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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

supposed, should, and discipline

Maybe not the words you were expecting, but allow me to explain:

When you’re “supposed” to maintain the “discipline” to do something everyday, what happens when you miss a day?  It means you lack discipline.  You didn’t do what you’re supposed to do, what you should be doing.

So the next day, because you feel guilty, you redouble your efforts.  This time you won’t slack off.  This time you’ll keep your nose to the grindstone and make it happen.

And, Oops! You forgot again.  You got distracted.  You had other obligations. And the cycle continues.

Is this bad? Does it mean you won’t reach your goal? Not necessarily.  The question hanging in the background is, What’s moving you forward?

Are you pushing yourself forward to avoid the feeling of guilt and failure because you didn’t maintain your regimen? Are you motivating yourself by avoiding what you don’t want?

And bear in mind, you can achieve just about anything with that mindset.  We do it all the time in school and work, we push ourselves forward because we’re supposed to, because we should, because we want to avoid the consequences of failing to do what we should.

But is that what you want?  Is keeping guilt and failure at bay what you want your Japanese journey to be about?

This is the nature of how we use the words “should”, “supposed”, and “discipline”.  We use them as clubs to beat ourselves and others.  Not doing what you should do is bad.  Failing to do what you’re supposed to do is bad.  And both are signs that you lack the discipline to accomplish anything.

But think of a little 5 year old girl with a basic grasp of language.  She can weave together her fair share of precocious sentences but the breadth of her knowledge is, of course, limited.

Did she acquire her language skills because of her discipline?  Does the word discipline even come to mind when you think of most 5 year olds?

For the few years she’s been using language, was she always doing what she “should” do, what she’s “supposed” to do?  Certainly not.  But great progress, for a child, was made.

And if we look at the success of that child, what do we see?  Well, she was trying to communicate everyday with parents, teachers, siblings and friends.  Hmm…Everyday - So you’re supposed to work on communication everyday!

Doh!

Slow down.  What you have done, is taken the description of what someone else has done and turned it into a prescription - a list of things you’re supposed to do.  It’s easy to do but it’s not what we’re looking for.

Instead, let’s ask why the little girl was communicating everyday?  Why does someone without a plan, technique, method or even a goal work everyday towards mastering a language?!?

As a 5 year old, she has shown more “discipline” in learning a language than you or I ever have with Japanese!

Both the disciplined language learner and the undisciplined 5 year old, display the same daily dedication to learning.

And, to be sure, what the adult language learner is working towards is very different from the 5 year old.

But the 5 year old doesn’t burn out and take 3 months off from learning language.  She’s still a child so she throws tantrums and gives people the silent treatment, but a few hours later she’s reading and chattering away.

The difference between the adult and the child is push and pull.  Adults push with “should” and “supposed to” while children are pulled by their wonder of the world around them.

But it gets worse, adults will apply that same “should/supposed” mindset to what pulls them!

Take something you love to do, something you’re passionate about, and turn it into a requirement.  Part of the core of what you’re passionate about is that it isn’t something you have to do.  It’s something you choose to do above all else.

Turn it into an obligation, a “supposed to”, a “should” and you diminish it.  Keep pushing and you could even lose your passion for it.  Have you ever met a brilliant pianist whose grace on the keyboard astounded you, but who didn’t like to play?

Despite such passion and talent, 15 years of being forced to practice, while cultivating great skill, killed the passion.

So what does all this mean?  Well, you can’t magically pull yourself with constant wonder through Japanese.

But you can always be searching.  Looking for topics or TV shows or people who pull you in because you want to understand, you want to “get it”, and suddenly it’s three months later, and you look back to see the daily dedication of a “disciplined” language learner - and you didn’t even notice the effort.

The moral of the story? Try to avoid “shoulding” on yourself

Khatzumoto is making an observation about how certain knowledge makes its way into our long term memory that I would like to extend: 

Why do you remember your own name? Because your mother sat you down one day and said it to you a thousand times until it had been indelibly etched into your little toddler memory? Because your name is special and powerful and beautiful and unique? No, and, no.

