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The Irrelevancy of Right and Wrong - Part 2

The problem with right and wrong in learning language is that everything on the wrong side is considered ‘bad’ and we’re afraid of ‘bad’ things so we avoid them.  Forgetting kanji is bad, forgetting a meaning is bad, misunderstanding is bad, reading something that’s too ‘difficult’ is bad, watching a movie where you don’t understand all the dialog is bad.

Here’s the rub: Mistakes are a part of learning.  Check that, mistakes and failures are a principal component of learning.  To avoid mistakes is to avoid learning.  Learning is stepping out of what you know into what you don’t.  It’s taking what you can’t do and turning it into what you can do.

Putting it boldly: branding mistakes and misunderstandings as bad is to oppose the process of learning.

When all you measure are mistakes and your learning process is built around avoiding mistakes, frustration, boredom and burnout will surely find you. Avoiding mistakes is a cause of burnout.

But if you allow mistakes and even encourage them, opportunities for real learning beyond regurgitation abound.

An Eight Wheeled Story

Years ago when I and a few friends were learning how to rollerblade, we would go to a nearby elementary school that had an outdoor, covered basketball court (This was Washington State, it rains…frequently).  The game was simple.  Skate as fast as you could around the court until you fell.  That’s it.

Now if you ask someone how to learn to rollerblade, they’ll probably tell you the first thing you need to learn is how to stop, then how to turn and then step by step acquire new skills.

I’ll tell you to ignore that.  The first thing you need to learn is how to fall.  If you know how to fall safely, without injuring yourself, you are free to try new things without fear!

You can boldly try crossover turns, skating backwards, spins and even jumps because you can handle the consequences of tripping or skidding.  You pick yourself up, good as new, and try, try again.

Skating around that court until we fell, we learned about balance, wheel grip, skating form, falling to our pads, falling while ensuring we slid to dissipate energy slowly and much more.  You can imagine how useful it is to be able to feel how much grip your wheels have.

It reminds me of a bit of gold I found in a book on rollerblading: Fear is counterproductive.

Lessons 1-10 are called Fear.

But Fear is how adults learn.  Sure we have better words for it: Accountability, Discipline, Study - but all are built around fear, around avoiding something ‘bad’.

Accountability is the fear of failing to do something we said we would do (or blogged we would do).

Discipline is the fear of not doing something consistently.

Study is the fear of not making measurable progress.

We’re not talking about paying taxes or obeying the law, learning Japanese is not something you must do, it’s something you’ve chosen to do.  And that means you have the freedom to fail, to goof, to screw up, to forget, to misspeak - and enjoy yourself in the process.

Do you have any idea how much fun we had racing around that court?  I’m game to do it right now!

And guess what? We never worried about whether we would keep our word and learn to blade, we had so much fun, we couldn’t help but learn.  We never worried about skating consistently, we found what we enjoyed and consistency came for free.  And we never fretted about making measurable progress, all we had to do was think back to how we skated a few weeks before and Voilà!, proof of progress.

Whether you use flashcards, an SRS, textbooks, expensive software or all the above, learning Japanese is typically about getting the right answers and avoiding wrong answers.  I don’t know about you, but I never encountered such serious consideration of ‘managing burnout’ until I starting researching japanese learning ‘methods’.

Playing with Fire

And so on the FeedMe half of this site, I’ve been wrestling with the freedom to be wrong and how it relates to learning.  The very idea of exploring in Japanese, checking out topics of interest involves consuming Japanese text and speech that you don’t understand. Some thoughts:

Rating performance

With flash cards, you mark yourself right or wrong.  With an SRS in its various forms, you mark yourself right or wrong with gradations on how easy it was for you.

The previous implementation here was a small step in the direction of allowing mistakes:

Wrong | Partly Right | Correct | Easy

But it was still focused on right and wrong, still sowing seeds for burnout.  Now there are three sets of rating options depending on what’s being reviewed

Nothing | Mistaken | Partial | Complete

Nothing | Partial | Most | Complete

Little | Some | Most | All

Instead of asking right or wrong, it asks, ‘How much?’.  How much did you understand? How much did you write?

What would be marked ‘wrong’ with flashcards or a typical SRS now has three gradations and a ‘wrong’ answer is frequently treated exactly the same as a ‘right’ answer.

But how can this be?  How can forgetting part of a Kanji, or misreading part of a sentence still be treated as a right answer?!?  Simple, we are learning here, not memorizing.

Memorizing demands perfection, Learning requires exposure.  Memorizing makes one card for 夢 and expects you to get it right, Learning recognizes that you will come to know this character by reading and writing it in many contexts.

Demanding perfection right now discourages exploration because perfection rarely comes ‘right now’. And to force perfection now, is to stand still.

Allowing imperfection frees you to keep moving forward.

Scheduling

FeedMe allows you to select a limit on the number of daily reviews, a nice concept but it has a fundamental flaw.  The desire to have a limit is not to just have a stopping point; you don’t need software for that, just stop.

The real issue is managing the rate that material comes up.  Just because you’ve selected a limit, doesn’t mean you want to do that many every day, but that you never want to do more than that in one day.

And so a small internal change has been made to limit the amount scheduled for a given day to a fraction of the daily limit, typically 1/3.  It means that you can skip days without immediately pegging yourself at your limit and if material does pile up, once you work your way back down, it’ll stay down.

What pushed this change is that review is not the central component of learning, play and exploration is.  When review demands that play and exploration be curbed, it’s fighting the learning process.

