So, I find that example can really help clarify a point in a way that explanation cannot. The explanation, principles and rationale for Lazy Kanji remain the same; these are just elucidating examples. Thanks to MDBG, Heisig and Alia for the kanji definitions and stuff.

Remember: always write out your kanji by hand once per rep. Handwriting is still a real life skill . See Nutshell for more details.

The format is as follows:

1. FRONT: Kanji
   1. BACK: Keyword(s), supplemental info [example words, mnemonic stories, readings, etc.]
   2. More back matter

Enough talk! To the examples!

1. 日
   1. day
   2. sun
   3. 日 ㄖˋ abbr. for 日本, Japan 日 ㄖˋ sun / day / date, day of the month
2. 月
   1. moon
   2. month
3. 明
   1. bright
   2. clear
   3. あきら　あきらか
   4. ming2
4. 人
   1. person
   2. Bruce Lee
   3. pictograph of a person walking
5. 大
   1. big
   2. 大きい
6. 、
   1. a drop of
   2. [not a standalone kanji]
7. 太
   1. plump
8. 犬
   1. dog
   2. hound
9. 車
   1. car
   2. vehicle
   3. pictograph of a car
10. 軍
    1. army
    2. military
    3. wearing TOPHATS and driving around in silly CARs is a requirement in the ARMY
11. 運
    1. destiny
    2. luck
    3. army + movement
    4. when an ARMY MOVES, DESTINY is in the balance!
    5. The MOVEMENTS of an ARMY determine the DESTINY of nations!
    6. ウン
12. 暈
    1. dizzy
    2. sun + army
    3. The SUN shining into the ARMY’s eyes makes them DIZZY
13. 台
    1. platform
    2. 台 ㄊㄞˊ Taiwan (abbr.) / surname Tai 台 ㄊㄞˊ (classical) you (in letters) / variant of 臺｜台
14. 怠
    1. 怠 ㄉㄞˋ idle / lazy / negligent / careless
15. 怡
    1. 怡 ㄧˊ harmony / pleased ／ elated

Note: Observe that the back of the card doesn’t have to conform to any specific format. Some backs contain more info, others less. Some contain stories, others don’t. Some contains readings, others don’t. It’s all in the game. All that matters is that they contain at least one English meaning (i.e. keyword) for the character that is on the front; this keyword does not have to be unique across the board — keyword collision is okay. Any other additional/supplementary info is fine, too, just not necessary.

Observe also that we are learning the kanji in a logical, incremental order that allows you to see, reuse and build on interconnections; that’s the Heisig magic right there. Explicitly learning radicals (character components) first/separately is unnecessary, because that information is implicit in the order in which you learn the characters. Also, many of the traditionally defined 200 odd radicals are themselves actually composites of other characters, so…yeah.

Speaking of mnemonic stories, RevTK/RevTH is a treasure trove of those! KanjiDamage is pretty sweet, too.

Language skill is a lot like antiques, fine wine and company stock in that rewards (=y-axis = gains) accrue disproportionately on the right-hand side, long into the game (= time = x-axis). “New antiques” tend not to sell so well, oxymoronic as they are.

But people treat languages like they’re freaking milk or something — as if they were going to spoil! As if Japanese were going to evaporate into thin air just because it’s not the late 1980s/early 1990s any more (that delightful period of the 20th century when many Americans sincerely believed that the movie “Rising Sun” was in fact a documentary). As if Mandarin were going to spontaneously combust just because the Huffington Post wrote a scathing article on the work environment at the (a?) FoxConn factory (I don’t know whether they actually did or not; this is just a random example).

The language isn’t going anywhere! It’s not running away. Think about it: an Oxford professor can write books in deliberately arcane English plus fake Scandinavian languages (come on now, we’re all adults here, OK? Elvish sounds just like Finnish and you and I both know it ); he can then proceed to die a good 10 years before Khatzumoto is born and still have his books widely read — with no formal instruction for the readers — and have the intellectual property they represent earn his estate tens of millions of dollars posthumously.

For all the talk of how dynamic and mercurial language is, and it is at some level — the slang level — language is suprisingly stable and long-lived. And even some slang just never seems to go away. “Cool” is still a cool word. So, there’s no need to go do what I’ve seen some kids do, which is send me breathless, all-caps emails to the effect of:

• “KHATZ, I MUST KNOW JAPANESE NOW!!! i MUST TALK NOW!!! NO TIME FOR FOOLING AROUND AND GROWING NATURALLY!!!!!!!!” I NEED TO COMMUNICATE!!!”, or…
• “I NEED TO WORK FOR MY DAD’S THEATRE COMPANY IN JAPAN AS AN INTERPRETER!!! I TOOK JAPANESE 101!!! MY DAD PAID FOR IT AND NOW…”, or…
• “I NEED TO BE READING ACADEMIC MATERIAL!!!!”, or…

Or what? Or the world will end? Don’t you think that’s just a teeny bit dramatic? Did Japanese really just go from “interesting thing I’m kinda into” to “I’ll die unless I’m native level at it in the next 15 minutes”?

The other thing to realize is that this is not a linear process. It is a non-linear process. It is logarithmic at worst and probably (if experience is telling the truth) exponential. In fact, scratch that, it is exponential: it looks like the graph of y = x^3, with a little dip in the middle (more on that later; y=x^3 actually only goes flatline, but, whatever) vindicated further down the x-axis by a meteoric rise.

What this all means is that learning a language is profoundly, fundamentally unfair. At no time, at no point in the process, are you ever getting as good as you give. Of course, overall you will; overall, the quality and range and volume of your output shall be determined by the frequency of your input. But at any given moment, you are always either getting back much more than you give or much less than you give.

Tolkien, everybody’s favorite Oxford don, is dead — literally doing nothing but rotting in the ground. But his language skill, embodied in a persistent artifact that acts as his surrogate, continues to work for him and thus continues to get him more than he can ever again give. Life is unfair and that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, like the man (Joseph Ford, quoted by Richard Koch and James Gleick) said: “God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics…is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.”

Unfair is good. If life weren’t unfair, there couldn’t be cars or planes or levers, because there would be no way for you to get out more than you put in. Life is ultimately unfair in your favor, if, that is, you use your brain a little. Or, better yet, use someone else’s brain. Someone, somewhere, has probably already figured out a way to exploit some of the unfairness for you — you probably didn’t have to invent most — any? — of the technology you use.

SRS is one way to exploit the unfairness and get more than you give, because what SRS really does isn’t show you what to review (although it does do that), but not show you what you don’t need to review. Another way to take advantage of the unfair advantages that exist for you…is to stick around until they mature. Which they will. Of their own accord. An acorn doesn’t struggle to grow into an oak tree, it just stays alive long enough to let Nature take its course. That’s pretty much all you need to do.

If you want to reap large socio-economic rewards from a language, you need to stick around until reaping time: harvest time. You can’t reap jack if you leave before the harvest. You’ve just wasted time and energy and gotten nothing in return. ¹ Yet most people leave in spring. Almost everybody leaves in spring.

And not for bad reasons. People leave for a good reasons. People aren’t evil or lazy or stupid. Myopic, yes. Misinformed, yes. But not stupid, not lazy, not evil. There is a dip in the language acquisition process, the same dip that Seth Godin talks about in his book, “The Dip”. It’s a period where the apparent, extrinsic benefits of the process of getting used to language do not exceed the apparent, extrinsic detriments. It’s the intermediate period, a period that can seem to last forever. A period where you can’t feel any progress any more (even though it is still happening).

