Tobberoth Wrote:He brings up some good ideas which, while not his ideas from the start, are genuinly good. It just makes little sense to give him credit (and especially money) for something which overall is just common sense.

Perhaps his ideas aren't entirely original, sure. He admits as much many times. Common sense or not, he was the first person I came across (and who really inspired me to learn this language) who described such a method of full-immersion + Heisig + SRS + sentence mining, and in a way that sounded immediately accessible and interesting. His inspirational posts quite frequently pulled me out of a slump and back into action, and his advice is practical and useful, more often than not. I'll be the first to admit that he occasionally contradicts himself, over exaggerates and doesn't always seem to have a lot of foresight, but he's only human - to say he doesn't deserve credit seems kind of silly to me.

As for money, well - his website, his decision. Hosting fees add up, after all, and what he advertises is relevant to the website's material, so I don't see the problem.

GoodSirJava Wrote:But I don't think he was condemning Teachers in general; rather, he was decrying basically everything related to how modern language education actually goes on. (He has a post on how to make language classes not suck, in fact, so he's obviously at least made some theoretical allowance for good teachers and classes.) Also, he's merely offering his services as a consultant, which is different from being entirely dependent on a teacher to tell you when to stop, when to go, what to read, how to say things, etc.

Um... I don't know what kind of classes you (and persumably Khazu by your logic) has attended, but that's certainly not how teachers have worked in any class I have ever been in. A teacher has a schedule they have to follow and their job is to make sure you do not fall behind it. A teacher will NEVER tell you to STOP if you're going "too fast". You are dependent on them to make you work hard enough, not to stop you from working "too hard". Then again, every single article by Khazu on teachers and classes I've read has been twisted oddities, so I wouldn't be surprised if he has had exceptionally bad experiences which language classes. Classes are a learning aid, nothing else. He makes it seem in his articles like people who go to classes expect to get fluent from just that without any effort of their own.

GoodSirJava Wrote:It's only a bilingual text if both languages are present in the text (these are also known as "parallel translations"). This would imply you using a language other than Japanese to read them, which is impermissible according to AJATT orthodoxy (and probably with good reason, at least in most cases).

The point of bilingual texts is that you can indeed use another language than Japanese to read them (I'm talking about books where one page is Japanese, the other is the same page but in English) so... yeah.

GoodSirJava Wrote:That's not at all what I said. If something would cause you to learn bad habits, it must be avoided. I'm claiming that reading translations probably won't do that, because professionally translated works tend to be quite refined and idiomatic.

A translation is always a translation, no matter who wrote it. That's why the Tanaka Corpus is not recommended for mining even though Japanese people wrote it: It's translations. It's not natural Japanese sentences, it's natural English sentences translated to Japanese. The same movie being made independantly in America and Japan won't be the same, they certainly won't have the same dialogue. It goes way beyond proper grammar, it comes down to society and norms. According to the AJATT method as Khazu tells us of it, it WILL give you bad habits.

Tobberoth Wrote:Um... I don't know what kind of classes you (and persumably Khazu by your logic) has attended, but that's certainly not how teachers have worked in any class I have ever been in.

I had four years of German in high school and three semesters in college.

Quote:A teacher has a schedule they have to follow and their job is to make sure you do not fall behind it. A teacher will NEVER tell you to STOP if you're going "too fast".

It's happened to me. Although usually, people don't need to be told explicitly; people in a school environment are subtly discouraged from being too slow or too fast, and more importantly, constantly being tied to a system of external rewards and punishments destroys your own intrinsic motivation. (Read up on Self-Determination Theory for the evidence of this.)

Quote:He makes it seem in his articles like people who go to classes expect to get fluent from just that without any effort of their own.

I don't think they expect to get fluent in them at all. That's what I think Khatz takes exception to.

Quote:The same movie being made independently in America and Japan won't be the same, they certainly won't have the same dialogue. It goes way beyond proper grammar, it comes down to society and norms.

Right, and that's the reason I regard translations askance. If the only thing you want to do is learn the Japanese language, no matter what the effect is on other parts of your life, then you can and should follow Khatz's advice to the letter.

GoodSirJava Wrote:It's happened to me. Although usually, people don't need to be told explicitly; people in a school environment are subtly discouraged from being too slow or too fast, and more importantly, constantly being tied to a system of external rewards and punishments destroys your own intrinsic motivation. (Read up on Self-Determination Theory for the evidence of this.)

