Top Chef has been in DC for some time now, and it got me thinking about challenges in the kitchen. While we like to think no one’s ever asked us to cook a five-star meal composed entirely from canned goods in under thirty minutes, there are plenty of quickfire challenges much closer to home. Whether an unexpected house guest or an in-law to impress, we’ve constantly had to avert disastre or pull a jackrabbit from a pot in culinary crises of our own. It made me think about what really makes one creative in the kitchen.

Top Chef would have you believe the fruit of Hawaii or the innate genius of the chef at hand are responsible for the final product, but in reality, the celebrity guest star is never the one to inspire the contestants. It’s the thirty minute time limit and the fifty dollar shopping budget. Or in my case, too many tomatoes.

My pilot garden this year has been an incredible success. Every plant has popped up lighting fast and produced the goods faster than I can pick them. It takes me longer to decide whether to pickle or roast my peppers then it does for new peppers to mature. Unfortunately, it also means that I’ve wound up with more peppers and tomatoes than I know what to do with.

Think baskets. Big, overflowing baskets. Every week. This is a problem I’m happy to have, but after the usual caprese salads it’s forced me to be more and more creative with my tomatoes lest they all go to waste before I can figure out how to squeeze them into every nook and cranny of my fridge. So far: tomato-apple chutney, sweet tomato relish, homemade ketchup, cold packed tomatoes, fresh salsa, pasta sauce, and of course all the soups, salads, and sandwiches I can muster. After several weekends caught in canning frenzy suddenly I was tomatoed out.

I had reached the ceiling, the upper limit of my known tomato territory. After the usual suspects sounded totally unappealing, the real creativity happened. This is when the experimental tomato stuffing started to happen, the round of ever-improving tomato breakfast cakes, my dabbling in panzanella, even that awful tomato smoothie I tried, until I was reacquainted with an old flame of mine: gazpacho.

Oh gazpacho, with your summertime swagger, your refreshing cool, your avoidance of the stove top, you are simply charming. You play well with the other garden buddies, the spring onions and the cucumbers especially, and while you are unsure of cilantro, you and Manchego cheese certainly hit it off at first sight. I am quite fond of you, gazpacho, and to be with you, on a breezy night with a slice of french bread, these are the moments I think cannot get any better. You look good all dressed up with white grapes or watermelon just as nice as you shine with avocado, and while sometimes your acid qualities burn my mouth, you always leave a pleasant taste behind, no matter how many times we fight.

Gazpacho in its many incarnations helped me keep the tomatoes under control. But whether or not you like raw vegetable soup as much as I do is unimportant. Point is, if I had never run out of tomato preparation methods, I never would have thought to make my own gazpacho. If I hadn’t ever hit the tomato wall, I would have a ton of rotting tomatoes in my pantry. In more general terms, limitations enable creativity, not prohibit it. The confined materials force you to find unconventional avenues and the limited working space allows you to focus on action rather than on vision.

Ever wonder why the final challenge of Top Chef produces the most boring dishes of all? Because they’re allowed to cook whatever they want. Turns out, when there are no limits, ultimate creativity is actually pretty difficult. That’s part of what makes the kitchen such an exciting place. It requires patience and passion in equal measure, but quite a bit of problem solving as well. Sometimes it’s the milk you don’t have or the cornmeal you need to get rid of that help you write your best recipes yet. So next time you run into a culinary tangle, remember that creativity might just be at the centre of it.

On my plate: assorted greens from my coworkers’ garden, herbed goats cheese from the Del Rey farmer’s market, vinaigrette using balsamic fig glaze from Borrough Market, and fresh cracked pepper. When it’s this good, you don’t need much else.

Note: I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a lecture on sustainability, but I’ve been looking at our food system differently since I began gardening. As I ate that delicious salad I thought about where it came from, how it got here, and how the true cost of food is a lot higher than the prices we pay at a supermarket. So here are my un-edited thoughts, for you to chew over yourself.