And that’s a huge motivational killer, because people love the feeling of making progress; they love the feeling of a linear reward for a linear effort. But that’s not how the game works. Putting in 10% effort doesn’t always get you 10% results. Again, early in the game, you get more than you give. Mid-game, you give more than you get. And late game, possessed of powerful language skill, you get infinitely more than you give. But that mid-game can seem grim; it’s like the dark part of a trilogy; it’s like “The Empire Strikes Back”. Everything seems to pot and lose meaning and — WTF? — the main villain is your father?!?!

Ironically, people who learn languages for economic reasons almost all adopt “day trader” strategies that ultimately maximize loss and minimize gain. They’re in; they’re out. They’re at this language; they’re at that language; they’re worried sick, when are they gonna get good, oh this is terrible.

And this is why, ironically, people who learn languages for economic reasons tend to get the least economic benefit from them. It’s a vicious irony, but it doesn’t have to be the case, because getting used to a language is far more a matter of persistence — of lethargy — than intelligence. To repeat: all you need to do is stay. Stick around. Literally. Show up. At your “farm”.

Learning languages for economic reasons is like American football: you go long and deep, because the scoring happens in the end zone. So you can’t be upset that you’re on the fifty yard line and no scoring is happening because that’s simply not where it happens.

People will happily spend double-digit numbers of years learning a sport that could be taken away from them by one misstep, one unintentional injury. Or an intellectual skill that could become obsolete by the time they peak at it. At least it seems so. And we think this perfectly normal. Programming languages like COBOL and Pascal have largely come and gone in terms of use and importance, yet natural languages like Swahili and English and Japanese soldier on.

Natural languages last a long time; it takes a lot more than a mere change in “the times” to uproot them. It takes a heck of a lot more than a busted knee or the emergence of a new, hitherto non-existent language, to make a natural language disappear, either from the world or from your life. Even a weird disease like ALS was not enough to take Stephen Hawking’s language skill away from him. Even that guy with no arms and no legs or that super midget guy — both of whom give personal development talks — cash in (and, in all seriousness, I mean that respectfully) on language = speaking skills. We would be unable to benefit from the wisdom of their experience if they were unable to communicate it to us.

You know how you make a cup of tea, right? A cuppa. Because, that’s just how you roll, right? And you put a bunch of sugar in it, because that, too, is the manner in which you roll. Guess where all the sugar is? ²

At the bottom of the cup. There. I have officially told you nothing new.

Why, though, do you disbelieve this when it comes to getting used to languages? Why are you so anxious to get that sugar hit RIGHT THIS MINUTE that you start to doubt the very existence of sugar? The sugar’s there, yo. In the endzone.

The trick is to get lost in the process, to have so much fun that you don’t even want to look at the clock, that you forget all about the clock. And so the trick to being economically smart about the game is, in fact, to appear to be economically stupid about it. To quote Barbara Sher: “…greatness? It will come…you won’t notice it because you’ll be so busy having a good time”.

You’re going to be great. Your eggs are going to hatch like gangbusters. Just stay long enough for it to happen.

You’re thinking this is going to be one of those creepier posts about “stalking” Japanese people. Not so. It’s far worse than that.

A good friend of mine, let’s call her Amy, has a stalker. Pretty girl problems, but problems nonetheless ¹. He got a hold of her phone number through unofficial means, and sends her all kinds of text messages…from the heart. Texts filled with gems like “I’m sorry; I love you; I HATE YOU!! I STILL LOVE THEE!”

Yeah. “Thee”. I know, right?!

What amuses me about these texts isn’t that they’re crazy, but that they reflect the unvarnished content of what I believe to be most people’s thoughts. Or maybe just mine. Chaotic, nonsensical, unprintable. It reminds me of how children and uninhibited adults react to the excitement of, say, Christmas day: they squeal and pirouette and blurt out high-pitched exclamations filled with nonsense words and a capella percussion.

“CEEEEEEE!!! DODOTISH!”

↑ That’s an impression of my little cousin when she was 7.

In a way, and you’ll have to excuse me for comparing a comedic genius to a common stalker, it’s the same thing that makes Dave Chappelle’s humor so brilliant: he verbalizes the unverbalizable; he says the unsayable, whether it was the obliviously self-loathing hate group leader guy, or the ethnically stereotypical pixies in the men’s urinals. That sounds redundant.

Anyway!

Stalkers, like Dave Chappelle, are shocking, in large part, not because of what they say, but for the fact that they said it. Not because of what they think, but for the fact that they actually went out and said it. Not for having considered the action, but for having taken it. Like a James Bond villain once quipped (and I paraphrase): “the difference between genius and insanity is success“.

Immersion is a crazy idea. But I don’t think it’s an idea that few people have had; I think many people have had the idea, but only a relative few have been mad enough, Glaswegian-accented enough — Spartan enough — to try it. Turn all your TV and movies and music and computing devices and websites Japanese? It’s kind of insane in its brutally straightforward logic: all Japanese people (and non-Japanese people) who are good at Japanese have been and remain exposed to Japanese; I want to be good at Japanese; I will expose myself to Japanese to the same extent as them. But it works and then people think you’re a genius and accuse you of having a genetic talent — a “gift”. From whom? We don’t know. And why do these gifts seem to have to be worked for? Conveniently, we don’t know.

Having crazy ideas won’t change your life. Trying even one of them will. Let a teeny tiny bit of that insanity out, like vanilla essence, just a drop, just enough to take you into so-called genius territory. And no more .

• 0 = total blank
• 1 = wrong
  
• 2 = mostly wrong
  
• 3 = mostly right
• 4 = right
• 5 = slam dunk
  
• WARP = Out-of-this-world ballin’ . WARP is generally about one or two orders of magnitude more powerful than a “5″. Use with great care. This will space your card very, very far out into the future.
  

Ironically enough, most people grade themselves too harshly. So:

1. Don’t be too harsh
2. Don’t grade yourself harshly on a card because you’ve had trouble with it in the past. Grade cards on a per rep basis: if you did well on the card this time around, then give yourself a high score. Surusu knows the card’s history and won’t boot it into oblivion just because you did well on it once or twice despite a troubled history .

You know what? I’ll just come out and say it: I like Darwin as much as anyone from where I’m from can like a Victorian Era English gentleman — economically. I’m not proud. He’s a man; I’m a man; I like him. What? We’re all adults here.

But I’m not a big fan of Darwinism. Heck, even Richard Dawkins, the man I pray to every night before I go to sleep, isn’t big on Darwinism.

Even Darwin didn’t like Darwinism. He never said “survival of the fittest”; he didn’t coin that phrase; he said “descent with modification”. Darwinism wasn’t good for the 20th century; Hitler and Marx were both fans of it, although perhaps for different reasons, which tells you a lot right there. Hey, I may pray to Richard Dawkins, but I live the law of Godwin.

But there’s definitely a place for Darwinist (should that even be capitalized?) or Darwinistic games, and one of those places is outside of real life, in the abstract world of SRSing. Here, where all that’s being “eliminated” are cards (and even then, not so much being eliminated as “moved” to “trashcans”), we can afford to be brutal.

So here’s how you do SRS Darwinism. Or, more accurately, here’s how I did it, and maybe you can try it and see how it works for you.

Every so often, a game-changing development in the field of SRS comes along. Sometimes you are its source. Sometimes I am its source. Sometimes someone else is its source.

The sentences method, lazy kanji, MCDs, all were once brand new methods that uprooted what had come before them. All were invented by people.

