kapalama Wrote:CreepyAF what were you actually doing every day?

Working in English? Going to school in English?

I had a golden opportunity in college to study Japanese. Even though my technique of straight immersion was terrible, I certainly capitalized on the moment.

Here's the timeline:

February, Year 20XX Nearing the end of my first year of college, decide to dive into the deep end of Japanese immersion.

April -- August Can't find a summer job, bum around my parents house and go hardcore Japanese (they were pretty bewildered).

September Go back to college, bring immersion environment with me. My timetable involved plenty of 2 hour gaps that I had to spend on campus. Perfect opportunity to study.

Spring, Year 20XY Met a girl.

The outside environment was English, but I did my best to shut it out. I did not watch an English movie, read an English book, watch an English TV series, or willfully listen to any English music during this time. I did not watch English YouTube videos that weren't related to learning Japanese, and I blocked time wasting English websites like Facebook from my router. I limited time with friends and made compromises like having Japanese audio in the background when I was with them. Fortunately my best friend was also into Japanese stuff, so that made it easy.

Here is what I did to build an immersion environment.

1. Any electronic device I had, I put in Japanese mode. My computer, my phone, my camera, etc.
2. I modded my Wii to play Japanese games.
3. I downloaded a ton of anime, J-Dramas, Japanese movies, Japanese music, etc.
4. I bought several hard cover Japanese books.
5. I had an iPod hooked up to a speaker playing Japanese audio near 24/7.

5 hours a day were devoted to active immersion, and reviewing my SRS decks.
15~hours (including sleep) was for passive immersion.
4 hours were when I could not compromise and functioned in English.
24 hours (especially those before falling asleep) were spent wondering why my grades were so poor.

I did not try to translate the input I was receiving, just tried to absorb it with open eyes and ears. I was trying to learn like a child.

All YMMV, etc.

It's important to note that it is precisely because kids have to use the language to get anything that their immersion works. It seems like the approach you took in effect took all the stuff that did not require your full attention and turned that to Japanese.

Unfortunately, this is the common thing that people, even those who go to Japan do. More regularly, Japanese people who come to "study English" in the US/Canada first find their support system of Japanese speakers, and then "Study English".

That's not really immersion. In some sense, that's just replacing the English noise at the edge of your life with Japanese noise, or vice versa, since you can opt out of all that Japanese, it reinforces the unnecessary aspects of the Japanese.

(I know nothing about AJATT, so you may have been doing what he suggested doing. If so, I guess I don't support what he espouses. I don't think immersion will work without true immersion. Any effort is better than no effort, but immersion is not about time in an environment, it's about no time away from that environment)

I am trying to think about what could count as immersion, that you could have done in scenario, and the only thing I can come up with is flying to Japan and spending the summer there, with no prior plans. If you do not want to sleep rough, you would have to get good at Japanese fast enough to convince someone with space to take you in.

If that's sound like a flying leap, then you were not immersed.

CreepyAF Wrote:I was trying to learn like a child.

The problem is, I don't think that's how a child learns.

I believe children learn by parents demonstrating "this is a ball" and pointing to the ball, "mommy" pointing to mom, etc. If they are bad parents, they will park the kids in front of a TV with a kid's show that basically does the same see & say repetition. It's just another iteration of comprehensible input theory. And it's been shown in experiments that even the sing-songy voice that adults use to speak to babies encourages understanding. So unless your immersion environment is media intended for infants, you were trying to run before learning to crawl.

(As an aside, if the mother points to herself and says mommy, the child is rightly confused by this. It's part of the theoretical construction of the world that context means that anyone pointing at themselves can use the personal pronoun "I", even though that is not their name. This is why hearing Japanese mothers called their sons "Boku" is a little hard to grasp, because the second person son is being called by a first person pronoun. It would be like American mothers calling their sons "I")

I have not read the research, but...

Comparing a child who lacks some of the basic tools for understanding the world (theory of other minds, counterfactuals, hypotheticals) to an adult misses the fact that the child is not just learning a specific language but learning how to represent the world theoretically in any language, (and vice versa).

