The Ergonomic Mnemonic
It’s all too easy to spend unnecessary time and effort when you start studying kanji because there is so much you could be studying and the goal of kanji stu...
Blog
2024
2023
Flashcards Will Not Make You Fluent (But They Help)
Perhaps no study tool receives as much conflicting, competing, and heated advice as that surrounding the use of flashcards and spaced repetition systems (SRS...
What Is High-Torque Japanese?
We all understand intuitively that subjecting our body to small “shocks” will cause it to grow and better handle future shocks. For instance, we get that lif...
Bonus Time
Setting your goals to minimum viable effort can lead to lots of benefits, including the breaking of any activity-atrophy cycle that is holding you back and u...
The Psychology of Kicking Ass
Almost every language app today tries to tap into your psychology in order to keep you engaged. Duolingo does this through “gamification,” motivating you to ...
Foundation: Minimum Viable Japanese Knowledge Before Input
If you want to learn Japanese as efficiently as possible, you will want to start inputting Japanese “in the wild” as soon as possible. Inputting is the only ...
Minimum Viable Effort
It’s all too easy to fall off the wagon when it comes to keeping up habits that we genuinely care about for self-improvement. If you miss a day at the gym, i...
Inputting a Language, or Training the Neural Network That Is Your Brain.
If you hang around language learning forums long enough, you’ll hear the phrase “inputting a language.” Most of the time that you hear this phrase, the autho...
Studying Is Not Learning
Many beginner and intermediate language learners confuse the difference between studying and learning and this sets back their progress by months, and someti...
It’s Not Lack of Time, It’s Lack of Interest
Lack of time is the most common excuse for not making progress towards your language goals (or goals in general for the matter). But even if you’re very busy...
The Order and Amount of Kanji to Study
Once you know why to study kanji, how NOT to study kanji, and how to study kanji, the next question is how many kanji to study and in what order? The key to...
How to Study Kanji
Once you realize the only goal of kanji study is to build kanji-meaning association so you can recognize kanji, how to study kanji may seem straightforward. ...
How NOT to Study Kanji
The only goal of kanji study is to learn to associate each kanji with a meaning (e.g., “火” means “fire”). This is a singular task, and it should be the entir...
Why Study Kanji?
If you’re studying Japanese, at some point you will be encouraged to start learning kanji 漢字(かんじ). There are thousands of kanji that are used in common writt...
Boredom: The Silent Killer
As I have written before, there are three major obstacles to navigate when you embark on your journey to become fluent in Japanese. I’ve discussed how to han...
Fluency Is Overrated
The language-learning world is obsessed with fluency. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s thrilling to see a non-native speaker engage in perfect conversation wit...
Sustainable Habits
明けましておめでとうございます! It’s 2023, which means that it’s time for your New Year’s resolutions to make contact with reality. If you’re like most people, the goals y...
2022
They Want Your Money, Not Your Fluency
A lot of intermediate and advanced-beginner Japanse language learners fall into what I call “the pre-fluency trap.” The pre-fluency trap is a state of artifi...
SRSly, What Is the Deal with Flashcards?
If you embark on a serious study of Japanese, it is only a matter of time before you hear how important flashcards and flashcard technology—in particular the...
Training Wheels Get You Killed Everytime
There might be no “right way” to learn Japanese, but there are definitely wrong ways to learn Japanese. Not every path will lead you to fluency, and there ma...
Pains, Gains, and Bloodstains
There is no getting around it: learning a language will be painful. It will be painful in part because learning anything new is painful as it takes time to b...
Fear and FOMO
Understanding Japanese stories in Japanese is the primary allure for many of us who embark upon a dedicated years-long Japanese study. But like most motivato...
Fear, Pain, and Boredom
There are three major obstacles that will try to prevent you from reading Japanese fluently. All three obstacles are deadly in their own way, and each arrive...