One of the most important culinary questions you can ask yourself is “does what I’m doing make a difference?” Fortunately I’ve the luxury of being picky about what sorts of food I put in my mouth and what sorts of goods go in my pantry. Recently I find myself caring more and more, and sometimes that puts me in a bit of a dilemma.

First it was the public transit, then it became the cycling everywhere, then I went a little nuts on our electricity consumption and subscribed to a CSA, all of which might have been a little eccentric, until I went totally crazy and changed all my toiletries and cleaning products, started gardening, composting, and now, canning.

It’s our world, and I want it to be a garden of eden. We foodies can no longer afford to ignore the problems with American agriculture, and neither can your tastebuds or your wallet. For a long time I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it, like every proactive step I could take was either a useless waste of energy or a tiny grain of sand on the endless coast of Australia.

It’s not just about people like me. It’s about your health, your taste, and your immediate future. Luckily, you don’t have to be vegan or vegetarian or raw foodist. You don’t have to only eat at home. You don’t have be an extreme green geek. The rules for making a difference are simple: do what you can when you can. The specifics of your actions will sort themselves out as long as you’re on the lookout to make a change. Some ideas…

Note: why is Whole Foods so expensive? Some of the food is more expensive because it’s not commonly found, or it required a lot of transport to get there. Whole Foods also offers a lot of products that aren’t ideal. Mostly Whole Foods is expensive because it’s fair trade, and it values certain kinds of relationships with distributors over others. Whole Foods simply makes it easier to make good choices. This is why I like Whole Foods, but the brand tends to elicit some incorrect assumptions. That’s the point of this whole post: your purchasing power is not to be taken lightly. What you do matters, and whether you’re aware of the choices you’re making or not, they’re definitely happening, so being an informed consumer really is the best way to make a difference. Otherwise you’re writing a check for thousands of dollars to companies you might not agree with.

This is a very important point: boredom is a good thing. It’s a clear indicator that you’re doing something wrong. Laziness is a good thing. It means you could be doing something better. Stop vilifying and start listening. Let me explain.

First, laziness. We Americans use laziness as an insult and force discipline on ourselves like it’s mother’s milk. Only laziness tastes like Tang and discipline tastes like rancid wheat-grass so not only do we always choose laziness, but we then spend hours making ourselves to feel bad about it. Take the recent phenomenon of people searching for “passive” income. Are they looking for an easy way to make decent money? Yes. Are they being lazy? Yes. The really important question is why. Most of us want to make easy money so that we can quit the jobs we hate and spend more time doing the things on our “someday” list. We don’t want to make more money so we can sit at home and eat bon bons, we want to make more money so we can travel the world, or spend more time with our kids, or fix things around the house, or buy our wives fancier Christmas gifts. Of course you’re lazy about your job. You don’t like it very much (sadly, it’s statistically true). And really, life requires enough of your willpower already as is, so why do you want to go making it harder by spending time perfecting the things you don’t particularly care about perfecting?

That’s why Tim Ferris is able to be Tim Ferris. Because he isn’t lazy, he’s lazy about the things he doesn’t care about. In her article bashing Tim Ferris, Penelope Trunk brings up one excellent point about the fallacy of The Four Hour Work Week: it isn’t four hours, it’s longer. Tim does a stellar job getting lazy people into tips and tricks to pick up his book, but it’s a misnomer. He only spends four hours a day managing the business he spent days, months, and years building. And he only spends four hours a day on the thing that “makes him money.” But he spends many many more hours on the things that have now become his job: writing his newest book, training to deadlift large weights, or practicing for a tango competition. He’s an incredibly hard worker when it comes to the stuff he likes. That’s how it should be, isn’t it?

Here’s the point: laziness isn’t a bad thing. It’s a litmus test. If you feel too lazy to go to the gym, well then your workout routine needs a huge overhaul. If you’re too lazy to eat breakfast, then you’re eating the wrong things. You should care pretty intensely about what you’re doing, otherwise why are you doing it? Laziness is an indicator that the task at hand isn’t good enough for you, not the other way around. If you feel lazy, it’s for a good reason, so stop beating yourself up about it already. Make the job seem more appealing or decide that you don’t really care enough about this thing to EVER do it. As Khatzumoto would say, “You still need help, you’re just not helpless.”

