Danchan Wrote:So... you watched a lot of the actual language, from which you learned directly. Which a core idea he wanted to get across to learners. Looking at how it is actually done, learning forms from the source.

... but everything he said was stupid? I'm not following.

Regardless, you're free to think and say so. But if you want to convince anybody to that extent the starting point would be to try and understand what his position or ideas actually are, then based on a generous interpretation proceed to critique it.

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:He did say that you have listen to 10 thousand hours in a year or 18 months, you have to listen while asleep, you have to mine 10 thousand sentences and so on.

It doesn't matter what his results were, if he passed any exams.
His ideas were STUPID. IMPOSSIBLE.

They're not remotely impossible (the mathematics easily check out), and certainty not "stupid". I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

ryuudou Wrote:Why is rapid Japanese acquisition "stupid"?

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:He did say that you have listen to 10 thousand hours in a year or 18 months, you have to listen while asleep, you have to mine 10 thousand sentences and so on.

It doesn't matter what his results were, if he passed any exams.
His ideas were STUPID. IMPOSSIBLE.

They're not remotely impossible (the mathematics easily check out), and certainty not "stupid". I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

They ARE impossible and stupid.

buonaparte Wrote:Try to listen while you're asleep.

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Danchan Wrote:I'm very happy to avoid Chinese classes or textbooks. I use some learner material for mining sentences with sound files attached for my SRS deck, and from those sentences I get a grasp of various grammatical forms. Slowly I'm moving more towards reading intermediate texts with audio (using lingq.com and other sources), and watching movies and TV shows with subtitles. I take it easy, have a good time, and grow at a steady and measurable pace. I'm looking forward to one day having good Chinese without every having attended a class, read a textbook, or formally studied grammar. It's working fine so far.

For Japanese I started out with classes. They were OK half of the time, but in themselves grossly insufficient when it came to teaching me the tools and techniques I would need to realistically get good at the language in my own time. I suspect that is typical of most language courses taught at university. For example, reading and listening -a lot- is obviously important. But nobody ever stressed to me just how important it was. Certainly my teachers never tried to instill this habit in me in all the years I took classes. It was only ever "now lets read this dialogue".

Finding AJATT helped me make the shift from receiving fish, to learning how to fish for myself (to borrow the analogy from Hacking Chinese - http://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-how-to-fish-or-why-knowing-how-to-learn-chinese-is-essential/). I doubt I would have received a monbusho scholarship (or would have been capable of sitting and passing the post graduate entrance examination) without the changes I made to my study methods thanks to Khatz. Thanks to AJATT I could get paid to attend a graduate school in Japan and write my masters thesis in Japanese. Thanks to AJATT, I now work as a translator and interpreter (underpaid and grumpy, but I get to sit in an editing room and help people make animated TV shows. When I started AJATT I was still washing dishes part time). Thanks to AJATT, I feel confident in acquiring any other language I wish. The year I spent going hard core with AJATT style methods was one of most enjoyable and exciting things I had ever done. Years later I look back on it really fondly. All those great comics and books and radio programs and TV shows. The leaps in ability I could feel every month or so I pushed forward. A whole new world opening up all at once. Man it was such a blast. ( * and no, I'm not forgetting I had years of (inefficient) study down beforehand, or making any arguments in favor of fluent in x months type projects)

You don't need to like his writing, or the guy himself. But every time you dismiss everything he said out of hand you only show to me that you haven't actually really read what he wrote or tried to understand what position he is coming from. That is again, as DT says, arguably because Khatz himself wrote in an annoying fashion with a badly laid out site (actually I quite like his extremely assertive writing style here and there, minus some of the more juvenile humor, but each to his own.) But it is not because there isn't actually anything there of any meaning.

