Myrddhin Wrote:After having read Khatz's latest post, "A Day In The Life of Khatzumoto (No, For Real)" http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...o-for-real , I found one of his activities during his hardcore phase to be quite enlightening:

"Speak Japanese with Japanese friends and get roundly abused for the tiniest error — or even for speaking too slowly! Aaaaah…tough love.

* I taught my Japanese friends to be cruel by insisting they not let me get away with saying anything “un-Japanese”. It takes several repetitions of such a request until people know you’re not just feigning humility. But once they know…oh boy."

Apparently part of a typical day. It might go some way towards explaining his leet speaking skills.

Haha, I know this feeling...I'm put in a situation in which I must feel guilty for not knowing more japanese XD

And you know, it works...

Myrddhin Wrote:After having read Khatz's latest post, "A Day In The Life of Khatzumoto (No, For Real)" http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...o-for-real , I found one of his activities during his hardcore phase to be quite enlightening:

"Speak Japanese with Japanese friends and get roundly abused for the tiniest error — or even for speaking too slowly! Aaaaah…tough love.

* I taught my Japanese friends to be cruel by insisting they not let me get away with saying anything “un-Japanese”. It takes several repetitions of such a request until people know you’re not just feigning humility. But once they know…oh boy."

Apparently part of a typical day. It might go some way towards explaining his leet speaking skills.

Lol, I got so pissed when he put up the "stuff you" post. I think I said something a little mean. I'm glad he actually put something real up. You can learn a lot about how to got about things from Khatz.

tokyostyle Wrote:* Learn Japanese from native sources thus learning it in context.

This way you learn "correct" Japanese and you are less prone to develop bad speaking/writing habits that are difficult to fix. If you're focusing on traditional vocabulary lists that go from Japanese to English words you will lose the actual Japanese meaning and end up creating sentences that monolingual Japanese can't understand. A trivial example would be medicine. You don't take or eat a pill in Japanese you always drink it. If you aren't studying a full sentence such as 薬を飲んだ then you might just translate the English thought straight into ピルを取った. (There's actually two big mistakes in that sentence.)

I've seen you dismiss vocabulary decks before, but I think you're viewing them a bit rigidly. Studying vocabulary doesn't necessarily mean EDICT-style J-E cards. I have up to 3 sentences on the back of mine, along with audio and a link to jump to 大辞林, where I can see a definition and further examples. This is mostly used when learning the word or as a refresher, the rest of the time I can speed through my reviews. I also find that for many words, especially nouns, the English is a convenient shortcut. It's a bit hard to misconceive words like 'window' and 'chair'. The importance of J-J and avoiding direct translations should be stressed from an early stage, but there is such a thing as overkill.

Why is 薬を飲む any more important than 薬が効く、薬をやる、薬を服用する etc? You're going to have to learn multiple collocations for a lot of words, so simply studying single sentences with furigana as the "answer" guarantees little more than studying the word in isolation.

What I find more worrying about sentences is relying on the "context". I can read words like 灌漑 and 痙攣 when I see them, but if you showed me the kanji separately I probably wouldn't recognise them. What happens when you see 薬 without 飲む? Do you mistake it for 楽 or forget how to read it ? It's a simple example with common words, but what about more difficult ones contained in longer sentences?

I'm not disagreeing with your approach; I just don't like having sentences on the front of a flashcard which is supposed to get me to recall meaning. It doesn't mean I'm not employing a lot of the principles you talked about though.

I'm changing the subject here.

What I think that makes AJATT work is enjoyment.
I've passed AJATT ahead for 5 successful language learners already, and all of them answer the same thing: "I hated to learn English. Now it's so much fun!"

One of them is my gf, who has come from very basic reading (could not read wikipedia in Simple English) to watching Young Justice with me in ~6 months. Most of what she did was watch cartoon network in English, with no subs of course.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'm changing the subject here.

What I think that makes AJATT work is enjoyment.
I've passed AJATT ahead for 5 successful language learners already, and all of them answer the same thing: "I hated to learn English. Now it's so much fun!"

One of them is my gf, who has come from very basic reading (could not read wikipedia in Simple English) to watching Young Justice with me in ~6 months. Most of what she did was watch cartoon network in English, with no subs of course.

Cool, I agree total with the enjoyment. You watch what you enjoy with variety/quantity and your bound to improve.

For vocab cards as long as one does a lot of reading/context with it. It works wonders.

I find I get almost nothing from doing vocab cards. I've started adding straight vocab cards for English (wich is my native language) words I don't know, and I actually find them harder than the J-sentences. It's not just that I'm learning to guess them from the sentence, because I've found it quite easy to recognise them in other contexts. The fact that some people find them easier suggests to me that they may learn differently to me, which brings me to the question that was the point of this post; Do those of you that find vocab cards more useful find it easy to define individual words? I'm not just talking about Japanese; Even in English I doubt I could give satisfactory definitions for most of the words I know.

For me, when I learn a knew word I look at the definition as a way of understanding how it is used in the sentence, which what it actually means. Obviously it depends on the word, since some are really obvious even without seeing them used.

I'm not really sure if this post makes much sense, but I think it would be really interesting to know if there is any difference between the way the sentence/vocab studiers understand words, or if we just disagree about the best way to learn them.