i've just randomly stumbled upon what appears to be his blog:
http://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/

There's plenty of interesting stuff on there...

Ah cool, thanks!

Really useful, thanks!

Do you have any proof it is him? I am pretty sure it is him but I am always amazed at how much writing style can help in identifying an anonymous author. Thanks for sharing it!

Good find, IceCream. :-)
Does anyone know if there's a way to contact the person if there isn't a contact link on the site?

Is Nest0r Christopher Brochtrup? http://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/tools/

If he is you could contact him through cb4960@gmail.com .

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:Is Nest0r Christopher Brochtrup? http://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/tools/

If he is you could contact him through cb4960@gmail.com .

I don't think he is.

lol. If you are in contact with him could you tell him I am a big fan?

Edit: I think it is gr8 you have rikaichan available for free rhino

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:lol. If you are in contact with him could you tell him I am a big fan?

Edit: I think it is gr8 you have rikaichan available for free rhino

I'll pass it along.

HonyakuJoshua Wrote:Is Nest0r Christopher Brochtrup? http://darkjapanese.wordpress.com/tools/

If he is you could contact him through cb4960@gmail.com .

I assume Christopher Brochtrup is cb4960, the creator of subs2srs, rikaisama, and much more. Judging from past forum posts, nest0r and cb4960 are not the same person.

Anyway, thanks for the find IceCream. I read the whole blog this morning. The blog format definitely makes the structure of nest0r's approach to language acquisition clearer and more concise (minus the forum wars too!). Although I appreciate the thoroughness of the blog, I wish nest0r would make a tl;dr version for those who lack the patience or ability to wade through the dense academese. There's a fortune of techniques supported by solid research, and it's a shame that it is inaccessible to a wide audience.

Love this.
Thank you so much IceCream!

TIL that you can't hide on the internet. It's unmistakably nest0r-esque.

[s0apgun]

whoa what the

vileru Wrote:I wish nest0r would make a tl;dr version for those who lack the patience or ability to wade through the dense academese. There's a fortune of techniques supported by solid research, and it's a shame that it is inaccessible to a wide audience.

One of the marks of pseudoscience/research is that it uses dense academese and copious citations of "solid research".

yudantaiteki Wrote:

vileru Wrote:I wish nest0r would make a tl;dr version for those who lack the patience or ability to wade through the dense academese. There's a fortune of techniques supported by solid research, and it's a shame that it is inaccessible to a wide audience.

One of the marks of pseudoscience/research is that it uses dense academese and copious citations of "solid research".

It's also sadly a feature of much real science. Getting scientists to communicate their work clearly to a wider, non-expert audience is difficult. Mostly it relies on a few excellent communicators in any given field, or on semi-expert science journalists. Sadly, language acquisition science is lacking any really good communicators (except perhaps Steven Pinker).

At least nest0r's having a good crack at it. Reading some of the posts, they aren't written in the obtuse language nest0r was famous for here, the style is undoubtedly familiar but I think more accessible and better structured. Where linguistics or other scientific jargon is used, the terms are bolded, which I take as an indication that the reader should look up the meanings. One way to make this more accessible would be with hover-definitions or perhaps a glossary. nest0r if you're reading this, there are wordpress glossary plugins.

I have to say that whilst it's great to have those extensive bibliographies at the end of each post, they mostly aren't referred to or interpreted in the text, meaning the lay person is unlikely to be able to effectively use the list as a jumping-off point into the literature. I would love to see nest0r summarising the research he's linking to in a more friendly format, and in particular citing the particular most relevant papers to any given point in the text, so the reader knows what references to follow up on.

Overall, I'm very glad to see nest0r hasn't disappeared.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

vileru Wrote:I wish nest0r would make a tl;dr version for those who lack the patience or ability to wade through the dense academese. There's a fortune of techniques supported by solid research, and it's a shame that it is inaccessible to a wide audience.

One of the marks of pseudoscience/research is that it uses dense academese and copious citations of "solid research".

Are you hinting that nest0r's approach to language acquisition is pseudoscientific or just making a general statement?

vileru Wrote:Are you hinting that nest0r's approach to language acquisition is pseudoscientific

I stopped debating him on the forum or even responding to his posts because it got too frustrating for me, but a good amount of what he says is not supported by mainstream linguistics or pedagogy -- his impenetrable style and volume of citations made it impossible for me to check everything he said (which is another common pseudoscience feature).

