I think the greatest strength of SRS is for "brute force" learning: learning things you have no handholds for and just have to rote memorize.

Japanese, at first (and probably for quite a while) requires that. You are really bootstrapping the vocabulary out of nothing (in terms of already-laid foundation).

French is not like that at all and I would definitely (if I were learning French) go organic from the start. And I would say that is where I am aiming to get with Japanese.

That is not to say that using SRS beyond the point I would is "wrong". It is not even to say it might not be more efficient in some respects (the arrangement of ropes might make for easier carrying than the handle to return to my analogy). However one of my priorities is getting as near as possible to making the language my language and one does not SRS one's own language, one learns it organically.

Not everyone has this aim. To many it may be an irrelevant consideration. But to me and at least to a few others I know, this is important.

CureDolly Wrote:... one does not SRS one's own language, one learns it organically.

Agreed, but it takes ~20 years to reach educated adult proficiency, and there lies the rub.

I think a lot depends on one's objectives. I am not in a huge hurry to become super proficient in Japanese in the manner of a foreign learner, though having said that, I know I am a long way ahead of most people who have studied as long as I have (and I am currently using SRS so that doesn't really counter your argument).

I don't expect to slow down radically when I retire SRS and I may even speed up, but that is an unknown as yet. What I do know is that I am getting more and more of a feel of how Japanese fits together and am getting to the point where organic learning becomes possible.

If the speed of learning were to take a hit, I would consider it worthwhile in order to be learning organically and really internalizing the language rather than just learning it.

Now when I say "not everyone feels the same" I am really not trying to imply that I am in any way superior. It is just my attitude to Japanese, and Japanese only.

If I were also learning another language (say German). I would want to learn it in the fastest and most efficient way possible (which might or might not be SRS) because I am not in love with German.

Japanese is different. I want to learn it deeply, from within. And even if it were to take a little longer (which I don't believe it will), I would still choose that way.

ryuudou Wrote:The majority of the advanced and fluent people here used AJATT to do it.

Helena4 Wrote:Everyone has been influenced by AJATT,

No.

I can't possibly know whether ryuudou-san is right or wrong,.

Helena-san was obviously making her point loosely (I mean, I don't suppose the Pope has been influenced by AJATT). More seriously there are a lot of straight-by-the-book academic Japanese learners who have never even heard of AJATT. But I think the point she is making is that AJATT has had a huge influence on everyone who is at all interested in immersion methods of any kind, even though many of us have taken it off in new directions.

It isn't to say that AJATT invented the general ideas (in fact sources were cited for some of them as I recall) but Khatzumoto's work gave great impetus, and helped to pioneer the idea of self-immersion that has been made possible by current technology.

I have never followed the AJATT system myself. I didn't even use RTK. But it is only right to give the site its due. A lot of the things that we all take for granted now were first popularized by AJATT.

Yeah, when I said everyone was influenced by AJATT, I did mean more like the majority of people using the immersion method (which is what you should be using ). I was just replying to a specific comment.

@Cure Dolly

Thanks for setting that straight and I love JALUP. Their idea of learning Kanji and basic grammar from setneces in tandem and their really structured advice about advancing to J-J, and when and how you should start a "reading rampage" is great. They even have, for anyone who's interested, a guide of dramas/anime/manga/books graded by difficulty (beware though, the books with 1 star are much above the dramas with 1 star): http://japaneselevelup.com/media-guide/ "Civilised" is quite a good word. They do give much more structured advice.

Jalup... Now that you guys mention it, Jalup was the last Japanese learning resource I tried to use. That was about a year ago.

I had started buying some of the beginner sentence packs, since they were i+1. It was actually pretty great, since I was learning one thing in each card, and using everything I knew from previous cards in subsequent ones; sometimes I could puzzle out a meaning all on my own.

The problem is, I kept running into super-obvious errors. I tweeted @adshap 3 of them before he told me to just send him an email each time. I added 2 more to a draft that's still saved in my gmail account before I threw up my hands and just walked away from studying altogether. One can only proofread one's study material (paid for, btw) so many times before something's got to give.

So yeah, Jalup is cool until you actually put money into it. Ugh.

Anyway, I'm glad to see so many names in this thread that I recognize after all these years.

