Skip to content

Burnout and Language Learning

Burnout is the greatest enemy of learning any language. It takes a goal like fluency that motivates you, that drives you, and turns it into something you hate.

I think most of us have had that moment when we’ve worn ourselves down trying to memorize as much as we can in as little time as possible and for just a moment, you hate the language, you hate learning the language and you want to throw the whole project out and find something else to do.

Or worse, the amount of time you spend with the language slowly slips over time and before you know it, you haven’t touched it in a couple months!

Given my experiences with burnout, I’ve been trying to nail down what it is so I can deal with it directly.

I think there are 3 elements:

  • Demanding Perfection too Soon
  • Lack of Context
  • Excessive Reviewing

I’ll start with context. Without context, all you have are Kanji and word lists. Long Kanji and word lists. We don’t use words out of context, why try to learn them there?

In my earlier kanji experiments, I tried using a list of the most commonly used Japanese words to provide context for learning kanji. Whenever I added kanji, I also computed what common words I could now read that only included kanji from my list.

This way I could build my vocabulary while building a feel for each kanji based on the words it appeared in.

It was horrible. The words added context for the kanji and that helped, but the words were out of context! Drilling the words to practice reading the kanji was absolutely mind numbing.

Wherever context is lacking, burnout is lurking.

Next up is excessive reviewing. This is simply a case of prioritization. What needs to be reviewed and what doesn’t?

Spending hours reviewing material that doesn’t need review is asking for burnout. Spaced Repetition Systems or SRS’s in their various forms are a great tool for dealing with this. Material that is easy for you is reviewed less and challenging material is reviewed more.

But even an SRS can blow up if you put too much in it too quickly. Then it doesn’t matter how well you’ve prioritized what to review, you’re spending way too much time reviewing.

Variety is the key. Reviewing/studying is one of many things to do to learn a language. When time spent studying pushes out reading for pleasure, enjoying a good TV show or conversing with a pen pal, burnout is bound to happen.

Lastly, Demanding perfection too soon. This one’s subtlety is what makes it more insidious. Kanji, words, grammar, pronunciation, listening comprehension, reading speed: All these things take time to learn and are learned at different rates.

Some kanji come easy and some are hard. Some grammar patterns are easy to read but harder to hear. Everything is learned at different rates.

So, to force yourself to study and restudy the words or kanji that challenge you, is fighting your own brain. Your mind wants pictures, sound, patterns to associate information. Subjecting it to more review and study for what your mind hasn’t built a pattern for is busy work.

See the kanji being used. See the word being used. Your mind will create imagery, uncover patterns that will be the basis for your memory.

The implication is that when you get an answer wrong, note the correct answer and move on. Subjecting your self to “extra” review is a recipe for burn out. Then, not only won’t you recall the information, but you might not even want to.

Learning a new language is a fun process. Eliminate sources of burnout and you can keep it that way.

Posted 16 March 2008 † Khalid § burnout § review § studying ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , ,

How long does it take to learn 1 Kanji?

All the tools I’ve seen out there are about learning Kanji Now! Fast! Locking it in your brain forever! Special mnemonic techniques! Learn hundreds of Kanji in a few days, remember them forever!

While it would be lovely to flip a switch and immediately understand another language. These things take time. So I’ll ask the question – what if it took 2 months to learn 1 Kanji?

Not 2 months for every Kanji, just some of them. Some you pick up immediately. Some take weeks. But suppose one took 2 months. Is that bad?

What if taking 2 months was the best way to learn that Kanji? What would that mean for all the special memory techniques out there?

Consider this. You use a special method and get that Kanji in your head. Great. Now what? What can you do with it? How would you use it? How do the Japanese use it?

When you see that Kanji, what do you want to pop into your head? Its English meaning? An English keyword? An English story? All of its ON and KUN readings? A memorized list of Japanese compounds? A photograph from some learning software?

This is a question that I don’t think we ask as language learners. We want the map, the list, the key. We want the Kanji in our head now.

Meanwhile, we don’t do any of that in our native language. We understand the meaning of the words we use because we’ve seen them used six-ways-from-sunday.

We effortlessly use words like “up” and “set” that have hundreds of definitions without a second thought.

Did you memorize all the uses of “set”? Can you even name 20 of them? 10? And yet you can understand every one of them.

You know what pops in my head when I hear the word “set”? Nothing. Not a thing. There is no context. It doesn’t mean anything until a person gives it meaning by putting it in some context. Without context, it means nothing so I think of nothing.

