Yo Thora,

I was worried about the same thing last month. My reading and listening skills are getting quite good, but I have a lot of trouble to formulate my own sentences.

Maybe it's just the order in which things happen. You gotta crawl before you can walk. So you gotta listen before you can speak.

My listening is yet far from perfect, but for some part of the language it is quite strong.
So I tried to talk with myself about the things I listen and read, about mechas, tsundere, chounouryokusha. And I found out that I can do it. Sometimes I choke, but I find someway around.

I feel strongly that my ability to speak is strongly tied to my understanding. And still there are many things that I can't understand well.
Maybe these are the parts of the puzzle that are missing. Maybe after that, I'll be able to speak fluently.

Jarvik,

I gotta agree on the overuse of kanji. It's just like Khatzumoto warned readers that people in English don't say "I lacerated my brachial a fortnight yonder." but instead say "I cut my arm two weeks ago". Using kanji excessively seems, off, even though they're the correct kanji. Now, that's my opinion as a non-native. If native's agree then that's the case.

However, I wonder if this writing problem is a by-product of his ACATT (All Chinese All The Time) project he's been doing for about 18 months. If that's the case, then I can understand that. I'm not using his writings and one youtube video as a source of Japanese.

I'm still buying AJATT as a principle. Yeah, I'm changing stuff on the studying part. But the idea of listening and reading to LOTS of Japanese just sounds correct. Plus the results have been there.

I'm just starting to add some AJATT into my study routines. I found I've gone to using text books a little too much. Boring and I wasn't improving. It's good to read some of your opinions on it. Studying vocab and grammar in isolation just isn't working for me so I'm working on adding sentences into my routine. I'm working on my grammar a lot right now so I'm mainly adding sentences dealing with that material. There are a lot of new vocab words too, and I'm enjoying seeing them in context. From words I previously only studied on vocab flashcards I can recall more then I expected, but there are still a lot I've studied that I don't recognize in the sentences.

Those who are serious with AJATT and have reached a high level should post both in English and Japanese. There is a Japanese only thread but I am not sure why those users are not using both English and Japanese in all other threads as well. When I reach a confident enough level I think that is what I will begin to do.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

james Wrote:Khatz is certainly fluent in Japanese but does not sound like a native speaker largely because of his accent.0

His accent is probably the least bad thing about his speech. His inability to form natural sounding sentences (inconsistent politeness levels & dialects), frequent incorrect word usage, overuse/abuse of kanji, etc are larger problems. Granted I haven't bothered reading much of what he writes, but from my limited sample it was evident. One thing I read even had random Chinese words thrown in in place of the Japanese ones. (Why the hell did he write Shibuya in Chinese in the middle of a Japanese sentence?) Maybe he's trying to show off his range of knowledge, but it comes across as him only having superficial understanding of what he's saying.

It's a symptom of the AJATT study method I think. Constant consumption of anime, manga, novels, etc in place of person-to-person contact have produced an unnatural speech style. One person I know here has a similar unnatural speech style, in that he speaks like an academic paper (which he seems to spend much of his time reading).

I am going to put what you are saying to the test by having some japanese people at work listen to that youtube clip and tell me what they think. My level of japanese is not high enough to rebuke what you are saying but i think/hope you might be exagerating a bit there in what you said about his speaking....well cause i follow his method hehe.

Having Japanese people listen to it isn't a reliable test unless you prepare the viewing conditions properly. Usually they'll just be polite and say it's almost perfect etc no matter what the actual level is. There are a couple very basic mistakes where he understands some simple word meanings that I caught when I gave his youtube vid a cursory watch. If the Japanese people don't mention it then they're just being polite.

ex: He used 人口 to refer to number of people studying Japanese. 人口 only refers to population sizes and not numbers of people in general (人数).

I think every learner of Japanese has had a Japanese person heap praise on their abilities, even though they were just starting out. A few of my friends continue to introduce me by saying that I speak perfect Japanese, even though personally I think I'm far from it. I'm a much more humble person than Khatz though

Jarvik7 Wrote:I'm a much more humble person than Khatz though

Either that or your standards/expectation are just a little bit too high. I mean, even natives make mistakes. やっぱり, basing his real life character of a blog is like basing someone's real life character off their radio personality.

saizen Wrote:My level of japanese is not high enough to rebuke what you are saying but i think/hope you might be exagerating a bit there in what you said about his speaking.

I think speaking of his strong points as well will give a better gauge of his ability, all together, rather than just saying "he's wrong here, here, and here."

mentat_kgs Wrote:Yo Thora,

I was worried about the same thing last month. My reading and listening skills are getting quite good, but I have a lot of trouble to formulate my own sentences.

