How helpful has AJATT been for you?

[Sarafina]

I came across the AJATT site a couple of years ago. I tried to implement it but I lasted for a week and never went back to it. I've always been interested in the method but it was a little extreme for me. Although there are certain AJATTers who put me off and make it somewhat like a cult. I can't deny how good Khatzumoto and MattvsJapan's Japanese are. My Japanese language exchange partners have remarked on how native-like they sound. I want to reach a similar level with my French and (to a lesser extent ironically with my Japanese). I consume French native materials but not as much as I should.

I've been wanting to implement the core principles of AJATT mainly for my French for some time. But I struggle to be put myself in a near-total immersion for longer than 3-7 days.

Any advice on how to implement this without being burnt out and staying consistent would be much appreciated.

These links help to explain what AJATT is.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/bl ... o-fluency/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikm_gL7 ... T2fNbYPHXm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSWabaj ... Xm&index=8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df24NIP ... T2fNbYPHXm

[devilyoudont]

The actual AJATT site is so poorly organized I haven't actually gone through it. But I'm broadly aware of what the method is.

I personally feel that their method is impractical. Most people can't create that depth of an immersive environment because of realities of their personal lives. Khatzumoto quite literally was able to immerse himself in Japanese for about 18 hours a day. I personally need to maintain relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and that basically makes that a total impossibility.

Assuming you can implement this method, I see a lot of people reporting burnout. I personally tried to do a mere 6 hours of constant Japanese listening per day, succeeded for like two months, and then burned out so long that I listened to ZERO Japanese podcasts for about a year. I made really concrete gains in those two months, and lost basically all of them when I burned out. When you are saying you struggle to keep it up for more than a week, I am hearing that you are burning out.

I also feel that a lot of people who have really good accents are just kind of mean to people for no reason at all. As far as I'm aware, there are some people who have a much higher innate ability for mimicking voices than other people do, and I am unaware that anyone knows the reason for this. For me personally, when I speak to anyone for a long time, my speech unconsciously drifts towards their accent. My stepmother natively speaks a low-prestige dialect of Caribbean English, but has lived fully immersed in a high prestige accent for close to thirty years, has spent countless hours on accent reduction training, and watches media basically exclusively in her target dialect. Her accent reduction is probably close to 95%, but she still has a detectable Caribbean accent 100% of the time despite her efforts, and despite being a native speaker. Also I have met people who speak English as a second language who speak very proficiently, have really integrated into American society but lack perfect accents. I feel like I've seen MattvsJapan just tear people up over accents before, and it's seriously an uncool thing to do, and having a understandable but clearly foreign accent doesn't actually mean that someone isn't proficient in a language.

[Ani]

I would say AJATT has been enormously helpful to me for several reasons. First being that it was the first thing I found that made me believe I could learn a foreign language. I can't over emphasize what a huge motivation the site was for me. This was before it was locked. I used to open posts to leave on my phone for the morning so when I unlocked my phone for the day they would be the first thing I saw. Pretty sure I read 100% of everything posted there.
How much I learned after applying the method is different. I have demands on my time potentially 24h/day so I don't even have an hour a day I can guarantee won't be interrupted. I've done what I've done, and what I haven't I haven't. I can't give AJATT credit for the successes or the failures, but I often try to get as much reading and listening as possible. And consider those ideas part of my base beliefs.

A lot of people who are critical really never read the site. Katz said tons of different things over time. He even had a theory one time that you needed 2 minutes of immersion per hour or something like that. He used pomodoros at one point, he admitted that much of his success was not just because of media infiltrating his brain but that he couldn't stand not to understand something so he looked up and researched everything. That's basically the same as building your own course, right?
I think his real messages were two:
-Have patience through the beginner stages, but use your frustrations to push you past it as fast as
- Be addicted to stuff natives like.

How can you really argue with that? The rest of it is useful but those were just his tools.

I also feel that a lot of people who have really good accents are just kind of mean to people for no reason at all. .

This is kind of a bizarre generalization.

[devilyoudont]

This is kind of a bizarre generalization.

I was trying to be diplomatic, and I hoped the rest of that paragraph clarified what I was talking about in generalized terms. I guess it didn't.

There are people online who talk themselves up constantly and put other people down in order to enhance their own brand.

Matt and Khatzumoto are teaching their method as a business. Maybe not their day job, but still a business. Matt's business is thru Patreon. Khatzumoto ran a program called silverspoon that cost several thousand dollars and was non-refundable for over six hundred days after purchase.

Matt specifically attacks other people who are attempting to monetize being a Japanese-Guru and even other Japanese learners. I guess one time it was justified, but there are other times where it's clearly not. He typically uses his accent as a way to do this, saying, "Ask a native speaker how good my accent is. This is how you know you can trust me." I even saw that he attacked Dogen saying, "there's no way for anyone to know how good his Japanese is, because he does scripted comedy sketches" (I guess Dogen's accent is too good, and so he can't be attacked on those grounds)

If you got value out of some of their contributions more power to you. I think it's a great idea to use the language to have fun, use native media, and use SRS flashcards. However, those things are hardly unique to them, and I do think people should be aware that they just aren't nice people (either by scamming you out of thousands of dollars, or by literally attacking other learners) as well as how impractical it is, how high the burn out rate is, etc. If it gave you motivation, that's great.

