Dramatic enough for ya?

The general message of Katzumoto and the principle that we follow is to do stuff we like in our target language. From this we come to the idea that we can have fun and get good at Japanese at the same time. This makes sense and is basically true. We don't focus so much on learning words and grammar, but on getting used to the language. Getting so used to it that we can't help but be awesome at it.

This is all more or less true however there are 4 important points I believe you need to understand if you want to become really good at a second language.

1. Clear improvement does not verify the long term value of study methods

When I first went to Japanese class, I had a terrible teacher, we just went through each page of the book and she spoke broken English at us. I though she was good because I was learning grammar and words. I was remembering them and so my skill increased. I couldn't speak Japanese for crap, but my knowledge was increasing. Just because you are increasing your knowledge doesn't mean you are on the way to becoming really good at Japanese. (I could have attended her classes until I died and would never have gotten far.

2. You don't know if a method is good or not until you get good.

There are generally 4 stages to learning Japanese

1. learn the basics
2. learn the intermediate stuff and start speaking at an ok level
3. learn advanced stuff that you don't hear often and start attempting to speak at a similar level to a native speaker.
4. with a core ability to use Japanese at a native level, fill in all the blanks in your knowledge such as idioms, dialects, highly specialised words and so forth.

Virtually any method will get you through 1 and 2. Once you reach 3 though you will be faced with many difficult questions. Many times people won't understand you. This is when you learn just how well you have used your study time until now. So what I am saying is think to the future. What do you need for your long term goals. Steps 1 and 2 will fall no matter what, but what can you do now to race through 3.

You may know 5000 words and their English translations, but you will be much further away from knocking off 3 compared to someone who only knows 2500 but has learnt these from native material in a Japanese only environment. Be wary of methods that don't focus on 3. You won't notice they suck until you hit “the wall”.

Most Japanese English learners are an excellent example of this. They have a degree of competency with English, but they never become great or really fluent. They may acquire more vocab and grammar, but fundamentally they speak Japanese English which doesn't change.

3. You will never get good having (only) a good time with Japanese.

Sorry but it is true. It is 100% true that it is wonderful to read stuff you love and so forth. This is far better than reading stuff that is boring. For example say you want to learn morse code, so to practice you start reading a novel about a topic that fascinates you written in morse code. You may enjoy yourself for a while however you will tire. No matter how interesting it is, it is way more of a pain in the ass trying to decipher the code to get to the content. It is however exactly at this point that must continue, even if you do something else in morse code, you cannot go back to nice plain English.

No matter how much you love the topic you will get sick of Japanese. However you have to continue WITHOUT reverting back to English, precisely because it is difficult. If you don't force your brain to cope with Japanese it never will and going back to English every hour means it never has to.

It is really hard to cope with the amount you need to leave your old self behind. You are so used to expressing, being your thoughts in English. When you cram Japanese down your throat you start to lose your old sense of self. Your thoughts start to turn to Japanese. You slowly become Japanese and it is very hard not to run back to your English websites. It is not pleasant (although it is quite an experience).

One more thing. You can't do 2 hours of immersion a day. It's like doing 10 minutes of 'marathon running' a day. It's called immersion for a reason. You have to specifically get out of it to be un-immersed. Being immersed is the normal state.

You will never get good (read native-like) chipping away at grammar and vocab and a bit of 'immersion' each day. Even if you are chipping away with a jack hammer.

4. You have to develop a new sense of self if you really want to be good

Have you ever met a really good English speaker who didn't just jive with English culture? Who didn't seem to have grown up with exposure to English culture?

Sorry, but your English self is not compatible with real Japanese. You need to learn to be humble. You need to learn to fit in. You need to learn how to play down your own achievements and praise others. You don't need to act like this all the time, but you need to be able to act inline with the norm (as if you grew up in Japan).

Once you can do this, you are able to bend and break social rules and become your own self in Japanese form. However, you can never be exactly your English self.

The classic example is “How are you?”. The Japanese almost never ask this. Even if you genuinely want to know how they are, there is no way to ask in most situations without being weird. (Kind of like asking people "Are you of good health?" in English)

Anyway, the way to get this is massive exposure to the language (without any english breaking it up). Then you will learn all the standard response and ways of interact and will follow them naturally.

