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.

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.

I wasn't clear enough. Sorry. What I meant: I did learn something from watching movies (subtiltled), but it was insginifcant compared to the same amount of acutally studing with grammar handbooks, parallel texts and audio recordings.

I don't try to convince anybody. It's just chit-chat. That's what language fora are all about.

As to K.'s ideas once more. I did understand what his ideas were: NO IDEAS. A handful of general statements.
And some jokes about nothing in particular.

I don't deny that some people could have been inspired. Anything can inspire some people. I don't even deny that K. acheived the results that he claimed to have acheived.

EDIT
To clarify one more thing. I've never said K. was stupid. His ideas are.

ryuudou Wrote:

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?

They ARE impossible and stupid. Try to listen while you're asleep.

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

ryuudou Wrote:Why is rapid Japanese acquisition "stupid"?

Rapid acquision of anything is not stupid. A quickie is always good for you.

Here are some more or less useful Internet guides for language learners by people who know a thing or two about learning them.

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/L...y_Language

Steve Kaufmann

http://www.lingq.com/

Iversen
Guide to Learning Languages, part 1
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...16932&PN=1

Leo Smith
http://www.polydog.org/index.php?forums/...ig_dog.19/

Alexander Arguelles
http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/

Vladimir Skultety
http://www.foreverastudent.com/

Bakunin's log (Thai, Khmer) this guy is absolutely crazy.
http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.org...f=15&t=789



My late sister's guide with resources (Japanese, Mandarin, and more):
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/


I personally prefer books by professionals. I don't mind Internet resources, though.
So read some books on lingusitcs and psychology of learning by university professors.

My piece of advice:
always start with pronunciation and listening comprehension, not reading and writing.

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:

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?

They ARE impossible and stupid.

Objectively incorrect. You said "10k hours and 10k sentences in 18 months". Both of these things are mathematically possible even if you don't play music while you sleep.

buonaparte Wrote:Try to listen while you're asleep.

If you had read the site, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that playing it while sleeping was intended as a way to minimize the dead time in immersion that generally happens before you sleep and when you wake up. Khatz talked about how sometimes the Japanese wouldn't come back on until noon, and how leaving it on before bed fixed that problem.

Read the site before you type. It will do wonders. There's no point in you angrily attacking something you're demonstrating complete ignorance about. Danchan put it very well about you: "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."

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Good. As long as know we're all of this vitriol is coming from.

Danchan Wrote: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).

Thanks for this post it was inspiring.

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Good. As long as know we're all of this vitriol is coming from.

I don't think sniping at one another and attacking other people's language skills is in the spirit of this forum.

Seriously, folks, chill out - it's just a thread about language learning on the Internet.

Man, I don't know if I just never delved deep enough into other language communities, but I've noticed that the Japanese language just seems to have some really...bizarre activity associated with it. I've never seen this level of argument, drama, cynicism, etc on forums for any other language. That being said, I love it and that's what I'm here for.

Also, for some of the people speculating, I'm 99% sure Khatz has been to this forum, and probably to the AJATT thread. It's practically impossible to study Japanese using the internet and not find yourself here at some point, especially when the users use the same Kanji book you did.

I'm sorry if people are getting upset because I am inspired by the passion on all sides.

Clearly there are many good ideas, and many passionate inspirers, AND many successful approaches.

Which I am certainly all for.

And the fact that none of this was available when I was first struggling along, well all you guys are lucky!

I don't understand the hate for classes, either. It's true that many people who take classes don't end up reaching the higher levels of fluency, but on the other hand, you can find plenty of long abandoned blogs/YouTube channels of people who started studying Japanese through self-study/AJATT methods and seemingly didn't get far. I think most people who start out, whether it's through classes, self-study books, AJATT, or whatever, and don't have the motivation to put in the time necessary for practice and acquiring the mammoth-sized vocabulary that you won't learn just from classes or beginner's references, will probably flake out at some point without getting very far. If you take classes or download an Anki deck, just assuming that the method will push you along, you probably won't get far.

