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+--- Thread: AJATT's youtube videos... (/thread-2009.html)
AJATT's youtube videos... - kazelee - 2008-11-20
Question... how varied are these 7000+ cards you have?
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-20
Kaze, I guess it depends how you define varied. Most of them are from the Kanji Odyssey books or Tanuki Corpus. The rest are taken from a combination of dictionaries, mangas, novels, and ripped anime dialogue with written transcripts.
Mostly, I preferred the structured route which is why I tried to mine from sources like KO before running out of things like that. I really believe that I would have been much worse off if I mined primarily from mangas, etc. I completely disagree with Khatzu's idea of "constantly having fun." KO was boring as hell but it was worth it.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Tobberoth - 2008-11-20
mentat_kgs Wrote:I recomend pimsleur basic 1.You must have had some really bad luck with Japanesepod... I don't know about the low level podcasts, but Upper Intermediate is really interesting.
I really cannot recomend japanesepod, because I tought it mas more boring than pimsleur.
There are plenty of great movies, anime and doramas with great dialogues that you can rip audio from.
But like I said before, the best of JapanesePod101.com is Mikis blog. 100% Japanese podcast made with learning in mind. It's just Mikis blog, but you are given some questions before so you have something to listen for, something to test your comprehension.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Nukemarine - 2008-11-20
I can't comment on jpod101 as I never got into it. I did do Pimsleur, and I agree it's great for someone that starts at zero. Its pace is just slow and lacks supporting material that would make the learning faster and more efficient. Similar complaints toward Rosetta Stone. Not to mention, both are horrendously expensive.
Anyway, Draqq, you mentioned having 7000 cards. Now, if it's all of KO in addition to other sources, you should be able to read most things. When you listen/watch media, you should be picking up words fairly well.
For myself, I think (ok, I know) I'm way behind the power curve on learning. This whole year has been starting over, change ups, distractions, and worse.
In hindsight, I think I approached the sentence method in a wrong way. Not wrong in how it's explained in AJATT, but wrong in how I think it works best.
For sentences that stress grammar, which usually means words you know very well, I was writing out the whole sentence. Why did I bother? Why did I waste all that time writing words I knew well just to get the ～で or ～んだよ or だから concept across? It just burned me out. (Now I think if it's a grammar concept, it merely needs to be recognition and a passing is knowing what's being conveyed by the grammar).
For sentences that stress vocabulary like with KO2k1, I burned out because I kept failing cards because there were too many new words. I tried to fix this by suspending cards. I tried by trimming cards. I thought I'd go back to UBJG. (Now it's I highlight ONE and ONLY ONE vocabulary word/phrase that the sentence is teaching. I don't even write out the whole sentence except the first time. After that it's writing out the highlighted word).
For immersion, well, I really messed up there. I thought watching subtitled dramas would not hurt if I did it only the first time through. Problem was, I never went back and re-watched the drama.
Anyway, it's been a painful process and one I'm still refining. You could go back through my posts and see I was advocating stuff I now say otherwise (Stuff like Tae Kim over UBJG, iKnow over KO2k1, no subs versus subs first time through). Hopefully, I've been good about disclosing I don't know a damn thing and it's just me testing the waters.
Sorry for the long reply. You post made me wonder if it's the sentence method that's at fault for me. As the last 2 months have been much better (slacker work environment, 2 hours everyday studying, better but not total immersion), I am seeing results from sentences.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-20
Nuke, I can read ALOT in Japanese, but I still have to guess quite a bit on various words based on the context of the sentence. I can read and understand many mangas fully at this point, but novels leave me clueless much of the time.
As far as listening, I can understand very little. Just about every Japanese show or movie sounds like a blizzard of words still. I can make out fragments but sometimes I even miss the general idea of what is happening.
In this regard, I have high hopes for Japanesepod. I'm buzzing through it because I already know most of the words; I'm just not used to hearing them spoken. It's really just a matter of continuous exposure (I hope) to the point where my brain makes the connections it needs to. Audio cards probably helped me, but not as much as I had hoped. I think I got too used to hearing them or something. I prefer the format of Japanesepod because they force a new dialogue on you every lesson and you interpret the whole thing as best you can before they give you the translation in blocks. It feels a whole lot more natural than learning from the same isolated sentences over and over because it really makes your mind scramble in a different way. However, I will admit that most of my cards do not contain audio so perhaps if I would have been less lazy about that, I would be having less problems right now on the verbal front.
