mattimus Wrote:Regarding the divorce, that's not surprising. The immersion method really requires going into monk-mode for a long time, and the idea of doing that while in a relationship leads to a pretty obvious conclusion. How many consecutive days in a row can you tell your partner "let's just stay in and watch dramas in a language you don't understand" before the relationship explodes?

To each his own, but that's exactly why I was never into the "listen to podcasts you don't understand until your ears bleed" school of language learning. Don't get me wrong - I'm a geek who can spend anywhere from two to eight hours a day in Japanese, depending on my schedule. But I also have a life in English (at least for the near future), and I'm not going to let it wither and die in the name of becoming fluent in 18 months.

Learning another language should expand your horizons, not shrink them.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:Learning another language should expand your horizons, not shrink them.

100% agree! Sorry just had to quote that

Today I was reading through a lot of the articles on http://www.hackingchinese.com/ after not looking at it for a few years. It's really been fleshed out quite a lot, with a bunch of nice guest posts and helpful links. A great resource to point people towards who are starting out on learning Chinese, or Japanese for that matter.

And you know what... it's basically AJATT. I'm not saying it's derivative. It's an excellent site that is actually superior in many ways in terms of readability and presentation. Speaking though as somebody who read many of Khatz's old articles a dozen times (don't look at my like that), I can see his thinking reflected in almost every article. And it's not just there, but in so many other sites. So that's where Khatzumoto's thinking is at least, anyway. It's everywhere now. Even where it has been rightfully superseded or modified the attitude of playful experimentation and utilization of technology to make study and immersion easier remains. As a technically savvy young guy he started out adapting and using technology for language learning purposes prior to the explosion of various services and applications that have kicked off since then. He wasn't necessarily the first to do so, but he was one of the first to write about many of the technologies and mental techniques/attitudes that has since become so widespread. As a pioneer so many of us have been influenced, even if indirectly. It's a shame how things ended up towards the end, but I'll always be grateful for the day I first discovered his writing.

yes while he's not universally praised on this forum, I can state categorically that I would not have had the understanding of how to DIY a self-study curriculum without his website (c. 2010). As a result of stumbling onto the website this man wrote, I now have an L2 and part of an L3. That's incredible. In America a white person speaking a foreign language is looked at like some kind of sorcery.
his style of learning isn't for everyone but it worked really really well for me, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude.

I guess that is why, being that I believe some of those essays are really brilliant, I want to hold this guy up as someone to be inspired by. And that is why I am also fairly tough on him for the moral failings. I appreciate that intelligence and morality are often unrelated (e.g. Bill Clinton), however I want them to be... and for that, the way this whole thing ended is really unfortunate.

It's interesting that people were so inspired by Khatz. My reaction to his writing was VERY negative. Along the lines of, "Wow, this guy is a ***** idiot and this learning method sounds awful (also, it's not important, but these jokes suck)." For me someone not attempting to evaluate the evidence or validity of their claim is the height of stupidity, and Khatz was guilty of precisely that. He did not seem at all cautious about making an assertion.

Since then I've come to appreciate that he inspired a lot of people, but I don't think I could ever have felt that way. I'm always evaluating everything I hear with the question "Should I really believe this?" and Khatz never passed the test.

Tzadeck Wrote:For me someone not attempting to evaluate the evidence or validity of their claim is the height of stupidity, and Khatz was guilty of precisely that. He did not seem at all cautious about making an assertion.

He gave us the method he said he used. I would say the evidence were his results. He had every right to assert that his method worked, because it did for at least one person.

Quote:I'm always evaluating everything I hear with the question "Should I really believe this?" and Khatz never passed the test.

It really comes down to, do you believe he lied about his results.

dtcamero Wrote:yes while he's not universally praised on this forum, I can state categorically that I would not have had the understanding of how to DIY a self-study curriculum without his website (c. 2010). As a result of stumbling onto the website this man wrote, I now have an L2 and part of an L3. That's incredible. In America a white person speaking a foreign language is looked at like some kind of sorcery.
his style of learning isn't for everyone but it worked really really well for me, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude.

