Tzadeck Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:In all this time I never looked at his site. But that "About Me" is cringe worthy. Why put that on your site at all?

I remember what it was like to be his age.

Isn't he a bit old to post something like that though? That's more 14 than college freshman.

buonaparte Wrote:I don't blame Imabi.
He had probably thought that universities are there to teach you something.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I am a university teacher -- I think on the whole we do our best to teach, despite the shortcomings of the institutional system.

buonaparte Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:I am a university teacher -- I think on the whole we do our best to teach, despite the shortcomings of the institutional system.

I meant no disrespect. On the other hand, you're probably young.

buonaparte Wrote:Ha, ha made me laugh. I wrote bucked (FFFUCKED) and then the forum software changed it to mucked. Life is beautiful. You cannot FFFUCKK any longer. What will human beings do to survive?

buonaparte Wrote:Of course you're passionate. You've been posting relentlessly, I've always admired you.
There are some other passionate people, too - Jim Breen, the Admin, Tae Kim, Imabi.

What about writing a comprehensive Japanese grammar for everybody to enjoy it - you could surely do it.
Or perhaps something else, I remember a project of yours here, but you gave up, you were not passionate enough.

Quote:Anyway, as long as languages go, the best way is to do it on your own.

hyvel Wrote:I haven't used the Tae Kim grammar guide, so I can't comment on it specifically. But due to it being free, I think it might be hard to get solid opinions on it, as it might often just get recommended across the board exactly because it is free and a lot of people mostly want to use free resources.
Sometimes I'm really surprised that people are too parsimonious to buy a 20$ textbook and instead solely rely on free resources. If you're gonna spend countless of hours learning Japanese, that time investment dwarfs the costs for good resources anyways... so why not base your learning on the best resources - free or not?!

yudantaiteki Wrote:A comprehensive grammar is a lot of work.

vix86 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:A comprehensive grammar is a lot of work.

I'm not event sure why you would bother with that project anyway, or why others would suggest it.

MelonBerry Wrote:Your question started by this thread? http://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/2h1ag4/is_tae_kims_learning_japanese_app_for_android_a/

complaint Wrote:The fact that, the majority of the time, when you see a の in written Japanese it will not mean any of the things written on that page (e.g. 30歳の私、普通の言い方、人気のある場所).

complaint Wrote:Also he conflates a bunch of different のs (e.g. he explains that the の in 毎日勉強するのは大変 stands for a missing noun, which of course it doesn't, otherwise it would mean "the thing that I study every day is difficult" - it is actually a nominaliser - and in any case he translates it as the highly non-English "the thing of studying every day is tough", and I wonder how many people actually understand what he means by "the thing of studying").

tae kim Wrote:However, the 「の」 particle is very useful in that you don't have to specify a particular noun. In the next examples, the 「の」 particle is not replacing any particular noun, it just allows us to modify verb and adjective clauses like noun clauses. The relative clauses are highlighted.

rich_f Wrote:Maybe some people object because he's not a professor, or he's not charging $100 a pop for it? Beats me. It's not like you need a Ph.D. to teach a foreign language, you just need to be good at explaining stuff.

john555 Wrote:According to Tae Kim's Amazon page, he was born in South Korea and immigrated to the USA in 1971. So where's the native Japanese background?

Is his knowledge of Japanese as good as that of a native speaker? For me to feel totally comfortable with a course/book, at least one of the contributors/authors should be a native Japanese speaker.

I saw a Modern Greek course advertised at the local university, and the teacher is a man with a German name, which put me off a bit. I thought, for a Modern Greek course, I'd have more confidence if his name were Zorba Popadopolis.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Most of his "about me" page is a rant against the UT Japanese program and how awesome he is. I don't know the UT faculty but I have a hard time believing they hate him for his Japanese ability and are scornful of anyone who is too good at Japanese.

PotbellyPig Wrote:In all this time I never looked at his site. But that "About Me" is cringe worthy. Why put that on your site at all?

qwertyytrewq Wrote:

john555 Wrote:According to Tae Kim's Amazon page, he was born in South Korea and immigrated to the USA in 1971. So where's the native Japanese background?

Is his knowledge of Japanese as good as that of a native speaker? For me to feel totally comfortable with a course/book, at least one of the contributors/authors should be a native Japanese speaker.

I saw a Modern Greek course advertised at the local university, and the teacher is a man with a German name, which put me off a bit. I thought, for a Modern Greek course, I'd have more confidence if his name were Zorba Popadopolis.

Not to be personal but your recent posts/threads regarding the Japanese language and your learning of it (eg. using a 60 year old grammar book and taking advice from 20 year old forum threads) don't inspire confidence in me either. I'd listen to Tae Kim's advice on the Japanese language before I consider your concerns regarding Tae Kim's capability of teaching Japanese as a non-native.

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Flamerokz Wrote:

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Back in my day I used dial-up and LIKED IT gosh darn it.

john555 Wrote:

Flamerokz Wrote:

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Back in my day I used dial-up and LIKED IT gosh darn it.

Guess it's too early to come up with a halfway intelligent response.

If you think Teach Yourself Japanese is no good, say why. Cite some pages, say what's wrong with it.

RandomQuotes Wrote:I'm not going to argue with you, but the the "Teach Yourself" book series tends to rely heavily on the grammar translation method. The grammar translation method is not the best way to learn a language. Using the language and being able to translate are completely different skill sets. If you want anecdotal evidence. Japanese students are required to take six years of English in school. This is almost entirely translation based and almost no one graduates with any real ability to use English.

If you want research here's a paper publish by Harvard about foreign language acquisition: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/10952296/SIEFERT_gsas.harvard_0084L_11049.pdf?sequence=1

a study contrasting the grammar translation method with the direct method: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/viewFile/10755/7604

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different methods
http://www.jcjykc.sdnu.edu.cn/english/unit2.html

Examination of the Grammar-Translation method: faculty.mu.edu.sa/download.php?fid=35886

RandomQuotes Wrote:If you want to practice translating ridiculous sentences, go ahead. But realize what you are doing is contrary to the last 30-40 years of research on memory and second language acquisition. The people who are giving you advice aren't doing it to be dicks, they're doing it because they have more experience with Japanese than you do. So, when I say that the grammar-translation method is an extremely inefficient way of learning a language, I'm saying it because it's relevant to my job, so I read research and essays regarding the various methods of teaching and acquiring languages. So when you say that grammar-translation is the best way to learn a language, I know for a fact you don't know what you're talking about.

Tzadeck Wrote:I have friends that are currently getting their masters/PhD in fields related to second language acquisition, and when I asked them they basically said that modern researches don't really talk about it in a way that favors or disfavors certain methods anymore. Thoughts on this? I don't know much about it myself.

I'm also very skeptical about all the old debates about learning methods for other reasons--mainly because I question whether you could really call the studies that were done scientific. Then again, I even consider fields like psychology as not-quite-science.