I came up with this idea a while ago, but I don’t have the programming experience to put it together. If you’ve seen anything like this on the web somewhere else I’d love to use it. Band-in-a-Box and Guitar Pro are just too expensive/complex for songwriting I think. I get so caught up in the software that I forget about writing music.
Read Time: 15 minutes
By utilizing techniques such as spaced repetition, complete immersion, and prioritized learning, I’m confident that anyone can learn any language to conversational fluency in six months or less. I started learning Japanese in November of 2008 and within two months I had learned the meaning of 2000+ kanji, and within six I was having conversations with strangers at rock concerts (cute Japanese girls!). I’m not trying to glorify myself here either – I’m a particularly weak-willed person and getting motivated for me often involves a literal act of God. Language learning has been put on a golden pedestal for most people, achievable only for the super-intelligent. Because of this false imagery and a bad case of failure-leading-to-lack-of-motivation seen in high school language classes, very few people achieve any real success. But if you are simply willing to put in the time, you too can have interesting conversations with people from distant lands.
You can do it.
Believe and have faith, this is the first and most important step. I know it sounds cheesy and motivational, but it’s true. Decide that you want to learn a foreign language and commit yourself to it. Imprint it to your mind and imagine yourself already at the goal. The most successful people are the ones who can best visualize their goals, and they don’t let excuses prevent them from reaching their goals – they find a way get around them. Understand that you’ll encounter barriers preventing and hindering you from reaching the goal, but decide beforehand that you’ll find a way to overcome them.
For languages with alphabets differing drastically from English (Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Arabic, etc.), learn the alphabet first. This shouldn’t take more than a day or two when using an SRS (I’ll explain what this is in a moment).
For Chinese, Japanese, and languages with characterized written languages, I suggest familiarizing yourself with the meanings of characters before learning their pronunciation. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, but there’s a reason. Essentially there are three parts to a character – meaning, pronunciation, and the written character. By skipping pronunciation you can simplify the learning process and familiarize yourself with characters faster than by trying to memorize two things at once. Check out Charles Heisig’s books – “Remembering the Kanji” or “Remembering the Hanzi” for learning characters and further discourse supporting this method.
SRS is a flashcard-like computer program which allows you to create digital flash cards and study them in the most efficient manner possible. Basically, our memory works best when we repeat items that we want to learn. Just like when you repeat the chorus of your favorite song twenty times on your iPod, SRS imprints the facts into your mind by repetition. But the problem with conventional flashcards is that you end up studying the difficult cards with the same frequency as the easy ones, wasting your precious time. Using an SRS solves this problem by automatically repeating the cards at the optimum time interval. Difficult cards get seen more often than easy ones, and you learn your language faster.
The SRS I use is called Anki, and I highly recommend it.
Now that we have the right tool for memorization, we need to know how to use it for maximum effect. From personal experience I’ve found that learning complete sentences, even if they are small, is the best way to study a language. Cognitive reasoning is one of our most powerful tools here. The brain easily takes phrases and pieces them together to create sentences and communicate ideas. Don’t study vocabulary by itself as this is a waste of time. All you have to do is fill your mind with example structures of everyday sentences in your target language, and your mind will automatically fill in the necessary vocabulary and verb conjugations.
Example flash card from my Anki deck (you may need Japanese text support enabled):
Front:
映画を見た人は誰？
Back:
えいがをみたひとはだれ？
Who is person who watched movie?
There are a few things to take notice of in this example. First, I didn’t worry about “translating” the sentence into English. As long as I can understand the meaning it doesn’t matter. Second, the sentence is short and simple. Linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests the “i + 1” method, where you add one new item to your knowledge. Try to never make a card with two new words in it. Thirdly, the sentence is native. I don’t remember where I got it, but it’s not an English thought translated into Japanese, it’s real Japanese from a native Japanese source. A dictionary with good examples sentences is one of the best sources for word-specific native material. Thinking in L1 (your mother tongue) and trying to translate to L2 (target language) is detrimental. Learn to think like a native by imitation, just like a baby!
Another deciding factor for success is immersion. Complete immersion. If you want to learn this langauge, really learn it, then you have to spend every waking moment in it. Most people fail at learning new languages because they simply don’t spend enough time in L2. Taking classes is especially deceptive because they make you feel like you’re learning, when in fact your going at a snail’s pace. I got straight As in my High School Spanish class, but when I took a trip down to Mexico City I realized just how valuable my two years of study were worth: NIL. I was one of the best students in my class, and I still couldn’t handle the most basic Spanish conversations.
Every aspect of your life should be entrenched in your target language. Do you use the internet? Download your internet browser in L2. Do you read the newspaper? Find a way to get it in L2. Do you have a smartphone? Switch the default language to L2. Watch movies in L2. Listen to L2 music exclusively. Every aspect of your life from now on should be done in the language you want to learn. If you want it bad enough you’ll find a way.
