I don't want to be confused for trying to represent Thora or anyone else here, these are my own critics of AJATT that try to kind of bundle together longstanding flaws of AJATT and what can be done to salvage the good parts of AJATT (if it's possible at all, with the way Khatz is)
Pedagogical:
His posts are often way more unfocused than they need to be
He writes much more about himself and spends too much of his text fleshing out his 'character' instead of focusing on the learner, who he also, for the sake of humour, talks about as though it's this lost soul who needs to find its way. Coupled with how he writes otherwise, this is part of what creates the 'guru' image that Khatz has repeatedly said he doesn't want.
He has a terrible tendency to use exaggerations in every which way that makes him very hard to understand sometimes (traditional teaching is just shit, all my critics think I think I'm a half-god or something, things along those lines). It's supposed to add humour and it does sometimes but his constant abuse of it makes it mostly tiresome and confusing by now, IMO.
From what I've seen, Khatz never reminds/warns his readers that for a lot of them, Japanese isn't going to change that much and they should seriously think about if there's something more important they should focus on and if Japanese should be allowed to get in the way of their social relations. This is the biggest flaw I find with the site and, I think, highly irresponsible considering the following that has formed. If I've missed something like this in the sea of text on the site, I apologize.
Many of the posts don't really add anything new but only drone on about points made long ago. The best thing to do at this point, for the sake of the readers anyway, would probably be to reorganize everything that's been written and make it more coherent, make the site work better with summaries etc. and declare that the site is complete and let it BE. It doesn't have to keep continuing. Just look at Antimoon for example; it gives the same kind of advice in a much more coherent manner and the creator never had this need to write endlessly about the same things over and over. There is a lot of good things on AJATT and I think its finalization is long overdue
Marketing:
The advertisements that are on the site are in the way and distracting when you're reading through everything, they're way too much in your face, I especially dislike that counter he's added.
He recommends the "Japanese in Mangaland", which I've never bought but I've had a look at them and they're just terrible. They are total crap. I can't imagine he's actually read them himself.
The "sentence pack", "japanese story book" and the "work.jp" are all stuff for suckers because anyone could find similar material but of equal or better quality and for free easily on the 'Net and they don't seem to fit very well with the advice on AJATT in general about using advice from different places etc etc. It just seems to be for people who are unable to let go of AJATT and find learning material on their own, I don't see the point of any of these "products", honestly.
I haven't seen anything about updates to the one-time payment products like the QRG, sentence pack etc. It's hard to think that there weren't any needed improvements or corrections at all in any of them.
Khatz does link to a lot of other people's sites etc. and says that much of what he writes is derived from their works... I think it would be reasonable for him to say that people should consider donating to people other than him, especially because he keeps saying that he isn't using the money for much good anyway.
Looking at what's written under AJATT Plus on why it has a subscription fee... "Forumwise, it acts as a conveniently simple barrier to people less intelligent than you, who would otherwise waste your time and flava." This is just bullshit, no matter how much irony, sarcasm or anything it's supposed to convey, this is bullshit and I despise the attitude that's behind it.Similarly, the "why wouldn't you want this?" parts of the posts for silver spoon and AJATT Plus are just a bunch of strawman arguments and well I think Khatz just uses a lot of cheap tricks in his marketing.
Skip this paragraph, Tzadeck already said it
(The Silver Spoon thing never guarantees what amount of effort will be put into the thing from the 'teaching' side (presumably just Khatz). Is he doing it as a full-time job? How many minutes of Khatz's time will each member get every day? It wouldn't perhaps be that you never have any actual direct contact, just a lot of automated things that are supposed to keep you going, with very little of any needs-specific consultation? It all seems very fishy and Khatz isn't explaining very well what you are really buying.)
"detailed instructions on specific words and word types to learn in the context of SRSing MCDs (a new SRS technique that’s even better than sentences)" Really? Are you serious? This is just classical "WE have SPECIAL information that you can only get from us!" This is the 2011 WWW, stuff like that just shouldn't be allowed to work anymore...
Bottom line is: Khatz must have already said all of the things he thinks are really important, it's been five years since the oldest post. Instead of trying to heap on more information it would be best for AJATT if he just put time into doing a final edit of everything that's been done so far and turned the site into a complete work.
Edit: Thanks for linking the video where Khatz is talking, fakewookie. I'm not going to get into any details or anything because I frankly don't care about what others think about Khatz's Japanese skills, but for me, it really shows that Khatz was grossly exaggerating his ability, just like he exaggerates everything.