That just refers to really bad teachers/school system and nothing else. In the classes I have been in, you're encouraged to move ahead of everyone else and if you're good enough, you can jump up a level. If a teacher holds you back because he/she doesn't understand how learning works, that's a problem with that teacher, not with classes and teachers in general. From my experience, it's also far from the norm.

GoodSirJava Wrote:I don't think they expect to get fluent in them at all. That's what I think Khatz takes exception to.

Then why would they be in the classes according to him? To NOT learn the language? That comment makes no sense. If he's talking about people who go to class without the intention to learn the language, why would he bring them up in any examples pertaining to people who actually WANT to learn the language?

GoodSirJava Wrote:Right, and that's the reason I regard translations askance. If the only thing you want to do is learn the Japanese language, no matter what the effect is on other parts of your life, then you can and should follow Khatz's advice to the letter.

But Khazu himself is very explicit about how one should be very much aware of such "unnatural language", it's one of the main things I personally learned from the site. If following his technique to the letter makes sure you speak unnatural Japanese, that makes the whole deal a pretty big contradiction IMO.

nest0r Wrote:kazelee, You definitely don't come across as older, so I wouldn't worry about it. ;p

Magnifique! Tu me promet le gateux. All I see are chains and whips. 何が起こっているの?

Quote:I agree, I think he's embracing a position of responsibility, and yet encouraging a bit of a 'cult of personality'.

Interesting. I took a look at his site and I saw was an informational source of income. It also had good copy. I would have never thought of it as cult-like. Then again, I would have never thought of RTK as cult-like were is not for a certain individual preaching of dogma.

Quote:If his ideas and the ideas of others that he posts seem to have merit in their own right, then test them out for yourself, improve upon them. It's not gospel. He's just one intelligent self-studier amongst many.

There be knowledge in them there words.

alyks Wrote:Kazelee, you're so awesome. Where are you from?

I'm originally from Detroit (America's own little 3rd world country). It's where I get my own unique blend of ego and insanity.

tobberoth Wrote:I said the cult of personality around Khazu is ridiculous. He learned good Japanese in 5 years. He brings up some good ideas which, while not his ideas from the start, are genuinly good

The cult personality only becomes stronger when you criticize it. Call it ridiculous enough times and it gains the ability to fly. Call ridiculous even more and it can shoot laser beams out of eyes.

Quote:Except you know, he IS being inconsistent. He's saying that you don't need teachers to show you the way to learn a language, yet he offers his service (for a hefty sum of course) to show you the way to learn the language. He takes money to be a teacher after having condemned them.

Teacher are not a necessity, but that doesn't mean they have no place. His entire site is teaching. Does a person need his site to learn Japanese? Not really. But, for a certain type of person, it's a good resource. Most teacher, given their schedules and the insane amount of students they manage, are not good resources. If you disagree with these words, change the word good in the previous sentences to excellent.

tobberoth Wrote:A teacher will NEVER tell you to STOP if you're going "too fast".

They will tell you when to close your text book, though, which is more of what I believe this person was getting at. Don't believe it? I took basic programming in High School. I got it in a couple of weeks. The teacher attempted to throttle what I was able to do in class to keep me with the rest of the students. Outside of the class, I could do whatever the hell I wanted, though.

tobberoth Wrote:He makes it seem in his articles like people who go to classes expect to get fluent from just that without any effort of their own.

Some do. Some don't. You are a driven individual. Some depend on the teacher/class too much. Think about how many people there are who took the class and quit compared to those who keep studying. Image how many of those people took the class expecting to learn by osmosis. Image how many people were expecting to be able to turn to the teacher when they hit a roadblock. Now, image how many people walked through the door with full knowledge of the incredible task ahead of them.

I forgot where the hell this is going or even why I responded... so....

Could someone please point me to some other English speakers who have reached what many would consider fluency, please?

Quote:I think there is a difference between questioning and arguing/whatever-is-going-on-in-all-of-these-threads-in-which-tobberoth-and-alyks-coexist.

I say we have a pit fight to-the-death to settle things once and for all.

I apologize for skipping everything you guys wrote, but in like 12 hours there's a whole completely new page to this thread. I just want to point out one thing that I didn't see mentioned.

Khatzu actually does believe in and respects grammar. What he disapproves of is the style of teaching that has you memorizing grammar rules and outputting them immediately after you learned them. This is at the heart of his classes suck and grammar doesn't exist posts.

In describing his method he repeatedly tells you to study grammar. For example take point #3 of where to get sentences:

Khatzu Wrote:3. Do you make example sentences for grammar points or just vocab?