It’s the same with boredom.

If you’re feeling bored, think about what that really means. Boredom is a symptom of something much more important: your engagement with the task at hand. Remember grade school? There were always really cool volcanoes to build and guessing games to play and Lincoln Logs so even when you had to learn math you were rarely bored doing it. Flash forward to high school where there are no games, no independent study projects, and definitely no Lincoln Logs. Suddenly, you’re a lot more bored than you used to be. Is that your fault? No. I think it’s the teacher’s job to engage you in learning. But I work for an educator’s association. Think about every TED Talk you’ve ever watched. People that were truly great were truly great because they cared about what they were doing, not because they were trying to be truly great. this brings us to the golden rule of study hacking: you must enjoy the means in order to reach the end. That’s right, you’ll never get what you want unless you enjoy the journey getting there.

In practical terms, this means that if you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong. You’re focusing on the wrong things. You’re making it totally dry and dull. And I promise, it isn’t supposed to be. Even the stuff like your job, which you need to pay your bills, doesn’t have to be boring. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (da-SHING-a-ma-holly) has this whole theory about Flow Experiences that make you a happy, fullfilled, ultimately engaged person. There’s even a chart he made to explain his theory, but I’ll simplify it even further (the original one is still worth a look).

It’s all about the ratio of how sure you are you can accomplish a task in proportion to how hard you think the task will be. Are you panicked? Then you’re trying to do something too hard for your current skill level. Are you apathetic? Then what you’re trying to do isn’t hard enough to capture your attention. The golden zone, the optimal flow experience, can only happen when you balance your competence at a skill and your challenge at the task. The sweet spot is when they are even. So if you’re bored, the ratio’s too small, and if you’re terrified, the ratio’s too big. Most people know that if they’re freaked out, they’re doing something wrong and they try to change it, but rarely do we have such a strong reaction to the other side of the problem: being too bored.

That’s what I’ve really gleaned from learning Japanese. It’s most satisfying when you can just barely figure it out. It’s most motivating when you’re good enough to advance, but there’s still loads you don’t yet understand fully. Most importantly, you have to enjoy the process. You have to be interested in the stuff you’re doing, in Japanese and in everything else in life. It’s generally accepted that in order to master anything, you’ll have to put in 10,000 hours working on it. That’s an awful lot of time. I don’t know about you, but I can muscle through a few hours of something I don’t care for, like running track hurdles or taking long exams, but there’s no way I could get through seven solid years of becoming a hurdles master, which is about the time it’ll take you if you practice 4 hours every day. So if I’m in it to win it with Japanese, I better figure out a way to be entertained for the next 10,000 hours or as the case may be, 10,000 sentences.

Here’s the best part: the beauty of only trying to keep boredom at bay is that 10,000 is only the beginning. After you’re deep enough in, you forget about the goal because SURPRISE! You’ve been living a satisfying, fulfilling life for the last however many years doing what you love. Sounds pretty great, right? And it all started by being lazy and bored.

I spent years thinking learning Japanese was hard. It isn’t. It’s easy. There are no complicated methods or specific benchmarks or forms and orders and grammar points and readings and all that junk. Forget it. This is all you have to do: Read Japanese. Write Japanese. Listen to Japanese. Read, Write, Listen. Done.

This is how I did it and so far it’s working pretty well for me. You, though? You can’t possibly do what I did. I mean, for starters:

“I’m not living in JAPAN.”
Yeah, well neither am I. So you don’t see kana signage every time you go outside, but you know what? There are plenty of Japanese movies at Blockbuster and Barnes & Noble will special order Japanese comics for you and chances are there’s a language group on your city’s meetup.com or at least on facebook and you probably already own a ton of anime (or, if you’re like me, just ate a lot of imported sweets and noodles) since you want to go there in the first place and there are sites like YESAsia and Amazon.co.jp and craigslist and ebay and J-List and there’s at least one Japanese person in your state who would love to tell you about the homeland and most sushi restaurants have native menus if not waitresses and are you getting the idea?