And

they are also learning how to manipulate the body to create the sounds needed. Children have to learn through baby talk because they cannot make most of the sounds "Epistemological solipsism", leaving aside whether the fact they could even understand the concepts that those sounds represent to certain English speakers.

Adults can learn languages so much faster than children because they already know how to think, and already know how to make noises with their mouth and throat.

Unfortunately, adults attempting to learn a language seem to often forget that children learn their languages by talking, more so than by listening.

True immersion environments force the non-speaker to go ahead and speak anyway, because that's the only way to get anything.

Thanks again to everyone who has responded. I've mentioned before that I've been an on/off creeper of this forum for years. During that time, scrolling through these topics has felt like opening the lid to a chest of treasure. Now that I'm engaging in it, it feels like I'm running my hands through those golden doubloons.

kapalama Wrote:I know nothing about AJATT, so you may have been doing what he suggested doing. If so, I guess I don't support what he espouses. I don't think immersion will work without true immersion.

I mentioned in another thread I was a Kool-aid drinking AJATTeer for a while. I believe during this year of "immersion" I was following the AJATT doctrine very closely.

I want to be clear that I'm not complaining, feeling stumped, or wondering why I didn't get much result after putting in so much effort. I realize my study technique was fundamentally flawed, and I wasted a ton of time and effort when I could have been dividing an conquering Japanese.

While I've mostly been talking about myself in this thread because I'm a massive narcissist, I also want to use my story as an example/warning for all the people doing immersion AJATT style. It doesn't always work. I really wish more former AJATTeers would talk about their failures because the method requires a lot of faith.

"I've been going at this for 6 months and have almost nothing to show," I'd think to myself, "Oh well, one day I'll have enough puzzle pieces to begin to see the picture." But that day never came.

And circling back around to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if AJATT style immersion -- and perhaps immersion at all -- is just a bad idea for monolingual people in early stages of language aquisition.

kapalama Wrote:True immersion environments force the non-speaker to go ahead and speak anyway, because that's the only way to get anything.

Hmm, this sounds a bit like a no true Scotsman argument. I thought an immersion environment was an environment that immersed a person in the language. In my opinion, it's the language learner's responsibility to force themselves to engage with it. But then again, I'm the one who failed to make fluency happen with immersion, so my opinion is likely worth squat.

--

EDIT: After some thought, I want to take back the no true Scotsman line. While I do have some knowledge in language learning, I am in no position to be calling logical fallacies on people who are significantly more experienced. I truly apologize for that.

See? I was right when I said I have a thick skull.

CreepyAF Wrote:I was a Kool-aid drinking AJATTeer for a while. I believe during this year of "immersion" I was following the AJATT doctrine very closely.

I never read deep enough into AJATT to figure out the method, but wasn't the core of the method SRSing 10,000 sentences? IMO the sentences are way more beneficial than the immersion. Immersion seemed like it was just intended to be icing on the cake.

yogert909 Wrote:I never read deep enough into AJATT to figure out the method, but wasn't the core of the method SRSing 10,000 sentences? IMO the sentences are way more beneficial than the immersion. Immersion seemed like it was just intended to be icing on the cake.

You've got it right. I should probably clarify this point from earlier:

Me, oh heavenly Me. Wrote:I didn't have any English translations to help me decipher what I was listening to. I went full monolingual in Japanese. Though at the same time, I did have an Anki side project going on, which I amassed about 1,200 cards consisting of words or simple sentences.

I mention this as a side project because these weren't monolingual. I had an immersion deck in Surusu which had somewhere around 5,000 monolingual cards, which I included as immersion environment. (Not the slated 10,000 cards, but Khatz himself said he was really closer to 7,500 when he started to consider himself fluent.)

At this point I'm starting to think I'm not giving myself enough credit for how much I truly learned. When I think back, there were times when I had a somewhat fuzzy understanding of a lot of the language I was being presented. But seeing how I couldn't tell if my understanding was just from the images I was seeing and the English loan words I was hearing, I don't think I really knew all that much.

