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ESL Materials: The Bilingual Secret Weapon

February 20, 2013, 6:59 am
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In my personal experience, by far the best bilingual material for someone approaching an L2, is L1 learning materials for L2 speakers. 1
So, in your case, that’ll be ESL (English as a Second Language) materials for Japanese and Chinese speakers.

Why? Well, because, Grasshopper;

  • There’s always way too much L2 material. ESL books for Japanese people contain more Japanese explanation and commentary than English.
  • You realize that most grammar explanations are ex post facto realizations of a pattern that is best acquired unconsciously (and can only be realized by someone who has already acquired them unconsciously); you realize that they are unnecessary and almost always succeed in producing fear and confusion rather than comprehension.
  • The English gives you a massive context cue: you always know what’s being talked about.
  • You learn how to discuss the L2 in the L2 — how to explain words and ideas and grammar and stuff…with words: the reason this is valuable is because once you can explain words well, you can basically explain anything. Ever notice how accomplished linguists like Stevie Pinker and Noam van den Chomsky range so far outside of linguistics? Yeah, that’s why.
  • The L2 (Japanese/Chinese) is almost always very natural, real, uncondescending, FUNBUN (for native by native). Sometimes there’s “translatese” (Japanese as it sounds translated from English), but this is mmm….relatively rare and not to be feared too badly.
  • It’s a major confidence boost to realize that Japanese and Chinese L1 speakers are as depressed, brow-beaten, neurotic, erratic and generally sad about their English as you are about your Chinese/Japanese/whatever. And you already know English, so…you must be awesome in some way.
  • It re-humanizes all people and languages, as you realize it’s not that Chinese or Japanese is hard (neither is), it’s just that the method is hard. There are no hard languages, only hard methods. There are no hard steaks, only blunt knives. Think of how ridiculous English spelling is. Yet we’re not about to change it and nor should we. All that needs changing is how it’s taught. Similarly, kanji doesn’t need “simplifying” or character reduction or any of that stupidity; the steak doesn’t need changing, only the knife.
  • If it doesn’t suck (i.e. isn’t a school textbook), it’ll often cover very real, idiomatic, English-specific phrases and ideas that you’re gonna want to know how to express in the L2 anyhow.
  • Conversely, if it does suck it’ll show you just how bad textbooks are and how stilted and unnatural and anachronistic the things they have you learn are.
    • People new to Japanese always think I’m exaggerating about how much JSL textbooks suck until I show them an ESL textbook. If you want to know how bad the Japanese in a typical JSL textbook is, just look at the English in an ESL textbook.
    • To be fair, not all ESL books that suck are textbooks, but most ESL textbooks, most language textbooks, do suck. I could draw you a Venn diagram, but then I’d have to upload it and that would be work and we can’t have that: I think it’s against my religion. 2

Finally, here are some links to the ESL material in question:

Notes:

  1. The one exception is any and every product I make. Har har har. ↩
    • Just checked. It’s official: hard work is against my religion :P .
      • “What religion is that, Khatz?”
        • I’d tell ya, but I can’t be bothered.
          • “It sounds to me like you’re just making it up.”
            • Oh yeah, of course, because all the other ones weren’t made up either.
              • “Oh. Oh, zing. Wonders will never cease — sarcasm on the Internet, Khatz? By Jupiter, your courage knows no bounds.”
                • By Jupiter? What, have you been watching Rome again? What is this, Asterix?
                  • “I put my Ast*rix into your Mom last night…”
                    • Yeah, and she said it was soft and floppy, like a French comic book…
                      • “Ohhhhh!”
                      • Ohhhhh! ↩
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AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week of 2013-02-16

February 21, 2013, 11:59 pm
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Success Story: Using AJATT to Pwn Japanese Classes (Which Still Suck), And Moving On In Life…

February 24, 2013, 6:59 pm
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Penname Shawn was an AJATTeer back when that meant something. Back before the violence and the hookers and the blow. Back before telling endless Mom jokes in footnotes became a substitute for content 1. Here, he shares his success and coming-of-age story in his own words:

I signed up for AJATT+ again to check in to see what recent developments have occurred and to also pay my dues. I owe a great deal to you and your website in helping me to develop my skills in second language acquisition and, most importantly, helping me reframe how I understand language learning.

As it stands right now, I am about 2 and a half years into learning Japanese. It took me a full year to get through Heisig. Hypothetically, you could say that I have only been learning Japanese for the last year and a half (obviously this isn’t true, but it sure felt that way at times during Heisig. Even more so when peers would question why I was wasting my time with something like RTK when I couldn’t even string together a correct grammatical sentence in Japanese to save my life).

I have done all of this while finishing my Master’s in English Literature and teaching college courses for the first time. I was also in a long-term committed relationship with someone who was not learning Japanese (which has recently come to an end, sadly). In other words, I was, and still am, living a busy, fulfilling life while teaching myself Japanese effectively. The trick I found, as you have promoted throughout your website, was simply controlling my environment, making Japanese a habit, and being willing to throw out materials that are boring until I find something that is compelling.

For a long time I really doubted whether or not I was making progress, up until I had the opportunity to enter into a Japanese classroom at the University I attend and teach at. It was a 400 level course (also the first Japanese course I had ever taken), so the students were in their fourth year of Japanese courses and some had even done a semester abroad in Japan. At first the learning curve was very high, the entire class was conducted in Japanese and walking into an upper level class really shook my self-confidence. But as time went on, I realized that not only was I on par with the students in the classroom, but I was quickly surpassing them thanks to immersion, Anki, and simply having fun with native materials.

What was disturbing for me was recognizing that the other students, throughout this semester, had simply plateaued. Obviously this is not an objective judgement, but my own impression of what was happening. After talking to a few students after class, I realized how many of them simply did not study outside of class or even use Japanese over breaks. They are spending enormous amounts of money on classes expecting that an undergrad in Japanese will lead to fluency or working knowledge of the language without putting in the time or effort outside of class. It completely boggled my mind.

But then, I started paying more attention to the materials we were using in class. They were incredibly boring and even painful. I remember getting really burnt out with our study materials and I would simply put it down and pick up a MURAKAMI Haruki (村上春樹) novel and pick through it. What I didn’t realize, which is crazy if you think about it, was that the novel I’d pick up would be way beyond my level or the level of the classroom, but it felt like a total pleasure and relief because I was interested.

For the majority of my fellow classmates they didn’t question the classroom itself. They saw it as the only way to gain fluency. They’d burn themselves out on class materials until they hated Japanese and would not look at it again until they were forced to from fear of punishment (i.e. tests). Then when a break came along, they’d simply stop studying entirely.

