Study habits! Okay, so I am very close to saying that this is the most important section of this entire book. I mean, the most popular section is definitely the kanji study guide. But I think study habits are more important, because…

If you learn to change and manage your habits, you can do anything.

And you can do anything without burning yourself out.

Allow me to give you a glimpse into a few of my study habits (I have a lot). Before I start, I should say that (1) I don't stick to habits 100%, because I'm not perfect. Sometimes I get lazy, or busy, or hungover. Meh. But! I do stick to my study habits long-term. Also, (2) my habits are always evolving, but they usually change into slightly varying habits with the same target effect. Here are some examples…

Study Habit #1 – Morning Flashcard Extravaganza

For nearly 3 years now, I have done the same thing almost every single morning—I wake up, and I study my Anki flashcards for Japanese. (I'll talk about Anki later). Sure, I missed some days, but I'm pretty confident in saying that I've studied my flashcards over 99% of the days that make up these last three years.

This is a small, simple habit. But it has had such huge, incredible results. Just to give you a rough idea, at the time of this writing my (digital) flashcard deck has 21,035 cards. In other words, I've memorized somewhere around 20,000 Japanese words. And all I'm doing is waking up in the morning, having a coffee, and studying some flashcards.

When I used to live in California, every morning I went to my favorite coffee shop, had a coffee and a bagel, studied my flashcards, then went to work.

When I lived in Tokyo, every morning I used to go to the convenience store down the street from my house, buy some mixed nuts and a cold canned coffee, then go back home and do my flashcards.

Right now (living in Sapporo) I follow the same morning flashcard routine that I used when I lived in Bangkok (Fall 2014): usually I study my flashcards in bed every morning before I get up. Sometimes I do them after getting up and having a coffee.

In a little bit, I'll explain how I formed these habits. Because these are things that you can consciously change. For now, though, the point I want to stress is: I formed a habit, and I got thousands of vocab words out of it.

Study Habit #2 – Long Walks in Tokyo

I love walking. It's kind of embarrassing, actually, because my last name is Walker. But, well, it fits. Anyways, yeah, I love walking. But what I really, really, really love is walking in Tokyo. There are two reasons for this: (1) I never run out of new things to see and (2) it's safe enough to wear headphones while walking, unlike some other places I've lived around the world.

So, I got into this habit when I lived in Tokyo. Whenever I had a few hours of free time, I started going for walks. I walked all over that city. Shinjuku to Roppongi. Shimokitazawa all the way to Odaiba! Chofu to Shinjuku. I walked for miles and miles.

But walking that far takes a lot of time. Specifically, it takes up a lot of low quality time. So, I started listening to audio lessons from JapanesePod101 every time I went for a walk.

I already listened to these (awesome) lessons from time to time when I went running, but usually it was hard for me to concentrate while exercising.

Walking was different, though. I was taking it easy. I wasn't out of breath. I could concentrate… more than 20% of the time. So I made an effort to listen to these lessons every time I went walking and, as luck (actually, science) would have it, after a while it felt totally natural to put on my audio lessons as I set off on a walk. Or, I should say, it felt unnatural to go for a long walk and NOT listen to lessons.

With this small tweak to something that I loved, I was able to form a study habit that resulted in me listening to hundreds of hours of Japanese audio lessons from JapanesePod101.

What's Low Quality Time?

I'm actually taking the term “low quality time" from the (very awesome) site HackingChinese.com, which writes:

Low quality time is time when you can study, but only in a limited manner.

A good example would be the time you spend driving your car to work. You could listen to something while doing this, but you can't practise writing characters. This is one kind of low quality time.

Another example would be time you spend alone, but away from your computer and phone so you can't listen to Chinese or look up things on the internet. This is another kind of low quality time.

Using this approach, every second of the day can be considered to be study time of different qualities, albeit sometimes so low that it's impossible to use for studying.

- “Time quality: Studying the right thing at the right time," HackingChinese.com

Most of my initial study habits were formed from dumb luck—me gluing Japanese to some other thing that I loved and did all of the time. But later, I finally started taking a closer look at the nature of habits, and the fascinating research into all those things we do without thinking.

One of the first nonfiction books that I ever read in Japanese is The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. The Japanese version is called 『習慣の力』 (shuukan no chikara), which is pretty much a direct translation. It's a pretty famous book, so maybe you've heard of it it before.

In my opinion, this is one of the best books that a person can read as they prepare to learn a foreign language, as changing habits is the easiest way to stick to a long-term study plan without burning out.