I don't think I have anything more to say on the topic at this point. Some people have asked for summaries of what he says. Well, the site is still there. You can read and find out. Or, if you prefer some better presentation, read similar ideas at http://www.hackingchinese.com, or http://www.spanish-only.com/, or http://thelanguagedojo.com/, or http://japaneselevelup.com/ or http://2mastery.com/, or http://www.antimoon.com/ (all similar to AJATT, influenced by it, or in antimoons case, a precursor to it).

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Good. As long as know we're all of this vitriol is coming from.

Thequadehunter Wrote:Also, for some of the people speculating, I'm 99% sure Khatz has been to this forum, and probably to the AJATT thread.

CreepyAF Wrote:

Thequadehunter Wrote:Also, for some of the people speculating, I'm 99% sure Khatz has been to this forum, and probably to the AJATT thread.

When Silverspoon was new, Khatz used negative quotes about him from here in it's initial advertizement. He also mentioned "a certain yellow forum" here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/music-is-underrated

He's definitely been to this forum.

patriconia Wrote:As for personal anecdotes, the most fluent foreigners I've met are non-Westerners, from places like China, Korea, or the Philippines, and who, from what I can tell, have never used methods like SRS or AJATT.

ryuudou Wrote:Read the site before you type. It will do wonders.

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Good. As long as know we're all of this vitriol is coming from.

chamcham Wrote:He's definitely been to this forum.

juniperpansy Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:He's definitely been to this forum.

I believe he's made a quote about this forum along the lines of "The blind teaching the blind."
Seeing the grammar section of this forum I think I have to agree with him

ファブリス Wrote:One thing I learned about language is that "plain english" goes a long way, and if you can't say something in plain english, well you probably have no idea what you're talking about or what you're even trying to say.

kapalama Wrote:I sometimes wonder when people are fighting against RTK, if there is not a degree of masochism in it; in that people feel if it comes easy, it's not true knowledge, or something like that. I know I hampered myself my not just running straight through RTK simple, and then going back through and fleshing out with readings and comparisons, because I was using some reasoning like that.

kameden Wrote:I am against RTK because it doesn't really teach anything useful beyond memorization of the radicals, which is really only useful for writing. If you don't want to physically write the characters then RTK is not worth it. You essentially just forget the mnemonics and with that the ability to write them anyway if you don't use them. I would imagine most people 3 years after completing RTK cannot write much.

When it comes to reading and typing it is based on recognition, something that I do not believe RTK is very efficient at helping with. It takes more or less the same amount of time to go from RTK mnemonic deconstructing to the almost instant recognition that you'd want for reading as it does starting from scratch and getting to that instant recognition point.

Even if you want to write I do not believe it is a good idea to start with RTK but rather go through it after you can read at a decent level. There is little reason to learn to write all the kanji before you can do anything else.

drdunlap Wrote:RTK is certainly not just for writing. I would go so far as to say that it may have been far more helpful for me with reading and learning vocabulary from that reading than it was with writing. At least 50/50 on the usefulness.

RTK directly helped me dive into adult reading material in Japanese (Murakami Haruki novels) because it gave me a foothold in meaning. Even without knowing the readings, I was able to guess the meaning of many unknown words and keep going when I just wanted to get in some good, quality tadoku. (I did, however, write down many of them to save for later look-uppage. Another feat that wouldn't have been possible without having done RTK). I knew how to write them all, too, so that helped differentiate similar kanji and made it no trouble at all to look unknown kanji up in the dictionary with a writing tool.

I can't say I'd suggest doing it before (and to the exclusion of) everything else but it's definitely an invaluable tool.

And of course you lose it if you don't use it. That's how memory works.

datrukup Wrote:It's hard to believe that Silver Spoon was bankrupting him. He expanded it to multiple languages so he must have felt like there was something about it that he could capitalize on. Although he's not selling it now, maybe that's because it required more work than selling sentence packs did?

datrukup Wrote:Also SS isn't his only product. I've never bought AJATT Plus (although I've been tempted before), but that's a $30 per month subscription, isn't it? Maybe someone who has AJATT Plus could give us a rough estimate of how many active users there are.