Feed Me Japanese

We all have a tendency to think like this.  We find something and call it “good” and with that, we imply that it’s always good.

But we know that isn’t true.  Exercise is good, too much exercise causes injury.  Food is good, too much food will damage your health.  Water is good, but too much Dihydrogen Monoxide and you’ll kill yourself.

We know this but the temptation is still there.  It’s there because we like to measure things.  We like to know exactly how much progress we’re making.  How far we’ve come, how far we’ve left to go.

And because we want a little more progress, we want to go a little bit faster, we take that one “good” thing and run with it.

From a discussion on the RevTK forums:

I’ve had much more free time lately. So basically, what I’ve been doing is getting as much sentences as I can, and putting them into my SRS. The thing is, I add at least 50 sentences every day, with each sentence having a maximum of 2 new words in them. I’m finding that my reviews are taking a long time. I do about 100, and that takes 3-4 hours per day.

SRS Good.  Sentences Good.  More is better right?

Yes and No.  Yes, because you cover a lot of material. No, because the risk of burnout is high.

On top of that, you miss out on making the reviews more valuable by finding complementary activities.

For example, we say that eating is good but eating more can backfire.  But suppose we complement eating with exercise.  We swim, lift weights, play soccer, do yoga, ride bikes, go rollerblading and rock climbing.

By expending all that energy, our metabolism and our appetite go up - way up.  Now we’re eating more, but it’s still very much a “good thing”.

Eating drives exercise and exercise drives eating - a virtuous cycle.

If SRS’s, review, studying, drilling, memorization, and dictionary lookups are eating, what is the exercise?  And what is a good ratio between the two?  And how does that ratio change over time?

I think the exercise is anything you do with Japanese that you don’t measure.  Reading Blogs and websites, watching TV, having conversations…taking a cooking class. Really it’s anything.  Anything you can simply do in, with or around Japanese without tracking the time spent, or the number of Kanji covered, or scoring your performance, or recording every mistake.

It’s time spent doing what you already do in English, only in Japanese.  And why is that valuable?  It builds context and interest.  When you go back to studying you have greater context to associate with the kanji, words and sentences you review and more interest in their deeper meanings beyond the dictionary and grammar lexicon.

Because really, what does it mean to look up 50-100 new words every day for two weeks?  What does it mean to have looked up 1000 new words in two weeks?  An SRS will only lighten the load if you can ace that list of words.  At first, you’re just doing rote memorization of a huge list of words with limited context.

Pushing through lists like that is a recipe for hating Japanese and feeding the incorrect perception that learning Japanese, or any language for that matter, is too hard.

The enemy of learning Japanese, of learning anything for that matter, is not lack of discipline, or lack of immersion, or lack of time: it’s burnout.

But using study to feed activities in Japanese and using those activities to feed study will not only make both stronger over time, it will maintain or even increase interest as well.