My Yaruki （やる気）

Next up is how I'm getting on with the weight training, since I started back in February I think it was, I've come a long way from being a skinny bean pole who could barely lift anything that could be considered to have a substantial weight, when I first started I was curling like 8kg and doing way too many different exercise per session 4 times a week I was basically running my self into the ground even with the small amount of weight I even had the complete wrong idea on how to do sets, basically after every set you should take about 60-90 second brake (good for Hypertrophy) for maximum testosterone production then go on to your next set after completing your sets for one exercise you jump to the next.

The big mistake we were doing is we did each set of an exercise concurrently, no rest, then we would rest for 60 seconds and start the next set of all exercises we were doing more harm than good basically wrecking havoc on our nervous system. Anyway the mistakes we made and the things we learned over the past 5 months or so can wait for a future post as there were more ^^

Any woo I gained a few pounds of muscle over the first few months of training averaging about 1 pound of weight each week which is about what your aiming for if your wanting to gain muscle and not fat this was helped by my increase of calorie and protein intake helped by the weight gainer protein shakes took some time to get used to the banana flavor but its grown on me.

Then typically when I was starting to see change in my physique I injured my right deltoid may have been caused by not warming up adequately or just from general wear and tear as weight lifting for hypertrophy puts a lot of strain on your body, this took about 3-4 weeks to get back to shape although I did no weights in that time I kept my weight/muscle by keeping my protein intake high and calories clean.

Then finally I could start again this time reading much more into what routines, exercises were best for me being a hard gainer, the basic idea for us hard gainers and beginner weight lifters alike is to do mostly compound exercises for the first month or so these include the bench press, deadlift, squats, military press etc on alternate days 3 times a week the idea is to build over all mass and increase strength rapidly then later when your bulked up you define the muscles by doing the non compounds e.g. bicep curls etc

One tip if its strength and size your after you need to constantly be increasing the weight you lift find your perfect weight that you can only manage around 6-8 reps per set with and each sessions try to add a little more weight from everything I've read over the months this is the best way to increase bulk and strength.

Anyway I keep getting off topic, with the change in exercises and new found knowledge on how to weight lift correctly for maximum results we again started to gain 1-2 pounds of weight each week and can now see a good change in my physique, I've added 9 pounds of weight from 8.5 stone to 9 stone which I've never weighed that much in my life always been either below 8 stone or just above.

Current stats below, this is over a month with the new routine (except the body weight which is from February)

Body weight: 8.5 stone to 9 stone
Deadlift: 132 pounds to 176 pounds
Bench Press: 100 pounds (not been doing long, but started not being able to even lift 100 pounds now I can do 3 sets of 6 reps)

Military press: 66 pounds to 77 pounds
Pendley Rows: 77 pounds to 90 pounds
Squats: 103 pounds to 123 pounds
Crunches: 3 sets of 15 with 10kg weight + 15 reps of leg raises on pull up bar
Pull Ups: 6 reps to 14 reps (working on lats not bicep pull ups to get that v shape)

Not huge weights by any means but for me its a great improvement, will keep posting updates over the coming months and maybe even some before and after pictures.

Well over the coming days I plan to do post some updates on my progress with my goals that I listed a while ago, to recap these were.

Learn Japanese
To keep improving my Japanese and hopefully step it up a gear.

Weight Training
To improve my overall physique to basically not look like a beanpole.

Healthy Body and Mind
Generally to improve the way I live and eat always believe you should look after yourself as you only get one body no point when your 50 starting to eat healthy because your obese and can barely move from all the crap you've eat and drunk over the years same goes for the mind.

Savings
One thing that I've always had trouble with is saving now that I realise I've gotta save if I ever plan to live my dream of going to Japan for a year to enjoy myself and job hunt.

Other goals I planned to set were to expand my reality in general experience as many different things as I could and to also network more in and out of my career.