CreepyAF, I think what happened here is that you've misinterpreted what "immersion" should be like. And that's not your fault at all, because Khatz's writing was so....he would circumvent and take forever to point out a simple fact. Have you seen the site, Japanese Level Up (JALUP)? It's basically AJATT, but clearer. One thing the writer advises is to listen to things you've already studied/learned/whatever. So, say for example, you mine a song, or an episode, and learn it's sentences through SRS. After that just put that track in your iPod/iPhone/etc. and listen to it over and over. Over time the amount of input will increase as you use more and more media. He calls it an "immersion iPod," I think. You will only learn what you will understand. That is true, and that is the core of comprehensible input. I think that's how Khatz went about doing things, too. I remember he had an article on there where he showed how he would use a song to learn, and mine sentences out of to SRS, and then add that to his immersion queue of listening tracks, and listen to the thing over and over. Yes, he listened to stuff he didn't understand as well, but he was learning from then, or reinforcing through them words and phrases he learned elsewhere. He also said that he would "stalk Asian people," or ask his friends to be brutally honest with him and correct him, which probably means he must have had some speaking/output practice going on as well. He would shadow his sentences or read them out loud. He would try and use what he learned in thinking in Japanese. He also started wit a Particles book for learners of Japanese, and a bilingual Oxford dictionary, so he had some help from the start. It wasn't just about listening to stuff he couldn't understand day in and day out. Or only about SRS. Now whether or not he lived up to his claims of 18 months is not for me to say, because I don't know him, but from my experience, it works for me.

Yes, immersion in a country involves listening to unfiltered raw speech in the street, or having it surround you all the time, but that's also precisely why some people can speak after living somewhere for 30+ years, while others can't. That's also why heritage learners may be able to understand some of their parents' language, but not be able to speak it. The whole point here is interacting actively with the language.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, immersion works, but you have to know what you need to do to make it effective, and not just slap some audio on in the background that you can tune out. You have got to interact with it in some way for it to be effective. That's a core of how children learn. Their little brains are working overtime to try and decipher the actions and words happening around them. Have you ever seen how intently a child would stare at you as you say or do something, how absorbed they can get in an activity, or how they keep repeating the same word or action over and over again until they master it? I've worked part-time on the side for a year in a preschool. I'm not comparing how children and adults learn, but the whole point of this is that they don't just sit there and listen. There's so much work being done inside their heads that we can't see.

Don't aim to be the next Khatzumoto. Aim to beat your current self.

頑張ってください！

So help me out here. AJATT is about doing work away from native speakers, and its stated attainable goal is to get fluent in speech?

kapalama Wrote:So help me out here. AJATT is about doing work away from native speakers, and its stated attainable goal is to get fluent in speech?

　
I'm not siding with Khatzumoto, or even claiming that he was right about everything. What I took away from his blog, and what I read through his posts, is that yes, input formed a huge part of what his environment was like, but I don't think that's all he did. That's what I concluded after I read through his posts. He comes of vague most of the time, and he changes things around, I get that, and after the initial run through his blog, I just took away the general philosophy and adapted it to myself. I didn't worship his words. To some degree, some phrases come naturally after you listen a lot, but I also think actively trying to engage the language, actively think or write in the language, provided you're emulating what you've read or heard, will reinforce it in your brain, and will speed up the process. I think the whole point of input was to have a model that you can unconsciously use to imitate natural speech, speed up understanding, and not go around making up your own version of the language. Like a reference of sorts, which will decrease your constant reliance on someone to correct you, but not eliminate it.