* Yes. (Both). One of the best books for that is Naoko Chino’s All About Particles. Back in the day, I learned at least one example of every grammar point in the book. For a solid foundation in Japanese grammar, few books can be more highly recommended.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...nces-where

If you read that book you'd realize it is nothing but grammar explanations and example sentences. So even a non-thinking fan following the method precisely would have a very functional grasp of grammar.

Tobberoth Wrote:A translation is always a translation, no matter who wrote it. That's why the Tanaka Corpus is not recommended for mining even though Japanese people wrote it: It's translations. It's not natural Japanese sentences, it's natural English sentences translated to Japanese.

Actually, it's not recommended because the Tanaka corpus was written by a load of postgrad students as assigned work -- it's full of dodgy translations, machine translations, typos and henkan misses, things pulled from bilingual texts, mismatches of wrong English sentence vs Japanese, and so on and on. English sentences translated competently into natural Japanese would be a definite improvement ;-)

Yikes, a pretty hefty reply chain got built up. From what I noticed:

1. You cannot purposely use Hitler to end an argument, it should come about naturally from one of the person's inability to concede defeat yet can offer no reasonable rebuttal.

2. Khatz is not offering teaching fees. He's offering consultant fees. If you're (lazy? unable? have too much money?) willing to fork over cash, he'll offer step by step advice on how he did his set-up and try to offer solutions to any problems in the interim. Pretty much EVERY online forum I attend has at least one person that e-mails me individually for advice that will only mirror what I put online. It's the penalty for offering lucid advice and responses in the online world I guess. Khatz realized that there are people willing to part with cash for advice that is out there for free for what ever reasons. That explanation is on the FREAKING LINK, it's not some hidden secret. An e-mail cannot be shared (legally in many places even), yet some insist on wanting one-on-one. Why? I don't know. Hell, go to a convention where you have a MICROPHONE to ask a question so EVERYBODY can hear the answer. Know what happens? Seminar is over and the speaker gets swamped with questions after the fact that would have been outstanding during the seminar.

3. Every public persona will have a likely pseudo following of some sort. Khatz, Harry Knowles, that banana with the maracas, Heisig. Doesn't it seem a bit silly to blame one person for the actions of another? Some guy came on here trying to pump up Heisig as beyond question and didn't like it when we (proponents of Heisig no less) did offer questions and criticism. For some reason, people need to believe in something beyond question (religion, Jenny Craig, the 2nd season of Heroes, HITT), but they seem the ones that quickly abandon it for the next shiny thing. Again, it's going to be a problem with any public persona.

kazelee Wrote:Could someone please point me to some other English speakers who have reached what many would consider fluency, please?

I speak English fluently. There. I haven't been doing it for that long, and it's kind of hard to quantify "fluency", but it's been getting me A's on all of my college papers, so I must be doing something right.

More seriously, consider that many speakers of any language[at least one of a developed country with linguistic regulation], be it 日本語 or English generally receive extensive education before they are considered "fluent" by educated native speakers.

Natively raised English speakers that haven't explicitly studied grammar would probably appear to all of us as having unnatural and mistake-ridden English.

playadom Wrote:Natively raised English speakers that haven't explicitly studied grammar would probably appear to all of us as having unnatural and mistake-ridden English.

Well, not necessarily. I for one have never been able to understand grammar -- I can tell you what nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbs are, but that's about the extent of it. I can never explain the rules on how to use them. I can't tell you what the subject of a sentence is, nor how it modifies the reflexive pronoun of the sub-clause or whatever crazy jargon they use. But I like to think that I can write sentences fairly well, and that's basically what confirmed the input hypothesis for me: I've never understood grammar, but I always end up correcting everyone else. Granted, I can't tell them WHY they're wrong, just that they are. ;P

Unless reading a bunch of words relating to grammar that I have never been able to comprehend counts as studying grammar? :P

Granted, I will say this: a lot of native speakers have been exposed to English forever and still can't write to save their lives. But I probably read a bit more than they did. And I'm rather pedantic. So I might be an exception here or something. :D

edit: Er, point being that the study of grammar isn't really necessary if you can pay enough attention to the language you're learning. I wouldn't think that it would hurt to study it, though.

Doesn't Khatz also recommend Tae Kim's guide?

It would seem to me what he's warning about is the excessive use of grammar and explanation books, which all of us have seen ESL students use, and far too much. At some point they need to stop reading books ABOUT English, and start reading books IN English. That's how I've interpreted his grammar warnings.

