Learn Japanese Today

Start thinking about time like money. Wait. Don’t do quite do that, just kind of think about time like money. I mean, your time is valuable, but converting everything into how much certain activities are costing you is a one-way street to serious anxiety.

This is a better example. Just think about spending your time like shopping in another country. Your plane leaves in about 10 hours, and you have X amount of foreign currency that you need to spend before you go home because you’ll probably never use it again. So what do you do? You don’t just give it a way, and you certainly don’t leave without spending it. You find the things you want the most and buy them as best you can with your remaining money. Maybe you buy things that you’ve read positive reviews of, maybe you buy something new just for fun, and maybe you buy things you’ve wanted for ages.

The key things about this scenario as it relates to time management go as follows:

1. You don’t get your time back. You can’t return anything. You can just decide to not buy it again in the future.
2. You can’t “save up” your time, not doing anything with your time does nothing for you.

Now how does this relate to Japanese. Well, the biggest problem most students have is that, Japanese being the daunting language that it is, any time spent on it seems like a drop of water in a canyon, a waste of time. These students instead often choose to spend their time doing hours of Facebooking, e-mail, and internet games, in which all the goals are so simple (beat this level, send this e-mail, poke) that they can be accomplished nearly instantaneously, and it doesn’t feel like a waste of time.

It should.

At the end of a year, let’s say, do you really care about how many e-mails you sent or how many people’s walls you posted on? Do you care that you have the high score? Probably not. But you probably do care about your level of Japanese, and if you didn’t spend very much time on it, you probably feel bad about it.

But there’s a solution. To stop wasting time and start learning more Japanese.

A Simple Substitution

Make a list, either on paper or in your head, of all the things you do that don’t really add anything to your life. Remember, fun and leisure are things in your life, so if you say, play some video games to releive stress, that’s fine. I’m talking about stuff the YOU KNOW isn’t important like looking through a stranger’s photos on facebook, or just staring blankly into space. These are things you aren’t proud of, things you wouldn’t necessarily want people to know.

“DUDE! I played free slot machines at this free online casino for like 6 hours last night! I made like $6000 fake dollars!”
“OMG! DUDE! That’s TIGHT! High-5!”

Anyways, once you have a list, come up with a reasonable limit for everything. I mean, I’m not telling you to give up Facebook and E-mail and stuff, just only use it as much as necessary. You might want to just use Facebook for 5 minutes a day, only check your e-mail twice a day, play video games for half an hour, stare into space never at all.

Then, once you’ve gone over your limits, or really whenever you feel I kind of dread like you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing, just study Japanese instead. Don’t think about it, just start doing Japanese as soon as you can. Try to read an online Japanese newspaper. Put sentences in your SRS. Just DO something.

A good example of this for me is checking my blog stats. I limit myself to checking only a couple times a day, and whenever else I feel like checking my stats, I just study Japanese instead. Over time, my desire to constantly know my stats has decreased, and I feel more comfortable spending more time studying Japanese. It works out a lot better.

I know I’ve been hitting you with a lot of metaphors, but learning a language is a lot like filling a bucket with a hole in it using a faucet, rather than a canyon with a dropper. Only spending a little bit of time means the water trickles in and is mostly negated by the hole. However, if you shift time from other things (like wasted time) and spend more time on Japanese, the flow of the water can increase enough to fill up the bucket despite the hole.

I know you’re overworked, I am too, but finding new ways to increase your water pressure is the only way to fill up your Japanese knowledge bucket.

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