He gives some conflicting advice, yes, and he's not exactly the best writer in the world. But I just took a step back, tried to think of what I can take from all of this, and work with it. I didn't just copy his method word for word. Yes, I listen and read whenever I can, but I have yet to stick with Anki. It may be because after a long day at the hospital or school, I'm too tired to be making cards and prefer to just read and look things up as I go, and make sure to look at the material again at some point in the future. I try to shadow, and I made a friend recently and have been working on outputting more in Japanese. But I always make sure that some form of input is going on. Whenever I see or hear something enough times, it sticks automatically, and that's one of the reasons why input is helping me, plus of course lots of exposure to vocab and structures. But I'm not 100% immersing, because it's frankly rude to be talking to patients with headphones on, and dangerous, and unrealistic. And when I'm studying for a test, I need to really focus, so I can't do that much in Japanese there either. I just try to work with the time that I have, and use the dead moments here and there. And from what I have done, it's been going okay for me.

I'm really not trying to defend anyone. All I'm saying is that he had some good ideas, but it needs some thought and not just blind following. I think that a large part of the work can be done on your own, and being around speakers later polishes your abilities and enhances them, rather than have you stumble around from scratch. It also means that you don't necessarily have to be in the country in order to use the language. For instance, if you like Japanese media, and not really planning on speaking to anyone, then input alone is enough, since all you have to do is understand the language well. So there's a degree of flexibility there.

"And circling back around to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if AJATT style immersion -- and perhaps immersion at all -- is just a bad idea for monolingual people in early stages of language aquisition."

As Woodsei says really, but the bigger question appears to be how you are interpreting "AJATT style immersion".

Listening only to stuff you don't understand when you are a beginner? Well, you will get very little out of that. Listening to stuff you have studied, like a song or a dialogue, or a film? Very good practice.

Listening all the time as a "default" also helps keep you on track I think.

So Let's help someone out who is just starting out, and only knows that they want to learn some Japanese.

Let's design a program that is both accessible (with media largely available, easily for sale) and reasonably fun (why I mostly watch variety shows) . I think one thing that people forget is how much setup work is involved studying, and it;s to easy to chase shit around instead of using time studying. The RTK books are a great thing fact, but the lack of stories caused a lot of people to crash and burn. I had almost no success in using RTK until I somehow managed to find this site. (How did I find this site? How did I find RTK?)

(I love you forever, Fabrice, for the effort you took in putting this together, and in keeping it going. Especially clearing the IP issues so that it can remain in place.)

This site is an amazing, no setup needed resources that simply did not exist, and could not have existed before the internet.

But the next steps are all fuzzy and annoying to set up, and there is no reason to commit to them, because until you do them, you cannot know whether they worked.

Anki got cool once it got turned into an iOS/Android app, but it really used to be, and still is, useless unless someone has the actual deck for the RTK system. And fiddling around with it is time someone could be spending atudying.

And if AJATT requires sentences (10,000 sentences) then where is the list of them that someone who has finished says yes these are perfect, so thet we can work together to make sure they are, and comfortably hand an earnest beginner the RTK book, this site (and a demand to donate), Anki, and two decks (RTK, sentences), and Rikaichan. And Tae Kim's pdf maybe.(?)

I am perfectly willing to give my Japanese friends any J-E materials to use because they too would like to have useful English sentences, and they will be brutally honest about ださい/死語/anime speak, because they love to give me shit about the weird poop that comes out of my mouth sometimes.

Immersion does work - I guess many of you are Americans, so chances are at least a couple of your grand-grandparents arrived in the USA without any English on them and here you are.

Now, what constitutes immersion isn't all that clear. I remember I read a book on linguistics long ago that discussed how a kid that watched TV all day long and didn't have contact with anyone didn't actually learn his mother language until he started interacting with people.

There are many types of immersion. I'll list a few distinct ones off the top of my head, in reverse order of usefulness:
1. unintelligible (for example a song or radio show in a language entirely new to you),
2. partially intelligible thanks to visual cues (this is far less intelligible than point nr. 3, coming up)
3. partially intelligible thanks to partial understanding of the language (or thanks to having previously watched something with subtitles)
4. intelligible thanks to a translation (where you're actually paying attention to the original language)
5. intelligible thanks to advanced understanding of the language

The ones that can realistically work to teach you a language, all by themselves, are the last three.