Maybe it's just the order in which things happen. You gotta crawl before you can walk. So you gotta listen before you can speak.

It's obvious . Your ability is always below your understanding . Your active knowledge is always below your passive knowlege . Your production is always below your comprehension .That's a well-known knowledge acquisition pattern . Just because babies spent a lot of time sleeping , crying , s.... themselves doesn't mean they're some lazy bastard . They spent several years trying to make sense of the gibberish they're feed with + another decade to hone their skills before producing a really correct sentence . Actually they're the most industrious workers of the human kind .

I like to think of it like making some orange juice : You need a lot of orange to have a single good , fresh glass of orange juice .
You can also envision an iceberg : the bigger the size (global knowlege), the bigger the part above the surface (active knowlege) . You 'll never change the proportion , but you can increase your knowlege of the language, your brain will take care of the rest . It's the whole input theory . If you really understood krazner's and katzhu's stance and you agree with it through ajatt then no need to worry about it.

I, too, am bothered by the way Khatz uses kanji. I also find his writings to be a little difficult compared to other native sources I read, though I'm not at a level to judge their quality.

But I'm quite sure that's exactly what Khatz wants. He doesn't simply aim to speak Japanese like a "normal" native, he wants to go beyond that. He doesn't care to sound weirdly exaggerated. He has his own idea of a "better Japanese".
It may be a strange way of boasting, all right, but I'm once more intrigued by his mentality.

From a different point of view: the power of his blog is to motivate the hell out of readers, not to teach pretty Japanese. It would be an order of magnitude less effective if he acted humble and coward.
As I said before, I would still value his blog even if I discovered that he can't actually speak a word of Japanese. Even if it was all a lie.
Let me be honest: I don't care how good HE is. It's ME that matters to me.

Finally, I don't see how people who have not extensively read his blog can comment on his "moral" or his attitude.

I am bothered by the way he uses English...he definitely does not sound like the New York Times....btw I think this is true for everyone else .

taijuando Wrote:I am bothered by the way he uses English...he definitely does not sound like the New York Times....btw I think this is true for everyone else .

LOL. I noticed a few split infinitives and abnormal verb tense shifts as well.... i think

Well, reciting the theory is great for giving advice. But when it's my Japanese that's in the line, I like to have measurable results.

=D

I'm definitely not an AJATT follower but I am a bit annoyed by all this Khazumoto-bashing.

Are you guys serious when you say he mixes formal and informal because he doesn't understand the difference?! And too many kanji?!.. It's a matter of style! I mean: look at his English! His English writing is all over the place, people love it or hate it (I actually do quite like it) but no one says it's incorrect because his English is bad. It's all a style thing, he is having FUN in the language. You need to know the rules before you can afford to break the rules and I never get the feeling he doesn't know them. An occasional slip of the tongue does not count.

In fact, when I listened to him some time ago, I got a feeling that in Japanese he sounds A LOT like some of the comedians that he pointed to in one of his early posts. Which is hardly surprising if he has listened to them as much as he says he has.

mentat_kgs Wrote:My reading and listening skills are getting quite good, but I have a lot of trouble to formulate my own sentences.

Wow I am starting to notice this myself, I am hearing people a lot more clearly and reading things a lot faster since starting the sentences 4 months ago..but wow all (not all but some)that vocab and sentences I have learned and remembered while quizzing and hearing it just dont come to mind when I actually want to say it. When I started, my speaking outstripped my listening...that really isn't saying much though if you were to see where i was at when i started ajatt. Anyone else noticing this? Khatz does say eventually it just comes out...but damn i am tired of waiting lol. Until then i guess i will just stutter my way through work as usual lol.

Serge Wrote:I'm definitely not an AJATT follower but I am a bit annoyed by all this Khazumoto-bashing.

Are you guys serious when you say he mixes formal and informal because he doesn't understand the difference?! And too many kanji?!.. It's a matter of style! I mean: look at his English! His English writing is all over the place, people love it or hate it (I actually do quite like it) but no one says it's incorrect because his English is bad. It's all a style thing, he is having FUN in the language. You need to know the rules before you can afford to break the rules and I never get the feeling he doesn't know them. An occasional slip of the tongue does not count.

In fact, when I listened to him some time ago, I got a feeling that in Japanese he sounds A LOT like some of the comedians that he pointed to in one of his early posts. Which is hardly surprising if he has listened to them as much as he says he has.

um the people saying stuff like he "mixes" formal and informal because he doesn't understand the the difference?! are the ones that don't understand the difference. There's more to it than just this is formal/informal...