I always had a resting point for my Japanese, I’d keep interesting materials that supported the boring, hard to do stuff. I’m not saying the class was pointless (it wasn’t, I learned a lot and it pushed me and gave me the opportunity to focus on Japanese in my already busy life), but rather how everyone approached the genre of the classroom was pointless.

The classroom is meant to support and guide you on your own discoveries and studies. It is not a magical purchase that will impart you with skills simply because you paid and show up to class having done the minimum amount of homework.

What really upset me was there was this reinforced culture of mediocrity amongst the students. Some of them almost seemed to brag about how little work they did or they would just complain about the teacher, the language (seriously? writing kanji is an absolute pleasure), or any other excuse they could come up with. I made a point to close myself off from that culture and focus on my own language acquisition process.

You know, if I had taken classes first, before finding AJATT, I think I would be exactly like those students. It is not really anyone’s fault, it’s simply how the system has evolved…the system influences in a large way what you can think and do. That’s why it is so important to have multiple systems. This is getting abstract, so let me try to give an example. Systems or genres influence what we can do or not do, for example the genre of the classroom dictates what is appropriate behavior and not.

If I were a student, taking off my pants and walking to the front of the classroom while the teacher is lecturing, obviously would break the conventions of that genre. In fact, normal, healthy people, would never think of doing something like that because we pick up on the rules of the systems and genres we interact with everyday. A weird example, I know, but you see the point I assume. Your website’s most important feature is simply breaking the power that our assumptions hold over our behaviors when it comes to language learning.

I can’t tell you how many of these students kept pushing textbooks on me to try and help me with my Japanese (yo, seriously? I have been studying Japanese not even half the time you have been and I am at your level already. You want to tell me what I ought to do?). Talk about cognitive dissonance…

What is my point? Well, first I want to tell you how thankful I am that you created this website and that you continue to break down misguided assumptions about language acquisition in entertaining and enlightening ways. Secondly, I want to echo one of your main points that has been the most difficult and important aspect in self-learning. Create your own system and constantly change it.

Don’t allow a rigid system to take over because you think you ought to be doing something. Keep your system healthy by pruning away at the parts that don’t work any more and feed those parts that are working. Be ready to abandon what isn’t working or has stopped working. Always be ready to explore and test. When your system is about to break you, break the system. You’ll move far faster by being pragmatic and allowing your likes and dislikes to guide you.

Because of my life (graduate student/instructor/friend/boyfriend/part-time waiter), I had to make my own system and make it work for me. Anytime I listened to dogma, it would eventually break me and take me away from exposing myself to Japanese. When I stopped being so anal retentive and just focused on what I liked doing and was interested in doing, I would make huge leaps in development without even realizing it.

I hope that my experience might help other people who are struggling with all the internal and external resistance that comes with self-learning.

Keep up the good work, Khatz. You are an inspiration and you have functioned as a kind of guru to me. It has been a pleasure learning from you and being challenged.

But as the Buddhists say, when you meet the Buddha along the path, kill him.

You’re the man, Shawn. I humbly accept my metaphorical passing. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Take care and stay handsome.

Notes:

  1. Your mother is lonely. Let me be the stepfather you need. ↩
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If You Played Songs The Way You Read Books, You Would Hate Music

February 28, 2013, 6:59 am
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“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” ~ Howard Aiken

Reading is skimming.

If you played songs the way you read books, you would hate music. You wouldn’t like any songs. You would have no favorite bands. It would all just be a frikkin’ chore. This isn’t a thought experiment: I didn’t really like music until mp3s came around and I was totally freed from the tyranny of “one artist, one album at a time, all in order” 1. The explosion of variety in choice and sequence changed the game for me.

Read books like you listen to music. Skip tracks. A page, like a song, must earn the right to keep being “played”. When you don’t like a song or don’t feel like it right now, you skip to the next track. Book pages are begging you to do the same to them You don’t force yourself to like or even listen to all the tracks in an album. Why should pages in a book be any different?

Here’s what school didn’t want you to know:
You’re not a bad reader, she’s just a bad writer. The world is full of bad writers; I speak as one of them. Skip the page. :)
There are no bad readers, only bad books. You don’t suck. That book sucks. That page sucks. If it were any good, it would make you want to read it.

People who don’t read enough or are illiterate altogether just haven’t been exposed to any good books yet: if they had been, they’d have been driven by an insatiable urge to read. I can read Japanese in large part because the first 9 volumes of the Evangelion manga are so good. I wanted to read them so badly, I had to become literate. I’d read what of them had been translated into English, but that wasn’t enough for me.

Every boring page that you don’t skip, that you don’t stop reading, is preventing you discovering a book or author or page that you will like.
Every boring page that you don’t skip lowers the likelihood that you will ever discover a a page that doesn’t suck.
Every boring page that you don’t skip is like a jealous, annoying sibling, vigorously rooster-blocking you from discovering the page, the line, the author the book of your dreams.

The more boring things you force yourself to read, the less likely you are to ever get to something cool.

You’re trying to drive to Wal-Mart and every boring page is a detour.
Think about it: if you were driving a car, and forced yourself to go everywhere but Wal-Mart 2…

Trying to read slowly to get the most out of a book is like trying to play a song slowly to get the most out of it. It produces more distortion than comprehension. To get that part of the song down, you just loop it. Similarly with a book, just re-read it again. Multi-pass reading. Loop the book. You’re far better off reading a book many times sloppily than reading it once well. Even painters run the brush over the spot a bunch of times, right? Same idea.

You don’t need to get good at reading to start skimming. If anything, the weaker your reading skill, the more you need to skip. It doesn’t matter that you’re a rabidly voracious reader in English. Get over your English self. Your English self can eat a dictaphone. In Japanese, you’re a baby. You will hate reading in Japanese if you don’t start skimming. It’s that simple. Your reading skill in Japanese is fragile. That means you’re fragile.

“B-But, Khatzumoto-sensei how will I ever learn to read if I skip stuff?”

Wrong question. Let me rap with you, son:
If you don’t skip, you will never learn to read.
There. I said it. The “n” word. Never.

“B-but is it even reading at that point, though? Isn’t one then merely glancing at random things?”
↑ Spoken like a true illiterate. 3
Well, for starters, you’re not a fax machine, needing everything fed in sequence.
You’re a human bean.
And guess what? If you need clarification (drum roll)…you can go back.
Just like you go through music playlists in Winamp 4…the direction is not only forward but also backward.
The trick is to stay the rhymes-with-duck away from boring things.