AJATT's youtube videos... - kazelee - 2008-11-20
Dragg Wrote:In this regard, I have high hopes for Japanesepod. I'm buzzing through it because I already know most of the words; I'm just not used to hearing them spoken. It's really just a matter of continuous exposure (I hope) to the point where my brain makes the connections it needs to. Audio cards probably helped me, but not as much as I had hoped. I think I got too used to hearing them or something. I prefer the format of Japanesepod because they force a new dialogue on you every lesson and you interpret the whole thing as best you can before they give you the translation in blocks. It feels a whole lot more natural than learning from the same isolated sentences over and over because it really makes your mind scramble in a different way. However, I will admit that most of my cards do not contain audio so perhaps if I would have been less lazy about that, I would be having less problems right now on the verbal front.Perhaps you should give iKnow a go... if for nothing only than the dictation portion of the site. It makes things seem less like a blizzard and more like a bunch of words you don't understand. Being able to discern where one word starts and another ends helps alot.
You could also check out some fansubbed dramas with Japanese scripts/subs, and then get acquainted with the time slider.
For the record: Having fun while learning is not something Khatzu cooked up. It appears quite often, in virtually every field of study.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-20
Kaze, I will give Iknow a shot. Thanks for the advice.
As for Khatzu's quote about making learning constantly fun, I agree it is not an original idea. I believe it is one of those half-truths to get people motivated about learning. I don't really want to get in a huge debate about AJATT because I have done that here in the past only to get heavily slammed by raging fanboys, but I will say that I feel that his methods and results are highly exaggerated.
AJATT's youtube videos... - kazelee - 2008-11-20
Sorry, my intention was not to start a debate. I'm just an advocate of fun in learning. I don't have bias towards any method in particular. Any method will get you to point B if you stick to it long enough.
Though, I am more towards the philosophy of taking what's best about these methods and rolling with them, and discarding anything you don't see as useful; Jeet Kun Do of language learning. No methods, just philosophy.
AJATT's youtube videos... - alyks - 2008-11-21
I don't want to get into a debate about AJATT either, but...
I think the one thing that we can all agree on is that constant Japanese study leads to fluency. I really think the core of AJATT is constant 24/7 hour exposure. And that, above everything else he says on the site, is why anything works. There was a thread here, something like "10,000 hours".
AJATT's youtube videos... - mentat_kgs - 2008-11-21
I like miki's blog too. And as natsuko's storytelling. She once told a mukasibanasi and it was very enjoyable.
But generaly, it is boring.
Dragg, I cannot relate to your problem.
At this time, I have only ~2000 cards in my vocabulary, covering 68% of the joyo.
I have a lot of trouble making sense of everything, but I think it is because my vocabulary is short and I was not yet exposed to some grammar points.
But _not_ on listening. I'm for 2 months already only watching anime without subs. About 2-3 episodes/day. In the beggining, I could not understand much, but for instance, yesterday, I watched the episode 07 of nodame cantabile pari hen and I think I could understand 99% of it.
The fact that I had already watched the first nodame cantabile series and the first 6 episodes of the second series might have helped ond the vocubalary side, but my point is that my listening skill is far superior than my "reading" skill.
And I never did audio cards. No one. Never. I just listen to what I enjoy, continuosly, all day long, repeteadly. I have Tiger & Dragon, Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star ripped audio in my mp3 player and I listen to them at least 3-4 hours/day.
Resuming, I went from Pimsleur begginer (first 30 lessons), did about ~20 intermediate lessons on japanesepod (did not liked as much) to real audio.
So maybe your audio cards were simply not helping. You need more real listening practice. How much time/day do you spend watching raw japanese audio?
AJATT's youtube videos... - wccrawford - 2008-11-21
mentat_kgs Wrote:watching anime without subsI'm looking forward to this point. Currently, I can only watch stuff like 'Chi's Sweet Home' without subs, but I'm getting better all the time.
I wonder, though... Would time be better spent learning vocab from a book or iKnow, or watching anime that you can't understand most of? I have to learn towards the book/iKnow learning. (I'm assuming the same amount of time spent per day on each. If the anime got a lot more time, it would probably win. There are many factors, though.)
AJATT's youtube videos... - Nukemarine - 2008-11-21
Dragg Wrote:Kaze, I will give Iknow a shot. Thanks for the advice.If you use terms like "slam" and "raging fanboys", I kind of question what merits you were bringing to the discussion. When you say methods and results are highly exaggerated, it rings false (in Khatsumoto's case) as he did get a job in Japan. I can't comment on his fluency, now that I think about it, since that should be left for a native speaker(s) to decide. Based on the native speakers I've shown his site too (specifically his Japanese writing, the audio posts he made), it tells me he's got high caliber skills. So the results don't seem exaggerated. As for methods, well, read below.
As for Khatzu's quote about making learning constantly fun, I agree it is not an original idea. I believe it is one of those half-truths to get people motivated about learning. I don't really want to get in a huge debate about AJATT because I have done that here in the past only to get heavily slammed by raging fanboys, but I will say that I feel that his methods and results are highly exaggerated.
