.

These questions are bizarre to me and I'm not entirely sure what the point of the thread is. Are you trying to gauge the ability level of people on the forum? Is this some sort of roundabout criticism of particular posters or threads?

(I'm not even sure what #18 means.)

I usually don't post anymore, mostly because this forum is turning into an AJATT flamewar, instead of a constructive study forum, but I have to say one thing about this thread, and that is...

WTF!?

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Zorlee Wrote:I usually don't post anymore, mostly because this forum is turning into an AJATT flamewar, instead of a constructive study forum, but I have to say one thing about this thread, and that is...

WTF!?

What he said. It's sad to see what this forum has become.

That said, I kind of feel like other members would appreciate if you post about how you've been learning Japanese. I listened to your recording posted on IceCream's thread, and as you're probably already aware, that was unbelievably awesome both in terms of grammar and accent. If you can pull that off in conversation, you're already light years ahead of other members who have been learning Japanese way longer than you.

Zorlee Wrote:I usually don't post anymore, mostly because this forum is turning into an AJATT flamewar,

I think people are blowing this out of proportion; there aren't that many AJATT-related threads. Just go back to posting whatever you want to post -- that's the best way to ensure that there's more of what you want to read here.

Quote:It's a thread which says that we all (I include myself, therefore the "we") won't be "fluent", no matter how we try.

I don't think that's true.

(Though, that depends on your personal definition of the term "fluent" itself. At least for me it means being able to read newspapers, articles and novels whose topics and stories you are interested. I don't mean to read medical essays or any material needed for Japanese universities. That's too special and unnecessary, as I would neither understand reading articles of that type in English nor in German, which is my mother tongue. On top of that, "fluent" means you can follow easily every day conversations at natural speed and participate in a discussion for example without sounding like a child. I don't want to go to much in detail concerning the skill "writing" here, but one should - from my point of view - be at least able to write notes in Japanese, or, anything that is grammatically and lexically correct and understood by natives, including kanjis.)

I learnt English to fluency in 5 years of intense studies; every day 45 minutes. I *know* that it will be the same for Japanese at some point, somewhen in (hopefully near?) future.

I just wanted to annotate at this point that such posts, stating and declaring kind of that "y'all wastin' your time, yo, learning Japanese as we, including me, will never reach fluency anyway" are extremely demotivating and absolutely.. senseless, as this board ever since it was made and evoked was made to help, to learn and to motivate.
Frankly, instead of writing this damn questionnaire you'd have studied already 30 minutes more.. Just sad :(

Perhaps there should be a new forum rule. The words "fluency", "AJATT", "Silverlight", etc should be cause to have your post deleted. No thread that has any of those words in it ever turns into anything useful. They're all almost pure flamebait/trolls at this point.

Can we get back to talking about bizarre grammar, funny words and good learning resources?

I happily submit my own post as the first target.

zigmonty Wrote:"Silverlight",

I guess you prefer Adobe Flash?

merlin.codex Wrote:10. Can we count fast enough in Japanese (when someone says ２６万, we imagine 260000 instantly, without trying to remember that １万＝１００００), don't have any kind of problems with their numbers, days, etc?

It's better to think 26 × 10.000 and not mentally convert it to 260 × 1.000, unless you're translating something.

merlin.codex Wrote:11. Is our accent and way of speaking so good that we can actually fool someone on the phone?

I never use a telephone. Never ever. I don't like their horrible sound quality.

merlin.codex Wrote:19. Are we using a forum dedicated to "learning Japanese" to actually learn?

No.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:"Silverlight",

I guess you prefer Adobe Flash?

Or HTML 5!

yudantaiteki Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:"Silverlight",

I guess you prefer Adobe Flash?

Hahaha, you don't expect me to care enough to remember the name of it do you?

And yes, I do. But HTML5 FTW.

The problem with debates about fluency, is there are people who set the bar way too high and others who set it very low.

I think OP is setting it too high judging by some of the questions.
Fluency to me first and foremost refers to speaking ability, so a person can be completely illiterate and still be fluent. I don't think not learning to read is a very practical route to fluency but it is possible. Then there are advanced learners who can read quite difficult texts but lack listening practice and are not yet able to converse freely, ie they are not fluent.

I also don't think a perfect accent is necessary to claim fluency. If that was required then half my fellow students at university and highschool were not fluent in English. Or what about Dutchmen, Swedes, Danes etc who can usually speak fluent but accented English?