How do you deal with these changes?

Let’s take a concrete example: the change from the plain-Jane “10,000 Sentences” method to the MCD method. How would we pull off something like that? The un-bucolic, denatured (bear with me, I’ve been reading too much Emerson) schooled mind wants to just go out and delete the old deck and make a brand, spanking new deck. The schooled mind wants a clean slate.

Bad move. No clean slates for you.

Instead, you want a dirty transition. Specifically, you create a new deck while keeping the old one. Create as many new decks as you want, each one a living experiment. So, you have (in this example) your old 10k sentences deck and your new (MCD) deck existing concurrently, contemporaneously, which is Italian for “with temporaneously”. You have two  (in this example) “parallel” deck universes. You keep adding cards to both, you keep doing reps on both.

Birds of the tit family, all calm

Now what? OK, so there you are, two concurrent decks. It looks like I’ve just doubled your work. It doesn’t feel very minimalist…You see those tits of yours? Calm them. Stress isn’t good for little birds.

Just keep going, because over time (days and weeks)…

…One of the decks starts slipping. Through no fault or conscious effort of your own. This is good. Let it slip. Let it go. Suddenly, you look back and one of the decks (perhaps the new one) is big, strong, dynamic and healthy and the other is just gathering dust like the penguin toy from Toy Story…what? 2? 3? Anyway, yeah, like that.

“Natural” processes have “selected” one of your decks. You like it better. You add to it more. You do reps on it more. This is the deck you keep. This is the deck you move forward with. Whether or not you officially, physically delete (=deactivate) the old deck is up to you.

It’s a dirty process. It’s an unclean process. It’s heterogenous (sp?) and messy and tangled and gradual and kinda non-linear. In other words, it’s a pretty good process . It’s less of a jarring jump and more of a natural transition, with an intermediate period, an interregnum (if you will), where you have multiple decks for the same purpose. Eventually, the balance of power — of attention, of card creation and reppage — tips in favor of one of the decks.

When the upstart deck eclipses and old deck in scope…that is when you abandon (or even delete) the incumbent.

So, basically, rather than burning down your old house and going out into a brave new world with nothing but vim, vigor and a smile, you get to have two houses for a while and spend time in both. See which one you like best (there’s always a favorite), which will become clearer as the second house fills out — or perhaps fails to. When it does become clear, you can abandon or get rid of one of the “houses”. Yes, an SRS card deck is a house .

PS: I actually have multiple non-kanji Japanese decks, but they’re all MCD decks, split by subject matter (humanities, STEM, language development). They’re more or less identical in structure but different in content. The “language development” deck is the pure Japanese deck.

Hexe sayeth:

You can cloze the kanji readings and individual word meanings, but how do you come to understand the meaning of the sentence? Can’t you learn the meaning and reading of every word and still not know what the sentence means?

Yes, that is entirely possible. That’s why you fall back to bilingual MCDs. If you don’t get it, don’t use it. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. If it’s too hard or boring, delete it.

Having said that, this ability to “punch above your weight” — to handle texts far beyond your current level, is also part of the power of MCDs, though. Because if, say, curiosity drives you to want to crack a dense text without waiting for your language level to increase to a point where that it’s a cakewalk for you, then MCDs allow you to make a piecemeal, termites-in-wood attack on it, comprehending it bit by bit, until (if you stick around) eventually, you understand the whole.

If anime is bad for you, then so are nursery rhymes.

What is a “tuffett” anyway?

When was the last time you even saw a live sheep, let alone found a black one, and asked him for wool?

Do you know any masters and dames?

AND WHY DO YOU TALK TO SHEEP?

Don’t even get me started on fairy tales and immigrants.

When was the last time you were asked about your family background and started your explanation with “once upon a time…”?

Yeah, immigrants. That wasn’t typo ¹. That was deliberate ironic prejudice. Picture this. Vancouver. Iranian cab driver. What mistakes do you think he made in his English? Hint: He didn’t talk like Dr. Seuss. He did, however, say “too many” when he meant “so many”. Another Punjabi guy said “can’t” when he meant “won’t”. It was the little things. The little things that, I would add, MCDs pound you on.

Can I tell you something I know about you?
Here goes, then. Here it is. The secret of the Universe:

YOU’RE NOT EFFING STUPID.

You’re not effing stupid. You weren’t effing stupid when you were a toddler and you’re no more stupid now. In fact, the only stupid thing about you is that you think you’re so stupid that unless someone spells everything out to you in excruciating detail, including all qualifiers, classifications and possible variations, then you won’t understand anything and you’ll get it wrong and start a war because of some minor verbal faux pas.

That isn’t true. But you think it’s true. And yet, at the same time, your actions betray you. Wanna know how I know? Because I know you’ve never read the Apple End User License Agreement on your iPad. Oh, you did once for kicks, but you’ve never been through any of the revisions. Why? Precisely because legalese is so explicit that it tires and confuses you. It literally wears you down. In fact, some legalese is said to be intentionally written and typeset like this, i.e. to discourage reading and comprehension.

Daniel:

The Japanese i[n] anime is as real as the English in books by Dr. Seuss. And as we all know nobody learned from them.
(Oh, wait…)

Malcolm Gladwell:

“Reading is a form of explicit learning… Video games are an example of collateral learning, which is no less important.”

You are capable of implicit learning. Yes, even from books. You are capable of unconsciously internalizing the context and appropriateness of the words you hear and see. You can tell just by the situation and tone of voice what phrases connote — often enough, you can even tell the entire meaning. You are smart in a way that computers aren’t. What you lack in linear, machine intelligence you make up for in parallelized, organic smarts.

You can learn things that haven’t been explained to you. Heck, you can learn things without even realizing you’re learning them! Arguably, most of what you learn works this way. ² Most of your learning is not only incidental, but unconscious.

Here’s another interesting idea to ponder. One drawback of your “organic intelligence” — that actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise — is that it usually takes more than one “pass” for you to learn something, if by “learn” we mean “remember a fact to the point that you can retrieve (ouput) it”. In other words, with very few exceptions, a single exposure is never enough.

It takes a lot of passes, a lot of “hits” (a lot of “cache misses”, in computer memory terms) until your organic memory system goes: “oh, snap, this thing keeps coming up, let’s remember it”. It is this property of memory that the SRS recognizes and efficiently exploits, in order to aid (produce?) long-term retention. Of course there are other factors, like the emotional content of the memory, but even then, repetition is key to retention.

This “leaky bucket” property of organic memory ends up working in our favor, because it means that, assuming you acquire words in context (rather than from some context-free “vocabulary list”), by the time you know a word well enough to use it correctly, you’ll have been exposed to (heard/read) it so many times in context that you pretty much won’t be able to use it wrong.

And that is why you never went around using the word “tuffett” randomly, because you only ever heard it in the context of Miss Muffett, so you unconsciously knew — learned — that it was a Muffet-specific thing. But no one ever had to take you aside and sternly warn you that: “hey, kid, watch out for them nursery rhymes; that ain’t real English!”, did they? No, they didn’t. So why are you taking life advice from pompous, obnoxious forum trolls with no friends? ³ Why do you let them make you cower in fear?

In short, you’re not effing stupid, so stop assuming that you are and stop assuming that other people are and stop letting other people tell you you are. You’re ignorant; you’re noobish; you’re ugly…but you are not stupid.

You’re a duck. Don’t let trolls tell you how to fly or swim.

Turn the anime back on.

