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Motivation Treasure Chest — 6 Comments

  1. Ah man, I was starting to get tears from the emotional manga scene one haha, definitely will buy it next payday!

  2. I’m feeling pretty motivated right now, but there are definitely ups and downs when it comes to that so I will buy this for the next time I’m feeling unmotivated. :)

    And here’s a motivational power-up someone might find useful: I usually listen to music (Japanese of course :P) when I do my RTK Anki reviews. Lately I’ve been listening to armitunes.com, which is an anime (mostly) radio station. The thing is, if you make an account there you can request songs to be added to the playlist (there’s usually like 5-10 songs in the queue so it’s not that long of a wait) and of course you want to hear the song you added (and show the world you excellent taste in anime music hahaha) so therefore you will definitely keep doing those Anki reviews until your song is played. ;)

  3. Really interesting product.

    It made me realize, though, that I’ve never actually had a serious motivation crisis (and maybe I never will, considering I’m finally at a level where I’m starting to really be able to do some of the things that motivated me in the first place).

    The sample Power-Ups look great, by the way. If the rest live up to the samples I expect this to be a pretty useful product.

    If there’s one thing I don’t like so much in the article, though, is the way it seems to define motivation, which I guess is different from the way I think about it.
    After thinking a bit about it, I guess a good way to put it is the following: the motivation the article focuses on is “short term motivation”, as in “do you feel like putting the work in right now”, and hence this motivation shines brightest in one’s best days; the motivation I tend to focus on, though, is “long term motivation”, as in “do you want it enough that you force yourself to put in the work even when you aren’t feeling that great about it”, a kind of motivation that shines the brightest precisely on the worst of days.
    It has been this last kind of motivation (and the occasional liberal amount of coffee) that has allowed me to finish my anki reviews in my darkest days, at the end of which I always reminded myself that “those are the days that really count”.

    Anyway, let me add an amusing source of (short term) motivation I personally found entirely by accident. In my very early days of learning Japanese I signed up for some features of the Japanese 101 website, and though I eventually stopped using that website altogether I still receive their promo emails quite frequently.
    It turns out that these e-mails are a great boost of confidence in bad days, because they seem to invariably be written with the assumption that the reader as let his Japanese slip up, and needs their help to get back on track. There’s something quite satisfying in proving said e-mails wrong :).

  4. I purchased this and I’m reading it slowly because each page really makes me think. It’s funny, inspiring, and keeps me motivated, and isn’t to be rushed through. I’m trying to remember all this advice for when I get stuck or discouraged. Thank you!

  5. I had a bad patch last week and downloaded your Motivation power ups. These are brilliant! It really helped me get across a difficult bump. One of the stand-out things about your approach is the emphasis on motivation which I haven’t seen anywhere else. But really it’s the key to the whole thing. If you’re engaged, and you persist, it’s impossible NOT to learn the language!

    I think the three ingredients to learning a language, in order of importance, are:
    1. Motivation
    2. Content (vocab, grammar, idiom, culture)
    3. Method

    If you stick at it, and you’re covering content, you will certainly get there in the end regardless of method. The right method will give you a faster and smoother journey. But without motivation, you will give up, and not get anywhere regardless of any other consideration.

    The thing I like most about the Motivation Power-Ups is that this product exists at all. It’s curious that this most important factor is so under-served.

    I’ve only looked at the first half dozen or so. Everyone is different, so I found that some did nothing for me, but others really got me going. I was in a complete funk about Japanese. I’d had to travel over the weekend disrupting my routine, work went nuts and was keeping me late in the office every night, and I had a bunch of stuff going on. I was getting home at midnight and then grinding through Anki until 3am for several days in a row. I just got to thinking “I don’t have to do this. I don’t need to learn Japanese. Why am I doing this stupid thing?”.

    I figured that, for four quid, it couldn’t hurt to check out the Treasure Chest. If it proved a complete waste of money then so what?

    From this slough of despond, the power ups weren’t able to raise me to transports of ecstacy and unconquerable enthusiasm. What they did do was give me that slight nudge, that flicker of light, that kept me staggering forward for a few more days. That was enough to stumble over the bump and settle back into a steady routine.

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