school”. Fortunately for me, growing up, I did a lot (indeed, most) of my reading entirely outside of the school framework, so for a long time I wasn’t “infected” as much by the school disease — at the very least, I was asymptomatic for many years.

But over time, it did get to me as well. So much so that I had to reach back into my childhood and reflect on what I had been doing outside of school, why it was so much fun, and why it worked so well, in order to get my then-stalled reading habits back on track _{(in the early years of my adult life, I went through a stage where I was basically not doing any reading, despite having a strong desire to read and a history of reading)}.

The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there.

The above is a style of reading that is, on the surface, well -suited to an early-stage student. After all, does someone who can barely read or who barely knows the subject matter at hand, really have the ability to decide where and what to skip? (Actually my answer to that is “yes”, but, school’s answer tends to be a resounding “no”).

Why How We Read Sucks

My guess is that the core reason why this reading style came about in the first place is because, at one time, in many parts of the world, there simply weren’t that many books, period. So, reading one book a year was fine, since you only owned one book and maybe had access to a few more. Oftentimes, the books in question were these massive, dense, metaphor-laden sacred texts, which probably do lend themselves to a special style of reading _{(then again, judging by how few people of any religious persuasion actually read sacred texts, perhaps these too could benefit from techniques like those I’m intending to share).}

Of course, things have changed. A lot. At least in terms of the number of books available. But in most schools and classes, the reign of tyranny of a single source of information continues. Moreover, the semi-compulsive behavior of reading (or, attempting to read) every-single-word-on-every-single-page-so-you-get-exactly-what-was-said-and-don’t-miss-a-single-thing is exacerbated by the earnest student’s fear of “missing” something that might be “on the test”. In fact, many tests are designed to reward this one-tree-matters-more-than-the-entire-forest type of reading.

There’s just no sense of priority; everything becomes equally important. It’s as if the Pareto Principle never existed. Indeed, some people might argue that that was the point: it is said that most school systems in the world today are based on a design that aims to produce compliant, docile factory workers — people who unquestioningly obey pre-made decisions, not people who make them. Those who go on to be managers get let in on the secret that most decisions are arbitrary, but people lower down on the ladder are to be left in the dark, believing that the pre-made decisions are absolute, based on the perfect or near-perfect knowledge of their elders and betters (“experts”, “superiors”), and carrying all the weight of divine decree.

OK, social engineering, blah blah whatever. Let’s not get too worked up. The deeper problem is that to force yourself to read everything is to force yourself out of your growth/true-comfort zone and into either your boredom zone or your panic zone (both of which are places where you are just going to…wait for the pun…”zone out”).

This leads to stress. Stress makes you forgetful: short-term memory gets pwned. No short term memory → no long-term memory. No long-term memory → no learning new information. No new information → less intelligent choices, far less brilliant flashes of insight. Less intelligent choices → more stupid choices. In short, the way school typically teaches us to read, makes us stupid. As in, Republican Gilmore Girls the end of Prison Break running out of cheap jokes stupid. The phrase “dumbing down” starts to take on a whole new meaning..

And now that we’re done complaining and making sweeping judgments and dubious historical references, it’s time to talk about how to fix the problem! But for that, dear children of the AJATT, ye shall have to wait for the very forthcoming sequel to this article — part deux! Wherein shall be demonstrated reading techniques that can help you have more fun reading any language, including Japanese.