Sequence is overrated. Which is not to say that it isn’t sometimes valuable (that’s why we go back), but it’s sort of like…like that girl who thinks she’s Helen of Troy’s prettier sister but is actually a 6 at best (maybe a low 7 in the right lighting and at a MySpace angle)? Or maybe even like Helen of Troy herself because, seriously, how pretty could this woman have been that calm, rational, phlegmatic Mediterranean men were losing their oh…men.
Anyway, sequence is like that.
Overrated.

You’re not a fax machine. You’re not a Turing machine needing ticker tape. You’re a person. And a book is like a person. So saying “but if I switch and skip, surely nothing will make sense!” is like saying: “if I don’t hear a person’s life story in excruciating detail from beginning to end, I’ll know nothing about them but random facts!”.

But you know what? Often you’ll know and learn and understand more from the summary, Cliffs Notes 5, headings and table of contents, plus a few random details here and there, than from effing hearing:

“Tuesday, September 22, 199X, I woke up at 6:43 and rubbed the gunk out of my eyes. My vision still blurry, I stumbled to the kitchen, where I opened the cupboard and pulled out a bowl. Into the bowl I poured some cereal — Honey Nut Crunch — and then 2% milk, for there was no skim to be had. I proceeded to eat this cereal for breakfast…”

And all you wanted to know was his name and hometown.

You’re not missing anything important by skimming, and even if you are, you can always rewind, replay change gears, go in slo-mo if need be (rarely necessary).

So, yeah, books are like people. And you don’t need to have read all the words in a book — or even most of them — to get the picture, any more than you need to see a printout of the quantum state of every subatomic particle of every atom of every molecule of all 10 trillion cells in a person’s body at every point in time since they were conceived and while we’re at it, every quantum state of every subatomic particle of every atom of every molecule of all 10 trillion cells at every point in time from division to apoptosis for all N-million of their direct ancestors…in order to know a person.

The real world is “random”. Much more than we generally give it credit for. Sequence, smooth linearity is largely an illusion that we create. That’s why movie editing works — because we make up a sequence of events where none actually existed. It’s why any kind of storytelling works, because our brains are machines for creating patterns and sequence and filling in blanks.

Virgin Mary in a tortilla, anyone?

So skip around. Eventually something will draw you in. But to get to that something you have GOT to skip. Japanese itself is at stake here. And that is the irony.

Fact: The most beautiful homes are the near-empty ones. Wabi-sabi and all that.
Bear with me while I tout a design philosophy that my site does not actually embody. If you want to think clearly, to live in comfort and dignity and true opulence, then you throw things away. Throwing things away sets you free and makes life fun. Same story with reading.

If you want a happy reading life, then you skip. You skim. Regularly. Frequently. Religiously.

People who try to read everything are like hoarders who hoard things, like in the show “Hoarders”.
“B-b-but…I should…it might be useful”
Yes, and that’s why your house is full of trash and you sleep in dark corners — much like the vermin who now rule it.

Just like hoarding things turns them all into trash, forcing yourself to read everything, in sequence, one-duckling-character-at-a-time-till-death-to-you-part turns all of reading into a pile of metaphorical feces.
Disgust is very hard to localize.
When you read a Japanese book in a boring way (i.e. by not skipping the boring(-to-you) bits)
You don’t get bored of the book, you get bored of the entire Japanese language.

But all you had to do was skip. All you had to do was not-do: not-read. Not-read the boring parts.

You still don’t believe me, do you? I’m that shady uncle who takes you to whorehouses and underage drinking, aren’t I?
Fine. It pains me to do this, but…let me just pull rank on you second.
I am literate enough in Japanese to…I dunno…be mean-spirited and pedantic to Japanese people and not show enough weakness to get any come-uppance (I am still talking about reading BTW).
Conversely, everyone who raises the “b-but, it’s not reading if I don’t do everything in order and feel boredom and suffering” argument…isn’t. Literate in Japanese, that is.

I’m like an experienced pilot giving flying advice and people who are yet to ever fly a plane are freaking out and raising objections to me home-brewed tips and pointers arrr. And Japanese people? Cannot help you, because they’re like birds now; they can’t even remember how they learned how to fly. But I do. And I’m telling you.

So listen to me. Trust me on this. Don’t be a hoarder. Start skimming now. The reading rooster must not be blocked!

It’s funny. I get flack sometimes for not giving enough concrete advice here at AJATT. But at the same time, as soon as I do give it, people freak out like: “THERE’S NO WAY THAT COULD WORK!!!”. 10k Sentences, MCDs, Lazy Kanji…always greeted with the same violent incredulity.
But don’t worry, I’m not blaming you and the Jews. Just the Jews. It’s not your fault. The truth is, I hate giving concrete advice. Even though, ironically, when I was a youngling in Japanese, when the iPhone was but a twinkle in a certain Syrian’s eye, I deperately sought concrete advice and techniques.

Having said that, concrete advice and techniques definitely have their place. We could sit around like potheads musing on martial arts all day but eventually, yeah, you probably want to spar or do some dummy work. The thing is (my) concrete advice too quickly becomes dogma.

I’ll never forget how skeptisicm over the old “10,000 Sentences” method (pre-MCDs) turned into fervent devotion to it and then rabid defense of it (as if it were litereally a noble and venerable tradition) when it was supplanted by MCDs.

And that’s just the thing. Methods change.
Remember the “Unified Reading Process“? I mean, I kinda sorta do it still, but not really; it’s evolved so much that it barely resembles the original.
So where does my loyalty lie? Certainly not to a technique. Techniques are literally just tools to me.
I care little for drills, and drilling, all I want is holes. That sentence will never get taken the wrong way.

I give you relatively little concrete advice not because, well, because the mindset that acquires and produces and — most importantly — adapts and evolves that concrete advice is far more important. Without that mindset, you could easily latch onto the advice and hurt yourself. History has shown this to be, yeah, a thing.

At some level, I think, and this is going to sound incredibly arrogant, but I think…I want to free the greatest tool of all: your imagination. I want you to be able to imagine yourself being native-like in Japanese.

I dunno…I’m not good with words like you are. I’m not eloquent. I don’t know how to explain why stuff works or even how. I can’t justify any of it theoretically; I can’t convince you with or without logic; I’ll leave that to other people. It’s mostly pictures anyway. All I know is…there’s stuff that I did and do and it works pretty awesome, and you can try it out and mix it up. I do want you to suspend your disbelief for a while while trying the stuff out, but I don’t want you to “believe in” the stuff. The stuff doesn’t need to be believed in. The one and only thing that must be believed in is you.

You’re illiterate. Not in English but in some other language. Presumably in Japanese.
You can’t read Japanese. I can. Like a bau5.
I know a way out for you.
Give it a try. It’s not like you’re going to get any worse at reading than you are now.