- Body and Mind -
For the first post I'm going to do a quick rundown on my body and mind goal, overall this is going pretty well most days I've kept with the eating healthy at least having some fruit and veg everyday, although I have had a bad habit of taking trips to KFC and the local Chinese a few times a week as they tend to be more convenient and a quick way of getting my required calorie/protein intake to keep adding more body weight this needs to be pretty high especially as I tend to be pretty active with 3 weight sessions a week and lots of cardio in between.

I've also started to take much more care on the way I look for years I had the same set of clothes and would only buy new clothes when they were worn thin but now if I see something I like (or my wife does) I'll go out my way to buy it, caring about the way you look doesn't just help change what people think about you it also makes you feel better and more confident.

On the mind front I think this has improved from before I'm generally feeling much happier and have a huge renewed interest in my Japanese language studies, web development and technology in general. Everyday I get closer to my trip to Japan even if it is years away planning for it now helps stop my interest waning and keep me motivated and happy.

Next up Weight Lifting

From Chester Zoo

From Chester Zoo

Well thought I would show a few photo's from a trip I made the other week and have a little talk about being content at were you are in life. I know most of us at one time or another have hit a wall of self improvement the point were life seems to be flying by and before you know it another year has passed and you still sat watching your favorite TV program wishing that you had gone ahead with that trip to China or put off learning that musical instrument that you always wanted to learn, and for what? the old I didn't have time or it can wait a week/month/year whatever the excuse may be.

From Chester Zoo

From Chester Zoo

Cum on do you really think that you have no time its pretty amazing the amount we can get done in a day if we put our mind to do we really need to watch a half baked show on TV that you have no real interest or the classic "I'm tired after work so dammit if I'm going to be doing anything" just a couple of examples of the many excuses most of us make at one time or another.

From Chester Zoo

I've been a victim of this many times after a long day at work I'll get home and say to myself "whoa tiring day I've earned a brake everything is going to have to wait" If you enjoy something is it really that much of a chore to do the things that you like whether its learning a new language, playing an instrument or planning that month trip to China just remind yourself what your aiming for and be sure to enjoy it.

From Chester Zoo

Now onto my point, what we don't realize is we start to become content with were we are, our daily routines even if we are not enjoying ourselves it can become very difficult for us to get up and do the stuff we have always wanted to, why? because its easier its easier to mope around doing the same routine day in day out being content can be one of the worst things for our productivity, I'm not saying being content is bad on the contrary if your very happy with were you are and have done everything you want to then your happily content which is great just don't get stuck in the trap, make sure you evaluate your contentedness every so often and decide if there is anything you should be doing now not tomorrow but now.

From Chester Zoo

You really don't want to look back in 20 years time and think wow there was so much I wanted to do but never did, time fly's' whether your happy with your contentedness or unhappy with it just going along with the flow

From Chester Zoo

From Chester Zoo

Recently when I started to learn Hangul I noticed how easy learning another languages characters/alphabet actually is, now a few years ago this would have been a different story before all the meta skills that I've picked up along the way while learning Japanese.

In little over a week I've learned how to read and write 한굴 and this is with missing days here and there, but if it wasn't for Anki and the huge amounts of shapes/variations I've seen while studying Kanji/Kana I doubt that I would have done it so fast with a 100% retention.

This all comes down to meta skills basically smaller skills that you pick up along the way to learning the main skill that your after e.g. Japanese I've picked up how and what an SRS is which basically helps me never forget material and using mnemonics to remember characters, all skills that will potentially stay with me for a life time and will keep on helping me in the future.

Also the other side to it is that in the process of learning another language other languages become easier to learn this comes down to the fact that your brain becomes more used to handling the data that you feed it i.e. this and this make up the structure of a sentences or this this and this make up this shape which forms a Kanji, basically your training your mind to get good at language learning. Thus why a lot of people who know a second language from when there very young find it much easier to learn more languages, they've processed so much information giving there brain more ways to just 'click' with the information that its given.

