Some people are able to utilize their time so that in 3 hours they can get as much progress made as those who practice 6 hours, I agree. Itzhak Perlman advised against over-practicing, and the violinist Sarah Chang didn't play nearly as much as aspiring violinists do now adays when she was a child.

But for those who aren't prodigies like Perlman and Chang were, sometimes sheer time and effort allows them to obtain the results they need. It definitely takes lots of time to work up to being able to do something for that long, but once you're used to it it's not so bad. I used to study 12 hours a day, and at first it was extremely mentally fatiguing, but it became as natural as breathing after a few years.

duder Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:I don't believe in 'diminishing return', at least when it comes to the amount of time invested. I believe that diminishing returns only apply if you're trying to learn too much and don't give your brain sufficient time to take in all that you know.
.

its not called "the theory of diminishing marginal returns" its called the "law of diminishing marginal returns."

Screw the law. Thinking too much about diminishing returns and trying to live by a logical approach all the time leads to overthinking and probably brain tumahs.

You can either spend all your time saying "ohhhh, I don't want to overstudy because some guys said there's going to be a diminishing return on my effort put in" or you can just give it your all every time you practice without any concern for how much time you put in.

Maybe I sound stubborn and stupid, but I still think it's easier to appreciate achievements if you work out your own means to an end rather than by someone else's. Thinking about how at a certain point that even more effort = lesser results is just pessimistic and probably demotivating at best.

Aijin brings up another good point. Those on this site are well aware that just "studying" does not mean you'll be better. We like to have effective studying. Sometimes this involves breaking it into time chunks (time boxing). Sometimes it's breaking it into areas: kanji via RTK, pronunciation via Memory Palace, vocabulary themes via KO2001 just as some examples.

Then there's methods of study that each of us do different. Some write essays and post on Lang-8 to be critiqued which they'll then correct. Some translate a page of Japanese into English, then retranslate the English back to Japanese. Some mine a novel or TV show. Some just read lots of books and watch lots of tv.

As long as the study and practicing is always keeping outside your comfort zone, I'm sure you'll improve at what you do. Even less effective studying will improve you more than no studying at all.

mezbup Wrote:

Nukemarine Wrote:This daily practice though goes into the next area. Impact over the long haul which goes into the law of diminishing returns. We see it on this site. The 1000 kanji that covers 80% of literature takes the same amount of time to study/memorize as the next 1000 kanji that covers the next 15% and the next 1000 that cover 3% (numbers not accurate). The return on your time invested is seemingly reduced. Same example would apply to those learning vocabulary or grammar concepts.

ahhh, you've hit the nail on the head with that one! That's exactly how the law of diminishing returns applies to learning Japanese.

Also, some words/kanji are used more than others. So something like nani/nan I never 'learned' I just heard it in anime a lot. And as its used a lot its re-enforced and I am unlikely to forget it. That is probs part of the first 1000 useful kanji. But others are used less and so to remember them there is a lot more work to retain them. I expect its the same with the grammar. Some is used a lot and so there is no need to continue to make the effort to retain it.

I am not sure a language has a diminishing return as such. But I expect that after a while you would need to make a concious effort to learn less used grammar/vocab/kanji. Whereas at first just using materials from that language will allow you to learn quite a lot. But they say that natives tend to fill in the words they don't know from context anyhow.

There is another book similar to the ones already mentioned called The Talent Code. It talks about something called Deep Practice. It gave a music example with a young girl who heard a piece of music and decided she was going to learn it (so she had some inherent motivation, which is required). First she took it all in (listening to the piece), then she broke it down to the first part, looked at the first few notes, took a swing at it with her instrument, frowned, went back, tried it again, then she got it, then the next notes and so on. You can also learn by watching other people, seeing how they doing, trying it yourself very slowly, making mistakes, thinking hard to fix those mistakes, and so on. The author was saying that skill is developed by the right circuits in the brain getting wrapped by myelin, and that this type of Deep (slow) practice gives the strongest signal on the neurons to get them to be wrapped by myelin.

Er... I think some of you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what diminishing returns are, exactly...

It's not just physical things that it applies to other things are effected as well. As for things like adults not being able to become classical pianist or dancers, this has more to do with the system. If you start when you're in your teens you won't be good enough to get into a good school. If you can't get into a good school you can't be a pro. If someone wanted to do nothing, but practice fore a few years before going to college I'm sure they could do it, but they'd be 26 or older before starting. I doubt many people have the money to do nothing but practice for 6 to 8 years. It's the same reason most of us can't become doctors. Many of us don't have the money and we have other responsibilities.

