Post Tadoku Wrap Up Jan 2013

During the 2013 January ReadMod I had planned to just report my every day normal reading, which looked like it was around 60 pages a day in Japanese and Korean but then some friendly or not-so-friendly competition motivated me to crank it up a notch. I tried to do as much extensive reading as I could, but also push myself to do more intensive reading too. One thing became immediately clear, I haven’t been doing as much reading as I could be doing. I also realized manga is fun and easy to read, maybe I’ve leveled up a bit to where I can enjoy manga without too many look ups, or maybe I’ve just found the right stuff for myself to read. However I haven’t been reading enough manga, so I pushed myself to finish at least one volume of manga on the days I read manga.

The solution to all your problems.

Pushing myself to read a bit more in Korean and to read faster made a big difference, and I feel like I leveled up my Korean a bit, suddenly watching dramas is a little bit easier. I feel like my Japanese is getting better too but it’s been a steady increase all 2012 from doing daily reading and listening. I plan to keep my up reading like this as much as I can for the rest of the year. I also some how managed to start watching 10 different dramas, and I’m trying to finish up my last semester of school. So things are crazy.

Continuing strategy

I finally want to finish Harry Potter in my parallel Japanese/Korean reading project because I’m already acquiring a list of Korean literature I want to read and I’ve got plenty of Japanese books waiting for me too. I also want to try to tear through as much manga as I can this year in Japanese. I feel like there is no stopping now that I’ve pushed myself to the point I can pull this much reading off, so I’m gonna try my best to just keep reading every day like I was throughout January. I feel less pressure now that I don’t have to count pages or worry about hitting a certain number each day.

(image source)

A few steps in the right direction

Since I’m finishing up one of my tougher classes and getting ready to tackle a difficult programming certification and I have break for an hour from my busy schedule, I thought I would share with you one of my secrets. This is something I started doing without knowing it, but it’s something that is one of the keys to my success right now. I call it “a step in the right direction.”

It was born from procrastination, and the idea is that you just do a little bit and then you come back later and do a little bit more. It’s very Kaizen, very baby steps. By just taking one step in the right direction every day eventually you get where you are going. So I have a new exam to prepare for and new materials to gather for it, I have to read through a new syllabus and do some research on what other people have been doing. I don’t really want to do it right now though, so I’ll just take a step in the right direction. I’ll look at the syllabus and I’ll look at the book I need on Amazon. That’s it, I’m done. Tomorrow I’ll have to go deeper and talk to the instructor about the materials and subject matter. Eventually I’ll have taken so many steps forward I’ll run out of easy stuff to do, but I’ll also have accumulated enough knowledge that I can begin studying hard and making flash cards and coding up a storm again.

When I started working out I just started walking for 10 minutes a day, now I work out one to two hours six days a week. When I started studying Korean I just started trying to read a paragraph a day (well to be 100% honest I started with just learning a few hangul a day), now I read 10 pages a day. However I know from experience if I had tried to start out exercising by doing a full one hour work out, there is no way I would be able to keep up. The same is true with Korean and Japanese, I couldn’t have started out just reading as much as I do every day, I’ve tried. I’m not the same person mentally and physically I was when I started, so it makes sense that I couldn’t do the “work outs” that I do now back when I first started.

I think this is actually what causes some people to become discouraged, trying to do things they aren’t ready for, trying to do “work outs” that they physically or mentally are unprepared to do. While it’s probably true that if you try something hard and keep at it, it will eventually become easy but I can tell you from my own experience it’s easier to give that advice than it is to take it. It’s not that easy to maintain motivation when you are a beginner, at least not without some kind of outside influence. I think a lot of experts and advanced learners also forget this and they give advice that works very well for someone at their level but is much too hard for a beginner.

So then how do you become prepared?

Just take one step in the direction you want to go, take two if you want to, but that’s all you have to do. Eventually after months and months you’ll have taken hundreds of steps. This seems really slow, at first. This is the hard part I think and the reason why people over do it and burn out. They feel like they are moving slow, too slow. So they go faster and faster, but they can’t maintain that pace OR they can but something happens that throws them off their game. A holiday with the family, an illness, something that prevents them from studying for a day or two then they lose their momentum. They try to start again but now since they have had a few days off they suddenly realize how much work they need to do in order to catch up. And, they can’t regain their momentum again, burn out.

