(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, 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".

I'm dying to know, how much is he asking? No reason it would be against the rules if it's just an advertised price for a product.

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, 11:19 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.

(2016-01-18, 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.

Haha, holy crap I didn't notice that part. I guess I should have expected it though. Thanks for the clarification.

Well all of this sounds great. I'm on my way to the bank now to get a loan so I can pay for this, I'll use my house as collateral. Even if I lose it I still win, because I'll finally be able to watch obscure cartoons IN THEIR ORIGINAL LANGUAGE!

So i wanna know is he gonna start posting to the blog again?

Maybe he finally blew through everyones silverspoon/neutrino money, and is trying to get more.

(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.

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, 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.

I second this. Additionally,
 - Since you -never- went to college, you're eligible for a lot of financial aid for first-time college attendees.
 - Your experience learning Japanese has surely taught you a lot about how to study effectively.
 - You could spend a semester (maybe a year?) in Japan as an exchange student.

2.5 years is pretty optimistic though, and I wouldn't particularly recommend it. If there's any chance you might want to go to graduate school, or any chance that you'll be applying for scholarships (MEXT scholarship to study in Japan even), you'll want the highest grades possible, not the earliest graduation possible.

If you just want the degree and done though, taking maximum course load is an option.

If finances are a concern (or if you didn't go to college straight out of high school because of grades), community college is a good way to go.

Taking a heavy course load (21-24 credit hours a semester) doesn't necessarily mean you make bad grades. Zon could take Japanese as his foreign language in college and get easy 4.0s for those classes and load up on other classes; where as someone else that doesn't know Japanese might have to study a lot for Japanese and that cuts into study time on other courses. You would probably want to try putting the language courses off till freshman year is over since some schools won't let you overload on credits until after your freshman year. You'd also have to take summer classes to have a chance at graduating in 2.5 years.

I feel if graduate school was on the books, then Zon would have already done college.

Another option that is there but seems unlikely is going to school in Japan for college, but you'd need a fair bit of money stashed away to do that. You don't have to take the entrance exam but you'll need to apply to the schools just like you would normally, with SAT scores, letters of rec., and transcripts. 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. I know one guy that did his 4 years at Sophia university and that's what he did, works at a financial company in Japan now. He did the 就職 the same as Japanese students but was placed in a position that let him make use of his bilingual skills.

(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

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.

(2016-01-18, 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.

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, 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.

You'll hear no argument from me on that, but its still better than being a teacher in my opinion but only marginally.

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, 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!

(2016-01-19, 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.

I second the community college suggestion (or a technical school). If you look around, you might find one that has a transfer program with another college, so that you can get an associate degree and seamlessly transition into a bachelor's program (this is how I'm doing my EE undergraduate).
The upsides being mainly these two:
1.) You save a ton of money on the first half of the program (while still getting quality instruction, depending on the school)
2.) These programs are usually designed so that even people in their thirties and forties can attend classes properly (so, evening classes). Many of the people in my program have full-time jobs and families, yet are doing fine.

(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.

(2016-01-20, 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.

Site's back up

http://thelanguagedojo.com/2016/01/guest...anchanman/

I hope you don't mind me replying to this here?

Anyway, thanks for the great post Dan! I’m sorry to hear you had such a rough experience.
Your story is really similar to mine in a lot of ways. I also did AJATT full on for a good while, which allowed me to get a scholarship to come and study in Japan like you. Also at Kyodai in the Faculty of Letters, coincidentally. I also live in Yoshidaryo now. Which makes me wonder, do we maybe know each other? haha
 
I took a gap year between graduating high school and coming to Japan, which I think was really important for me. It gave me time to emerge from my AJATT-induced insanity and become a bit more adjusted to reality. By the time I got here in April 2012 I’d mostly overcome the unrealistic view of the country I had back in my AJATT days. Also, I made a bunch of great friends with people on the same program as me, which has probably been the most important contributing factor to my happiness here over these last 3 and a half years. Having a good girlfriend has also been very important, as it seems it was for you too. I’ve also been very lucky in the way of scholarship money and baitos. The scholarship money I get always been ample for me alone, and on top of that I’ve managed to get a few really easy baitos that pay well. I also have a number of friends on different programs who are having a rough time financially speaking like you did though.
 
Managing to escape the mindset of practically wanting to *be Japanese* before I got here was critical for me. If you’re locked into that AJATT mindset, it can set you up for a rude shock when you actually come to live here I think. On the other hand, the year or so when I was doing AJATT back home was one of the happiest periods in my life. Being so motivated and dedicated to something like that was really awesome. Sadly, I’ve never been able to regain that level of motivation. In my time here I’ve tended just to do the minimum required to get good grades and move forward. On a whole, I’ve been very lazy. It also didn’t help that a senpai of mine taught me an easy way to get great grades here, which further provoked my laziness.
It sounds like your experience of doing masters in the faculty of letters here was really intense. While I’m sure there are some big differences between undergrad and masters, a couple of my friends doing masters here never seemed to have it that tough. I’m wondering, did you choose to study a lot, or was that just the normal workload?
 
