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 unlocking the psychology of kicking ass. But embracing this laughably small goal can have another unexpected benefit: allowing you to learn Japanese as quickly as possible.
This may seem backward because minimum viable effort requires you to spend only 15 minutes a day learning a language. After all, research indicates that it takes hundreds of hours of study to advance past the basic level of understanding in Japanese. And with 15 minutes a day, you’ll reach a total of 91 hours of study a year. While the published research doesn’t account for using a highly efficient learning method like high-torque Japanese, it’s nonetheless true that 91 hours, even well spent, is not going to get you to reach your goals as quickly as possible. So how may can minimum viable effort possibly allow you to reach your language goal as quickly as possible?
The answer is simple: bonus time.
If you want to learn Japanese, you have to put in many, many, many hours of study and input. In fact, the prevailing wisdom is that you’ll need 10,000 hours of language study (or 10,000 sentences) to become fluent. There is almost no way you can learn for this many hours in a single, dedicated block of time. Language learning is therefore not a sprint, but a marathon. And unlike a true marathon, the major impediment to sustaining your language learning journey is not physical, but psychological.
More specifically, if your language learning habits feel like work, you are not going to sustain them long enough to get the amount of input required to complete the marathon of learning Japanese. But many new language learners do just this by planning to put in hours of study each day to try and reach their language learning goals as quickly as possible. But just because you sprint off the starting line doesn’t guarantee you will sustain the pace. And the reality is that this brute-force approach is not sustainable.
If you set big study goals, the hours of scheduled learning will eventually feel like study and stress you out, while completing your study will make you feel relieved. In this way, your goal becomes to “complete” the study, instead of enjoying the learning. So after completing the scheduled study for the day, there will be no extra input—just recovery and a growing anxiety for the next day’s ordeal. Because studying has begun to feel like work, the hours of scheduled study become the upper limit of the hours you will actually spend learning. And this doesn’t account for missed days or breaks you take to recover from burn out.
On the other hand, if you’ve set your goal to minimum viable study and have started to unlock the psychology of kicking ass, you’re going to find yourself still hungry for more after you reach your daily goal of 15 minutes a day. This is the natural effect of seeing your efforts result in serious gains: you start to enjoy learning for learning’s sake and will try to sneak in additional study because it feels good to be immersing. In this way, minimum viable effort sets the lower limit for the hours you spend learning in a year, with the upper limit set by this bonus time you put in for fun.
And when you feel the desire to study beyond your goal of 15 minutes each day, you should!
Even if you find yourself spending additional hours studying as bonus time, the beauty of bonus time is that it won’t feel like work. Bonus time is just that: bonus. It’s a freebie that is great when you get it, but no disappointment when you don’t. Bonus time is flexible to the demands of daily life and will often be squeezed into the random hours that you find yourself waiting each day. And most importantly the many extra hours beyond your daily target you clock as bonus time will not be a drain on your desire to keeping inputting. If anything, bonus time leads to more bonus time, because you will enjoy your learning more and more the better you get.
Note: While the amount of time you spend learning as bonus time will be significant, it is important not to track it too closely. If you keep close tabs on the bonus time you spend learning on a daily or weekly basis, you will subconsciously adjust your daily goal beyond minimum viable effort. And this can eventually undo the psychology of kicking ass and dry up your desire to put in bonus time.
Over the course of the year, 91 hours is guaranteed with minimum viable effort. But with the reality of bonus time, you could be putting in closer to 10x that amount of study time. And this is why minimum viable effort is the best goal to set if you want to learn Japanese quickly—because it actually is the fastest way to learn when you factor in your own psychology.
And on the flip side, once you realize that language learning is a marathon, you’ll understand that setting big study goals is the worst thing you can do, even though it’s the typical strategy embraced by “serious” language learners.
Big study goals will force your learning journey into a series of sprints and resting periods, a.k.a. the activity-atrophy cycle. While you may have intervals of rapid progress in each cycle, they are offset by the breaks that follow.
On the other hand, minimum viable effort is like starting a marathon by walking off the starting line. While your progress may be slow to begin with, as you enjoy the walk, you’ll naturally pick up your pace. If you get tired or have do other things, you’ll drop back to a walk. But you will never stop. And because the longer you walk, the more you will enjoy moving, the more you will choose to run just as fast (or faster) than the “serious” sprinters. And all because it’s fun.
So start moving towards your goals as quickly as possible with bonus time by embracing the counterintuitive: setting your goal to minimum viable effort.