nest0r Wrote:hehe, I often see sarcasm that 'defends' Khatz from legitimate criticism, in other words, sarcasm that seeks to counter an absurd rendition of that criticism as a straw man. So I will counterbalance the tone of these forms of sarcasm with my own:

Don't worry, he's a big boy now. He can probably defend himself.

harhol Wrote:What AJATT did for me:
1. Motivation. [...]
5. Helped me to get over my fear of (academic) failure.

Professor Harhol - it sounds like you've already been successful in both those areas! But good to hear you were inspired. (And somewhat comforting to be reminded that even the high achievers have moments of doubt.) I think I'm overdue for an online guru for some areas of my life. =))

Kazalee Wrote:Come now. I was fluent after 1 year. Hell, I was having conversations with natives, remember wink ?

hehe. As I recall, you mentioned having conversations with human beings (which I found a bit puzzling.) ;-) Ah, but weren't those the good ol' days, darling? *sigh* So nice of Gramps to drop by so that we can revisit these lovely topics. :-)
[snipped]

I have something on the 18-month issue that might help make it go away. Hopefully. But I have to walk the dog first (closest thing I have to an online guru for exercise)

AJATT is one of many places I've trawled for tips, ideas, and resources, and browsing there gave me the impetus to finally try RTK, which I'd been resisting for years (because I didn't want to use someone else's mnemonics). It was also the first place I read about SRS, and it directly or indirectly - don't remember which - led me to this site.

That said, I was surprised to learn that so many people take Khatz so seriously, given the low signal:noise ratio of his writing, his doctrinaire attitude, and the difficulty of implementing full immersion outside of Japan. I do understand that the possibility of fluency in 18 months through comic books and cartoons would have a certain allure, but still...

I, too, have wondered what Khatz was doing for that 18 months besides (presumably) acquiring fluency. Managing his trust fund? Working in a host club? Living with his parents?

I don't know what it is about this thread title, but I snicker every time I read it. Or I giggle.

BJohnsen Wrote:I, too, have wondered what Khatz was doing for that 18 months besides (presumably) acquiring fluency. Managing his trust fund? Working in a host club? Living with his parents?

Is this a joke? He tells us multiple times on the AJATT site. He was studying a Computer Science degree in America whilst also working several part time jobs.

aphasiac Wrote:Is this a joke? He tells us multiple times on the AJATT site. He was studying a Computer Science degree in America whilst also working several part time jobs.

Is this a joke?

Thora Wrote:As I recall, you mentioned having conversations with human beings (which I found a bit puzzling.) ;-)

Why'z that puzzling? Or did I specifically use the words "human beings"?

All things considered, you guys should present alternates or new twists on AJATT instead of writing so much about it.

Everyone would benefit.

BJohnsen Wrote:and the difficulty of implementing full immersion outside of Japan

Difficulty? It's for the most part just more expensive.

I think the only legitimately useful thing I got out of AJATT was knowledge of SRS. I tried the whole "total immersion" thing in between jobs, and I realized, looking back it it now, that I didn't gain much. The reason is simply because, while I was constantly exposed to Japanese, the material was not suitable for studying.

For example, despite my reasonably decent vocabulary, I had absolutely dreadful listening skills, and even though I listened to Japanese TV or music around the clock, everything they said sounded like OADdfkaiejAKDjFJie to me. I followed the advice to "just keep listening and eventually everything will click," but it never did.

It wasn't until I no longer had time for immersion and instead imported the smart.fm Core sentences into Anki that my listening ability began to rapidly improve. I started from the absolute very beginning, even though reading and vocabulary-wise it was way below my level, and by the time I finished Core 2000 I could comfortably understand spoken Japanese. This was only from doing like 50 sentences a day, too. I think the fact that I could listen to something, and immediately reference the correct transcription, were why my ears were able to smoothly adjust to spoken Japanese. But, subtitles on Japanese TV is rare, so you don't get the same benefits.

I guess it differs from person to person, but personally I think just immersing yourself is flat out useless unless the materials you are using to immerse yourself are suitable for learning. It's like looking at a Japanese newspaper every day, but not knowing how to pronounce or read any of the letters. I may come to recognize the different kanji and alphabets, but I will still have absolutely no idea what's being said.

@Evangelo,

This forum is loaded with threads that discuss AJATT, alternatives to AJATT, clarification to AJATT, versions of AJATT on top of many other things not related to AJATT. Apologies if that smiley face meant you were being sarcastic.

@Mirina,

Your comment mirrors my own revelation last summer. Seems that you need to be "ok" at Japanese to get benefit of reading/listening to Japanese a lot. However, you need to read/listen to Japanese a lot to get "great" at Japanese. So removing English and installing Japanese 100% at the beginning feels almost useless and may be detrimental to motivation. However, ramping up to 100% replacement over time is very beneficial and can build motivation.

Evangelo Wrote:All things considered, you guys should present alternates or new twists on AJATT instead of writing so much about it.