Duhigg's site explains it as follows:

(Another (Reportedly) Awesome Book on Habits)

I recently learned about another book called Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time, by Tynan.

I haven't read it yet, but I have heard many say that it's even better than The Power of Habit. I'd love to hear from anyone that gets a chance to read it.

Habits make up for about 40% of all that we do (apparently), and according to some fancy MIT researchers, there is a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.

One of the simpler examples of this is brushing your teeth. Sometimes your mouth feels icky (CUE), so then you brush your teeth (ROUTINE), and at the end you feel sparkly fresh (REWARD), so you end up repeating the action again… in other words, it becomes a habit.

But that's a highly simplified example. Sometimes it's not that easy to tell what's going on inside of our ridiculous heads.

I'll give a (somewhat embarrassing) example from my personal life. About a year ago, I was living in Tokyo, working as an English teacher at a conversation school. Since I was teaching mostly adults, I usually worked nights. My lunch break was around 4:30pm. Too early for dinner; too late for lunch. So I would usually only eat something pretty small. Then I'd finish work around 10pm, and by the time I got home, it was usually around 11pm. Too late to cook anything. But I also didn't want to eat a big meal. But I also wanted to eat something.

Well, I fell into the horrible—and yet, wonderful—habit of eating Butter Soy Sauce Popcorn from the convenience store like three nights a week. Yikes.

It's kind of cool knowing that these habits find their way into almost every aspect of our lives, but the truly awesome part of this is that habits are malleable. With a little bit of effort, they can be changed.

You might think that I'm losing track a bit, but I promise that being able to change habits is most definitely relevant to learning Japanese.

This is a very simplified explanation. For a detailed look on how to change habits, please either read The Power of Habit or do a google search to read up on the hundreds of blogs that talk about this topic.

The basic explanation for how to change a habit is to keep the Cue and the Reward, but change the Routine.

For example, if you're trying to stop eating junk food, it might look like this:

Or for my popcorn addiction, maybe I could start eating fruit or something—I don't know. I never tried to quit, honestly. I love popcorn.

Okay, that's great. People can change habits. Awesome.

But the real question is: How can I use this for learning Japanese?

Why, I thought you'd never ask…

I think that changing habits is really, really hard. Most of the time people talk about changing habits, they're trying to stop eating delicious food or quit drinking or something. But we're not trying to get rid of a bad habit; we're trying to gain a good habit. And I think creating a new, good habit is much easier than changing an old, bad habit.

I have a very complex system for doing this:

1. Pick a habit that you already have.
2. Link it with Japanese.

Yeah, I was joking. It's not complex at all. It's really simple, and it's something that I like to call it habit tagging… but that's just a phrase I made up.

“Habit tagging" refers to taking a deeply ingrained habit that you already have and sticking a new, awesome routine on top of it.

For example, for about three years now, I've been studying Japanese every morning right after waking up. I used to think that the cue for this habit was waking up, but after reading The Power of Habit, I realized that the real cue was my deeply ingrained—and deeply enjoyed—habit of having a coffee every morning.

I took something that I really loved (my morning coffee), and I made a rule that I had to study my Japanese flashcards every time I did that thing (or before I was allowed to do it). This is the same thing that I did when I started listening to JapanesePod101 lessons every time I went for a walk in Tokyo.

Established Habit That I Enjoy
Cue = Having free time.
Routine = Going for a long walk.
Reward = Feeling healthy and adventurous and seeing lots of cool things.

Enjoyable Habit Version 2.0
Cue = Having free time.
Routine = Going for a long walk and listening to Japanese lessons.
Reward = Feeling healthy and adventurous and seeing lots of cool things and learning.

Study Habit Assignment

So, in Phase #2, I'm going to talk about a daily study routine. You don't need to worry about it yet, but as a little bit of preparation I recommend the following:

1. Write down a list of your deeply ingrained, enjoyable habits.
2. Put stars by the ones that you do every day.

That's pretty much all I have to say about habits for the time being. Check out these articles if you want some more whatnot on habits and advice from habit sage gurus:

• Zen Habits - The Smart Way to Stick to Habits
• Zen Habits - The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior
• Zen Habits - 36 Lessons I've Learned About Habits
• Zen Habits - Habits: A Simple Change in Mindset Changes Everything
• Zen Habits - It's Not Too Late to Change Your Habits
• PsychCentral - The Golden Rule of Habit Change
• James Clear - The 3 R's of Habit Change: How To Start New Habits That Actually Stick