“But I don’t live in country X!” “How can I be completely immersed with all this English around me?!” – I feel this is one of the biggest language myths ever. You don’t need to live in France to learn French. You don’t need to live in China to learn Chinese. You don’t need to live in Latin America to learn Latin. Wait a second… that’s not right. Anyway, there are plenty of resources available to you (many for free) where you can get a life-like immersion experience without a 10 hour plane ride. Granted that the real immersion experience is better, but I can surf YouTube for hours and get nearly the same native language exposure as somebody who lives in Japan.
There is no need to worry about understanding the language right away. Complete immersion means you won’t understand everything, and that’s okay. Listen even when you don’t understand. It usually takes babies a year of listening before they start talking, and as adults we have the advantage because we can already think logically and don’t have to figure out our vocal chords.
Don’t force output. It will probably take months of high quality input before you’ll feel comfortable speaking. I feel this is a major flaw in modern teaching methods, and one of many reasons to avoid the classroom. Many college professors expect their students to produce native-like sentences after the first few lessons! Their theory is that you should make mistakes often so that they can be corrected, leading to a better understanding of the language. Bull. Mistakes only create bad habits and confusion. Learn it right the first time and you don’t have to worry about it. Output should feel natural and mistakes should be avoided at all costs; don’t be in a big rush to speak.
Recommended Inputs:
A typical unabridged Chinese character dictionary will have more than 40,000 independent entries. It would take a lifetime to familiarize yourself with all of these characters, but thankfully languages follow the rule of 80/20, a.k.a. the Pareto Principle. What this means is roughly 20% of those characters are used 80% of the time. A well-educated Chinese student will recognize upwards of 7,000 characters, and reading a newspaper may require a working knowledge of 3,000 characters [1]. We can find the same thing in English – “The Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material [2].” Using an SRS like Anki and a dictionary with good example sentences, the initial effort of memorizing 100 words should take three days at most. Three days for 50% comprehension! I know I know, that number is slightly overstated because many of those 100 words are lemmas (more than one word – like “is” can be “He was”, “I am”, “You are” etc.), but you see the point I’m trying to make right? By learning the common words first, you quickly increase your effective comprehension of the language. Note: You can find the first 3000 common Japanese words in this post.
Beyond the first 500 words or so, I suggest learning interest-specific or field-specific vocabulary. Take the things you currently do in L1, and do them in L2. Find a way to make an L2 copy of your current self. Language learning isn’t difficult, but it does take focused effort over a long period of time. If you want to make this endeavor sustainable, and it must be sustainable, it sure as hell better be fun. Like any good drug addiction, you want to keep coming back to it again and again. I treat myself to a cup of coffee or tasty drink every time I do my SRS reps.
When I was studying in Japan, I completed an introductory program for the PA-10 Mitsubishi robotic arm. It involved learning basic robotic arm control, which was comprised of creating a computer program from scratch, solving inverse kinematics problems, and a mother trucker load of questions for my Japanese lab-mates. In order to communicate effectively I had to learn some of the technical jargon associated with robotics. Now I’m pretty confident using words like 逆行列 (inverse matrix), 再起動 (restart), 軸線 (shaft axis), 運動学 (kinematics), and 機械工学 (Mechanical Engineering). This kind of vocabulary would be useless for anyone else, even most Japanese, but it was essential for me and my situation.
During my most intense period of learning Japanese, I bought this calendar for 100 Yen ($1) at a thrift store and used it as a daily visual reminder of my goal to become fluent. Each day I accomplished my (small) goal, I took a big red marker and made an X on the day. The sense of accomplishment I felt after each X’d day helped to create even more momentum for the next day.
Learning a language takes a lot of effort, so keep your goals small and achievable while finding ways to keep them sustainable over long periods of time. A small effort every day for a month is far more productive than three days of caffeine-induced cramming. After a few days of studying you’ll become more aware of your physical limitations; it’s at that point you want to create a daily goal. Make your goal achievable, but somewhat of a stretch. Too easy and you’ll end up cutting yourself short, too hard and you’ll get disappointed by failure. The key is long-term sustainability.
In contrast to this, don’t put an extended timeline on your goal to become fluent. When you’re first starting out you shouldn’t worry about when you’ll arrive at your goal, or make baseless assumptions about how long it should take you to acquire a 10,000 word vocabulary. Yes I know, the title of this post is “Learn any language in 6 months”, but it may take some people longer and others shorter. Just start walking the road and have a surprise party when you get to the end.