I wouldn't call it a half-truth that you learn things that are fun. I'll take a risky assumption and say it's human nature. Hell, it goes beyond learning. People will work for a lower paying job that they enjoy. Some turn down a promotion knowing that it takes them "out of the field, into the office".
As for AJATT, he's been honest that these are things that work for him. After using it for a year, I've slowly taken my own way of doing things as have others. A lot of that though is the "studying" portion of it. Khatsu apparently drew his sentences, aside from All About Particles, from mangas and tv shows and internet pages. Others including myself, like the less intensive pre-packaged sentences such as from iKnow, KO2k1, and other books. Khatsu does audio to production, while others prefer recognition.
The thing that seems to get people is that immersion part. The full removal of English as much as you can. I can't do it, but I don't degrade the concept because of it. To me, it just makes sense. What makes it hard is that it's so easy not to do it.
AJATT's youtube videos... - mentat_kgs - 2008-11-21
wccrawford Wrote:Well, I did not. When I started to watch anime I was just getting out of pimsleur.mentat_kgs Wrote:watching anime without subsI'm looking forward to this point. Currently, I can only watch stuff like 'Chi's Sweet Home' without subs, but I'm getting better all the time.
I wonder, though... Would time be better spent learning vocab from a book or iKnow, or watching anime that you can't understand most of? I have to learn towards the book/iKnow learning. (I'm assuming the same amount of time spent per day on each. If the anime got a lot more time, it would probably win. There are many factors, though.)
I actualy did pimsleur/japanesepod at the same time, 1 lesson everyday each, for 30 days, while still doing RTK.
That means I could not understand much besides "desu" in the end of sentences.
That pretty much proves, at least for me, that it is possible to stick to "real" material from the beginning.
Things that I have to point out:
1) I really enjoyed to listen to the opennings with karaoke again and again.
2) I was doing (and I'm still doing) sentences.
I pretty much cover the pace in wich I'm learning japanese in my blog:
http://onhowtolearn.blogspot.com/
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-21
Nuke, I'm sorry if my tone bothered you even though I wasn't calling you or anybody else in this thread a raging fanboy. But I believe that what I wrote was true in terms of what has happened in the past. This forum has long been a place where people have debated the pros and cons of learning systems and resources. However, AJATT seems to be the one system (besides Heisig) that is immune to criticism. If someone starts listing what I feel are the faults of AJATT on this forum, they will usually get a response like "Don't use it if you don't like it. Why do you have to ruin it it for the people who feel that AJATT works for them." I guess there are a lot of people biased towards AJATT because they were linked to this site from there. I don't have anything personal to gain by criticizing AJATT. Just trying to put out opinions based on my experience and critical thinking. Just like you, I am open to the possibility that some of my ideas are flawed and biased. I have changed my own views before as well based on opinions here so I think freeflowing dialogue is healthy for this community. I was just expressing my annoyance that AJATT seems like an exception..
Btw, I never criticized the idea of fun in learning. I criticized the idea of "constant fun" in learning. I think that there is something to be said for doing hard grinding work to achieve a goal sometimes. You can try to make it as fun as possible, but as with any major challenge, there are hurdles along the way.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-21
Mentat, sorry I missed your post directed towards me. Currently, I listen to only about a half hour to an hour of raw audio a day. However, there was a period in the past where I tried listening to raw Japanese nearly all day, every day. Maybe I didn't do it for long enough to benefit from it though. How long had you been listening to raw Japanese before you were able to understand 99 percent of an anime on the fly? That is pretty amazing to go from Pimsleur to near-perfect comprehension in a short time. You might be gifted.
AJATT's youtube videos... - PrettyKitty - 2008-11-21
Nuke, where can you see stuff Khatzu has written in Japanese? I've only ever seen that English site from him.
AJATT's youtube videos... - albion - 2008-11-21
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/category/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E
AJATT's youtube videos... - kazelee - 2008-11-21
Dragg Wrote:That is pretty amazing to go from Pimsleur to near-perfect comprehension in a short time. You might be gifted.Either that, or the level of listening wasn't too difficult.
AJATT's youtube videos... - alyks - 2008-11-21
Dragg Wrote:How long had you been listening to raw Japanese before you were able to understand 99 percent of an anime on the fly? That is pretty amazing to go from Pimsleur to near-perfect comprehension in a short time. You might be gifted.Nothing against Mentat here, but it's not because he's super smart of not. If you put in the hours, you will be rewarded. Simple as that.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Dragg - 2008-11-21
Alyks, I am going to greatly increase my raw Japanese listening over at least the next week and see where it gets me. I will go as close to the all-the-time mark as reasonably possible. Since my understanding of Japanese grammar and vocabularly are fairly good now, it is possible that I could benefit a lot more from this attempt than last time I tried. I will try to keep an open mind about the process and see where it gets me.