Chandlerhimself Wrote:It's not just physical things that it applies to other things are effected as well. As for things like adults not being able to become classical pianist or dancers, this has more to do with the system. If you start when you're in your teens you won't be good enough to get into a good school. If you can't get into a good school you can't be a pro. If someone wanted to do nothing, but practice fore a few years before going to college I'm sure they could do it, but they'd be 26 or older before starting. I doubt many people have the money to do nothing but practice for 6 to 8 years. It's the same reason most of us can't become doctors. Many of us don't have the money and we have other responsibilities.

I know I just wrote a whole post on trying to avoid pessimism, but even I agree with this. It's kind of sad how there's so much potential for developing skills, yet in some cases the system (as you pointed out) restricts this potential. This is why we don't have people like Einstein or Da Vinci anymore: despite the fact that the system in their times was still pretty similar to ours, it wasn't impossible to study in a certain field and not break the bank, per se.

I remember my father talking how about in the 60s/70s you could afford most mortgages on low salaries. I'm not gonna say it's a fact, but I think that's why we had so many virtuosos in music - the cost of living was just so darned low that it was easy to concentrate on expanding your skills. But in modern times, because everything has become so inflated, most types of mortgages require full-time work, and in some cases two jobs - that pretty much translates to having little time for studies. Fluency or even decent proficiency in a language would take two to three times longer because of your current commitment to a workplace.

There's a few exceptions, however. You do still have geniuses, but that's only because they were raised as such from childhood or just had a lucky upbringing. It sorta feels chastising.

IceCream Wrote:So, you know, just the fact that people have to work full time isn't really an excuse for not being motivated to do something they really want to. Decades or centuries ago learning opportunities in general, and certainly university, wouldn't even have been available to most of us. The problem is more that people are so motivated by money that they don't have the motivation to do other things, i think.

with all the learning resources we have nowadays, especially online, even working full time we can become fluent in another language much much quicker than we ever could before. Before, it would have been really difficult without moving abroad (which would have been impossible for most) or studying it at university (again, impossible for most).

I wasn't saying they couldn't try. I was simply just saying/thinking that the goal intending to be reached takes much longer than if it were attempted without being restricted by full time employment - granted, some people move faster than others through sheer motivation (and because others are moving slower).

You definitely hit the nail on the head with the internet. Nowadays we have access to information that would otherwise cost us cash. In fact, the internet is so helpful that it pretty much knocks down all of my points about the cost of living.. though I still think that the cost of living does have an impact on one's ability to study, whether largely or insignificantly.

All in all anyway, I'd say there's a life lesson to be learned about diminishing returns and full-time employment restrictions: that people should try to be somewhat happy with what they already know and be patient in the acquisition of new knowledge (we really take what we already know for granted).

I should really take my own advice though, considering I've put guitar-playing off to the side in order to learn Japanese, which is kind of irritating because I can't do both at the same time. The relevance is that I should try to be somewhat satisfied that I know anything at all and that I can get back to guitar down the road. @__@

IceCream Wrote:don't give up! prioritise! do 30 mins of guitar practise a day, and by the time you're fluent in japanese, you probably won't regret it at all. plus, soon you can read music theory books in japanese, and learn some japanese songs, & do both at once

Haha, "give up". I doubt I'll ever do that, I love guitar too much to ever drop the thing. I was born into a musical family so the concept seems utterly impossible to me. But yeah! I thought about learning japanese songs - there's a lot of Hironobu Kageyama songs I'd like to learn to play on the guitar.

Music theory though, eesh! It's already one thing to read music theory books in english. If they could teach the circle of fifths or scales like RTK, that would be fantastic. Or, if it was actually do-able to include SRSes into my guitar routines, I couldn't even imagine what results I could get from that. Possibly, the best thing would be to input theory into an SRS but do scales the old fashioned way.

[Warning, guitar lingo ahead]

Like for example, I learned how to play the C Major scale in 7 positions. Having said that, I should be able to play major scales in any key, y'know, but I can't manage it - that would require me to move what I already know in those 7 positions down a certain amount of frets. There's no real analogy I can use to describe this: Most people say it's easy to play the guitar because you just move patterns up and down, but the frets get bigger or smaller based on their position on the neck - so, muscle memory is DIFFERENT all across the board. Learning to play one thing that you know effortlessly somewhere else on the neck requires hard effort.

