raseru:

If you want some good sentences to be able to throw into your SRS immediately without doing much work, go ahead and pick up the Hiragana Times (if you don't have a Japanese bookstore near you, then you can find it on a few sites that will send it to you cheap).

In this magazine they usually have a couple of pages of articles where they will give English paragraph and then the Japanese paragraph. However, on a few pages they will have the Japanese sentences translated word for word underneath each Japanese word. Using this, you can put sentences into your SRS without much thought at all!

It should provide a good foundation of sentences.

Good luck!

Ryuujin27 wrote:

So, the "unnatural" use of kanji would pretty much show that it is, in fact, him writing it.

He just uses kanji far more often than a native would, making it "unnatural" but not wrong.

Just because that AJATT guy "wrote" a few small articles in Japanese doesn't mean that he is fluent.  For all we know, maybe it took him a week to write each one and he might have received a lot of help from a friend.

I find it a bit comical that he claims to have had studied (or at least did something with) Japanese for 18-24 hours a day while pursuing a degree in computer science.  For someone not living in Japan, but instead Utah, this scenario is pretty much physically impossible.  Computer science is very time-consuming in itself, and has a very heavy workload involving high-level math homework and coding peojects.  At the very least, I think all this activity would be mentally unhealthy and would probably be more likely to lead to a nervous breakdown than fluency, especially after 18 months.

Having said that, he still seems to be a decent motivational writer!  I just don't take what he says as gospel.

Last edited by Dragg (2008 April 02, 4:24 pm)

Btw, did you guys ever see the Sentence Starter Pack 1 (there is no 2) on the AJATT site?  He writes "I made a point of making this list small and most of it is based on the Goo dictionary entries, so there shouldn't be any mistakes.  If there are, please flame me with nasty correctional comments and/or e-mails"

Well, there are only ten "sentences", most of which are actually sentence fragments that even a developmentally-challenged Japanese preschooler wouldn't screw up such as "Baka na yatsu", "Baka ga, omae wa" and "be-da". 

Why would someone who is supposedly fluent enough to read technical journals in Japanese need to consult a dictionary for help with such pitiful sentences?  And shouldn't he be confident enough to not even consider that he might have made any mistakes warranting a flaming response?  For someone who claims to "own" the Japanese language, he seems a little insecure about using it and rarely does seem to actually use Japanese on his site devoted to Japanese.

Last edited by Dragg (2008 April 02, 6:26 pm)

Dragg wrote:

Btw, did you guys ever see the Sentence Starter Pack 1 (there is no 2) on the AJATT site?

Now, I don't want to be that guy, and while I think he has a lot of good ideas, I certainly don't take everything Khatzumoto says as gospel, but you're just plain wrong there.  He's released 5 sentence packs so far.  I must say, you seem oddly angry about the whole thing.  It's good to have passion, but why not devote it towards something other than decrying some blogger?  I mean, even if he were a fraud, so what?  C'est la vie, and all that jazz.

As for why he put that disclaimer about the sentences, who knows?  Maybe he just wanted to sound humble.  Maybe he's really a fat, 49 year old white guy in Michigan who's pranking us all.  Does it really matter?

Dragg wrote:

Just because that AJATT guy "wrote" a few small articles in Japanese doesn't mean that he is fluent.  For all we know, maybe it took him a week to write each one and he might have received a lot of help from a friend.

I find it a bit comical that he claims to have had studied (or at least did something with) Japanese for 18-24 hours a day while pursuing a degree in computer science.  For someone not living in Japan, but instead Utah, this scenario is pretty much physically impossible.  Computer science is very time-consuming in itself, and has a very heavy workload involving high-level math homework and coding peojects.  At the very least, I think all this activity would be mentally unhealthy and would probably be more likely to lead to a nervous breakdown than fluency, especially after 18 months.

Having said that, he still seems to be a decent motivational writer!  I just don't take what he says as gospel.

Those sentence packs were from the early days of the website, before he really found his voice.  His posts back then had a different feel to them. 

I don't need to defend him, but I will say that your post makes you sound jealous.  18-24 hours probably includes just listening to background noise.  He's not selling anything or forcing you to click on banners.  He's just offering the experiences he had while learning the language.  The most important thing is to just focus on what works best for you.

Maybe his entire site is a scam to sell kanji posters!