• "涙に濡れても笑顔枯れても 怖がる事はないよ僕らは弱い生き物なんだから 手を取り合おう" t.co/7GX8kU6MqE 16:00:06
• Telling yourself to do something hard is the same thing as telling yourself to do nothing at all. t.co/ndAUhpK0Ot 18:00:15
• Stop kidding yourself. You’re not gonna do that hard thing. So do something easy instead.
  t.co/BVK2wooXwV #immersion #SRS 20:00:11
• "it’s so much easier to do something when it’s fun" t.co/8ooOZC8GoY 22:00:15
• ゼンハイザーコミュニケーションズ の 【国内正規品】 ゼンハイザーコミュニケーションズ Bluetooth ヘッドセット MM 100J を Amazon でチェック！ t.co/5VtLSUOe9Q @さんから 00:00:40
• ネックバンド型高音質Bluetoothステレオヘッドセットゼンハイザーコミュニケーションズ の 【国内正規品】 ゼンハイザーコミュニケーションズ Bluetooth ヘッドセット MM 100J t.co/UABDnwu2R9 02:00:27
• "what might be most helpful is to adopt a philandering, slightly-abusive role model towards books" t.co/C0KhKjEek7 04:00:24
• "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." t.co/gBkvUZizAE 06:00:22
• "Detective Conan. I love the anime, but some episodes just suck. I skip them" t.co/nSxAfCxVMW 08:00:14
• I'm so used to reading comic panels in manga order that I go "backwards" even with American comics translated into Japanese… 10:00:12
• 【庵・菴・廬】いおり ①僧侶や世捨て人などが住む粗末な小屋。庵室（あんしつ）。いお。「━を結ぶ」 ②小さな家。粗末な家。また，自分の家を謙遜していう語。 ③農作業などのための仮小屋。「秋田刈る旅の━にしぐれ降り／万葉集2235」 ④軍隊の宿営地。軍営。〔和名… #daijirin 11:37:49
• 【筆〈忠実〉】ふでまめ （名・形動）［文］ナリ  手紙や文章を書くことを面倒がらない・こと（さま）。また，そのような人。⇔筆不精。 #daijirin 11:48:40
• 【感慨】かんがい 心に深く感じること。しみじみと思うこと。「━を覚える」「━にひたる」 #daijirin 12:58:22
• 【感慨深い】かんがいぶかい （形） しみじみと深く感じている。「—・い面持ち」 ［派生］━ げ（形動）・━ さ（名） #daijirin 12:58:25
• 【感慨無量】かんがいむりょう はかり知れないほど身にしみて感じること。感無量。 #daijirin 12:58:48
• 【感傷的】かんしょうてき （形動） 悲哀の感情に動かされやすく，涙もろいさま。感慨にふけるさま。センチメンタル。「━になる」「━な文章」 #daijirin 12:59:42
• 【悲哀】ひあい （名・形動）［文］ナリ  かなしく，あわれな・こと（さま）。「人生の━を感ずる」「━が漂う」「一種の━なる新音階を作れり／希臘思潮を論ず敏」 #daijirin 12:59:56
• 【抒情・叙情】じょじょう 感情を述べ表すこと。→叙事 #daijirin 13:01:12
• 【抒情詩・叙情詩】じょじょうし 作者の思いや感情を表す詩。元来は楽器に合わせて歌う詩。→叙事詩 #daijirin 13:01:24
• 【抒情文・叙情文】じょじょうぶん 自分の感情を表現した文章。 #daijirin 13:01:31
• 【奔出】ほんしゅつ （名）スル ほとばしり出ること。「地中から温水が━する」「情熱の━に身をまかせる」 #daijirin 13:03:55
• 【不問に付す 】取り立てて問題にはしないでおく。 #daijirin 13:05:24
• 【不問】ふもん 問いたださないこと。 #daijirin 13:05:45
• 【義足】ぎそく 足を失った人が，代わりにつける人工の足。義肢。→補装具 #daijirin 13:09:35
• 【義肢】ぎし 手や足の一部を失った人が，失われた部分の機能を補うためにつける人工の器具。義足や義手。→補装具 #daijirin 13:09:46
• 【堅実】けんじつ （名・形動）［文］ナリ  ①手がたくあぶなげのないこと。しっかりしていて，確かなこと。また，そのさま。「━な商売」「━な研究方法」 ②果実が堅いこと。また，その果実。→地道（補説欄） ［派生］━ さ（名）・━ み（名） #daijirin 13:16:46
• 【健実】けんじつ （名・形動）［文］ナリ  考え方・方法などがしっかりして確かな・こと（さま）。「誘惑に打勝つ，志操の━な新婦人／一隅より晶子」 #daijirin 13:17:04
• It is very difficult to force yourself to do anything. That's why you need to use finesse — fun — not force. 16:00:20
• 19世紀から生きている最後の人物…世界最高齢の日本人男性に対する海外の反応:らばQ t.co/FFIqPmTZik 18:00:17
• 驚愕することまちがいなし…自転車の概念をくつがえすほどのトリックプレイ集（動画）:らばQ t.co/ApXrhhGGHZ 20:00:36
• 【姶良】あいら 鹿児島県中央部の市。薩摩半島と大隅半島の付け根に位置し，南部は鹿児島湾に臨む。鹿児島市や霧島市に隣接し，交通の利便性にも恵まれ，住宅地としての開発が進んでいる。 #daijirin 12:46:29
• 【四親等】ししんとう 親等の一。四世を隔てた関係にある親族。高祖父母・いとこ・玄孫など。 #daijirin 22:07:01
• 【寝巻・寝間着・寝衣】ねまき 寝るときに着る衣服。 #daijirin 22:07:10
• 【不行き届き】ふゆきとどき （名・形動）［文］ナリ  注意が行き届かないこと。気がきかないこと。また，そのさま。「監督━による不祥事」 #daijirin 22:07:43
• 【腹】はら ［一］ （名） ①㋐動物の体で，胴の下半部。哺乳類では胸腔（きようこう）と骨盤の間にあって，胃や腸などの内臓を収めるところ。背の反対側となる体の表面をもいう。おなか。「━が痛い」「━をさする」 ㋑消化器，ことに胃腸。「━がすく」「━が減る」「━を… #daijirin 22:10:06
• 【年端・年歯】としは 〔「年歯（ねんし）」の訓読み〕 年齢のほど。年の端。 #daijirin 22:13:10
• 【年端＝も（＝の）行かぬ 】年若い。幼い。「まだ━◦ぬ子供」 #daijirin 22:13:24
• 【蝟集】いしゅう （名）スル 〔「蝟」はハリネズミの意〕 ハリネズミの毛のように多くの物が一時に寄り集まること。「僕の頭脳には万感━して／思出の記蘆花」 #daijirin 10:26:06
• 【万感】ばんかん 一時に心に浮かぶ種々さまざまな感情。「━胸に迫る」「━の思いを託す」 #daijirin 10:26:23
• 【蝟】い ［音］イ ハリネズミ。また，（ハリネズミの毛のように）群がり集まる。多い。「蝟集」 #daijirin 10:26:48
• 【獰猛】どうもう （形動）［文］ナリ  強く，荒々しいさま。凶悪で乱暴なさま。「━な顔付き」「━な犬」 ［派生］━ さ（名） #daijirin 10:28:31
• 【獰悪】どうあく （名・形動）［文］ナリ  性質や姿かたちが凶悪で，荒々しい・こと（さま）。「━な人相」「━なる夜叉の顔を／幻影の盾漱石」 #daijirin 10:28:39
• 【凶悪・兇悪】きょうあく （名・形動）［文］ナリ  性質が残忍で，悪いことを平気でやる・こと（さま）。「━な犯罪」「━犯」 ［派生］━ さ（名） #daijirin 10:28:57
• 【残忍・惨忍】ざんにん （名・形動）［文］ナリ  むごいことを平気でするさま。「━な仕打ち」「━な性格」 ［派生］━ さ（名） #daijirin 10:29:03
• 【律義・律儀】りちぎ （名・形動）［文］ナリ  ①ひどく義理がたいこと。実直なこと。また，そのさま。りつぎ。「━な人」「━にあいさつをして回る」 ②健康な・こと（さま）。「お━で重畳（ちようじよう）〳〵／浄瑠璃・山崎与次兵衛寿の門松」→りつぎ（律義） #daijirin 13:23:09
• 【律義・律儀】りつぎ ［一］（名）〔梵 sa〓vara〕 〘仏〙悪を防ぎ，善に導く正しい行い。また，そういう行いを定めた戒律。禁戒。「故笠置の解脱上人如法の━興隆志深くして／沙石集3」 ［二］（名・形動）［文］ナリ  →りちぎ（律義）①に同じ。「風俗━に／浮… #daijirin 13:23:17
• 【律義者・律儀者】りちぎもの 義理がたく実直な人。 #daijirin 13:23:26
• 【実直】じっちょく （名・形動）［文］ナリ  まじめで正直な・こと（さま）。律義。「誠に━な好人（よいひと）たちなので御座ります／小公子賤子」 ［派生］━ げ（形動）・━ さ（名） #daijirin 13:23:35
• "I have my own triumphs that when I really think about it didn’t justify the unhappy road to them." t.co/A2wdFXTIgb 16:00:18
• Just returned from a trip in rural Japan. People really do have strong accents, just like in "Trick" #鹿児島 18:00:22
• 「これはどう考えてもアイデンティティの危機だろう？」というコスプレ写真:らばQ t.co/I7pOPKawUm 20:01:09
• 【嘱目・属目】しょくもく （名）スル ①人の将来に期待して，目を離さず見守ること。「万人が━する人材」 ②目に入れること。目を向けること。「宜しく注意━せざる可からず／民約論徳」 ③俳諧で，即興的に目に触れたものを吟ずること。嘱目吟。 #daijirin 20:07:33
• タカラトミー の タートルズ バトラクション ミケランジェロ MT-03 を Amazon でチェック！ t.co/iMBxe5HAWV #TMNT #action #figure 22:00:11
• この差はいったい…野球の観客席にバットが飛んできたときの比較:らばQ t.co/gAldoXwZaN 00:00:12
• Typhoon Club / 颱風クラブ (Full movie with English subtitles) – YouTube t.co/Zo7yr0iKro 06:00:25
• Nobody thinks well of you. Nobody thinks ill of you. You are the top story in just about nobody else's mind. #speaking #output #shadowing 08:01:09
• 【格下】かくした 地位や格式・力量が下であること。⇔格上。「━の相手には負けられない」 #daijirin 09:56:04
• RT @crazypuce: I'm supposed to sleep but I can't stop watching Bleach #immersion #anime @ajatt 02:01:57
• Any idiot can be hard on themselves. The trick is being nice to yourself. #mindset #motivation #immersion 04:00:29
• Blood is no advantage, because (wait for it)…there's no language in your blood. Nobody bleeds kanji. 02:01:43
• Brute force works on things (sometimes); it doesn't work on people, definitely not when "people" is just you. #funoverforce #immersion 16:07:31
• The truth does not matter; all that matters is what works. What works *is* "the" truth. #language #acquisition #method 20:01:18
• If you want to know who the smartest is, have a debate. If you want to know what works, try stuff out. t.co/FJhGUcK2RT 14:00:10