Engagement is the name of the game.
The primary objective is not to get yourself reading “the” right things in “the” right way but to get yourself reading at all. We’re not trying to hit home runs. Just to get you with your cleats on and a bat in hand. On the ice with skates on and stick in hand. Anything — everything — that happens beyond that is gravy on the cake. Icing on the turkey.

Boredom roosterblocks the primary objective.
So boredom must go.

Read books like you listen to music. Skip pages like you skip tracks. A page, like a song, must earn the right to keep being “played”. Life’s too short to go all the way through every song to figure out whether or not you like it. If you like dubstep, you’re not doing yourself any favors listening to country music and hoping that Skrillex will magically appear out of nowhere to save the day. Go straight to the Skrillex.

I love music. I love Japanese hiphop. But only because I, like, buy, rent or download 10 albums at a time and throw away all but 1~2 songs per album (and sometimes, all songs). Don’t die of thirst waiting for Evian when there’s Volvic. Don’t wait until you know every word in the language to start turning pages.

Apparently, the best readers come from homes where their parents showed (and read them) books before they could even speak, let alone read. Learn from these parents. Do you want to live in the metaphorical illiteracy ghetto forever, or do you want to pwn? Don’t wait until all your ducks are in a row to touch them books. Read now. Skip now. Skim now. Because reading is skipping and skimming.

Notes:

  1. Mixtapes? Please. Ain’t nobody got time for dat. ↩
  2. (what? I like Wal-Mart) ↩
  3. You know I love you, Eric. I’m just winding you up. You’re from AJATT Plus. We’re like family. ↩
  4. Brazen nostalgia…I don’t even use Winamp any more, but…she deserves a mention because we grew up with her. ↩
  5. Fact: The Cliffs Notes work. I was in a reading club and we discussed Hamlet one time. I’d read all of the Cliffs Notes and only some of the play. I was able to discuss that s### more intelligently than anyone there. I once pooh-poohed the Cliffs Notes. I was wrong. ↩
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AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week of 2013-02-23

February 28, 2013, 11:59 pm
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How Real Is Anime Japanese?

March 5, 2013, 6:59 am
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How real is the Japanese in books, mangas and so on…?

At the moment I’m full in my immersion. It works and I’m glad to make a big progress.

But now there are people around me who say that the Japanese in movies, mangas isn’t the Japanese which is spoken in real life.

Does this mean that I’m learning Japanese that isn’t real?

I don’t believe that. But I’d like to pose the question to people who are in Japan and know better. Please help me!

How real is anime Japanese?

Short answer: Real enough.
Long answer: That is a very good question.


Some anime are more naturalistic (dialogwise) than others.
Just like how in American cartoons, “Ben 10″ 1 is much more naturalistic in its dialogue than, say, “Looney Tunes” or “Swat Kats”.
Yes, I am a grown man and I watch cartoons with a fearsome intensity.

Another American example: “Phineas and Ferb”. The dialogue may not be real real real, but the wit definitely is. The fourth wall-breaking, self-deprecating, stream-of-consciousness humor of Dr. Doofenshmirtz is very current, very natural and very adult.

The fact is, there are different kinds of “real” Japanese. Just like there are different kinds of wrong.

Arguably, there are billions of different kinds of Japanese: different dialects, different sociolects, different idiolects, different situation-lects, with each individual person possessing their own…set of subsets of these.
So you can’t point to one thing and say “this is ‘The One True Japanese to Rule Them All’”.
There’s telephone Japanese, convenience store Japanese, hanging out with guys Japanese, old friends Japanese, friends’ parents Japanese, strangers Japanese, baby and pet Japanese, news Japanese, politician Japanese, TV discussion show Japanese, comedy Japanese, documentary Japanese. All have their specific “things”.

What can be said about textbook Japanese is that it’s unnaturally normative, pedantic, boring and…unreal as a tournament.

Anime Japanese definitely has its “flavor”.
But then there are many different kinds of anime.
“Shonen Jump” anime Japanese is one thing…
“Samurai Champloo” another,
“Ergo Proxy” another altogether.

Again, anime has its flavor. But it’s a native flavor. A real flavor. A Japanese flavor.
Will you talk slightly funny if all you watch is anime?
Yes, probably.
BUT it’ll be a native-like, Japanese funny, not a gaijin funny.
You’ll be like a guy who watched too much “Full House” and talks like Bob Saget or Uncle Joey. I’m not saying that that’s John Kabira’s story, but…yeah. Haha.

I had a phase where I wrote and spoke like shonen anime character (thankfully not “Naruto” 2). All my sentences ended in “ぜ”. I also had a phase where I talked like a kid from “Gokusen”. All my sentences ended in “じゃねーぞ”. But I outgrew those phases. And it only took a couple of weeks, literally, two weeks of living in Japan for real, to correct the last of my “imbalances” 3.

So, yeah, there is “anime” Japanese just like there is “Star Trek” English.
But guess what?
“Star Trek English” is more than 90% the same as “regular” English, even with all the jargon.

If anything, what truly separates anime Japanese from “normal” Japanese is not that it’s anime, but that it’s scripted and rehearsed. The news, TV dramas, movies, audiobooks. All are good, linguistically at least. All are worth your time if they’re fun for you. But all are scripted and rehearsed.

Real speech is, of course, ad-libbed. (There are some awesome shows that feature ad-libbed Japanese, like Peeping Life). And that is the real difference.

Here it is in a nutshell; if you like, you can call it the Two Laws of Media (anime included):

  1. Any Japanese that’s made by and for Japanese people is closer to real Japanese than anything made “for learners”.
  2. Any scripted Japanese is closer to other scripted Japanese than it is to real Japanese.

Let me “draw” that for you as an “ASCII Venn Diagram”:

(JSL)








































                    (Anime/Movies/News/TV) – (“Real Japanese”)

As you can see, JSL (“Japanese as a Second[ary?] Language” = fake, sanitized, whitewashed, “for learners”, “for foreigners” Japanese) is separated from real Japanese by a great horizontal and vertical distance. Anime, on the other hand, actually overlaps and intersects with real Japanese. A real Venn diagram woulda been betta, but…you have no idea how little I can be bothered. If you only knew the depths of laziness we’re dealing with here, you wouldn’t even entertain that thought :D .

Ultimately, anime is worth your time.
Anime will not “hurt” your Japanese; it will strengthen it. Yes, it will certainly “color” and “flavor” it to some extent in the process, but not in a way that cannot be balanced out by other “colors” and “flavors”.