(This whole post got kind of long but at least now I've said everything I'd ever want to say about AJATT so that's Done. I hope this post is worth reading to someone. I'll now happily ignore AJATT and all discussion related to it for the rest of my life, I won't be writing more in this thread as I have nothing to add)
Pedagogical:
His posts are often way more unfocused than they need to be
He writes much more about himself and spends too much of his text fleshing out his 'character' instead of focusing on the learner, who he also, for the sake of humour, talks about as though it's this lost soul who needs to find its way. Coupled with how he writes otherwise, this is part of what creates the 'guru' image that Khatz has repeatedly said he doesn't want.
He has a terrible tendency to use exaggerations in every which way that makes him very hard to understand sometimes (traditional teaching is just shit, all my critics think I think I'm a half-god or something, things along those lines). It's supposed to add humour and it does sometimes but his constant abuse of it makes it mostly tiresome and confusing by now, IMO.
From what I've seen, Khatz never reminds/warns his readers that for a lot of them, Japanese isn't going to change that much and they should seriously think about if there's something more important they should focus on and if Japanese should be allowed to get in the way of their social relations. This is the biggest flaw I find with the site and, I think, highly irresponsible considering the following that has formed. If I've missed something like this in the sea of text on the site, I apologize.
Many of the posts don't really add anything new but only drone on about points made long ago. The best thing to do at this point, for the sake of the readers anyway, would probably be to reorganize everything that's been written and make it more coherent, make the site work better with summaries etc. and declare that the site is complete and let it BE. It doesn't have to keep continuing. Just look at Antimoon for example; it gives the same kind of advice in a much more coherent manner and the creator never had this need to write endlessly about the same things over and over. There is a lot of good things on AJATT and I think its finalization is long overdue
Marketing:
The advertisements that are on the site are in the way and distracting when you're reading through everything, they're way too much in your face, I especially dislike that counter he's added.
He recommends the "Japanese in Mangaland", which I've never bought but I've had a look at them and they're just terrible. They are total crap. I can't imagine he's actually read them himself.
The "sentence pack", "japanese story book" and the "work.jp" are all stuff for suckers because anyone could find similar material but of equal or better quality and for free easily on the 'Net and they don't seem to fit very well with the advice on AJATT in general about using advice from different places etc etc. It just seems to be for people who are unable to let go of AJATT and find learning material on their own, I don't see the point of any of these "products", honestly.
I haven't seen anything about updates to the one-time payment products like the QRG, sentence pack etc. It's hard to think that there weren't any needed improvements or corrections at all in any of them.
Khatz does link to a lot of other people's sites etc. and says that much of what he writes is derived from their works... I think it would be reasonable for him to say that people should consider donating to people other than him, especially because he keeps saying that he isn't using the money for much good anyway.
Looking at what's written under AJATT Plus on why it has a subscription fee... "Forumwise, it acts as a conveniently simple barrier to people less intelligent than you, who would otherwise waste your time and flava." This is just bullshit, no matter how much irony, sarcasm or anything it's supposed to convey, this is bullshit and I despise the attitude that's behind it.Similarly, the "why wouldn't you want this?" parts of the posts for silver spoon and AJATT Plus are just a bunch of strawman arguments and well I think Khatz just uses a lot of cheap tricks in his marketing.
Skip this paragraph, Tzadeck already said it
(The Silver Spoon thing never guarantees what amount of effort will be put into the thing from the 'teaching' side (presumably just Khatz). Is he doing it as a full-time job? How many minutes of Khatz's time will each member get every day? It wouldn't perhaps be that you never have any actual direct contact, just a lot of automated things that are supposed to keep you going, with very little of any needs-specific consultation? It all seems very fishy and Khatz isn't explaining very well what you are really buying.)
"detailed instructions on specific words and word types to learn in the context of SRSing MCDs (a new SRS technique that’s even better than sentences)" Really? Are you serious? This is just classical "WE have SPECIAL information that you can only get from us!" This is the 2011 WWW, stuff like that just shouldn't be allowed to work anymore...
Bottom line is: Khatz must have already said all of the things he thinks are really important, it's been five years since the oldest post. Instead of trying to heap on more information it would be best for AJATT if he just put time into doing a final edit of everything that's been done so far and turned the site into a complete work.
Edit: Thanks for linking the video where Khatz is talking, fakewookie. I'm not going to get into any details or anything because I frankly don't care about what others think about Khatz's Japanese skills, but for me, it really shows that Khatz was grossly exaggerating his ability, just like he exaggerates everything.
(This whole post got kind of long but at least now I've said everything I'd ever want to say about AJATT so that's Done. I hope this post is worth reading to someone. I'll now happily ignore AJATT and all discussion related to it for the rest of my life, I won't be writing more in this thread as I have nothing to add)
Edited: 2011-08-01, 4:22 am