OK. Guess what? You know that AJATT support ticket system?
Total failure. Pretty much.
And it’s my fault, not yours.

So, we’re going back to email — where things make more sense. But with a twist (more addresses, more eyes on the email, including Veronica’s).
The support ticket system is being phased out.
Here are the new email addresses if you need help:

• Contact | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time – is.gd/Nthycy

PS:　And you thought I was joking when I talked about being imperfect …

If an idea makes you afraid that no one will ever love you again, then it’s probably a good idea. Here’s a dirty little secret: Murderers get loved before, during and after the fact. Women falling in love with — and marrying — convicted murderers happens so often it’s no longer even newsworthy. There are Slavic people who think Hitler was a good guy. You could literally cause the deaths of millions and someone, somewhere will still love you.

Now, I want to go on record here and say that the official AJATT policy on murder is that it’s a bad thing, right up there with pins-and-needles and bleeding hangnails. And Starbucks shops that close too early, because WTF kind of coffee shop closes at 9pm? And genocide? Oh, don’t even get me started on genocide…that’s worse than immigrants.

What? They’re takin’ our jerbs.

But I also want to go on record and tell you that, if you could do something morally reprehensible and still be loved, don’t you think you could just do something weird and still be loved? Again, not necessarily by a specific person or group, but by some person and/or group of persons. Rhetorical question. You could.

You aren’t gonna die and only people who were inclined to hate you are gonna hate you anyway ¹, so please, play that anime, shadow them voices and visibly carry around Japanese books like you own the place, because you kinda do. You own your personal space. It’s your little moving kingdom. No one can take it away from you (Pauli Exclusion Principle, mate).

A lot of people are afraid of shadowing — embarrassed to be seen or heard doing it. But as I see it, the socio-economic prospects alone of the kind of people who would make fun of someone for learning things are so woefully abysmal that they inspire only pity. You should feel sorry — bitterly, tearfully, Bambi’s-mother-just-died sorry ² — for the kind of people who would make fun of you for shadowing. A few years from now, they’ll literally be begging you for help with Japanese and then they’ll be begging you for advice on how to learn Japanese, but by then you’ll be, like, I dunno, Nelly in Ride Wit Me. It’s a total non-issue.

Nobody you want to be like would make fun of you for practicing, even — especially — if your practice method looked and sounded weird. Because everybody you want to be like knows that looking like an ugly duckling now is just a swan precursor. The uglier the better. The people of the kind that you are becoming, that you are growing into, know that it’s all part of the game; they respect you; they support you; they’re hoping for you to succeed. For real, even if they’ve never met you, they wish you well. They don’t think you’re a wannabe ³ — in fact, they wish more people wanted to be. And somebody, some groupie, somewhere loves you or soon will .

That is all.

There’s always been a bit of a catch-22 with learning to use a personal computer (or smartphone or similarly advanced device) in Japanese.

What exactly do I mean?

Well, like:

• you need to learn Japanese to comfortably use a Japanese UI (user interface), but….
• you need to use a Japanese UI in order to learn Japanese.

“Why not just copy and paste?”, you say?

Good luck with that. Many computer UI screens cannot be copied and pasted and therefore cannot be easily looked up in an online dictonary or SRSed (turned into SRS cards). So you would need to know how to read the words in order to type them out and thus learn them, and you would need to learn them in order to know the readings…

A massive, clusterhump of a chicken-and-egg problem it was.

…Until now.

The AJATT Computer Software Sentence Pack (CSP) ends this catch-22, because its sentences are SRS-ready, DRM-free and copy-pastable. This is a sentence pack for nerds, full of stuff that matters. Stuff like warning screens — undoubtedly some of the most important textual computer information of all. Because it’s no good to only ambiguously understand an important warning screen. You need precise understanding and certainty.

