yogert909 Wrote:

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)

Part of that is where she Elizabeth Jordan was a professor (Yale). And one of the reasons that it is dinged (now that I remember it) is that she invented her own romanization system for use in the books, based on pronunciation since her goal was to get people going and then throw away the romanization system IIRC.

Unlike PinYin, romanization is always a clusterpoop. Sinjyuku, Mati, Itoh, and then in Hawaii the romanization of the Okinawa names like Uyesugi, and hey on topic Khatzumoto.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

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. [...]

Damnit JapaneseRuleOf7, I began writing a post, walked away from my computer, and come back to see you've beaten me to making the exact same point I was planning on lol.

Either way, to add my own thoughts to what you've already said, I don't think he's technically lying, but I do think his start and end points are less defined than the claimed 18 month period.

Here's a quote from AJATT's about page: "I learned Japanese in 18 months by having fun. In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese."

I think it's fair to say 18 months is just a rough estimate in his claims. A few months longer or shorter doesn't really change anything.

But here is a quote from Khatz on another site dated June - August 2004: "I have, in the past year, come to understand 日本語 to a basic level--I can follow my favorite ドラマ（drama, IGWP)、 アニメ(anime), and even some of my favorite 歌 (songs)."

If he considers his end date September 2005, and we split the difference and say he posted that quote in July 2004, that would mean he spent 27 months rather than 18.

I don't think this on its own changes the validity of the AJATT method, but I think it goes to show that sizeable amounts of studying have been omitted from Khatz's "official" AJATT timeline.

Also, I don't know if there is a definite line when fluency occurs. I'm sure he didn't stop adding new material when he got to Japan in Sept '05. My Japanese isn't good enough yet to comment how cringe-worthy that video of him speaking is, but that was done almost four years after September 2005. Who knows how much improving took place in that time period (my guess is a lot).

If anyone were to ask me when I began studying Japanese, I would probably do the same thing. I'd tell you 2009 or something, but then I'd forget about the Pimsleur lessons I got off Limewire a couple years prior. Or the handful of terms I picked up from watching anime even before that. It's pretty human. I guess the difference is I'm not selling anyone my method.

yogert909 Wrote: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.

Agreed - his mom sounds like a total badass.

buonaparte Wrote:

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.

If you switch sentences with vocabulary and cut down the listening to 1-2k hours while awake plus 2-3k hours of reading then that is pretty similar to what I did.

I'm at circa 19 months in now and I would not call myself fluent (stupid word anyway), but I can comprehend next to everything that I hear/read (passed JLPT1 at 12 months for reference). And all of that while being a full-time University student (with almost every lecture in German) and also having a part time job (again, German as well English).

I did something similar to Khatz and got amazing results, and given that he got way better immersion and longer hours logged than me, his claims are obviously 100% believable from my point of view.

Sorry for bringing my personal story in here but I'm kind of sick of people calling stuff impossible just because it's something uncommon that they have not successfully been able to reproduce.

Like I said before I think he exaggerates his claims.

if I did this much in this amount of time I would have had these results

But in reality he was probably extrapolating based on his imperfect progress.

Take a look at this schedule:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...o-for-real

It shows that he really didn't even really do all that much himself, and considering this is the internet I would expect that schedule to even be a bit of an exaggeration.

I think in theory his exaggerated method and results are somewhat accurate, but I do not think he actually did that himself.

Tzadeck Wrote:

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.

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.

Yes, maybe they were the most useful part of your language learning process, but your language learning process took you 5 years to pass N1, and that was with you doing Anki (and other AJATT inspired things as well, Damien Elmes made Anki with the intention of studying Japanese and was a user of the AJATT "sentence method") which is the anti-thesis of "traditional methods" as you say. Believe me when I say classes are not the "best and most useful" part of learning Japanese.

And certainty not the fastest. Four years of college classes will generally get you between N4 and N3.

Tzadeck Wrote: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.

The people who randomly find it in the bookstore are the people who generally do it pen and paper or with flashcards like the book says. And that's more a Japan thing because it's a lot more rare in western book stores. It didn't have this large online presence until the AJATT times.

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.

They're not remotely impossible (the mathematics easily check out), and certainty not "stupid". I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from? Why is rapid Japanese acquisition "stupid"?

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote: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/bl … just-do-it)
2. Studied Chinese in high school
3. Super wealthy family (https://www.facebook.com/VoltzMedia/pos … 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.

1. Two of those were languages he was raised with. That has nothing to do with independent language acquisition.
2. His Chinese ability was nothing until after he learned Japanese. That's when he decided to actually study it.
3. That helps with anything, but isn't inherently related to Japanese.
4. That was one class during the journey (not before) that he likely took for elective credit. Not a starting advantage as you framed it.

