Over at All Japanese All the Time, Khatzumoto has been pushing the importance of small, incremental, accumulated action, rather than big, difficult steps. His post on washing dishes, and the importance of process over results, is particularly good. As usual, he’s put something that I’ve wanted to write about better than I could have myself, but I’m going to add my two cents regardless (as if you could stop me! ).

For the first several years I was learning Chinese, it was no fun at all. It was something I did because I felt like I had to, but it was work with a capital pain in the ass. My pitifully slow progress was a reflection of my general lack of enthusiasm. At some point, and I’m not exactly sure when it was, I just gave up. I decided that my Chinese was good enough (“good enough for a white guy,” or something inane like that) and that I’d be able to get by well enough. Once I made peace with the idea that I’d be spending my free time on other things, I was happier than I’d been in a long, long time.

For a few weeks, I really did ignore Chinese, or at least ignore it as well as one can while living in China. Pretty soon, though, my curiosity got the best of me and I started randomly looking up characters on signs when my bus was stopped in traffic. I bought a couple of comic books. Still, though, I was done with Chinese. Done. I’d tried, and failed. Chinese had won. But, hey, I like to read, and English books were hard to find. And it’s not like I was doing anything else waiting for the bus to move again. It wasn’t long before I’d finished those comic books, and decided to buy a couple more. Pretty soon, all of the signs on the route I took from where I lived to downtown Hangzhou were familiar. Still, though, my and Chinese were finished. Maybe I should learning Spanish, I thought. That’s got to be easier than this stuff. Oh, what do you know, time to go back to the newspaper stand and pick up some more comic books. Geez, I read those pretty fast this time. Hardly seemed like work at all.

You get the idea.

The same thing happened to me when I started with SRS. I knew that using it was good for me — it’s not hard to convince a programmer that a good algorithm and a database can keep track of things better than he can — and I wanted to be 认真 about it, so I set up a pretty harsh regimen of reviews. Several hundred cards a day, at least, plus all the time it took to input enough cards to keep that sort of review schedule going. It was … insane unsustainable. Unsurprisingly, I lasted a couple months before swearing off SRS forever — totally unworkable, I thought.

These days, I maintain a pace pretty similar to the death march I did back then, without any of the anxiety. If I don’t have time to do my cards on a given day, I just don’t. If I get some cards wrong, I just mark them wrong. Failure practice is a good thing. On the vast majority of days I do finish all my repetitions — it’s normally the first thing I do when I wake up, while everyone else is still asleep and the house is, for the briefest of moments, quiet — but I don’t get too worked up if I don’t.

Really, when you think about it, doing something like going from a non-speaker to a totally fluent speaker of a language as an adult (who has all sorts of other responsibilities vying for his or her time) is pretty ridiculous. If you actually stop to think about what you’re trying to do, it doesn’t seem possible at all. C’mon y’all, I barely speak English, now I’m learning Chinese? WTF? It’s that pressure, the consciousness of the enormity of the task that you’re facing, that makes you want to give up. But, the truth is, life is long. You may not feel like you’re making progress, but the tiny stutter steps forward that you’re making every day are going to add up to a massive amount of movement if you just give them time to accumulate.

“I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

Update: Somehow this post was posted with comments disabled, and I didn’t notice until this morning (I just thought that nobody loved me *sob*). All fixed now. Apologies for the idiocy.

Image by andres.thor

Related posts:

1. Avoiding SRS burnout and repetition hell
2. The messy in-between
3. Thoughts on SRS content selection
4. Maintaining one language while learning another
5. REQUEST: content recommendations for an intermediate Chinese learner

Tagged as: chinese, failure, languages, learning, motivation, srs