(2016-01-18, 9:55 am)Sebastian Wrote: How much is each tier?

Is anybody thinking of buying it?

(2016-01-18, 10:59 am)SunlightUnderWater Wrote:

(2016-01-18, 9:55 am)Sebastian Wrote: How much is each tier?

Is anybody thinking of buying it?

Is it against forum policy to post the price? If nothing more, I will say it's jaw dropping. Also, it does not come with a refund, except in "extreme circumstances".

(2016-01-18, 11:19 am)kanjiwarrior Wrote: I got the same email, without being specific about prices they range from $1000 to $200.

Really sad that he is still going with this type of business model.

(2016-01-18, 11:22 am)SunlightUnderWater Wrote:

(2016-01-18, 11:19 am)kanjiwarrior Wrote: I got the same email, without being specific about prices they range from $1000 to $200.

Really sad that he is still going with this type of business model.

Should probably also clarify that the higher end of the price range is per month, and the lower is per week.

(2016-01-06, 11:25 pm)Danchan Wrote: Well that's an alarming turn of events.

The way this has all panned out strikes me in a very personal way. As I've written before in this thread, AJATT was the catalyst for me trying out hard-core immersion for a year back in 2010. I got a lot out of it. It's hard to put into words how exhilarating, how exciting it was to be dedicating every ounce of my effort, day in, day out, to one goal. Month after month. To be really, finally becoming bilingual and unlocking what felt like a constellation of little realities by way of sudden exposure to a mass culture that is quite different from that found in the English language (all the great TV shows, the great manga, the funny radio programs...) I still look back on that time fondly. I was relatively young and impressionable, and it feels in retrospect like a last final burst of youthful naivety. But it was a kind of madness. Walking around everywhere with headphones in all the time. Shunning my own native language through which I constructed my own thoughts and my understanding of myself in the world. This just made adjusting to -reality- in Japan when I moved there - which is I find in many ways to be a quite grim reality - only harder, as I had spent so long immersed in the fabrications of mass media.

What made the AJATT approach so powerful is also what makes it so dangerous for a certain type of intense personality. It's the perfect example of a so-called double-edged sword. You sacrifice something to get something else. I succeeded in getting what I wished for (speaking Japanese, living in Japan), while at the same time not really understanding what the hell I had gotten myself into. I had become used to thinking of everything as being primarily a matter of linguistic skill, letting my more concrete everyday rationality become too weak to deal with the question of who the hell I was in this environment, and what I was supposed to even be doing. You arrive at the destination, and it kind of sucks. And given the sacrifices required to achieve this mediocre result, well... that was probably the worst feeling of depression in my life. Adjusting to a very different cultural environment requires a very strong grasp of self and purpose to keep you anchored through the period of adjustment, and I had just the opposite.

So, to see what's happened with Khatz makes a kind of perverse sense to me personally. It's kind of a logical conclusion to this way of dealing with the world in an all-or-nothing, go-it-alone manner. Everything is turned into a game about how to achieve your goal, but the greater context of what having goals is even for can end up being covered over. Something like a more general, holistic integration of the components of being a f--king human being can't be captured with this narrow thinking. I recently watched a youtube video of him explaining something in his sweat pants (I think linked from this thread), dating from a few years back. I could barely even understand his English as he was mumbling the whole time, jumping from this point to that point. The reality of this guy, holed up in a tiny Japanese one-room apartment with his various digital devices, newspapers stuck on the windows...  the disconnect with his more heroic inspiring writing would be funny if it wasn't so worrying.

I hope he makes it back to the land of the living safe and sound. Adios Khatz.

(2016-01-18, 7:51 pm)vix86 Wrote: Uh you could still go to college. Its not like you are 50 and going to college puts you in a weird age range to be starting a career. You could enter college, pick a useful degree, and then get a real job in Japan. If your determination at AJATT is applied to college you could finish in 2-2.5 years probably, depending on course load.

(2016-01-18, 10:15 pm)vix86 Wrote: The upside is that you basically can transition straight into a company in Japan by doing the job hunting the same way undergrad students do....就職 the same as Japanese students

(2016-01-18, 2:20 pm)Zon70 Wrote:

(2016-01-06, 11:25 pm)Danchan Wrote: Well that's an alarming turn of events.

The way this has all panned out strikes me in a very personal way. As I've written before in this thread, AJATT was the catalyst for me trying out hard-core immersion for a year back in 2010. I got a lot out of it. It's hard to put into words how exhilarating, how exciting it was to be dedicating every ounce of my effort, day in, day out, to one goal. Month after month. To be really, finally becoming bilingual and unlocking what felt like a constellation of little realities by way of sudden exposure to a mass culture that is quite different from that found in the English language (all the great TV shows, the great manga, the funny radio programs...) I still look back on that time fondly. I was relatively young and impressionable, and it feels in retrospect like a last final burst of youthful naivety. But it was a kind of madness. Walking around everywhere with headphones in all the time. Shunning my own native language through which I constructed my own thoughts and my understanding of myself in the world. This just made adjusting to -reality- in Japan when I moved there - which is I find in many ways to be a quite grim reality - only harder, as I had spent so long immersed in the fabrications of mass media.