“I don’t have enough MONEY.”
You don’t need money. There’s this really neat thing called the Internet, and word has it people in Japan/Italy/France/Iran/Wherever are on it too. You don’t have to pay for a class or buy Rosetta stone. Use Lang-8 or Smart.fm instead for free. Find a language partner to skype with. Follow @cipher on twitter. Better yet, follow the people that @-reply @cipher on twitter. Watch weird Japanese commercials and music videos on Youtube. Stalk Hikosaemon and Chris Gen and Maggie-sensei on the interwebs. Download game emulators and Japanese versions of cheesy 8-bit games for your computer. Change your operating system to Japanese. Listen to the hundreds of free podcasts from Alex & Beb, Japanesepod101.com, and JEdutainment. In total I’ve spent maybe $50 on Japanese materials for my 9 months of study.

“I’m short on TIME.”
You are lying to me. To my face. And I don’t appreciate it. Yes it is true that you totally need a lot of time to learn a new language, but time does not equal time. You don’t need an uninterrupted block of four hours to study. That’s grossly ineffective, actually. You need a lot of exposure hours (10,000 is the recommended) in sum. As in total. As in not all at once. You just need to find out how to integrate Japanese into the cracks in your schedule. While you’re waiting in the supermarket queue, pull out your phrasebook and try to learn some new vocab. When you’re driving/commuting pump up the M-Flo. If you’re waiting for your regularly scheduled programme to resume, practice writing some kanji until the commercial break ends. There are plenty of spare moments, if not minutes, hours, and you know, “time.” But if you are always prepared, there’s plenty of time.

“I’m too big of a NOOB.”
Okay, that’s why you’re doing the whole learning Japanese thing instead of coming out of the birth canal already speaking the language. You’re not going to know enough out of the gate. You’ll be listening to endless amounts of Japanese and you won’t have a clue what any of it means, and guess what? No one’s going to teach you. The point of listening to so much native audio isn’t that you’ll suddenly wake up and know half the words. The point is to expose yourself to certain patterns and phrases enough that you’ll get comfortable hearing them, and then too comfortable, so comfortable you’re curious as to what they mean and you’ll go look them up. You may only know two words when you start — “domo” and “arigato” — but eventually you’ll see/hear a phrase like nanimo or konomama enough that you’ll just have to go figure out what they mean. So yeah, you better like what you’re writing and reading and listening to in the meantime, but on the bright side, there’s a whole country worth of books to read and movies to watch and music to listen to that it won’t feel like work. Stop worrying about how much you don’t know and start worrying about how much you’re doing to fix it.

“I’m too OLD.”
If you can read this right now on then you are not too old. If you can make out letters and noises, you can learn Japanese. If you can say the phrase “Can you pass me two eggrolls please?” you can even speak Japanese (it includes all the proper vowel tones and most of the consonants). Contrary to ’70s linguistic theory, your brain actually never stops learning. So you’re not a toddler. So what? Your neurons travel a lot faster and your brain makes connections a lot more rapidly so you actually don’t need to regenerate brian cells as fast. It’s all mental, folks. If you believe you can learn it, you can learn it. Look up all those Definitely Not the Opera podcasts on self-worth and self-identification’s impact on assessment testing in high schools or that RadioLab podcast on Limits. Right now it may seem surprising what the human body is capable of, but you need to get it in your head that you can do it no matter your age or upbringing.

