Critical Mass and Lethal Radiation

One of the main concerns you might have about this method is that such small time sent “immersing” yourself in Japanese is going to prevent the

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/boiling-water/ http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-boiling-water/ (“The point, then, is not necessarily to have the heat on all the time, but to not let the heat go off long enough for the pan and water to cool.”)

Focus on consistency. This is why the default is set so low. By breaking up the tasks you do each day into bite-sized chunks, you remove the barriers to the most critical piece: consistency.

Need to talk about how this is not a problem: consistent effort vs the binge purge

• obtained all 2000 漢字 in one year.
• obtained 6000 vocab words in the next two. You will feel the growth. Daily practice (even if you make it only 2/3 of the time), will be enough to keep the fire burning, your knowledge growing.

Spillover and Criticality Incididents

Perhaps the most damning thing for an intermediate learner are what I call criticality incidents. When you bring enough fissile matter together, eventually it’s going to reach a critical mass. At that point, do you get a nuclear bomb? No. You get heat, some noise, and a lethal dose of radiation. Ok, so maybe that last part isn’t quite analgous.

But serisouly, all language learners must cross the criticality threshold. You might know the phenomonen. You almost grasp the sentence you just heard or read. If you repeat that sentence slowly, once or twice, you might actually get all the way there and make the connection. But for those of who don’t get that chance, the feeling of almost understanding, just outside our fingertips, is maddening.

And it gets worse. As you approach k = 1, the heat and noise created by almost fluency can feel like you have to push through a wall. Don’t get discourage by this. It means you are close. Very close.

Note: this phenomenon will occur again and again in different domains of knowledge, and make you feel like your starting over. Recognize this for what it is: the result of your atomic efforts.