Think of it like this.  If you work out for an hour every day and skip 4 days, would you consider it reasonable to workout for 5 hours on the 5th day?  Or would you just jump back in for an hour? Most don’t workout for the sake of working out, they have some other activity that benefits from the workout.

Someone learning to rock climb might lift weights to build grip strength, but if pressed for time, he’d rather climb rocks than shift weights around.  And in the long run, he’ll be the better climber.

Freedom

We ask people not to give spoilers when they share their opinions on a movie. Why?  Why don’t we want to know exactly what will happen?  Because it’s less fun.  Not knowing the spoilers means we can be wrong: Wrong about what will happen next, wrong about the protagonist’s choices, wrong about the ending.

The very act of being surprised means that your expectation of what would happen was wrong!

And not having the spoilers means you have the freedom to be wrong.  Just as learning to skate is easier when free to fall, learning Japanese is more fun when you’re free to fail.

P.S.

There have also been a few major updates to FeedMe.  The most notable being a customizable parser.  It gives you control over simple things like setting a default for この so you don’t have to select every time, to conveniences like auto splitting には because it’s usually not the name, to advanced control like aliasing 2つ to 二つ, it’s a fun update, especially for heavier users.

The original plan was to build an advanced parser with semantic understanding that could fully analyze Japanese text.  But the goal is that you and I understand Japanese, not a piece of software.  And so the parser stays dumb, if you will, but can be made more intelligent by you as you progress.

Posted 18 January 2009 † Khalid § explore § fun § play ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , ,

The Irrelevancy of Right and Wrong - Part 1

A reader, phauna, recently added some interesting thoughts to several posts here.  I originally wanted to respond to the points he introduced but HiddenSincerity and toadhjo came along with some great food for thought.

But really, at the heart of these discussions is right and wrong.  Recalling the right answer for a given kanji. Grouping words in the right pattern. Giving the right answer on a quiz or test. Using the language in the right way.

And as unintuitive as it sounds, the problem with right and wrong is relevancy.

It’s easy to harp on “I could care less” and “irregardless” as ‘wrong’ uses of English.  But if you walk down that path, you need to strike down virtually every colloquial expression.  And while your at it, most text messaging, instant messaging, casual emails and casual conversation are out along with local expressions in every English speaking locale.

Some say colour is correct, others say color.  Boot versus trunk. Bonnet versus hood. Is ‘for’ pronounced like ‘four’ or like ‘fir’? Well, what part of Chicago are you in?  How many different words for rain do you have?  If you’re in a place like Seattle where it can drizzle for 30 straight days, probably quite a few.  Is ‘Trump’ a luxury hotel or a slang term for…breaking wind?  That depends on which side of the pond you’re on: New York or London?

And how do you deal with the changing definitions of words over time? Cool, Hot, True and Stupid now have many, many definitions.  Personally, I always smile whenever ’stupid’ is used to describe something good ;-) .

Right and wrong isn’t at issue here. This is about natural and unnatural.  In different locales, the same language can take on a very different character.  In different situations the same language can be appropriate or inappropriate.  And natural and appropriate are based on feel, not rules - experience, not memorization.

And so discussions of right technique versus wrong technique and tools that emphasize right answers versus wrong answers are useful insofar as you are thinking about this new language and trying to understand its structure, but neither produces that feel.  Neither produces the ability to just ‘know’ what sounds natural.

And here’s why: You can’t pick the moment of learning.  You can choose when you’ll try to memorize or try to understand but never when you actually learn.

This is because learning is more than regurgitating the ‘right’ answer.  Take this definition for learning:  “A change in behavior”.

You’ve learned to ride a bike, not when you understand the mechanics of balancing the bike, not even when you can take a couple laps around the block.  You’ve learned when you can ride without thinking about ‘how to ride’.  When your focus shifts from keeping the bike up to which trail would be more fun.

A change in behavior is not when you do something different, but when you can’t help but do something different.

With language, true learning has occurred when you can read a phrase or sentence you’ve never seen before and understand it perfectly without thinking about its structure.  You can’t know exactly when those vocabulary and grammar patterns clicked in your head, all you know is that understanding almost jumped out at you with no conscious effort.

If this sounds strange, consider this: Can you look at a sequence of letters in English and not read it?  Can you instruct your mind to not parse the characters, to ignore the word, to avoid the meaning and the message?

If you can, then change your flashcards to put the question and answer on the front because you are a rare breed, my friend.

The same is true for spoken English.  You don’t need to consciously parse what you hear because, unless you cover your ears, it happens automatically.

To put it another way, the Japanese that you’ve learned is what you can’t not understand.  It’s what you see and hear and can’t help but comprehend.  And what you say and write flows from what you’ve seen and read.

And so with the Japanese journey, if we can’t know when we will learn, what do right and wrong do?

They don’t do anything.  But we use them to unwittingly discourage ourselves and others.

We tell people that we know the ‘right’ method without having any understanding of how others learn and send people further down the perfect method rathole and a million types of burnout.

We beat ourselves for giving wrong answers while ignoring that different words, grammar and kanji take different, and unpredictable, amounts of time to learn. And I mean learn, not memorize.

We reduce language to a set of right things to know and wrong things to avoid, encouraging people to stay inside comfortable little language learning sites, software, books, classrooms and forums.

Your head won’t be cut off if you use a casual tone when a formal one is more appropriate.  Not understanding most of what you see and read is the same stage you went through as a child, you’ve done it before, it’ll be easier the second time around.  How fast you acquire Japanese will be different from others no matter what approach you take (and could take an infinite amount of time if you don’t enjoy it).

