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.
