Week Three: Automation

• Automation is the key to time management. Recall Leo Babauta's advice: "Make it so easy you can't say no." Other tips include: 
• Remove any resistance (friction) to starting up your studies. 
• Consider making a language app the first thing you see you in the morning, the first thing you play in the car.
• Participate in a spoken session every one or two days at least, or even just talk to yourself to get both practice and build your confidence.
• Expert feedback is important. (Am I saying it right?)
• Measure progress in minutes and hours, not months and years. Use timeboxing - study 20 minutes at a time - to reach a daily 1-2 hour (or more) goal. Repeatedly emphasized by Benny Lewis, Shannon Kennedy, Luca Sadumy, and Simon Ager (of Omniglot), as well as a core feature of Duolingo called a "streak", which gamifies the number of consecutive days in a row you have practiced your target langauge to help sustain a learning habit.
• Record short videos to track language learning progress, because action comes before motivation. We are motivated by our previous success. Use both comprehensible input and massive amounts of input. 
• The Iroquois legend, retold by McGilchrist, will be used to shape my memory palace (see the post on this). I will chunk and review the Genki textbooks from this perspective, and look deeper into them, in ways that I, and perhaps no one else, had before. "See a world [continuous POV of RH] in a grain of sand [fragmented POV of LH]." Or a culture in a kanji character, as it were. 
  
• Use the mimic method, which emphasizes the embodied and intuitive approach (get into the flow, maybe even try to rap!)

Also recall Whitehead: "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." (An Introduction to Mathematics) 

The more I can automate my responsibilities, the more time I can devote to learning new things, including Japanese. I recall an article I read four years ago about how "self-automators tackled inventory management, report writing, graphics rendering, database administration, and data entry of every kind. One automated his wife’s entire workload, too". By automating as much as I can, I should make it a lot easier to engage with Japanese. This is not unrelated to the notion of forming a daily habit or routine, and that in turn is not unrelated to the notion of ritualization. Rituals entrain, synchronize, and bond people. Vastly under appreciated, and maligned in our secular age due to associations with superstition and religion, they can provide an “honest signal” to others (see Amotz Zahavi's work on the Handicap Principle as it relates to altruistic acts). David DeSteno has more recently explored rituals in his work and book "How God Works". Many people who have left an earlier religious heritage due to perceived irreconcilable ideological differences still seek out the sense of community it provided. Gaining an intimate understanding of ritual could help them regain the communal feeling whose loss is felt most keenly. As Dimitris Xygalatas described it, ritual is primordial, and precedes religion. Perhaps, in addition to the Iroquois legend, I could try to understand the place of ritual in Japanese culture, where practice is given much more attention than supernatural beliefs (which are not regarded as requiring endorsement, thereby rendering the contemporary Western focus on ideological conflict practically irrelevant, and permitting religious pluralism to flourish). In McGilchrist's retelling, the Iroquois legend appears to address ritual indirectly, as both recognize the importance of a broader view that finds the continuity among fragmentation. 

At a used bookstore I picked up Japanese Street Slang, by Peter Constantine. Hopefully it will shed new light on how the language is used within local cultures. Someone mentioned saving inspirational quotes, phrases, or prayers in the target language, or even just counting. I like that idea. If McGilchrist has not been translated into Nihongo, perhaps I could try a Google translate of the Iroquois legend. I have other phrase books I can look at for more. ...Is motivation sustained by the promise of "forbidden fruit"? By psychological reactance? Or by the possibility of seeing deeper and further into something that no one had seen in the same way before?