Take-home points in support, defense and praise of anime as a learning tool and more:

  • It’s a real and pervasive part of contemporary Japanese culture
    • There are only two types of culture: Living culture and dead culture. Pop culture is living culture. High culture is dead culture. (Twain: a classic is a book that everybody praises and nobody reads). Anime is alive; anime is here and now. Anything considered respectable is high culture: the rotting, badly preserved corpse of once-living pop culture. Remember that Shakespeare used to be pop; kimonos used to be dirty.
  • It’s fun, engaging and addictive
  • It’s close enough to real
  • Occasionally (as in the case of “Peeping Life“) it’s basically 100% real — and exact-L2-subbed, to boot!
  • Schools and jerk-off teachers hate it, which is a good sign that it’s awesome; those people hate smiles, smartphones, pretty girls and comfortable clothes, too, so…yeah.
    • Frankly, the whole anti-anime stance is nothing but a proxy war against fun itself. Nobody gets their knickers in a twist over TV news or the effing tea ceremony or handwritten letters made from cherry blossom paper. Just anime and other fun things.
  • Most anime these days implement some form of “Tarzan”-style media mix 4, so you can enjoy and learn from the manga, the radio play (“Drama CD”), the comic book, the video game, the novelization and the anime reboot of the same basic work.
  • We don’t all want to live in Japan. For some of us, anime itself is the main reason to learn Japanese. It was certainly a big reason for me. So being able to learn the language through the very thing you want to learn the language for is, how you say, a good get.

And that’s all from me, folks.
Sorry for the lack of elegance in the argument…I have much room for development in that regard.
Anyway, the point is not to be convinced by me.
Don’t agree or disagree, just go out there and have fun and be a baller :) .

Notes:

  1. especially the character “Kevin Levin” ↩
  2. After every mean-spirited joke that’s been on this website, you’re going to be butthurt about this? ↩
  3. When I first came to Japan, outputwise my two registers were über-polite and gangster. I had no stable “middle ground”. It didn’t take but a mo’ to get one, no conscious practice required. Getting over my tendency to fall back on technical language when cornered (lol) took somewhat longer, but that’s a different issue, more of an engineer/geek thing… ↩
  4. (yeah, “Star Wars” came later) ↩
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AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week of 2013-03-02

March 7, 2013, 11:59 pm
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Don’t Feel. Measure.

March 10, 2013, 7:59 am
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When to think. When to feel. When to measure.

  1. When acting, don’t measure. Feel.
    • Just wing it. When you’re speaking is not the time to be thinking.
  2. After acting — when tracking your progress — don’t feel. Measure.
    • When you’re measuring is not the time to be feeling.
  3. When planning, don’t feel. Think. Brainstorm.
    • The only feeling you should have here is…excitement at the ideas you’re going to act on (try out) when you…
  4. Return to step 1.
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AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week of 2013-03-09

March 15, 2013, 12:59 am
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The Dumbest Idea Ever

March 15, 2013, 7:59 am
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Learning certain languages as “prerequisites” for learning other languages.

Dumb.

FFS, this isn’t school. No one not high on laudanum would suggest you learn Latin and Greek (or even Italian and French) and Frisian before learning English so that learning English would be easier and your English “purer”.  But somehow there’s an idea in the stupid section of language-learning circles that one “should” learn language X before learning language Y.

Languages aren’t lubricant for each other. One doesn’t make it so that the other slides in easier. Not in the way you’re thinking. The second language helps you learn the third language not for linguistic reasons but for psychological ones: you’re full of confidence 1 from the knowledge that you’ve handled another language before; you not only know that it’s doable but that you can do it. 2

If anything, linguistically, languages interfere with each other. If they’re too far apart, there’s no reinforcement. If they’re too close together, there’s confusion, false friends and the pernicious, unconscious tendency to mix and overlap (in fact, even if they’re far apart, there’s still that tendency). Either way, you need to train yourself to keep them separate while also keeping each one healthy — logistically, there are time and media resource allocation issues to resolve.

So, yeah, don’t learn one language so you can learn another. That’s like forcing yourself to eat crap food so you can better “appreciate” good food: you just end up developing a taste for crap food. Again, no one not high on anachronistic narcotics would suggest you listen to all jazz and only jazz before you listen to any hip hop, so that you’ll “get it”. It may be an interesting academic exercise, but so is electrocuting gay people in the bollocks to de-gay them: in practical terms, it’s the dumbest idea ever. Not good dumb. Dumb dumb. Remarkably dumb. 1980s fashion dumb. The dumbest idea ever, dumb.

Notes:

  1. (well, memory, but we won’t argue it) ↩
  2. You probably also have a lot of “stored capital” in the form of personal learning techniques you’ve developed, many of which will always be useful, some of which will have to be adjusted or abandoned. ↩
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Good Immersion, Bad Immersion

March 18, 2013, 7:59 am
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The First World Problem is Choice, Or: Which Language Should I Learn?

March 19, 2013, 7:59 am
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im-learning-thaiLook closely at any of the problems people bring you (or you bring yourself) and you’ll see that at the core, what you’re stuck not between a rock and a hard place, but between a sofa and a beanbag.

If you can read this, you are a member of the global elite: you have electricity, running water, literacy in a socio-economically powerful dialect and all that that entails. And so basically all your problems are first world problems.

Which, as my friend CJ likes to say, doesn’t make them any less vexing, but definitely does make them not worth sweating about.

Which language should I learn first? What activity should I do first? Should I keep this SRS card, or toss it? Zounds, iTunes isn’t syncing my songs properly!

Listen to yourself.

This kind of horrible indecision wears you down, and leads to stupidity like spending half an hour choosing what to eat at restaurant. Just pick anything that sounds good and pick something else next time. There will be a next time.

That’s how I like to think of it right now. Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t. I dunno. But here’s how I roll: Assume you will get to do it all. Assume you will get to learn it all, taste it all. Just assume. Assume you have infinite time and resources but that this moment, this time window, this timebox, is finite. There is only one luxury you cannot afford: the luxury of worry and indecision.

Now you’re no longer choosing what to do or even when to do. All you need choose is what to do first. I would add that it’s important to not try to make the best choice here. Pick that low-hanging fruit. Narrow it down. Make the easy choice. The choice that feels good, that feels “you”; you’ll know which choice is the easy choice because you’ll feel guilty for it. 1

Since most of us are socialized to extend morality into places where it doesn’t belong and thus feel guilty about otherwise neutral things just because we like them, if you feel guilty, you’re probably on the right track. If it makes you feel any better, it only seems easy to you because it’s your thing: “easy”, like “delicious”, is relative. So go for it. Go for easy.

