Keep in mind, though… these aren’t really good “long term” techniques, but if they get you going in the right direction them I’m all for it. Go ahead and try these on other things besides Japanese study too. You’ll find they work just about anywhere where motivation is a concern. Let’s do this thing.

Imagine the Finished Product

One particularly neat (and easy) brain trick is to simply just imagine the finished product before you start. Say you’re learning a set of kanji. As you sit down to get started, imagine yourself being able to read all of the kanji and associated vocab words. Imagine how you’ll feel when you get done. Feels good, doesn’t it? Ahhh, those feel-good brain chemicals are being released now. Ooh, that’s encouraging me to want to study so I can reach this end goal and be happy, finally!

This won’t work if you do it all the time, but it’s nice in a pinch. Creating those good feelings that we get from finishing something we don’t necessarily want to do can create a nice association with the actions. If you don’t normally like studying kanji, doing this will slowly but surely turn you into someone who kind of enjoys studying kanji. Them chemicals are teaching you to like it, whether you like it or not.

Try it out the next time you have to study something you don’t want to. Imagine a nice outcome, and enjoy the feeling of having learned something new. You can read all these kanji that you couldn’t read before! How amazing is that? Oh, wait, now it’s actually time to study them. Strangely, I feel good about it now. Hmmm.

Don’t Tell Anyone What You’re Doing

You should give this one a try. Might be hard with past goals that you already have, but with future goals it might be worth a shot. You can even come up with some small goals to try this out on. Maybe your goal is to learn these next 100 kanji? Cool, don’t let anyone know you’re doing it. It’s our little secretsesessss, precious.

I don’t think this works for everyone, but it’s not going to hurt if you do it a few times to see if it’s effective with you. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t follow through with your goals (aren’t we all?) then this might be for you. On the other hand, maybe you should be setting higher stakes, instead. Mix and match and see how it goes.

Take Studying Away When You Want It Most

Photo by thecrazyfilmgirl

I’ve written about this before, but I thought it was worth mentioning again. When you’re at the point in your study session where you want to continue… stop. Take the candy away from the baby while the baby still wants the candy (not when she’s asleep). This idea actually came from a Haruki Murakami Book (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running). He said that he would stop writing when he wanted to continue, so that way when he woke up in the morning he’d want to keep writing, and then motivation wasn’t an issue.

You can use this idea on just about anything else, too, including learning Japanese. Essentially, you’re using reverse psychology on yourself even though you know you’re using reverse psychology on yourself (does that make it double reverse psychology?). If you do this you’ll put down your Japanese studies, then be able to jump right back into it next time, motivation already ready to go. So give it a try sometime. It might be a little painful but it’s worth it if it works, I think. Let me know how it goes for you!

Other Ways To Trick Your Brain

There are plenty of other ways to trick your brain into wanting to study. Some are:

• Try changing your environment. If you find that your computer area makes you prone to distractions, go someplace completely different where that trigger does not exist. Move away from bad triggers and you’re left with more motivation to do the thing you want to do.
• Try changing the temperature to 77°F (25° C). This is supposedly the ideal temperature for being able to focus.
• Natural light and sun supposedly make you more productive as well. Try to get some sun to get those motivational juices flowing. Don’t get too much, though, that would make you sleepy.
• Take a nap. Sure, you spend 20 minutes taking a nap (don’t take a longer one, you’ll be groggy), but it’s amazing how much this helps with willpower and therefore motivation. I sometimes find myself staring at my computer screen, hardly doing anything. Then, I take a nap and magically I’m a magic productivity guru once again.

There are many more brain tricks you can do to help your motivation, I’m sure, so if you know any of them be sure to share them in the comments! We can all use a little more help when it comes to motivation at times (unless you’re a robot. Are you a robot?), so I’m looking forward to reading what you come up with! :)

Right now you’re motivated to complete the task at hand, be it learning the joyo kanji or being able to read hiragana. Let’s talk about habit forming and how to use that to get from A to B. If you don’t have that consistent gradual progress, there’s no way you’re going to make it to the end goal. No matter how motivated you are, waiting until the last minute on a big project like “learning the Japanese language” isn’t going to work at all. No, you have to form a habit.