But make no mistake about it, to acquire that feel, to hear and read Japanese effortlessly, to be unable to not understand Japanese requires massive exposure to the language.  And that is much less likely to happen if you are discouraged, burned out or bored.

An interesting snippet from a recent post by Peter Payne of JList/JBox:

I’ll never forget how taken aback my teacher was when I first asked her for help in understanding what I was reading in the comics [manga], though: “That is not Japanese! You should not read it!” she said, refusing to even answer the question I had. 

Do you see a missed opportunity to further someone’s interest in the language and the culture?  Or a ‘good’ teacher ensuring that her student is using the ‘right’ method? Irrelevant indeed.

Posted 24 November 2008 † Khalid § burnout § explore § fluency ‡ Comments °

There Are No Difficulty Levels

Khatzumoto’s impromptu video on language learning over at AllJapaneseAllTheTime is a fun one. I recommend checking out the whole thing.

I’d also like to reiterate my point in the last post on reading levels. Khatzumoto described his progress for listening to a language as moving from hearing gibberish, to hearing the occasional word, to hearing phrases, to not understanding the occasional word, to full understanding. A process that takes place over time and consumes a tremendous amount of material.

He describes this in terms of “sucking less every day” or “making progress everyday” depending on your preference. I look at it as a continuous scale, one where you can’t definitively say where you are at any given time. To munge this scale into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels is to hijack the learning process.

Difficulty is irrelevant. Any new language sufficiently different from your native one will sound like gibberish at first. We label it difficult and run to easier things because we think we have to understand everything.

And when we don’t, we run for what we do understand and actually run away from the language in the process.

I think the biggest challenge for any language learner is not learning the language. It’s learning to enjoy the process of learning. Learning is not a regimented process where you carefully stack each brick of knowledge upon the brick below. You can’t measure how much better you are on a daily basis. You can only look back over the weeks and months and look at the differences in yourself.

And to enjoy the process of learning, you have to understand that the mind is driven by interest. There is no difficulty. There are no levels. There is only what interests you and pulls you in further.

It means just as you watch TV in Japanese, understand nothing and enjoy it, you can take on any book, blog or newspaper if it interests you. Don’t put a book down because it’s too hard. Put it down because what you did understand wasn’t interesting.

The more enjoyment you can pull from what you understand, the more you will look to understand. The more you look to understand, the more time you’ll spend with the language.

And every so often you’ll look back over the weeks and months, notice how far you’ve come, smile, and look for more.

Posted 27 October 2008 † Khalid § feel § fluency § reading ‡ Comments °

There Are No Reading Levels

This post has been a very long time coming.  It’s about how we approach reading Japanese.  It’s about expectancy versus expectation.

Expectations are what happens in a perfect world.  The ideal.  What’s supposed to happen.  It’s a list of vocabulary or kanji we’re supposed to know when we see them.

Expectancy is anticipating and dealing with what actually happens.  It doesn’t work with what should be, only what is.  It either recognizes the kanji on the page or not and moves from there.  It didn’t expect to recognize the character, only that there would be a character to be recognized.

Confused yet?  Lemme ’splain.

Most of the advice I’ve encountered for reading Japanese is about expectations.  You are at a certain “reading level”, therefore you can only expect to understand certain words and certain grammar patterns. And to move your Japanese forward as quickly as possible, you should avoid material that is above your “level”.

The idea is that in a perfect world, there is a perfect sequence of material you could read that would introduce each new word, tense, pattern, postposition, and idiom at the perfect time for your current level to propel your understanding forward.

While this perfect world doesn’t exist, we use it to model our approach in the real world.  It’s one of those all-things-being-equal, educated-guess, best-approximation type things.

But what about reality?

In the real world, this ideal is preposterous, impractical and laughable.  And I’ll tell you why.

First. The human mind is not organized like a database.  You don’t save data to it with explicit links to other data that your consciousness queries for language recognition and production.  There is no ideal sequence of input.  There is no standard mindmap for each language that you can build in your mind to construct fluency.

Second.  Language is not logical.  Double negatives, changing meanings - How else could “I could care less” mean the same thing as “I couldn’t care less”? For much of language, asking why words are ordered the way they are, or why native speakers use one word versus another is pointless.  Ask a native why they speak or write the way they do and they’ll respond with something along the lines of “It sounds right”.

Third.  You learn the most when you’re most interested.  Any method that reins in a learner based on their level will eventually run against what actually stimulates the learner’s mind.  To master the first level before moving to the second level is to become bored with the first level.  Life and language cannot be organized into discrete bins - they are always fluid.

Slow Down

Maybe I’m being too harsh.  If you only know a little bit of Japanese or only know a hundred kanji, how much reading can you really do outside of children’s books and beginner level readers?  Reading is hard and to keep up motivation, you introduce new material in small bites that you can handle.

This is logical, this is reasonable…but it has a serious hidden contradiction.  Because despite how practical this approach is, the exact opposite is presented as the ideal form of learning language. I’m speaking of Immersion, of course.

Go to Japan with 20 phrases memorized and make your way around, either on vacation, work, or school exchange.  You’ll be able to pick up listening, speaking, reading and writing much more quickly because you have to.  You need to function, you need to find your way, buy food, buy clothing, find a place to live - and all of these will force your mind to absorb Japanese as fast as it can.

The Difference Illuminated

There is a critical difference between how we approach reading and what we know about immersion and it’s the difference between expectation and expectancy.

