I saw someone had mentioned the All Japanese All the Time website in these forums. (I think it may have been snozle?) Either way I read about the 10,000 sentences method, and so far I've been giving it a try for about a week.

What I'm doing is taking genuine Japanese sentences I find on the internet and putting them into Anki. I'm testing from kanji to kana, and instead of testing against an English translation, I'm including J-J definitions of new words from Yahoo!辞書. This has definitely been the most time-consuming part. One definition introduces many unknown words, and you need to pick the right definition out of several possible ones. But even after one week, I've noticed my reading speed and comprehension ability have improved drastically.

Has anyone had any experiences with this method? Has it helped? Is there something I should look out for?

I am using Khatzumoto's method as well and I'm finding great results thus far (yay). I mine my sentences from textbooks (with the provided english translation) and dump those into my SRS. For most of them I refer to A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar so I can recognise the subleties of what's going on in each sentence.

Seeing that I'm only just starting out, I'm not sure I could understand the meaning of each sentence without an English translation. But if you can do without that, then all power to you dude.

My main issue with the 10,000 sentences was a simple question: where the hell do they come from? I more than understand that as one becomes more and more awesome, fewer sentences maintain the status of being too complex, but, as a beginner, I simply can't grasp the grammar points of many example sentences.

aircawn Wrote:I mine my sentences from textbooks (with the provided english translation) and dump those into my SRS.

Yeah, I decided just yesterday to start this (my wrists hurt...speaking of which, this was my first experience with the Japanese IME, and I got to say: that thing is freakin' amazing), and since they're textbooks I'm using, I better damn well be able to read them. With SRS, it should be hard not to memorize the grammar points, as I'll be seeing them on a fairly regular basis.

Well, in my case I had already learned many basic grammar points from this one book Teach Yourself Japanese, and now I'm working on completing Tae Kim's site.

I already started to use Anki to test vocabulary words and short sentences from English to Japanese. I thought reproduction was important, but I found myself failing too many cards cause I overlooked little things. It was turning into a boring memorization spree, so I dumped those cards and am starting fresh with a virtually English-free deck. Now I'm focusing mostly on understanding (imitating?) real Japanese.

For now, I'm getting my sentences from the RSS feed for Smash Bros Melee, an upcoming game for the Wii. It's definitely video-game orientedーa minus for those who can't stand themーbut the feed is offered in both Japanese and English. So if a Japanese entry REALLY stumps me, I can peek at the English version to double-check. I'm also planning on starting with a Japanese SNES game and stealing some of the better sentences from there.

The AJATT site has some stories that you can steal sentences from:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...e-stories/
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...-and-jane/

aircawn Wrote:Seeing that I'm only just starting out, I'm not sure I could understand the meaning of each sentence without an English translation. But if you can do without that, then all power to you dude.

Trust me, I'm not far along my Japanese abilities either. But once you come across the basic stuff, you'll see it everywhere. It won't take long before non-textbook sentences start to make some sense.

I'm currently imputting all the sentences in the Assimil Japanese with Ease course, which should take care of the first 1000 sentences, roughly. Then after that I'll go through Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, followed by Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar and Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar. After learning the sentences from the latter two books one should be ready to tackle almost anything.

akrodha Wrote:Smash Bros Melee, an upcoming game for the Wii.

I would recommend that you edit this. (I kid! I kid!)

Sheetz, you mentioned Assimil before. From my understanding, the books alone, minus, the audio, are fairly cheap, so I'll try to get that. However, as I intend solely to harvest the sentences from it, I'm concerned if that's a truly efficient use of money. I do have the Dictionaries of Basic and Intermediate Japanese Grammar, however, although I can't access them as I'm away from home right now.

I find Assimil useful because the lessons are all presented in dialogs so you learn lots of colloquial and informal speech presented in context. Another thing that is good is that all the sentences are given in full kanji, with pronunciations in romaji/furigana, and the translations are both in word-for-word as well as idiomatic forms. One last thing I like about it is that the newer lessons build upon the older ones, so that as you learn the new dialogs you get some extra review of the older material. If you have other sources for sentences that do that then those would be just as good.