Language study has traditionally been dominated by humanities types. They set the curricula; they write the books; they make the rules. That’s fine; they’re nice people; they bleed when tickled and laugh when cut; my best friend is one, etc. etc. But the problem is that they don’t like computers; they mistrust computers. That’s why they’re in the humanities to begin with, to get away from all that coarse, colorful, fun, useful, flashy stuff . Some of them even have a Neil Postman-esque disdain for all modern technology. They barely tolerate electronic dictionaries. Technologywise, they would just as soon have us go back to the Bronze Age, or at least the Renaissance, presumably because that would “build character”.

That’s right, your typical Japanese teacher is Calvin’s dad.

But software and computers are all around us, and they ain’t goin’ nowhere. That smartphone in your pocket? More computer than phone.

Make no mistake, software now runs your life. Geek or not, you spend your days glued to machines through software; your smartphone is now an extension of your body. You probably touch it more than you touch your lovers — and you’re one of the cool kids! I know hippies — hippies — modernity-hating, outhouse-loving, barefoot-walking, won’t-take-Advil-when-they-have-a-headache, contraceptive-hating-but-somehow-cigarette-loving, pothead hippies who literally text on their iPhones while making out.

This CSP is real, natural Japanese as it is used in software, because software unites us all. Software is our new reality.

Before I was that guy who wrote raunchy emails and boring, repetitive, self-helpy articles and made dumb videos, I was a guy with a degree in computer science — not Japanese. I was a software engineer at a little corporation called Sony back when that meant something (lol), programming middleware for CyberShot cameras.

As an IT consultant, I helped Japanese companies stop shooting themselves in the Internet foot. As a video game translator, I helped millions of English speakers who can’t or won’t learn Japanese, enjoy the some of the best of Japanese pop culture. You name a big game over the past few years and I’ve probably been involved in it, although non-disclosure agreements prohibit me from sharing the exact details with you.

Here at AJATT.com, I also wrote software like Surusu (the SRS), built entire learning ecosystems like Neutrino and wrote all manner of little programmatic tools and scripts that keep AJATT running somewhat smoothly .

In short, my geek-fu is strong. Almost as strong as my self-promotion-fu. And it is in this geeky spirit that I present to you this sentence pack for all humankind, for all 10 types of human beings — those who understand binary, and those who don’t. So geek especially, but geek or not, this sentence pack is for you. The most modern, realistic, current, natural, up-to-date and fun learning material of its kind ever produced. And it can be yours now and forever.

So Why Would Anyone Even Want This?

For more or less the same reason why you would want My First Sentence Pack. The key words here are ease, convenience and, to quote a Simpsons episode, “can’t somebody else do it?”. Sure, you could go figure out how to read that computer Japanese by yourself — you totally can; I did. You could go out and buy buy thousands of dollars’ worth of gear, read through mountains of hardware manuals, scour hundreds of websites — thousands of pages of text — in order to compile, transcribe and translate your own sentence pack. There’s nothing wrong with going it alone. Independence is noble. But if you can’t be bothered, if you don’t want to put in the effort, then consider this the equivalent of paying somebody to do your homework for you.

Who’s It For? Who Should Get the Computer Software Sentence Pack (CSP)?

The CSP is for you if:

• You use a personal computer, tablet and/or smartphone, and
• You are getting used to, or wanting to get used to (i.e. “learn”) Japanese, and
• You are not a total beginner — you already know some Japanese
  • All hiragana and katakana
  • At least some kanji (completing RTK1 is highly recommended, though not absolutely essential)
  • You can read some basic phrases
• Note: If you you’re still a bit of a noob — still close to being a total beginner — My First Sentence Pack is prolly a better fit for you.

Who’s It Not For?

• People who are already native-level in Japanese
• People who don’t know or don’t want to know any Japanese
• People who are still beginners at Japanese
• People willing and able to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of gear, read through mountains of hardware manuals, scour hundreds of websites — thousands of pages of text — to compile, transcribe and translate on their own

Don’t MCDs (Massive-Context Cloze Deletions) Make Sentences Irrelevant? Didn’t The 10,000 Method Sentences Die?

The answer to the first question is no. The answer to the second is yes. MCDs re-orient how we work with sentences; they change how sentence packs are used. And as a result, MCDs actually make sentence packs even more useful by allowing us to absorb and internalize them both more deeply and more effortlessly. “More effortlessly” — that sounds funny, but you get the point! Ultimately, the point is to get the language inside your head, inside your body, and MCDs, combined with sentence packs, accomplish this in spectacular fashion.

Sweet! How Can I Get Mine?

The Computer Software Sentence Pack (CSP) comes in two versions, basic and deluxe. Basic’s cheaper; deluxe is more value. Because the CSP is so closely related to the similarly-themed “Gadgets and Electronics Sentence Pack“, I’ve decided to give you the latter for free, combining them into one super-pack containing hundreds of sentences, with natural and authoritative English translations and kanji readings (furigana) to boot. And it’s all based on engaging, for-native-by-native subject matter that’s actually relevant to your life, because how many times are you going to read a textbook that shows you how to say you’re a student with two brothers and a younger sister before you want to shoot yourself? Exactly.

Sexy Satisfaction Guarantee

Buy it. Try it. No likey? No payey. Just ask me for a full refund. No fuss. No hassles. Just be like: “I love you, Khatz. You’re so pretty and smart. I just want a refund for the Computer Software Sentence Pack. I promise I’ll be back soon”, and AJATT staff will run your refund for you with a smile . We know you’ll be back .

“What would be really interesting to see…is how beautiful things grow out of s##t. Because nobody ever believes that. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they’d somehow appeared there and formed in his head—before he, and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what’s so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing, things evolve out of nothing.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you can say, ‘well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.’

You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work.”

Brian Eno [Emphasis Added]

“We take greater pains to persuade others we are happy than in trying to think so ourselves.”
Confucius (supposedly)

“You can do anything if you stop trying to do everything”
Oliver Emberton

“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves.”
François de la Rochefoucauld

The idea I’m about to share with you, like pretty much every idea I’ve ever shared with you, sits on that fine line between profundity and obviousness. So, either it’s going to sound really deep or too obvious to go without saying. My own personal experience is that, in many contexts, obvious things need to be said. “Common sense isn’t common”, as one AJATTeer once put it. And even if we “know” something, we need to hear it many times in many ways until we actually start to live it.

If you think about it, that’s why parents worry so much about their kids running with a bad crowd. You’re not gonna…well, you’re highly unlikely to pick up any bad habits from just one outing with a bad crowd. Or even two. Or even three! In fact, you’ll probably have fun. But over time, you’ll become desensitized to their attitudes, to their behavior. Their worldview will become yours and their behavior will become yours. This is not simply true of bad behavior; it’s true of all behavior. The process is subtle and gradual but inexorable. You become like the people and ideas you spend time with.

Crap! Two paragraphs in and I already said something obvious! And it’s not even the thing I want to talk about today. OK, back on topic. Don’t take parenting advice from me, by the way, I only have cats.

In my life so far, I’ve tried many things. Projects. Initiatives. Schemes. Experiments. A lotta experiments. And I’ve found that there is one mindset, one way of doing things that always (despite appearances) seems to work best. For want of a better name, I call this mindset “mediocre excellence”.