As for personal anecdotes, the most fluent foreigners I've met are non-Westerners, from places like China, Korea, or the Philippines, and who, from what I can tell, have never used methods like SRS or AJATT. Obviously, Chinese and Korean people have a massive advantage in that they speak languages which share many features with Japanese, and that can't be overstated, but the most clear correlation I can tell is simply time spent in Japan combined with willingness/necessity of engaging Japanese people and society without falling back into the expat bubble. From what I've seen, things like good classes or SRS can be very useful tools, but ultimately there seems to be no magic bullet.

Thequadehunter Wrote:Also, for some of the people speculating, I'm 99% sure Khatz has been to this forum, and probably to the AJATT thread.

When Silverspoon was new, Khatz used negative quotes about him from here in it's initial advertizement. He also mentioned "a certain yellow forum" here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...underrated

He's definitely been to this forum.

CreepyAF Wrote:

Thequadehunter Wrote:Also, for some of the people speculating, I'm 99% sure Khatz has been to this forum, and probably to the AJATT thread.

When Silverspoon was new, Khatz used negative quotes about him from here in it's initial advertizement. He also mentioned "a certain yellow forum" here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...underrated

He's definitely been to this forum.

If CreepyAF is Khatzumoto (as someone speculated earlier in this thread), then the quoted comments are Khatzumoto talking about Khatzumoto hypothetically reading RevTK (and the post itself is in RevTk)....

patriconia Wrote:As for personal anecdotes, the most fluent foreigners I've met are non-Westerners, from places like China, Korea, or the Philippines, and who, from what I can tell, have never used methods like SRS or AJATT.

Korea is Japanese with different words in a sense.

And anyone from China or the PI already has an L2 or even L3.

Probably.

I am going to learn Chinese to improve my Japanese.

ryuudou Wrote:Read the site before you type. It will do wonders.

I did read K.'s site when he started it, for a year or two. Then I stopped - it was the most wonderful thing.

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I've seen your Japanese and it's about as heavily foreign sounding as your English. On what basis is this critique coming from?

As to my English and Japanese - I've never claimed otherwise.

Good. As long as know we're all of this vitriol is coming from.

Some are wise, some are otherwise. I've never claimed otherwise.

EDIT
Let me repeat once more.
I've never said K. was stupid. Or that he didn't achieve what he claimed. I've never discussed his personal life.

And perhaps the most important thing: can you become reasonably fluent in 18 months?
Of course you can. Learning a language is not exactly rocket science. Anyone can do it.
If you do it full time and have all the resources you need.

I've just read this passage and it made me think of this thread.

Fascinated by Languages by Eugene A. Nida

Our family attended a Methodist church, where, as a small boy, I had one
of the most meaningful experiences of my life. One Sunday a visiting preacher
used the thirteenth chapter of the book of Revelation to prove conclusively
that Mussolini was the Anti-Christ, but a week later another visiting preacher
used the same passage to prove that Mussolini could not be the Anti-Christ.
At first, I did not understand just how the Bible could be used in such a
contradictory manner. But my father helped me understand by saying, “In life
it is even more important to be able to doubt than to believe, because too many
people love the unbelievable.”

chamcham Wrote:He's definitely been to this forum.

I believe he's made a quote about this forum along the lines of "The blind teaching the blind."
Seeing the grammar section of this forum I think I have to agree with him

[ファブリス]

One thing I learned about language is that "plain english" goes a long way, and if you can't say something in plain english, well you probably have no idea what you're talking about or what you're even trying to say.

juniperpansy Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:He's definitely been to this forum.

I believe he's made a quote about this forum along the lines of "The blind teaching the blind."
Seeing the grammar section of this forum I think I have to agree with him

In disguise. And turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.
But he should have turned the other cheek.

ファブリス Wrote:One thing I learned about language is that "plain english" goes a long way, and if you can't say something in plain english, well you probably have no idea what you're talking about or what you're even trying to say.

Richard Rorty, and William James are two of my heroes for just that reason. Unfortunately, because they spoke plainly, people confused that for not having amazing ideas.

Fighting through Foucault is a horrible slog in comparison, and apprehending his amazing ideas comes only through sweat and tears.

I sometimes wonder when people are fighting against RTK, if there is not a degree of masochism in it; in that people feel if it comes easy, it's not true knowledge, or something like that. I know I hampered myself my not just running straight through RTK simple, and then going back through and fleshing out with readings and comparisons, because I was using some reasoning like that.