“It’s too HARD.”
Well it ain’t easy. But you want to do this, right? You’ll stop at nothing, right? Most people say “I want to learn Japanese” but never read, write, or listen to anything in Japanese. They get all nervy when it’s time to speak and refuse to try. They like the idea but not the actuality. That’s fine. If you don’t care enough to put in the work, then you obviously don’t want to learn. You people, just go away. I certainly don’t want to waste my time or yours. On the other hand, if you’ve tried to put in the elbow grease and are still coming up against the wall, then perhaps you’re expecting too much. A case of biting off more than you can chew, perhaps? Are you trying to learn 35 new kanji a day and expecting to be able to understand Spirited Away after watching it twice? Are you trying to write paragraphs when you barely know one hundred words? In other words, if the problem isn’t that it’s hard, but that it’s too hard, that’s fixable. Just lower your expectations and back off your intensity. Make it fun and inconsequential and it becomes infinitely easier.

“I’m not wired like THAT.”
Funny, no one on this site is telling you there’s only one way to learn Japanese. I don’t learn so well in a Japanese classroom, a fact I had to learn the hard way. Take me out of the classroom and give it a whirl, and what’s that? I can still learn? You are together enough to have gotten this far, so clearly you just have to start experimenting with different ways of getting the information in your head until you find one that works for you. There’s no right or wrong way, and in the real world, no one cares about your process. Japanese people don’t care that you logged over 200 hours in a classroom. They care that you can properly pronounce words and that you know when to be polite. Learn however you have to learn, even if it turns conventional wisdom on its ear, and we’ll wind up at the same place anyway.

So go! Go forth and learn Japanese because there are no more excuses! Write, Read, and Listen to Japanese! Conquer! And feel free to brag about your language conquests in the comments!

I’m radical in many ways (ever met a tech-savvy net-Gen-er that wants to start a commune? Now you have). From polyphasic sleeping to using hippy, aluminium-free deodorant, I routinely flout conventional wisdom, yet even I had trouble believing the plausibility of any diet that lets you eat as much bacon as you want. The paleo diet, the primal diet, the low carb diet, the Atkins diet, all seem to suggest just this. How is it that bacon can be better for you than Oreos? It seems ridiculous to me.

I’m not a dieter, and I enjoy a good laugh at the latest fad diet (”The Hollywood Cookie Diet” comes to mind), mostly because I’m reasonably well-informed when it comes to nutrition. It’s easy to laugh when you understand why weird diets appear to work — the 48hour juice cleanse just makes you poop out all the water in your body, the NutriSystem is plain ol’ portion control, and diet pills are just a boatload of energy supplements that make you too twitchy to eat — but I had a lot of trouble understanding why these meat-heavy diets could possibly work long term (aside from ketosis). It didn’t make logical sense, so I did what every curious millennial does: I went to the interwebs and looked it up.

As a comfortable vegetarian, I’ve now read as many success stories from the raw diet as I have from Mark’s Daily Apple. Mark Sisson is not the first person to suggest that you’re better off with bacon than brownies; I recall Michael Pollan saying something similar on his many diatribes, echoed by countless other bloggers out there into the movement. After weeks of reading, I figured out why it works, and, while I’m not about to start replacing all my canola oil with butter, as Mark suggests, I’ve come to terms with the kernel of the primal diet. It’s the basic idea I’ve always believed: eat real food.

A history lesson, before I get to the punch line. Processed foods are a recent phenomenon unique to America. As the inventors of marketing, it was only natural we’d start breaking down food into components we can use to leverage sales. We’re very good at it, that’s why we’re a rich country. This is great for industry, but terrible for the consumer. You can think they’re pure evil or think they’re probably harmless, but the fact remains that the repercussions of a diet high in processed foods are still being discovered. This is where the paleo/primal/low-carb/Atkins diets etc. all come into play. They say: eat like our ancestors did, before domestic farming and husbandry. They didn’t have supermarkets, or crops to tend to, so they ate what they could find. Fruit was rare, vegetables and nuts were abundant, and meat was gorged on whenever we could bother to kill something. So eat mostly vegetables, some meats, and a few fruits here and there. That’s the primal diet in a nutshell.