The prevailing approach to reading is guided by what you don’t understand.  And based on your ignorance, this is what you should read.

Immersion is about the reality that you can only use what you do understand. And whatever input comes your way, you squeeze out every drop of understanding you can.

Expectation looks at a difficult book and says, you won’t understand this.

Expectancy looks at any book and wonders how much you will understand.

Expectation beats you down by focusing on what you can’t do.

Expectancy cherishes everything you can do and looks for more.

Think about it.

Plan a trip to Japan to immerse yourself in the language and seek advice before you go.  Will anyone tell you to spend most of your time with children so you don’t hear too much vocabulary you don’t know? No! They’ll tell you to take bold strides with your new language.  To try and fail and try again.  Explore, play, interact - don’t worry about embarrassing yourself because it’s inevitable.  Just stumble forward as a child would and bask in your new surroundings.

Oh…but you’re still in some English speaking country.  Well, don’t get too bold with your reading material.  Try these graded readers. Try this children’s website. You can look at the news if you really want to but you won’t get it, so I wouldn’t bother.

When outside of an immersive environment, it’s as if we run even further away from the language.  We find academic justifications for avoiding language because it’s above our level instead of reaching out of our comfort zone and clawing our way up.

Don’t wait.

Take a topic that interests you in English and hunt it down in Japanese.  Read the news even if you only know 50 kanji.  Dig around and see what you can figure out, what you can understand.

With expectations, you carry a mental list of kanji and vocab you expect to know and ding yourself with guilt every time you make a mistake.  But read with a sense of expectancy, accepting whatever words come your way and enjoying what you understand, you will feed your desire to read and learn more.

Throw out your expectations of what you should be able to understand.  Turn off your mental reviewer that counts every mistake, every missed word, every forgotten kanji, and read.  The more you enjoy what you do understand, the better prepared your mind is to understand more.

Posted 20 October 2008 † Khalid § explore § kanji § reading ‡ Comments °

What is Fun?

Fun is a difficult word.  The range of meanings it can take is wide and everyone has their own interpretation. One person says watching classic Japanese films is fun.  The other says that writing calligraphy is fun. Who’s right?

Fun is in the eye of the beholder.  Fun is never about the action, it’s about who is doing the action.  Fun is always relative to a person.  When we say that motorcycles are fun, we’re not saying that these two wheeled machines have somehow been imbued with some quantum fun property.  We’re saying that for some people, the act of riding a motorcycle, talking about motorcycles and looking at motorcycles is fun.

To say that you like to ride motorcycles says little about motorcycles but a lot about you.

And so when I and others speak about having fun with Japanese, it’s not a statement about any method, technique, book, TV show, movie, article, bar, theater, city, town, restaurant or shop.  It’s about you.  It’s what you enjoy, what challenges you, what excites you, what piques your curiosity, captures your interest, gives you ‘aha!’ moments, spurs you onward, motivates you, makes you laugh and cry, tense with anger and relax in comfort.

It’s what pulls you in.

Khatzumoto’s ongoing updates (part1, part2, and part3 as of now) on his Japanese learning experience produced a mini-goldmine of perspectives on the word ‘fun’.  I yanked a few out of context for discussion fodder:

The catch is though, if watching Japanese TV shows or dubbed movies is the funnest[sic] thing for me and I focus on that, how will I ever learn to read or write fluently?

That one activity appears to be the most fun right now doesn’t mean it will always be that way.  Watch too much TV and you’ll probably bore of it.  What you may enjoy is not fixed for all eternity. Much of what you enjoy now, you may not have known existed 10 years ago.

As to reading, what topics do you enjoy?  Seek them out in Japanese.  That TV seems more fun than reading right now doesn’t mean it isn’t worth looking for fun reading material.  And no matter what, if you want your writing in any language to be worth anything, you’ll have to do a lot of reading. Find something that pulls you in.

What a load of bollocks that fun is the key. I don’t suppose people doing PhDs consider fun to be a major element in the learning process. I can’t see med students chucking their books and saying to themselves, “You know, I just don’t feel this pharmaceutical effects on physiognomy gig, I think I’ll go watch House MD.”

Here, ‘fun’ has transmorgrified into ‘unproductive activity’ or possibly ‘procrastination’.  The person pursuing the PhD presumably wants the degree.  However, I would bet that the student who volunteers at hospitals and clinics finds the material easier to learn as they are hungrier for it from their real world experience.

Just because it’s a PhD doesn’t mean you have to learn everything from the book.  And I’ll bet most doctors would say that the real learning occurs during residency.  Would you let a burned out book smart doc operate on you? Or would you take the experienced doc whose passion for helping people made med school an enjoyable challenge?

 Why dontcha’ll just go back to watching your little anime’s 24/7 Tofugu-style and while you’re at it looking up stuff in the dictionary is boring too—burn your dictionaries and just learn through osmosis.

What basis is there to assume that because someone finds something boring, they should never, ever, ever do it?  Something that is boring is something you are less inclined to do.  There is a frequency of dictionary lookups that is boring for a lot of people.  They still think dictionaries are valuable, they just use them in moderation to avoid sucking the fun out of reading. No burning needed.

I mean I’m asking this as a serious question, the level of *fun* you guys seem to be talking about isn’t even an option for me. 電車男 is really a pleasure for me to watch, but if I was “fun” focused I would watch it one time only (I *loath* to watch or read anything a second time.) and burn through $200 in less than a week. 

I think it’s a sad statement to live in a free country (presumably), and believe that certain levels of ‘fun’ are not an ‘option’.  As the saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re always right.

