This, of course, shouldn’t be confused with being “emo” (do people still do that?). Your emotions are actually one of the most effective tools in your Japanese learning arsenal, yet you’ll never see a Japanese teacher telling you to “get angry about that kanji” (not that most people don’t already do that on their own). By using your emotions, you can safely expect a 2-3x jump in Japanese learning effectiveness. No joke. You’ll learn faster, you’ll store things in your long term memory more quickly, and be a much better learner because of it.

Why Emotions Help Us Learn

A big part of learning a new language is memory. Think back to some kind of disaster or traumatic moment in your life. A good example for most Americans would be 9/11 or the Kennedy Assassination. You can look back and remember pretty vividly where you were and what you were doing at the time you heard about it or experienced it. For some reason, those memories are more vivid and memorable than all your other memories. Why?

These memories are called flashbulb memories, and they’re triggered during times of great emotion. Whether that’s sadness, shock, happiness, anger, fear, or what-have-you, for some reason you remember things better when you’re experiencing a great amount of emotion. For example, I remember a big earthquake when I was in middle school quite well. I was in the doorway of the house, putting my shoes on, and everything started to shake. I remember the person outside telling me to get outside and the trees swaying side to side. On the other hand, I don’t remember a single thing about every other day I stood in that doorway. Sure, you could say it was because nothing interesting happened, and that’s partly true, but a huge part of it is the emotional response as well.

So how do we use our emotions to help out with our Japanese learning?

Harnessing Emotion

Harnessing your emotion to use in learning isn’t an easy task, and actually takes some practice. Really it’s like anything else: Ballet, baseball, drawing, etc. If you don’t practice you won’t get better. You’d think that an emotional response wouldn’t take any practice, but in fact you can get better at controlling and releasing emotion whenever you want. You’ll start out doing it pretty badly and slowly, and it will seem like a waste of time… But it’s not!

Here’s the basic idea (and we’ll get into more details and specific examples a bit later).

1.With everything you learn, you should try to associate an emotion. This doesn’t mean you should be angry at something (like kanji), but you should create a story or some kind of mnemonic device to help you remember the thing you want to remember. Remembering the actual thing is very difficult. Why? Because it’s brand new in your brain, and you have nothing to associate with it. Your brain loves associations, so anything you can do to create an association with the thing you want to remember, the better. More ways for your brain to reach that memory.

2. The story should pull an emotional response. Some good ones to start with are disgust, fear, or surprise. This means the story itself should disgust, scare, or surprise you (or whatever other emotion you want to use).

3. You will have to use your imagination to make it work. This is the part you have to practice. The more vividly you can imagine the story is taking place (and happening to / around you), the more effective this tactic will be. Depending on how imaginative you are, this could be pretty easy (or pretty difficult). Over time, you’ll develop the ability to imagine things more crisply, vividly, and most importantly, quickly. When you have a lot to learn, being quick and efficient with these is going to be important.

Now, none of this is very useful without some solid examples to take away. One of the best ways to use this is with kanji learning, so let’s take a look at that.

Associating Emotion With Kanji Learning

As you already know, being angry at kanji won’t help you very much (though it might make you feel better, I suppose). What you should do instead is create a story that helps you learn the kanji more effectively, then add some kind of emotion to the story. I’m not going to go too much into detail on how to create these stories (I wrote a little about it in my “Biggest Kanji Mistakes” article) since I create them for you in TextFugu’s Kanji Section, but the basic idea is this:

1. First, learn your radicals.

2. Use the radicals to learn the kanji. This way, you will almost never have to learn more than 2-3 pieces to put together a kanji (versus up to 15+ steps needed when you learn kanji stroke-by-stroke).

3. Create a story based off these radicals to help you remember how to put together the kanji, as well as how to pronounce it.

It’s easy enough to create a story and come up with something pretty memorable (and punny), but most people stop there. Instead, you should add some emotion to that story. Come up with something so shocking, and so surprising, that you can feel your body release a bit of adrenaline to cope. If you can get to that point, you’ll find yourself remembering kanji so much more effectively, because you’ll be creating flashbulb memories (instead of boring old regular ones).

Using Happiness To Get Addicted

Happiness and bliss can be very addictive. When you are happy, your brain releases chemicals that make you want more. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Shoot me up with some of that sunshine.

Sure, learning Japanese might be something that makes you really happy, but there are times where it can be tough to keep studying. One thing you can do is make yourself happy, and associate that happiness with Japanese learning.

For example, one thing I have people do on TextFugu (which you can do on your own, too!) is to pick something that they are passionate about. It could be anything, from baseball, to marketing, to gibbons. The only requirement is that they love this thing and that it makes them happy. So what makes you uncontrollably happy?

Whenever you learn something new in Japanese, use it as an opportunity to associate this passion of yours. If you are learning how to use desu in a sentence, then instead of practicing it using things you hate (like pens, for example), you should come up with a list of vocabulary from your passion (if it was baseball, you might choose things like gloves, baseballs, hot dogs, etc) and use those to practice desu. This will make learning a lot more pleasant, enjoyable, etc., which means you will learn a lot more effectively since your happiness keeps you engaged.

What Else Can You Be Emotional About?

Almost anything, really. It’s all a matter of practice and getting good at making yourself scared, sad, shocked, angry, happy, etc. Even things like jealousy can help motivate you. I want that, and s/he has it! You just need a little creativity to come up with your own ways of adding emotions to your learning. What have you used, and what can you come up with? Share in the comments to help all of your emotional reader-friends out.

P.S. “Whaa, whaaa, whaaaaa,” cried Mr. Subscribe To The Tofugu Newsletter

P.P.S. “Hooray! Yipee! Yatta!” yelled Mrs. Follow Tofugu On Twitter

P.P.P.S. Just moved into a new apartment, and got myself a new camcorder. Subscribe to the YouTube channel to watch my ugly face say things in HD.