The reason that I asked Mentat for a timeline is that my schedule only allows me to push the envelope until the end of December. I'm wondering about how much progress he had made in about that time for the sake of comparison. I have also been doing the Japancast intermediate level lessons so I would be starting at approximately the same skill level of listening comprehension that he was at before his immersion.
AJATT's youtube videos... - vosmiura - 2008-11-21
Can I ask, when listening to mp3s of dramas/anime, do you just listen through the whole thing or do you stop & rewind segments over & over until they get clear?
For me I haven't really tried just constant listening or background listening much, but I do find that when watching dramas, by rewinding some segments over & over, I can pick up more each time.
AJATT's youtube videos... - playadom - 2008-11-21
alyks Wrote:Nothing against Mentat here, but it's not because he's super smart of not. If you put in the hours, you will be rewarded. Simple as that.Very true! Of course, one could argue that he's gifted at hard work...
AJATT's youtube videos... - phauna - 2008-11-21
Personally I didn't and don't believe the usefulness of listening to native audio for comprehension from the beginning. For this reason and another big one, I didn't listen very much to audio, and have just done cards for about ten months. I'm around the 6000 number that Khatzu says he had, and even with a possibly more varied and better stocked one since it's mostly from JFE, KO, and real sources. However I feel lately that the audio part is extremely important to the method and I don't feel near fluent.
I still don't think it would have helped to listen all the time to unintelligible audio from the start, rather, the more knowledge you have in your head initially, the more you are going to benefit from audio. However there is also no line where it would have been appropriate to start so the best perhaps would have been to listen to graded audio from the start. The problem is finding this audio. So AJATT method in this respect is right and wrong, graded audio would be better, but it's hard to get, so anything is better than nothing.
So lately I can say a lot of things, I can read very well for that amount of time and I can write if I need to. However I can't understand spoken normal Japanese, even gist wise, this skill is really lagging. If I can't hear the question, then I can't respond. I can't really remedy this situation quickly as I'm still not in a position to listen to Japanese all day. However, from my own experience, I advise not to wait to start audio, even if you are going to be wasting a lot of time listening to things you don't understand and don't benefit from. The habit is more important.
AJATT's youtube videos... - kazelee - 2008-11-21
Perhaps he should have called his site Some Japanese, Some of the Time. LOL.
AJATT's youtube videos... - Nukemarine - 2008-11-21
There's tons of sources for Japanese. It's a matter of finding something that's to your liking that you'll listen to a lot.
There in lies the problem. Why would you listen to jibberish (which, let's face it, at the beginning Japanese is jibberish) for fun? Plus, who wants to spend 300 dollars on a Season 1 of Prison Break or 24 in Japanese? "Oh, wait, Battlestar Galactica Season 1 is out in Japanese? Umm, honey, can you rent these for me at Tsutaya and I'll rip them on my laptop." I actually like BSG, and I can see myself watching it is Japanese. Ripping the audio for it would be fun.
I just wonder if I'd have done that October last year (when I tried starting AJATT). I was listening to various Japanese music. I did rip Spiderman 1, 2, Harry Potter and X-men and put it on my i-pod. I just could not sit through watching them. But I did listen to them a lot on my iPod (along with 250 Japanese songs, Hokkaido girl chat, and yomiuri shinbun news).
Anyway, some tips I took wrong and some things you can do:
AJATT made a tip way back to rip audio from movies, break it up in 3:30 minutes, and play it on random. I concur with the breaking it up, but still play it in order. I did this with entire season of IWGP, Tiger and Dragon and Galileo. It became annoying on random, but when I began doing them by episode in order, I found myself thinking back on the scenes and concentrating on what was being said. I actually have listened to those shows more than I've watched them. So, even though I watched them subtitled, I think I benefited with those three shows thanks to ripping the audio and listening. The gibberish decreases. I need to do this with more shows now.
But yes, just listening to something you did not understand just is work. And it's not fun. And it does go against what AJATT is partly about.
Anyway, if you can't stand the idea of WATCHING shows you don't understand (yes, I'm in that category), the iPod is what you need in the beginning. Find a show you understood (Japanese dub of show or movie you watched, Japanese show you watched subbed), rip the audio and listen to it mixed in with Japanese music you like. Listen to it all the time just loud enough to make it more than background noise. I don't think it's training so much as conditioning.
PS: I think I can listen very well. I just don't understand a damn thing. It's on par with the way I can read, in that I can distinguish the words but not understand them. Maybe that's why I connected so well with iKnow. It's increasing my vocabulary, putting all this latent training to use. I also can grasp more with Japanese subtitles, which means I can understand the show and be willing to watch it with zero English.