I attempt to live my life in such a way that I’m always exposing myself to new ideas and attaining new knowledge. But at the same time, I make an effort to not forget the things I’ve already learned. Learning a new language is an exciting and fulfilling experience, but not quite as fulfilling ten years from now when you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned. The initial effort of learning is long and tough, but the fun kind of tough, and similar to getting a freight train moving. The power you need to start is immense, but as soon as you’re moving, it’s not too hard to keep going. Many people are willing to put forth the effort to get the train started, but don’t quite realize that the train will eventually come to a slow stop if they don’t keep shoveling the coal.
ajatt.com – All Japanese All the Time dot com. This is the blog that inspired me to pursue fluency in Japanese and provided the resources and ideas that are making it possible. Purveyor of the 10,000 sentence method: learn 10,000 sentences in an SRS to achieve native-like fluency. Major props.
antimoon.com – Polish pioneers of the SRS/sentence learning method. These guys learned English to college level fluency in 3 years using their method.
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months – Author Tim Ferriss wrote an enlightening article that directly inspired my writing this post. Hence, credit is due. Our content is similar in many ways, but disagree with him on some points. I encourage reading his post also to gain a broader perspective on language learning.
Anki – The free SRS that makes it all possible. I suggest watching the Intro Videos to get a better understanding of the concept.
Supermemo Articles – Supermemo, the original SRS, was created by Dr. Wozniak who has written not-a-few articles about SRSing, memory, and acquiring knowledge. Recommended reading: 20 Rules and Memory Myths. Fascinating stuff.
Do you have any language acquisition stories? Failure/Success stories? Discussion and idea-sharing are encouraged, so post a comment!
One Ok Rock got their name from their practice time, One O’Clock. Japanese makes no distinction between r’s and l’s, so One O’Clock sounds like One O-kuroku – which was modified to the name they are now famous by. Morita Takahiro’s surgeon knife vocals are what sets this band on top for me.
完全感覚Dreamer
恋ノアイボウ心ノクピド (Koi no aibou Kokoro no kupido)
After leaving a solo career as a pop artist, Shina Ringo started a fusion band know as Tokyo Jihen (Tokyo Incidents). I consider this ultimate dance music.
群青日和 (Gunjou Biyori)
遭難 (Sounan)
Takanori Nishikawa (aka T.M. Revolution) has a vibrato vocal style that I’ve never heard of before. Aside from being slightly over-produced, this band is definitely one of my favorite karaoke choices.
Innocent Sorrow
Howling
Blade Chord
This instrumental math rock band will blow your mind. They put together so many poly-rhythms that it makes the mouths of physicists drop.
Infinite Mirror
Ghost Dance
One of the more well known Japanese bands. Everyone in Japan knows Bump.
カルマ (Kharma)
五月雨 (Satsuki Ame – May Rain)
This isn’t exactly one of my favorite bands, but for nostalgic purposes I really wanted to add this song. It was the opening song for my band’s debut in Japan. The first song I ever played at a real gig.
The Way of Tea is naught but this:
first you boil water,
then you make tea and drink it.
– Sen no Rikyu
Minimalism as a lifestyle is concerned with stripping unnecessary components to arrive at the most fundamental ones. Minimalism has strong roots in Japanese lifestyle and design, such as Zen Gardens and Tea Ceremonies, and these things had a very strong effect on me during my sojourn in Japan. My stay also caused many of the truths found in Christianity to become clearer and more personalized.
photo by telmo32
When people first hear the term “Minimalism”, it most likely conjures up ideas of empty rooms, riding buses instead of driving cars, paintings with practically nothing in them, and ordering “a tall cup of Joe” at Starbucks instead of your “double pump no foam soy mocha latte with whipped cream”. Minimalism is not about elimination only, but rather about minimalizing the fluff and mere distractions in order to get to the truly beautiful things in life. It’s about giving up that new cool car so you can save for a round-the-world plane ticket. It’s about gutting mindless TV shows in order to free up time for creativity and relationships. It’s about eliminating clutter in your house and office so you can focus on living life – without always having to clean it up! It’s about decreasing the amount of time you spend checking email and text messages so you can notice the mesmerizing way the light reflects off trees when the afternoon breeze flows through them.
In reaction to the United States’s rampant consumer-culture of overspending and superfluousness, I’ve developed a few basic principles that I try to abide by in my own life. Just a few pragmatic things that have helped me simplify life and stay organized.
Junk mail, receipts, financial records, shopping lists, and random papers can really add up to create a lot of unneeded clutter that crowds our workplaces and home lives. Finding ways to eliminate or decrease the amount of paper we handle can really help foster organization and decrease some of the stress we encounter in our lives.
One of the products that I use almost every day is Evernote. Touted as “an external brain”, Evernote is a note-taking software that can capture just about any type of data and file it away into a searchable database. Did you really enjoy that bottle of wine you had last night? Take a picture of the label, upload it to Evernote (very easy if you own a picture phone), Evernote will automatically read the text in the photo and make it searchable, then go ahead and tag the note as “wine” to find the wine instantly next time you go to the liquor store.