However if you started out slowly, then built upon that, it’s taken quite a long time build up those habits and momentum. So much time that if you miss a week or so you can easily get back into the habit because it’s so deeply ingrained  Or if you had to miss a day or two early on you don’t  have that much to catch up on or do every day so it’s easy to start again. You just take a step in the right direction!

And that brings us to…

3 States of language self-learning

The beginner mind:

I don’t understand this. I have to memorize everything. I have to study all day, and punish myself when I miss a day. I have to take the most difficult route. I know it’s working because it hurts. I can’t enjoy this because I don’t understand it. I need to read all the language learning blogs and forums, I’m sure the perfect method is out there waiting to be found. I won’t listen to the advice of more experienced learners, I’m sure I know better than they do.

The Intermediate mind:

I have to go back and learn all the stuff I missed. I have to keep focusing on the things that I didn’t master. I have to master the easy stuff before I can go on. I can’t enjoy this because I don’t deserve it. I need to have as many SRS cards as possible, that’s the key, I need to figure out a way to SRS everything. If I don’t enjoy SRSing it’s because I’m doing it wrong, there must be something wrong with me because it’s not as easy for me as it seems to be for everyone else. I’ll re-invent the wheel instead of using a method that already exists. If I don’t see results today, I better find a new method.

The Advanced mind:

I don’t need to understand this. I’ll learn it eventually, if it’s important it will come to me. I should work on my weak areas, but not at the expense of enjoyment. I don’t study for long, but instead do short, focused practice sessions. I use SRS for things that work well with it, but recognize where it has weaknesses. The right tool for the right problem instead of the same tool for every problem. I don’t really have a method, I just spend time doing the things I enjoy and challenge myself with new material on a regular basis. This is a life-time goal, it’s part of me, I’ll just take my time. There’s no rush. I probably suck but that’s okay I’m a lot better than I was before, and that is good enough because it means that if I keep doing this eventually I’ll be better than I am now and so on and so forth. Consistency over intensity and building a foundation of habits that lead to long term results.

This is something I’ve been struggling with lately, the gradual shift from expecting immediate goals to realizing that I’m in this for the long haul. I have to say that when you study a third language you gain a lot of perspective. Ideas and techniques you thought worked well, don’t work very well and ideas you dismissed suddenly seem like the best ideas you ever heard of. You have the confidence of knowing that results do come in time with hard work

Easy is not always good

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

- Samuel Johnson

Taking a break from some coding to look through my inspirational quotes document I keep for whenever I’m feeling down and I came across this quote. I think it’s important to pick low hanging fruit, as AJATT recommends. Making things as easy as possible, making studying Japanese so easy you can’t not do it. I still agree with these ideas and I believe that you should avoid making things harder than they have to be, I was guilty of this when I started Japanese. My current study regime is based around one concept and making that as easy as possible.

However, easy isn’t always good. When we think of what’s required to become good at something, to master something, you can’t just focus on the easy stuff. In fact you’ll learn far more by focusing on the hard stuff. Take reading for example. When I started reading Korean about 7 months ago, it was so hard and frustrating that it took me an entire month to read through one podcast transcript from talk to me in Korean’s intermediate pod casts. I’m not exaggerating  it took me an entire month to read through the whole thing and look up all the words. I had to do it a small section at a time and listen to the audio for that part and read it again the next day. I initially put off the idea as a waste of time because I thought it was just too hard.

However eventually when I started to see the diminishing returns of SRSing I dove into those podcasts. Looking up every single word, reading and listening and rereading and relistening. At first it was impossible to keep up with the audio, even though the podcasts start off a little slower than natural and a little easier than the later ones. I had this idea of shadowing the dialog but it was just too hard and the pronunciation of Korean words too difficult for me to shadow more than one sentence or two before giving up.

