As every method has both positive and negative aspects, and they are in part subjective, I'm not going to speak about what I think of AJATT, but:

Quote:Another reason why listening to raw audio can be beneficial is when you hit the vocab stage and become accustomed to words. Where your listening comprehension developed to become somehwat familiar to the syllables in a stream of audio that you don't understand, learning vocab can help you isolate individual words in that stream and be able to better recognize them through a different amount of media types.

Quote:A staple of what AJATT has been standing for is the comprehensible input method. Being exposed to completely incomprehensible material won't have you acquire anything. As you make progress though, material isn't going to be completely incomprehensible, and there will be more and more "i+1" bits. A flooding of as much exposure to the language as possible is undoubtedly going to contain comprehensible input

I'm doing this and I find those two comments are true, at least for me To try it for a month isn't going to hurt anyway, so try it and if it doesn't works, then drop it. But as they already said, it is essential you do this beside vocabulary, so the two things sustain mutually

Quote:A flooding of as much exposure to the language as possible is undoubtedly going to contain comprehensible input

If you look up what Stephen Krashen has said -- he's the originator of the theory of comprehensible input -- he's very firm that listening to target language TV/radio doesn't really help when you're a beginner because it's so hard to parse the fast stream of sound into separate words. At the stage where it's as much as you can do to recognize the basic language routines that keep coming up -- ただいま、お帰りなさい -- the ratio of comprehensible input to incomprehensible input is so low that it's doing you very little good. It's not really comprehensible input unless it's slow enough, clear enough, and controlled enough in terms of vocabulary that you can understand everything or almost everything.

And it's not like it's going to hurt you, but in terms of efficiency -- I think it's called 'All Japanese All the Time' because it's so hard to pick up enough crumbs of comprehensible input unless you really are doing it 8 or 16 hours a day. It's probably just as helpful to spend an hour a day talking to someone who can talk slowly/clearly for you, or listening to podcasts for language learners, or in classes with a comprehensible input philosophy, as to spend all your waking hours with Japanese TV on.

Fillanzea Wrote:

Quote:A flooding of as much exposure to the language as possible is undoubtedly going to contain comprehensible input

If you look up what Stephen Krashen has said -- he's the originator of the theory of comprehensible input -- he's very firm that listening to target language TV/radio doesn't really help when you're a beginner because it's so hard to parse the fast stream of sound into separate words. At the stage where it's as much as you can do to recognize the basic language routines that keep coming up -- ただいま、お帰りなさい -- the ratio of comprehensible input to incomprehensible input is so low that it's doing you very little good. It's not really comprehensible input unless it's slow enough, clear enough, and controlled enough in terms of vocabulary that you can understand everything or almost everything.

And it's not like it's going to hurt you, but in terms of efficiency -- I think it's called 'All Japanese All the Time' because it's so hard to pick up enough crumbs of comprehensible input unless you really are doing it 8 or 16 hours a day. It's probably just as helpful to spend an hour a day talking to someone who can talk slowly/clearly for you, or listening to podcasts for language learners, or in classes with a comprehensible input philosophy, as to spend all your waking hours with Japanese TV on.

An hour a day does not compare to 24 after a certain threshold — Your skills will ramp up to the point where 24 hours of random input will give you more practice than 1 hour of controlled input. Furthermore one thing tons of natural random input does is instill subconscious patterns irrespective to language comprehension. Things like natural pauses, flow, and intonation. So when it comes to your efficiency critique you actually missed a large portion of the purpose. Khatz emphasized this and it's part of the reason he was mistaken for a Japanese person on the phone so often back in the day.

That said you can always have both kinds of input. That's the best if you really care about progress.

In response to what you said about passive audio listening you're probably right when it comes to your example or subbed anime, but in my experience its scary how good it works with podcast type audio or music. Especially music.

A specific example for me being before I even started learning Japanese I would listen to j-pop and rap all the time. After a while I stopped listening to those initial artists that got me into learning in the first place and moved on to new bands when I started to know more. I eventually got to a high enough level where I could watch TV with ease never looking up a word and felt very confident jumping into new material without having to study the book/show/movie beforehand. It was around that time I began to revisit some of my old loves that got me into the language in the first place. When I re-listened to the songs from that period not only did I understand every word they were saying because I had learned them in other contexts more recently, but I already knew every single thing they were going to say and could rap/sing along with ease as though I had been practicing. Songs that I not only hadn't heard in years, but whose content was at the time so beyond me that I couldn't even get my head around romanized approximations of the lyrics.