I think it ultimately comes down to what the definition of “fun” is, and how one goes about finding it. But at some point though, to attain a high level of fluency, I think you have to put your head down and plow through certain things you initially may not consider to be fun.

The next quote aptly addresses the previous, I think:

To be clear: what I define as fun in this case is not “something that makes you laugh” or “something that feels like playing a game”. It’s “something that attracts your interest and stimulates your mind”. This can apply even to the most serious of subjects.

Whatever attracts you to Japanese can be used to make the difficult, enjoyable.

About the ‘fun is bollocks’ comment, I just meant that I could think of about ten other things more important than fun in the AJATT learning method, and indeed many other methods. Here are some; amount of input, repetition / SRS, more listening practice than regular language learning methods, input before output, immersion, intensity/ drive/ motivation. comprehensible input / i+1, variety, etc.

This was an absolute non-sequitur for me.  What definition of fun precludes anything in that list?  Are fun and intensity mutually exclusive?  Does input before output forbid fun?  I think this is a case where the method is the center of the universe - where fun is derived more from feeling superior to others than from learning Japanese per se.

I like reading the editorial sections of newspapers. I wouldn’t necessarily call it fun, but it’s definitely enjoyable. Much like doing SRS reps (in moderation).

Enjoyable, fun; potaytoe, potahtoe.

So the key thing to this rambling message is that I’ve done SRS “the wrong way” — heaven forbid J-E entries! (I learned Mandarin C-E without trouble, btw. Though I agree J-E is best if you can learn that way.) But I had fun doing it, and never troubled myself that I wasn’t doing it “right.” I’ve still got results that I’m happy with, and I know I am on track to get the additional results that I’m seeking.

Keep on truckin’.

The Best Learners Have All the Fun

You are most able to learn when you are interested. Period.  Children absorb knowledge like sponges because they throw themselves at what interests them.  Being children, it’s all they can do.

But as teenagers and adults we acquire a new skill: the ability to force ourselves to learn even when we aren’t interested.  But just because we can, doesn’t mean we have to consign ourselves to this approach.

Fun is about finding what interests you and taking advantage of your tremendous capacity to learn when your mind is ready to receive.  Fun is about finding new material, locales and activities to further your interest.

To quote William Butler Yeats:

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.

What fuels your fire?  That is what fun is.

Posted 03 September 2008 † Khalid § fun § play ‡ Comments °

Learning From Drudgery

I was going to respond to Charley Garret’s comment on the Collecting Sentence or Learning Japanese post directly but I decided to break it out into another post.

He makes a great point that there is some value in bringing in sentences through a collection.  That reducing the drudgery of entering sentences is, in the long run, helpful.  In his words:

…there lurks the the question about how much are you really learning re-typing the sentence from the novel, manga, grammar book, or dictionary? Even cutting and pasting, if you had an online source, saves you some drudgery.

I liken it to learning math. You should definitely know how to do it. And that means you have to do it yourself, with your own little brain. After a time, after you know it, then you can save some time and effort by using a calculator.

I agree that “merely” importing a sentence collection is probably a bad idea. However some of these “sentence collection teams” are merely sharing the drudgery of entering/keying the sentences from a context that they’re simultaneously immersing themselves in. It does sound tempting to join in the effort and lose the relatively non-productive time spent merely re-typing something.

There is an expression in military strategic planning: The map is not the territory.

The map is a representation, a perspective, a simplification.  It is not the actual ground.  You want to win territory in the real world, not on the map.  The map is a tool.

The danger is to focus on the map as if it were reality.  And when reality and the map clash, we focus even harder on the map, ignoring the fact that it’s not helping in reality!

What is a Method?

For our discussions of learning Japanese I would modify it to: The method is not the learning process.

Look around and you see that real learning doesn’t occur in a classroom or a book - It happens through experience.  The masters of every subject (including the native speakers of every language evar), all achieved it through experience.

There were tools, techniques and classrooms along the way, but the core is always the experience.

The big method today is to use intelligent flash cards.  I use them too and like them.  But they are not the learning process.  Experiencing Japanese doesn’t happen with a deck of cards in your hand or an advanced SRS on your screen.

And so when I see these groups forming to reduce the drudgery of typing sentences, I see people equating the method, using an SRS with sentences, with the learning process of experiencing Japanese.

When you think the method is the learning process, drudgery is a legitimate problem to be dealt with.

But when you recognize that the mere presence of drudgery indicates that the learning process is being slowed, you can learn to use your tool in the proper measure, the right amount, to truly aid learning.

Drudgery = Slowed Learning

Burnout = No Learning

Extreme Burnout = Hates Learning - this is scary

It is always more difficult to learn what you are not interested in.  It is virtually impossible to bring all your learning capabilities to focus on something you don’t enjoy.

2 Years of Study: 0 Learning

I’d like to relate a little story of my elementary childhood experience.  I grew up an Army Brat and during a three year period from 3rd Grade through 5th Grade I attended 3 different elementary schools from the Midwest to the Northwest.

Math was my strongest subject.  My 3rd grade school was challenging and fun - Good Times.  But unfortunately, my 4th and 5th grade schools were a little behind.  Despite being put ahead and working on my own, I was still forced to relearn the same material for two years.

At its worse, I would spend most of my time in 5th grade math class with my head on my desk, working up the will to do one…more…boring…problem.  I didn’t think it was possible to take a subject that I enjoyed so much and turn it into something that caused so much pain.