Here’s where I compare my food philosophy to Mark Sisson, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Ellie Krieiger, Jamie Oliver, Naomi Moriyama, and all the others that have shaped my idea of what food really is. I think the less steps there are to eating a food, the better off you are. Nutritionally, an apple is better for you than concentrated apple juice. Foods like wheat are actually toxic to humans in their raw form. In order to make wheat edible, you have to shuck it (twice, might I add), grind it, bleach it, mix it with other stuff, and roast the hell out of it to seem remotely palatable. Then there’s butter. It’s okay that it’s calorie-rich because it’s a lot of work to make. You have to churn it for ages, so you’re not about to dip into it every day. You savour it. Except nowadays we aren’t churning our own butter, and it’s easy to eat it by the stick. I’m not against apple juice, wheat four, or butter at all, but there’s something to be said for eating foods in proportion to how difficult they are to get into that form. Things you can eat any which way, like carrots, tomatoes, peaches, bananas, green beans, cashews, and so on, I eat a lot of. Stuff with extra steps involved, like beans, yoghurt, fish, pickles, eggs, wine, coffee/tea, corn, and so on I eat in smaller quantities. What I would never bother to make from plant to product myself, like cheese, butter, bread, pop, and so on, I only eat occasionally.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I don’t count calories. I don’t keep a food diary. I don’t make all my meals at home. I don’t take supplements. I don’t add protein powder to my smoothies or flax seeds to my yoghurt, because I don’t know that you can break down your needs into components. If you need more of Omega-3s, eating fortified cereal ain’t gonna do it. Think about iron. Your body needs calcium and vitamin C to absorb iron properly. Taking an iron supplement is not enough. Instead I eat food with iron in it, such as spinach which, not surprisingly, has all those things in it already, plus some fiber and antioxidants to boot. This part of the primal diets I agree with. But I also think the human body is incredible versatile and adaptable. We can eat ridiculous quantities of processed food and survive because we’re adaptors. That’s what we do. Natural selection would theoretically kill off those of us that can’t handle the diet and leave those that can to procreate, but that’s a pretty unnecessary fate, if you ask me. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat a space-age, reconstituted meal in pill-form. I like food. Real, whole food.

This is where I agree with the crazies on another front (though, admittedly, not all accounts). We have a choice. We have more fruits and vegetables and dips and chips and cuts and pastes available to us than any ancestor before us. There are aboriginals in the Torres Straight islands that subsist off of nothing but wild goose eggs and yams grown in rocky soil. There are tribes in Africa that kill antelopes by outrunning them long-distance. There are societies that eat mostly bugs, people that would rather make soup from raw kale than eat a french fry, large populations of pacific islanders that no longer have the option to eat what their ancestors ate, and vast numbers of consumers that will never give up their Oreos. The point is that humans can survive eating whatever. You, though, you have a choice. Look at your own diet, your waistline, your own ancestors. Do your own research, make your own decisions, be well-informed so you can make a good decision when I ask, “What’ll it be? Bacon or brownies?”

I talked about my troubles with Japanese class a while back, when I was debating whether to continue with formal instruction because it was drop-dead boring. I never made it to my fourth class, instead I combed iTunes for Japanese language music and updated my Netflix queue to only include Japanese movies. I am so glad I stopped going.

Now that’s not to say that we don’t all need a little help now and again, or to suggest that classroom learning can’t be fun, but for me, rote textbook memorisation wasn’t enough. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, but in the few months since I beefed up my own studies, I’ve learned absolutely loads about how to make leaps and bounds in a language most of my mates still find baffling. The biggest question is the how. How do you start from scratch, how do you make significant progress when you’re facing linguistic Mount Everest? What do you need to do to get a foothold stable enough to build some momentum? I thought I might share some of my language learning best practices so that you too might find a way to conquer that intimidating foreign tongue.