I've noticed this trend in your posting where you blame things out of your control. You talk a lot about people having "different capacities for learning Japanese" which is essentially a way to rationalize failure. In this situation you're essentially doing the same thing, but instead attributing it to the idea that Khatz had secret advantages that you didn't and that's why he made faster progress than you.

Or could it just be that he put in more hours than you?

[Zgarbas]

Where does one hear buonaparte speaking?

Man, this thread has gotten really mean and really meta. If you could please not tread dangerously close to a flamewar, that would be great.

@Ryuudou You bring up a lot of good points. There is one I'd like to discuss (though it's directed at JapaneseRuleof7)

ryuudou Wrote:I've noticed this trend in your posting where you blame things out of your control. You talk a lot about people having "different capacities for learning Japanese" which is essentially a way to rationalize failure. In this situation you're essentially doing the same thing, but instead attributing it to the idea that Khatz had secret advantages that you didn't and that's why he made faster progress than you.

Or could it just be that he put in more hours than you?

I think every language learner (or every person for that matter) has advantages they should use as leverage, and disadvantages they need to overcome. Khatz is no different. The thing that sets him apart from the rest of us is that he downplays or omits his advantages in order to exaggerate his claims. And then he sells products based on his claims.

At the same time, there is nothing wrong with having advantages. His prior knowledge of some Chinese before learning Japanese was well earned. But in the context of learning Japanese, it's still an advantage.

Zgarbas Wrote:If you could please not tread dangerously close to a flamewar, that would be great.

This conversation has been blunt and contains a jab here and there, but I really do think we've done a good job on keeping it under control.

Do I just have a tin ear when it comes to the warning signs of a flamewar? Or maybe I'm just too much of a newb?

Did he put in more hours? In the short-term, absolutely. Did he get better results? Eh, that's questionable. But who the hell cares.

Khazumoto Vs. Seeroi: Epic Japanese Battles Absolutely no one Gives a Shit About.

It'd be better to look things that are a bit more relevant:

1. Saying that learning Japanese is "fun and easy," then going on to describe how you'll need to memorize all the kanji, followed by studying 10,000 sentences. Because that doesn't sound easy at all.

2. Saying that anyone can do it, just like he did. Again, it helps to have advantages. But it's flat-out discouraging to encourage a big fat kid to be a high jumper. That kid should work on being a sumo wrestler.

3. Charging people thousands of dollars. If it's so easy, why would you charge huge amounts? I guess that's the fun part.

4. Not properly honoring your money-back guarantee. Because that's over the line.

Jeez, I really gotta quit coming back to this thread. Okay, this time I really am out. Really. I mean it. Really.

CreepyAF Wrote:Do I just have a tin ear when it comes to the warning signs of a flamewar? Or maybe I'm just too much of a newb?

You just CreepyAF, dawg.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Seeroi:

Who?

ryuudou Wrote:Yes, maybe they were the most useful part of your language learning process, but your language learning process took you 5 years to pass N1, and that was with you doing Anki (and other AJATT inspired things as well, Damien Elmes made Anki with the intention of studying Japanese and was a user of the AJATT "sentence method") which is the anti-thesis of "traditional methods" as you say. Believe me when I say classes are not the "best and most useful" part of learning Japanese.

And certainty not the fastest. Four years of college classes will generally get you between N4 and N3.

I think I passed N1 in about the same time frame that almost everybody who studies relatively hard does.

Also, no, I won't believe you about classes. I know there are some shitty Japanese classes out there, and I know there are some good ones (I took two). I assume there are more bad ones than good ones; that's also true about learning physics, programming, music, Chinese, Spanish, astronomy, etc., i.e., basically everything. Again, a mundane observation.

buonaparte Wrote: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

...

EVERYTHING he said was stupid, stupid, stupid.
K. was just a clumsy learner who just picked somebody else’s ideas here and there.

So... you watched a lot of the actual language, from which you learned directly. Which a core idea he wanted to get across to learners. Looking at how it is actually done, learning forms from the source.

... but everything he said was stupid? I'm not following.

Regardless, you're free to think and say so. But if you want to convince anybody to that extent the starting point would be to try and understand what his position or ideas actually are, then based on a generous interpretation proceed to critique it.

kapalama Wrote:

CreepyAF Wrote:Do I just have a tin ear when it comes to the warning signs of a flamewar? Or maybe I'm just too much of a newb?

You just CreepyAF, dawg.

I try my best.

Danchan Wrote:So... you watched a lot of the actual language, from which you learned directly. Which a core idea he wanted to get across to learners. Looking at how it is actually done, learning forms from the source.

... but everything he said was stupid? I'm not following.