He is before my time, but I have read a few of his posts and like them. I am all for diversity of opinion as long as it's polite and I for one would like to see him back posting here.

It's a much better forum without him.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

vileru Wrote:Are you hinting that nest0r's approach to language acquisition is pseudoscientific

I stopped debating him on the forum or even responding to his posts because it got too frustrating for me, but a good amount of what he says is not supported by mainstream linguistics or pedagogy -- his impenetrable style and volume of citations made it impossible for me to check everything he said (which is another common pseudoscience feature).

I concede that many of nest0r's specific suggestions are questionable (i.e. various Anki card formats, reading tips, etc.). However, are you also skeptical of the foundation of nest0r's approach? In particular, I find it hard to argue against the "Four Strands" and "The Four Principles of Memory Improvement." While I'm not entirely keen on nest0r's specific recommendations for implementing the ideas in those two articles, I do think it is a good idea for language learners to base their study methods on those ideas.

yep, nest0r isn't the kind of person you necessarily want to buy wholesale. (well, nobody is, tbf). It's worth checking his sources, looking for contradictory ones, and generally thinking for yourself when you're interested in any of the ideas.

But nest0r actually says something to that effect too:

Quote:Rather than accept the advice here because of anonymous claims over the Internet, use your own logic, experience, and the empirical data referenced on this site to take what is useful.

Plus, there's tons of other useful things on his blog as well, links and tools and stuff. You can just use it as one other helpful reference. And it's not as loud as his forum persona was, so you can disagree and not get shouted down ;p

'Stumbled upon'...

For a moment I just hoped that you were so clever that you managed to find him through stalking or something and that I could steal some secret stalking advice from you

haha

It's impossible to never leave a trace anywhere

hahah sorry, i'm no master stalker.

... i was actually looking for ways to automatically get pictures pulled from google images into anki for my new produce-from-images-noun-deck for french. Which shows i'm not even good at searching lol cos it's right there in Anki plugins

ydtt, I did spend a lot of time following up on nest0r's language related links and topics (excluding the brain biology stuff - most of which I don't understand.) I have to disagree that it's mostly pseudoscience. I can understand how you could become frustrated with some of the exchanges, though. It would be difficult to respond to.

Your idea of mainstream strikes me as rather narrow. Some of what you consider prevailing views are no longer, yet you almost ridiculed nest0r for suggesting that. Your views on kanji appear to be aligned with a particular group of academics, but you didn't seem to be familiar with the scholarship/criticism found in other approaches. It was sometimes apparent you were outright dismissing some things you didn't have knowledge about. Some perspectives you claimed don't exist in linguistics, do apparently exist.

I wouldn't expect that you (or anyone) would be knowledgeable about each of those topics without further research, btw. But it doesn't seem right to claim it's pseudoscience when you apparently didn't even bother to look into it. Because people know you're doing your PhD, you automatically have a certain credibility.

Some of nest0r's responses were admittedly over the top. A few posts were obviously 'mock outrage' with exaggerations (as pointed out by nest0r) and a few posts I couldn't figure out. But the ones in which nest0r basically strung together a list of terms for people to Google were truly astonishing. nest0r was able to fit a course worth of material into one paragraph! lol

I learned an enormous amount about topics I wouldn't otherwise have taken the time to explore. I discovered that much has evolved since I was in school - increasingly specialized areas as well as interdisciplinary work. I was excited to see some of that research trickling down to teaching. Much of the neurolinguistic stuff was new to me. I learned that some things I had considered uncontroversial have since been challenged. I was introduced to views of some Japanese and Chinese linguists pointing out the inappropriateness of applying certain Western linguistic and pedagogical concepts to Japanese. (reading processing and primacy of speech, for instance.) I realized how influenced I had been by the views of my profs (both in Japan and Canada) without properly situating those views in a broader context. I became fascinated with language acquisition by deaf children and ended up developing a closer connection with my 2 adult cousins who are deaf.

In fact, this reading rekindled a former passion and a desire to return to teaching. If I'm lucky, I'll be making a mid-career transition! scary... (Incidentally, academic jargon and lengthy bibliographies certainly exist in respected papers. (?) You can find serious incomprehensible 300 pg papers about a single particle! ) :-)

I don't share or understand all of nest0r's views, but I felt you were being a bit too dismissive. I think some of what you consider strategic obfuscation might be just nest0r-style. :-) Maybe it'd be worthwhile to go through what you consider to be pseudoscience. I probably missed some things and would be interested to know.

[wow, today is my defend nest0r day...]