Hey guys

Today I had my first oportuning of speaking japnese face to face with a group of people and HELL YEAHH. I could do it easy =D

I studied Japanese by RTK and AJATT, but I stopped 3 years agoo and only once in a while watched an episode of anime and read manga. But even so, it went really well.

AJATT WORKS!

I am not jealous...not even slightly.

Haha, sometimes we just need to yell something like that out to the world.

Enjoy the moment while it lasts!

Just wait until I'm done with my studies..... in a few years.....I'll be owning Japanese like no tomorrow. Na, just kidding around here, it's one of those things that we just need to keep going.

<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

Don't knock it until you try it.

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

I've got plenty of great tips and guidance from his website without shelling out any money at all.

If people are willing to pay him for further help, I don't see a problem.

Do you want people to not be able to make money online doing something they enjoy? They should just give everything away for free? :\

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

Ridiculous. All the help and motivation he's ever provided to a vast amount of potential language learners is now moot because he's trying to make money out of other things?

Omoishinji Wrote:

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

Don't knock it until you try it.

I haven't participated in this forum for a good year or so, but I'm going to step in and say that fam, you don't know what you're talking about.

Khatz put in work over a number of years to provide people with the tools they need to teach themselves Japanese. I found his site in early 2008, and by late 2010, I was fluent. By 'fluent', I mean that I am able to have arguments on government policy and philosophy in Japanese. I do this for approximately two hours every other day or so, for work. I am now, as a direct result of my newfound abilities, working in my dream job.

I never gave Khatz one red cent. I thought he was totally justified in charging, but by the time he had products available for purchase, I was already too far along. I don't even read his site anymore, because guess what? I don't need it anymore. I've actually become a mini-khatz to a few of my peers, providing coaching to anyone that asks.

Obviously I do this for free, but if at some point the three kids asking me for help suddenly jumped to three hundred or three thousand, you better believe I'd ask for compensation, just so that I could afford to give people my full attention.

I encourage you to drop the sarcasm, and pick up some of the knowledge that the dude has put out on his site. It's pretty simple stuff - he didn't even make most of it up himself; it's all nicked from Antimoon. Then, if you feel like you have a gift for teaching, and the patience to do so, pass on your knowledge to a few others.

Then, if at some point, you have people beating down your door for your unique spin on how to self-teach a language: start charging. If you ever come up with some genius method for Mandarin, you might have me as a customer.

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

The reason this post is so ridiculous is that the guy you're knockin, mentat_kgs, has 1671 posts on this forum. And you're accusing him of just being a shill for AJATT?

Surely in the other 1670 contributions he has made to this forum he has provided enough content to allow him to make one feel-good thread about an experience he had and the method that he thinks led to it.

(PS, I don't recommend AJATT btw, so it's not like me liking AJATT is my motivation for posting this)

Why do threads on this site get derailed so quickly? It's like Godwin's law x10. Except in this case replace Hitler with Khatzumoto/ajatt.

On topic: congratulations on your successes! enjoy the positive energy!

Omoishinji Wrote:

louischa Wrote:<sarc>Wow! I am certainly going to do this AJATT thing since you could have a ***AWESOME JAPANESE CONVERSATION*** after three years of doing nuthin'! Nicely done! </sarc>.

... and this content-free thread has been sponsored by AJATT. AJATT: Why Learn Something By Yourself For Free When You Could Be Paying Installments To A Deranged Black Guy With A Website™ (trust him, he knows Japanese).

Don't knock it until you try it.

Very mature. Love the racist undertones.

For goodness sake, AJATT does not equal Silverspoon. It is all about learning by yourself, and for free.

Going to join dihutenosa here and mention my own story in the probably vain hope that it will make you take a rethink. For years I studied Japanese at university including a year on exchange. I worked at it quite hard, but could never really seem to get anywhere near fluency. My conversational skills were poor, I couldn't read difficult texts, and radio and TV were impossible for me to fully understand. Years of grinding textbooks and taking classes and I still sucked balls. Start of 2010 I found AJATT.com and went for it. Within half a year or so (I had a head start) I could understand almost all radio and TV just fine. My conversational skills also shot through the roof. After a year I was comfortably fluent. Thanks to going hard core AJATT, I aced the tests and interviews I sat for a very nice scholarship and convinced a professor in Japan that I was worth taking on. Where am I now? In Japan, attending a top tier university (hint: it starts with 京 and ends with 大), paying no fees and having my living expenses paid for to boot. All my classes (on philosophy) are in Japanese, and I understand them just fine. Recent I translated my own graduation thesis into Japanese (20,000 words). Not many errors were found by native checkers. Newspapers? Easy. TV shows? Easy. Radio? Easy. etc. etc.

So yeah, damn you Khatz you Deranged Black Guy, screwing up my life with your snake oil! blah blah blah.

P.S. No I do not happen to think the sun shines out the guys arse, or that his blog is the way, the truth and the light. It is one interesting blog out of a number out there, that you may or may not find interesting/helpful. In the end it is up to each of us to decide what best works for us. So, how about some civility please?