The main problem I had with AJATT + immersion is that immersion is pretty much gibberish and unintelligible squiggly lines, but RTK doesn't actually help that at all, unless you supplement your study with material that is immediately useful (like AJATT says specifically not to do, at all). At best, you might recognize individual kanji, and can recall their Heisig keyword, but you then have to immediately question that recollection because you know that Heisig keywords often have nothing to do with any of the meanings of individual kanji, and at best represent only one meaning of several, and don't take into account compounds.

So to sum up the problem I had with AJATT, or studying in general, I spent the lion's share of my studying time focusing on literacy via RTK, which IMO helps the least when it comes to learning the language. Even when I got frustrated and tried adding in Japanese the Manga Way, JapanesePod101.com, Understanding Basic Japanese, Genki, Tae Kim's guide, and everything else, I just never got very far or stuck with anything too long. It was either too boring (almost all study material) or not informative enough to be worth the time I spend on it (JPod101). To learn Japanese, I would have to treat it like a job, which is hard because that motivation isn't there at all.

I'll be switching gears to making it as enjoyable as possible. I still have my Core10k deck with pictures and audio synced to my Ankiweb account, on top of all my other old decks. I'll probably wipe the review data and start over with cards that lean more towards audio than anything, but I'll figure out the particulars later. I'll also use some of my "fun, but slow" learning materials to try to get up to speed.

Also, I'm not sure why there's any sort of debate about AJATT and self-study. I remember trying to learn Japanese on my own, before AJATT. I had printed out a hiragana chart and just tried to drill them by hand over and over for a week before I got burned out. I found a pdf of some Kanji book that was supposed to be super awesome (and had been out of print since the early 90s). My study plan back then was to use an SRS (Mnemosyne; pretty awful). Sharing decks, afaik, wasn't a thing, so I was going into this low-quality scanned pdf, copying and pasting everything from each entry into my Mnemosyne deck. The one kanji I was learning, its various meanings, onyomi, kunyomi, several example compounds, and an example sentence + translation. I got maybe 3 cards in before that got really, really old.

Then I found AJATT, Heisig, Krashen, and everything else. And around that time, all the discussion I found online about studying Japanese mentioned him and his methods. RTK was the best way to become literate in Japanese. But, IMO, if you're starting to learn from scratch, it's probably the worst way to begin.

On a side note I find it slightly ironic when Khazumoto-san's "input before output" is quoted against my advice to interact in Japanese as much as possible and from a reasonably early stage. Khazumoto-san was once the Young Turk of gung-ho immersionism. I wonder if he would like being quoted as the Voice of Caution.

I am absolutely in favor of *massive* input. And if you have that you don't have to be afraid of output. And you don't have to be afraid of non-native speakers. I have made enormous progress by talking extensively in Japanese with people below my level. I do it because I support my kouhai, but *far* more than I imagined it has been hugely good for me.

Why? Because I am using my Japanese continually. And learning isn't enough. You don't just need to know it, you need to be able to draw it fast. Really fast. And nothing helps that but use, use and more use.

Also my kouhai are Young Turks too and progressing so fast that there is nothing stagnant about it. And we don't "practice Japanese" we talk. We talk about everything we used to talk about in English. Just everything. I am amazed how fast it is going. Today I was explaining some of my theories of language in Japanese to someone who could only talk about the weather and what was on or under the table a year ago.

And if we can't talk about something we really want to talk about in Japanese, that's tough. Better learn some more Japanese because there is no other language to fall back on.

And I am delighted to relate that a very dear friend and senpai has decided to take the plunge and come over to making Japanese her default language this week:

http://petitelumi.blogspot.mx/2015/04/ma...guage.html

ryuudou Wrote:

Aikynaro Wrote:I still thing it's broadly a good idea, but it's still messed up and isn't going to work as a general method. Obviously it was fine for Katzumoto but that's just one anecdote - there's no evidence it works for anyone but him.

The majority of the advanced and fluent people here used AJATT to do it. I'd even say vast the majority of non-classroom learners of the English world who have achieved success with Japanese in the last 8 years were influenced by AJATT. The site is dead now, but nothing really matches the outreach and influence AJATT had in it's golden years. It's clearly not a singular anecdote.