When I listen to someone speak, when I read, I don’t think in words and characters. There is a thought in that person’s head, he wants to get it into mine. The characters, words and grammar are just the carrier signal, nothing more.

So. Why hang so many “things” on each Kanji? Is recalling all that information at will somehow more special than wasting time memorizing all the definitions of “set” and “up”?

Well, I need to know 2000 Kanji to read a Japanese newspaper. No you don’t.
Well, if I’m reading a book and I see a word with Kanji I don’t know, I have to look it up. No you don’t.
I can’t just read any book if I don’t know every word. Yes you can.
I have to read books that are at my reading level. No you don’t.

I built my intuitive unthinking feel for “set” and “up” by reading and hearing those words used. How can I build the same feel for Kanji, for Japanese vocabulary, for Japanese grammar, by avoiding reading until I’ve “learned” all this stuff?

Intuitive unthinking feel. That is what we have in English. That is what we want in Japanese.

Posted 10 February 2008 † Khalid § feel ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , ,

Learning Kanji From Context

Tae Kim has a great final post up on the “Remembering the Kanji” books. The best part isn’t when he discusses the merits of RTK but when he describes the process he went through in learning Kanji.

I may have mentioned this before but I never studied kanji; I studied the words that are made from kanji. For instance, I learned 「力」 as 「ちから」 but never as 「リョク」 or 「リキ」. I only learned the other on-yomi when I learned words like 「努力」 and 「怪力」. The key to learning these words is, of course, reading. Therefore, it’s very important to find reading material that is interesting and appropriate for your level, something that is a lot harder than it should be.

When learning a language we talk about context, context, context. Words must be seen in context to understand their full meaning. Expressions, idioms, clichés, slang – they all need context for you to grasp their full meaning.

But not Kanji. Get your flashcards out. Start memorizing readings and meanings. Yes, it’s soul-crushingly boring. Yes, you’re memorizing information in a format that you won’t use. But if you want to learn Japanese – you need to suck it up and start memorizing.

Why not learn Kanji in the context of words while at the same time learning words in the context of sentences?

Our brains think in patterns and stories, not lists and maps. By seeing the same Kanji in multiple words again and again, our brain will make the connection – It’s not studying, It’s inevitable.

Similarly, when we see the same word in multiple sentences we build a feel for its meaning. When we see the same grammatical pattern again and again, we build a feel for the language’s structure.

Context, Context, Context – except for Kanji. No context for Kanji.

Part of this comes from our strange desire to “know” things…right now. I want to know this Kanji right now. I want to look at it and “know” what it means.

Reciting the on and kun readings and the English meanings for any Kanji doesn’t mean you “know” it. You know about it.

If I give you a list of private information about any person on this planet – will you know them? Of course not. You must spend time with them. Interact with them and in time you’ll come to know them.

So it is with Kanji. See it used again and again and you will discover meaning over time. There won’t be a specific day or time when you can say you “learned” that Kanji, you’ll simply know it when you know it.

But which is faster? I want to know the Kanji now! Learning about a Kanji character will never lead you to knowing it. Eventually you’ll start reading in Japanese and inevitably you’ll run across it again and again on the road to truly knowing it.

When do you want to start knowing, Now or Later?

Posted 31 January 2008 † Khalid § heisig § kanji § studying ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , ,

Stop Studying Japanese!

How do you study? Simple. You are given the answers to a set of questions and you review those questions until you know the answers. The key is that you are given the answers.

And that’s the problem. True learning doesn’t come from being given the answers, it comes from discovering solutions, connections, principles and ideas on your own.

So why do we give answers? Because it’s easy to measure. Checking whether or not you remember the answer is easy. Checking whether or not you truly understand is very hard.

If all you need are answers, then study. But if you want understanding, you must discover.

Said another way, study is work and discovery is play. What is your path to excellence, to fluency? Work or Play? Study or Discovery?

Two examples outside language learning to illustrate the difference:

Do as Avogadro did

An article from Oct. 2006 by Lisa VanDamme on teaching Physics by Induction.

You know how learning physics goes. You are given the principles, the equations, the relationships, the “laws”, i.e. the answers. Regurgitate them on your exam and you can go to MIT.

In Lisa’s words:

Scientific knowledge is presented as a series of commandments rather than as conclusions that have been reached by a laborious process of observation, experiment, and induction. If taught physics this way, a student’s grasp of the principles is necessarily detached from reality.

And what happens when you stop giving answers and encourage students to play with these concepts as the original great minds did?