Danchan and Dihutenosa, that's interesting. I found AJATT in Mid 2008, and went for a whole year studying Kanji (while being immersed) and have been doing sentences maybe from 2009. I wouldn't say I am "comfortably fluent". I would have comprehension problems if I were to get into a deep conversation about politics or philosophy. Is there anything special you guys did besides "immersion"?

Okay, people keep mentioning AJATT so I decided to check the website one more time (I have done so several times in the past).

Unfortunately, my conclusion now is still the same as the past: AJATT is like the Tony Robbins of Japanese learning. In other words, he acts like a life coach, he doesn't actually teach you anything (based on my brief browse at least), but he teaches you how to teach yourself by inspiring you and motivating you (and getting you to inspire and motivate yourself).

How correct is my conclusion?

The website doesn't seem very focused, but jumps around all kinds of topics. If I wanted to learn Japanese Kanji, there are specific books and sites I can go to. If I wanted to learn grammar, same thing. If I wanted to learn something specialised like honorific language or video game terminogy, I know just the places to go.

But this site? I'd call it a jack-of-all-trades except I don't know what exactly it's trading.

The site has a few blog entries called "Learning Japanese = Playing a Video Game". That's great. I like video games, these articles should be useful. So I read it and it sounds like a whole lot of nothing. I don't know what the heck I'm reading. What's that word to describe how one sounds like he's saying a lot of things, when in reality, he doesn't seem to be saying anything? That word is what I mean.

Anyway, good for those it works on, but AJATT is not for me I'm afraid.

Overview

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

There's also this if you want more detail Table of Contents

All of AJATT summed up here.

I just wish people would stop confusing AJATT the method, which is the same as allo-immersion to me, and AJATT the website, which is about Khatz.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Okay, people keep mentioning AJATT so I decided to check the website one more time (I have done so several times in the past).

Unfortunately, my conclusion now is still the same as the past: AJATT is like the Tony Robbins of Japanese learning. In other words, he acts like a life coach, he doesn't actually teach you anything (based on my brief browse at least), but he teaches you how to teach yourself by inspiring you and motivating you (and getting you to inspire and motivate yourself).

How correct is my conclusion?

I'm not sure I get that interpretation. OK, some articles are somewhat 'motivationy'. But as a whole? For example, I'm not sure what you mean when you say 'he doesn't actually teach you anything'? Perhaps this interpretation is from reading the more recent posts? To be honest, most of the methodological stuff was written up a few years ago, and hasn't changed much since. If you look at the table of contents and look at the article titles most of them date from a couple of years ago. Might be worth having a browse.

Some of my favorite posts, like this one...

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...just-do-it

might be called 'motivational' in that they are about your attitude towards the process of learning. However, calling them 'motivational' really kind of makes me think of somebody (like Mr Robbins) prancing on a stage asking you to 'be hungry' or tell you to 'think positive', or perhaps somebody simply urging you onwards in some way. Maybe useful in some way, but not containing any real insight. I think posts like the above though are much more than that, in that they are making an argument about what kind of process learning a language is.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Okay, people keep mentioning AJATT so I decided to check the website one more time (I have done so several times in the past).

Unfortunately, my conclusion now is still the same as the past: AJATT is like the Tony Robbins of Japanese learning. In other words, he acts like a life coach, he doesn't actually teach you anything (based on my brief browse at least), but he teaches you how to teach yourself by inspiring you and motivating you (and getting you to inspire and motivate yourself).

How correct is my conclusion?

The website doesn't seem very focused, but jumps around all kinds of topics. If I wanted to learn Japanese Kanji, there are specific books and sites I can go to. If I wanted to learn grammar, same thing. If I wanted to learn something specialised like honorific language or video game terminogy, I know just the places to go.

But this site? I'd call it a jack-of-all-trades except I don't know what exactly it's trading.

The site has a few blog entries called "Learning Japanese = Playing a Video Game". That's great. I like video games, these articles should be useful. So I read it and it sounds like a whole lot of nothing. I don't know what the heck I'm reading. What's that word to describe how one sounds like he's saying a lot of things, when in reality, he doesn't seem to be saying anything? That word is what I mean.

Anyway, good for those it works on, but AJATT is not for me I'm afraid.

Well, it *is* just some guy's blog, so it's gonna be all over the place. Did you look at the table of contents? I think that's where the meat of it is.

I don't agree that he is using a lot of words to say nothing, but generally what he does say could be conveyed in fewer words, to put it kindly. I guess "rambling" is just his writing style. I think that's one of the things that turns most people off of the site - you either find it humorous and enjoy reading, even if you don't agree with all of the content, or it frustrates you to the point where you can't bear reading for very long.

On the overall content of the site, I think most of it is just motivational material(I use "most" in referring to the number of posts pertaining to the subject, not the goal of the site). I don't see how that's a negative at all, though. Any bit of motivation you can get is useful in something as drawn out as learning a language. Some of it could be a real mind-blower if your experience in language learning is limited to bad classes, too.

I don't really understand why AJATT is even famous and keeps getting mentioned. He just says immerse yourself and study a lot (+ a whole lot of waffle), essentially, right? I'm thinking "well, duh".