Maybe I should quit whining and just "do it"? Maybe I have to go outside my comfort zone to get good at moving my scales around a bit more.

Back to what I was saying, anyway: upon discovering anki and the concept of SRSes, it was like a godsend, because I know how useful it could be in my upcoming school years. But /oh man/, if I figured out how to utilize it for music theory properly.. or even for ear training!

Ear training, thus far, is incredibly inefficient and takes lots of practice. If you inputted audio samples and then tried to copy those audio samples with whatever instrument of your choice, you could answer accordingly.. music is a tonal language that involves more output sound-wise than written-wise. My analogy is: When we were kids, we spoke more than we listened, but we learned to listen to others and what they were trying to say to us as time went on. Couldn't the same be said for music, but with understanding gained through SRS reviews? So if we build long-term memory around the sounds of a language (which is music) that are more tonal than phonetic, won't we create a better, re-inforced ear?

I think I've stumbled upon something! I'll test this out at some point.

I don't really care about the effects of Diminishing Returns personally. As a uni student the one thing I do have is time. Sure, 3 hours per day (or whatever) might be the optimal study time before diminishing returns sets in. But if I have more time than that per day (and I do) as long as I'm not doing active damage to my ability and going backwards why would I choose not to use it? Studying 4, 5, 6 or 7 hours instead of 3 might only bring minimal additional progress but who cares? Even if the progress is minimal, its still progress. And over years all that minimal progress adds up to a hell of a lot.

blackmacros Wrote:I don't really care about the effects of Diminishing Returns personally. As a uni student the one thing I do have is time. Sure, 3 hours per day (or whatever) might be the optimal study time before diminishing returns sets in. But if I have more time than that per day (and I do) as long as I'm not doing active damage to my ability and going backwards why would I choose not to use it? Studying 4, 5, 6 or 7 hours instead of 3 might only bring minimal additional progress but who cares? Even if the progress is minimal, its still progress. And over years all that minimal progress adds up to a hell of a lot.

Darn straight! Besides as I was saying, at that point it's nothing to worry about. If it's harder to find new things to learn, it means you've reached some level of proficiency and that's something to be proud of (and I can't wait until I get to that point!). Though, there's no reason to get comfortable. Never forget the old proverb, "if you don't use it, you lose it!".

KaitouJS Wrote:

blackmacros Wrote:I don't really care about the effects of Diminishing Returns personally. As a uni student the one thing I do have is time. Sure, 3 hours per day (or whatever) might be the optimal study time before diminishing returns sets in. But if I have more time than that per day (and I do) as long as I'm not doing active damage to my ability and going backwards why would I choose not to use it? Studying 4, 5, 6 or 7 hours instead of 3 might only bring minimal additional progress but who cares? Even if the progress is minimal, its still progress. And over years all that minimal progress adds up to a hell of a lot.

Darn straight! Besides as I was saying, at that point it's nothing to worry about. If it's harder to find new things to learn, it means you've reached some level of proficiency and that's something to be proud of (and I can't wait until I get to that point!). Though, there's no reason to get comfortable. Never forget the old proverb, "if you don't use it, you lose it!".

The difference in the two posts here is the time frame. Over a short time span for studying language the law of diminishing returns is (virtually) non-existant because there is so much to absorb. It's when you get to a much longer time frame I.E that of post 2, where you have reached a certain level of proficiency after maybe 1 - 2 YEARS.

So the point here is that...

Studying Japanese 3 hours a day Vs 7 hours a day... 7 is better if you've got the time.
Studying it 3 years (lets just presume fluency for arguments sake) vs studying it 7 years to know EVERYTHING about the language... is where diminishing return SERIOUSLY sets in considering at the 3 year point you could already do virtually everything you ever needed to in the language!

So I hope you all see the point! It begins to kick in once you've reached a very high level of Japanese! Beginners need not worry.

I thought the point of AJATT was to "study" Japanese while doing other things, so as to not turn it into a zero-sum game...

mafried Wrote:I thought the point of AJATT was to "study" Japanese while doing other things, so as to not turn it into a zero-sum game...

If by other things you mean 'do stuff in japanese', yeah. It's a zero-sum game either way. A lot of what Khatzu prescribes is just plain immersion psychology. It's easier for you to pick up your L2 if you do stuff in that language. Khatzu doesn't say, however, that it's okay for you to study Japanese and then go do something in english for several hours. Essentially, you're always studying Japanese, it's just that you're not actively studying it when you're doing fun things in it: you're re-inforcing what you already know through exposure or you're giving yourself stuff to sentence mine from.