Are there language learning methods that don't think that listening practice is a good thing? Haha. Doesn't really seem like a method you can attribute to AJATT.

Tzadeck Wrote:

Danchan Wrote:So... you watched a lot of the actual language, from which you learned directly. Which a core idea he wanted to get across to learners. Looking at how it is actually done, learning forms from the source.

... but everything he said was stupid? I'm not following.

Are there language learning methods that don't think that listening practice is a good thing? Haha. Doesn't really seem like a method you can attribute to AJATT.

I'm not going to claim that this is the case for Khatz and AJATT, but I don't think anyone would claim that the person who invented the gear was just ripping off the work of the people that first used wheels and levers...

There's a reason patents are awarded to improvements on current technology, and a reason software can be copyrighted (whether you agree that these things awards should exist or not): society has deemed derivative work and packaged ideas to be creations with merit beyond their source or components.

Again, not saying that Khatz pioneered the use of SRS, mnemonics, and massive exposure all together to learn a language, but then, his site does seem to be the most associated with it from my perspective. Edison didn't invent the first light bulb (or the first of much of anything he made buckets of money from), but that doesn't keep him from being the person associated with their refinement and popularization, despite the fact that research into incandescent light started over half a century prior.

I'm sensing too much bitterness in this thread. If this continues, it will only devolve into the same mess as every other AJATT thread.

i think that we have a failure to communicate here, and the reason is quite simple.

khatz buried a cluster of great ideas within a mountain of nonsense. if you are turned off by his jokes, writing style, sales tactics, or any number of other possibly objectionable qualities, you have zero incentive to dig through that mountain of crap (that got bigger every day until recently) to try to find and pull out the nuggets of wisdom.

people objecting the strongest simply didn't read enough (because they hated it) to get through the crap and find the nuggets. It's like when I try to watch inception with a cute girl because i think its a great movie, but she's turned off by all the shooting and wants to make out or whatever, and i'm like "but baby...aw, o~k." and then later she doesn't understand whats going on and says that the movie is dumb.
The people strongest opposed to his ideas, which he badly summarized with over-simplistic catchphrases like "don't learn grammar" are 100 out of 100 times mistaken as to what those ideas actually were. because they couldn't get through reading the whole article, and all the other articles that it was connected to.
I don't blame you for that, but then you can't write a detailed disparaging book review for a book you didn't read fully because you hated it.

hence comments like

buonaparte Wrote:What exactly were his ideas?
He had no ideas.

And Tzadeck if you're such a stickler for verifyable results, i'm amazed that you stick as tenaciously as you do to classes being the way to go. In my life I have never met someone who simply took classes and without intense self-study became remotely functional in an L2.

this guy either

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.

That's two people's empirical observations of the results of language-learning classes efficacy. you say youself:

tzadeck Wrote:I know there are some good ones (I took two). I assume there are more bad ones than good ones

(emphasis mine) that's not a ringing endorsement, if classes are supposed to be the better alternative to this stupid man's self-study ideas, which are really Krashen and Antimoon's self-study ideas.

Moreover just in this thread you have a string of testimonials to the fact that this DIY self-study curriculum, which Khatz championed but didn't invent, brought people to language-learning success. One account is anecdotal but several builds plausibility. Classes have no greater proof of efficacy, if anything language college courses are famous in their failure to teach people the one thing that they are spending tens of thousands of dollars for.

I'm glad this thread took the turn that it did.

Khatz was always prone to wild exageration, and I could always feel it dripping off my screen as I read the site, even back in the day when IU had little experience of learning a language.

But it can't be denied that Khatz posts, particularly his early nuts-and-bolts stuff, gave me the tools I have used to build a solid base, on which, in a few years, I've managed to gradually build my Japanese upon, slowly but surely. Many of my study techniques and tools are modified and adapted from Khatz early posts, and other bloggers and websites clearly inspired by his ideas.

Khatz was really a trailblazer in a lot of very important ways, and I actually think he's, to no small part, somewhat responsible for why the online Japanese learning community seems to be years ahead of any other language learning communities in terms of utilising linguistic concepts and technology. Not necessarily directly, but through his influence steering people toward important jumping off points.

Even the closest runner up, the Chinese learning community, is just starting to really catch up on Japanese at all, and basically every other online language community look like they're still learning in the year 2000, compared to us.

I really think Khatz had a lot to do with that, and I hope that him being a poor businessman doesn't totally overshadow that.

EDIT: NVM, seems the thread got more personal since my last refresh

Ah, and K. said that classes suck. Language textbooks suck. Grammar sucks.

And that's absolute nonsense.

buonaparte Wrote:Ah, and K. said that classes suck. Language textbooks suck. Grammar sucks.