I love this method. I'm about 800 sentences in and my reading comprehension has already exploded. Take Khatzumoto's advice and go monolingual as fast as you can; using the dictionary now is very time consuming, but it gets quicker and will get you to fluency much much faster. For just starting out I'd recommend the Sanseido Dictionary because it's a concise dictionary and doesn't introduce too many new words, while still giving a monolingual definition (if you turn off the other dictionaries).

I have a canon wordtank electronic dictionary. I find sentences that are my current level or that I can decipher with some work. I think the alljapaneseallthetime.com guy started with with Oxford Beginner's Dictionary of Japanese which is filled with oodles of good sentences at a beginner to intermediate level. I'm also inputting sentences from a manga, Death Note, which I have in Japanese with furigana and in English. I look up unknown words in my canon and sometimes even include the sample sentences from those entries. I'm at the beginning, too. I also ordered NHK television through my cable channel so I can be surrounded in Japanese. Let's see what happens.

im doing JATTM as well. Before starting this method i was somewhere in between jlpt 3 and 2 so picking up sentances from anywhere wasnt so hard. He does say though that if your not sure of how to translate a sentance then just look up the words you dont know in that sentace in a dictionary and use its example sentances instead as you can be sure the translation is correct.

Anyway im basically going through japan times intermediate grammar reference and putting 3-5 grammar points a day into an SRS, reading a manga called BERSERK and puling new sentances from there and getting examples from my dictionary for any new words i hear in converation.

Dictionary wise i posted a thread about this and there are a lot of options. Personally i use my pda with "the green goddess" dictionary (japanese to english) and also have Jim Breens free thing as a backup. I use EBPocket to access these dictionaries. The best thing about ppc or palms is that you can draw the kanji real quick to lookup.

The only problem i have with the method is remembering the compounds. Some compounds are real easy to remeber such as zasshi (misc + docmument) 雑誌 but others are quite random. How do you remember the compounds???

Well, for now I don't bother with most compounds that appear within dictionary definitions. What I'll do is look up and include their readings in a definition. Usually I can guess the meaning quite well cause of RTK1.

However, if I find a compound on a website, or if I keep seeing one over and over in the definitions, then I'll look for a sentence (usually in Yahoo!辞書) and add it to my sentence heap.

SRS is good for long-term retention, but I use Genius for drilling new readings into my short-term memory.

The Sanseido dictionary is pretty good, but I like Yahoo!辞書 cause it uses URL arguments to look up words. This allows me to look up words with Quicksilver.

Quick question for those of you using this method, approximately how many sentences a day are you guys learning per day? 10? 100?

I'm happy if I manage 10 sentences in a day. Though there's a couple of steps involved with selecting one...

Find it.
Type it.
Write it (on paper).
Kana-ise it.
English translation.
Gaze at at.
Copy all data to a spreadsheet.

Then I add it. It can easily be over ten minutes between sentences... bleh.

Hey everyone,

I think I may have found the holygrail of the AJATT 10,000 sentence method.

http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Japanese...457&sr=8-1

It is called the Effective Japanese Useage Guide (ISBN 4-7700-1919-X)

From the back Cover
""302 comparisons of 708 synonymous terms
Explains words that seems similar, but have very different uses.
Sample sentences in Romanized and standard Japanese script with furigana, followed by the English translation."

Furthermore, each word has a definition in Japanese, then an English Explanation. I'll quote almost verbatim the Omou　part of the Omou/Kangaeru section. The whole section is just over 2 pages long and contains 12 sample sentences, but this excerpt should be enough for everyone to get the idea.

おもう / かんがえる
omou kangaeru

おもう　[思う] to think

頭や心に浮かぶ・感じることです。[考える]よりも直観的で情緒的です。
感情や意志を表現したり、想像・希望・感想・意見など、いろいろなことを
述べるとき使います。意見・主張のおわりにつけて、やわらげた表現として
使うことが多いです。(例１，２，３，４，５，６）

To mentally or emotionally sense something. Omou is more intuitive
and emotional than kangaeru. It is used to express one's emotion, will, etc.,
or to state an opinion. Omou is often used at the end of a sentence expressing
conjecture, hope, opinion or argument in order to make one's statement
softer.　(ex. 1,2,3,4,5,6)

1) 初めて東京に来たとき、なんて人が多いのだろうと思った。
Hajimete Tookyoo kita toki, nante hitoga ooindarooto omotta.
When (I) came to Tokyo for the First time, I was amazed by the large number of people.

