Thora,

I think the essence of the AJATT is not that everything is crucial and correct, but that on the whole it all has some positive effect. Using any one way, such as pure listening, or reading, or srsing and such is unlikely to get you all the way there. However, we can say with certainty that listening is better than not listening.

You will get used to the sounds and learn intonation and i + 1 sentences will come up. Further more it constantly refreshes what you know. I don't think Katzumoto is saying that listening will get you all the way there, just that it is definitely a very good thing to do for your learning.

(I personally believe that listening to the same thing over and over is particularly effective)

Hinode,

Interesting! I think you are more than likely correct. Found this btw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning. However, here are some thoughts as to how you may not be.

Language is unique from normal knowledge since producing language is primarily an unconscious process. For learning some piece of knowledge we need to consciously acknowledge it, however parts of language learning can occur without any conscious effort. For example whilst in Japan I learnt the mean and became able to use よね without ever consciously understanding it's rules. There are also patterns like しか〜ない that we begin to feel. Since our brain unconsciously figures out stuff like this bit by bit until it can feel it, then maybe we don't need higher brain functions to get a benefit.

Also, whilst language learning may not be possible, I think language retention is more probable and as far as I can tell not tested by Simon and Emmons. Learning something new is more of a conscious process than hearing something you already know and having that memory strengthened. Like how you are more likely to wake up if someone calls your name (my theory, may not be scientifically proven) words you hear while sleeping may be referenced against ones you know and may reinforce them.

In the same way sounds of a language and intonation, may be absorbed on some level.

Plus there are different phases of sleep, so it may be the some are more susceptible to hearing and benefiting from it.

As for me I have been listening to the same episode of a drama over and over while I sleep and often when I am awake. It's hard to know why, but am prone to spouting out lines from it when I am doing my morning routines.

I'll keep doing it for the period during which I fall asleep and wake up regardless, but I think I will settle for hoping that the Japanese I hear during sleep is going in somehow.

I think of AJATT more as a concept rather than a strict method of learning languages. Everybody is different and there's no "single correct way to learning" but there are some things in it that nobody would argue (like time spent learning = results etc.).

Personally I find some of his methods a bit too 'hardcore' and they look like they were created just for show/shock rather than studying efficiency. To name a few:

1. Listening in your sleep - First of all there is no proof you can learn anything so it's not beneficial but I also see the other side of this: not getting enough quality sleep. This leads to fatigue (built over time) that can degrade your learning performance and memory (during sleep brain works hard on recent connections - that is proven).

2. Listening all the time - As admirable as it is I think it causes more harm than good. If you constantly have something in the background during your studies you get distracted (changing songs/podcasts/radio&tv stations) and your concentration is worse (though the amount differs from person to person). So not only you're not training your listening comprehension but you're ruining your study efforts. Listening should be conscious and if not, during activities that don't require your full attention (shower, bus/train ride, cleaning).

I'm very much in agreement with Tobberoth and phauna and others on AJATT. Firstly it is massively impractical and secondly it seems to be so obsessive in its approach. The result of this IMO is that it's probably going to lead to burn out / feelings of guilt for most people who try it and this is likely to result in them doing a quick sprint, rather than the marathon that is required.

Conversely, without AJATT I would never have found Heisig, never have started SRSing, I would still be learning Japanese like a primary school child doing everything in kana and I'd never have found this site. And perhaps, if it were not for his firebrand rhetoric then people would not take him so seriously and his message would not get through. And personally I interpert his philosophy as "Learn kanji, learn grammar and vocabulary through SRSing sentences and do whatever else you can to expose yourself to and use the language." (the last bit is the tough one for me) I think that is very good advice.

On the input vs output argument, it is very important to remeber that khatz was continually doing output; he took notes in Japanese and had a good Japanese friend with whom he often spoke and who pedantically corrected him. I think his point is that it is much easier / more effective to learn grammar / vocab through SRS input than any other way, but you are never going to turn that into active knowledge unless you use what you learn. That makes sense to me as you can read a ton of mathematics books, but it takes a long time to turn that passive knowledge into active knowledge to allow research.

Oh and IMO the hypnopedia / background learning is probably just window dressing and might help a little, although for me I like silence when going to sleep (unless there wasa way of embedding words into the motor of my computer fan).

In conclusion for me AJATT, like many religions, is a great overall idea and a great source of motivation, however I think that it seems to offer so much more, so much faster than the traditional methods, then easy to get radicalised!

Last edited by bandwidthjunkie (2009 August 03, 8:22 am)

coverup wrote:

Tobby,

ぐらい is technically not correct for points in time, but seems to be one of those "native mistakes" that I hear from my friends a lot.  You too?

ゴローーーーー

I agree.  Within the past 2 days, I've received emails from my Japanese friends making this " native mistake".

thermal wrote:

I used to have this problem. I set up my computer to wake from sleep about 2 hours after I go to bed and start playing Japanese stuff. It would wake me, but sometimes I could go to sleep easily. Now I can go to sleep while listening to Japanese so I don't do this, but it could be an option for you.

I suppose that there are ways around it, but I suppose the real question would be, can you quantify how beneficial it has been for you?

Definitely, everyone can make mistakes, and in my experience, people who have relied too much on output early make the same mistakes natives do, just more often... maybe they NEVER use ごろ and always use ぐらい instead, maybe they didn't understand the difference when they learned it so they just kept saying it like that. Same with "who" and "whom" in English, most natives have no idea what the difference actually is and use it incorrectly from time to time, while many foreigners don't even know wtf "whom" is and never use it.

