littlewonderlog

People say their English never improves no matter how hard they try.

They say they put in so much effort but never achieve the desired results.

I’ve said the same thing about learning French.

I never understood why my French didn’t get past the beginner level. Why did I always suck?

After some observation, I easily got the answer.

I talked a lot about learning French, yet I didn’t actually study that much.

So many times I babbled, “Ah, I should learn French….” yet I spent so little time actually doing it.

I spent so much of my energy talking on and on about French that I thought I was learning French.

The same thing happens with my attitude toward sorting out my clothes.

For days and months, I talked about the need to rearrange my drawers.

And yet?

I didn’t even want to look at the drawers, and I didn’t.

The reason your English never improves is clear.

You don’t really work at it.

Words are funny.

Sometimes they come out after long and hard consideration, and sometimes they just pop out without even thinking.

Some words are heard so many times from people around me, stay in my head quietly for a while, and then one day just come out unconsciously.

We need to keep an eye on these words.

“It’s not gonna work in this life.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“How am I going to be able to do that?”

“It’s too much for me to handle.”

I mean, why not?

What stops you in this life?

Money can be earned.

How am I going to do it? Well, I can figure that out somehow.

Everything feels like too much to handle at first. We can learn, experience, and get used to it.

Words are a habit, and habits become reality.

By controlling the words that come out unconsciously, we control our reality today and tomorrow.

On Saturday night, I watched an episode of the Culinary Class Wars again with my husband.

Unlike the K-foodie Meets J-foodie or the Solitary Gourmet which run for about 20 minutes, the Culinary Class Wars takes up more of my time as it runs for more than 1 hour.

And another thing about this show is that…

it interferes with my deep sleep.

Just like last time, I had rather light sleep after watching this show before going to bed. Usually, I don’t wake up during the night and have very deep sleep, but my sleep becomes light as a feather after watching this show.

While our usual habit of reading books for 1 or 2 hours before going to bed can be a factor, the characteristics of this show seem to be another.

Unlike the K-foodie Meets J-foodie or the Solitary Gourmet, the Culinary Class Wars is a survival competition show and its filming style has a lot of anticipation and surprise factors, which stimulate dopamine.

Going to bed right after watching an exciting show seems to prevent me from having a relaxed state of mind and interfere with the deep sleep that I usually have.

One more strange thing is that this kind of dopamine-enhancing show shuts down my Japanese-learning ears.

When I watch shows in Japanese, I usually keep an ear out for the words and phrases very consciously, yet while watching the Culinary Class Wars, I kind of lose that sense.

Although the Japanese conversations I hear are all accumulated in my unconscious brain, they just flow away at a conscious level.

Then, is this show really suitable for my Japanese learning?

Well, I need to watch some more and figure that out.

(And I really should not watch it right before going to bed.)

I’ve taken some time to list all the Japanese TV shows and movies that I watched over 1 year in the holy name of learning a language.

Since I found that the typical sense of humor in Japanese dramas doesn’t quite suit me, I also watched a lot of non-Japanese TV shows with a Japanese dub (thanks to Netflix and Disney).

This list also includes a lot of food and cooking-related TV shows as food is one of my major interests in terms of cultural exploration.

The list is actually longer than I imagined.

Solitary Gourmet – 5 hours
A hard day – 2 hours
Finding Nemo (Dub) – 20 hours
The Practice (Dub) – 40 minutes
Tokyo Swindlers – 12 hours and 40 minutes
Kiyo in Kyoto: From the Maiko House – 6 hours
K-foodie Meets J-foodie – 16 hours
Evening Drink Style – 4 hours and 20 minutes
Big Short (Dub) – 2 hours
Slam Dunk Movie – 2 hours
Atom’s Last Shot – 37 hours and 30 minutes
The Family – 2 hours
Wakako Sake – 1 hour
Weekend Family (Dub) – 50 hours
Prison Break (Dub) – 6 hours and 30 minutes
Hanzawa Naoki – 9 hours and 30 minutes

The total is 176 hours and 10 minutes.

The time specified in the above list is not the total runtime of the show but rather the actual time I spent watching. Some were watched several times and some were stopped without finishing the whole series.

The main contributor to this grandiose list of watching TV in the name of learning Japanese is dishwashing.