....
6) 現在の進行状態から見て、このビルの３月完成は無理だと思ういます。
Genzai shinkoo-jootaikara mite, kono biru sangatsu kanseiwa muridato omoimasu.
Looking at the current state of progress, (I) think it will be impossible to finish this building by March.

....end example.

I think it is a great place to get sentences from as it hits all levels. Japanese to English, then Japanese to Japanese as we advance, and the added advantage of distinguishing between similiar words.

I am not quite finished RTK1 (around 300 to go). But I am going to start using this reference to get going on my 10,000 sentence project.

Cheers!

Megaqwerty Wrote:Sheetz, you mentioned Assimil before. From my understanding, the books alone, minus, the audio, are fairly cheap, so I'll try to get that.

Even with the audio Assimil is pretty cheap, you can pick the 2 volumes up for about 35-40 bucks each. Also even if you plan to just take sentences from it, it would still be really easy for you to listen and read the lesson first. The audio for a lesson is less than 4 minutes.

I've been using Assimil for a few weeks now, it's basically the AJATT method with a structure already there. There's no SRS program involved, but you're supposed to review previous lessions periodically, it would probably work fine if you swapped reviews for an SRS program, which is kind of similar.

There's also the "active phase" of Assimil that I haven't tried yet. About half way through the course you go back to the start and translate the english back into japanese on your own; it's supposed to take your passive skills and start building up your active skills.

Istvan Wrote:Hey everyone,

I think I may have found the holygrail of the AJATT 10,000 sentence method.

http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Japanese...457&sr=8-1

I think it is a great place to get sentences from as it hits all levels. Japanese to English, then Japanese to Japanese as we advance, and the added advantage of distinguishing between similiar words.

Nice find! I think this has a lot of merit since it has J -> J definitions. Khaz has persuaded me to move in that direction asap.

I do about 10, maybe 20 sentences per day. I figure that Khatz's 50 is way too much for me at this point. For me this is a hobby, not a life goal.

It's also worth mentioning that those ten sentences really do take about an hour or two to understand and look up. I guess once I get faster I'll be able to sneak in some more.

yea, finding stuff that you really want to say or show the meaning of a word that sticks out to you can be a tiring task of searching through blogs and googling the word your looking for many times over.

worth it in the end though surely!

Khatz claims Japanese must become your life if you are going along the AJATT method..
then again, he says everybody has a different way of doing things

I personally cannot commit my full life to learning a language like that. there are limits to how much studying I can do before I lose it. By this I mean that I "burn out" or just need to tear myself from it for a brief period of time. A good example is when I went on holiday to Hokkaido with my girlfriend (japanese btw) and just constantly speaking, listening, and reading Japanese for that 1 week trip totally burnt me out to the point where I started to stop speaking coherently after a while. this made me want to speak less.

It's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but there must be some people that understand.

i think "burnt out" is the best expression i can come up with to describe the feeling of beiong surrounded like that...

it's also important to have fun

exactly.

And making Japanese your life 24/7 can be the opposite. at least for me anyway

yorkii Wrote:I personally cannot commit my full life to learning a language like that. there are limits to how much studying I can do before I lose it. By this I mean that I "burn out" or just need to tear myself from it for a brief period of time. A good example is when I went on holiday to Hokkaido with my girlfriend (japanese btw) and just constantly speaking, listening, and reading Japanese for that 1 week trip totally burnt me out to the point where I started to stop speaking coherently after a while. this made me want to speak less.

It's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but there must be some people that understand.

i think "burnt out" is the best expression i can come up with to describe the feeling of beiong surrounded like that...

Edit: lost my post somehow. The gist of it was:

I know exactly what you mean, I had a similar experience with Hindi when I went to visit family in India. I ended up borrowing English language novels from my cousins to maintain my sanity.