Another program that I really enjoy using is Remember the Milk. It’s a simple, easy to use to-do list that syncs across multiple platforms and can be used online. I keep two lists: a to-do list, a shopping list, and I’m thinking about moving my bucket list from Google Docs to RTM.
Also check out Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Going Paperless, which includes tips for dealing with financial records, printing to pdf, and other ways to minimize tree killification.
Consistent with minimalist philosophy, the goal is not to eliminate everything, but to remove the unnecessary in order to expose the truly important. I think it would go well with us to do the same with taking in media, aimless web surfing, TV, news, email pushed to smart phones, and other distractions. I don’t cut off these things entirely, especially during election years (!), but I’ve found that most of the media that I took in was completely worthless.
“To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.” – Henry David Thoreau
I did a media fast for two weeks last year – no news, no TV, no movies, no books, no web “browsing”, no magazines, no blog reading. I had so much extra time that I was oppressed by it. I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I was forced to resort back to doing interesting things like practicing my guitar and talking with my family. Try it out and see what happens. I’m thinking about doing another media fast soon, but maybe for a whole month this time.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and dust destroy, and where theives break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where theives do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there is your heart also. Matthew 6.19-21
In the most pragmatic sense, minimalism is about owning less. One good cooking pan is better than three average ones. One good pen is more useful and reliable than a hundred ball point pens stolen from the local bank. One pair of comfortable and stylish jeans will get worn more often than three pairs bought at a discount store. Most of us know it to a certain degree already, but we don’t always acknowledge that our earthly possession give us a false sense of importance and status.
Start by going through each room in your house and identifying all the things you haven’t used in more than a year, or items that are constantly taking up space. Get rid of them, and thank me for it later. Craigslist, thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales should become your new bff.
At his time of death, Ghandi’s earthly possessions could be counted on two hands. I think it’s time to reanalyze our opinions about what is needed in order to have a positive impact on the world. It seems to me that possessions hinder, rather than aid, our ability to positively affect situations and people.
Time is quite possibly the most valuable thing we own. It’s an asset which rich and poor are given equal share, a distinction which I’m quite sure is given by God to remind us that no man is better than another. What better opportunity to be good stewards of the investment that’s been made in us than spending our time wisely?
Some simple ways to free up time:
Finally, find ways to automate income. Perhaps the most vital key to freeing up time, most people don’t even realize that creating passive/residual income is possible. Time doesn’t have to equal money, and you don’t have to put in the 9 to 5 in order to get paid. I haven’t been able to build this process into my own life yet, but I’m keeping my eyes open for potential opportunities and doing a great deal of research on the topic. Here are some resources to get you going: Steve Pavlina’s blog post – “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job“, and book – “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss.
Living debt free allows you to better leverage your time and money. Getting control of finances is a daunting task for some, and most especially for those who have, up to this point, lived paycheck to paycheck without a budget or any financial plan whatsoever. “Learn to be SMART with your money!” as financial guru Dave Ramsey always says. I highly recommend you get his book “The Total Money Makeover” and start listening to his radio show (9-5 M-F on 105.5FM here in Colorado Springs) or podcast. He’s a virtual bank of practical financial knowledge, and it’s very motivating to hear people call into his show who, after digging themselves out of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and completely pay off their mortgage, yell the famous “3…2…1…We’re debt free!!!” You can start by checking out the 7 Baby Steps to Financial Freedom. No bills to pay? Seriously, how minimalist is that?
The same with every philosophical thought I encounter, I do my best to weigh it against the perfect example of Christ. Jesus didn’t just teach people to live a simple life, he grappled with the deep issues of people’s hearts. If you chisel away the passions and possessions that this world tends to distract us with, you aren’t left with purity or peace like Buddha teaches, you’re left with emptiness. I believe that only through Christ, who claimed to be God, can we understand the meaning of our existence and gain purpose in our lives. Shedding the extraneous stuff is only beneficial when you fill it with something better. Morality, ethics, and philosophy can only be defined by a God who is “outside the box”, not by any human being, and so in this fashion we must fill ourselves with love for God, his people, and his truth.
Hello everyone. In the past, this blog has been exclusively about music and subjects related to it. The thrill and excitement has died. I’ve discovered that writing about music wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, so I’ve decided to slowly transition this blog into a more personal web log. I’ll continue to write about music related subjects since it remains one of my core passions, but I’m going to give myself more freedom to write about topics that interest me and stories of a more personal nature. Okay! Thanks for reading!
“Find a penny,
Pick it up,
And all day,
You’ll have a penny.”
– Unknown