The Importance Of Habits

I think we all know the importance of habits, but I felt like I should reiterate a little bit, just in case. With habits, you’re doing several positive things for yourself:

• You make regular progress towards a goal. With small, consistent steps comes big change.
• Especially in terms of studying, a habit will help to space out your learning. By spacing your learning, you’re forcing yourself to recall information larger spaces of time. This helps with learning a lot more than putting all your learning into one concentrated moment only not to have to recall said information for weeks or months.
• You’re less likely to burn out since you’re not putting all your proverbial eggs in one basket.
• Habits will cause much less stress on you and your mind. It won’t use up your limited resource of willpower, either (more on that later).

Essentially, with a habit you get stuff done. You also get stuff done faster in the grand scheme of things and be a much happier person overall. When you associate less stress with the actions you’re taking, you also won’t learn to hate these actions as quickly either. Not hating the thing you want to do is always a big plus.

Fifth Time’s The Charm

Time Ferris talks about this “5 times” rule a decent amount, so let’s see how it works with Japanese. The basic idea is that if you do something at least five times, you’re way more likely to keep doing that thing more than five times. Nike+ data shows that the difference between people who go on five runs and the people who don’t go on five runs is pretty huge. Basically, if you can figure out how to run five times, you’ll be much more likely to have formed a habit.

So let’s adopt this hypothesis for Japanese. If the Nike+ data is true, then that means that if you study Japanese at least five times, you’ll be more likely to continue studying more than five times. This sounds really dumb and obvious, but I do think it’s quite important. If you want to get into a habit, you should attempt to do it five times. It really does work most of the time.

Besides just buckling down and studying your Japanese five times in a row there are some strategies you can try and implement, which I’ll go over right now.

Create A Tracking Method

First off, you should create a tracking method. For some reason tracking information reminds your brain about it and then causes it to want to continue the action. Perhaps it’s part “beat the streak” and part just plain old remembering. Whatever it is, this does indeed help quite a lot.

• Pick something that you can track. Kanji learned? Kana learned? Anki sentences cleared? WaniKani reviews? Whatever it is, make sure it’s quantitative. Something you can graph and see at a glance.
• Put this paper/tab/window somewhere where you’ll see it. It will remind you.
• Do whatever you can to fill this out five times. Profit.

It doesn’t actually matter what you track, to be honest. What matters is that you track something. This is the motivation that keeps you going long enough to form a habit.

Making It Easy

Humans are particularly lazy creatures. If it’s easier not to study, there’s a good chance we won’t study. If we make it so it’s easier to study, we’ll probably end up studying. Simple as that. People only have a limited amount of willpower, so once it’s all used up, it comes simply down to this idea.

So, think about the things that are “easier” to do than studying. What is preventing you from completing whatever it is you’re tracking? Figure out what those things are and eliminate them. Is your Xbox there, waiting for you to turn it on? Put it in a box that’s taped shut for a little while… at least until you get to the magic five (or six, or seven) number. Is it easier to click on the bookmark to your news feed than it is to go to WaniKani to study? Delete the bookmark link. Hide your bookmark bar. Make your homepage http://wanikani.com/reviews.

It’s a pain to do all these things, but you have to remember: humans are lazy, and so are you. We like to take the easy way out whenever possible, so if you change your environment so the easy way out happens to be studying… well, I think I see a habit forming on your arm. You’d better get that checked out by the you’re-awesome doctor.

Becoming A Tradition

What happens when something becomes such a habit that it becomes a tradition? Something very good, actually. Habits become traditions when they become something that you just do. You don’t even think about it. It’s not even something you worry about. It’s never an “if I want to” thing. It’s also never a “maybe I’ll do it” thing. It’s a…. if _____ then ______ for-sure-100% sort of thing. For example:

• After walking my dog, when we come home I wash his feet.
• When I wake up I do 20 pushups.
• When I eat food, I don’t eat meat.

Once the “optional” part is taken out it becomes a tradition, not a habit. When something is a tradition it doesn’t use up any of the (limited) willpower that you and every other human being has. It is just something you do, and it causes zero stress or pain on your brain at all. You just do it.