Then on the other end of the spectrum, there are people that will happily consider themselves fluent if they can order a beer or sustain 5 minutes of small talk in a bar but wouldn't be able to understand much at all of typical TV programming or simply enjoy a movie. These people aren't fluent yet.

To me fluency means, you are able to have a conversation about any topic with a native speaker who is speaking normally and without ever needing to switch to another language. You're not dependant on a sympathetic native speaker.

It does not mean speaking as well as a native. That takes much much longer than becoming fluent.

The whole "fluency" thing is unfortunate because on the one hand, it's pretty useless to try to define these vague terms. But on the other hand, it is often helpful to know what someone's ability is if they're answering a question or recommending a method.

The questionnaire in the first post contains some things that I consider totally useless (like reading Structure of the Brain in Japanese) so I don't really care if I can do them or not.

Tori-kun Wrote:I just wanted to annotate at this point that such posts, stating and declaring kind of that "y'all wastin' your time, yo, learning Japanese as we, including me, will never reach fluency anyway" are extremely demotivating and absolutely.. senseless, as this board ever since it was made and evoked was made to help, to learn and to motivate.

Being "demotivated" can be counted as practice — to be able to persevere even when everyone is against you and when there isn't anyone cheering you on is a great ability to develop. People are usually too soft and depend too much on external validation and motivation, and that's one of the reasons most of them don't do anything that is not what 'everyone else' does (which I call boring stuff.)

Scott Young says something about this in one of his articles (Needing Encouragement is a Weakness):

Scott H Young Wrote:If you need people to support your goals and ideas, you won’t reach many of them.

This doesn’t mean encouragement is bad. Having people who do support you is great. However, needing those people to support you often guarantees failure.

The first reason for this is that, unfortunately, people often aren’t supportive. If you rely on their encouragement, you give them veto power over your life. The issue of whether they should support you is irrelevant.

The second, and perhaps more important reason, is that persistence is a function of needing encouragement. If you want to be more persistent in an area, you need to lower your hunger for positive feedback.
...
Claiming that someone worked on a project for five years isn’t a good indicator of persistence. It would be better to ask how much positive feedback they needed to sustain the project throughout the five years. I’d be more impressed by someone’s doggedness to keep working without approval for five years, than someone who pushed through the steady growth to success.
...
I think a good first step is realizing you don’t need encouragement to go out and start something. And perhaps more importantly, is realizing you don’t need encouragement to continue working hard at something.
...
Stop Expecting People to Encourage You

Part of the problem is that, as a culture, we expect encouragement. We expect it so regularly that even neutral comments can seem discouraging. [...]

I think he's absolutely right about it. And what he says can be applied to language learning, too.

merlin.codex Wrote:It's a thread which says that we all (I include myself, therefore the "we") won't be "fluent", no matter how we try. Maybe have a good command of the language, yes, at least in my opinion.

There are lots of people who succeded. Maybe you should use google or meet some foreigners ;)

Btw....Who cares if not fluent people claim to be fluent? As long as their post are useful/funny/interesting/whatever who cares, really.

magamo Wrote:

Zorlee Wrote:I usually don't post anymore, mostly because this forum is turning into an AJATT flamewar, instead of a constructive study forum, but I have to say one thing about this thread, and that is...

WTF!?

That said, I kind of feel like other members would appreciate if you post about how you've been learning Japanese. I listened to your recording posted on IceCream's thread, and as you're probably already aware, that was unbelievably awesome both in terms of grammar and accent. If you can pull that off in conversation, you're already light years ahead of other members who have been learning Japanese way longer than you.

Wow! Thank you so much! That means a whole lot coming from you! Again, thank you! =)
I'd be more than happy to write about how I study Japanese, but I really don't want to come off as a Mr. know-it-all / "Now that I've mastered Japanese, do what I did" kind of guy.
I still struggle with a lot when it comes to Japanese, and it's a work in progress, but I just really love the language and the whole learning process, so that's what keeps me going.

Zorlee Wrote:Wow! Thank you so much! That means a whole lot coming from you! Again, thank you! =)
I'd be more than happy to write about how I study Japanese, but I really don't want to come off as a Mr. know-it-all / "Now that I've mastered Japanese, do what I did" kind of guy.
I still struggle with a lot when it comes to Japanese, and it's a work in progress, but I just really love the language and the whole learning process, so that's what keeps me going.