70% of the total time was spent doing the dishes while watching the shows.

I feel obliged to dedicate myself to the dishwashing to maintain my commitment to learning Japanese, which leads to serious eating.

I need to keep going.

I need to keep eating, all in the name of learning Japanese.

Over the period from Jan 22 last year to Jan 21 this year, I’ve calculated the total time spent learning Japanese.

It’s 613 hours, which is equivalent to 1 hour and 40 minutes a day on average.

I’ve always felt there was no time to learn Japanese, yet the total amount was quite a lot.

Out of those 613 hours, 62% (about 367 hours) was spent listening to or watching something while multitasking such as doing the dishes or taking a shower.

Since the priority for learning Japanese is pretty much at the bottom of my daily task list, it was only about 30 minutes a day that I could really focus on what I was learning. Yet, accumulating it for 365 days makes it almost 180 hours.

I haven’t been able to spend as much time on Japanese as I wanted to and therefore I can’t speak Japanese as well as I would like to. Still, I would rather be grateful that there are more words I can understand and more phrases I can express now.

Given its priority, it’s great. Totally great.

The English speaking ability of Kang Kyung-hwa, the former Foreign Minister of Korea is very classy.

She doesn’t make grammar mistakes, uses very high-level vocabulary (quite understandable given her field of work), and speaks eloquently in a calm manner.

It’s not just that she speaks good English, but that she speaks it well.

Even during her term, what she did every day was ‘learning English’.

Wait, did she have to learn more with her level of skill?

Yes, obviously.

She said that she looked up words in the dictionary when she encountered new ones while reading, and she always carried English magazines or books so that she could read whenever she had time.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The fact that those who are really good at something are the ones who work the hardest is a timeless truth.

Overthinking drains the energy necessary for action.

Overthinking complicates things and prevents moving forward.

Overthinking causes fatigue and prevents starting anything.

It’s great to have a direction, strategize, and come up with a plan before taking action. Yes, it’s true. Yet, if it’s too difficult to figure things out, it’s better to just start something – anything.

Although there will be (so incredibly many) times when you feel like “Wait, it’s really not working”, staying away from those circumstances will show better ways, other ways.

If there’s no direction or way to do things, just start something small, now.

If you procrastinate and do nothing, nothing will ever happen.

I was talking to my friend and found out that she has had trouble sleeping because of work-related stress. She’s got so much work to do, and often wakes up in the middle of the night because of the issues that need to be addressed.

What should we do when problems keep coming up and there’s no choice but to keep looking for answers?

It’s been almost a year and a half since I started walking or running in the morning, and more than six months since I cut out caffeine, so I usually have very deep sleep. I hardly wake up during the night until morning.

When I think so much about solutions to certain problems, however, those problems are the first ones popping into my head right after I wake up. It’s like they stayed in my head before I went to bed, took a break during the night, and started showing up first thing in the morning. I mean, seriously?

What do I do?

After getting out of bed, I do some reading and head out for a walk or a run. After that, I feel much lighter. There’s still no solution to the aforementioned problems, but my mental state when dealing with them has changed.

Since I get some fresh air while running outside, my head feels much clearer, and I can think straight. Then, if I keep seeking solutions, they eventually come.

We need to have a good night’s sleep and keep looking for solutions.

Because, at the end of the day, the power to change everything is inside me. Always.

I knew that word, but it has faded.

I know that phrase, I know that it’s there in my head, but it won’t come out.

What was that? What was that?

It feels like it’s there, but it just won’t come out.

What do we do? What do we do?

Is there any other choice but to keep going?

There’s no way but forward.

There’s no other way but to move forward.

If you quit because it doesn’t work, you shouldn’t have started in the first place.

Am I talking only about language learning? Not really.

After I write something in my native language – Korean, I usually try to check it with a grammar tool.

The same mistakes often keep popping up, yet I feel very happy when there are no grammar errors.

Although it is my native language, I have a college education, and I read and write, it’s amazing how many grammar and spacing errors I make without really realizing it.

Writing seems to be an excellent way to find weaknesses in my language skills.

There is no such thing as true mastery of a language.

Even with my native language as well as with foreign languages, I keep moving forward little by little.