Turning a habit into a tradition takes some time, but I think it mostly comes down to changing how you think about habits. For the things you do often, be sure to think of them as “if _____ then _____” statements instead of “if I want to” ones. If you apply this type of thinking to your habits, they will slowly turn into traditions. It will take some time, but once you get here you’ll notice (or maybe you won’t) things going much more smoothly. A lot more will get done as well. This is basically the Super Saiyan version of habit forming.

Your Japanese Habits

As you can see, habit forming works best when you can measure the things you’re doing. They also work better when you think about them as things you do, not things you could do. With this in mind, here are some ideas for habits you could attempt to form, should you want to. Of course, you should come up with habits that will affect you the most positively in your Japanese studies, so come up with your own habits where you can.

• Learn the meaning and reading of ten kanji per day.
• Zero out my WaniKani reviews before going to sleep every night.
• Write a Lang-8 post every night before going to sleep.
• Learn one new vocabulary word every day.
• Read a page out of my book every morning at breakfast.

Notice how they all include a “when” as well as a very specific “what”? Hopefully the habits you’re attempting will look like this too, whatever they end up being. Whether big or small, the important thing is that when you feel like something has become a “tradition,” add another habit to work towards into the mix if you think you can handle it. Traditions (in theory) don’t take up any willpower, which means you should be able to keep adding more up to a certain point. Eventually you’ll find your limit, but hopefully by that time you’ve completed some goals via this “traditions” method and will have some extra room to spare.

Good luck on your Japanese learning and hopefully you’ll get into the habit of continuing to read Tofugu, because there will be another “Staying Motivated” article next week! :)

Bonus Wallpapers!

Stay motivated with these bonus wallpapers & animated gifs! :)

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There’s a lot going on here. Some of it is physical ability. Some of it is being busy. Some of it is being lazy. But… it all really comes down to your motivation. If you’re not motivated to do something you’re not going to do it (or if you do, it certainly won’t be at 100% focus and effort levels). Motivation is key in absolutely everything that you do. While I’d say around 25-50% of motivation has to come naturally, that other 50-75% can be manufactured by you. You just have to know what that process is. Once you’ve discovered this power, you can apply it anywhere in your life and basically choose when you want to be ultra motivated. What you end up choosing, however, will be up to you.

Of course, in this post we’ll mainly be talking about motivation in relation to Japanese learning. I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about the topic of motivation (it seems to be really core to our Japanese learning sites TextFugu and WaniKani, after all), so I wanted to write a series of posts covering the topic. I was going to write it all at once in one article, but then thought it’d be best spread out so you can try individual techniques out a little bit at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed. Without wasting any more time, here’s today’s “motivation”-related topic: Setting Stakes.

Stakes

This idea isn’t a new one, but I was reminded of it by a Tim Ferris TED talk. Simply put, you should set stakes for yourself. Now, this sounds really easy and all, but it’s actually quite a bit harder than you’d think. I think most people set stakes just by telling themselves they have to do something by a certain time. For example:

“I’m going to learn the joyo kanji this year!”

“I’m going to lose 500 pounds this year!”

Those sound a lot like New Year’s Resolutions to me, and we all know how often New Year’s Resolutions are carried out (not that often). When there are stakes associated with goals like these, they tend to be “I better learn it!” or “I have to learn it!” but there’s never really any reason to follow through. The only stakes here are the ones that make you feel bad for not completing your goal. Humans forget and move on easily. These kinds of stakes will not do anything. This is not motivation at all.

Now go ahead and think about the times when you get something done because the stakes are high. Focus mainly on the victories. What sorts of stakes were they? Fear of losing your job? Getting a bad grade? Letting down a friend? Getting whipped by your overlord? Losing money? Breaking the streak? What motivates you will depend solely on you, but I can pick out one or two things from that list that would certainly work well for me (and already have). What about you? Figure that out and move on to the next section.

Asking A Friend

Friends / Shutterstock

Friends can be very helpful for setting stakes. In fact, when it comes to setting stakes, you should never be in control. If you’re in control, you’re liable to cheat and unset your stakes. It’s a particularly natural and human thing to do (if you have the power to make your life easier, you probably will make it easier). So, pick a friend who’s particularly evil and very willing to do things to you that you wouldn’t want them to do. Also make sure you can trust them enough to not screw you over on purpose.