You have heard, read, written and said your name many times, not all at once but spread out over time. That’s the key to remembering something. Not cramming–not concentrating repetitions, but spacing them. Basically, if you hear or read something at the right spacing over time, you will remember it better and better. And the cool thing is that this spacing grows over a time. After a while, this space of time can grow so long as to go beyond the duration of your natural life. Put simply, even if you stopped writing, saying and hearing your own name today, and didn’t hear it again until the day before you died, you would probably still remember it.

Learning your own name, didn’t come through cramming that’s for sure.  But the key reason that you remember your name was not the spacing or time, it was context.

Over and over again, you heard, said, wrote and read your name in different contexts.  Over and over for 20 years. Whether the spacing was 1 second or 1 week didn’t matter - that the interaction occurred in so many different contexts, does.  That it occurred over 20 years is simply the reality of interacting in so many different contexts, it takes time.

Take any word, kanji, idea, equation or whatever and do something with it every day for 20 years and you’ll know it like the back of your hand.

But look at the task of learning Japanese. You want to get to the same level in Japanese in 2-3 years, that you achieved in English in 20.  This time constraint requires, not spacing, but prioritization. You still need to see and interact with all that material in different contexts - how do you find the time?

Take all the Japanese you could learn in 20 years.  Take every word, every kanji, every colloquial expression and try to do something with each one, every day, for 2 years.  It’s impossible.

You simply won’t be awake long enough over the next two years to find enough different ways to touch that much material every day.

So, unless you can figure out what doesn’t need to be reviewed on any given day, you’ll run out of time.

And so the spacing of an SRS is an attempt to find the minimum number of reviews necessary to get it in your head.  But - and this is a heavy But - memorizing something is different from remembering something.

Recalling what you’ve memorized is a dictionary lookup in your head.  Remembering something you’ve experienced can pull forth libraries of knowledge and intuition.

Remember that the ideal is how you learned your name: Varied contexts day after day. Note that I said, learned your name, not memorized.

If you think I’m just playing a semantic game, do a little experiment with me:

Tell me every word you know.

Just list them out.

Too hard? Well just give me your “active vocabulary”.  Not every word you can read and hear but just the ones that you write and speak with.

It’s a monumental task.  The only way you could complete even a portion of this task is to imagine something.  Think of a pink elephant or a baseball game and think of words to describe what you see.  The more you describe, the more words you find buried in your mind.  You’ll have to search far and wide in your minds eye to scratch the surface of the words you know.

The point is that there are tens of thousands of words you can use effortlessly but you can’t recall until you actually need them!  They are not associated with definitions but with context.

And some of those words went into your head on the first shot! - no time, no spacing, but perfect recall.

So what does this mean for an SRS?  It’s not about memory - that comes for free with context.  It’s not about time - seeing things in different contexts always takes time.

An SRS is all about prioritization.  And learning language is all about context.  Put the two together and you can prioritize what to look for, in context.

Whether you review the same item on day 1,3,7,10,14 and 30 or you review it everyday in between doesn’t matter.  You’ll memorize it either way.  Whether or not you learn it, depends on how varied the context.

And this is why I harp on exploration, play, or whatever you want to call it.  There are words like わたし or 今日 that are easy to find in context - in fact they’re impossible to avoid.  But for the wide swath of slightly less common words, how do you experience them in enough different contexts without spending 20 years?

One way, is with an SRS.

Put the same words, kanji and grammar from different contexts in an SRS, it will help you prioritize what to look for in context based on what interests you.

Commenter sarius24 responded to the AJATT post:

Somtimes I just want to get on top of a soap box and tell people in my school in Québec on how they should be using an SRS to improve their french. Basically most kids suck at it, especially in english schools.

There are a few billion people on this planet who have mastered their respective languages without ever hearing of anything even remotely related to an SRS.

They didn’t need to collect sentences because they simply lived life while using their language as best they could.  In time they mastered it.

They didn’t need to look for context because, in life, it comes to you.

But you and I - we don’t want to spend 10, 15, and 20 years mastering a language.  And the time constraints that we apply require prioritization.

So what is an SRS, really? Just a tool for prioritization.  You still need to stop and smell the roses - think of an SRS as pointing out the especially fragrant ones.