"Each day I’d walk along the cluttered hallway of my dormitory, down the end to the dirty unisex squat toilets. “
I can certainly relate to this haha. Winters in the old building are pretty brutal… I always used to use the４共toilets when I was living there, because I couldn’t stand those washiki abominations.
Things have got a lot better here though! The dorm got a new building last April, which is actually pretty sweet. New rooms, new showers, new kitchen, new conference rooms. A big step up from the old building (although everyone’s done a pretty good job of dirtying the place in the six months since its completion). I kinda miss living in the old building though, it has a lot more character.
One thing I do hate about the dorm is the “farming group”. A small group of barbarians who have slaughtered chickens, goats, rabbits and even an emu in the past. They even used the blood from the slaughtered emu to create a horrific mural on one of the walls of the refurbished cafeteria. These are the freaks who give the dorm a bad reputation. The whole 自治 thing is annoying as well, although pretty easy to ignore haha. The constant announcements on the loud speaker are a pain in the arse too.  On a whole though, I think Yoshidaryo is still the best option for Kyodai students. After renting an apartment for my first 18 months here, I realised it’s just a waste of money; there’s no point renting an expensive apartment when you can live in Yoshidaryo practically for free. Since being freed from paying rent, I’ve been able to live very comfortably off my scholarship money alone. Also, I think it’s comparatively easy to make friends and join in the community here, whereas in an apartment you’re very isolated. If you play your cards right you can get a room to yourself as well, instead of sharing with someone. Anyway, enough about the madhouse.
 
I’m interested to hear more about your experience working in Japan! I’m in my 3rd year now at Kyodai and have just recently started shuukatsu. I’m thinking IT at the moment. I just wanna work at a good company for 2 or 3 years to get training/experience before relocating back home (as a history major, I don’t have many job opportunities waiting for me back home straight out of uni). I’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that I’ll be worked like a dog and be miserable at most companies, but obviously would like to avoid that if possible. Do you have any advice? What sort of company did you work at?

Hey no kidding. That's some coincidence! I doubt we've ever met because I left the dorm at the start of 2013, and graduated at the start of 2014, but we probably know a lot of the same people. Good to hear that construction at Yoshida dorm got finished. It was still being built last time I visited. It is a pretty cool place in its way. And very true about it being a good option for saving money. After half a year in a shared room I got a room of my own which I renovated in the south wing, second floor. It was really nice and if I had stayed in it for my last year I would have saved quite a lot of money, but GF just couldn't stand the filthy showers and toilets (we were still on 3 moldy showers for 100 plus people at that point). 

About post grad: it was pretty intense for me because of the research and thesis writing (not because of the coursework which was easy to ace; just turn up, read something and hand something in). Also the training for the entrance exam. Was the only non-Asian to enter into post-grad there in 2011. I needed to be able to write about Western and Japanese philosophy in Japanese, and I needed to learn another language, in my case German, as it was expected to have two foreign languages. So yes, training for that in the cold months really wore me out. 

Good to know you have been enjoying the experience. I really did enjoy quite a lot of it too, although I focused more on the really difficult first year in the piece I wrote.

Regarding Shuukatsu, I never did it because I intended to continue on and go to a uni in the states for PhD. I shot too high though and did poorly on a final interview (I was really burned out at that point staying up all the time doing my paper). That fell through, and my partner got a job in Tokyo, so I decided to take a couple years off before going home and stick with her. Suddenly turning up in Tokyo with no job... not a great idea. So I ended up as a hakken shain working without any transport fees or bonus money (also no overtime though, which was a plus).

What I can tell you though from my partners experience is to be very suspicious of any company you apply for in Japan. Especially if they are in IT. I would recommend shooting for a "maker" instead that has a decent bottom line. If they have a decent income, then you have a better chance that they won't be trying to exploit you to save a buck. There is a difference between being miserable and being mercilessly exploited. Because things are so cut-throat and a lot of companies are barely keeping above water they strategically use the weak protection of labor rights to make more money. I.E. step 1) lie about the conditions and hire more people than you actually need. Step 2) make them work like a dog for a few years until they burn out and quit, hence getting super good returns on your labor costs. Step 3) Get some more meat for the grinder. In the long run this is destroying the mental health of the youth and in turn the country itself which is supporting the existence of these businesses, just like cancer kills its host. They don't give a shit though. They have money to make. So, do a bit of research. For example, look into the rate at which a company loses its employees within the first few years. If it's getting up to a 50% rate within three years then you are looking at a bonafide black company. Remember, it doesn't matter how famous the brand of the company is. 
So yeah, look into this. There are a few books on the subject you can read. For example, 　ブラック企業 日本を食いつぶす妖怪 (文春新書) .


Best of luck!

[Zgarbas]

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, 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?

That's normal for the old Japan post grad unis. You need English (or in my case Japanese), plus a second foreign language. Keep in mind that I was in the school of letters, not researching or publishing in science. It would make little sense to come all the way to Japan to go to a Japanese university school of letters and read and write in English. I'd be better of where I already was. Everybody is Japanese, save a few Chinese. Any other foreign students in post grad at a place like Kyodai are going to be doing science or sociology research in a different department, not the school of letters.

Just as a concrete example, but the Japanese students in my research room would have mostly done English and German as their foreign languages. English for participating in academic conferences etc. abroad, German for actually reading 18th-20th century philosophy like Kant, Husserl and Heidegger. Some people do French instead, some do both, but mostly it would be German. Everybody would write their thesis in Japanese though.

(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.

If I called someone out on this in Korea they'd say "PLEASE UNDERSTAND MY CULTURE!" Is there a Japanese version of this phrase that everyone uses to explain everything?