Step 1: Figure out what you’re trying to achieve. It shouldn’t be an impossible thing, because that would be silly. Also, it should be quantifiable. You can’t say “done with learning kanji” because that doesn’t mean anything. You have to say something like “be able to read this list of 1700 kanji and know their meanings at a 90% accuracy rate when tested in xyz way by xyz date.” This is very specific. It’s obvious if you can do it or not do it since it’s all numbers that can be measured by you and by your semi-evil friend.

Step 2: Find a friend you can trust. Family could work too, though they tend to be soft, and that’s no good. Evil friend it is.

Step 3: Tell them about your goal. Tell them what you have to achieve (make sure it’s specific!). Tell them how they will test you when the time comes.

Step 4: Think of “a lot of money.” How much that is depends on who you are. Let’s just say $1,000 for the sake of this example. Now, think of a group of people you’re not a fan of. Nazis? KKK? Whatever. Write a check out to them. Give it to your friend. Tell them that if you don’t complete your goal by a certain date, they should mail that check off to the organization of your (not) choice. Add some postage and an envelope to make it incredibly easy to send.

Step 5: Get cracking. You don’t want the KKK using your money, right?

Now, the really hard part is actually doing something that you’d be terrified to do. Like, accidentally giving $1,000 to the KKK is a terrifying prospect to me. Why would you even put yourself in a situation where you’d have to give $1,000 to the KKK? Well, because you want to accomplish your goal. So, bite the bullet and embrace the fear. Pick something you’re terrified of and it will greatly increase your chances of success by quite a lot, possibly doubling or tripling your chance of success.

Using stickK

And, believe it or not (I know you believe it) there’s a service that does just this. It allows you to create a goal, add stakes (money, which can go to your friend, a charity, or an anti-charity), add a referee (that’s your friend), and then friends for more support. It basically streamlines everything and will hold on to your money until the referee decides whether to give it back to you or release it to George Bush’s Library fund.

Anyways, I’d trust this more than giving my friend an envelope with a check in it. Who goes to the post office these days, right?

Setting Goals, Setting Stakes

As I mentioned before, goals need to be specific and quantifiable. If you can’t decide “true or false” whether or not you accomplished the goal, then there’s no way the referee can make a decision for you. While your goal is going to be unique and specific to you, here’s some ideas:

• Learn the Joyo kanji by ________. Here is the list of Joyo kanji. I am going to learn the on’yomi reading and meaning for all of them. I will test myself by allowing my friend to show me 100 of these items at random, and then I have to write down the answers (and he will guess). I must get 90% correct.
• Burn __ number of WaniKani items by _________.
• Be able to read any page of this Japanese book, at random, by year’s end (make sure to have a referee that can judge that you’re not making things up).
• Study my Anki deck every single day this month, even if it’s a little bit.

Goals can be big or small. I’d suggest things that are 1-3 month goals, as you can keep setting new goals and setting new stakes more often. It’s easier to gauge 3 months than it is to gauge a whole year, too. You’ll be able to set difficult but more realistic goals this way.

Tell me what kind of goals you could make for Japanese in the comments. Then let me know if you have any ideas for stakes. I’m sure other people here would be glad to borrow some ideas from you if you’re willing to share. Good luck and be sure to stickK around until next week, when the next “Staying Motivated” article gets published!

For the self-learner, there really aren’t the same sort of consequences. You skip doing Japanese for a week and you’re not punished at all. You’re actually rewarded. Rewarded with more time to play video games, watch TV, or go out with your friends. So how do you keep yourself motivated when there’s so much other fun stuff to do?

Habit, Habit, Habit

One of the most important factors of keeping motivation is developing it into a habit. Once something becomes a part of your daily routine, you’ll be much more likely to keep doing it from now until forever as it’s become second nature to you, just like walking the dog or brushing your teeth.

Lots of places on the internet say that it takes about twenty-one days to develop a habit. I personally feel that this is a very arbitrary number and how long it takes to develop a habit will very much depend on the activity and the person in question, but three weeks is a good starting point.