While I'm trying to follow AJATT, even I get slightly tired of it when it drags on for too long. I just got back from watching Burn After Reading on TV, and I can honestly say I needed the break, even if it was only for two hours.

The main method, however, isn't as important when you're just studying kanji, but immersing yourself in a japanese environment as soon as possible goes a long way (making a habit out of it is important, since it's a long term goal). I went to such an extent that I got a Japanese OS, took down all my english posters, and put up motivational "posters" (actually, slips of cardboard and paper with inspiring phrases in japanese). There's some things I can't deal with like my TV - unless I put duct-tape everything that's english on the monitor, but I'd rather not. Besides, I guess it's about what stands out than what's passive and overlooked.

KaitouJS Wrote:

Chandlerhimself Wrote:It's not just physical things that it applies to other things are effected as well. As for things like adults not being able to become classical pianist or dancers, this has more to do with the system. If you start when you're in your teens you won't be good enough to get into a good school. If you can't get into a good school you can't be a pro. If someone wanted to do nothing, but practice fore a few years before going to college I'm sure they could do it, but they'd be 26 or older before starting. I doubt many people have the money to do nothing but practice for 6 to 8 years. It's the same reason most of us can't become doctors. Many of us don't have the money and we have other responsibilities.

I know I just wrote a whole post on trying to avoid pessimism, but even I agree with this. It's kind of sad how there's so much potential for developing skills, yet in some cases the system (as you pointed out) restricts this potential. This is why we don't have people like Einstein or Da Vinci anymore: despite the fact that the system in their times was still pretty similar to ours, it wasn't impossible to study in a certain field and not break the bank, per se.

There's a few exceptions, however. You do still have geniuses, but that's only because they were raised as such from childhood or just had a lucky upbringing. It sorta feels chastising.

Being a virtuoso in music is much more difficult, (read probably impossible) if you're starting at an old age. That's because for the most part it's building muscles, once your muscles are developed it is really tough to 're-develop' them.
But in something like the sciences there's no reason why you can't become a great scientist. Da Vinci or Einstein were just two random people who happened to be alittle different. Einstein failed his engineering entrance exams, he wasn't that spectacular at a young age despite having derived pythagoras theorem before I could add 2 and 2 , he merely had his passion and pursued it. And there are people like Einstein these days it's just that the field of study has become drastically more complex, I personally see the notion of; '1 smart man figuring something out' dead. It has evolved into the stage of a group of smart men working something out together.



Fields of study aren't as 'simple' these days as they were back then. I'm not trying to scrutinise their work or anything, the greats had splendid paragdimic thought back then it was remarkable they even came up with what they did in the first place. But we should realise that it isn't a matter or understanding things which seem to be independent from each other, as it was centuries ago. As the study of applied and theoretical science developed they become so convoluted and intricate you require a majority of experts in their fields to work together on something.

My thesis project and further studies Im thinking of pursuing require knoweldge in;
Fluid Dynamics
Optics
Biochemistry

Each of these fields are complex in their own right, imagine a much more difficult project which requires the expertise of people who spend their entire lives researching one tiny little subset of a field. The webs that we built up over the thousands of years of human existence are finally connecting, so mastering one web isn't enough, people need to communicate from web to web. Possesing knoweldge of more than one field is possible, there are many who are capable of it, but we still need other experts.

Passion breaks walls, barriers, boundaries; ofcourse there are some countries where you have a group of oppressed people bounded by physical walls, barriers and boundaries but I'll leave that out of this discussion I hope that you see the point I'm trying to make here, if you aren't in a third world country then things aren't so bleak for you. But if you want I don't mind critising the capitialist system which biases freedom of thought and progress of science either

mafried Wrote:I thought the point of AJATT was to "study" Japanese while doing other things, so as to not turn it into a zero-sum game...

AJATT is putting Japanese in your face so you can't avoid it. For many studying Japanese, they only experience Japanese during their study time. This part is what can occur up to 24 hours in a normal day (unless you choose to live on a different planet with different day cycle).

The other portion people mistake for AJATT: RTK, Sentence method, Sentence mining, i+1, SRS are the efficient mode of study. This is the area under discussion on this thread. How much studying/practice on a daily basis actually begins to less if not zero impact on learning?

If you're doing other things, then you're not studying Japanese. You can have Japanese audio running 24/7, but you're not going to get much from it if you've done zero determined studying of some sort.