1. Stop with the pretense
If you’re waiting until you learn X to do Y, or if you think you can’t do THIS because of THAT, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot. It’s stupidly easy to put off things or to create qualifiers or to feed your energy to the wrong thing. I struggled with this quite a bit when I started my vlog but I can’t tell you how glad I am I made it over the pretenses I had put up to keep me from doing what I wanted to do. Having trouble quieting the lizard brain? Do what I did with vlog 1, make it bad on purpose. Not hard, but bad. Do it badly. Make it suck. Then the worst has happened and you can get on with the learning. You can put the pretense aside and start doing. Don’t wait until you know all the kanji to try and read manga. Don’t tell me you can’t speak Japanese because adult brains harden after a certain age. Don’t believe it’ll take years to become fluent. Don’t think there’s no good music. There is no reason in the world you cannot learn Japanese. No. Reason. Whatsoever. So stop with the pretense. Remember, it’s never a good time so you might as well get cracking.

2. There is no excuse for illiteracy
First of all, millions of people can read Japanese well enough, and millions more know triple the number of characters you have to know (Chinese has significantly more hanzi than Japanese has kanji). Second of all, the writing system is the best way to communicate in the language. Especially kanji, because drawing the kanji of a concept you don’t know how to say let alone pronounce it will get you much farther than any kind of gesturing, pantomiming, or poorly pronounced vocabulary ever will. Learn all three alphabets as you’re learning to speak. If you’re a Japanese school child, you’re surrounded by the writing every day of your life. You can ask your parents questions. You have to read it every waking hour of your school day. You would be laughed at for not knowing it. You are not a Japanese school child, so you need to learn hiragana and katakana immediately if not sooner. As for kanji, same thing goes. Japanese school children learn less than 200 characters a year until they graduate. Not you. You’re going to learn much faster because, unlike Japanese school children, you are not confronted by hundreds of characters every day. You can live your life happily without ever setting eyes on a single character. So you are going to have to shove kanji down your throat. Make it easier however you need to: by making up mnemonic stories, using pictographs, reading that textbook that uses examples from manga, using the Heisig method, eating an m&m for every kanji you get right, it doesn’t matter, just do what you have to do. I’ve learned more kanji in three months than my intermediate-level Japanese college buddies did in 3 years and as a result I can read what feels like 13 times the street signs, maps, and menus they can.

3. No, マジ(for real), learn the kanji.**
It’s intimidating I know, but far from impossible. Here’s how you do it: 1) ignore the way the Japanese government/most schools present it. You have to separate out your writing learning from your reading learning. Learn more kanji than you learn Japanese. In other words, learn the meanings of kanji you don’t even know the Japanese word for yet (e.g., learn 専門 means specialty even though you don’t yet know it’s pronounced せんもん and is translated as major/area of study). Learn the characters and stroke order along with their English meanings first (stroke order is important otherwise you can’t look them up). Then learn their readings and radicals and all that jazz. As you learn more about the spoken language, you’ll have a better chance at discerning when they’re used and how to pronounce them (which changes based on context) than you would by straight up drilling. 2) When you learn a Japanese word, learn it all at once. When you encounter a new word or phrase, learn how to say it, what it means, and how it’s written with kanji otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad trying to unlearn stuff later. Plus you’ll be literate a hell of a lot faster.

4. Pimp the vocab, drop the grammar
This was a most valuable lesson taught to me by Benny Lewis. When you are at square one and you know nothing, the most important thing you need to do is pimp your vocab. Beef it up. Cram it into your head. Learn everything in your basic phrasebook. Do not start with the first pages of a textbook. Textbooks like to teach you the most basic grammar and the most formal vocab. In Japanese they seem to start with “to be” structures, introductions and asking people what school they go to and how old they are. Besides being dry and dull, I find it harder to start with grammar. Too much is unfamiliar. And you still can’t talk about anything because you don’t know the words “I” “know” or “nothing.” So forget about grammar. You’ll learn it intuitively and remember it much better after you realise that “の” seems to denote possession than if someone had told you outright. The point of a language is not to write copy-perfect paragraphs. The point is to communicate, and what you need is to develop a base of vocabulary from which to communicate. Back when I was in Kyoto and knew zero Japanese, I could still ask someone where they were from by pointing and saying “anata” and then looking inquisitive. I didn’t have to know that -ka signifies a question, or that anata is understood, and when it isn’t must be followed by +wa, no screw all that. Now that I know enough vocabulary to order in a restaurant, I know I should have said “doko kara kimashta ka” or “watashi wa vegitarian des.” But you can bet I knew how to say “niku” (meat) and shake my head before I knew the rest of it. So don’t stress about grammar until you have a shedload more vocabulary in your arsenal first.