To make sure you stick to this habit of studying Japanese every day, every other day, or every week (especially in the beginning when the going is tough, and then once again when you reach the intermediate plateau) a great idea is to schedule your time. Actually block off time for activities during the day, or at the very least your Japanese. Physically write it down somewhere that you’re going to study Japanese from 7pm to 8pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and set an alarm or something to remind you when it’s time.

It also helps to be specific. Instead of just writing “Study Japanese,” write stuff like “Study Anki Deck,” “Study WaniKani,” or “Study TextFugu.” This makes it much easier to get right into your study session instead of wasting time thinking about what method you want to use because you’ve already laid it out ahead of time.

I really like this method a lot and I use it often when I have a lot of stuff to get done in one day. I’ve also used it in the past to get into the habit of working out each day and I also used it for studying Japanese (and now French). I feel like I’m much more productive when I have my whole day mapped out in an Excel file or something and I waste way less time derping around the internet. Trust me, it works. Mapping out your day is absolutely wonderful for productivity and motivation.

You don’t have to take my word for it though, just check out this list of famous people and their daily rituals and scheduled activities. If it worked for them, it can work for you too.

But of course there will always be that one night you were planning to have a study session and out of the blue your friends show up and want to go see a movie, or play video games and hang out or something and you’d feel like a real jerk blowing them off to study Japanese. You just need to promise yourself that you’ll reschedule your study time for later so you don’t get behind.

It’s important to keep up with your learning, but you don’t want to become a social outcast because of it. Unless of course you’re already a social outcast, then in that case, study away!

Keep it Fun

Fun is a huge motivator. You’re a lot more likely to do something and keep up with it if it’s fun. So, it’s important to find study methods that both work well for you and aren’t boring as all get out. Some great ways are to study with video games, anime, and dramas.

It’s also important to keep your individual study sessions short enough so that you aren’t burnt out by the end of them. The sweet spot for me is usually about thirty minutes to an hour, but you should go with what works best for you and then you can schedule that block of time into your week like I mentioned above.

Studying with these materials is also very rewarding. It may seem terrible at first when you start studying with a drama or something because there are so many new words, but in the end when you can watch the entire show and not have to look up any words and you know exactly what’s going on and what’s being said, it’s a pretty amazing feeling.

You should also be sure to select material that’s suitable for your level of learning. If you’re at expert level, you shouldn’t be reading and watching kid’s material (unless you’re just looking for an ego boost), and if you’re a beginner, you shouldn’t be diving into news reports and technical manuals.

Children’s books and TV shows are a great place to get your feet wet, and they can really make you feel a lot more accomplished. Unless of course you have trouble understanding anything that’s going on in the kid’s show, in which case you’ll feel like an idiot (it’s happened to me more than once), but that’s something you just have to get over. You’ll understand it eventually, just be patient.

Accountability

Accountability is a great motivator. Tell someone else your plan for keeping up with your Japanese studies and let them know exactly what you plan to do, when you plan to achieve milestones, and how you’re going to get there. Tell as many people as you can. You could even have some of them remind you about it, or get some really good friends to ask you if you studied Japanese today or not. Having to be accountable to people about your learning is a great way of guilting yourself into being motivated.

This way, if you fail to keep up with your studies, you’re not only letting yourself down, but you’re letting down everyone you told about your grand plans. You don’t want all your friends to be disappointed in you, right? Accountability works wonders. Plus, when you do achieve your goals, you’ll not only be proud yourself, but you’ll also have lots of other people to be proud of you and support you along the way.

Accountability is a great way to motivate yourself to achieve goals. Just don’t annoy your friends and family by talking to them about it all the time (unless they’re studying Japanese too, then by all means, bug the crap out of each other), wouldn’t want to alienate yourself or anything. Just use your best judgment.

Keep at It

Once you’ve developed a good habit of studying Japanese and having fun with it, you’ll be an unstoppable Japanese learning machine. No longer do you need a classroom, nagging teacher, or the threat of bad grades to motivate you. You have a fun schedule you created yourself, awesome self-learning materials, accountability, and the self-satisfaction of making it on your own. Learning Japanese solo is entirely possible with the right materials and the right attitude. So get out there and JFDI.