Was my capability of learning mathematics diminished? Not at all.  Was my interest affected? You better believe it.  And no amount of private schooling or college engineering courses ever took away the bad taste.

It’s Not You, It’s the Method

I can’t stress this enough.  All those feeling of drudgery, guilt, depression and dread are indicators that the learning process is being slowed or stopped.  And investing more and more time to optimize a method that’s slowing down your learning is pointless.

I second Tae Kim’s comments on methods.  Each person needs to find what works for them.  You can’t shoehorn a learning process into one method any more than you can force reality inside a map.

When you feel drudgery coming on - Japanese isn’t the problem.  It’s how much you’re using your current method.  Don’t blindly stay with one method because it’s the most “efficient”, or because it worked for someone else.  Find what works for you.

When you’re having fun and the time flies by - that’s when you’re learning the most.

Posted 22 August 2008 † Khalid § burnout § studying ‡ Comments °

Recalling Japanese or Using Japanese?

In my opinion, the biggest challenge for learning Japanese is not whether you have the best teachers, techniques, methodologies or other nonsense.  It is your interest.  Real “discipline” come from interest, not will power.  Real dedication comes through interest, not self-flagellation to maintain focus.

And so the question that I ask whenever I see someone struggling to keep up discipline or consistency is, “Where is the interest?”  The typical response you’ll get when you say you’re having trouble will be something along the lines of: “Suck it up”, “Do it everyday”, “You just have to”, “You’re supposed to”, “Stop making excuses”, “Be more like me, I do it everyday”, “You have to want it”, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And we have the nerve to call this help!  Imagine a similar meeting with a therapist or counsellor; you struggle with depression and don’t know what to do.  The fix? “Feel better!”. Thanks, chief.  That helps.

Meet People Where They Are

I bring this up because of a discussion I recently read on the Reviewing the Kanji forums.

User ihatobu lives in Japan and has been starting and stopping with the Heisig method and is looking for other’s thoughts on long term retention.  For ihatobu, life gets in the way of flashcards.  Put another way, he enjoys living more than studying.

And so, given that ihatobu doesn’t have the interest to plow through all that studying continuously, he seems to be looking for encouragement or alternatives for attaining long term retention.  He also uttered the greatest sacrilege of language learning, “…sooner or later everyone lapses in their study. It’s inevitable.”

In response he gets an earful of “You biffed it. Study harder”:

People manage to spend hours every other day exercising to keep fit. People read novels before bed every night. People read their bibles every morning before work…That argument invalidates the entire attempt at language learning anyway, really. Every aspect of the language takes minimal amounts of effort every day to become proficient, not just the kanji.

Most people who get a lot of regular exercise find it easy because they enjoy it, not because they force themselves.  People read novels because it’s fun, not because they’re working on their English.  That language involves everyday effort doesn’t mean you need to force specific activities everyday, especially if they burn you out.

Every day effort is the natural fruit of their interest, not something they imposed on themselves.  Just try to get a dedicated marathoner to stop running or a voracious reader to stop reading.

No offense to the OP, but I think you need to re-evaluate how you manage your time…The time you put in will equal the results you get.  A lot of us on this site are SRS junkies.  I have probably missed less than 2 weeks total of review days in 2 years of using a SRS.

Why can’t you be more like me? Why are pleas for help met with claims of superiority?

You’re an apple.  I’m an orange.  Be like me and the problem will go away.  If you’re really interested in helping this person, you’ll deal with the reality that they’re an apple, not enumerate the advantages of being an orange.

Some days, it was VERY HARD to make myself review. But you know what, after doing it for so long now, it has become a part of my life. Its just what I do every day.

The most important thing above all, is to try to never miss a day, no matter what. Because when you miss a day, you may just think “I can make up for it tomorrow”. But then when tomorrow comes, its suddenly much easier to blow it off again. And before you know it, you’ve completely stopped. 

Go ahead and miss a day.  Seriously.  It’s ok.

Back From Vacation

It’s been a little quieter than usual on this blog because I’ve been working and took 10 days traveling from Chicago to Little Rock, Arkansas to Omaha, Nebraska and back to Chicago.  Water skiing, a little bocce ball and a wedding: Good Times.

I didn’t review at all.  I didn’t miss it.  I didn’t feel like I’d blown my obligations or a solemn oath to myself.  I listened to Japanese music and podcasts, read some Japanese blogs and had a grand ole time of it.

And when I came back I had 500 items to review! Oh the horror!  But it didn’t matter to me because I do no more than 75 a day regardless.  And I start with the easiest items on the pile to reinforce what I do know first and build up momentum.

That, for the moment, is what I do.  It works for me.  Its driven by what I read and watch.  It builds my interest in Japanese culture and their perspective on the world and makes study that much easier.  But what works for you?  What works for ihatobu?

Recall vs. Use

Looking back at the discussion, notice the focus on tools for language as opposed to using language:

I did the same thing (I was reading a TON) and skimped on reviewing.  After 6 months I realized I could no longer write a lot of the Kanji.  My vocab and grammar skills definitely improved, but my ability to write and recall Kanji were abysmal.  So I started RTK over again (this time with Japanese keywords).

Notice that when people talk about forgetting how to write kanji, the solution invariably moves towards a study technique like flashcards.  No one’s writing essays in Japanese or seeking out the equivalent of a creative writing course in Japan.

No one is suggesting reading material that uses those obscure Kanji more often.  No one is talking about using the Kanji, only recalling the Kanji.

If you don’t use those Kanji outside of SRS reviews, why should your mind retain them?  To do what?  Win a Heisig recall competition?  To memorize what you don’t use is to fight with your own brain.