Eventually a few months later I was reading 2 a day, and some times I would forget to listen to the audio afterwards because I had become so used to Korean that I forgot I didn’t listen to it since I could hear the voices of the hosts in my head as I was reading. When I first tried to read Korean I had a lot of trouble with the dipthongs, but now it’s something I don’t even think about. It’s become so natural to me that it drives me crazy to see people arguing over Korean romanizations, something I completely avoided.

Instead of doing what I had always done, stick with sentences and wait till I’m ready for something harder, I just did the hard thing and read. I looked up every word and didn’t even try to remember what things meant, but eventually over time I started to recall all the common words and get used to the flow of the language. I remember being intimidated by long, run-on sentences but now they aren’t hard at all.

If I had continued to do something that was easy, kept picking the low hanging fruit I wouldn’t have made so much progress with Korean. Also I know now that if I keep moving on to more challenging things that I will make more progress, so for example starting on books in Korean I am back to looking up every single word however, now I know that it does pay off and I can trust my brain to remember. Eventually this will become easier too if I stick with it.

With Japanese I’m back to reading books, actually doing a parallel Japanese/Korean reading project at the moment, but I’m finding that all the reading I did in Japanese over the past six months has paid off and what used to be hard has become easier. When I look back at doing the easy thing, versus doing the hard thing, even if less enjoyable the hard thing pays bigger returns. It also teaches you that you can take on harder projects and tasks and overcome the difficulties.

We can say “nothing is hard, only unfamiliar” and that’s some what true I guess. I am more familiar with Korean than I was 6 months ago, or it is easier now than it used to be. Same difference I guess. My point is that I had to push myself out of my comfort zone and when I did I started to see a lot of improvement. I guess that sums it up in one sentence.

Mini update 2012

I haven’t really had much to say lately, and I’ve been really busy so I haven’t felt like taking time off from studying to make a blog post. I originally started blogging about language learning to talk about the journey and also try to answer questions I had about learning languages. I was still searching for the best way to do it, the best way to get results, because I didn’t really know anything about language learning, or even learning in general. I guess I was mostly blogging for myself, to work stuff out and get my thoughts out about the process, a process that I was still really unsure of until recently.

Over the past year I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t and how to use the right tool for the right job instead of the same tool for every job. I feel like I’ve found the answers I was looking for, I found what works for me. I found the best way to do it, for me, so I’d rather do that then spend time blogging. My “method” if you could call it that, isn’t anything special. I’d have to do a whole series walking through how I arrived here, and why I do it this way, why I quit doing everything I was doing with Japanese to switch to the way I was doing it with Korean. However I really don’t feel like doing that. It all comes down to priority, and focusing on what’s important but it’s not any kind of super-secret amazing learning method or any bull shit like that. No tricks or gimmicks, no hacks, no shortcuts, just the things that have given me the most gains.

Anyway I’ve gone on a little too long, but basically I’m super busy with programming, Korean, and Japanese, but it’s so much fun that’s all I want to do right now. Eventually I would actually like to do some blogging about maybe learning in general or something unrelated to languages, however I’m gonna put that off till I finish up school. I know I’m on the right track now and all I have to do is keep moving forward.

Tomorrow is a mountain

Every step that you take towards your goal is a step in the right direction. A master painter had to begin with his first stroke, a master swordsman had to begin by learning to hold a sword. The first step is the most obvious, but what we often don’t think about or talk about, or maybe what I mean is that nobody tells you – mastery takes a tremendous amount of work.

A master painter may spend hours studying painting techniques, he may spend his entire life painting when he feels unmotivated to do so. He may sacrafice a social life, he may never get married, he may sink into a depression, he may die never thinking his paintings are worth anything. The same with a master swordsman, he may spend his entire life training for a battle that will never come, he may know his students and teachers better than his own wife and kids. His kids may hate him because he spends all his time at the dojo training. A master may have to sacrafice in order to achieve greatness. These are things they don’t tell you when they say “you can be anything you want to be”.

It takes a lot work, it takes resources and time, and you may have to make sacrifices to reach your goal. Ever step you take towards your goal is a step towards mastery, a step towards the mountain. If you keep walking in the direction of the mountain and you don’t deviate from the path for very long, eventually you will reach the top of the mountain. Or at least you will die near the summit in a place that says “I was here” for all time to be witness.