I have personal experience with knowledge of grammar helping. Before I moved to Japan, I did some basic selfstudies in Japanese. No exposure at all really, I just learned bits and peices from various websites like thejapanesepage.com etc. Thus, when I came to Japan I couldn't speak any and I couldn't really read any Japanese at all. However, I knew the sentence order, I know the conjugations of the verbs and the adjectives, I knew many of the particles. In Japan, I got exposure just like everyone else in my class. Of course, I excelled WAY faster at first because of my advantage. When we got a new sentence, I already understood it because I recognized the conjugations even if I had never seen the word before. While the other students had to get some exposure to understand the conjugation, I just started using it right away and I didn't need as much repetition as many of the others.

So I'd say like timcambell, you can't just read ABOUT a language and expect to learn it... but just like learning the kanji ahead of time, learning grammar ahead of time will enhance your ability to pick things up quickly. Like everything else I guess, it's an issue of balance.

playadom Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:Could someone please point me to some other English speakers who have reached what many would consider fluency, please?

I speak English fluently. There. I haven't been doing it for that long, and it's kind of hard to quantify "fluency", but it's been getting me A's on all of my college papers, so I must be doing something right.

I should clarify. ...someone capable of explaining in English their path to reaching fluency in Japanese....

On grammar... Grammar rocks. I think it helps best when you've heard/read the grammatical elements a few times before looking it up.

So this discussion:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2503
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2491

is here now. Use grammar guides however you want, just don't be afraid to consult them, and you're probably going to get messed up if you try to use prescriptive grammar for ouput, as Ryan put it in the AJATT comments and was dismissed as a loser/whiner (before having his advice essentially repeated), or attempt to memorize excessive jargon. I think it's best to establish a grammatical corpus based on frequent, basic grammar with descriptive guidelines, and use those while you're doing other sentences to study particular grammar points for exponential benefits. It'd be nice if you could have those sorts of open-ended, dynamic guidelines based on a constantly updated source of sentences.

playadom Wrote:Natively raised English speakers that haven't explicitly studied grammar would probably appear to all of us as having unnatural and mistake-ridden English.

I didn't really want to get into this because I don't feel strongly about the grammar thing, but I just wanted to point out that I have NEVER studied English grammar in school. Or English spelling for that matter. I've actually been wondering if this is sort of an American thing.

Where I went to school in Australia we had "English class" but it was mostly creative writing, drama, a lot of reading, book discussion, and essays. We got the essays corrected but that was it. I didn't know what the difference was between an adjective and an adverb until I was like 16. My brother, who is 6 years older than me, had the same experience. Apparently it's been unpopular to teach grammar here for a while. I write better university essays than most of my classmates.

shakkun Wrote:I've actually been wondering if this is sort of an American thing.

After reading through this thread i'm also wondering the same thing.
I live in the UK and have never had a grammar lesson in my life, my English classes in school where also the same as shakkun's in that we just read poems, wrote short stories (which were then only corrected in terms of punctuation... and i still guess where to use my commas etc. lol) and did a couple of essays.

shakkun Wrote:I didn't know what the difference was between an adjective and an adverb until I was like 16.

I specifically remember my English class where we learned about grammar. I was 13 at the time and we did sentence diagrams until we dropped. That was in 8th grade. In 7th grade we did sentence diagrams but not as complex as the ones in the 8th grade class. That's my experience at my little school in the Midwest of America.

At the risk of becoming a broken record...

I get the feeling that the 'anti grammar' folks are talking at cross-purposes because of the straw man that's been constructed, which conflates all 'grammar' as this one type of jargon-filled, out-of-context, prescriptive entity. They're using that to say "don't systematically use 'grammar' at all!" I place a lot of blame for that on Khatzumoto's rhetoric, but mostly on people who are taking the rhetoric too seriously.

What I and others are arguing for is making an awareness of descriptive grammar a part of your in-context studies, in order to speed up your understanding of how the sentences are put together. (Edit: I think are all our goals are to rapidly develop a native-like intuition of the language, based on accumulating, through our experiences, a 'mental corpus' and recognizing patterns, etc. I think that it's quicker to develop that intuition by using some calculation in designing and condensing your input, rather than purely arbitrary, extensive reading like a native did over the years of their life [mixed in with and despite traditional grammar teaching which we all have our horror stories about].) You don't *have* to memorize terms and tables and whatnot to do this, but for some people, it helps. Personally, I just prefer simple explanations based on example sentences. This is, once you get past the rhetoric, what Khatzumoto advocates as well. Keep the grammar subordinate to context, secondary to *you* as an individual.