Well then I eagerly await your evidence that AJATT is a comprehensive working system that can be picked up off-the-shelf and be applied to anyone with consistent results.
For every anecdotal success you can find I bet I could find an anecdotal failure.

Don't get the wrong idea - I'm not anti-AJATT, though I think that should be clear from my earlier post. I think many of the ideas are good. It influenced me a great deal and I owe a lot of the success I've had to it.
But it is not a comprehensive well-tested system. Attempts to turn it into a curriculum (Neutrino) don't seem to have had great success. I think there's plenty of (anecdotal! some real facts would be lovely but I suppose no one has ever done a study on this stuff) evidence that it doesn't work in its vanilla form for everyone. Take this thread, for instance...

AJATT is contradictory.
The overriding theme is that learning Japanese should be easy and fun.
But it demands that you do RTK first, although it is neither fun, easy, or necessary.
It pushes listening to stuff you can't understand, even though this is pointless and not fun (your mileage may vary, of course)
MCDs are just awful.

So yeah, it's messed up. It's a great place to mine ideas for putting together your own system, and it's worth giving it a try to see if it works for you personally, but if it's not working that's not the fault of the person it's not working for.

Anyway, I'm not particularly invested in attacking AJATT - I was just trying to help OP. I don't really care to argue about this further.

@Aikynaro
I agree with most of what you said, apart from that I think it is possible to find enjoyment from listening to stuff you can't understand. I think in the early stages this is music, then later on TV like romance and comedy dramas and anime, and only later stuff like podcasts and interviews (though some Japanese groups have some very goofy interviews that can be fun to watch with minimal understanding in short bursts). Listening before you have a chance of understanding doesn't always seem to have benefits at the time, but actually gives you a great understanding of the rhythm of the language, since that's pretty much all you're observing, and, particularly if you practice some shadowing with it, will give you an understanding of pronunciation before you are able to stumble and create your own bad pronunciation ideas in your mind while studying from a textbook. However, as I said above, the JALUP approach is often more balanced, and in the case of immersion, states that you should be halfway through your beginners course (so I guess after Genki 1, or halfway through Japanese for Everyone textbook or JALUP beginner deck) before immersing yourself. At that point, comprehension is low, but with the right sort of material, coming across some understandable titbits is quite enjoyable. Nevertheless, I still think you can quite happily listen to music and sing along from day one and reap the benefits stated above. And some jpod101 in the early stages should make the later stages less of a shock.

I have to agree that blasting through RTK as a first step is nothing like fun though. And I have never quite been able to work out what MCDs are. I go for i+1 sentences or sentences I am reviewing from my textbook (Japanese for Everyone), which are sort of i+0, except for some grammar.

Well, music is different. It's enjoyable whether you understand it or not in any language. I don't think it's necessarily all that helpful for learning a language, but it's better than not having it.
Watching anime or whatever without understanding is a waste of time though. You get just as much benefit hearing the rhythm of the language and whatnot as you would with English subtitles. The chances of picking up anything else from forcing yourself to watch without them is negligible (in fact, I'd say you're more likely to pick up something with subs on).
I'm speaking from experience - I watched a fair amount of unsubtitled anime with minimal understanding as a beginner and I think it helped not at all. Five minutes in Anki is worth a hundred hours of incomprehensible input and is more enjoyable.

Aikynaro Wrote:Well then I eagerly await your evidence that AJATT is a comprehensive working system that can be picked up off-the-shelf and be applied to anyone with consistent results.

I already went over this. You're far out of your element. AJATT's influence is essentially the sole reason that we quote passing N1 in a solid two years as the standard now, and not 6-8 years as before. Not only does it work, but it works so well that AJATT single-handedly advanced self-learners of the Japanese community forward 4-6 years of saved time with the concept of SRSing Japanese words/sentences + immersion + RTK.

Also as someone so new that you only have a deck of 500 you shouldn't even be talking on this in the first place.

Aikynaro Wrote:For every anecdotal success you can find I bet I could find an anecdotal failure.