So you’re no longer choosing or even scheduling per se. You are merely sequencing. There’s no guilt because you’re never rejecting a choice, merely re-sequencing it.

Don’t choose what to do. Just choose what to do first. Just choose a little something something for here and now. Later, you can and will get to make more choices, new choices, even better choices. Assume you’ll get to do it all, because, at the rate your life’s going, you basically will.

Back in the (“AJATT Hardcore”) day, I never felt deprived of English because I wasn’t. I was just doing Japanese now. English would still be there; English-speaking friends would still be there, and I could come back to them any time. Life is surprisingly long — in a good way — there’s time enough to do what you want if you just pick what you want (for that time) and do that…run with that…for a while…see where it takes you; you will get to pick again.

I think there’s this sense that each decision you make somehow decides things for eternity and that simply isn’t the case. Outside of the most dramatically ridiculous examples that too much movie- and TV-watching would have you imagine, each choice you make only lasts forever if you keep making it forever. Each choice turns out to have a limited window of effectiveness (like the range of a bullet) and so you get a near-infinite number of chances to do it over.

All those dramatically awesome examples of people turning their lives around are just a manifestation of this phenomenon: the fact that choices actually have quite a short effective range; you do not have to be in for a pound just because you’re in for a penny — you get a bunch of pennies and with each one you get to choose.

Admittedly, most people either don’t exercise their choice (let inertia and the environment choose for them — i.e. choose to repeat previous choices), or choose worry and fretting and indecision. But that certainly doesn’t mean they have no choices: wasted time only exists because there is enough time to waste; wasted opportunities only exist because there are so many opportunities.

Don’t make the best choice. Make a doable decision now knowing what you know now, using what you have now. There will be no regrets. Regret is just information you didn’t have at the time. Using that information against yourself is just you being a jerkwad to yourself. You know what you know now; you have what you have now. Take that and run with it.

Notes:

  1. If you’re ever stuck between two languages, pick the less “useful” one: it’s the one you really want to learn. ↩
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March 19, 2013, 8:20 pm
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March 19, 2013, 8:20 pm
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Protected: [SilverSpoon] Join Neutrino SinoSpoon (Mandarin Beginner + Intermediate)

March 19, 2013, 8:25 pm
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The Blessing of Forgetting

March 20, 2013, 7:59 am
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Forgetting and learning are just two sides of the same coin: change.

Forgetting is just a form of change. If you can forget, you can change. If you can change, you can learn. I guess this must be what them experts call “neuroplasticity“. Or not. I don’t know. Not an expert here.

All I know is, forgetting means that you’re not static. You’re not set it stone. You’re in flux, in motion, constantly in motion, until you die — and even after that. Your mind, your body, your skills are fluid and mutable. While you’re alive, it’s up to you what you flow and mutate (?) them into; you have the power to choose. If you can forget Japanese, you can un-forget it, too. It cuts both ways. The trick is to simply run the process in reverse: do the opposite of whatever it is that makes you forget it.

The best way to forget Japanese is to not come into contact with it. It follows that the best way to not forget it is to…not not come into contact with it. 1

So don’t think of forgetting as your enemy. Don’t think of it as the opposite of learning but as merely a different form of learning. You don’t forget Japanese, you simply learn not-Japanese. You’re always learning. The only question is what.

Notes:

  1. I know, rocket science, right? Next I’ll be telling you that the best way to get dry is not get wet. Wonders will never cease. Clearly, I’m not just Captain Obvious any more: I’m the Commander-in-Chief of the entire Obvious Armed Forces. ↩
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The Moë Sentence Pack, 2013 Edition: The Most Dangerous and Sinfully Sexy Sentence Pack Ever Created (Now Even Sexier and Sinfuller!)

January 24, 2013, 6:55 pm
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Update 2013/2/15: The Moë Sentence Pack is no longer available. Maybe she’ll be out again next year. Maybe never again. Who knows? Congratulations to everyone that got one :) .

It’s Valentine’s Day season, yo! That’s right. Singles Awareness Day…season. The season of the day when single people become painfully aware of their singleness. Or not. Whatever. Anyway. Yeah. Valentine’s Day. VD 1. Sex, chocolate and…sexy sentences. What more appropriate time of year to release the latest version of this, the single most inappropriate AJATT product ever created.

The Moë Sentence Pack

The Moë Sentence Pack

The Moë Sentence Pack will be available only until February 14, Earth time at the very latest, and may get pulled of the market before that. It’s that dangerous. It’s that hardcore. It’s that sexy. And it’s that sinful.

This is not your father’s sentence pack. Your father would blush at its content. Yeah, it’s so bad that it’s the one your mother bought, owns and keeps in secret, at the back of the closet, behind the good shoes she never wears, in the circular Louis Vuitton box 2. This thing is dynamite. And so it will not be for sale for a limited time to a limited number of people. Because I can’t just have content like this just flying around AJATT.com.

Truth be told, I’m actually not a prude — I laugh a little too hard at Quagmire in Family Guy for that to be true – but I do have a carefully constructed, clean-cut, prudish image to protect. Think of me as your local priest or politician: lascivious things are happening, but we’re certainly not advertising the fact. I don’t go around talking about how I’m constantly involved with hookers and blow, because talking about that kind of thing is just in poor taste. So, hypocritical as it may seem (read: is), I can’t just have content like this just flying around AJATT.com.

In fact, I’m so image-conscious that I actually didn’t even make the Moë Sentence Pack. I didn’t. Some chick I know 3 — Momoko — did. It was her idea. She made it. She had the moral degeneracy to come up with the idea, did the research and compiled it from raw Japanese sources. And then, despite advertising it briefly (and under protest), I totally put a lid on it. It was too risqué, too ヤバい, too raunchy. For the longest time, I simply couldn’t bring myself to sell it. Because it’s that raunchy. Because I can’t just have content like this just flying around AJATT.com.

Because I cannot, will not, must not go down in history as the man who sexualized Valentine’s Day.

It ain’t raht.

…

The MoëSP continues in the illustrious tradition of My First Sentence Pack (MFSP), giving you real Japanese as it’s used by, for and among actual Japanese people. No Japanese for foreigners here. No whitewashing here. This is…this is 玄米, baby. Brown rice. Raw. This is wholewheat Japanese, not the wonderbread kind they try to shove down your throat in so-called institutions of learning around the world.