IMO that stuff does get in your head and will show itself/become useful if you give it time and deliberate study of those words and phrases. Even in unrelated contexts.

I have to agree what Ryuudou said about passive audio listening as well, from my experience.

Even when I was at low beginner level, I'd pick up some things, sure I defined chikushou as "thing you say when frustrated" and baka as "thing you say to someone when angry/frustrated at them" for a while, but it helped me remember words better after I looked them up if I already had a semi-definition in my head.

As I got further along, I started picking up bits of grammar. stuff like [noun] to onaji which I didn't know where I learned them from, but they just felt right to me. Later I figured out I had been picking them up from playing Japanese TV or podcasts in the background while I did other things. I had heard them so many times it just felt familiar.

It may be that massive amounts of largely incomprehensible input have some benefits; but it's *not* the same thing as comprehensible input as defined by the researcher who actually came up with the idea that comprehensible input is the only way we really acquire languages.

Fillanzea Wrote:It may be that massive amounts of largely incomprehensible input have some benefits; but it's *not* the same thing as comprehensible input as defined by the researcher who actually came up with the idea that comprehensible input is the only way we really acquire languages.

It's only an issue early on in learning, before we get to a point where there is enjoyable material that isn't majorly incomprehensible (as in only picking out lone words and short phrases here and there. What do you really mean by largely incomprehensible?).

Here are some words from the man himself, in this video at 30.05 after the audience question, where he describes how he never meant that you should specifically aim for strictly i+1 material.

Also in this conversation with Steve Kaufmann from the 17:00 mark forward where they talk about people wanting full transparency in their input, he says he will personally, at a low intermediate level, happily read something compelling (in his case Star Trek) at 60-70-, sometimes 80% understanding.

Yes, Krashen says that any comprehensible, compelling input in sufficient qualities is going to have i+1. But that's comprehensible input. (And I've seen him in other videos making the case that subtitled English TV is not going to be really helpful for English learners in Japan and Korea because it's too fast and the vocabulary is too advanced.)

It IS just a problem with the beginning stages. But I think it's something that needs to be addressed because the beginning stages can last a long time, and that's where most people lose their motivation and give up. I'm not sure if my own case is typical or not -- I've been studying Chinese quite seriously for two years and I'm just now getting to the point where I can do anything more than pick out short phrases here and there in Chinese dramas. I think I got there a little sooner with Japanese just because Sailor Moon is so simple and repetitive, but even after two years it wasn't at the point where I could follow a whole episode without subtitles. Heck, I was following university lectures in Japanese and I still had trouble with Japanese dramas, because at least my professors spoke slowly and clearly! If you can get input that's compelling even though you can't understand very much of it, then it's not a problem... but spending hours a day listening to stuff that's way above your level, hoping that it's just going to magically click? I just feel sorry for anyone who thinks that's what they've GOT to do, especially if they're like me and have a full-time job and freelance work and social life and have to schedule language study around the edges of that.

I do think it's a bit easier to read something above your level than to listen to something above your level, because you can read things over again and look words up in the dictionary -- if you're watching TV, even if it has target-language subtitles it's a hassle to pause to look a word up. But obviously there's a lot of individual variation in motivation, and tolerance for ambiguity, and so on.



This is Krashen from Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition:

Quote:1. OPTIMAL INPUT IS COMPREHENSIBLE
This is clearly the most important input characteristic. It amounts to the claim that when the acquirer does not understand the message, there will be no acquisition. In other words, incomprehensible input, or "noise", will not help.

Positing comprehensibility as a fundamental and necessary (but not sufficient) requirement makes several predictions that appear to be correct. It explains why it is practically impossible for someone to acquire a second or foreign language merely by listening to the radio, unless the acquirer speaks a very closely related language. A monolingual English speaker, for example, hearing Polish on the radio, would acquire nothing because the input would be only "noise".

This requirement also explains the apparent failure of educational TV programs to teach foreign languages. The input is simply not comprehensible. My own children watched programs such as Ville Allegre faithfully for years, and acquired about as much as I did: They could count from one to ten in Spanish and recognize a few words such as casa and mesa. The comprehensibility requirement predicts that TV would, in general, be somewhat more successful than radio as a language teacher, but that even TV would be inadequate in beginning stages.