Find me someone with a 7.5-10k sentence deck who has setup an engaging immersion environment who is not proficient with Japanese. You may need a personal tweak or two, but that has nothing to do with it inherently not working. Your logical flaw is equating getting bored or wanting a tweak with the system not working. No. The system works damn well if you do it. It works so well in fact that it's the sole reason you won't end up hitting fluency by the time you're middle-aged due to it's influence completely changing the landscape. It's anything but, as you said, "messed up". You're disrespecting something out of ignorance while, due to being new, not realizing that it set the foundation that you're currently reaping the benefits of. You're an Anki user who has interest in mining from manga according to your post history. Anki exists because of AJATT (Damien Elmes was an AJATT follower who got the Japanese + SRS idea from there and wanted to develop an SRS that specifically catered to Japanese), and mining from native materials is a concept that AJATT pioneered.

That's like riding in an airplane while saying locomotion sucks. Ironic. This is what I meant earlier by newgens who don't know their history.

Any SRS + immersion learner is in debt to AJATT. Even those who never read the site before it died are. JLVLUP for 80% of it's existence has been essentially a carbon copy of a AJATT (nowadays there's more otaku/pop stuff). The owner was a hardcore AJATT fan, and the "walkthrough" page there was basically plagiarism of AJATT's old "table of contents" page. He even structured it the same way with "groups". The entire JLVLUP method was the AJATT's core method with different names until Adshap deviated and starting offering his own custom products, though even his custom products are influenced around AJATT. Adshap's obsession with making the J-J phase transition (which gave us his well done J-J intermediate deck product) is something Khatz pushed on him.

Aikynaro Wrote:AJATT is contradictory.
The overriding theme is that learning Japanese should be easy and fun.
But it demands that you do RTK first, although it is neither fun, easy, or necessary.
It pushes listening to stuff you can't understand, even though this is pointless and not fun (your mileage may vary, of course)

These are opinions and not inherent system flaws. If kanji is insufferable to you AJATT had always directly supported making them easier with card formats like lazy kanji, and AJATT had never at any point suggested listening to things you don't enjoy. You said yourself music is enjoyable.

@ryuudou

Yep. We are influenced for the better by AJATT. Imersion is essential for learning a language fast and srs is absolutely the most efficient way not to forget stuff.

Yep. AJATT is not inherently wrong but is best used by tweaking it for your personal needs.

And yep, JALUP is basically AJATT, but with more structured advice, products slightly more worth buying and no prior RTK requirement. It is nothing more than that, and it is also not inherently wrong and is best used when tweaked.

If you look at it, this is more of a summary of what Aikynaro (and some of what I) said.

So I guess we all agree here.

Before getting all high and mighty maybe you could actually read my post? The part where I specifically acknowledge that AJATT has influenced me and all that? I understand perfectly well how AJATT influenced things, and criticism is not the same as 'disrespecting', although even if I was disrespecting it why would you even care?

Please don't insult other users.
Zgarbas

Aikynaro Wrote:Watching anime or whatever without understanding is a waste of time though. You get just as much benefit hearing the rhythm of the language and whatnot as you would with English subtitles.

I hope you will not mind my saying that this isn't really the case. Watching with English subtitles means your mind will be focusing on the English. It will only focus on the rhythm if you force it to by not giving it something it can digest more easily.

However, I do *not* recommend watching anime or whatever when you don't understand it. I don't strongly disrecommend it, but I've never been fully convinced of its value.

What I have done is watch a lot of anime with Japanese subtitles from fairly early on. It really is worth getting some basic grammar first but that is a matter of a few weeks, if you just go through things like sentence structure i/na adjectives, te/ta form, basic conjugation. And of course you have to know kana. A week for each syllabary while working on grammar/basic vocab at the same time. Genki is ok. I never did anything but the grammar explanations and wrote little stories to exemplify the grammar. If you want to do it all online, try Tae Kim. I have a lot of reservations about Lang8 but you could post your grammar stories there to get native speaker corrections. At that level the whole thing is probably so straightforward that you can be confident of reliable corrections.)

If you want to watch anime at this preparation stage, I would recommend watching Anpanman episodes. I think there are still a lot on YouTube. These are entertaining and often surprising (really imaginitive for a young children's show) and you can mostly follow the story without understanding a word, so you will be absorbing something without being bored.