As a result of Mr. Harriman’s approach to teaching physics, my students have not just memorized the principles of physics, they understand them clearly and concretely. Let me tell you a story that conclusively makes the case for this method of instruction. One day, Mr. Harriman was teaching the kids about the first evidence for the existence of atoms. He had spent several hours explaining many of the discoveries made by chemists, and he reached the Law of Combining Volumes, which states that the volumes of gases involved in a chemical reaction can always be expressed as a ratio of small integers. (For example, 2 L of H will combine with 1 L of O to make 2 L of steam.) Francisco, as focused and intent as always, thought about this for a minute, and then raised his hand and asked, “Does that mean that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules?” If you don’t see the connection, don’t worry–I didn’t either at the time, and I had the benefit of Mr. Harriman’s class behind me. As it turns out, Francisco was anticipating the next development in science. Avogadro’s Hypothesis states exactly what Francisco said–that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules.

When you learned physics did you ever anticipate the next discovery? No? Join the club.

Never Saw It Coming

For round two, we’ll go to Carnegie Mellon University and Building Virtual Worlds, a multidisciplinary course founded by Randy Pausch – You may know this name from his recent “Last Lecture”.

This is a class where small teams of engineers and artists collaborate to create virtual worlds. Your grade then is no doubt based on your programming skill, your artistic prowess, your creativity, your boldness is trying new things…not so much.

Your grade in this course is based on your ability to work with a team. Why, oh, Why would you do that?!? Simple. If you work well as a team, and you aren’t complete muppets, you’ll be surprised at what you can create. And every so often, you’ll create something really great.

Pausch calls this a head fake. You learn without knowing you’re learning. The Alice Educational Software that came out of his Stage 3 Research lab teaches computer programming in a 3D environment. Students think they’re playing and telling stories, their actually learning the logical basis for computer software. Head Fake.

Inevitable

While playing with 3D software you learn programming.
By building virtual worlds, you learn teamwork.
By learning physics by induction, in historical order, you can make the same discoveries the original scientists did.

What is most powerful about these examples is not what was learned or even how it was learned. What’s important is that you cannot help but learn.

You cannot play with the Alice program and not learn programming.
You cannot take BVW and not learn teamwork.
You cannot learn physics by induction and not build a fundamental understanding of the world around you.

I call these inevitable processes. Simple processes that are easily followed and cannot help but produce some benefit. Put apple seeds in the ground and provide light, water and air and you can’t help but produce Apples. It’s inevitable.

And this is what’s missing from the resources for learning Japanese out there. It’s all about studying, answers and work. It’s rarely about play, discovery, induction, and head fakes.

So, what is the inevitable process for learning Japanese? One where you cannot help but attain fluency? One where you cannot burnout? One where you discover Japanese?

2008 seems like a good year to find answers to these questions.

Posted 03 January 2008 † Khalid § play § studying ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , ,

What does it mean to “know” a word?

What do you get when you review a word with flashcards or a spaced repetition system?

When you can go through a list and give all the correct answers, what have you accomplished? Do you know the words or are you simply adept at reciting answers?

What does it mean to “know” a word? At a minimum, you should be able to understand it when it’s spoken and when you read it. Beyond that you must be able to use the word when speaking and writing.

And if all of that is true, what have you accomplished when you review a word? You’ve read it, but out of context. You haven’t heard it. You haven’t seen it written in context so you don’t know what context to write it in. Ditto for speaking it.

So once again, what have you accomplished?

And when you take a word in Japanese and look it up its english translation so that you can review it, what do you have? Can you use this new japanese word in Japanese as you would its english translations in English?

If not, what is the value of learning this direct translation?

I’m not suggesting that there is no value to translated meanings or to reviewing. I’m asking how much are they really worth? And given how easy it is to burn out reviewing vocabulary, I think it’s a very important question.

Posted 18 December 2007 † Khalid § review § studying ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , ,

Flashcards: The Bane of Human Existence

How do you take something that’s fun to learn and make it soul crushingly boring? Make flashcards.

I’ve made flashcards by hand with my hideous handwriting (the technical term is “chicken scratch”). I’ve bought thousands of Kanji flashcards. Good cardstock, cheap cardstock. Curved corners and decks of paper cuts waiting to happen. All of them filled with all sorts of fantastic information about the kanji character – and even a few compounds it appears in!

All these cards did one thing and one thing only: They made me want to learn Japanese less.

Every card took something fun, learning about the Japanese language and culture, and reduced it to painful, boring, mind numbing repetition.

I still can’t believe that I ever thought that you had to memorize every On and Kun reading for a Kanji to be able to say you “know” it. You realize how many readings 上 has, right?