I also prefer those example sentences to be as natural as possible, yet representing a wide variety of types of language used, both general and specific. I want the best of both worlds. That way you're getting exponential benefits overall, but able to tailor it to your particular interests and needs. It seems more and more, however, that this argument is becoming a moot point, because pretty soon instead of just one grammar book printed years ago or one free guide, it's getting easier for all sorts of people to analyze bodies of work and design guidelines based on those in a more updated fashion. Grammar isn't just valuable because it allows people who are familiar with the language to have circular, context-less discussions with one another, it's valuable because it allows a consensual awareness of grammar use to be created by analyzing how language is used, and using that awareness to design tools for you to use how you want (and giving you the freedom and flexibility to push the language forward on your own).

And with this, I wash my hands of this grammar affair. Do as you wish. ;p

Edit: Also, I feel the same way about active/passive vocabulary and frequency-lists as tools for creating flexible descriptive guidelines, but I already screwed that argument up by trying to remain cryptic (that was nest0r version 2.8.7) and using similar rhetoric to that which I'm currently complaining about.

Careful there, you're starting to sound like a preacher....or maybe a teacher...

Conclusion = Grammer Gud ..... I-so-laided Grammer .... boring not so gud

nest0r Wrote:What I and others are arguing for is making an awareness of descriptive grammar a part of your in-context studies, in order to speed up your understanding of how the sentences are put together.

I agree which is why I didn't want to make a anti-grammar point. However I don't think native English eduction is a strong supporting argument for the NECESSITY of grammar. Reading about grammar is a great thing. I'm ambivalent about memorizing conjugation tables etc, because I don't think it would have any real positive or negative long term effect so who cares. I never did that but I still consider myself to have "studied Japanese grammar".

Incidentally, a really good monolingual grammar dictionary is the 日本語表現文型辞典 here. Lucid explanations with plenty of example sentences. A lot of Tae Kim's advanced grammar explanations are translations of it. オススメ.

I think when Khatsumoto and certain other people here who read ABOUT grammar say things like "I never studied grammar!!" it's at best misleading and at worst dishonest. Because for some people, reading Tae Kim or AAP=grammar study, even if you're not memorizing tables. This causes confusion and internet forum arguments with no end.

Juukyuu Wrote:

shakkun Wrote:I've actually been wondering if this is sort of an American thing.

After reading through this thread i'm also wondering the same thing.
I live in the UK and have never had a grammar lesson in my life, my English classes in school where also the same as shakkun's in that we just read poems, wrote short stories (which were then only corrected in terms of punctuation... and i still guess where to use my commas etc. lol) and did a couple of essays.

Perhaps it's something more prevalent in schools where teachers teach according to the test. That is, they are given an outline of information to be studied specifically for some sort of standardized test (which proves useless sometimes).

shakkun Wrote:I think when Khatsumoto and certain other people here who read ABOUT grammar say things like "I never studied grammar!!" it's at best misleading and at worst dishonest. Because for some people, reading Tae Kim or AAP=grammar study, even if you're not memorizing tables. This causes confusion and internet forum arguments with no end.

Tae Kim is 100% grammar studies. I don't see the focus on tables, tables just show a word being conjugated in all forms. You use it to learn how various types of verbs conjugate, not to actually learn the meanings of the conjugations. Grammar studies is simply when you learn rules about the language, exactly what Tae Kim is all about. Taking a concept in the language and explaining it.

nest0r Wrote:I get the feeling that the 'anti grammar' folks are talking at cross-purposes because of the straw man that's been constructed, which conflates all 'grammar' as this one type of jargon-filled, out-of-context, prescriptive entity. They're using that to say "don't systematically use 'grammar' at all!" I place a lot of blame for that on Khatzumoto's rhetoric, but mostly on people who are taking the rhetoric too seriously.

I find it amusing that people aren't disagreeing with you, they're disagreeing with the straw man and are thus arguing the wrong thing. It's not that they disagree with you, they just don't understand your argument!

Hi, I might have not made myself clear here. I'm don't think that looking up grammar out of curiosity is bad.

If you enjoy reading tae kim's guide, hey, read it!
I've read a few pages and it is pretty nice.

But it cannot be your main source for study. Your main source must be quality input.
My personal experience makes me believe that during the first stages, tons of audio and after, when you are used to the sounds of the language, tons of text achieve the best effect.

shakkun Wrote:Incidentally, a really good monolingual grammar dictionary is the 日本語表現文型辞典 here. Lucid explanations with plenty of example sentences. A lot of Tae Kim's advanced grammar explanations are translations of it. オススメ.

Cool, I'll check out that dictionary, perhaps if I use that, I won't feel the need to reference Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar.