How helpful has AJATT been for you?

[devilyoudont]

When a discussion comes down to quibbling about how literally I meant the word "innate" when I've said from the start that no one knows the causes of these differences, I think it's time to move on.

[smallwhite]

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/

Thank you for bothering to provide links rather than choosing to hide them.

[kulaputra]

When a discussion comes down to quibbling about how literally I meant the word "innate" when I've said from the start that no one knows the causes of these differences, I think it's time to move on.

It's not quibbling to point out a contradiction. "We don't know " and "we know that X is innate." The former suggests a (usually healthy) skepticism; the latter, defeatist pessimism.

[kulaputra]

Ok I've actually read the study thoroughly now and as fascinating as it was, it has almost no relevance to the subject at hand, since they tested their participants by specifically picking a language they had never heard before. I'm not really sure what No Hindi None of the Time has to do with All Japanese All the Time so perhaps we should return to OP's original question.

[Querneus]

Being completely unfamiliar with AJATT, I just spent a few hours reading a number (~25) of his open blog entries. I appreciated his surprisingly irreverent style and comments at least...

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 [possible]
- 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 wouldn't say either of those two things seem that important to him though? He doesn't seem to say much about beginners in particular (patience and frustration should be appropriately utilized at any stage), and he recommends input from any native source (regardless if it's widely liked by natives or not).

I'd say his message is more like:
- Languages are not hard to learn with the right approach, although it still takes time to learn one. You can aim high. Much of what is said about why non-European languages are hard is a myth. Such an opinion may even be originally racist sometimes (like his university's history professor who thought kanji was "primitive").
- The right approach is:
* * Massive input, listening a ton even if you don't understand at all (disregard Krashen's i+1 thing), and reading a ton, delaying output until what you say feels natural to say.
* * Use of an SRS, particularly to internalize sentences (ideally sampled from your input) and kanji.
* * It's hard to force yourself to do anything, so change your environment to make it more likely you'll do stuff. Have Japanese books lying everywhere around the house (even the bathroom and car). The most important step of using an SRS is to open the SRS app at all.
- Taking classes is bad, especially because the student 1) is forced to learn too much about grammar (which can be daunting and demotivating, and in his opinion it's largely useless anyway), and 2) receives an education that's not individualized enough.

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.

That's still an open blog entry on his website.

He used pomodoros at one point,

I can't find anything on pomodoros but he does have a series on timeboxing, which is really the same thing without a fancy Italian name.

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.

Although it's true it's called All Japanese "All The Time", the name is actually misleading because Khatzumoto actually advocates adapting to your circumstances and your actual willpower. If you can't do Japanese all day, then do it for half the day. If that's still too much because you can't or because you quickly get tired, then cut it further. Whatever gets you moving and doing better than before (you were probably doing zero) is good.

[Ani]

Being completely unfamiliar with AJATT, I just spent a few hours reading a number (~25) of his open blog entries. I appreciated his surprisingly irreverent style and comments at least...

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 [possible]
- 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 wouldn't say either of those two things seem that important to him though? He doesn't seem to say much about beginners in particular (patience and frustration should be appropriately utilized at any stage), and he recommends input from any native source (regardless if it's widely liked by natives or not).

I'd say his message is more like:
- Languages are not hard to learn with the right approach, although it still takes time to learn one. You can aim high. Much of what is said about why non-European languages are hard is a myth. Such an opinion may even be originally racist sometimes (like his university's history professor who thought kanji was "primitive").
- The right approach is:
* * Massive input, listening a ton even if you don't understand at all (disregard Krashen's i+1 thing), and reading a ton, delaying output until what you say feels natural to say.
* * Use of an SRS, particularly to internalize sentences (ideally sampled from your input) and kanji.
* * It's hard to force yourself to do anything, so change your environment to make it more likely you'll do stuff. Have Japanese books lying everywhere around the house (even the bathroom and car). The most important step of using an SRS is to open the SRS app at all.
- Taking classes is bad, especially because the student 1) is forced to learn too much about grammar (which can be daunting and demotivating, and in his opinion it's largely useless anyway), and 2) receives an education that's not individualized enough.

He used pomodoros at one point,

I can't find anything on pomodoros but he does have a series on timeboxing, which is really the same thing without a fancy Italian name]

Yeah. "Pomodoros" is a dumb name. I don't use that name myself but that's what it's been referred to lately here so I went with it.
I haven't read AJATT in a couple years ago I'm pulling all this from my shakey memory.

I agree with you on the first point -- learning languages isn't hard. The other points I disagree were fundamental to the message. I'm ok with reading something differently out of it than you did:)

The stuff I'm referencing about being a beginner he talked about in terms of "sucking" and how to deal with sucking at the language. He had lots of techniques like pretending it's just your native language but you are really bad at it. "Act like a builder, think like an aristocrat", don't ask people on the internet for advice..
The SRS is definitely one of the most notable parts of his method and he's credited for MCD cards. I see that as a tool. He has posts that say not to do SRS if you hate it and just do stuff you love.
He kind of goes both ways on Krashen, IIRC. He talks about getting i+1 moments out of extensive listening and also about making i+1 content for yourself by listening through carefully and then stripping the audio to fill an immersion iPod or similar.
Changing your environment, for sure. That's what I was getting at I guess with being addicted to native materials. It's not just changing your environment to anything in your TL but specifically loading stuff you'll be addicted to into your space -- room, computer, phone, car, etc so you can just feed your yourself stuff you love all the time. It doesn't work if it's target language but boring.

[kulaputra]

As I see it, i+1 material is more useful then i+100 material, but no piece of media (oral, written, etc.) is gonna be consistently either. Even difficult media will have bits and pieces of i+1 material. And some Japanese is always better then no Japanese.

[aaleks]

I didn't know much about AJATT before this tread was started. Although I remember seeing the abbreviation on the forum. It looks like that I've inadvertently been following some of the principles listed above. Like:

* * Massive input, listening a ton even if you don't understand at all (disregard Krashen's i+1 thing), and reading a ton, delaying output until what you say feels natural to say.

And if I have understood this part right I was doing something like this too

about making i+1 content for yourself by listening through carefully and then stripping the audio to fill an immersion iPod or similar.

But as I said I didn't read that AJATT site, I just coincidentally came to similar conclusions. At the same time I never used any SRS (I'm not sure if I really know what it is), and I never tried, at least consciously, to immerse myself in my TL.

[Sarafina]

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.

I agree that sort of attitude bothers me so much. I find it to be discouraging. It used to make me feel like it doesn't matter if how high of a level my French is, if I have a noticeable foreign accent then it is not valued at all. That's why I had such a massive complex about speaking French because I was projecting my past experiences regarding having a foreign accent. Similarly with your grandma's situation, Nigerian accent does not high prestige status (to be fair very few accents/dialects besides the standard one can claim to have a high prestige status in England). Moreover, as a child when I had a Nigerian accent, my classmates made it very very clear that it was not a desirable accent to have at all. However I wonder if children who immigrate to other countries lose their accent a lot faster because there is a greater pressure and more social consequences if you stand out as 'the foreigner' and this deep desire to fit in. I eventually lost my Nigerian accent so did my siblings but my parents retained theirs. (Although in my case I code switch between a Nigerian accent when speaking to my parents and speaking a British accent when I'm in school).


In comparison, no matter how thick and terrible my accent is French, very few French adults will give me any grief about it as long as I'm understandable. And I don't have a deep desire to fit into French society. I don't care if someone can tell that I was not born or raised in a Francophone country. It would be wonderful to have my French be at such a level that people mistake me to be a native speaker.

But it's up there with my desire to learn how to do a back-flip.

[Sarafina]

I feel like I need reread the site again because it's been a while since I've actually read and I don't know how much of it I'm actually remembering correctly.

I am at a stage in my French where I could feasibly 'AFATT' (although maybe for now a chill version I guess). Before when I tried to do 'AFATT'- my level was too low to enjoy the native French material. I would get incredibly frustrated and demotivated and avoid French for weeks. Now my French comprehension is by no means perfect but I can follow along most of the things I hear. But I still struggle with feelings of discomfort when listening to something that I don't understand 100%. There's just so many good content in English. I am trying to change my mentality not to think it as a huge sacrifice instead I am trying to frame as an opportunity to discover even more awesome content in French.

Even if I'm enjoying watching the TV series in French, but the back of my brain whispers that you do know that it is so dumb forcing ourselves to watch this French when it's so so easily available in English and besides 30 minutes of watching an episode in English wouldn't hurt your French in the long-run and so the cycle continues.

I think my biggest problem is discipline and self-sabotage because I have a lot of good enjoyable French stuff that I can use for immersing. I am getting frustrated with my progress with French. It's my summer holidays and I've already wasted a month not doing that much. I have nothing to lose. I know that I only feel slight discomfort because I've never really established a proper habit with immersing in French for a long period of time and I keep coddling myself.

(I know that to properly do AJATT I need to drop Japanese oh the irony but I want to do something with Japanese. I justify it by saying that it's not like I'm not learning these two languages entirely from scratch)