The specific “Chain Item” for our calendar is 1 lesson per day. To be honest, though, this is nothing. 1 lesson on JapanesePod101, for example, is only like 15-20 minutes. You probably spend more than that much time commuting to work, school, the grocery store, etc. So just by listening to audio lessons on the train, in your car, etc., you could do all you need in order to get that big, beautiful, blue X on your calendar.

But why stop there? I have found that listening is such a powerful study tool, because it is so easy to integrate into your daily life. For example, recently I've been listening to lessons from SpanishPod101, and I listen to them on my walk to the gym (30 minutes), at the gym (45 minutes to an hour), and my walk home from the gym (30 minutes). Yeah, I spend way too much time going to the gym. But it doesn't feel like I'm wasting any time at all, because I'm combining two forms of productivity. I listen to around 2 hours of audio lessons per day just by going to the gym. Doing that, I can easily rack up over 500 hours of audio lessons in under a year. And I'm probably racking up much more than that if I also take into account the hours I spend walking around [whatever city I'm living in].

The trick, I think, is to get used to putting on your headphones every time you're alone and not able to focus on something 100%. That's why I listen to audio lessons when I'm walking, exercising, driving, or riding public transportation. The situation that I'm in does not allow for 100% focus on study materials. I can't exactly pull out a grammar textbook while I'm running on the treadmill. This is called “low quality time,” and we talked about it back in Phase #1.

A great way to be sure that you get lots of listening practice is to decide ahead of time where and when you will listen to your audio lessons each day.

Here are some examples of times and places that I have listened to audio lesson in the past:

• Every time I clean the house.
• Every time I drive anywhere in my car (alone).
• Every time I ride the train (alone).
• In bed, as I fall asleep.
• Going for walks.
• Going for runs.
• At the gym.
• Every time I eat lunch.
• During my breaks at work.
• Before work (I used to get to work early, and then sit in my car for 1 lesson).

These are just a handful of examples, and the places and times that you choose will naturally be different than the places that I have chosen in the past.

Once you choose where and when you'll be listening to your audio lessons, you should…

I remember a few years ago I decided that every time I drove in my car, I was going to listen to audio lessons. However, I kept flaking and listening to music (or nothing) instead. The reason was that every time I got into my car, it seemed like a hassle to plug my phone into the stereo and play a podcast. I know that sounds ridiculous, because it only takes five seconds, but five seconds feels like a long time when you're only planning to be in the car for two minutes anyways. Add to that the fact that I had to muster up the willpower to decide to listen to audio lessons every time I got into my car.

After only a couple of weeks, I was pretty much never listening to audio lessons at all. So I decided to burn JapanesePod101 lessons onto CDs, and I always had a CD in my car playing. Once I did this, the lessons came on automatically every time I started the car, and my listening consistency went up exponentially. I had removed the barriers to my study habit, and it had become effortless. And ever since then, I have always tried to remove barriers to studying whenever possible.

Barriers differ from person to person and situation to situation, but I think it's a good idea to try to explore what the barriers are to you listening to audio lessons regularly, and then you should try to knock them down in order to allow for effortless studying. I'll list some examples to give you ideas. You'll probably hate some of them, but I'm not saying that you need to do them. It's totally up to you which barriers you decide to tear down and which ones you just can't bear to let go of:

Goal	Barrier	Solution
Listen to audio lessons every time I drive my car (alone).	Plugging in my phone to play audio lessons is a hassle.	Burn CDs and always have one playing in the car. / Put audio lessons on an old mp3 player and always have it plugged in and ready to go.
Listen to audio lessons in the train on the way to work every day.	I'd rather listen to music. / I'd rather browse [waste-of-time app].	Delete music and time-wasting apps. / Delete music from phone.
Listen to audio lessons every time I clean the house.	It's uncomfortable to have headphones in when I'm moving around the house.	Buy a cheap stereo, put it in my [living room], then just press play on some audio lesson goodness every time I'm cleaning.
Listen to audio lessons every time I eat lunch (at home).	It's uncomfortable to have headphones in when I'm eating. / I like watching things when I eat.	Listen to the lessons on a stereo. / Watch video lessons. / Have video lessons ready to go at the [place I always eat lunch].

Your barriers will probably be unique to your situation, but once you encounter them, please take a serious look at how you might be able to tear them down. Tearing down one obtrusive barrier could mean adding hundreds of hours of effortless study time to the next year of your life.

When it comes to things like “immersion learning,” this concept that you should simply expose yourself to the language as much as possible, I see a lot of people wasting a lot of time. A great example of this is when people say that they can learn Japanese by watching anime.

If a study resource, especially a listening resource, is far above your level, then it does not qualify as study material. Speaking of Japanese TV shows in particular, if you don't understand at least 50% of what's being said, then you're not improving your Japanese by watching.

I'm not saying that you should give up on watching your favorite Japanese TV shows. After all, wanting to understand what's being said is great motivation for actually studying. In fact, I think that there are productive ways that we can use Japanese materials that are way above our level.

For example, let's say that I'm still a beginner at Japanese, but I really love a particular anime. It's my favorite show, and I've seen it 8,000 times, and I'd be happy to watch it over and over again for eternity until I die. In this situation, the following is a waste of time:

• Watching that show with English subtitles.
• Watching that show without subtitles.
• Watching that show with Japanese subtitles.

Yes, I think that all of these are a waste of time. Remember that I'm still a beginner at Japanese. If I watch the show with English subtitles, I'll always end up reading them and forgetting to listen to the Japanese. If I watch the show without subtitles, I won't understand anything! If I watch the show with Japanese subtitles, it might be helpful depending on my understanding of kanji, but even then the words would be going by so quickly that I'd have no time to give them the proper attention they deserve, and 99% of them would end up going over my head.

However, this does not mean that I am completely without productive study options that utilize this potentially amazing resource. There are some things that are not a waste of time:

• Painfully trudging through the manga series of this anime one page at a time. Since I'm a beginner, this would mean looking up virtually every word in the book. It sounds like torture, maybe, but after you got through twenty books, I bet that you'd start seeing the same words quite a lot.
• Watching the same episode over and over again. This would include pausing to read and look up subtitles, rewinding to hear the same phrases over and over again, and pretty much memorizing the whole thing word for word.
• Creating Anki flashcards for this anime series and learning every single phrase that comes up. I'll talk about how to do this later in this guide.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you don't have to use “audio lessons” if you don't want to. If something like JapanesePod101 or Assimil or any of those learning resources isn't your thing, then don't force yourself to do it. There are other options like the ones described above. Yes, these options would require a lot more effort on your part, but effort is tied to motivation, and if you really loved that show enough, maybe you would feel motivated enough to go through the processes described above.

Towards the end of this guide, by the way, I'll also go into some detail about other methods of studying Japanese through anime and manga.