I agree with this. His methods for language learning were tremendous for me, and inspired me to set up an environment for Japanese language immersion and learning that moved me forward dramatically from the textbook-based learning I had been pursuing. I am grateful for AJATT and that he took the time and effort to put it together.

That said, I think that his online persona was detrimental to his business and to his being viewed as having a valid educational method. Looking at his educational background and what he accomplished with coding and language learning, he is clearly a brilliant guy. For that reason, I could never understand hiding behind the Hookers & Blow, I slept with your Mom, Fo' Shizzle, the line drawings of little begging African kids, etc. bullcr*p that was on pretty much every single page of AJATT. And as a daily reader of AJATT for a couple of years, that wore so, SO thin. I also think it probably contributes to a lot of the reputability problems he has had over time, where people viewed him as some sort of charlatan. It did nothing IMHO towards building his credibility.

Tzadeck Wrote:Since then I've come to appreciate that he inspired a lot of people, but I don't think I could ever have felt that way. I'm always evaluating everything I hear with the question "Should I really believe this?" and Khatz never passed the test.

For me it was never inspiration... i'd stick my neck out and say i think most people that actually did learn a language from his site never got it from the self-help articles. it was the really early-on nuts-and-bolts advice that was valuable.
he held your hand and explained "this is RTK, this is an SRS. this is how you create sentence and cloze-deletion cards. this is how you do immersion intensively. daily practice is important.." etc.

that was life-changing advice, no exaggeration.

blackbrich Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:For me someone not attempting to evaluate the evidence or validity of their claim is the height of stupidity, and Khatz was guilty of precisely that. He did not seem at all cautious about making an assertion.

He gave us the method he said he used. I would say the evidence were his results. He had every right to assert that his method worked, because it did for at least one person.

Quote:I'm always evaluating everything I hear with the question "Should I really believe this?" and Khatz never passed the test.

It really comes down to, do you believe he lied about his results.

I don't think he was lying; rather, I think we're just in disagreement about the nature of evidence. A method working for a single individual is no evidence that it is likely to work for others, nor that it is better than another method. A method may have worked for Khatz, but maybe it only works for 3% of the population, in which case it's not of particular importance as a language learning method. There's also the matter of efficiency: if you devoted the same number of hours to another method as to the AJATT method you may have gotten better much faster--it's impossible to know either way without a sample much much larger than one person. (Methods with really low efficiency, such as listening to input far beyond your level, are essentially the same as just wasting time. It's a high opportunity cost: you could be devoting that time to something more useful or at least more enjoyable.)

Essentially, Khatz has no evidence for anything he is saying; he does have anecdote (i.e., he knows one case where the method worked--his own), but to me that's not persuasive.

It doesn't matter if he lied or not (he didn't).

What matters is that, even if you ignore all of his amazing articles and motivation, he is the one who single-handedly popularized both using an SRS to learn words/sentences and using the Heisig method (and to a lesser extent the concept of massive exposure and ignoring learner material) in the Japanese language learning community. These concepts were essentially foreign to the community before AJATT. The vast majority of you would be taking college classes and doing JPOD101 and filling out conjugation charts if it weren't for Khatz and his promotion of using a SRS and his influence on the Japanese language learning community, and the vast majority of you here who are fluent now would not be. The majority of you here would be those "been studying for 10 years, around N2 level" people if AJATT never happened. Even JLVLUP is one giant AJATT copy. The site owner's success story is buried somewhere on the AJATT blog.

Even Fabrice owes a large amount of this site's prominence due to AJATT sending them here directly and indirectly. This site's activity peak coincided with AJATT's popularity peak (2007-2011), and even indirectly a lot of people who know about Heisig only know about it because it really blew up again beginning in 2006 due to you know what.

Tzadeck Wrote:It's interesting that people were so inspired by Khatz. My reaction to his writing was VERY negative.

So was mine. He kept deleting my comments under his posts in a jiffy.

