Zgarbas wrote:

Was never a fan of reading that much about studying, but I really liked his Japanese RTK deck, for the record. I also downloaded his anki sentence deck, but it was pretty weird. Didn't pursue it, but I think the only reason the J-J worked was because it was really low-level.

I understand where a lot of you are coming from with the JLevelUp. I like his mods for RTK, I've integrated it with the "Lazy Kanji Mod V2" deck with satisfactory results. But beyond that. I really don't know what to think of his ways. Plus the website is a nonsensical pain to navigate.

JimmySeal wrote:

uisukii wrote:

From a language point of view, those three roles are superior to a lawyer in terms of creative vernacular, syntax and grammatical manipulation.

That's exactly yowamushi's point.  Why is the bar exam a higher level than becoming a rapper?

I completely misread that earlier. It does seem weird. I just went through and read the "level" descriptions, and did the "level test" and well, it's a little odd. Initially sites such as JapaneseLevelUp and AJATT where my primary sources of motivation and which introduced both Anki and RtK to me, though reading through a lot of the material now, having a far greater understanding of the Japanese language, a lot of it seems, well... silly. And pretentious.

Odd.

There were both positive and negative comments. You'd have to be more specific about which comments you found objectionable and why.  Trying to silence any negative comments by labeling it  "bashing" isn't very reasonable.

The language used on the last page shouldn't be necessary when they've done more for the Japanese learning community with their left pinky than anyone in this thread in their entire accumulative life.

I'm afraid I don't see the relevance. Contributing to the online Japanese learning community doesn't make all of contributions immune from criticism. Tae Kim seems to be used by many people, but that shouldn't prevent people from pointing out any dodgy content.

We can respect people and admire their contributions while at the same time disagree with certain opinions or be critical of certain actions.  We don't allow aid workers to hand out bad medicine just because they've devoted their lives to helping disadvantaged people. We don't have to love every work by our favourite authors or songwriters.

If a person can explain why they disagree with certain content, that benefits the community. It might even spark an interesting discussion and generate better quality information for a blogger to use. The person commenting doesn't need to have an blog, book or youtube following in order to share their opinions or information.

Besides, if someone sets themselves up as a language learning consultant, they should expect to have their advice and content reviewed.  Especially if they're trying to sell stuff.   (But we've had this discussion, so there's no need to repeat it.)

btw, were to attempting to insult people in this thread using a childhood expression?  (Reminded me of a similar one: "My dad could beat your dad with his left hand tied behind his back. So there!") haha

I personally like reading Japanese level up and I think it's got a lot of good tips and ideas and the general ethos of his website is good. I really liked his idea of switching to J-J as early as possible, although perhaps 1000 sentences is a little detrimental as during that stage its almost certainly more efficient to just use J-E. However I agree with Arupan above in that his Japanese level guide is quite terrible and entirely subjective.
For example almost all of my tutors at university spoke English as a second language and a good potion of them I would consider only borderline fluent and vastly far away from being at the native level. Some of the best only impacted my learning very slightly when I either couldn't understand the odd sentence from their accent or strange sentence structure. But the worst made me switch off their module immediately, as I couldn't understand the majority of what they were saying.

The ones for the later levels annoy me more, but I feel I'm arguing semantics here so you may wish to ignore the rest of this post.

In Mastery which apparently is above a Native speaker:
- Can teach a University Course
As I said before most of my tutors spoke pretty bad English by native standards.

- Can get into Japanese politics
Politicians may be good at public speaking, but surely that's a separate skill set to just language mastery?

In Legendary, which is apparently far above a Native speaker:
- Can pass the Japanese Bar exam and become a Japanese National Lawyer, and probably write new laws
Again surely this is just a different skill set? Just because someone has studied Law rather than another degree that doesn't necessarily make them far better than a native speaker does it?

- Can enter any deep technical profession (physicist, neuro-surgeon, microbiologist)
I can enter a deep technical profession on climate research and many topics related to Mathematics, but again that's only because I've studied it extensively; it's different skill sets again. I fail to see how this sets me apart from others in terms of language mastery.

In my opinion my mother has a better standard of English than myself because she reads a lot and knows a lot more words than me; however according to this guide she would be placed in the Native section while I would get Legendary status.

Edit: Just to add the earlier levels annoy me also. I know at least 3000 sentences, so according to his level guide I'm apparently in the 30's or proficient. Apparently this means I should be able to read manga and most young novels as well and be able to have difficult conversations on wide topics. I can do neither of these things, since I haven't practised production much at all I can barely talk about intermediate level topics.

Last edited by Kewickviper (2012 December 30, 8:21 am)

You bumped this to reply to a year old post?

Nope. Topic closed.