[T-967] Leaving time for the final drill and questioning my approach

Dear Rine,

Today I started incorporating the final drill more carefully into my immersion process.

It so happens that I already have two analog kitchen timers in my room. Before I began my study session, I dialed one to count down half an hour, and the other to count down 45 minutes (if I had the time I would have done 45-60)

After the first timer rang, I stopped mining sentences and moved on to add them to SuperMemos' final drill, reviewing them until the second alarm rang.

Or at least that’s what I envision I should be doing in the ideal case.

But right now I am catching up with reviewing the sentences I collected while I had troubles with Migaku.

I have a backlog of about 60 sentences already imported into SM. They are currently pending (light blue icon). So during that 15 minute final drill slot today, I went through a few of them and chose five nice ones to add to add to the final drill and mark them as memorized (so that they start appearing in the outstanding queue).

I realize that all my daily entries sound awfully technical. Someone looking from the outside could conclude that I’m not actually studying Japanese, but just designing a studying setup so as to avoid the real thing.

The outsider’s conclusion might as well be true. This kind of failure pattern reminds me of an article Scott Young wrote.

The tl;dr is: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives. The alternatives are what Scott calls “pretend activities,” everything that’s not the core activity, the central thing you should be attacking directly.

Business owners who spend more time printing business cards than finding clients. Students who create elaborate multicolored folders for their classes instead of sitting down and studying. People trying to get in shape who buy fancy workout gear instead of exercising. Pretend activity instead of the real thing.

However, it may also just be the case that everything process-related is more noticeable and easier to report.

I’m still immersing a lot with my earbud. Usually I listen to a single podcast episode over and over throughout the day, and usually I discern a couple new words. Sometimes I recognize a word I already have memorized in my SRS only after hearing it for the fifth time that day. Whenever that happens, I can almost feel how the new word clicks as it slots into my brain.

And I am doing my repetitions diligently. I’m getting a sense that they are getting more firmly embedded in my mind with each rep.

On the other hand, I’m still behind on what I consider my target hours to spend on active immersion. I’ll have to try again next week. Onward!

What I planned/did today