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Staying forever on vocab and grammar sentences (KO2001, core2k) and not progressing to pure native material, not progressing to a JJ dictionary, breaking up any Japanese you do with constant English, not making Japanese the greater portion of your day, leaving Japanese when you get tired, being too closed to allow a new Japanese self to develop, these are the kind of things that will prevent you from becoming a natural Japanese speaker.

You need to decide how far are you going to take Japanese and then act on it.

</my opinion>

Way too much preaching on these forums as of late. I' glad I don't frequent so often nowadays.

Yonosa Wrote:Way too much preaching on these forums as of late. I' glad I don't frequent so often nowadays.

Your comments are always.... enjoyable

You'll experience 'preaching' of some kind in virtually every group/group oriented endeavor you take part in.

Get used to it!

I don't know what prompted this post, but I think you need to calm down and try to redirect all that energy into something more constructive, like... I don't know... learning Japanese?

Great post!

I see your point about 1 and 2 being achievable any which way but 3 and 4 require special attention. True True.

My immersion environment is as much as it can be although I spend a lot of time here. Everything I use is in Japanese and I'm so used to it now I forget it's another language. Yesterday I called my mum and asked her when I should come over next for dinner and she suggested monday and I nearly answered with すいません、もう用事があります。 I never think "copy and paste" anymore it's always "コピー、貼付け”.

Just a thought or two of mine....

I think developing fluent reading is a really important skill and for me I'm trying to develop fluent reading before anything else. I'm seeing steps 1 and 2 through until I feel
that they're largely complete and I'll know when that time comes by way of progress.

Theres two kinds of reading; deciphering text and reading for meaning.

Deciphering text is when there are 項目 in the text you don't get and need to decipher them to get the meaning of the text. Reading for meaning is when you know everything (~95%) in the text and you're reading it for the meaning like you do when you read your native language.

when we're learning we start off in the deciphering phase but as our vocab and grammar knowledge increases we start phasing in and out of deciphering and reading for meaning and til steps 1 and 2 are largely complete and reading for meaning becomes the norm as there isn't anything new whenever you read.

It's at this point fluent reading can be achieved. Reading for long extended periods without needing to pause, look things up or have to think hard about things. We begin processing the language in real time and at this point are able to do it in vast quantities for extended periods of time.

I see it as a perfect way to really begin internalizing language patterns. It's by no means a complete solution but I definitely am starting to see the effect it's having on me as I've shifted into the stage where I'm phasing between deciphering text and reading for meaning.

I think you make some good points--such as, just because you are learning, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good method to help you to achieve fluency--but I disagree with the concept that immersion is necessary to become a native speaker of a language.

I only say this because my grandparents are German immigrants and they did not stop using German when they came to America, yet, my grandmother speaks flawless English (I don't know about my grandfather, as he passed on shortly after I was born). The only time she studied English was as a girl, and that was cut short during the war. Both she and my grandfather learned English by watching movies. They may have had some basic knowledge, but they didn't really study. And, since they weren't fluent, they still had to use German with one another when at home. All of their children were from Germany as well, sans my mom, so they all spoke German too (although they had to learn English in school).

She also still occasionally inserts German in replace of her English when speaking, out of habit. I also don't think she ever tried to become American; in fact, my mother complained about how weird they were culturally when growing up.

I'm not trying to tear apart your post or anything, but I do think it actually demotivates people by telling them that they can't really reach native level if they don't immerse themselves 100% in the language and abandon their native tongue. For example, my job REQUIRES me to use English--I'm a professional writer (although my forum writing probably doesn't reflect this). If I don't use English, I don't get paid. If what you are saying is true, I might as well give up learning Japanese because I simply can't immerse myself all day, every day.

I agree with everything you said, but I don't see how this is the dark side of AJATT - AJATT is to eat, breath and sleep Japanese, which is pretty much what you are advocating. This seems to be more like the dark side of learning Japanese than dark side of AJATT

Meh to number 4

My stance has always been to be polite but ***** trying to be someone else to fit their cultural mold.

Erubey Wrote:Meh to number 4

My stance has always been to be polite but ***** trying to be someone else to fit their cultural mold.

My cultural mold is quite clear. 俺が外人。　

If you want to participate in Japanese society as something other than a foreigner, you have to learn to use polite language in a culturally correct manner, whether you like it or not.