To sum up if you have the opportunity to learn new skills then dive in learn all the processes along the way, learn all the techniques to mastering the target skill that your after, as you can guarantee one day you will be glad you did if nothing else it will make you a more rounded individual.

Another great article explaining meta skills can be found here

또봐요

Well i often here people saying that its generally a bad idea to set yourself too many goals or resolutions whatever you want to call them, but in my opinion setting yourself many goals can actually be advantageous.

The general consensus on why setting more than a few goals for yourself at time is bad tends to be that you get over worked, burned out etc and end up completely giving up after only a short period of time, now if we look at two common examples of resolutions people set lets say smoking and losing weight pretty common as I'm sure you will agree people will often set these goals at the same time often at the new year, which they are both pretty big lifestyle changes giving up something that your body is so used to, thus why a lot of people find it difficult to complete both goals they would be better off setting only one and the other later. Obviously everybody varies and people with greater will power may be able to manage this.

Now onto why I think its a good idea to set many goals all at once say for example something like my own personal list I have keeping fit, learning a language and saving money to name but a few which many of these I set around the same time after hitting a stage of wanting to improve myself, so far I've managed to stick with these although I have dropped some along the way i.e. a while ago i set myself a goal to learn powershell scripting not hugely difficult but my interest waned and without even realizing it became a failed goal. There's also been a few others I set around the time of my self improvement phase which I've lost site of but all in all I've kept going strong.

To say I set myself around 10 goals or so of which I've only dropped around 3-4 of those over the last 5-6 months and the others are still going strong, I think I've done pretty well now if I had only set 1-2 goals which might have taken say 2-3 months to do for a short term goal with the possibility of one of those being dropped I don't think I would get as much self improvement in the time than I would with multiple goals so potentialy wasted time.

Choosing your goals

How to choose your goals for the best retention this can be down to each persons willpower and motivation but a general idea is to keep them varied maybe have 1-2 that could be called major lifestyle change like not having a daily trip to Burger King order everything large and instead having a salad, then perhaps set the rest of your goals as mini ones i.e. get an extra half hours sleep a night and/or setting yourself long term self improvement goals like learning a language, saving for a holiday or improving your image the ones that don't take a huge change to your life just adding something extra.

So to cap it off, the next time your in a self improvement phase dont just choose one thing you want to change or add to your life try making yourself a list of ways you'd like to improve, change or to just expand your reality you'll be supprised with how much you can actually stick with.

Well at the start of the year i set myself a few goals of achieving things or just improving myself in some way so were better to jot these down and see my progress over the year than on my blog so here go's.

Ever notice how when you read a lot in your native language your spelling and grammar tend to improve and every time you make a mistake and correct it you less frequently make that mistake again you've basically told your subconscious mind that this is correct and how it should be even without actively trying. Most of the time you don't even need to actively find and correct your mistakes as they will correct themselves the more you see them written correctly in context.

I wasn't sure were to start naturaly like a lot of people I looked for starter guides around the net and considered a Japanese course after much frustration and still no idea the best way to start I eventualy came across alljapaneseallthetime.com which really appealled to me and made a lot of sense especially when you relate it to how you actually learned your native language.

So I started not exactly as suggested as I learned all the Kana first using Remembering The Kana which for me was a great motivational boost if i could learn these 100 or so characters i could learn any 6 days later I had finished. Then onto the Kanji 4 months later after some struggle with myself taking brakes and procrastinating I had completed Remembering the Kanji with this came a realization that Japanese was possible to learn and that I could do it all I needed was to stick with it.

Now onto the sentences I've been going at them for 3 months or so now and have noticed great gains in my Japanese ability so far I can understand many simple sentences I can usually understand something out of most things I read and listen too and have moments of understanding all the time, although I'm a little dissapointed in myself as I have taken many brakes and slowed down always kept up with my reviews but still been slack unlike over christmas I powered through 100s of sentences in only 2 weeks I intend to get this moment back once my workload starts to calm down.