No (edit: not in reference to Nukemarine here), I mean multitask so you're always doing at least something in Japanese, even while doing something else in English. I can't communicate with my coworkers in Japanese. But I can listen to Japanese music, or loop Japanese videos on a second monitor while working/doing email/whatever.

My point is that the OP is making a false comparison. Japanese isn't like playing the piano in two ways: you must be at a piano to play the piano, and you need to be focused on playing the piano while doing it for it to be really be called studying.

Japanese can be done anywhere, and it doesn't have to take up your full, undivided attention to get a payback.

mafried Wrote:No (edit: not in reference to Nukemarine here), I mean multitask so you're always doing at least something in Japanese, even while doing something else in English. I can't communicate with my coworkers in Japanese. But I can listen to Japanese music, or loop Japanese videos on a second monitor while working/doing email/whatever.

My point is that the OP is making a false comparison. Japanese isn't like playing the piano in two ways: you must be at a piano to play the piano, and you need to be focused on playing the piano while doing it for it to be really be called studying.

Japanese can be done anywhere, and it doesn't have to take up your full, undivided attention to get a payback.

True, but some would argue that it's best done with your full attention or in situations where english isn't a dominant factor. For example, some people have said that trying to study japanese from subtitled animes is actually rather distracting: when one part of your brain is trying to comprehend or understand grammatical structures within Japanese, another is distracted by the subtitles on screen and thinking about english. So it kind of cancels out. I can even say from experience (without even knowing a bit of japanese) that watching anime or japanese TV without subtitles even feels different. Maybe it's because you're trying to feel for emotions or context. Or maybe because 20% of the screen isn't dominated by words, .

You can't think in two languages at once. You also can't get the best results by trying to do things in both languages in the same span of time. So, there are things that you can do whilst listening to Japanese, but it'd be pretty hard to find something that doesn't require you to think too much in english.

Again, I'm really contradicting my own advice, since I'm listening to japanese music right now and using the RevTK forum.

liosama Wrote:

KaitouJS Wrote:

Chandlerhimself Wrote:It's not just physical things that it applies to other things are effected as well. As for things like adults not being able to become classical pianist or dancers, this has more to do with the system. If you start when you're in your teens you won't be good enough to get into a good school. If you can't get into a good school you can't be a pro. If someone wanted to do nothing, but practice fore a few years before going to college I'm sure they could do it, but they'd be 26 or older before starting. I doubt many people have the money to do nothing but practice for 6 to 8 years. It's the same reason most of us can't become doctors. Many of us don't have the money and we have other responsibilities.

I know I just wrote a whole post on trying to avoid pessimism, but even I agree with this. It's kind of sad how there's so much potential for developing skills, yet in some cases the system (as you pointed out) restricts this potential. This is why we don't have people like Einstein or Da Vinci anymore: despite the fact that the system in their times was still pretty similar to ours, it wasn't impossible to study in a certain field and not break the bank, per se.

There's a few exceptions, however. You do still have geniuses, but that's only because they were raised as such from childhood or just had a lucky upbringing. It sorta feels chastising.

Being a virtuoso in music is much more difficult, (read probably impossible) if you're starting at an old age. That's because for the most part it's building muscles, once your muscles are developed it is really tough to 're-develop' them.
But in something like the sciences there's no reason why you can't become a great scientist...

...Passion breaks walls, barriers, boundaries; ofcourse there are some countries where you have a group of oppressed people bounded by physical walls, barriers and boundaries but I'll leave that out of this discussion I hope that you see the point I'm trying to make here, if you aren't in a third world country then things aren't so bleak for you. But if you want I don't mind critising the capitialist system which biases freedom of thought and progress of science either

I can agree with you there. Still being young myself, I can't comprehend what being older feels like in terms of learning a different instrument. Sometimes I have conversations with people who play guitar but only off and on during their late 30s and frequently I hear "haha, I could never do that, I can't play guitar that well, etc". I guess it definitely has something to do with the continuing maturation of the muscles. It's too bad we can't just shove down pills so that it makes it easy for muscle memory to develop, D:

Muscle memory has more to do with the brains interaction with the muscles rather than the muscles themselves. If age has any affect on muscle memory I would think it to be caused by the speed of deterioration of neural connections. As adults we learn things faster but things are easily forgotten.

Quote:Japanese can be done anywhere, and it doesn't have to take up your full, undivided attention to get a payback.