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...to-fluency

You could probably become fluent in the time it'd take to read all of these

Seriously though, is there anything to be had discussing this again? Louischa's comment was out of line, but the topic has been done to death numerous times already, and the last thing we need on here is another flame war. Go do what you want; no one needs to be converted. After all, as the guy put it himself - a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

eltheoldsoul Wrote:Danchan and Dihutenosa, that's interesting. I found AJATT in Mid 2008, and went for a whole year studying Kanji (while being immersed) and have been doing sentences maybe from 2009. I wouldn't say I am "comfortably fluent". I would have comprehension problems if I were to get into a deep conversation about politics or philosophy. Is there anything special you guys did besides "immersion"?

Just immersion interspersed with some SRSing. The question though is what you mean by 'immersion'. I certainly did more than just play Japanese all the time in the background while doing other things (although I was listening to 10+ hours per day). I actively watched a lot of TV, true, but I also read for several hours every day. I basically had to admit I was being too pretentious, and went back to manga. Over the course of a year I worked through maybe 300+ volumes of manga, and 20-30 books. This year most of my reading has been non-fiction for study purposes (textbooks, 新書, 文庫本, etc.).

By the by, the 10,000 hours listening sounds crazy to some people, but I think this is because they misunderstand the role that number is playing.

Steve Kaufmann (the guy who knows ten odd languages) recommends reading and listening for a minimum of an hour a day, more if possible. Keep it up for a few years and you will get there, there being fluency (being able to communicate comfortably like an adult, to understand and make yourself understood without difficulty, to be literate, etc.). Over three years then, we are looking at at least 1,000 hours.

Why then is Khatz giving you a figure ten times as high? Actually, he is not asking you to focus carefully for 10,000 hours, simply to have Japanese around you, coming in your ears for as much as possible. The reason is to provide a fail-safe way of getting that 1000 hours+ of focused listening that many of us would allow to go by the way side if we attempted to plan it into our day. Of course, the extra listening won't harm you. I doubt Steve would say that you can achieve anything like native-level ability with 1000 hours of listening/reading. Native-like vs. fluent is quite a different kettle of fish. The point is to get you in the habit of always listening to the language you want to be good at, pretty much exactly what Steve also recommends.

dizmox Wrote:a whole lot of waffle

That was the word I was looking for, thank you. The words I'm reading, they sound like a lot of waffling.

Danchan Wrote:Some of my favorite posts, like this one...

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...just-do-it

I'm afraid that's a good example of what's not for me. My aim is to learn Japanese and get into memorising Kanji or grammar or whatever, but as you say, he is "making an argument about what kind of process learning a language is" and elaborating on the, I guess, theoretical background of language learning, which from my point of view, merely digressing from the task at hand. The practical task at hand being, learning and immersing yourself in the language.

If I was to consider AJATT a serious source for Japanese learning, this would be my initial good faith approach:

1) Read Part -1. "Hmm, okay go on."
2) Being reading Part 0 and 1. "Too Tony Robbins-esque life coachy. I'll skip it. Oh, SRS should be useful, thanks for the tip."
3) Part 2. "James Heisig book and offline and/or online flash cards. Got it."
4) Part 3. "I know kana already, boo-yeah. Next."
5) Part 4. "Okay... should be something useful here."
6) The rest of the chapters. "Immerse myself. Buy Japanese entertainment. Learn Japanese culture. Other random stuff. Okay, all done. I'll go back to Part 4 later when I feel like it."

But like I said, if others have gotten more out of AJATT than I have, good for them.

dizmox Wrote:I don't really understand why AJATT is even famous and keeps getting mentioned. He just says immerse yourself and study a lot (+ a whole lot of waffle), essentially, right? I'm thinking "well, duh".

If what he writes about is so much obvious waffle, why is it that so many serious learners of the language do so badly? Is it so hard to believe that many students still do not understand the absolute importance of huge amounts of listening and reading in your target language? Prior to reading AJATT I did not. I studied hard for years and yet barely any of that study was graded reading or listening. All I got was textbooks, textbooks and more textbooks.

Yes, since then I have found several other sites that say similar things, like Steve Kaufmann. It just so happened however, that it was Khatz's site which I found first, which convinced me, and changed my outlook for the better. I think this is the same for many other people, and hence reason for its popularity. I wish I had found it years earlier than I had, because I could have saved myself lots of grief and wasted time. Not everybody is as misinformed and silly as I was, but some are and could benefit from having their ideas challenged. Hence I will continue recommending the site (among others) to people out of a sense of duty.

Danchan Wrote:If what he writes about is so much obvious waffle, why is it that so many serious learners of the language do so badly? Is it so hard to believe that many students still do not understand the absolute importance of huge amounts of listening and reading in your target language?

"Understand(ing) the absolute importance of huge amounts of listening and reading in your target language" AKA immersion, is something I would have thought was common sense.

If people are not immersing themselves in Japanese (eg. reading a manga, watching an anime, listening to a Japanese song, etc), what the heck are they learning Japanese for then?

For fun?

(nothing wrong with learning a language just for fun, but just saying)

Common sense is not that common.