How do we measure success?

Is a certification good enough to measure success? Or is it just a measure of how well you did  on the certification exam? Often in real life there is no measure for your success other than the praise of your peers, is it ok to shoot only for this as a goal? Some things are hard to measure, like the ability to draw or paint. From my own experience with art, I know you can learn to paint a decent portrait in just few days but that doesn’t really mean you are an great artist. Nor does a youtube video of you speaking in a foreign language prove anything other than that you can make a decent video.

Does this mean we shouldn’t strive for the respect of our peers?

As a means to an end I suppose not, but then by what measure do we hold our accomplishments against? Certianly you will be the only one who can properly judge your abilities because only you know what it took to get where you are. You will also be held back by the bias of others more often than not. Someone who is a great artist and graduate from a top school will have a hard time getting more praise than someone who is entirely self taught with the same ability, despite the fact that both individuals worked just as hard. Similarly someone who taught themselves a foreign language won’t be judged the same as someone who holds a high level certification in the same language.

The only answer I have is to keep walking towards the mountain. Taking another step every day, and eventually ending up on the summit. I suppose eventually you have to settle for the praise of others as a measure of your success, that or money and material goods. With language, I suppose that to blend seamlessly into the language as you use it in the same a way native does, perhaps you are mistaken for a native, but ultimately if nobody is around to see it or you never tell anyone will it mean the same thing to you?

I already know how much work it takes to create art, so it’s easy for me to make an arbitrary goal for becoming a good artist: the viewer sees the same thing you saw when you envisioned the image in your head and they are moved by it. With language I suppose it’s the opposite, you want to appear so ordinary and mundane that the listener forgets you are not a native speaker.

Maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about though, I have to admit I am a jack of all trades master of none myself. I do know that if you can’t read a book, but you start to look up words, eventually you’ll be able to read it. If you listen to enough of a language, *eventually you will be able to understand it. There is work to be done, but if you are willing to do it then you can be anything you want to be. You actually have to do the work though, every day, every day even if you don’t feel like it or don’t want to. The work has to be done.

**I am willing to do the work.

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*of course I’m talking about a situation where you are actively studying while listening, eventually you learn the words and become accustomed to the sounds and are able to understand more and more of the language.

**forgive me I’m high on painkillers and caffeine I’ll probably regret posting this pseudo-motivational crap later.

Grammar… what’s it good for?

I’m taking a short break from my intense study schedule to make a quick post. I think there are several important things you need to do when studying a language, there are more don’ts than dos, however there are some really important basics that have to permeate throughout your study.

First, be consistent. Study every day, no matter what. Even if you don’t feel like studying, if you make studying a habit you will find that you won’t feel good if you don’t study everyday.

Second, focus on learning words and collocations (words that go with words) instead of grammar. Because grammar isn’t important, at least it’s not as important.

I’m not saying “never learn grammar”, what I’m saying is: if you only focus on vocabulary, a lot of grammar will acquire itself. That is to say that a lot of grammar goes hand in hand with vocabulary and just by learning the words the grammar will come along for the ride.

I can’t emphasis how important it is to focus on the right things. I just read a blog post about a guy who quit Japanese because he didn’t feel after 6 months of trying to master kana, that he had made much progress. What…? He then blamed his failure on no interest in Japanese, well… put aside I can’t understand why someone would study a language they hadn’t fallen in love with, you certainly aren’t going to learn much if you only focus on the alphabet/syllabary.

Back to grammar, I’ve seen people spend years studying for the JLPT and never feel like they have gotten far in the language.  Why do something you don’t enjoy? Unless it’s for a degree program then I can understand because I’m in the same boat with school (not language related). I’ve learned much more focusing on the things I enjoy about Korean and Japanese than studying for some test that only means something to other language learners. Maybe I will take those tests some day, but I wouldn’t try to learn a language by studying for one. Test preparation materials rarely reflect the real, living language. Yet after a few Takeshi Kitano films I always feel like my Japanese has gotten a lot better. That’s one other caveat, you should be doing the right things but they also need to be challenging. They need to be slightly out of your reach, just a tad difficult because otherwise you won’t improve very much.