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.