My long term goals with English are not to have perfect recall of the definition of every word or to be able to name every word based on its definition.  I want to write better, to more readily understand others’ writings, to listen better - To use the language.  And that’s not a memory problem, it’s a practice problem.

Now using language isn’t quantifiable, you can’t make satisfying statements like, “50% cards in Stack 8, 95% of RTK cards in Stack 4 or higher, ~25,000 reviews since June 2007″.  But then again, when you know a language, you don’t think about it or measure it, you just use it.

Posted 07 August 2008 † Khalid § heisig § studying ‡ Comments °

When Does Learning Occur?

Part of our natural tendency to want to study-study-study to learn Japanese is how we think learning occurs.  We equate study with learning.  They are certainly related, but there’s a lot more to it.

Let’s start from another type of development activity for humans: exercise.  Specifically, strength training and weight lifting.

You go to the gym and lift weights, do push-ups, pull-ups and all that fun stuff.  When do you get stronger?

You’ve been at it for an hour, completing a brilliant workout of every muscle from every angle.  Are you stronger?  Actually, you’re weaker.  Much weaker.  You can barely lift your arms.

What’s happened is that you’ve actually injured yourself.  You’ve made thousands of small tears in your muscles that now need to be repaired.  And a few days later when the repairs are complete you’ll be stronger.

But there’s even more to it.  If you do that workout and then fast for the next three days, you won’t get as strong.  Without the nutrients, you body is not well equipped to heal itself.

What this means is that your workout didn’t make you stronger, it prepared your body to make itself stronger.  And you still needed to provide the fuel, the food, to help it do that.

So, studying Japanese… Study is the workout.  Reading, conversing, writing, watching, listening are the food.  Study is great because it can prepare you to hear new words spoken in context or understand patterns of speech, idioms, jokes and the like.

The real learning occurs as your mind strengthens itself through non-contrived interaction with Japanese.

And just as you can over train your muscles, you can over study your brain.  A strained or torn muscle is one that can’t be used.  A burned out mind is one that won’t learn.

Think about it - If you wanted huge biceps, how many days a week would you work on them? For how many hours?  To build stronger arms, you actually spend the vast majority of your time not working them out!

A few forum quotes from a recent discussion, you tell me when the real learning is occuring:

When I was doing RTK, I made paper flashcards to drill throughout the day, and then did my electronic reviews at night. But, now that I’m doing UBGB sentences and audio flashcards, I’ll be looking at the book, ripping MP3s, making Anki cards.. I don’t think making paper flashcards as well is an option. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I usually have 200 cards to review per day. I’ll stay on top of the reviews in spurts, usually 5 days on, 3 days off. I just get to a point where I can’t stand looking at the Anki screen any longer. My cards then pile up, and at the 600-700 expired mark I’ll go through the whole stack over a weekend day. 

I had 200 today to go through and I gave myself a migraine trying to get through them throughout the day.

Posted 14 July 2008 † Khalid § Uncategorized ‡ Comments °

Collecting Sentences or Learning Japanese?

It’s become popular of late to “collect sentences”.  As though this is a goal unto itself.

There have even been a few discussions on the interwebs. Some have even blossomed into organized efforts with semi-elaborate controls on copyrighted works.

 I did my own experiment with these a while back because I thought this was a good idea as well.  It saves time!  You don’t have to put in all that work finding and typing sentences, you can just pull them all in and start reviewing.

Look at all the sentences in those dictionaries of Japanese grammar!  If I had them all in an electronic format I could have thousands of sentences in my SRS right now!

But what are you actually getting? What are you giving up? And is it worth the tradeoff?

Let’s take a look at this from three perspectives: Context, Time and Focus.

Context

My little experiment with creating a collection really surprised me.  I went through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Grammar and pulled about a third of the sentences and put them in a “collection”.  

But I noticed something interesting as I pulled them together - they lost context.  They lost the context from reading the commentary in Tae Kim’s guide.  They became sterile word strings.

Juxtapose them with key sentences that I pulled from interesting topical articles that brought a richness of context that rushed back into my head every time I read them.  Or compare these harvested sentences to those I grabbed from textbooks where I read the accompanying discussion.

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 the amount you learn from that is a testament, not to the sentence collection, but to the human mind’s learning ability.

Context is important, not simply for learning, but for your interest in learning.  Without it, burnout always lurks.

Time

But we can accept a loss in context because we’re spending less time, right?  By having these collections, we spend less time typing in sentences and more time reviewing. That’s good right?

Well, doing anything with Japanese can be considered “good”.  But which direction does it take you?

You say that you want to learn Japanese and that, presumably, includes learning to write (or at least type) in Japanese.  If that’s the case, why look for more ways to avoid writing in Japanese?  Why seek out yet another English language forum to find help with not typing in Japanese?

And how much time are we talking about?  How much does a pre-made collection of sentences speed the learning process?  You still have to become comfortable listening to Japanese.  You still have to look at pages and pages of Japanese text to get over that ‘wall of kanji’ feeling.

You still have to read and read and read to improve your reading speed.  Whatever technique, philosophy or terminology you use, at the end of the day, you learn to listen by listening. Speak by speaking. Read by reading. Write by writing.

Optimizing your use of time is an admirable goal, but why not reduce the time spent studying, where burnout lurks the most, and spend more time reading to really get the benefits of studying and further your interest in the culture?

