SRS is just a computerized Ebbinghaus Curve.
SRS was developed by Piotr Woźniak (SuperMemo). I read about it back in the nineties in a Polish computer magazine.

Heisig wasn't invented by Heisig, as it were. The idea of bushu and kanji components has been there for centuries.
I persnonally find it funny to memorize Chinese/Japanese hanzi/kanji in English (or any native language) .
When I look at, let's say 習, I can see 習う or 練習, not a 'scary clown' or whatever.

PS
And don't tell me I don't know Heisig. I even made audio playlists for all 'his' kanji with example vocab. Somebody asked me to, that's why.

CreepyAF Wrote: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...

For me at least, I knew about RTK before I discovered AJATT, but I don't think I would have actually given it a try if I hadn't read something similar to Khatz's pep talk articles. I remember I thought it sounded like too much work to set up, at first, and I didn't know then how well it would work.

I've never learned individual kanji separately, but if anyone wants to do it or would like to have a try, here are two resources (not Heisig):
1. Hadamitzky - Japanese Kanji & Kana A Complete Guide to the Japanese Writing System Tuttle 2012

2. http://ck.kolivas.org/Japanese/kanji.html
This one is free.

PS
I've always wondered why people should need pep talk. A puzzle I've never solved.

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.

Same for me.

datrukup Wrote: 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 still have an active AJATT Plus membership. Looking at the forum membership page, it states that there are 11,125 users, which seems amazingly high to me. The last posts to the forum were ~2 months ago, and are as you might expect, was someone asking where Khatz was. The forum was never terribly active, and I have to say that I rarely looked at it.

Khatz posted new entries to AJATT Plus in March 2015, and that was it. That was actually how I realized he was missing, when I went onto the site to grab any new posts for the last few months and found that there hadn't been any.

drdunlap Wrote:

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.

Also agreed. Anyone saying RTK is just for writing is someone who doesn't understand RTK.

ryuudou Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote: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.

That's more than 18 hours a day, every day, for one and a half year. It may be technically mathematically possible, but I think most people have jobs and other responsibilities and don't suffer from sleep deprivation.

What is your point? That it requires sacrifice? Well duh. Turning yourself Japanese is not supposed to be without sacrifice. Tremendous results require great effort. However listening is passive so it's not that hard to get the exposure in. Even if it's difficult it's not impossible and can be done while retaining responsibilities. Someone said it was impossible, and that person was wrong. I was correcting him.

Those who can do it will be rewarded, however there's also nothing wrong with something slower. Maybe you'll hit the milestone in 22 months. Whatever your pace as long as you're moving forward. That's the most important part.

Making some sacrifices and quiting your job and/or sleeping are two different things. Sure it's mostly passive studying, but even then, listening to podcasts while in a business meeting, adressing clients in Japanese, or reading a Japanese book while your wife is giving labour to get those 10,000 hours in 18 months of (passive) studying still isn't practical for obvious reasons.

Yes, 22 months or even longer would be more ideal, but that wasn't being discussed. To get to those 10,000 hours in 18 months you have to study 18+ hours per day, which ain't gonna happen (not if you have a job/school and any other responsibilities at least). So I agree with that person who said it was impossible.

kill4food Wrote:r reading a Japanese book while your wife is giving labour to get those 10,000 hours in 18 months of (passive) studying still isn't practical for obvious reasons.

But if she leaves you, and takes the kid, think how much more free time you would have!

kapalama Wrote:

kill4food Wrote:r reading a Japanese book while your wife is giving labour to get those 10,000 hours in 18 months of (passive) studying still isn't practical for obvious reasons.

But if she leaves you, and takes the kid, think how much more free time you would have!

Good point! I stand corrected.

kill4food Wrote:Sure it's mostly passive studying, but even then, listening to podcasts while in a business meeting, adressing clients in Japanese, or reading a Japanese book while your wife is giving labour to get those 10,000 hours in 18 months of (passive) studying still isn't practical for obvious reasons.

Reading a book isn't passive study, and has nothing to do with listening to Japanese. I don't think you know what you're talking about here.

kill4food Wrote:Yes, 22 months or even longer would be more ideal, but that wasn't being discussed. To get to those 10,000 hours in 18 months you have to study 18+ hours per day, which ain't gonna happen (not if you have a job/school and any other responsibilities at least). So I agree with that person who said it was impossible.

Then you're also wrong. Difficult != impossible. Passive exposure != active study.

And that person also said 10k sentences was impossible too. This, of course, is wrong as well.

Christ, this AJATT thread has turned into every AJATT thread before it.

Bickering over the "do-ability" of stuff on AJATT. I'm pretty sure its been stated before, but to state it again. There are good ideas on AJATT and then some ideas on AJATT that really only apply to people that are OCD Japanese.