I use AJATT because I don't want to pay for classes and don't have unlimited time. That being said, I teach English as a language, and not in a crap way. So I actually meet many people daily who have used different methods to learn a language with varying results.

So, the first thing to realise is that when you learn a language other than English, that teacher will probably have done no actual language teaching training. They are just good at that language, through whatever means. The best language methodologies are being used to teach English, with other languages far behind. If the teacher has learned any sort of English taught ESL methodology they will probably teach well.

So how to teach well? The key is letting the students use the language a lot. This usually means most lessons revolve around learning some target language, which should take about ten minutes, then doing controlled practice with the language, like a gapfill or transposing something, another ten minutes, and then about an hour of various activities linked to that structure, like reading a text containing that structure, listening to audio containing the structure, but mostly just talking a lot, lots and lots of talking with error correction.

Speaking is the number one skill. If you can't speak well you don't know a language. If you know a million kanji and can write them it won't mean anything if you can't speak. So pretty much AJATT falls completely flat because there is no speaking. And there is no way to be good at speaking without speaking. Knowing words and grammar is knowledge only, not skill. Additionally, being good at one skill does not necessarily translate into being good at other skills. I have students who are good listeners, but not good speakers, others are good readers but not good writers. This is because input is different from output, one may need the other but it doesn't lead to the other.

So AJATT is good with helping you remember the knowledge that you've learned over the long term. And reading and listening all day makes you good at reading and listening. However none of these things can teach you how to use your mouth and pronounce things, nor can it give you the speed of thought necessary to speak well. You need to speak a lot too.

So, English classes these days are 80% speaking to other students with error correction, and other skills and knowledge relegated to homework or introductory material. If you can find a Japanese class like this and do AJATT at home then you will be golden.

Why would talking to native speakers using skype or other means of free verbal practice not be part of AJATT? All English All The Time is how I learned my native language as a toddler. Granted, it took me 20 years to learn to read at a college level. Maybe the next 20 to regress back to high school level

One thing doesn't always lead to the other is true. I have been doing rounds at the various government offices filling out paperwork in Japanese for residency status. The bureaucrats working the desks have been so impressed by my kanji knowledge they speak to me in Japanese 100 miles per hour leaving me completely baffled and embarrassed.

I don't think thermal is saying you should change your personality or anything. I think it's kind of localization to be yourself in another culture.

You know it's not a good idea to do a word-for-word translation like a cheap machine translator when you want to say an "equivalent" thing in a foreign language, right? You use an idiomatic phrase to get the closest expression even when its literal word-for-word translation sounds ridiculous, right? Same thing. If you behave the same way as you do when you're in your own culture, you can't be yourself in another culture. Your behavior doesn't represent yourself at all.

If you think idiomatic translation that sounds natural carries the sole and meaning of your words better than unnatural translation, you might want to do the same thing when you "behave" in a foreign culture. The "literal translation" of your behavior won't make you look like yourself.

Change your behavior to be yourself. Gesture-for-gesture translation won't work well unless you're a totally unpredictable guy who does random things at every turn in your culture.

By the way, I think people naturally change their way of thinking and whatnot when they learn about a foreign culture. It's not a bad thing, I think. It's also yourself. It's just you're a bit more mature and knowledgeable.

As for the 100% immersion thing, I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to achieve native fluency, whatever that means. The more you invest your time, the faster your progress will be. I think this is the only thing we know for sure.

I will never get rid of my mother tongue to learn a second language. I might temporally shut out my first language to improve my learning speed, but it doesn't mean I'd respond in a foreign language to my friends in my home town just because I'm in an immersion-ish phase.

phauna Wrote:Speaking is the number one skill. If you can't speak well you don't know a language. If you know a million kanji and can write them it won't mean anything if you can't speak. So pretty much AJATT falls completely flat because there is no speaking.