Focus

Could it be that what’s valuable about collecting sentences is not being the fustest with the mostest?  Perhaps it’s the fact that you’re out there reading and listening to actual Japanese people?  Or that you’re in a textbook or on a learning site trying to understand more of the structures used in Japanese?

Doesn’t it seem silly that someone would ever say, “I’m having trouble finding Japanese sentences.”?

Or to quoth a forum byline:

provide fuel for AJATT : you like Khatzumoto’s method but you’re desperate to get some good sentences ?

Is the focus on Japanese or on sentences?

Now, to be sure, it can be difficult to find reading material at your ‘level’, whatever that is.  But isn’t that the real question?  Where do I find stuff to read?

Consider this, what would you regard as a more ideal ratio of sentences you’ve read, to sentences you’ve collected for review: 1:1 or 10:1?

1 to 1 is what you drift towards when the focus is all about review, all about studying, all about collecting sentences.  10:1 and higher is when you can consistently find something interesting to read that just happens to be in Japanese.

Do you think that when you were a child, you would have had more fun learning to read if you were given big lists of sentences at your ‘reading level’ for you to put in your KidSRS?  I was quite happy just reading books that set my imagination on fire.  Jules Verne’s Around the World in 180 days? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Bring it on.

Final Thoughts

Note that I’m not denigrating any learning technique or method, just our natural tendency for mental navel gazing.  We find the perfect hammer and spend all day looking for nails to drive.  The hammer is just that good, I gotta nail something!

And we forget that we got the hammer so we could build something.  And sometimes we even forget what we wanted to build in the first place!

Likewise with Japanese.  Sentences are a tool, a hammer.  I think the person who focuses on reading Japanese and the person who focuses on collecting sentences will both acquire thousands of sentences in time.  But I suspect that the former will have more fun, wrestle less with burnout, and find it easier to encourage others to learn Japanese.

P.S. A lot of the interest in sentence collection comes by way of readers of the All Japanese All The Time Blog - a great read.  But, unless I’m missing something, Khatzumoto didn’t have sentence collections, he collected sentences from everything he saw and read in Japanese.  10,000 sentences was a natural product of what he did, not the purpose.

Posted 08 July 2008 † Khalid § burnout § review § sentences ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , , ,

Are You Ready for the Answer?

Today we’re going to learn how to catch a ball.  First we’re going to learn the Newtonian laws that describe the motion of an object under the influence of Gravity.

With those equations memorized we’ll be able to accurately model the flight of any ball.  We’ll go outside and, at first, we’ll launch the ball with a machine so we’ll know the starting velocity and angle.  We can then compute where it will land and stand at that location with our glove at the ready.

Once we’ve mastered that, we’ll graduate to using a small millimeter band radar system to plot the flight of the ball in real time, take our position and catch the ball.

It will take some time, but eventually we will master catching a ball.

Sounds absurd?  You would be surprised at how often this method is used to learn.  Classrooms that produce brains filled with knowledge, but still haven’t learned to catch the ball.  You have all the “answers” but still haven’t really caught a ball.

On Green Pigs

When I first learned to read, I didn’t actually know the alphabet.  My Father would read to me before bed.  And being an impetuous little child, I frequently insisted on being read the same story: “Last One Home is a Green Pig”.  It’s a story of a monkey and a duck who race each other home.  And the last one home is a “green pig”.  Great stuff.

That book was read to me so many times that I memorized it.  My Dad would intentionally skips words and I would stop him, point to the word he skipped, and demand that he go back and read it.

Did I know what a word was? Not really.  Did I know the alphabet? Not as such.  But when it was time to learn the alphabet, how much easier for me was it to learn?  These squiggles had been jumping around in my mind for months - giving them names and spelling stuff with them? Not a problem.

I was “ready” to learn the alphabet.

Knock, Knock.

Do you know what a bad standup comedian is?  Someone who gives you the punchline when you aren’t ready to receive it.  So much of comedy is in the timing.  To see this, checkout Seinfeld’s “I’m telling you for the Last Time”.  This standup routine that he did after concluding his namesake sitcom didn’t have any new material.

Go back through the Seinfeld episodes and you’ll hear the exact same jokes during the standup ‘intermissions’.  But they aren’t as funny.  They aren’t nearly as funny.  And some of the jokes have virtually the same wording - the difference was in the timing.  He refined the jokes and the presentation to better prepare his audience to hear jokes they already knew.

Readiness is important.  I say this because when learning Japanese, we want to be able to understand every nuance of a sentence.

But trying to parse every sentence for perfect understanding right now, is like trying to learn how to catch a ball by carefully analyzing its flight and learning all the equations governing its motion.

Plug and Play

Learning about the flight of a ball is easier if you’ve watched a ball in flight.  Learning the alphabet is easier if you’ve seen it in use.  Learning the subtle meaning of Japanese sentences is easier if you’ve read a lot of sentences.

The kid who’s seen the letters of the alphabet many times is ready to learn the alphabet.  And the Japanese learner who’s seen or heard a grammar pattern many times, is ready to have it broken down.

The human mind is not a bucket to be filled with knowledge.  It’s a pattern recognizer built on experience.  Buckets can be filled quickly with answers.  Gaining experience takes time and letting go of being right all the time.

And after you’ve spent some time in the field trying to catch a ball, consider this:  Keep the ball in the same position in the sky and it will come right to you.  If it moves up in the sky, move back.  If it moves down, move forward. Left, left. Right, right.  Keep the ball fixed in the sky.  That’s what the pros do.

Posted 15 June 2008 † Khalid § Uncategorized ‡ Comments °