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 lifting weights will cause our muscles to grow in size and strength. We also intuit that more intense shocks will cause our body to grow more quickly (assuming you can avoid injury). It doesn’t take an expert to tell you that lifting heavier weights will cause your muscles to grow bigger than if you lift lighter weights.
However, our intuition fails us when we consider the degree of growth our body makes in response to the increasing intensity of these shocks. Sure squatting 300 pounds once is more beneficial to muscle growth than squatting 60 pounds 5 times. But the degree to which your muscles respond to this stress is nonlinear–your body’s growth response is more than 5x greater for lifting heavy once than light 5 times.
The body responds in a nonlinear way to stresses because it is antifragile—it grows in response to stresses. Nassim Taleb coined the term antifragile in the book of the same name, and explores the surprising realities of nonlinearity in antifragile systems in his collected works. While the concept may seem abstract it’s anything but. That’s because we interact with antifragile systems on a daily basis—and most importantly—because we are in charge of the antifragile system that is ourselves. And understanding a system is the first step towards controlling it to achieve better results.
In fact, it’s kind of a life hack once you recognize that your body is antifragile. That’s because you can use this knowledge to achieve your goals more quickly and with less time. For instance, you’ll know that by increasing the size of the weights you lift (the stressor) you can shorten your workouts (i.e., by dropping the number of sets and reps) and still experience just as much (or more) muscle growth as you would throwing lighter weights around for a longer time.
But the body is not the only antifragile system in our control—so too is the mind.
When we stress the mind, it grows in response. When your mind inputs new information, struggles to understand that information, and then assesses its error, the mind grows. We call this learning. Like the body, the mind is constantly encountering stresses that cause it to grow on a daily basis—whether it is remembering the face of new people at school, a new route that you decided to take to work, or how to get better at your hobbies.
However, if your goal is to deliberately learn something, you can use your knowledge of antifragility to learn more efficiently. Just as with lifting weights, the key is to increase the intensity of the stress you subject your mind to so you can reap the benefits of nonlinearity.
In short, to get the best results, you need to increase the difficulty of your study.
For instance, if you want to learn Japanese, your growth will depend on the difficulty of information you input. If the information you input is difficult to understand, you will learn Japanese in a highly efficient manner. But if you input information that is easy to understand, you will take much longer to reach your goal. These two different approaches are what I call high-torque and low-torque Japanese.
I like “torque” because it helps to make this concept more tangible. Learning Japanese (or any language) is like climbing a mountain, where each sentence you input helps your rise. If you input high-torque Japanese, you will be in a near vertical climb of the sheer face of the mountain. If you input low-torque Japanese, you will be walking on a near horizontal path that slowly winds itself around the mountain until it eventually reaches the summit.
It’s obvious that language learners would prefer to be in the vertical climb of high-torque Japanese, where each step you take moves you directly towards your goal without wasted effort. After all, time is precious, and who wants to waste time, especially when it takes many, many hours of input to learn a language?
But, unfortunately, most people who are serious about learning Japanese—even those who spend many hours a day learning—are inputting low-torque Japanese. And they often don’t realize it.
There are multiple reasons for this, but I’ll give you the top three.
The primary reason is that most people don’t understand what it feels like to lift heavy weights in their target language. If it takes you 15 minutes to decipher a sentence in Japanese manga, it’s easy to think that the sentence was “beyond your level.” After all, if you could read 10 sentences in the same time from みんなの日本語, taking 15 minutes on 1 sentence can make you feel like you don’t know enough.
But in reality, inputting each of those textbook sentences is like squatting 60 pounds. Sure, inputting them will help you learn Japanese. But that 1 sentence from the manga you struggled with was your 1-rep max. And the gains you’ll have in learning Japanese from reading that 1 sentence are going to be more than 10x the amount that you would have had just from grinding through 10 predictable textbook sentences that were hammering the same point home anyway.
The second reason is that learners treat lack of full understanding as failure. If you’re learning a language, it’s only a matter of time until you read a sentence and don’t get it after looking up the relevant vocab and grammar. But the fact is that many times you won’t understand the full nuance of a word (especially adverbs!) the first time you encounter it. For instance, many new learners obsess over why a sentence uses が instead of は, and get frustrated when they can’t understand.
It’s easy to create a mental barrier to moving on because you are stuck trying to “fully” understand some language point. But the solution is not to stop, but to see more examples. This is because language is highly context-specific, and you have likely not seen enough examples to understand.
If you analogize to the body, you’ll also see how ridiculous it is to expect perfect mastery of grammar points or words on the first go. Would you expect to be able to do a handstand on your first go after looking up how to do it on YouTube? Do you think you’ll have perfect form the first time you try to squat? Obviously not.
In the same way that you won’t understand the proper movement of an exercise until you have tried it many, many times, mastery of certain language concepts will not occur until you have input relevant examples many, many times. Accept that you are not going to understand 100% of the information you input on your first attempt so you avoid unrealistic expectations.
The third reason is that language learners often prefer measurable growth over absolute growth. As humans, we like to know what we know and what we don’t know. After all, if we can measure how many sentences we have read, how many flashcards we have reviewed, how many days we have studied, surely that will show how much we know, right?
Sure, measuring your study might approximately gauge your learning. But the desire to know what you know will lock you into a systematic learning process, which by its very nature will put artificial training wheels on your learning. When you encounter grammar or words outside the set course of your learning system, you will reject learning it because it’s “not in the right order.”
But learning things out of order is the key to learning quickly. Just because reading Japanese in the wild does not come conveniently in a set sequence or on a gamified app does not mean that you should avoid it. In fact the opposite is true. When you learned your native language, there was no filter or structure that forced you to input in a systematic order—you were inputting sentences of all kinds, regardless of difficulty, because immersion forced the variety upon you.
So if you want to learn Japanese as efficiently as possible, you can’t let perceptions of difficulty, unease with lack of perfect understanding, or a desire to measure all your progress hold you back. Trust yourself and start inputting high-torque Japanese. You’ll be astounded how fast you climb.