aphasiac Wrote:So, just got an email saying that AJATTPlus is free for me this week. I just have to sign up, and then remember to cancel my free subscription in 7 days time.

Browsing it now. This forum is very good reading, but not massively active - mandarin form for example, only has 8 threads. The most popular forum after "general language learning" is (unsurprisingly) "Ask Khatzumoto", with 4 pages, but he doesn't respond to every topic (usually some other forum member tries to answer the OP's question).

As for other content, havn't really dived in properly yet, but seems to be alot of focus on a new type of card Khatz is using (MCD - massive closed delete). Lots of blog posts and forum topics etc.

Anyway interesting site, but no way worth $16per month for me at least - i really feel that there is more useful content and a more active helpful community on this forum than there. Will have a proper read then subscribe methinks.

a lot of the time, he says you don't need it. I definitely agree, I got the AJATT guide a while back. As I wanted to hear what he had to say, now I know what he means when he says you don't need it. You seriously don't lol

So, I've been going through the articles. Pretty similarly written to his main AJATT blog, but more specific posts about learning or flashcard methods, rather than motivational talk. Also khatz has translated many of his blog posts into Japanese - oh and there's an interesting multi-step guide into breaking into the translation industry.

I suppose the biggest surprise is that khatzumoto still has a 15,000 card Japanese deck, and reviews it everyday. I've always imagined that at some point, if I lived in Japan for a long enough period, worked at a Japanese company and totally immersed myself in Japanese during down time, SRSing would become unnecessary. Sure there would be rare words I'd need Anki to recall, but 15k cards? ouch..

Actually thinking about, they're probably all scheduled for review at intervals of 1 year+, so he has very few reviews to do..but still, hmm..

aphasiac Wrote:So, I've been going through the articles. Pretty similarly written to his main AJATT blog, but more specific posts about learning or flashcard methods, rather than motivational talk. Also khatz has translated many of his blog posts into Japanese - oh and there's an interesting multi-step guide into breaking into the translation industry.

I suppose the biggest surprise is that khatzumoto still has a 15,000 card Japanese deck, and reviews it everyday. I've always imagined that at some point, if I lived in Japan for a long enough period, worked at a Japanese company and totally immersed myself in Japanese during down time, SRSing would become unnecessary. Sure there would be rare words I'd need Anki to recall, but 15k cards? ouch..

Actually thinking about, they're probably all scheduled for review at intervals of 1 year+, so he has very few reviews to do..but still, hmm..

You just can't stop doing reviews after you've spend so much time with your beloved decks I can't imagine my life without daily reviews I so got used to it.

actually, once you reach fluency and all your goals. In terms of srsing, you can stop adding and just keep reviewing until it goes down to a number that's so easy to maintain daily to the point to "why would I even stop reviewing if it's so easy?"

aphasiac Wrote:I suppose the biggest surprise is that khatzumoto still has a 15,000 card Japanese deck

Not exactly. He deleted his sentence deck and that's his new MCD card deck.

What makes Khatz special is that he shared his experience with the world.


Not only that, but he motivates people from his own desire and he has done lots of stuff to make learning easier for us, the people after him.

This is what I truly respect.
And imo it is good that he made this go even further with commercialization.

If people pay him, he can have a good excuse for wasting his time on helping/guiding other people.

Edit:
If it would be this quote

"10,000 people wanna do it. 100 people start. 1 keeps it up"

Then collect the 100 lone people who keep it up, and

only 1 person,Khatz, Is doing something like this.

I think we all should learn from it and share our knowledge.

So, coming to the end of my AJATTplus trial period.

Most useful part of the site are the articles on breaking into the translation industry. See, turns out Khatz has quit his corporate job and is now earning his living as a freelance translator, as well as living off the proceeds of AJATTPlus (now we know the reason for the commercialization, and fair play to him for giving it a go).

As mentioned before, i probably won't be subscribing, as I'm still at the beginning of my journey and it doesn't really give me anything the regular site + this forum doesn't. But it's definitely worth a look if you're a hardcore AJATT fan and/or want to support khatz.

i also got one of those emails!

i'm glad you summarised it ...i was going to check it out, but don't have even the $0.01c for the 1st week lol!

Actually there's alot more content than in my summery! I don't think i really did it proper justice.

Like i say though, it's mostly advanced stuff (blog posts translated into japanese, talk about advanced SRS techniques, living in japan, a series on reading japanese emails), so not so useful for me at this time.

But I do admire that khatz is doing, so might come back when i've reached a higher level!

aphasiac Wrote:So, coming to the end of my AJATTplus trial period.

Most useful part of the site are the articles on breaking into the translation industry. See, turns out Khatz has quit his corporate job and is now earning his living as a freelance translator, as well as living off the proceeds of AJATTPlus (now we know the reason for the commercialization, and fair play to him for giving it a go).