“Mediocre excellence” (mediocrellence? lol); I love how oxymoronic it sounds. At the same time, it’s hard ¹ for me to explain what it looks like, let alone what if feels like, but I know when I’m doing it and I know what it is and I know what it feels like. It’s just…hard for me to put into words. I’m going to use words to try to describe it to you, but these words will not work 100% because this is something that transcends description, or at least my powers of description.

Another name for mediocre excellence would be “functional excellence“ ². Mediocre excellence is about doing what works. Not doing what’s perfect, or even what’s good, or even what’s “right”, but what works. It’s about doing what’s good enough. Mediocre excellence is about executing simple, concrete, obvious actions and processes, perhaps best encapsulated in the famous Jim Rohn maxim: “[Success is easy...but] the things that are easy to do are easy not to do”.

The word “mediocre” has negative connotations. This is a deliberate word choice on my part because it is essential that you disabuse yourself of the notion that doing difficult things or doing wonderful things or big things will get you results. No, doing not-nothings is what gets you results. All those other things just get you tired.

mediocre  (md-kr)
adj.
Moderate to inferior in quality; ordinary. See Synonyms at average.

“Mediocre”. It’s usually used as an insult. This is good. Things need to be so small, so easy that you insult your intelligence; they insult your sense of scale, your sense of propriety; they even insult your aesthetic sense. People should look down on you a bit. If people aren’t looking down on you, there’s probably a problem.

The mediocrity is in doing things that are so easy, that they cause you no pain. So easy that they cause you no strain. So easy that you can’t believe they count. So easy that you almost (or totally) doubt that they even help. Here are some examples, although there exist many more ³:

• 10,000 sentences (when it was the core method): (“What? All I do is read them aloud?! But that’s TOO EASY!!!”)
• Turning on a Chinese cartoon and leaving it on (“but I’m not even paying attention!”).
• Using only one earphone instead of two (because you can’t be bovvered)

It’s about taking actions that are so far within your ability to take that you…yeah, you get it. So there’s basically no comfort zone departure. You are working fully within your ability. No stretch. You stretched when you chose a language you weren’t born into. No more stretching required. I’m reminded of an article I once read, an interview with the coach of Japan’s national synchronized swimming team, and she said (I paraphrase): “I train my girls to give 80%. Because you’re not going to be able to give 100% in a real match, so we train at and for 80%”. Maybe that quote doesn’t hit you like it hit me, but…in world where people say things that “110%”; it was freightrainful of fresh air . My muscles relaxed just reading it.

So, where does the excellence come in? Well, it turns out that the “magic”, if I might be so bold, is in the process. It’s kind of like how digging ditches gives you Greek god statue muscles; you weren’t trying to look statuesque; it just happened. You just wanted, I dunno, beer and comics and tuition money for the summer. The process made it happen. The process made you(r body) beautiful. The magic is indirect and imperceptible. You don’t force or control it directly; you guide it; you influence it. So it’s not like scoring a try in rugby where you’re there and you’ve got the ball and you take the ball over the line and you put it down all nice and firm.

Now, this may seem at odds with all the AJATT talk of going “all out” and” in it to win it” and “do moderation in moderation“, but I assure you, it works…kinda. More or less. It hangs together. The trick in all this is sticking around long enough for Nature to do its work, to work its magic.

You don’t have to have to work to make your heart beat or digest your food or even grow hair/taller. It’s not a conscious process. You don’t have to work but you do have to help. You support the process by, well, making sure you don’t die. You do that by not stepping into traffic, not jumping off buildings and not going into rooms where you can’t see or hear Japanese . It’s so easy that you don’t even think about it, but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing anything.

Hmmm…I still don’t feel like I’ve communicated it to you yet and we’re kinda treading old ground all over again. Let’s try again…

Mediocre excellence is all about:

• Obvious — doing the obvious
  • What’s staring me in the face?
  • What opportunities are available to me?
  • What can I think of to do?
• Easy — doing the easy
  • What’s would be easy for me to do now?
  • What would be fun to do right now?
  • What wouldn’t require much effort/energy?
• Convenient — doing what’s convenient, what’s at hand
  • What’s do I have the tools to do right now?

It escapes me now who said it or where I read it, but there was this guy, I think he may have been French and old school (pre-20th century) and he said, basically, that ordinary people try to do what they can’t do but heroes just do what they can do. And, again, that’s the mediocrity part. You’re always doing things within your ability to do. You only do things you have the tools, energy and desire to do at the time. And so on the surface, this is incredibly mediocre. Nothing earth-shattering is happening.

You only do things you have the tools, energy and desire to do at the time. You don’t try to surf the Internet when you’ve got no Internet connection. You don’t try to read books in the shower. You don’t try to do kanji reps in your sleep. You don’t try to concentrate when you’re tired. You don’t try to pick up ice with chopsticks. You don’t try to thread proverbial needles when you’re too sleepy to focus. You do only what is easy, convenient and obvious at the time. Steven Johnson would call this working within the “adjacent possible“. It’s so small and incremental, like climbing up and down steps, that you have no sense of difficulty or effort or amazingness or even progress. It’s just the thing within arm’s reach. It’s just the next step.

mediocre (ˌmi diˈoʊ kər)
adj.
of only ordinary or moderate quality; barely adequate.
[French médiocre, from Latin mediocris : medius, middle]

Mediocre excellence is all about identifying and then choosing these ridiculously easy, ridiculously doable things. Mediocre excellence is also about avoiding the temptation to fly up the steps because it would look cooler. In my personal experience, this is the biggest pitfall, bigger even than a failure to appreciate that small things add up, that dust can pile up into a mountain (to quote a Japanese saying), is the desire to look cool by doing big, hard, complex things flawlessly. To “show” “the world” that you’re “trying”.

Don’t be fooled by my scruffy clothes and soft voice. It’s all a front. I am positively plagued by a desire to look cool; there is a part of me that is still trying to impress people from first grade (not to mention high school and second grade and total strangers in the street)! It’s there. And it’s stupid. And I’ve learned to suppress/ignore/avoid/bypass it in certain contexts but not yet in all situations and certainly not at all times. Which is not to say that you should hide your practice (i.e. do your reps, shadowing and CCSing in private), because that’s the same coolness desire in a different form; it’s just the countersignaling version of the same thing.

Mediocre excellence is about getting off your own back and letting it go because good enough is good enough. And more than 0 is good enough. Don’t try to be amazing, just be. There. Doing It. Showing up. You won when you showed up. There’s nothing left to prove.

Mediocre excellence is about recognizing that:

1. Most things in life aren’t important, and therefore don’t need doing
2. A few things in life are important and but (new word )
3. The important things are better done badly — mediocrely — than left undone. A bad or half-buttocked job beats 0 every time. Better to drink tap water than no water. Better to breathe even stuffy air than no air.

And, yes, “they” might laugh at you. You might become a laughingstock. But what of it? We’re all maggot food anyhow. What do you care what other maggot food thinks? ⁴ Most likely people will be indifferent. More importantly, don’t make the situation worse by giving yourself difficult things to do. Enjoy the mediocrity. Don’t try so hard to be cool that you end up hating your own life.

I’m totally still talking about getting used to Japanese, by the way . Don’t try to take a “life lesson” or some other such scrap away from this. I won’t let you!

Um…yeah…still doesn’t quite get it across. I haven’t…ugh. The feeling of mediocre excellence. How relaxing it is. How liberating. How easy. From what I’ve been able to observe of him, I think B. F. Skinner (my favorite psychologist of all time) was a mediocre excellence type of guy. Just running simple, straightforward experiments (mediocre — anybody could do it; anybody could understand it) and then seeing and getting profound results (excellence — his name lives on etc.). But you know what? Whatever. This is good enough.