Listening to music is just as beneficial as listening to Japanese. In fact it is a key component. You are speaking a language when you play. The language might be near infinite in its complexity but it's still a language. You must also study the music, away from the instrument. This helps with memorization. Then you can read while you listen to a recording. This helps even more. Then you can play alongside a recording. This helps more. Notice any parallels?

mafried Wrote:My point is that the OP is making a false comparison. Japanese isn't like playing the piano in two ways: you must be at a piano to play the piano, and you need to be focused on playing the piano while doing it for it to be really be called studying.

I'm not making a false comparison. I'm asking if there are any sort of daily limits to the amount of Japanese one can take in before one begins wasting time. The piano example, even though I listed a comparison above, was merely to illustrate what I meant about diminishing return.

ropsta Wrote:Muscle memory has more to do with the brains interaction with the muscles rather than the muscles themselves. If age has any affect on muscle memory I would think it to be caused by the speed of deterioration of neural connections. As adults we learn things faster but things are easily forgotten.

Doesn't the myelin sheath around neurons deteriorate over time? The myelin is largely responsible for faster nerve impulses along the axon, so that would probably explain why as we get older it's harder to recall things as fast.

mafried Wrote:My point is that the OP is making a false comparison. Japanese isn't like playing the piano in two ways: you must be at a piano to play the piano, and you need to be focused on playing the piano while doing it for it to be really be called studying.

Japanese can be done anywhere, and it doesn't have to take up your full, undivided attention to get a payback.

You still have to focus to call it studying, and it's highly debatable whether or not there actually is ANY payback from passive listening to Japanese. A lot of people here seem to claim it does, but I think it's like trying to listen to Japanese while you sleep: You might get tons of listening hours, but your brain isn't registering it so it's not helping at all.

Personally, I only think passive listening is useful because you will actively listen to bits and pieces of it every now and then. The peices where you are not paying attention are just going in one ear and out the other so to speak, making 0 impact in your brain.

KaitouJS Wrote:Ear training, thus far, is incredibly inefficient and takes lots of practice. If you inputted audio samples and then tried to copy those audio samples with whatever instrument of your choice, you could answer accordingly.. music is a tonal language that involves more output sound-wise than written-wise. My analogy is: When we were kids, we spoke more than we listened, but we learned to listen to others and what they were trying to say to us as time went on. Couldn't the same be said for music, but with understanding gained through SRS reviews? So if we build long-term memory around the sounds of a language (which is music) that are more tonal than phonetic, won't we create a better, re-inforced ear?

I think I've stumbled upon something! I'll test this out at some point.

Do you mean training people to get AP? Or just generally training them to get a good ear?

Won't this kill all the precious instrument time that you'll get by playing on the instrument? When you're on an instrument you aren't just learning 1 thing at a time independently, but you are learning many many things.

I mean I'm not sure what a 'trained-ear' actually means, excuse my ignorance. I have an untrained ear, and I've only been learning Oud for a few weeks now and my Oud instructor, though he says I have a 'good ear' I really have no idea what he means by that when he says it. From what I gather, it's when I know that I'm playing a wrong note because I follow after him, and I correct myself after. If that is what a good ear is then I suppose srs would be okay, but I think it'll take the instrument hours away from you, when instrument hours is what you need to become a good player in the first place.

You sound like a well accomplished musician, I really have no idea when it comes to music theory etc, I tried learning the circle of fifths for guitar but I kept getting bogged down , Fat Crabs Go Down And Eat Bugs (at least I remembered that? ^_^). I can't wait till I go for a proper guitar instructor, there are so many questions that I'm waiting to ask him/her T_T

ropsta Wrote:I'm not making a false comparison. I'm asking if there are any sort of daily limits to the amount of Japanese one can take in before one begins wasting time. The piano example, even though I listed a comparison above, was merely to illustrate what I meant about diminishing return.

But "studying" Japanese (say, by passive listening) is not an either-or choice. Sitting down at a piano is--it has the opportunity cost of giving up whatever else you could have been doing instead. In that case you can argue that you're wasting time if the opportunity cost is higher than what you're getting out of it. But Japanese isn't like that. You can passively study with it in the background while doing any other thing, so the opportunity cost is effectively zero. Remember, diminishing returns does not say that you will have no benefit by studying more in one day, it just says that marginal benefit of each extra hour will be less and less (but still positive).

KaitouJS Wrote:For example, some people have said that trying to study japanese from subtitled animes is actually rather distracting...

That's a red herring: there are neurological reasons to believe that you cannot do the same exact thing in two languages at the same exact time, but for someone used to multitasking there's no reason you can't do/actively switch between two different tasks in two different languages, as it engages separate centers in the brain.