What made the AJATT approach so powerful is also what makes it so dangerous for a certain type of intense personality. It's the perfect example of a so-called double-edged sword. You sacrifice something to get something else. I succeeded in getting what I wished for (speaking Japanese, living in Japan), while at the same time not really understanding what the hell I had gotten myself into. I had become used to thinking of everything as being primarily a matter of linguistic skill, letting my more concrete everyday rationality become too weak to deal with the question of who the hell I was in this environment, and what I was supposed to even be doing. You arrive at the destination, and it kind of sucks. And given the sacrifices required to achieve this mediocre result, well... that was probably the worst feeling of depression in my life. Adjusting to a very different cultural environment requires a very strong grasp of self and purpose to keep you anchored through the period of adjustment, and I had just the opposite.

So, to see what's happened with Khatz makes a kind of perverse sense to me personally. It's kind of a logical conclusion to this way of dealing with the world in an all-or-nothing, go-it-alone manner. Everything is turned into a game about how to achieve your goal, but the greater context of what having goals is even for can end up being covered over. Something like a more general, holistic integration of the components of being a f--king human being can't be captured with this narrow thinking. I recently watched a youtube video of him explaining something in his sweat pants (I think linked from this thread), dating from a few years back. I could barely even understand his English as he was mumbling the whole time, jumping from this point to that point. The reality of this guy, holed up in a tiny Japanese one-room apartment with his various digital devices, newspapers stuck on the windows...  the disconnect with his more heroic inspiring writing would be funny if it wasn't so worrying.

I hope he makes it back to the land of the living safe and sound. Adios Khatz.

Wow that's crazy, you sound exactly like me. I too, started this AJATT japanese learning process in 2010, right after graduating high school. I didn't go to college and thought I would be able to just make it out in the adult world by being bilingual(lol) and also holding a firm belief that there would be a way to get to Japan without having a degree.(which led to wasteful 2 year realtionship with a japanese woman). I am fluent in Japanese right now, in fact I would have considered myself fluent in 2012, about the 2 years its said to master ajatt.  When I realized I was fluent I thought I was the coolest thing ever, I could read books, newspapers, watch whatever I wanted to and understood all of it, but as time went on, I noticed all that has ever come from me learning japanese is just media consumption. I live in an area with next to no Japanese people so I rarely get to use my Japanese, I'm 23 and about to be 24 and still work the same crappy part time job stocking shelves at a supermarket, never went to college, while most of my classmates from school are already school teachers, programmers, police officers, getting their masters degrees, I've essentialy just frozen in time from when I started learning Japanese. I had two goals when I started and that was to get fluent, and move to japan. I've got one of them and honestly it's really hurting to think this has all been a waste of time. If I had gone to college I could actually be in Japan with a nice job teaching english, instead I went for fluency and now I have nothing to show for it.

(2016-01-19, 12:28 am)dtcamero Wrote: which would lead us to the problem that Dan and several others mentioned earlier... working in a japanese company the same as japanese people do totally blows.

(2016-01-19, 11:00 am)Danchan Wrote: The trick is to use Japanese to augment some high value skill like corporate law or software engineering. Japanese by itself really isn't worth anything much to speak of.

(2016-01-19, 4:58 am)RawrPk Wrote:

(2016-01-18, 2:20 pm)Zon70 Wrote: [...]

You're only 23? I envy you! I'm 28 and still in college. I f***ed around my first few years just taking part time classes and with the mentality "Cs get degrees". My GPA is trash but I'm still not quitting. If you start now at a CC, you can either an associates or even transfer to a 4 year school for whatever major you desire.

(2016-01-19, 11:23 am)mattimus Wrote:

(2016-01-19, 11:00 am)Danchan Wrote: The trick is to use Japanese to augment some high value skill like corporate law or software engineering. Japanese by itself really isn't worth anything much to speak of.

For those interested in Danchan's story, he kindly wrote a guest post for us over at The Language Dojo. Thanks again Dan!

(2016-01-20, 11:41 am)yangchuanzhang Wrote:

(2016-01-19, 11:23 am)mattimus Wrote:

(2016-01-19, 11:00 am)Danchan Wrote: The trick is to use Japanese to augment some high value skill like corporate law or software engineering. Japanese by itself really isn't worth anything much to speak of.

For those interested in Danchan's story, he kindly wrote a guest post for us over at The Language Dojo. Thanks again Dan!

Your website seems to be down.

(2016-01-22, 5:56 am)Zgarbas Wrote: Your post-grad experience sounds really weird, Dan-chan. There's so much pressure to publish in English since that's the only language that gets taken into account for global rankings, even in the Japanese programs (though, for example my Uni pushes this by saying that no one can write their dissertation in their native language, so if I were a native English speaker I couldn't write it in English...was that the case with you?). I also don't get why you'd need two foreign languages?

(2016-01-22, 3:20 am)thecite Wrote: They even used the blood from the slaughtered emu to create a horrific mural on one of the walls of the refurbished cafeteria.