Some Internet 'language personalities' who had or still have a religious following:

Ziad Fazah - does he exist?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...PN=0&TPN=1

Penny Lewis

ALEXANDER ARGUELLES
http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html

Steve Kaufmann


OFF TOPIC:
The only person I'm inspired by is Malala Yousafzai.

Quote:Congrats Malala! The Nobel laureate scored straight As in O-Levels
The grades included A*s in maths, biology, chemistry, physics, and religious studies and As in history, geography and English.

She knows three languagues: Pashto (native), Urdu (second language), English (foreign/school language).
Class Dismissed: Malala’s Story
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/...0002500298

ryuudou Wrote:The vast majority of you would be taking college classes and doing JPOD101 and filling out conjugation charts if it weren't for Khatz and his promotion of using a SRS and his influence on the Japanese language learning community

and using paper flashcards, shudder...i cant tell you how many times ive seen people on the train going through a huge stack of index cards. i can only shake my head and smirk, but if not for ajatt that would have been me, lucky to be at N2.

As dt said, it wasn't "inspiration" so much as concrete explanations about what I was doing wrong, and how to go about fixing it, grounded in an understanding of what language is and how human beings acquire it. It was like a light-bulb going off for me, perhaps exactly because so much of what I had been doing for the previous six or seven years was really ineffectual or downright misguided. I see though how people smarter than me who had been using more reasonable methods from the start might not be particularly impressed, but I admittedly struggle to see to this day what is controversial about most of what he says.

I have the feeling that for some people AJATT actually means = "a method whereby a person is supposed to learn a foreign language by simply listening to it all the time, regardless of if they understand it or not. Includes sticking words on their walls and generally being a weird recluse."

Admittedly as promoted by Khatz it does contain all of the above... Except -minus- the word "simply", and -plus- everything else that actually makes his ideas and writings important. It's that plus part which is mostly good sense, and has been borne out by the successes of so many other people using similar variations of what he promotes.

ryuudou Wrote:It doesn't matter if he lied or not (he didn't).

What matters is that, even if you ignore all of his amazing articles and motivation, he is the one who single-handedly popularized both using an SRS to learn words/sentences and using the Heisig method (and to a lesser extent the concept of massive exposure and ignoring learner material) in the Japanese language learning community. These concepts were essentially foreign to the community before AJATT. The vast majority of you would be taking college classes and doing JPOD101 and filling out conjugation charts if it weren't for Khatz and his promotion of using a SRS and his influence on the Japanese language learning community, and the vast majority of you here who are fluent now would not be. The majority of you here would be those "been studying for 10 years, around N2 level" people if AJATT never happened. Even JLVLUP is one giant AJATT copy. The site owner's success story is buried somewhere on the AJATT blog.

Even Fabrice owes a large amount of this site's prominence due to AJATT sending them here directly and indirectly. This site's activity peak coincided with AJATT's popularity peak (2007-2011), and even indirectly a lot of people who know about Heisig only know about it because it really blew up again beginning in 2006 due to you know what.

Hmm, I see. I don't know... I've been living in Japan for seven years, and I'm fairly social so I've talked to hundreds of people about language learning. I've recommended Anki and methods of using it to dozens of people who were lost with how to go about self-study. And, to be honest, almost nobody stuck with it. It's just incredibly boring. I didn't stick with it either: I did SRS for a few months at a time a few times. It did help me get through RTK and get over a vocab hump between N2 and N1, but it hasn't been a particularly large part of my learning process (and I passed N1 in a reasonable time period).

Also, you seem to think Khatz was really the momentum behind all these things but I'm not really sure. I meet a lot of people who know about RTK--mostly because in Japan you can find it in most Japanese bookstores that have a Japanese Language section. And I meet some people who know Anki too. But I have basically never heard anyone mention AJATT or Khatz in real life--only on this forum, really.

Lastly, I don't actually believe that AJATT is faster than traditional methods. Not by number of hours invested, at least. Or, at least, I see no evidence.

Also, I'll say it before and I'll say it again: my college classes were absolutely the best and most useful part of my language learning process.

Tzadeck Wrote:Also, I'll say it before and I'll say it again: my college classes were absolutely the best and most useful part of my language learning process.