Everyone would benefit.

For real, we should get together on some kind of forum and talk constantly about Japanese self-study from our continuous experiences/obsessions with learning the language, where AJATT plays only a small direct or indirect role, if any, in the overall idea department for most of those users.

Tangent: It is kind of cool that this forum has reached the 'random user writes a self-centered revisionist history post' stage.

Is it really even possible to revise the history of a medium where all of the history is still where it always was? It's not like the thousands of topics leading up to here have gone anywhere.

mirina Wrote:I think the only legitimately useful thing I got out of AJATT was knowledge of SRS. I tried the whole "total immersion" thing in between jobs, and I realized, looking back it it now, that I didn't gain much. The reason is simply because, while I was constantly exposed to Japanese, the material was not suitable for studying.

I totally hear ya there. If anything, jumping straight into the deep end slowed my progression and added heaps to my frustration level, early on in the game. And for the love of 神々 I don't recommend switching your OS language unless you have a heck of a lot more patience than I do or can actually understand that you're about to delete C:\WINDOWS

Rather, for me, immersion is something I've been steadily introducing more and more as my Japanese skill improves. Whereas a year ago I'd find myself overwhelmed and frustrated by all the immersion material I was forcing on myself, it all feels so much more natural and (get this) enjoyable now. The majority of my music is now in Japanese, I now play far more games in Japanese than in English, ditto with movies, TV shows, and so forth. I'm honestly not sure if I would have reached this level had I stuck with immersion-overload, rather than introduce it in layers over a period of time while taking advantage of things such as Smart.fm and 2001KO to bolster my vocabulary, etc.

Not to badmouth AJATT, though - Khatz himself wrote this article recently about the necessity of being flexible in your studies and methodology... which further proves my point that there is/was no "method" "AJATT", for me, stands for "As much Japanese At a Time as I can Take" (which is quite a bit these days!) or, alternatively, AMJAATAICT. Or, "How to learn a language with the attention span of a mosquito on methamphetamine."

@Burritolingus
I agree with you on that one. Like i did khatz immersion for the months were i didn't know much japanese and the things i heard weren't all i could understand yet.But after collecting sentences on basics,grammer and SRS sentences for the SRS anki and doing monolingual sentences and understanding. The immersion becomes more enjoyable when you start to understand what's being said, for me personally i feel i can't understand everything i hear in japanese 100% but nowadays if i hear anything in general in japanese i can understand it fully. Dramas i can understand alot now, with the addition of subs of course. Playing games in japanese may be diffcult but i can decode and undeerstand 90% of anything they are saying(Games such as onimusha 1 and onimusha dawn of dreams, in full japanese i could understand 85% of that game no problem, some of the kanji are rare even among the 3155 kanji i know, meaning wise. But i feel that it'll general increase when i get past 10,000 sentences. I do believe AJATT can help ppl get fluent, but of course doing you're own thing experimenting. Such things as kana-kanji SRS cards and learning grammer points,etc. These things i've experimented and it has shown good results so far.) So the immersion can go both ways, but i believe after a while of SRSing sentences+grammer+smart.fm+monlingual dictionaries,etc. You'll develop understanding japanese at a good level, may not be fluent but it will be in the future!)

nest0r Wrote:

Thora Wrote:Alyks, you say this New Method (?!) worked. How did it work for you? You were often keen to report your progress. You were also indignant and fiercely adamant that you would achieve native fluency by March (RTK +18 mos). (I normally wouldn't put someone on the spot like this, but you had a bit of a tantrum when well-meaning folks tried to manage your expectations back then.) [edit-fixed garbled stuff]

This. ^_^

Another vote for this.

Alyks you've written a lot of good things, but I think it's fair for people to call you to the table and for you to answer. I remember you wrote something like (paraphrase): "I don't care what any of you say because I will be fluent because I believe I can and I'll work hard to achieve that dream."

If Japanese took a back seat to your other projects that's fair- life happens- but we want to know how it went, and not just to say "I told you so" or to congratulate you but to learn from the experience.

cuz subway is a beautiful sandwich making creation and tacobell makes me sick.

BJohnsen Wrote:AJATT is one of many places I've trawled for tips, ideas, and resources, and browsing there gave me the impetus to finally try RTK, which I'd been resisting for years (because I didn't want to use someone else's mnemonics). It was also the first place I read about SRS, and it directly or indirectly - don't remember which - led me to this site.

That said, I was surprised to learn that so many people take Khatz so seriously, given the low signal:noise ratio of his writing, his doctrinaire attitude, and the difficulty of implementing full immersion outside of Japan. I do understand that the possibility of fluency in 18 months through comic books and cartoons would have a certain allure, but still...