10k hours in 18 months. Possible? Sure, but probably just about as possible as graduating with your Ph.D by time you're 18 years old. People have done it, some people have done it even earlier, but most people can't hope to accomplish that. Whether you think giving that advice to [new] learners is constructive or not, is your own opinion and its one of the things that tends to ruffle feathers around here.

vix86 Wrote:Christ, this AJATT thread has turned into every AJATT thread before it.

Bickering over the "do-ability" of stuff on AJATT. I'm pretty sure its been stated before, but to state it again. There are good ideas on AJATT and then some ideas on AJATT that really only apply to people that are OCD Japanese.

10k hours in 18 months. Possible? Sure, but probably just about as possible as graduating with your Ph.D by time you're 18 years old. People have done it, some people have done it even earlier, but most people can't hope to accomplish that. Whether you think giving that advice to [new] learners is constructive or not, is your own opinion and its one of the things that tends to ruffle feathers around here.

I don't think it's very helpful to the tone of this thread to chastise people for discussing the efficacy of AJATT and then handing out your own opinion.

^

Agreed. The irony.

Vix86 Wrote:10k hours in 18 months. Possible? Sure, but probably just about as possible as graduating with your Ph.D by time you're 18 years old. People have done it, some people have done it even earlier, but most people can't hope to accomplish that. Whether you think giving that advice to [new] learners is constructive or not, is your own opinion and its one of the things that tends to ruffle feathers around here.

No one is debating if it is difficult. Someone tried to attack Khatz, dismiss all of his ideas, and then cherry-pick the 10k sentences and 10k hours part and call it "impossible". It is not. Saying so is objectively incorrect.

It's very possible. It's unlikely that I will make 100k by age 30 but that is also very possible. A better word choice would be "very difficult" or "crazy". It's also worth noting that Khatz set 10k as a mark so that even if you fall off you still get where you want to be. He said he personally did around 7.5k sentences in the 18 month period but that there's no reason you shouldn't aim for higher.

So everyone seems to agree that K. went to Heaven (alive!). I must confirm that the rumors were true. I got a phone call from K.-san himself yesterday. We had a long conversation in my Plain Broken English and my foreign sounding Japanese. I must say that K.-san was very patient and really tried to understand me.
Ok, so K.-san said that there are some pretty weird things in Heaven. God turned out to be a she, and she's a black midget with slanting eyes. But she looks young for her eternal age. She's only got two front teeth missing.
K.-san said that everybody here speaks the local lingo and they're perfectly monolingual. So he had some trouble at first, but immersed himself in the media and in nine months was even more proficient than any local guy. He didn't need to listen while asleep as they don't sleep here at all, it would be such a waste of eternal time.
K.-san told me that everybody there is happy, they smoke some local weeds and watch doramas and anime in the local lingo that's called Tensei. Their main activity, though, is to invent new ways of torturing their human ex-fellows in Hell. Hell is just next door to Heaven and it has a mysterious inscription on the door: 'AJATT unbelievers'.

I'm not sure what's more silly between the clear passive aggressiveness above or your original "well-thought out" argument:

buonaparte Wrote:It doesn't matter what his results were, if he passed any exams.
His ideas were STUPID. IMPOSSIBLE.

ryuudou,
I agree.

Let me quote my late sister, buonaparte (I'm aYa).
'Don't say the possible is impossible just because you can't get it up.'

This thread is fun.
Not as good as this one, though:
Ziad Fazah - does he exist?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...PN=0&TPN=1

Link won't work.

kapalama,
the forum's down. It happened many a time before. Let's hope it returns again.

sigh... so "Where's Khatzumoto?" has turned into another AJATT flame war.... lol, gotta love the internet...

cae99v Wrote:sigh... so "Where's Khatzumoto?" has turned into another AJATT flame war.... lol, gotta love the internet...

Welcome to koohii how may I take your order?

What flame war? A healthy discussion.
I've enjoyed every bit of it.

buonaparte Wrote:What flame war? A healthy discussion.
I've enjoyed every bit of it.

Same.

Also, I really don't understand what there is to discuss about whether AJATT works or not anyways. It clearly helped some people, so what's the problem? It works for some, doesn't for others, and some people (Like me) like the ideology but simply don't have time for it.

People seem to forget that his method is not a strict rigid guide to learning Japanese. It's what Khatz did in his experience, and it's just a mindset and some ideas and methods that may help you along the way.

Thequadehunter Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:What flame war? A healthy discussion.
I've enjoyed every bit of it.

Same.

Also, I really don't understand what there is to discuss about whether AJATT works or not anyways. It clearly helped some people, so what's the problem? It works for some, doesn't for others, and some people (Like me) like the ideology but simply don't have time for it.

People seem to forget that his method is not a strict rigid guide to learning Japanese. It's what Khatz did in his experience, and it's just a mindset and some ideas and methods that may help you along the way.

the only people argueing about whether or not AJATT makes you fluent are the ones who aren't fluent....