But the first two have their uses too, when complemented by other activities. They serve to familiarize you with some common expressions and words, making them easier to remember once you actually study them. Nr. 2 will even help you actually learn a few common expressions. But it wouldn't be effective by itself.

One thing is clear: early on (beginner/intermediate), immersion is not as efficient as drilling i+1 sentences with Anki. So if the only thing you're interested in is efficiency (least time spent before reaching an advanced level: hereby defined as the ability to understand, but not be able to correctly use, most everyday sentences and speech patterns), then you shouldn't bother with immersion until you're at that level. Then immersion of course becomes an absolute necessity for learning all the finer points of a language.

However, if you're not into spending over a thousand hours drilling sentences (and who is, really?), I recommend using all forms of immersion, from the start. In moderation, and in combination with other methods. No point in spending hundreds of hours on unintelligible immersion.

P.S. I didn't add someone going over to Japan just to learn the language to the list, because a. most people can't afford to do that b. I don't see being in Japan as any kind of special immersion, with extra benefits; you can immerse yourself in Japanese just fine from wherever you are

CreepyAF Wrote:And circling back around to the main topic of this thread, I wonder if AJATT style immersion -- and perhaps immersion at all -- is just a bad idea for monolingual people in early stages of language aquisition.

A couple of points:
1. AJATT is ever evolving. There's no one, well defined AJATT method. It's just a guy's evolving opinion on language learning.
2. At no point in AJATT's evolution did Khatz recommend either "one and only one style of immersion" or "relying mainly on immersion".

He was always very clear on the backbone of his studies: the 10,000 sentences, most of them gathered and translated by himself out of native sources. Clearly, he wasn't relying on passive, unintelligible immersion when doing that. Clearly, to add a sentence, from a native source, you have to understand a lot of what's in the native source, not to mention translate the sentence itself.

CreepyAF Wrote:I was a Kool-aid drinking AJATTeer for a while.

That's an odd thing to say. If, after having browsed through the AJATT blog back in the day, someone had asked me to name the main benefit of AJATT, compared to other language learning materials, I would've said: "It encourages language learners to think for themselves."

There are things wrong with AJATT, but, as far as the free blog (the only one I read) is concerned, the last thing you could accuse it of is the promotion of any kind of Kool-aid drinking.

Hey Stansfield123, you bring up many valid points.

Stansfield123 Wrote:There are things wrong with AJATT, but, as far as the free blog (the only one I read) is concerned, the last thing you could accuse it of is the promotion of any kind of Kool-aid drinking.

I agree that Khatz promoted his readers to be free-thinkers, but at the same time I think it's undeniable that there was a cult-like following in his wake.

Okay, maybe Kool-aid drinking and cult-like following are going overboard. I just mean I was an AJATTeer who followed Khatz's site as if it was Universal Truth, refused to listen to fair criticism, and put my faith in the method higher than the results I was achieving. Some of the other former AJATTeers I've talked to in the last few years have told me similar stories.

Stansfield123 Wrote:P.S. I didn't add someone going over to Japan just to learn the language to the list, because a. most people can't afford to do that b. I don't see being in Japan as any kind of special immersion, with extra benefits; you can immerse yourself in Japanese just fine from wherever you are

It's not always possible to live in Japan, certainly,

But if actually being in the only country that speaks a language is not special immersion with extra benefits then I am completely "はてな，はてな, はてな" about what the goal of language study is.

Or maybe we are just talking about levels of capability in a language??

(Full Disclosure: sometimes at a loss as to why some people are studying Japanese.)

kapalama Wrote:It's not always possible to live in Japan, certainly,

But if actually being in the only country that speaks a language is not special immersion with extra benefits then I am completely "はてな，はてな, はてな" about what the goal of language study is.

Or maybe we are just talking about levels of capability in a language??

(Full Disclosure: sometimes at a loss as to why some people are studying Japanese.)

I am at a loss about what people's reasons for learning Japanese have to do with the subject at hand.

Do you have an actual argument? Like a list of benefits that you can only get in Japan, when it comes to immersion?