Speaking of anecdotal ness. That is still a case of one, and yourself to boot.

I have never met a person who studied Japan at college who was the slightest bit useful at actually interacting with customers in the real world. Hundreds and hundreds, all useless.

Japanese teachers and Japanese textbook writers are almost comically bad at presenting the language as it is spoken. What book series did you use?

kapalama Wrote:

Tzadeck Wrote:Also, I'll say it before and I'll say it again: my college classes were absolutely the best and most useful part of my language learning process.

Speaking of anecdotal ness. That is still a case of one, and yourself to boot.

Yeah. Basically, I'm saying that my anecdotal experience is different than his. Comparing anecdotes is completely okay. I'm saying that we have two different sets of experiences, not that mine represents reality better; it's hard to know which is closer to the objective truth (I didn't say this explicitly because it's annoying to be so overtly concerned with epistemology every time you mention an anecdote; instead I went with "I don't know..."). Of course people who were guided by AJATT are more likely to be surrounded by the influence of AJATT, and people who weren't are less likely. It's an extremely mundane observation.

What Khatz did was create an anecdotally-confirmed learning method and present it as if it were a sure-fire approach, and one superior to other methods. And his followers did the same. That's completely different than going "Okay, you think AJATT was very influential in these ways; it doesn't seem that way to me; also, I'm not sure if there's a good way to figure out which is true." The former requires evidence to substantiate, the latter isn't even making a claim. I would have been completely fine with what Khatz was saying if he presented it in a more honest way.

kapalama Wrote:I have never met a person who studied Japan at college who was the slightest bit useful at actually interacting with customers in the real world. Hundreds and hundreds, all useless.

Japanese teachers and Japanese textbook writers are almost comically bad at presenting the language as it is spoken. What book series did you use?

Japanese: The Spoken Language. Very natural sounding. (I had to use Genki II for four months on a study abroad and I f'in hated it, haha)

(Here's an example dialogue, selected randomly:
A:今度の集まりのこと、どうしましょう。
B:うん。あと一週間もないのに、まだ何も決まってないんでしょう？
A:来月ならいいのにね。伸ばすわけにはいきませんかね。
B:さあ。おそくなればなるほど、こられない人が増えますよ。
A:そうですね。じゃあ、とにかく場所だけでも決めなければ。
B:まあ、場所さえ決まれば、あとはなんとかなるでしょう。

Not bad for textbook-ese, I'd say.)

I found K.'s ideas stupid. I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, it's just my opinion, mind you.

I watched hell of a lot of Japanese movies (I didn't intend to learn Japanese then) and picked up plenty of expressions, some quite complicated.
I still remember some of them:


あの夏、いちばん静かな海。

男でもあり、女でもある。
私はアルファであり、オメガである。
神だ。あの人はやっぱり神だった。
伝説は伝説だ、事実ではない。
これが地獄だ。
俺は誰だ。

愛している。
愛しています。
私はあなたも愛しています。
愛って・・・何だろう
博士の愛した数式

ここはどこだ。
ここ、どこですか。夢じゃないですよね。
分からない。
分かりません。

その人、目が見えないんだよ。
刀は武士の魂です。

When I decided to learn Japanese, I L-Red Jehovah Witnesses' books.
天と地はどこから来たのでしょう。太陽や月や星，それに地球の上にあるたくさんのものは，どのようにして，できたのでしょう。

Not bad sentences, don't you think?

As to kanji. Just learned classical bushu and then relied on texts: audio + transcript + translation + pop-up dictionary. Plus my own brain.
Never used Heisig (to use mnemonics in English to remember thousands of individual kanji????), SRS, never listened without understanding (10 000 hours of listening, even while asleep, that's what K. recommended). EVERYTHING he said was stupid, stupid, stupid.
K. was just a clumsy learner who just picked somebody else’s ideas here and there.

blackbrich Wrote:It really comes down to, do you believe he lied about his results.

