Kuma01 Wrote:I honestly do not think AJATT works because of its '' method'' but simply because it basically tells you to dedicate hours each day to doing the thing you want to improve at. It doesn't matter how you learn kanji, if you're exposed to them every day you will eventually learn them whether you use Heisig or not. It doesn't matter if you mine sentences or not, if you read Japanese sentences almost every day you will get better at it regardless. If anything the combination of incredible effort + SrS is what gives anyone learning Chinese or Japanese an edge.
That brings up a new point to consider: The weighing up of efficiency and effectiveness.
If you spend 12 hours a day on ANYTHING, not just learning languages, then you're going to make progress, whether you want to or not. That's AJATT (ie. all the time).
However, it is better to find a technique to learn something so that you can achieve the same thing in say, 6 hours rather than 12. That's efficiency.
One example of efficiency is James Heisig's books. Instead of going for depth (learning a Kanji's appearance, meaning/keyword, 音 and 訓 readings) you are going for breadth instead (learn a Kanji's appearance and meaning, leaving the readings for later. One argument is too much information too early, making it counter-productive to memorising it. The other argument is expose yourself to the 2000 or so Kanji as early as possible (about 3 months). The earlier you expose yourself to the Kanji, the quicker the long-term memorisation process can complete.
That's a valid efficiency technique.
The other example of efficiency is instead of learning the Japanese 常用 Kanji way, you start by breaking all the Kanji down into primitives and only learn and build Kanji systematically with the primitives you already know. In other words, the order in Heisig's book.
That's another valid efficiency technique.
Now we'll compare it with AJATT's method, or as some people, such as the post I'm quoting, prefer to say, "method".
As other people in this thread said, AJATT more or less = immersion. In other words, listen to Japanese podcasts 12 hours a day. Read Japanese manga 12 hours a day. Japanese video games, Japanese music, Japanese news, Japanese novels, etc... 12 hours a day.
As a person who is looking for efficient techniques for learning Japanese, the first two examples was exactly the kind of thing I wanted.
Unfortunately, while AJATT has a very positive encouraging tone, I hesitate to call it a Japanese learning "method" or "technique".
I think I'm repeating myself now so this will be my last post in this thread.