So tell me, how do you keep motivated with your Japanese self-study? Do you struggle with keeping up with it? What other tips and tricks do you use to stay motivated? Let us know and share in the comments!

What Are The “Little Victories”?

The idea of little victories is really simple, though quite difficult to achieve… especially if you’re learning on your own. A little victory is basically one of these things:

1. A sense of accomplishment after you’ve done something.
2. The act of finishing something… anything really.
3. Understanding something (i.e. a concept, remembering a word, kanji, etc).

Now, little victories may seem simple, but that’s only when you’re really thinking about them. If you’re using most textbooks, resources, etc., there’s almost no focus on little victories. Instead, your “victories” are spread thin, take more effort to complete, and are generally forgotten about. Sure, there are “chapters” set up, and you (in theory) learn something (or often, somethings) by the end of it, but you rarely realize that you’re making an achievement.

So, to sum it up, most resources either don’t pay attention to victories at all, or their victories are too big / too spread apart.

Why Are The “Little Victories” So Important?

When you “complete” something or “get something done,” you get an energizing boost from it. The funny thing is, “big victories” and “little victories” are nearly equal when put side by side. Little victories, however, can happen with so much more frequency and this is is what makes them so powerful.

When you create “little victories” with you Japanese learning, the “energizing” effect starts to snowball, and you’ll want to study more and more and more. The long your go without a victory, the more your energy to study depletes, and eventually you start running on empty. When you run on empty, you start associating bad feelings with Japanese studies, which means you end up quitting altogether.

How Do You Create “Little Victories” For Yourself

Basically, here’s what it comes down to: Set your goals small

I know this seems kind of lame. “But I want to set big goals to achieve!” … “But I want to be a go getter!” etc. Small goals, however, are the key.

Basically, here’s all you have to do. Basically, there’s a kind of hierarchy to everything you use to study with, and I’ll map out some of them.

Traditional Textbook “Victories”

Level 1: Finishing the entire book

Level 2: Finishing a “section” (usually 1/2 or 1/3 of a textbook)

Level 3: Finishing a chapter

Level 4: Finishing a segment of a chapter

Level 5: Finishing one grammar point / one area of a segment.

Now, most people / resources will have you focus on Levels 1-3. You want to get rid of that notion, and focus entirely on levels 4 and 5. Sure, have a bigger goal that you’re working towards, but when you sit down to study, you should take your textbook, and break it up into small, almost laughable pieces. Things that will take you 5-10 minutes to complete.

Vocab / Kanji Lists

Level 1: All the vocab words in a stack. This could be 100+ plus items!

Level 2: Half of the words in the stack.

Level 3: Set of 10 words (this is where things start to get little, though I’d break it down further)

Level 4: Set of 5 words to learn.

Level 5: One word to learn.

You want to focus on 4 & 5 again. Each time you get one of those things done, remind yourself that you’re getting closer to your ultimate goal of learning Japanese. Also remind yourself that each time you do one of these little things, you’re accomplishing something and moving forward. Basically, we’ve turned something that would normally be one big achievement (let’s say 100 words learned) into 20-100 little victories. Each one of these victories will motivate you to keep studying, and make learning Japanese a lot more enjoyable.

One last thing I should mention is that before you start on a “little victory” section, you should spend a minute or two planning out what you’re actually going to learn during that period. Whether it’s a set of five kanji, a grammar concept, or whatever, the important thing is that you know what it is you’re setting out to accomplish. I know this may seem like a lot of extra work (going in and planning each little victory) but it will really help you out a lot in the end.

Really, though, the most important thing is to just know the (little) goals you’re working towards. If you don’t know where the little victory finish lines are at it’ll be pretty hard to feel any sense of accomplishment when you end up getting to them. The power is in your hands – you choose what counts as a little victory.

What Are Your Little Victories Methods?

The more you think about little victories, the more you can see them in the real world. What resources are you using, and how can you break them down into smaller, bite-sized pieces?

P.S. Achieve a “little victory” right now by following Tofugu on Twitter.

P.P.S. I’m currently working on converting all the lessons on TextFugu over to this concept, too, so if you like the idea of “Little Victories” you should take a look!

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