"I don't need to defend him, but I will say that your post makes you sound jealous.  18-24 hours probably includes just listening to background noise.  He's not selling anything or forcing you to click on banners.  He's just offering the experiences he had while learning the language.  The most important thing is to just focus on what works best for you."

I'm not attacking him.  I'm just criticizing him and calling him a liar.  There is no way that he listens to background noise while he is in class, in the shower, spending time with his "signifigant other", or sleeping.  It is physically unlikely and almost mathematically impossible.  I think his site is good and could be an even greater source.  Its just kinda funny and absurd....

rich_f wrote:

Well, until they can just jack my brain into a computer and I can do a quick Japanese Language download, I'm going to keep going the immersion route, or whatever you want to call it. He didn't invent it, but he does have some good ideas. I totally agree with his input over output take.

And the antimoon.com guys have some good ideas, too.

You know, the tech to do that will probably actually be available within the next 50 years or so.  Unfortunately, even the most liberal timeframes put its commercial availability at right after I actually manage to attain near-native fluency in Japanese.  Just watch.

Ryuujin27 wrote:

Right, I know that. That's why I said "unnatural." Did I ever say wrong?

No, I just wanted to clarify for those who might not know.

Let me explain my primary reason for being skeptical of the AJATT system.  The Khatzu guy is basically implying that you should expose yourself to as much Japanese as possible.  But according to other systems, such as Pimsleur, overexposure can actually be counterproductive.  For example, Pimsleur states that you should only do one lesson of their audio series at a time.  They say you can repeat the same lesson over and over again.  Do you see the difference in philosophy?  One is all about moderation, and the other is all about extremes.  I'm not sure which is right, but I would like to know.  The reason that I am criticizing the AJATT is because the dude is trying to convince you that his way is right under the pretense of his own success.  That is why I think I have to call him out if I think he is lying.  But I am open to to the possibility that what he is saying actually works, even if I don't actually believe that he has followed his own advice.  I am curious about hearing more from anyone who has tried both AJATT and
JIM (Japanese In Moderation) about which works better.  I think they both probably work, but which works better?  Please don't give cop-out answers like "just find out what works best for you" because I really don't think the answer is as obvious as that.

Dragg wrote:

I am curious about hearing more from anyone who has tried both AJATT and
JIM (Japanese In Moderation) about which works better.  I think they both probably work, but which works better?  Please don't give cop-out answers like "just find out what works best for you" because I really don't think the answer is as obvious as that.

I hope you don't think it's a cop-out, but the absolute best amount of study when it comes to language is as much as you can do consistently.  That is, more is always better unless you do so much that you "burn out".  Taking weeks off of a language at a time is one of the worst things you can do.  Of course, that's for active study.  If you can stand to leave Japanese running in the background all the time, I see no harm in that.

uberstuber wrote:

Dragg wrote:

For example, Pimsleur states that you should only do one lesson of their audio series at a time.  They say you can repeat the same lesson over and over again.

Pimsleur lessons=/=real Japanese.
Pimsleur lessons are an active recall process; this is completely different from a passive listening situation. Pimsleur limits you to one lesson a day so you aren't overwhelmed by new information, and so the spacing between having to recall a specific word works out nicely. This can be seen in the AJATT method's use of an SRS; if you put every single new sentence you heard in a day into your SRS, you'd never learn anything, and if you did all of your srs reviews too early, you'd never move anything to long term memory.


Listening to audio also serves purposes other than learning new vocabulary/phrases.
In any case, there is almost no way that listening to 'too much' Japanese will damage your path to fluency.

I think you are correct in your distinction between active and passive learning.  I agree that listening to a lot of Japanese is probably not a bad thing, but I do wonder how useful or necessary it is.  Unless one is very advanced, I doubt he/she would get too much benefit out of listening to background Japanese noise for more than a couple hours a day. I would describe myself as a somewhat low-end intermediate Japanese-learner, and I could probably pass JLPT 3 but not 2.  I can honestly say that passively listening to Japanese radio or movies, at least at this point, is almost totally useless without context or chance for word-lookup or interactivity.  Therefore, I am mainly interested in active learning.  On a different thread, somebody commented (without source) that the human mind can only process about 5 hours of material in one day.  Has anybody here actually attempted to learn Japanese, actively or passively, for ten hours or more in a single day on a regular basis?  I'm pretty sure that a "sweet spot" exists for an optimal amount of learning time per day, and I doubt it is anything remotely near 18 to 24 hours a day.

Last edited by Dragg (2008 April 03, 12:12 am)