I would move onto Japanese subbed anime as soon as I had a bit of basic grammar and vocabulary under my belt. BUT be aware that while this is less boring than starting with RTK it is a lot tougher. You have chosen to scale the vertical face.

You can have the subs in a separate subs editor and paste bits into Denshi Jisho. It is going to take you hours and hours to get through your first anime. You'll be popping words into your Anki at the same time (or note them to do it afterward if you find that works better for you). But it is going to be full of triumphs and emotional moments as well as well as hard struggle. And as you push on through other anime the black night of unknowing slowly starts to clear and you notice that an episode is not taking you as long as it did, and you are understanding more without looking it up.

More detail on this anime method here.

Can you do it without learning any grammar? I would say yes, you'll get there if you stick at it, but it's kind of like deciding to tackle the mountain without a rope.

I wasn't quite saying to start studying from TV shows before you have a basis. Watching simple TV shows should be a sort of relaxed thing in the early stages as far as I'm concerned. Only watch things that are visually enjoyable, practice a bit of shadowing on it, and look up stuff if you want to but don't seriously mine from it. I think getting a basic grammar and vocab grounding is very important before you start trying to intensively study from native material.

My advice is, work through a textbook first, try some Core 2k if you want (not necessary), and then slap on the jsubs and start subs2srsing away. You'll have a much easier time in studying from fun stuff like TV shows if you both give yourself some grammar grounding, and a grounding of listening to and deciphering native audio. You'll also have a much easier time in listening tests, if you want to take an exam, because even though it seems that your listening sucks a bit when listening to native audio at an early stage, the stuff you do pick up requires much more perceptiveness and skill than it does to pick up stuff in dry, slow exam audio, and so working out what they're saying in that should be a breeze, especially since what they will be saying is probably a mix of stuff from your textbook which you will have studied, unlike in TV shows, where the vocab, grammar and slang is unlimited.

The only native material that is enjoyable to me while incomprehensible is music, some video games, and very few, specific TV shows. The unifying thread between these three things is that enjoyment is not at all tied to comprehension. For J-Rap, for example, I mainly enjoy the rhythm of the lyrics as well as the beat. You don't need any language knowledge at all to play a fighting game or action game. You can even muddle through Super Robot Wars if you can read katakana, since attack names are generally loan words, and every other menu item's location can be memorized.

As for TV, I enjoy watching Downtown Gaki no Tsukai specials (like silent library, or the no laughing ones) and Game Center CX. The former is mostly slapstick comedy. The latter is watching a dude fail at playing video games over and over. Reactions to dying are funny no matter the language.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Aikynaro said about AJATT being contradictory. Khatz says to watch Tiger and Dragon and Trick and JP dubs of American shows you've already watched. I have hundreds of gigs of all of that, and it just isn't fun. The only immersion I can stand is immersion where my lack of comprehension doesn't get in the way. I can listen to NHK news in Japanese, but unless they use a foreign loan word, I'm not gonna understand anything they say. "Blah blah blah bittokoin blah blah blah maunto gokkusu blah blah blah" is the farthest I ever got after a month or two of listening.

And I actually took the whole "immersion" environment thing seriously, too. I went through my RSS feed and removed every English site, replacing them with Japanese feeds. Did the same for my podcasts. I really wish I hadn't, because years later, I still haven't gone back and fixed it. It's just a bunch of Japanese sites/shows that I never read/listen to.

@vgambit

That sort of stuff sounds great for low level native media. That's the sort of thing I mean. Though I never really had a problem with watching some simpler dramas with low dialogue understanding (if I couldn't understand the plot though, then I would drop immediately), some people really can't deal with that. In the case of low level material, the key really is visual humour (e.g. people failing at video games etc. as you said)There's nothing more enjoyable at a low level.

God NHK News. Don't even bother watching news. Is news even fun in English? NO. And news is hard. I will start dealing properly with news when I want to do N2 or something.