Actually no, it would be like if he was speaking English and switched randomly between Texas, Canadian, Australian accents for no apparent reason, and between a gangsta voice and a hyper little girl voice for no apparent reason, PLUS randomly changing his politeness levels when the subject in question & roles are not changing, all the while throwing in giant/advanced Latinate compounds and making basic mistakes at the same time.

Khatz might well be inspiring to some people but sorry, he is not god of Japanese.

I'd be curious to hear in more detail about what errors Khatz makes - after all, that might enable me and others to avoid them by getting appropriate input (er, I don't mean to encourage people to viciously pick apart things he says (which I'd hate someone to do to my English, let alone Japanese), I just mean things it might be good for other learners to look out for, especially those like me who are just starting out, and thinking of giving this method a go. I'm pretty sure the Kanji usage is a deliberate stylistic choice, though).

By unnatural speech style, do you mean his sentences sometimes sound awkward (non-native? Due to too-frequent shifts in politeness levels, as you mentioned?), or is it that his spoken Japanese can be more like written Japanese (from manga, newspapers etc.?) ? That's interesting if so, though it can happen even to native speakers in English - I've met quite a few lecturers who sound like a research paper! I'm inclined to agree with Khatz's point that language is like acting:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...-is-acting
since I'm often aware of having 'acquired' (in English) a phrase or speech pattern from something I've read or heard, then using it without really thinking about it. Make me read ten Victorian novels in a row, and that's what I end up sounding like for a while.
Native English can differ quite a bit, so it'd be tricky to pick a style which was most natural (though it admittedly probably isn't the mess produced by my brain under the influence of Victorian novels).

I think I'll give this method a serious trial when I finish RTK, as I figure that at the very least I'll pick up lots of new words. I'm personally interested in reading Japanese rather than speaking it, so problems with speaking that may result aren't such a worry. If, some day, I wind up speaking like people in The Tale of Genji, I'll just be thrilled I managed to read the thing. ; )

Jarvik7 Wrote:Actually no, it would be like if he was speaking English and switched randomly between Texas, Canadian, Australian accents for no apparent reason, and between a gangsta voice and a hyper little girl voice for no apparent reason, PLUS randomly changing his politeness levels when the subject in question & roles are not changing, all the while throwing in giant/advanced Latinate compounds and making basic mistakes at the same time.

Khatz might well be inspiring to some people but sorry, he is not god of Japanese.

It might be worth noting that this is actually exactly how he writes in English.

Although I'm not sure how writing formal and informal can somehow be compared to mixing dialects.

Mixing politeness levels is something he does in addition to mixing regional and social dialects.

Ampharos64: His Japanese is unnatural because it is so inconsistent. He just gathered up Japanese in bits & pieces from all kinds of pop culture sources and has nothing tying them together. In my opinion it's a fundamental flaw of doing AJATT with no sort of structure to guide you.

QuackingShoe: His English writing is also very awkward, but in a much different way. He attempts to insert jokes and references to media continually instead of just getting to the point. His writing style is at least consistent though.

Something to note is that I'm not just picking on Khatz because his Japanese is not perfect. Mine isn't either. I'm picking on him because he seems to think that it's perfect, as do many of his followers. Humility is a virtue.

Ampharos64 Wrote:Make me read ten Victorian novels in a row, and that's what I end up sounding like for a while.

Man, I used to do this all the time when I was younger, and still do it to a pretty fair extent now. There was some period when I was ten or thereabouts where I read several rather old Robin Hood and similar books in a row, and I ended up speaking in that style for weeks, completely unintentionally. Got made fun of

ok damn jarvik give the guy a break..now you are even going off on his english too! LOL

But this thread is prime ground for getting disagreed with if you say something(anything) against the guy who actually teaches the method this thread is about. But of course you knew that hehe

QuackingShoe Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:Actually no, it would be like if he was speaking English and switched randomly between Texas, Canadian, Australian accents for no apparent reason, and between a gangsta voice and a hyper little girl voice for no apparent reason, PLUS randomly changing his politeness levels when the subject in question & roles are not changing, all the while throwing in giant/advanced Latinate compounds and making basic mistakes at the same time.

Khatz might well be inspiring to some people but sorry, he is not god of Japanese.

It might be worth noting that this is actually exactly how he writes in English.

My point exactly.

saizen Wrote:ok damn jarvik give the guy a break..now you are even going off on his english too! LOL

What? You think his English is readable? My eyes just fall off the page and end up in TL;DR land.

Jarvik7 Wrote:What? You think his English is readable? My eyes just fall off the page and end up in TL;DR land.

I can barely comprehend some of his newer [English] stuff :/
His older posts aren't quite as bad.

Reminds me of Nest0r, the king of convoluted English