masaman Wrote:Hey, it took me a lot of work to accumulate that 9000!!

Hahaha, I didn't mean to belittle your efforts. 9000 is close to the "magic" 10,000, and by that point I had expected my Japanese to be functional, but not good enough to pass as native, as you have. So your story gives me hope, and thanks for sharing!

yukamina Wrote:

masaman Wrote:As for why I'm here, I know, why am I here? mmm. Somebody posted a link to this site on a Japanese forum for English learners, and since then, I've been lurking here.

Can I ask what forum that is? I've looked for language learning forums in Japanese before, but I couldn't really find much.

It's called 2ちゃんねる but I don't know if it'll help you. There are some useful info there for sure if you read Japanese but they pretty much have no moderator and some of them are real psychos. I mean real real psychos. Now I warned you, this one is for English learners

http://academy6.2ch.net/english/

And this one shows you the links to all other categories

http://www2.2ch.net/2ch.html

You might find it interesting if you can ignore these wackos or are lucky enough not to bump into one, but It's really not for learning Japanese.

mafried Wrote:

masaman Wrote:Hey, it took me a lot of work to accumulate that 9000!!

Hahaha, I didn't mean to belittle your efforts. 9000 is close to the "magic" 10,000, and by that point I had expected my Japanese to be functional, but not good enough to pass as native, as you have. So your story gives me hope, and thanks for sharing!

So 10,000 is said to be the magic number then? I was thinking 12,000 from my personal experiences. Everybody I know who can pass as an Asian American seem to have spent at least that much, and I don't know anybody who "doesn't" pass and have spent like 15000. Of course, there are variations and people have strengths, but if the data from 2 completely different sources are this congruous, there may be some truth behind it.

Duh, Colorado is late now, I'm going bed. Good night !

masaman,

10,000 is just a number, a marketing gimmick with only a little special meaning. It's the long-term goal for AJATT people--10,000 Japanese sentences, and 10,000 hours of listening or active studying. Khatzumoto got his gig with Sony after about 7,500 sentences and 10,000 hours of immersion. In this article he quotes another author that independently analyzed the lives of a bunch of really successful people (sports stars, business leaders, pop stars, etc.) and found that the common thread that each of them spent about 10,000 hours (plus or minus a few thousand) practicing what they do before they "made it". So a bunch of anicdotal evidence. It's a ballpark figure though; could be 8000, might be 12,000.

esgrove Wrote:

masaman Wrote:

mafried Wrote:Am I the minority here?

I'm actually learning English (I'm Japanese

Wow. You're really Japanese? I'm impressed. Your English is better than mine. I had to look up the word "antipode". If you're a Japanese person studying English, why are you on this forum?

masaman Wrote:As for why I'm here, I know, why am I here? mmm. Somebody posted a link to this site on a Japanese forum for English learners, and since then, I've been lurking here. I guess I respect the people here for tackling Japanese as I know how hard it is to study a language that is completely different from your own, and I find a lot of information here is actually useful for me too. Anki is a great software for instance.

Actually, this forum is a great resource for ESL learners looking for practice...

By the way, could you please share that Japanese forums for English learners -and other forums as well- with us?

to masaman: You are amazing. Truly inpirational. Do you have a blog I could subscribe to? You are my hero.

masaman Wrote:

yukamina Wrote:Can I ask what forum that is? I've looked for language learning forums in Japanese before, but I couldn't really find much.

It's called 2ちゃんねる but I don't know if it'll help you. There are some useful info there for sure if you read Japanese but they pretty much have no moderator and some of them are real psychos. I mean real real psychos. Now I warned you, this one is for English learners

http://academy6.2ch.net/english/

And this one shows you the links to all other categories

http://www2.2ch.net/2ch.html

You might find it interesting if you can ignore these wackos or are lucky enough not to bump into one, but It's really not for learning Japanese.

I should write faster... ORZ



I hoped it wasn't 2ch... I can't get how having the most advanced technology in the world, the Japanese can have such a distorted idea - IMHO of course - of how to design a forum...

Thanks for the link anyway, I'll check it later.

BTW, if someone is interested in a more 'readable' forum, you can check 読売新聞's 発言小町

masaman Wrote:And in order to get that much hours...

That should be "that many hours...". Much goes with mass nouns and many goes with count nouns.

eg. "I have much furniture." (we use much here, because furniture is a "mass noun"... more than one piece of furniture is not furnitures, it's still furniture)

As opposed to:

"I have many chairs." (we use many here because chair is a "count noun"... more than one chair becomes chairs. You cannot say "I have much chairs".)


You probably know this already and it was just a mistake, but in the interests of learning I thought you might appreciate it!

mafried Wrote:Khatzumoto got his gig with Sony after about 7,500 sentences and 10,000 hours of immersion

Except that Khatzumoto seems to be willing to count anything as hours of immersion including the time he spent sleeping. Only hours of active listening should count, random Japanese audio in the background might count for something but not much if you can't concentrate on it.

Codexus Wrote:

mafried Wrote:Khatzumoto got his gig with Sony after about 7,500 sentences and 10,000 hours of immersion

Except that Khatzumoto seems to be willing to count anything as hours of immersion including the time he spent sleeping. Only hours of active listening should count, random Japanese audio in the background might count for something but not much if you can't concentrate on it.

This I agree with. I'm willing to bet that 500 hours of active exposure is more effective than 10 000 hours of passive exposure.

Tobberoth Wrote:

Codexus Wrote:

mafried Wrote:Khatzumoto got his gig with Sony after about 7,500 sentences and 10,000 hours of immersion

Except that Khatzumoto seems to be willing to count anything as hours of immersion including the time he spent sleeping. Only hours of active listening should count, random Japanese audio in the background might count for something but not much if you can't concentrate on it.

This I agree with. I'm willing to bet that 500 hours of active exposure is more effective than 10 000 hours of passive exposure.

O god here we go again! Every little bit helps as it shows with this man's accomplishments. Why should hours of active listening only count? Are you saying that passive listening is completely useless and a waste of time?

I think he's just saying that active listening is, by his reckoning, 20x more effective. I don't think anyone is saying passive listening is "useless" or "a waste of time".

esgrove,
Thanks! そんな褒められると恥ずかしいな　笑
I'm too lazy to write a blog though. And I'm not THAT confident

SammyB
Duh! Just when I thought it was perfect! You bet I appreciate your comment. My sense of plural-singuler is still a bit weak after all these years. And why are fish still fish when it's plural? Then different kinds of fish are fishes ? mmm I have a headache.

mafried
it seems he's saying pretty much like "it'll be a lot of hours anyway so let it all hang out and just keep doing. You'll get there some day" and the number itself doesn't hold that much importance. His writing is encouraging and I do think 10,000 or 12,000 "active" hours will get one to the native level too though.

Sebastian,
You might want to try 2ch ブラウザ
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/2ちゃんねるブラウザ
Most people don't use the ordinal web browsers there.

If all you did was passive listening, yeah, I doubt even 20,000 hours will do you much good. It's just too easy to tune out if your mind is occupied with something that it has to concentrate on.

However, passive listening (iPod or TV on while doing your job, surfing English sites, watching English subbed Japanese show, etc.); combined with active listening (Japanese videos, paying attention to the iPod); combined with reading (websites, books, manga); combined with ever improved learning (could be college, could be sentence method, could be self study in other areas) make it hard to beat.

The benefit with 24/7 passive listening is those breaks in your day when you begin to pay attention to it. It's there and available. It's the low hanging fruit your mind can grab onto when it desires. It's the reason you put Japanese stuff all over your room, your mind sees it and goes briefly into active mode. Yeah, it's easy to tune out. But if it's never there then you can't tune in either. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that's all you need.

Yea, I've been trying turning on the TV whenever I'm home even when I'm browsing Japanese web since I started reading this site, and it seems to be helping my listening ability a bit. This is something considering I've been in the states for over 10 years now.

Whow, that's an amazing confession. It's never too late for AJATT =D

Passive input is about maintaining the state of mind you achieve through active input.
I was impressed when I first started using a TV with Japanese stuff as a background in my room. In just a couple days I started thinking (a little) in Japanese, which is something I had never done before.

EDIT: Masaman, thanks for the tip about the browsers! There's one called JD in the Ubuntu repo, checking it out now.

yeah the better your japanese gets the less passive it becomes ...just like you can catch what people say off in the background in your mother tounge w/o even a second thought. I really notice this with music. The more japanese you understand the more likely you are to hear and understand something that will bring your attention back.

nac_est Wrote:There's one called JD in the Ubuntu repo, checking it out now.

Wow, Ubuntu? you must be a very technical guy. It'll be interesting to see 2ch browser running on Linux.

Just a small thing... But I've also started doing Japanese workout videos. They are pretty fun.

masaman Wrote:Wow, Ubuntu? you must be a very technical guy. It'll be interesting to see 2ch browser running on Linux.

やあ、別に！
The above mentioned browser is simple but it does the job for me. I've already spent inordinate amounts of time on ２ちゃんねる thanks to it

I'll check JD out when I'm installing Ubuntu 9.04 today (Been waiting to get Ubuntu again since I formated my computer because I knew 9.04 would come out in April, and yesterday it finally did )

Wow, Ubuntu seems to be quite popular in Europe, I'm ashamed for not knowing as I am (supposed to be) an engineer. I'm digressing, so to get back to the topic, I didn't use my native language in my head today. That was really tiring, but I feel like I accomplished something.

masaman Wrote:Wow, Ubuntu seems to be quite popular in Europe, I'm ashamed for not knowing as I am (supposed to be) an engineer. I'm digressing, so to get back to the topic, I didn't use my native language in my head today. That was really tiring, but I feel like I accomplished something.

I definitely think Europe is a forefront when it comes to Linux. Many countries are moving over to Linux completely (the french army for example) and most people at least know what it is even though they might not have tried it. It was invented in Europe so I'm guessing that could be part of the reason.

I think you should download Ubuntu, throw it onto a secondary partition and give it a go for a week or two, you will probably love it (most engineers do).