I'm hoping to gain a good amount of fluency by next year and I'm sure this is possible If i can just keep up a good pace and improve my immersion environment more the main battle is with myself I can be a terrible procrastinator at time although I've improved at this a lot in the past few months. I also have many more goals and resolutions I'm going to improve / stick with over the year which I will talk about in a future article.

I've noticed something over the past month or so that if i think about it daily I don't feel like I'm making an improvement but when i think back to around this time last month my ability in Japanese has already grown vastly for example I know my vocabulary has grown hugely hundreds and hundreds of new words in less that a month which i put mostly down to the great learning tools over at iknow and anki for my long term retention and the more i learn the easier it becomes to learn new words they just seem to stick better.

My understanding of grammer has vastly improved also this is probably more down to seeing 100s of sentences in context than it is me studying them on sites like tae kim , although i must admit that Japanese in Mangaland has helped alot in my understanding of things that i couldn't get my head around with sentences alone, oh and by the way i highly recommend Japanese in Mangaland even over tae kim for learning grammer as IMO it's much easier to understand and the sentences with manga context makes it even more enjoyable a read, one of very few textbooks I'd recommend.

So basicaly make sure you keep it up everyday no matter how tired/depressed/busy etc you are as most of us know that half of the time we are just being lazy you've always got time to do atleast something in your target language even if its just a quick 10 min timebox in your favourite SRS that will be 10 mins worth of knowledge that you have retained unlike if you did nothing at all, even for example earlie this week i had the worst headache that i've had in years I still managed atleast my reviews probably wasn't on my best form but atleast it got them done i would hate to see the reviews if i had left them although i did collapse in bed after that with some headache tables :D

Well after doing Japanese 'properly' for almost 2 months now I finally see what other people were talking about that languages are not hard to learn I think there are 3 key ingredients to learning any language nothing to do with intelligence or being in the country of the language your trying to learn. It's more down to time spent, effort and motivation if your missing any of those you will not learn the language at any sort of reasonable pase even if your surrounded by the language and nobody speaks your native language you will still not obtaine any sort of fluency unless you put those 3 things into practice.

This can be proven easily by the amount of foreigners that live in Japan for many years and can hardly read 平仮名　and can barely say anything past こんにちは / お元気ですか　etc they are missing atleast 1 of those things, if they have no motivation/interest they will not try to learn so there mind will just class what they see/hear as useless information no matter how much they are exposed to it.

Time spent is obviouse you can have all the motivation and effort in the world but if you only spend 1-2 hours a week its going to be a long time before you notice any improvement, you can pretty much gaurantee the person that spends 3-4 hours a day doing there chosen language will be much further ahead than the person doing 1-2 hours a week, this is often why classes dont work as some students will only do the language when they are in class (maybe a few hours a week) and don't spend time studying in there own time.

Last but not least 'effort' if you don't put the effort in e.g. keeping up with reviews, maintaining a language environment basicaly doing anything in your target language your not going to see much if any results, there's no excuse for "oh i fancy a brake from Japanese it'll be ok till tomorrow" that one day can easily turn into 2 days, 2 week, months and so on, you need to keep it up no matter what even if you just do your daily SRS reps even if your tired just do something in your target language keep putting the effort in.

Since i put these 3 things into action my Japanese has improved leaps and bounds compared to the years before when trying to learn, usually down to not putting in the effort daily (always taking that one little brake...), now that i put in daily effort I'm seeing huge improvements in less than 2 months.

So basically がんばって　(do your best)

Stats update.

Deck created: 1.7 months ago
Total number of cards: 643

Card counts
Mature cards: 64 (9.95%)
Young cards: 579 (90.05%)
Unseen cards: 0 (0.00%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 100.0% (3 of 3)
Young cards: 79.1% (3067 of 3879)
First-seen cards: 80.7% (601 of 745)

The 643 seen cards in this deck contain:

• 466 total unique kanji.
• Jouyou: 457 of 1945 (23.5%).
• Jinmeiyou: 2 of 287 (0.7%).
• 7 non-jouyou kanji.