Well, let's look at what Khatz had going in, and where he ended up. Here's where he started:

1. Fluent in 3 languages (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...just-do-it)
2. Studied Chinese in high school
3. Super wealthy family (https://www.facebook.com/VoltzMedia/post...6383770994)
4. Took a high-level Japanese newspaper reading class (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about)

Those are some pretty sweet advantages that few people have.

After that, Khatz "started" studying Japanese. Apparently, everything up to that point didn't count. Okay, whatever. Then he spent "18-24 hours a day doing something, anything in Japanese." That I believe. He called it "fun." Well, eye of the beholder.

And here's what his results were after 18 months:

1.Claimed the ability to "read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese"
2. No JLPT certification
3. Some years later, appeared in a truly cringe-worthy video

Given what he had going in, what he put himself through, and what his "results" were, I kind of wish he were lying. He could've at least made up something a little more impressive.

Now, don't get me wrong, I actually like Khatz. He's a funny, quirky guy. But anybody trying to duplicate his results needs to factor in his advantages. And certainly anybody shelling out thousands for AJATT "methods" needs to scrutinize his results a lot more closely.

He didn't even try for JLPT so I don't know why that's even mentioned. Also I remember he posted a daily schedule once for what he actually did and he definitely did not listen to 18-24 hours of audio per day. He didn't seem to do all that much at all.

kameden Wrote:He didn't even try for JLPT so I don't know why that's even mentioned. Also I remember he posted a daily schedule once for what he actually did and he definitely did not listen to 18-24 hours of audio per day. He didn't seem to do all that much at all.

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.

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.

I think his method is just an exaggerated version of what he did himself. But it's not technically impossible.

Tzadeck Wrote:

kapalama Wrote:I have never met a person who studied Japan at college who was the slightest bit useful at actually interacting with customers in the real world. Hundreds and hundreds, all useless.

Japanese teachers and Japanese textbook writers are almost comically bad at presenting the language as it is spoken. What book series did you use?

Japanese: The Spoken Language. Very natural sounding. (I had to use Genki II for four months on a study abroad and I f'in hated it, haha)

(Here's an example dialogue, selected randomly:
A:今度の集まりのこと、どうしましょう。
B:うん。あと一週間もないのに、まだ何も決まってないんでしょう？
A:来月ならいいのにね。伸ばすわけにはいきませんかね。
B:さあ。おそくなればなるほど、こられない人が増えますよ。
A:そうですね。じゃあ、とにかく場所だけでも決めなければ。
B:まあ、場所さえ決まれば、あとはなんとかなるでしょう。

Not bad for textbook-ese, I'd say.)

Not bad より，that is pretty much a real world conversation, with all the backtracking and even an のにね! My favorite thing when first hearing Japanese is that there were times when なのにね would be said.
checks google.....
Hey you found the book I used to teach myself Japanese! (seriously) Lost in 4 international moves is basically every book I ever owned.

I completely forgot that there was a textbook that was not an annoyance in the real world. What was the full run of books you used, and how many years did you study in college?

buonaparte Wrote:His ideas were STUPID. IMPOSSIBLE.

What exactly were his ideas? I was never able to get past his wall of text to what his method was really about. The most that I ever got from ajatt beyond some 'motivation' to work hard was to play japanese in the background whether you understand it or not and make 10,000 sentence flash cards. Is there anything to his method beyond working really hard to the exclusion of nearly everything else? Can anybody actually summarize his actual method for me?

Off Topic: His mother is an ambassador, former model, and former rally driver? That's the most interesting thing I've read about him, especially the rally driver part.

Tzadeck Wrote:Japanese: The Spoken Language. Very natural sounding.

Interesting. It's an old book, but I noticed it's the text used in a few ivy league schools (Yale and MIT I believe)

yogert909 Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:His ideas were STUPID. IMPOSSIBLE.

What exactly were his ideas?

He had no ideas.
1. He read Heisig - learn how to write 3000 kanji. (mnemonics in English)
2. Then learn kana.
3. Sentences, SRS - ideas from http://www.antimoon.com/
4. 10 000 hours of listening, even while asleep, even if you don't understand
5. do it in 18 months.

And that's about all.