Also it is weird to use a phrase like "plain English" for you at all? I'll assume English is L3, at most, for you right? (Flemish, French, German, Dutch before English)

kapalama Wrote:I sometimes wonder when people are fighting against RTK, if there is not a degree of masochism in it; in that people feel if it comes easy, it's not true knowledge, or something like that. I know I hampered myself my not just running straight through RTK simple, and then going back through and fleshing out with readings and comparisons, because I was using some reasoning like that.

This is a little off topic, but this whole thread is sort of off topic.

I am against RTK because it doesn't really teach anything useful beyond memorization of the radicals, which is really only useful for writing. If you don't want to physically write the characters then RTK is not worth it. You essentially just forget the mnemonics and with that the ability to write them anyway if you don't use them. I would imagine most people 3 years after completing RTK cannot write much.

When it comes to reading and typing it is based on recognition, something that I do not believe RTK is very efficient at helping with. It takes more or less the same amount of time to go from RTK mnemonic deconstructing to the almost instant recognition that you'd want for reading as it does starting from scratch and getting to that instant recognition point.

Even if you want to write I do not believe it is a good idea to start with RTK but rather go through it after you can read at a decent level. There is little reason to learn to write all the kanji before you can do anything else.

That's kind of like saying there is little to reason to earn any alphabet before you can read.

Without the alphabet you cannot read. No one is reading Japanese "at a decent level" who does not know several hundred kanji, because that is not how Japanese is written.

Which get back to the entire rationale for RTK to begin with. It';s worth reading the introduction to both RTK and RTH with an open mind to see why the systems exist.

http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2012...sample.pdf

http://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/en/files/2013...sample.pdf

No one thinks Chinese is written in PinYin.

No one should think Japanese is written in kana.

kameden Wrote:I am against RTK because it doesn't really teach anything useful beyond memorization of the radicals, which is really only useful for writing. If you don't want to physically write the characters then RTK is not worth it. You essentially just forget the mnemonics and with that the ability to write them anyway if you don't use them. I would imagine most people 3 years after completing RTK cannot write much.

When it comes to reading and typing it is based on recognition, something that I do not believe RTK is very efficient at helping with. It takes more or less the same amount of time to go from RTK mnemonic deconstructing to the almost instant recognition that you'd want for reading as it does starting from scratch and getting to that instant recognition point.

Even if you want to write I do not believe it is a good idea to start with RTK but rather go through it after you can read at a decent level. There is little reason to learn to write all the kanji before you can do anything else.

Personal experience story incoming.

RTK is certainly not just for writing. I would go so far as to say that it may have been far more helpful for me with reading and learning vocabulary from that reading than it was with writing. At least 50/50 on the usefulness.

RTK directly helped me dive into adult reading material in Japanese (Murakami Haruki novels) because it gave me a foothold in meaning. Even without knowing the readings, I was able to guess the meaning of many unknown words and keep going when I just wanted to get in some good, quality tadoku. (I did, however, write down many of them to save for later look-uppage. Another feat that wouldn't have been possible without having done RTK). I knew how to write them all, too, so that helped differentiate similar kanji and made it no trouble at all to look unknown kanji up in the dictionary with a writing tool.

I can't say I'd suggest doing it before (and to the exclusion of) everything else but it's definitely an invaluable tool.

And of course you lose it if you don't use it. That's how memory works.

drdunlap Wrote:RTK is certainly not just for writing. I would go so far as to say that it may have been far more helpful for me with reading and learning vocabulary from that reading than it was with writing. At least 50/50 on the usefulness.

RTK directly helped me dive into adult reading material in Japanese (Murakami Haruki novels) because it gave me a foothold in meaning. Even without knowing the readings, I was able to guess the meaning of many unknown words and keep going when I just wanted to get in some good, quality tadoku. (I did, however, write down many of them to save for later look-uppage. Another feat that wouldn't have been possible without having done RTK). I knew how to write them all, too, so that helped differentiate similar kanji and made it no trouble at all to look unknown kanji up in the dictionary with a writing tool.

I can't say I'd suggest doing it before (and to the exclusion of) everything else but it's definitely an invaluable tool.