This is not that kind of website. But the MoëSP is that kind of sentence pack. It’ll be available only until day’s end of February 14 at the latest. If I get too many compaints about how hardcore it is, I am pulling the plug, and it might never be released again. If it gets too popular, I am pulling the plug because I will do whatever it takes to safeguard my chances of becoming the second Kenyan President of those United States. Khatzumoto 2020 for the win! Assuming news of the contents of this sentence pack doesn’t leak out, that is. Momoko’s hippy liberationism be damned: some of us have a priestly politician image to protect. I can’t just have content like this just flying around AJATT.com.

I don’t want too many people to get their hands on the MoëSP. It’s too dangerous.

So let’s say you’ve come this far, you’re adventurous, you like it a little…you know…titillating….a little prurient…a little Quagmirey, and you want a copy of the MoëSP. Now what? Well, just to be nice, I’m giving away not one, not two, not three but five free bonuses with each copy of the MoëSP:

  • 1 free month of AJATT Plus — premium multimedia AJATT content combined with access to the AJATT+ Forum: The Most Intelligent, Civilized and Trolless Forum in the Multiverse (for free!)
    • Your AJATT Plus subscription will automatically continue beyond the first, free month unless you cancel it.
    • If you don’t want the subscription at all, you may cancel it at any time (even right after you purchase) and still keep your free month of AJATT Plus anyway. Aren’t I awesome?
  • 1 free copy of the MCD Revolution Core Kit (for free, yo), so you can learn how to get the most out of your MoëSP. This alone is worth $24.95 (and that’s just the price — it’s worth infinitely more if you think of the value you’re going to get out of it :) ).
  • 1 free copy of ARES-3: The Science Fiction Sentence Pack1 lifetime (yes, lifetime) of free, instant access to MoëSP extensions and updates (for free, playa!)
    • Ever wanted to know how to say those Star Trek and Star Wars and Stargate and pretty-much-anything-with-robots-or-”star”-in-it lines in Japanese? Want to have fun and learn how to talk about math and science at the same time? You’re gonna with this bad boy.
    • This guy alone is worth $29.95. Look at you go — you buy one sentence pack and you get one free. You’re just getting drenched in awesome sauce here. Look at you, all wet — can I get you towel? :P
  • 1 free smile…not in real life, but in my heart, where smiles and other wanton emotional displays belong (for free, son 4! a free smile for free! ← WOW 5).
  • All 100% DRM-free. No DRM whatsoever: I hate DRM. I trust you. You’re a good person. I know you’re not going to screw me over. I believe you should and must have the right to remix (copy and paste, etc.) information for your personal, educational use. I believe that information is for fiddling with, not just looking at. I believe that you, a paying customer, should and must not be treated like a freaking criminal and subjected to ludicrous, draconian restrictions on how you manipulate data you paid for for you own consumption. The MoëSP is easy to copy and paste and otherwise manipulate digitally for your personal, educational use, so that you can get the maximum possible value out of it. That, and, you can do all those little things like resize the text to a size that fits you exactly, not to just one of three lame presets.

And so it came to pass that you buy 1 big thing (the MoëSP), but you get five big things (and that’s not even counting the free smile! 6). Win, win, win, win right?

Oh, who am I kidding? What a load of bull. I lied. I’m lying. It’s all a lie. I’m not giving away those premo freebies 7 because I’m nice (I’m not nice). I’m doing it to kind of ease the shock of how hardcore the MoëSP is. I want to mitigate its effect a bit. Because it’s that shocking.

So, just in case the MoëSP is too real for you, too much for you, which it may well be, at least you have these nice, tame freebies to ease the…psychological trauma of what you’re about to read.

The Moë Sentence Pack: The Most Dangerous and Sinfully Sexy Sentence Pack Ever Created. Available only on until February 14 (Earth Time) at the latest, because I can’t just have content like this just flying around AJATT.com. Enjoy. And. Happy VD 8. Giggity, giggity, giggity.

 

The Moë Sentence Pack

Get Yours Now, While You Still Can

 

PS: Technically, the Moë Sentence Pack isn’t 萌え (moë). I’m afraid it’s nowhere near that tame. The MoëSP is, in fact, エロい (eroi). I just couldn’t bring myself to call it the Eroi Sentence Pack. I…yeah. We’ve discussed this already. Image and stuff. Can’t just have…etc., etc.

PPS: For your safety, there are no images in the MoëSP. The text is wild enough. And extremely NSFW.

PPPS: Seriously. If you want to have any innocence left, don’t buy this. And if you’re under 18, definitely don’t buy this. In fact, let’s just pretend it doesn’t exist and close this chapter of AJATT history, shall we?. We can just act like this whole thing never happened, huh? How about it? It’s probably sold out anyhow. The Internet’s probably down anyhow. Don’t you have dentist’s appointment today? Huh? Why not just go tidy your room or something? It could use a good tidying. You’re not exactly Captain McClean of the USS Hygiene lately. Yeah…and what about that novel you’ve been planning to write? You know…that novel?…With the protagonist and the characters and the narrative arc? The little novel…

Fo’ Shizzle Refund Guarantee

Buy it. Try it. No likey? No payey. Hey. I don’t even want to sell this sentence pack. It’s too hardcore. As far as I’m concerned, the world would be a better place if this thing simply didn’t exist. Plus, I mean, I can’t just have content like this just flying around. If you don’t like it, keep your copy and ask me for a full refund. Just send an email to refund at ajatt dot com with the subject line: “I love you, Khatz. You’re the best I’ll ever have. I just want a refund for the MoëSP. I promise I’ll be back.”.

Notes:

  1. What? ↩
  2. Coz your Mom is shallow! Haha j/k. OR AM I? And why do I know so much about your mother? ↩
  3. no… ↩
  4. unisex “son”…it’s an urban thing; you wouldn’t understand ↩
  5. !!! ↩
  6. I’ll let you work this one out on your time… ↩
  7. (plus the smile! don’t forget the smile!) ↩
  8. Valentine’s Day! Mind out of gutter, people! Mind out of gutter… ↩
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Failing Gracefully

January 25, 2013, 6:59 am
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Rather than crash, try failing gracefully. If you can’t do 100%, your next option is not 0%. There is (literally, mathematically) an infinite number of numbers, and therefore options, between 0% and 100%. 1

Helicopter Rescue at Guiltback Mountain

OCHR (Other Choices Helicopter Rescue) @ Guiltback Mountain

There’s 90%, there’s 70%, there’s 50%, 30%, 25%, 10%, 1%, 0.01%, 0.00001%, 0.0000000001%, 0.0000000000000000001%. And you’re like, “that doesn’t count”. Doesn’t it? It’s a number. Surely we count with numbers, not flippant three-word putdowns?

Your options are not “suck it up and do it this painful way” and “do nothing”. Those are certainly two of your options, but to simply say they “are” your options is like saying that the contents of that glass of water in front of you “is” the ocean. There’s more where they came from; there are other choices.