I, too, have wondered what Khatz was doing for that 18 months besides (presumably) acquiring fluency. Managing his trust fund? Working in a host club? Living with his parents?

he said he was attending college to get a a degree in software engineering, had a girlfriend, and a parttime job.

captal Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:

Thora Wrote:Alyks, you say this New Method (?!) worked. How did it work for you? You were often keen to report your progress. You were also indignant and fiercely adamant that you would achieve native fluency by March (RTK +18 mos). (I normally wouldn't put someone on the spot like this, but you had a bit of a tantrum when well-meaning folks tried to manage your expectations back then.) [edit-fixed garbled stuff]

This. ^_^

Another vote for this.

Alyks you've written a lot of good things, but I think it's fair for people to call you to the table and for you to answer. I remember you wrote something like (paraphrase): "I don't care what any of you say because I will be fluent because I believe I can and I'll work hard to achieve that dream."

If Japanese took a back seat to your other projects that's fair- life happens- but we want to know how it went, and not just to say "I told you so" or to congratulate you but to learn from the experience.

For the record, that was the bit from Thora's comment I was least emphatic about This-ing. ;p

Not to totally hijack this thread (cuz I have read most of it and I find it quite interesting), but something said in the thread about manga reminded me that I should ask this question at some point. If I'm not into manga or watching TV dramas (I don't enjoy English TV either, nor did I ever enjoy comics) is there any other thing I can read at a beginner level aside from kid's books that would improve my Japanese comprehension?

Or, is there a really sensible or somehow enthralling manga series or whatever that an adult male who has no interest in what he assumes to be junior high school girl stuff or some weird sexual fantasy fluff found in those books? Please don't flame me for saying that. It's probable that I'm totally ignorant about what's really in those books. But from what I've seen on the subways and such, it looks like silly cartoon-y stories that would not hold my interest (I prefer more life-like crap like Grisham, some early Stephen King, and Clancy).

<<to above:
go do music (lyrics). don't tell me you don't like music either.

nest0r Wrote:For the record, that was the bit from Thora's comment I was least emphatic about This-ing. ;p

My bad That's the part I'm curious about- I haven't heard anything for ages...

Mcjon01 Wrote:Is it really even possible to revise the history of a medium where all of the history is still where it always was?

I think so. Don't PR people rely on it? (something to do with short-term memories, accessibility, higher priorities, visibility, laziness, passivity, turnover...etc.)

Quote:It's not like the thousands of topics leading up to here have gone anywhere.

True (for either interpretation of that phrase!)

It's not unlike the myth of "18 months to native level fluency" persisting (even expanding) despite the AJATT blogger having qualified what he meant by "fluent" in the deep recesses of his blog. His own descriptions of his level of proficiency aren't enough to dispel this myth! So long as the site description and intro say "native level fluency" and folks in forums and blogs continue to spread "native level fluency", it doesn't matter that the AJATT blogger himself denies this. (And his own descriptions put him closer to functional at 18 months, imo)

I Googled some language sites and blogs. Almost invariably there's a link to "this guy who became native fluent in 18 months." That's the hook, the tag, the buzz, whatever. I read several people saying the short time frame is the reason they started AJATT. Here's one blog eg: "Native level fluency is said to lie at around 10,000 sentences (if you add 25 new sentences a day, that’s a language in a year)." lol This gets spread around. This get needlessly debated in several forums (zzz). This gives beginners unrealistic expectations (and gets them committing to the weaker aspects of AJATT without accurate information.) Yet something closer to the truth exists in the pages of the AJATT blog where it always was. Unread, forgotten, ignored?

So you've given me an idea, Mcjon01. This myth can only be busted by PR. Not the slimy whitewash type of PR in this case, but the more noble type: the dissemination-of-truth type.

Thora Wrote:It's not unlike the myth of "18 months to native level fluency" persisting (even expanding) despite the AJATT blogger having qualified what he meant by "fluent" in the deep recesses of his blog. His own descriptions of his level of proficiency aren't enough to dispel this myth! So long as the site description and intro say "native level fluency" and folks in forums and blogs continue to spread "native level fluency", it doesn't matter that the AJATT blogger himself denies this. (And his own descriptions put him closer to functional at 18 months, imo)

Hmmm. The main 'about' page states that after 18 momths he was able to fill out job applications, go to interview(s) and land a job in Toyko:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about

This article appears to detail the interview process, which makes him sound more than just "functional":

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...-and-money

I'm interested, where does he deny the native-level statement?

arcoins Wrote:Or, is there a really sensible or somehow enthralling manga series or whatever that an adult male who has no interest in what he assumes to be junior high school girl stuff or some weird sexual fantasy fluff found in those books?

You might want to try Monster or 20th Century Boys.
Pluto is another great one by the same author, but it drifts a little more into Sci-Fi territory.

aphasiac Wrote:I'm interested, where does he deny the native-level statement?

If I remember correctly there's an article that states what exactly he could do (or considered himself able to do) after 18 months and also in which way Japanese natives were still ahead of him. For example he did not (at least actively) know what cucumber means in Japanese or stuff like that.

ah ha, thanks!

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...-18-months

I guess in that article he's claiming "near-native" rather than "native" - but meh, splitting hairs slightly..