But you know what’s worse? Knowing every reading and every translated english meaning doesn’t mean you know that character. It means you’ve memorized a list of bits. It means you successfully forced the data into your head despite your brain’s best efforts to prevent it.

The average child falls about a 1000 times when learning to walk. If you want to stunt that learning process, sit the child down and attempt to explain the mechanics of walking.

But here’s the kicker: The child wasn’t learning to walk. He was just trying to go faster. If he can go faster, he can explore more, discover more, play more. The learning, the walking, came for free.

Flashcards are for learning. But true learning comes from exploration, discovery and play.

Japanese became fun for me when I stopped studying and started playing – The learning comes for free.

Posted 08 December 2007 † Khalid § discovery § studying ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , , , ,

What Did Your Last Test Teach You?

I’ve never been a fan of tests or reviews for the simple reason that they are rarely used to move you forward.

Did poorly on a test because you had difficulty understanding the material? That’s nice, the class will be moving on now.

Reviews, Tests, Quizzes and the like are typically used to determine what you know. That’s backwards. Tests should be used to isolate what you don’t know.

What do you have difficulty grasping? What takes you longer to learn? If the objective is to obtain full understanding of some concept or idea, who cares what questions you got right? We need to work on what you got wrong.

This isn’t about getting cute little stars on your paper or currying favor with a professor because of your diligence – This is about learning.

And with Japanese there is a lot to learn and while most of it will be learned though listening and reading, we nudge ourselves forward by reviewing Kanji and Sentences.

But we don’t want the typical review. We don’t want to arrive at the end of the review with a correct list to be happy about and an incorrect list of more work to do.

If a review can determine what we don’t know, then it can help us learn it. A test can evaluate and teach.

When we only use a review to measure what we know, all we get is a snapshot of our “knowledge”. But if we use a review to measure what we don’t know we can leverage that information right now to move our “knowledge” forward.

Said another way, we should know more at the end of the review than we did at the beginning.

And when the review is done, all the reviewing is done. No additional studying, dictionary mining or grammar hacking. Just watch your JDrama, enjoy your anime, listen to your podcast, or read your book or manga – Because that’s where the real learning occurs.

Posted 05 December 2007 † Khalid § review ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , ,

Starting with Heisig

Keep it simple. It’s amazing to me how many people learning Japanese do everything within their power to not read anything in Japanese. As though there is this magical point when they have memorized enough Kanji, drilled enough vocab, and crammed enough grammar, reading fluently will spontaneously occur.

Now, to be fair, reading Japanese requires that you learn hiragana, katakana and Kanji. How many you need to learn is irrelevant – if you want to learn Japanese you have to learn Japanese.

But still, there are a lot of Kanji. How do you get them in your head? Some say, use Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” mnemonic/story techniques. I say no. My objection won’t be as colorful as Tae Kim’s but here we go:

  • It’s a form of work – not play
  • It’s easy to burn out
  • It uses too much English
  • Knowing Kanji is part of the fruit of knowing Japanese, not a prerequisite.

My first two objections are easy. Drilling of any kind is soul crushingly boring. While useful and in some ways invaluable, reviewing should be kept to an absolute minimum (I’ll talk more about this later). The idea that anything approaching a majority of my time should be used for recalling stories is repulsive to me.

My third objection has a little more meat. As a native English speaker, I have been and will continue to use English crutches to support my learning. But manufacturing english stories around each and every Kanji character is overkill. Especially, as Tae Kim points out, when you only view those Kanji outside the context of any compounds, phrases or sentences.

My last objection goes the deepest – to the danger of quantifying the unquantifiable – turning becoming fluent in Japanese into having knowledge of Japanese.

If you become fluent you will have lots of knowledge. But having lots of knowledge doesn’t beget becoming fluent.

You can see this quite clearly in the english sentences all over the internet written by people for whom English is a second language. They have tremendous knowledge of the language. Sometimes their knowledge surpasses even that of native speakers, and yet their speaking and writing belies their knowledge.

Fluency in a language is unquantifiable. You cannot reduce it to a number. You can observe people who are fluent and build a description of what they know but you cannot turn that into a prescription that someone else need only acquire to become fluent.

If someone who’s fluent in Japanese knows 2000 Kanji, 20000 vocabulary, and 500 grammar rules (or however many there are – I have no clue what it is for English…), then you have a description of what a fluent speaker has.

Memorizing those Kanji, vocab and rules will not make you fluent and I think Heisig’s technique encourages people to think the opposite.

Posted 01 December 2007 † Khalid § fluency § heisig ‡ Comments ° Tagged: , , ,