There are other choices. Choices you’ve never even considered. Choices no one’s ever even heard of. Or imagined. Or if they did imagine them they immediately said some dumb sheet like “that doesn’t count” and talked themselves out of a genius idea.

How do you think this website came about? I took what I liked from other people, threw out what I didn’t like, made up some crazy stuff on my own and just mixed it altogether like a smoothie, then I add lots of sweetener in the form of bad jokes to mask the fact that it’s probably not that good; that’s how this game is played. 2 And anyone who tells you otherwise, even me, is either lying to you or misinformed themselves. That, or they’re just saying what’s most convenient for them: I know; I’m a jerk; I do it all the time.

So you  didn’t do your reps today. Yes, yes, bad you, slap on the wrist. There’s a helicopter standing by, waiting to take you off Guiltback Mountain and its name is “other choices”.

In dumbed-down movies, robots invariably blow up and catch fire (in that order) as soon as one tiny thing goes wrong. The thing to realize is…them robot movies ain’t about robots.

Notes:

  1. And, indeed, between 0% and 1% ↩
  2. No one gave me permission; I took it. They’d have had me taking classes and watching Ghibli anime (shudder); they’d have had me do as I was told. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble following good advice that’s boring, let alone bad advice that’s not only boring but also clearly doesn’t work and is only being given because almost everyone’s been brainwashed into believing it. I’m looking right at you, Japanese classes. ↩
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Practical Tips on What To Do Instead of New Year’s Resolutions

January 30, 2013, 6:59 am
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OK, so, we’ve let down our pants and gone and taken a collective #2 on a New Year’s tradition. So what now?

Well, I like to think that every day is New Year’s; I really do; every day is a chance to start again. But if that’s too much for you, try this instead. Try…

  • New Month’s Resolutions, or
  • New Fortnight’s Resolutions, or
  • New Triplet (or whatever a 3-week period is called)’s Resolutions

Every month, set a goal for, say, how many:

  • L2 movies to buy
  • L2 movies to play
  • SRS reps to do
  • Et cetera

And then see how you’re doing at the end of the month. Rather than judge your performance yes/no (goal reached or not), judge it on what % of the goal you completed. In other words, judge it proportionally. Also:

  • Be sure to set the goal to be something that is 
    • Fun
    • Directly within your control (you can control how many emails you send, not how many friends you have)
  • Less is more. The fewer goals you set, the better. I think…maybe…or not, I dunno, I mean…I would never try to inflate the number of goals per se, and I would prune the useless ones, so…it’s not like I’d get anal about it, I’d just only have the goals I care about, no more, no less…

You don’t have to wait till M/1 (the first of the month) either, you could just pick any arbitrary 30-day period. Say, 1/10 through 2/10.

Another option is New Week’s Resolutions, but…I personally tend to find that stressful, actually. The week has always been an awkward unit for me. So, yeah, no more on that from me :) .

You could also split the difference and make New Fortnight’s Resolutions for every 2~3 weeks 1, that way you’re really marching to your own tune, really spinning on your own axis, as it were. Pivoting on your own fulcrum, if you will. You get the picture.

You wanna know which is my favorite? Well, I especially like the 3-weeks-at-a-time deal because it has a beginning, middle and end “triplet” structure. It’s long enough to be significant (and, if the 21-day “rule” is to be believed, habit-forming), but short enough that you don’t waste time. You get 15~17 triplets a year, not just 1 new year’s day. Also, because it’s not bound to the calendar, you don’t find yourself procrastinating (waiting for a new month/year to begin) or self-flagellating (“Oh sheet! Today’s the first day of the month and I still haven’t started!”). You can also take a day or two off after each triplet, for analysis and reflection, before going at it again.

To tell you the truth though, personally, I’m not the biggest goal-setter. I just try to do my best in the moment, each day. I tend to just GLOAF it a lot. Which is not to say I don’t set goals, I do, and but I also change them quite often. Some people will tell you this is a bad thing, but I’ve personally found that it’s a wonderful thing. And I’ve been pleased to find that the great productivity author and speaker Brian Tracy is on my side of the issue. In fact, if I recall correctly, he’s the one who turned me onto this whole goal-changing thing; he gave me the courage to be a goal-changer and not just a goal-setter. He “made it OK”.

Ultimately, goals, targets, resolutions, projections, whatever you wanna call them, are just tools. The point is to use them and not be used by them. You shouldn’t be taking orders from your tools — your tools should be taking orders from you. Ideas are the biggest tools of them all. They’re for using, not worshipping. Short of a steel-booted kick in the nuts, nothing’s more painful than doggedly continuing to go for something you don’t even want any more just because it’s something you thought you wanted, that you thought mattered, back in the past. But now you’ve said it, you said you wanted it, so, like a proverbial lemming off a cliff 2, you’re grimly marching to the bitter end. So, yeah, I’m constantly changing — refining, tweaking, modding and even discarding — goals as new information comes in. And yes, that information includes new personal preferences and desires. 3

Does that make me a flip-flopper? 4 I suppose it does. But then again, so what? I’m not a political monkey here for your entertainment, right? We like things and people who don’t change, not because stasis is good but because it’s convenient for us. Mercurial personalities are much more difficult to deal with than even consistently negative — violent, surly, cruel — ones. You know what, though? If you want something that doesn’t change, get a stone (oh, wait, those change, too! ;) ). If you want something straight, get a needle (they taper a bit, but, whatever). If you want to hear the same thing over and over again, put an mp3 on loop. Human beings change. 5

Notes:

  1. “But 3 weeks isn’t a fortnight, Khatz!” — Don’t make me come over there and take off my pants, bro! ↩
  2. Emphasis on the “proverbial” because, apparently, this whole lemmings off cliffs thing is a lie? Which is sad because I really enjoyed the Game Gear game ↩
  3. Like how I “desired” your Mom and now I’m kind of over her :P ↩
  4. One good way around the whole flip-flopper issue is to just not share your goals; that’s my default policy. I do share them from time to time, but almost always with great regret after the fact. It’s weird, but…people who are good at getting you to talk about what you want tend to be crap at helping you get it. My, admittedly negative, impression is that people seem to want to know things — like your goals — for their own amusement, out of a morbid, intellectual curiosity rather than out of any genuine desire or (more importantly) ability to be of assistance. Wow, that sounds terrible. The good news is that I may be wrong :) . On this. :P ↩
  5. I am a superhero and my name is 朝令暮改マン :) . ↩
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AJATT Twitter Tweets for Week of 2013-03-16

March 22, 2013, 12:59 am
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