And that's absolute nonsense.

pink floyd wrote a handfull of shitty songs too...

buonaparte Wrote:Ah, and K. said that classes suck. Language textbooks suck. Grammar sucks.

And that's absolute nonsense.

Try and think back to when you were 21 yo and found something really cool, that you wanted to get the word out about.

There are few twenty one year olds who think that they can be persuasive presenting both side of an argument. Their brains are actually not done developing yet.

buonaparte Wrote:Ah, and K. said that classes suck. Language textbooks suck. Grammar sucks.

And that's absolute nonsense.

I'm very happy to avoid Chinese classes or textbooks. I use some learner material for mining sentences with sound files attached for my SRS deck, and from those sentences I get a grasp of various grammatical forms. Slowly I'm moving more towards reading intermediate texts with audio (using lingq.com and other sources), and watching movies and TV shows with subtitles. I take it easy, have a good time, and grow at a steady and measurable pace. I'm looking forward to one day having good Chinese without every having attended a class, read a textbook, or formally studied grammar. It's working fine so far.

For Japanese I started out with classes. They were OK half of the time, but in themselves grossly insufficient when it came to teaching me the tools and techniques I would need to realistically get good at the language in my own time. I suspect that is typical of most language courses taught at university. For example, reading and listening -a lot- is obviously important. But nobody ever stressed to me just how important it was. Certainly my teachers never tried to instill this habit in me in all the years I took classes. It was only ever "now lets read this dialogue".

Finding AJATT helped me make the shift from receiving fish, to learning how to fish for myself (to borrow the analogy from Hacking Chinese - http://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-h...essential/). I doubt I would have received a monbusho scholarship (or would have been capable of sitting and passing the post graduate entrance examination) without the changes I made to my study methods thanks to Khatz. Thanks to AJATT I could get paid to attend a graduate school in Japan and write my masters thesis in Japanese. Thanks to AJATT, I now work as a translator and interpreter (underpaid and grumpy, but I get to sit in an editing room and help people make animated TV shows. When I started AJATT I was still washing dishes part time). Thanks to AJATT, I feel confident in acquiring any other language I wish. The year I spent going hard core with AJATT style methods was one of most enjoyable and exciting things I had ever done. Years later I look back on it really fondly. All those great comics and books and radio programs and TV shows. The leaps in ability I could feel every month or so I pushed forward. A whole new world opening up all at once. Man it was such a blast. ( * and no, I'm not forgetting I had years of (inefficient) study down beforehand, or making any arguments in favor of fluent in x months type projects)

You don't need to like his writing, or the guy himself. But every time you dismiss everything he said out of hand you only show to me that you haven't actually really read what he wrote or tried to understand what position he is coming from. That is again, as DT says, arguably because Khatz himself wrote in an annoying fashion with a badly laid out site (actually I quite like his extremely assertive writing style here and there, minus some of the more juvenile humor, but each to his own.) But it is not because there isn't actually anything there of any meaning.

I don't think I have anything more to say on the topic at this point. Some people have asked for summaries of what he says. Well, the site is still there. You can read and find out. Or, if you prefer some better presentation, read similar ideas at http://www.hackingchinese.com, or http://www.spanish-only.com/, or http://thelanguagedojo.com/, or http://japaneselevelup.com/ or http://2mastery.com/, or http://www.antimoon.com/ (all similar to AJATT, influenced by it, or in antimoons case, a precursor to it).

dtcamero Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:Ah, and K. said that classes suck. Language textbooks suck. Grammar sucks.

And that's absolute nonsense.

pink floyd wrote a handfull of shitty songs too...

You mean ‘we don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control’?
Roger Waters must have meant a madrassa in Saudi Arabia or schools in North Korea.

Because schools even under communism (at least in Poland) taught us something. I learnt what a relative clause is in elementary school. If K. didn’t do it, he should blame himself, not grammar or schools.

OFFTOPIC

i went ahead and checked that chinese forum that's been mentioned here a couple of times and WOW, a nice surprise. it looks very...mature. there's a whole section about learning chinese language of course, but i was very surprised to find a subforum dedicated in its entirety to chinese culture, meaning chinese music, literature, movies, history, etc. and there are some very good discussion there, too. there's even a discussion about mo yan. i've never seen a thread about yasunari kawabata or kenzaburo oe on here. most japanese forums i've seen seem to cater mostly to teenagers or young adults.
i've been into chinese lit lately, so i'll be visiting that forum again, thanks for mentioning it (i can't remember who it was, sorry).

umetani666 Wrote:i've never seen a thread about yasunari kawabata or kenzaburo oe

I posted about them here, but not thread topics.

Oe just seems like an amazing human being in general.