[Speakeasy]

Knowing absolutely nothing about AJATT, out of simple curiosity, I typed this acronym into the "Search" function of this forum and was rather surprised by one of the results ...

AJATT.PNG

[Lawyer&Mom]

Having all the time in the world and seeking absolute perfection both belong to the young. Which is to say I wish I had read AJATT in college, but I don’t have much use for it now.

Okay, I am following an immersion approach influenced in part by AJATT, but for me immersion means like maybe an hour a day. Which is a lot considering how much free time I have. But not nearly as much as I could if I were willing to forgo my English based pleasures. Which I am not.

[NoManches]

I remember reading AJATT a long time ago. I really like the idea of just immersing yourself in your L2 at every possible moment throughout the day. I never paid much attention to the suggested 10,000 sentences via SRS. I think early on SRS is good but after a while it is good to ditch it for "real life SRS"


I found AJATT to be very motivating and often times I try to do ASATT (all Spanish all the time), although it is harder now that I have a demanding job and other obligations in life.

So has AJATT been helpful to me? Yes. First off, it has been very motivating (although I should point out that I was never a huge follower of AJATT. I simply read a bunch of posts on that site, got super motivated, and made a better effort to do EVERYTHING in my L2). I think everyone could benefit from squeezing more input into their days. There are so many times in the day when we pass 5 or 10 minutes doing something with no L2 input. After a while those 5-10 minute windows start to add up.


Just thinking about AJATT makes me want to create a mini immersion experience (again) in Spanish. It's something I really enjoy doing and after I always feel like my Spanish is stronger.

[kulaputra]

OP: I personally feel AJATT is amazing, and it has helped me tremendously, but you need to be careful to actually follow it (rather then some simulacrum of it you've constructed in your head).

I personally feel that their method is impractical. Most people can't create that depth of an immersive environment because of realities of their personal lives. Khatzumoto quite literally was able to immerse himself in Japanese for about 18 hours a day. I personally need to maintain relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and that basically makes that a total impossibility.

Khatz did all of those things.

Assuming you can implement this method, I see a lot of people reporting burnout. I personally tried to do a mere 6 hours of constant Japanese listening per day, succeeded for like two months, and then burned out so long that I listened to ZERO Japanese podcasts for about a year. I made really concrete gains in those two months, and lost basically all of them when I burned out. When you are saying you struggle to keep it up for more than a week, I am hearing that you are burning out.

AJATT doesn't literally have to be every minute of your day. It just has to be more minutes then zero, and more minutes then it would it be otherwise. 2 is bigger then 1. 1 is bigger then 0. Khatz has posts about this; I'm pretty sure he has a whole series on burnout.

Also, if you were enjoying the material you listened to, it's not clear why you burned it. If you weren't enjoying at least most of it (if not all of it), it's not clear you were actually doing AJATT.

I also feel that a lot of people who have really good accents are just kind of mean to people for no reason at all.

The world is full of linguistic bullies, unfortunately. But what's that got to do with AJATT?

As far as I'm aware, there are some people who have a much higher innate ability for mimicking voices than other people do, and I am unaware that anyone knows the reason for this.

I'm not aware of any such thing. Would you mind awareing me?

For me personally, when I speak to anyone for a long time, my speech unconsciously drifts towards their accent. My stepmother natively speaks a low-prestige dialect of Caribbean English, but has lived fully immersed in a high prestige accent for close to thirty years, has spent countless hours on accent reduction training, and watches media basically exclusively in her target dialect. Her accent reduction is probably close to 95%, but she still has a detectable Caribbean accent 100% of the time despite her efforts, and despite being a native speaker.

Caribbean English is a perfectly valid English dialect and personally I find it very pleasing to the ear. I'm sorry your stepmother had that experience; it is an experience she shares with hundreds of millions of not billions of other people who are bullied for just speaking their own languages. I'm still not sure what's this got to do with AJATT though.

[devilyoudont]

I've said my piece about AJATT and MattVsJapan.

I'm not aware of any such thing. Would you mind awareing me?

There are many studies on this issue. The study linked below is researching correlations between brain structure and speech imitation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3804907/

In the introduction, the authors summarize the state of the field as well as others investigating brain structures and speech imitation.

Although the origins of differences in imitation ability—whether neurobiological, genetic, psycho-cognitive, social or environmental are still unknown, recent neuroscientific research has suggested brain structural and functional differences as a partial explanation (e.g., Golestani et al., 2007; Golestani and Pallier, 2007; Reiterer et al., 2011). Anatomical predispositions in the brain have been proposed to explain why some individuals have better speech sound imitation or auditory discrimination skills

In other words, why some people can more easily acquire a natural accent in a foreign language than others is currently unknown to science.

[kulaputra]

But that's not the claim that was made, which is that such differences are innate. If the differences are not purely biological then they are not innate. The article just makes the trivially obvious point that not everyone does mimic as well as others; it is agnostic towards the question of whether people could mimic as well as anyone else.