And as I may have said earlier, for direct advice:

1. Do a beginners textbook. Don't do the excercises, just read chapters, listen to CD and review sentences in anki.
2. Listen(/watch (essentially listening but more fun)) a lot.
3. Review unknowns (e.g. use subs2srs and morphman to create i+1 cards)
4. Relisten (rip audio from things you watch to make this more convenient on the go)
5. Shadow what you've listened to.
6. Stop when you don't enjoy the show and find something even more exciting. Use your passion for the shows your watching and songs you're listening to to fuel your motivation to study.

ryuudou Wrote:I already went over this. You're far out of your element. AJATT's influence is essentially the sole reason that we quote passing N1 in a solid two years as the standard now, and not 6-8 years as before.

How many people have actually done this?

@vgambit

You not enjoying the news in Japanese doesn't mean that there's a contradiction. You never even finished RTK, so obviously you're not going to enjoy the news. AJATT never once told you to listen to things you don't enjoy, but rather to always keep some form of (enjoyable) contact.

For you it would be something like keeping the Japanese music going while you finish RTK (if you decide to, for you it might be better to skip over it for now given the stuff you said in the opening post) until you finally get a foot into Japanese that allows you to transition to listening to other media without torturing yourself.

Helena4 has the right idea. Some great ideas in her posting.

@vgambit

I think you are totally right about how AJATT is contradictory with immersion and whatnot. I even wrote a bit recently on why I think immersion is nonsense. I agree mostly with what Helena4 is saying here, and that's part of what I have been seeing some success with.

I also want to say that I think you shouldn't get too caught up on the whole "fun" angle. If there are people out there who legitimately have fun while learning Japanese, then good for them. But if you can't find a way to have fun, then just suck it up and do what you need to do. I have honestly never had "fun" with learning Japanese except when I was taking classes and interacting with other people. A sure-fire way to suck every bit of fun out of something that I legitimately enjoy is to turn it into a learning exercise. The two things just do not go together for me. So at some point, I think you have to realize that you aren't studying to have a good time, you are studying to enrich your knowledge in ways that will hopefully pay off with increased fun and enjoyment in the future.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:I already went over this. You're far out of your element. AJATT's influence is essentially the sole reason that we quote passing N1 in a solid two years as the standard now, and not 6-8 years as before.

How many people have actually done this?

Well, if we assume "date registered" = "date started studying", quite a few people in last December's N1 alone. Why, there was even one person who started in September 2014, that's seriously impressive.

[Zgarbas]

CureDolly Wrote:I hope you will not mind my saying that this isn't really the case. Watching with English subtitles means your mind will be focusing on the English.

I never watch anime without subtitles. At first I started picking up random words, and these days if there's a subtitle mistranslation I instantly notice it, even if I'm making no effort whatsoever to listen to the Japanese... it just happens. I can't say it single-handledly magically taught me Japanese, but it definitely helped from an immersive perspective, without the major frustration that I was feeling when I was trying to watch something that I couldn't understand.

There's a lot of projection with ajatt. People focus on the few who used it and reached their goals in 2-3 years, ignoring the ones who used it and were as average as the average Japaese learner (hint: they were probably the majority)... I'm fairly sure that if a learner of any method is willing to dedicate as much time to Japanese study as our success stories, than they could achieve the same result; it's actually a bit demeaning that there's so much downplay of individual effort and talent and crediting ajatt. At best, it is a motivator (they manage to dedicate as much time and effort *because* they like/are encouraged by it), so that's pretty cool.
But it influencing other people on a global scale to the point where all Japanese learners are affected by it? Not so much. Khatzu didn't exactly invent the concept of watching something you like to learn a language.

And if you could please stop insulting one another, that would be great.

@Zarxrax
You don't find any enjoyment in studying at all? That's awfully depressing to think about, voluntarily spending that much time on something you dislike... I guess it's paid off for you by now, though.
I like learning things, so I find learning Japanese to be fun. Hopefully, most of us (who don't actually need to know the language) feel the same.

I can understand not particularly enjoying the early vocabulary grind (over a nice book or whatever else one is easily distracted by), but hating it suggests to me that it doesn't offer any of what one really wants.

@AJATT Discussion
I'm fairly sure this is the reason AJATT discussions were banned before...
Whether it was AJATT or not, something along those lines was going to appear eventually, since the technology required was there; AJATT just happened to be the first / most popular / best advertized version.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with the thread topic, so could we at least keep it civil, please?

Long live Khatzumoto!!!!! Burn the heretics!!!!