And of course you lose it if you don't use it. That's how memory works.

My personal experience with RTK is similar to that of DrDunlap.

I tried to learn Japanese via brute force for several years. The idea was to take the most direct and obvious route to memorize kanji and vocab. Save time and effort, right? Save space in the brain. Despite a significant amount of time and effort, my Japanese progress was less than stellar.

So, this spring I decided to rethink my language strategy; I put traditional Japanese studies largely on the back burner and concentrated on RTK 1.

For me, RTK really opened up the language, baking the kanji into my subconscious. Now learning Japanese is so much faster and more intuitive. That includes everything: reading, memorizing vocabulary, studying grammar, etc. Writing vocabulary has suddenly become second-nature, and if I can't guess the compound, I usually get it the second time around; it is so easy. As a bonus, now it doesn't take much more time to learn to write a new vocabulary word (vs. simply learning to read it). And that facility with writing the kanji makes it so easy to read. All this great comprehensible input is helping my speaking as well.

Granted, I am reviewing a lot of topic and vocabulary that I previously reviewed c.50x and forgot c.50x. But this time around it really is much easier and faster. And it is sticking.

If I could do it all over again, I would have done RTK1 at the very beginning. This would have given me (at least some of) the advantages the Chinese students had in Japanese language classes.

ソ、I know this thread has turned into discussing the merits of Khatz's advice, but no one really seemed to state this opinion earlier (or at least I didn't find it by skimming).

It's hard to believe that Silver Spoon was bankrupting him. He expanded it to multiple languages so he must have felt like there was something about it that he could capitalize on. Although he's not selling it now, maybe that's because it required more work than selling sentence packs did?

Also SS isn't his only product. I've never bought AJATT Plus (although I've been tempted before), but that's a $30 per month subscription, isn't it? Maybe someone who has AJATT Plus could give us a rough estimate of how many active users there are.

Anyway, I had a self-sustaining online business that required almost no work and even made just $20k a year-- especially if I'd had a recent life change like he seems to have had-- I'd definitely peace out to a cheaper country for a good year-long backpacking vacation.

datrukup Wrote:It's hard to believe that Silver Spoon was bankrupting him. He expanded it to multiple languages so he must have felt like there was something about it that he could capitalize on. Although he's not selling it now, maybe that's because it required more work than selling sentence packs did?

I kind of figured that people weren't getting fluent, so he put it on hold until he retinkered it, or just plainly discontinued it. (This is wild speculation.)

datrukup Wrote:Also SS isn't his only product. I've never bought AJATT Plus (although I've been tempted before), but that's a $30 per month subscription, isn't it? Maybe someone who has AJATT Plus could give us a rough estimate of how many active users there are.

I'm sure AJATT Plus was/is constantly evolving. When I was a part of it 3 years ago, the forum was a ghost town. I recall even the mod saying something along the lines that the forum acted more as a historical record than an active discussion board. At the time, Khatz almost never posted, and in fact didn't post during the month I was on it.

I didn't pay attention to the AJATT articles translated into Japanese because they were way out of my ability to read at the time.

Also, there was a cloud based library that would host the other products I had purchased (like sentence packs). I seemed to have access to a couple different packs that I didn't buy for a while. I guess that was a part of the member only benefits.

It seems like for many of us (including myself) we attribute the base of our Japanese language study to Khatz. Through him I was exposed to RTK, SRS, and the notion that exposure to native Japanese material is critical to Japanese learning.

But I think we should ask ourselves, would we really have never discovered these things if not for Khatz?

I used to work as a videographer and would travel to various locations to film the onsite activities of industrial businesses. I had two large cases of gear I would travel with, and many pieces of equipment were mission critical. If I forgot one thing, I would have to try to buy or rent a piece near the location I was filming, or likely not get the job done correctly.

It wasn't obvious at first, but making up a couple detailed checklists made a world of difference when it came to ensuring I never forgot to charge or pack something. I didn't need anyone to tell me to make a checklist, I just figured it out on my own.

So I wonder, would I really have never discovered RTK without Khatz? Would I never have come across the idea of electronic flashcards (didn't Antimoon bring up SRS before Khatz anyway)?

I guess I'll never know for sure...