Mediocre excellence doesn’t get it right and doesn’t get it done; mediocre excellence gets it started. Mediocre excellence never tries to get it right the first time. Mediocre excellence never tries to get it done in one shot. Mediocre excellence just tries to get closer with each shot ⁵. Mediocre excellence whips up a temporary solution and improves it gradually.

Since mediocre excellence isn’t about doing big, hard things, it shouldn’t surprise you that it’s not about doing clever, brave things either. So you don’t need to be or act like your favorite movie heroes, Captain Kirk (brave) and Khan Noonien Singh (clever). At best, you get to be cheeky. Yeah, that’s it. Mediocre excellence is “cheeky”. Bravery and cleverness are finite and domain-dependent. Cheekiness goes everywhere. Cheek is perhaps brave, but in a cowardly, understated way; it’s sometimes clever, but in a dumb, non-self-conscious way. That’s what you want. Or not, I dunno — I haven’t really thought this part through ⁶ .

If you were to ask me: “what is the guiding philosophy of AJATT in two words?”, I would say “mediocre excellence”. Not because I woudn’t like to to be more perfect or more impressive, but because mediocrity is sustainable. ⁷ And what’s sustained, grows. And what grows, well, gets big. And big things — big vocabularies, for example — look like excellence, look like magic, look like genius, look like skill. And maybe they are but, all you’re ever doing is what’s obvious, easy and convenient at the time.

No push. No harshness. Never break a sweat. Don’t let your conscience be your guide; your conscience is a crap guide: it’s been co-opted; it’s been compromised; it’s been socialized; it’s been ASMized ⁸. It will only lead you to self-loathing and struggle for the sake of struggle. You accomplish the great thing, an “everything” (a functional approximation of “everything”), not necessarily by doing nothing (although…there’s certainly a place for that), but by doing things that feel like nothing.

So, I have three older sisters, which means that I grew up in a house full of women. Why does Khatz act like a girl doing an impression of a guy? Now you know.

The youngest of my sisters, my little big sister (Oliver Twister!), hates tepid tea. On her personal 1~10 scale of injustice, tepid tea is at 11 with the Holocaust earning a respectable 9, right behind bad punctuation.

Whether or not you share my little big sister’s idiosyncratic sense of hate priorities (to her credit, maybe she feels so strongly about tepid tea because it’s such a tractable, avoidable, solvable-by-one-person problem), you know that tepid tea is just…wrong. Cartman wrong. Wroang!

So, as I write this, I’m staying at a hotel in an undisclosed country, collecting information and recordings for future secret AJATT projects (don’t worry, plenty of hookers and blow) and it was bed time, so I ordered room service: piping hot milk and some chocolate chip cookies off the children’s menu. Screw you; I’m grown-up enough to not need to act like a grown-up!

Anyway, the milk came and it was decidedly, stridently, gay pride parade-level flamboyantly…tepid.
(I’d get angry, but one doesn’t simply yell at the people who handle one’s food behind closed doors. That, and, the room service lady on the phone had a really sexy Russian accent: “but this is only meelk we hev; oh, you are vanting it hot, yes? Vill thet be all, ser?”
Yes. Yes, I am vanting it hot).

And that, I imagine, is what it can and does feel like to be at intermediate level sometimes: it feels worse than when you were an ice-cold noob. It feels worse than knowing nothing, perhaps because the fruit of the tree of knowledge has shown you the extent of your ignorance ¹. Inasmuch as the size of the circle of your knowledge has increased, so the circumference of that circle, which represents the edge of your knowledge and thus the ignorance of which you are self-aware, has also increased. In fact, the circumference of ignorance expands in size faster than (but in proportion to) the size of your circle of knowledge.

In other words, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Your knowledge has made you humble. Too humble. What is it that that Frenchman said? At first we hope too much, then too little? It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. And it makes you feel like, well, tepid tea.

The key is not to give in to this feeling. Just because you feel tepid, doesn’t mean that you are. OK, no, I mean…yeah, in a way you are tepid; you are; you’re not boiling, but you’re hotter than you’ve ever been before and it’s important that you recognize, accept and congratulate yourself for that. You are literally at the very top of your game thus far. How do I know? Well, because tepid tea is hotter than ice tea! You have never been this hot before. It’s an awkward temperature, to be sure, but that’s fine: you outgrow it by adding heat, not giving up.

Realize how much of a noob you used to be and how far you’ve come. You probably said things like “kanjis” and called it “the Japanese alphabet”. Realize how much you know. It almost seems like you where better when you were ice tea — a noob — but that’s an illusion. You feel subjectively worse, but you are objectively better. So keep on moving.

“Eurogram” mode and “Manual mode” have been merged into one, so now it’s all just called “manual” mode. All the features that were part of “Eurogram” mode are now part of manual mode as well.

• Default = Normal = Manual mode: Creates the only cloze deletions you explicitly specify (separated by whitespace) in the clozetexts box, with some optimizations for definite/indefinite articles and verb endings as are commonly found in European languages.
  • Example: Clozetexts box input ¹ “and you are not it” results in up to 5 cards, of clozetexts “and”, “you”, “are”, “not” and “it” respectively.

Oh, also, while we’re at it — Surusu multimedia now supports WAV files as well, in addition to OGG and MP3. Don’t say I never did nothin’ for the peoples .

Hey there, Tiger.

The recent backend upgrade over at AJATT Plus has made it possible to provide lifetime access to data over there as well. So…as of today (actually, as of January 27), the AJATT Library is migrating back over to AJATT Plus. Since AJATT Plus can now do everything that the AJATT Library was originally established to do — and more — it just made sense.

Key benefits for you are:

• The same “lifetime access” awesomeness you’ve enjoyed at the AJATT Library
• Faster access to updates
• Faster access to add-ons
• Single-sign-in: Fewer logins to worry about

Basically, as far as you’re concerned, the “lib.ajatt.com” URL simply becomes a “plus.ajatt.com” URL.
Your login info will remain the same (it’ll either be the same as at the AJATT Library or the same as your AJATT Plus account).

Thanks for your support and for being so good-looking. Here’s to more good times together

Khatz

Peep this. So I’m in Vancouver. And I’m hungry for something awesome to put into my mouth. So I go into this Persian bakery, because that’s a good place to find awesome things to put into my mouth. So I’m walking in and guess what I see?

• A Persian bakery, with
• Very good-looking Persian people in it
  • Including a gorgeous young woman (typical college age?) manning the till…well, the entire store, really
• Persian music playing, and
• A guy at a table reading a newspaper — in Farsi!

…And you still wonder how people can have accents (including the young person)?
Let’s review. The people at this bakery were doing full spectrum Persian immersion — no cross-language multiplexing. They were:

• Hearing Persian,
• Reading Persian,
• Speaking Persian, and
• EATING Persian

Now imagine this happening every day for 20 years…

Where’s your critical period god now, skeptics?! Huh?!

My point here is: children aren’t magical. They’re just bad at immersion; they’re bad at controlling their environment. Children don’t even get to choose what to eat and when to sleep. Adults are amazing. Adults can re-create one country inside another. Reminds me of the American parties with American food and American people playing American games that I go to in Japan. Adults rule. Literally.

So next time you want to know how to do immersion, do it like a Persian . Also, visit your local Persian bakery, coz…dayom.