Checking out Japanese language learning forums reveals some common trends. I often find myself analysing people’s entire personalities through their comments. I’m not entirely sure remote psychology is a thing but I do see certain attitudes and behaviours that are unlikely to be very helpful in your language learning journey. The one I’ll focus on today is ‘Min-Maxing’.
Min-Maxing?
Min-Maxing is a an idea that comes from games, particularly RPG style games involving building a character. The basic idea is that you minimise or reduce things that won’t help you, and maximise something that will help you the most. At its core, this idea is very powerful as it involves having a sort of Platonic ideal or fully formed concept of what your ‘endgame’ or goal is. Then you consider how to reach that goal and the steps that need to be taken and the things to be avoided. If done correctly, it can lead to great efficiency, specialisation, success and above average achievement.
However it can also have the downside of the end result being unbalanced, asymmetrical or otherwise janky.
So how does this apply to language learning? One of the big issues with min-maxing things in the real world is that it is not as easy to do the 1-to-1 conversion of effort ⇒ result. Spending inordinate amounts of time to determine the ‘best’ study method would have been much better spent actually studying, even if it was inefficient. To continue the RPG analogy, the ‘grind’ must be done at some point: the words must be learnt, the grammar internalised and the immersion must take place. If you’re into your fifth article reading about which anki deck to use or typing out your huge wall of text asking for opinions on which Vtuber to watch, you’re probably better off actually opening a textbook, reading a news article or speaking to a (Japanese) native speaker.
Worked Example
In response to the question, ‘how do I learn compound kanji?’, this is a response that is worth reading (emphasis added):
It’s best if you don’t think of them as ‘compound kanji’ as much as you think of them as words. Because (usually) what comes first is the spoken word, then a writing system appears. And for that, there’s not really a ‘best way’ simply because it’s too complex of a task and learning is an individual process.
What people generally do for Japanese is use a core deck (2k or 6k), which has audio for every word. Then you start consuming native media and either relying on encountering them enough times to stick or making your own cards (sentence mining). At the same time to get familiar with kanji, you can use one of the common methods like WaniKani or KKLC that teach them to you together with words [or kanji damage -Ed].