Sorry but I can't agree with this. It's not possible to be completely literate and not be able to speak the language, unless you have some kind of social anxiety disorder.

mezbup,

I agree, reading is crucial. I think becoming really natural in a language takes a lot of reading. It's just too easy to space out so much stuff when you are doing listening, but reading forces you to take it all in. It's tough until you know the majority of common words.

mirina,

I think you have to consider that German and English both derive from latin so the hurdles are not as big going from one to the other (and particularly German to English it seems.) I have been really impressed by the German people's English that I have met.

mirana Wrote:I'm not trying to tear apart your post or anything, but I do think it actually demotivates people by telling them that they can't really reach native level if they don't immerse themselves 100% in the language and abandon their native tongue. For example, my job REQUIRES me to use English--I'm a professional writer (although my forum writing probably doesn't reflect this). If I don't use English, I don't get paid. If what you are saying is true, I might as well give up learning Japanese because I simply can't immerse myself all day, every day.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that you should be completely immersed. Just that if want to come really natural you need long periods of Japanese only. Not an hour here are there with lots of English in between.

phauna Wrote:So AJATT is good with helping you remember the knowledge that you've learned over the long term. And reading and listening all day makes you good at reading and listening. However none of these things can teach you how to use your mouth and pronounce things, nor can it give you the speed of thought necessary to speak well. You need to speak a lot too.

So, English classes these days are 80% speaking to other students with error correction, and other skills and knowledge relegated to homework or introductory material. If you can find a Japanese class like this and do AJATT at home then you will be golden.

I agree that this is the dream. However, I don't believe in the English teacher principles used by English schools (I did the CELTA). With AJATT in conjunction, awesome. But without it you get a lot of speakers who spit out grammar, need to think when they speak and don't have much flexibility.

Erubey Wrote:Meh to number 4

My stance has always been to be polite but **** trying to be someone else to fit their cultural mold.

You can still be yourself, just not in the exact same way you are yourself in English. For example you can make jokes, but you can't make most of them in the same way at the same times. (Sarcasm is a good examples of this).

There are also times when you need to be quiet and discreet. For example, you need to be delicate when contradicting your boss or someone older than you. You may be direct as a person and can still be more direct than most Japanese people in this situation. However, if you are just your English self you will offend people.

magamo Wrote:As for the 100% immersion thing, I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to achieve native fluency, whatever that means. The more you invest your time, the faster your progress will be. I think this is the only thing we know for sure.

I didn't explain this very well. Sure it's ideal to be immersed as much as possible. What I wanted to say more here, is that you need to keep using/inputting Japanese for extended periods without any English. When you aren't used to it, you watch 1 episode of a drama and at the end you are tired. If you just watch one, then switch back to English, your brain copes ok and doesn't really need to adapt. However, when you are immersed in Japanese for 3 hours, you get tired and struggle. I think struggling with it and keeping going is exactly what allows rapid improvement and allows people to get used to a language, rather than understanding parts of it.

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I think we should keep in mind when learning a language that there are people who have been in a foreign country for many years and still suck at it's language. For example a guy I work with has been in Australia for 25 years (and presumably been using English for at least 8 hours a day at work during that whole time) and his English is terrible. I think you really have to think long term about your study methods. if you want to become a very natural speaker.

It's interesting how one skill doesn't translate into another and that is completely correct. However, mastering one skill as a foundation for building the next can be a good strategy if it fits your road map to fluency.

Obviously if you live in Japan speaking/listening will be a big priority. For someone like me who lives in an English speaking country and isn't planning on visiting Japan for the next 2 years I have the time to follow such a method.

I'd really love to sit down with the guys at anti-moon, khatz and others that have done things a similar way and really pick their brains about things. I know a russian guy whom learned English in school for a while but really picked it up through watching English movies and I've never heard him make a mistake while speaking.

I think a lot of doubt about AJATT lies in peoples minds, I know I have mine. I guess it stems from understanding volumes and speaking single sentences... Then again, if it's really going to work the way they say it works then after a lot of thought I would presume it's only after you have conquered the mountain that is vocab and own it as your own.

You ever watched a movie so many times you know 3/4's of the lines at any given point in the movie? That's repetition for you.

Could a foreign language learner who understands ~60% - 80% of the same movie and watch it the same amount of times be able to accomplish the same feat? Highly doubt it tbh.

Could they if they had a comfortable understand of ~95% of it? I think so yes.

thermal Wrote:For example say you want to learn morse code, so to practice you start reading a novel about a topic that fascinates you written in morse code.

A novel in morse code? That would be rough on the ears. Are you sure such a thing exists?

JimmySeal Wrote:

thermal Wrote:For example say you want to learn morse code, so to practice you start reading a novel about a topic that fascinates you written in morse code.