Seriously man, do it. In detail. From your writing style, I don't think it would come across as "how to learn japanese in the objectively best way, absolutely."
I know I'd be quite interested in how you did it -- particularly the accent. Just write about what methods you use for what skills, what sort of progress you've witnessed come from it. What goes on through your head when doing it? If you're SRSing, how do you grade yourself? I think the best posts reflect on their own experiences and aren't just a list of resources to go through. The magic comes through in the details.

No problem! I'm kind of busy tonight, but I'll see what I can do tomorrow
Don't expect magic, thought! It's just all about time, fun and keeping at it, hehe!

Zorlee Wrote:No problem! I'm kind of busy tonight, but I'll see what I can do tomorrow
Don't expect magic, thought! It's just all about time, fun and keeping at it, hehe!

I expect magic.

Seriously though, I remember you from when I first joined. You did the KO2001 book in like a month or two? I was certainly inspired.

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zigmonty Wrote:Perhaps there should be a new forum rule. The words "fluency", "AJATT", "Silverlight", etc should be cause to have your post deleted.

Fabrice could just make them new swearwords so they're starred out... or autoreplace with "goats" or something... could make things slightly more entertaining:

merlin.codex Wrote:In short, I read this forum every now and then and just can't understand what is all this fuss about "goats", being "goats" and so on.

IceCream Wrote:

zigmonty Wrote:Perhaps there should be a new forum rule. The words "fluency", "AJATT", "Silverlight", etc should be cause to have your post deleted.

Fabrice could just make them new swearwords so they're starred out... or autoreplace with "goats" or something... could make things slightly more entertaining:

merlin.codex Wrote:In short, I read this forum every now and then and just can't understand what is all this fuss about "goats", being "goats" and so on.

Hahaha seconded.

And also, I agree with the others, I wish the people who have succeeded *would* speak more about their methods. You can talk about your methods and your abilities and still not come off as an arrogant ass.

I don't really care if someone considers themselves fluent and someone else's opinion differs. If that word even vaguely applies to you, you're worth listening to IMHO. I mean, I'm so far from fluent it's not funny (as in... it's embarrassing).

I read and understand everything once I learned it in any language. Learning is an ongoing process thus it takes time. Learning involves asking questions, even stupid ones, and many of them! But it does not mean that we are less fluent than a native when we ask questions. To learn something we have to ask questions, or else we aren't able to learn, and asking questions involves the use of the language, which can be fluent or stuttering, with a lack of words, or with many words detailing the nature of the question, if we know them. Without dedication we can not learn, and without taking time to learn even if its some minutes per day, we will not become any better. We are only then advancing, when we learn new things. When we learn more, we are able to reach an advanced level, and once we reached that level we can say we are at an advanced stage of learning. We are rounding off our skills, being able to fool natives into believing we are one of them, without the physical appearance giving away that we are not. And we can write, once we learn how to write, when we write often. And we can read and speak fluently, once we learn how to speak and to read. We will never be natives, try as we might, and even in our own language we can never and will never know everything there is to know, can say everything there is to say, and write everything there is to write. It will never make us less fluent, less native, less educated, less advanced. And it is nothing else in another language, we are babies, but become adults, we grow old and we gain wisdom.

So the answer to all your questions is time and nothing else.

1) Yes, plenty.
2) 0 days
3) Lots
4) What do you mean by 'shortenings?'
5) No
6) Hmm, fairly well.
7) Offended? Not exactly. And I think 外人 is pretty similar to the word 'Jew'--it's used both neutrally and offensively.
8) No, though I do screw up.
9) Hmm, no, people don't really slow down, but they probably change their word choice a bit.
10) Yes, counting is very easy. In fact, I can do Japanese money amounts in Japanese very easily, but it's very hard for me to think of them in English. In English I think in 'bucks', and in Japanese I think in yen.
11) Not sure, since when I'm talking to people on a phone I generally give my name first, so it gives it away.
12) I speak some Kansai-ben
13) No
14) No
15) Yes
16) Not really.
17) No. But I dream only a few times a year. Strangely enough, when I was in Tibet a month ago I dreamed every day. Something about the high altitude maybe? Two of the six nights there I dreamed in Japanese.
18) Yeah.
19) Sometimes.
20) Yeah, I'm an advanced learner and I'm fairly fluent.

The reason I filled it out is because it's fairly obvious that you can answer almost all of the questions about ability in this thread in the negative--that is, answering that you don't have that level of ability yet--and still be justified in calling yourself fluent or an advanced learner (In response to "In short, we are all learners," I would borrow a meme from Orwell: "We are all language learners, but some of us are more language learners than others"). Whatever vague message this questionnaire is trying to send is wrong, or at least very poorly expressed.