As mentioned before, i probably won't be subscribing, as I'm still at the beginning of my journey and it doesn't really give me anything the regular site + this forum doesn't. But it's definitely worth a look if you're a hardcore AJATT fan and/or want to support khatz.

getting into the translation industry stuff is very helpful. Something I want to get into (professional translation in general i mean). I'd say, AJATT plus is good for a trial/testing the waters. But even he says you don't need it lol

aphasiac Wrote:Actually there's alot more content than in my summery! I don't think i really did it proper justice.

Like i say though, it's mostly advanced stuff (blog posts translated into japanese, talk about advanced SRS techniques, living in japan, a series on reading japanese emails), so not so useful for me at this time.

But I do admire that khatz is doing, so might come back when i've reached a higher level!

the emails are helpful but yea, I think for someone in the beginning phases, it wouldn't benefit all hat much.

@ta12121
Perhaps one could copy a few parts of these entries concerning industrial translation for the sake of everyone (just parts, I mean.. otherwise you would call this "stealing", right? Just for reference, to be able to know what some people are talking about concretely)

So aphasiac, care to give any hints on what MCD is about? I'm very curious how it compares to: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid89995 ← Not for the originator's fee Thora joked about in the ‘what's an MCD’ thread (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid121435), it's more because I'm getting ready to implement my cloze delete strategy, amongst others, but will avoid the method out of spite if MCD is similar to it (kidding).

Cranks pretty much summed it up.

Each card contains a paragraph rather than just a sentence (i think the example was an entire product description from amazon.co.jp), with one word missing which you have to fill in. Then next card is same paragraph but with different word missing. You can make loads of cards from the same source material.

Debate going on on the AJATT+ forum about how useful the method; some love it, some find it impossible/boring.

Production cards are not exactly new on this forum; also nukemarine has been an advocator of close deletion cards to hammer home grammar points. So it's not really a huge revelation to be honest.

Tori-kun Wrote:@ta12121
Perhaps one could copy a few parts of these entries concerning industrial translation for the sake of everyone (just parts, I mean.. otherwise you would call this "stealing", right? Just for reference, to be able to know what some people are talking about concretely)

Honestly I don't think that would be really fair. I'm happy talking about what's going on there, but re-posting content isn't really on, especially as it's how khatz is making a living now.

Just sign up for one month - $16 wont kill you.

aphasiac Wrote:pretty much summed it up.

Each card contains a paragraph rather than just a sentence (i think the example was an entire product description from amazon.co.jp), with one word missing which you have to fill in. Then next card is same paragraph but with different word missing. You can make loads of cards from the same source material.

Debate going on on the AJATT+ forum about how useful the method; some love it, some find it impossible/boring.

Production cards are not exactly new on this forum; also nukemarine has been an advocator of close deletion cards to hammer home grammar points. So it's not really a huge revelation to be honest.

Yes, that's what I had been thinking (I explained in a lengthier comment in that thread), keeping things as swaths of text as I have with non-Japanese cards (which apparently was similar to incremental reading as Supermemo called it, though I had eventually switched them to ungraded cards and they were rarely consecutive passages), per my style of ‘sampling’ pieces of native media (such as only taking ~20 sentences from a given episode via subs2srs), where the goal, while semantic in tone, isn't vocabulary or grammar learning but a form of associative reading practice structured with SRS/spacing effect. I think what I hadn't decided on was how many sentences/words to have per card (I'm of the i+X faction), plus I kept putting it off because I desperately want to be able to chain cards together in Anki, a sort of multi-level, nested spacing system (which I also want for call-and-response cards).

MCCD seems like a more granular, lexicogrammatical type of incremental reading, combining incremental reading and the usual cloze delete for grammar/words, perhaps.

Edit: I think I might experiment with something more similar to alternative 2 in my initial post in that thread and randomly cloze delete separately/previously studied words from non-SRS'd swaths of text. Perhaps mix it up with some ideas I had in my posts on crosswords/word searches/interface localization + FoxReplace.

aphasiac Wrote:

Tori-kun Wrote:@ta12121
Perhaps one could copy a few parts of these entries concerning industrial translation for the sake of everyone (just parts, I mean.. otherwise you would call this "stealing", right? Just for reference, to be able to know what some people are talking about concretely)

Honestly I don't think that would be really fair. I'm happy talking about what's going on there, but re-posting content isn't really on, especially as it's how khatz is making a living now.

Just sign up for one month - $16 wont kill you.

i agree. Doesn't feel right. Or maybe because I'm pro AJATT...

I'll say my attempt with MCCD met with a failure. It seemed better to create vocabulary cards from my sentence deck. Granted, that was from swapping 100+ vocabulary cards into MCCD. Starting new cards with MCCD might work better combined with a Pimsleur timing plug-in as you're not really learning so much as memorizing a word in a sentence. Picking the correct word in a sentence seems a cool way to go, just will be very difficult. All this assumes using subs2srs

Of course, in the last 2-3 months my studies have been non-existent. Take my advice with a huge dose of reservation.