A novel in morse code? That would be rough on the ears. Are you sure such a thing exists?

Here is some audio books in morse code. There is even a tool to make your own.

Pfft, I'm currently translating Finnegans Wake into quipu. *You* try punning with gordian knots and see if you can keep up Csikszentmihalyi's concept of 'flow'.

Confusing post, you're basically just summarizing the AJATT method and all of its plus sides, only concluding that sometimes you can't have fun but need to be persistent to get through..

So basically the dark side of AJATT is that sometimes you will have to not have fun. Bit of a long post for something that could be put into one sentence

The first post reads like a coaching story for some kind of sports manga. Having to work your ass of day and night, almost dying from exhaustion just to be able to compete a the highest level.

From learning languages during high school I've learned my fortes and weak point in it, I know I'm bad at output, never scored above a C, even in my native language I 'm terrible at it. But input and passive intuitive understanding of languages, I excel in that, never scored below an A. And guess what after excelling at that for years, and getting a better and better understanding of languages, at a certain point doing output was hardly a problem anymore. It just came naturally. Even without immersion. And I was even better at it than the people that would do better at output previously.
So even in Japanese, when there comes a point I want to output in Japanese, I'm sure that skill will grow on me as well. No need to force myself to get there already, if I can use that energy in a better more efficient way to gain other skills.
Besides I know I will get frustrated and bored if I pressure myself to do so. Maybe I won't make progress as fast as those people that do like to work their ass off. But I'll get there eventually.

Everyone has different skills, different eases of learning, different kind of learning they excel at, different availability of time, different everything. Just go where you like to go.

Good post, though I agree that naming it "Dark Side of AJATT" makes little sense. It's a fact that you don't know a language until you can speak it and AJATT lacks a LOT in the speaking department, but it's also true that if you read 200 books in Japanese while watching 200 movies, you're going to be able to speak. Not good, but well enough to survive... and with all that knowledge in your brain, it will take no time nor effort to bring it all out, so I don't think it's a big problem with AJATT since it was made for people who study outside of Japan without the intention of going there for quite a while.

Waiting for the thread titled "AJATT Kills Little Puppies"; although my other thread I used a flame inviting title myself so Pot/Kettle/Black.

1. Clear improvement does not verify the long term value of study methods

--Clear improvement over time might. Remember, we're dealing with vague terms called literacy and fluency after all.

2. You don't know if a method is good or not until you get good.

--Measure your progress and you can derive quite a bit of data to suggest that a method is good or not.

3. You will never get good having (only) a good time with Japanese.

--Debatable. I think what people want to do is only have fun, but not do something that can be construed as "studying". However, even thought I "study" drama and drame scripts in that I'm looking them up in a dictionary and testing them in parts via an SRS, it's still fun and it's making me good. If the "studying" portion is boring, it may be the either the method you're using to study or the material.

4. You have to develop a new sense of self if you really want to be good

--How you act in the new culture may be different than how you act in your current one? I think Khatzmoto hit on this about dropping the ego and realize you're an illiterate kid again. Let the ego drive you to become literate.

Have to admit, I'm also not seeing how the above relates to the "dark side" of AJATT. You say "dark side" then that suggests the negative side of things. Perhaps if you linked to the posts that Khatzumoto makes that you view as negative aspects yet he advocates.

Tobberoth Wrote:... it's also true that if you read 200 books in Japanese while watching 200 movies, you're going to be able to speak. Not good, but well enough to survive...

...don't think it's a big problem with AJATT since it was made for people who study outside of Japan without the intention of going there for quite a while.

I absolutely feel I could survive in Japan given my current output and I think that's the most basic level of speaking one needs to have. So long as you have confidence in surviving everyday life and situations when you are in Japan your interaction with real people, langauge and situations will grow your output rapidly if you have the foundations down

If you nail speaking in 18 months without ever going there then perhaps you should start a blog.

And I thought the dark side of AJATT is a preacher, who is looking for methods to get more and more money from his cultists (e.g. "This video is a lot like sitting with me, in my “Fortress of Solitude”, having a conversation. If that’s something you would enjoy, then I think you might enjoy this video as well."). The next big thing is the AJATT Immersion Air, filled up in bottles... (its a lot like breathing with "him").