If you learn it and decide to correct it however, you can.

Tobberoth wrote:

Definitely, everyone can make mistakes, and in my experience, people who have relied too much on output early make the same mistakes natives do, just more often... maybe they NEVER use ごろ and always use ぐらい instead, maybe they didn't understand the difference when they learned it so they just kept saying it like that. Same with "who" and "whom" in English, most natives have no idea what the difference actually is and use it incorrectly from time to time, while many foreigners don't even know wtf "whom" is and never use it.

If you learn it and decide to correct it however, you can.

As far as the "whom" thing goes, whether it's correct or not to use "who" in situations where "whom" is technically the correct usage is actually the subject of much debate.  One of my college English professors said that he used to correct people on the issue over and over again years ago, but now he's stopped correcting people because 95% of his students get it incorrect constantly.  If everyone forgets the "correct" usage and starts using a different, "incorrect" structure, is it really incorrect?

Grammar is really just how we talk about a language... The immersion environment is all about the language itself and not the non-existant "grammar". We merely spit back out the patterns that everyone else uses because everyone else recognizes them. If one pattern becomes obselete and a new one takes its place in common usage then this pattern is now correct in practice. Even if it's not correct in theory, it's only that. Not correct, in theory. IMO its only functional use is to serve as a reference guide to language patterns. They aren't the "rules" they are the "This is just what people say when they want to express X... now deal with it".

Hm... I downloaded the QRG that Khatzu has released out of curiousity and I have to say I'm less than impressed.

Not too impressed with Khatzu either, I wrote a comment saying I did not feel it was worth the money (And explained why, politely) and he deleted my comment off the site. However, he sent me an email asking me if I wanted a refund. Interesting. I'm not sure how to interpret the situation.

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

And what about the American "There's two of them?" I suppose that this contraction is so widely used it is now official grammar, in fact I don't think that among speakers of American English one ever hears "There're two of them."

As an American I would still say "there're two of them" is totally natural and said quite often and "there's two of them" would be incorrect grammar. It is said quite a lot but more because we are changing what we are saying mid sentence. It's like we're saying, "there's......................(to self: what? Oh yeah!) two of them." Not that we say it because we think it is natural grammar. But maybe that's just me:)

thistime wrote:

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

And what about the American "There's two of them?" I suppose that this contraction is so widely used it is now official grammar, in fact I don't think that among speakers of American English one ever hears "There're two of them."

As an American I would still say "there're two of them" is totally natural and said quite often and "there's two of them" would be incorrect grammar. It is said quite a lot but more because we are changing what we are saying mid sentence. It's like we're saying, "there's......................(to self: what? Oh yeah!) two of them." Not that we say it because we think it is natural grammar. But maybe that's just me:)

Nah, it's pretty standard, spoken. I use both forms, just depending on mood, and so does everyone I know (Note: live in Virginia), and it's never been about changing what I was trying to say. I've also had some lengthy conversations with some English learners who were trying to understand why we did this, because they kept seeing it on TV etc. The bottom line was "there're" is difficult to say, and we're too lazy to say "there are," though I, personally, actually say "there are" more often than "there're."

There was another, very similar thing like this, but I just completely blanked on it...

I suspect that in addition to 'there're' being pointless phonetically to say instead of 'there are' (although when you write it as 'there're', even though there's very little length difference it adds an informal feel), there's the possibility that 'two' has the idiomatic connotation of 'a pair' or 'a couple' (thus: 'there's two of them' is like saying 'there's a cpl of them'). I can't imagine the ppl who say 'there's two' shifting to 'there is two' unless they're weak at grammar--the informality of contraction and idiom are connected. Perhaps that's why we sometimes say 'the two of them' or 'the two of you', it's also like saying 'the pair of x' or 'the both of x' (although the choice of 'the', a definite article, instead of an indefinite article, is a different matter of adding an accusatory [or simply emphatic] tone)...

Descriptive grammar deserves a flexible but formalized awareness when learning a language, even if it's merely to the extent that you're deconstructing sentences as you learn them from fun materials so that you understand how they're put together. So once you accept that even if grammar is a byproduct of meaning that it exists as it's used (and thus new grammatical forms that are rarely used but still understandable feel 'awkward' and can be defined as 'ungrammatical' for the purposes of study unless you deliberately use them for semantic/aesthetic reasons), it's a matter of determining the best path to structuring your awareness of grammar to best suit your studies. I prefer compartmentalizing it where it's effective (common patterns with little variation, for example) to incorporate it into an 'assembly line' approach that began with using RTK to learn kanji.

There's really no place for inflexible prescriptive grammar though, I feel. With the different approaches to learning, it's just kind of pointless to continue that method. Even for abstract linguistic analysis it's unnecessary.

There's also this: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=42251#p42251 - I feel like the fellow in the pdf points out some other good ways to incorporate descriptive grammar in an objective way for structured learning, although he clearly didn't know about subs2srs for corpora and self-study. ;p

Last edited by nest0r (2009 August 04, 11:18 am)

thistime wrote:

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

And what about the American "There's two of them?" I suppose that this contraction is so widely used it is now official grammar, in fact I don't think that among speakers of American English one ever hears "There're two of them."

As an American I would still say "there're two of them" is totally natural and said quite often and "there's two of them" would be incorrect grammar. It is said quite a lot but more because we are changing what we are saying mid sentence. It's like we're saying, "there's......................(to self: what? Oh yeah!) two of them." Not that we say it because we think it is natural grammar. But maybe that's just me:)

I stand corrected, it's just an observation I've made from watching American TV and Films.