5. Avoid translations
Eschew anything with romaji. It will just make it harder for you. Don’t watch anime or movies with the subtitles on. Subtitles do a great job of making you focus on the story but a terrible job of making you concentrate on the language. Story is incidental. It’s the honey that makes greek yoghurt taste better. Watching subtitles is not eating yoghurt at all, thus not improving your Japanese. And like taking straight shots of honey, just focusing on the story is addictive but ultimately leaves you hungry and is not the best way to go about snacking. If you’re really fighting to read よつばと but can’t seem to get it right, the moment you turn to the English translation is the moment you have no reason to keep struggling. It’s basic logic. We’re hardwired to take the path of least resistance. So don’t offer yourself that option. Instead keep at the hard stuff and you’ll progress faster overall, despite how painfully slow your progress through a single page may be.

6. Be a tortoise, not a hare
Okay, this one I stole from Khatzumoto, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it isn’t true. Sure your rate of improvement is directly proportional to how much time you but in, but it isn’t like filling a coin jar. Whether you put in two quarters every day or 60 quarters at the end of the month does matter. It’s like eating. Your body probably wants around 2,000 calories per day, and we tend to spread them around the the waking hours. If you eat 10,000 calories for breakfast on Monday, you may skip some meals but you will be hungry long before Friday rolls around. You haven’t thwarted the eating system by filling your coin jar for the month, you’ve gained weight and probably messed up your metabolism. Just like your body is good at processing calories, even excess ones, it’s really good at forgetting stuff that isn’t constantly reinforced. If you want to eat properly, you have to eat three meals a day every day, and if you want to learn Japanese you have to practice regularly and routinely. Read more about why tortoises are much better than hares over at Khatzumoto’s site.

7. Start with filler words
If we’re talking about basics in any language, I might add that one area you won’t be able to navigate by feel is the filler words. The particles, subject markers, indefinite articles and other such nonsense that appears a ton but seems to have no meaning. So if you only read up on one thing, read up on the particles and what they mean. Learn the conjunction words. Learn words like “anything” or “something” or “nothing.” More importantly learn your Ws (what, where, why, who, how, etc.) and your Ts (there, that, this, those, these, the others, etc.). Luckily you won’t have to learn possessives in Japanese but if your target language requires them, learn them too. Learn the prepositions. Learn how to stall in your language. How do you say “er…so…well…that’s right…” and the like? Having these filler words will not only make your Japanese sound more native and smoother, but will help you pick out new vocabulary amidst the words you don’t know. You can tell when わ is は and other semi confusing bits of grammar you are going to ignore until you’ve learned more vocab.

8. Practice numbers early
This is especially true with Japanese, where the word for three when talking about people is different than the word for three when talking about pieces of paper. Numbers are incredibly important. Can you image not being able to tell time? Not being able to write down a phone number? The problem with numbers is that you have to know them backwards and forwards, in other words so thoroughly that it appears intuitive to be able to use them. Just knowing how to count to 100 isn’t enough. Get really insanely good at dealing with numbers sooner rather than later. You’ll need the help, and if you get good at spouting off and picking up numbers you’ll be one whole huge step more functional. It will take much practice, so get started now with your numbers, and you can thank me by sending a 三百(さんびゃく) euro check to me later.

**I hear “but kanji is sooooo hard!” all the time and it drives me crazy. It’s one of my pet peeves when people claim writing systems are too difficult. I don’t care how difficult (or more accurately, different) they are, being illiterate but fluent is a travesty. Especially you expats, if you’re living somewhere for goodness sake take a few months to learn the language of the country you’re in. If you don’t know to read it, you don’t know the language.