Postby gsbod » Sun Jul 01, 2018 2:22 pm
In all honesty, I think I would have made better, more satisfying progress had I never encountered AJATT at the time that I did. This was around 2008-2010 and I'm sure a lot of content has been added/changed on his site since then. Also everything is down to interpretation and maybe I just took the wrong lessons from what I was reading at the time. Japanese was the first language I ever attempted to learn, from scratch, as an adult, so I spent a lot of time looking for solutions and a few dead ends are going to be inevitable when you don't know what you are doing yet. In any case, I can summarise some of my issues as follows:
I became distrustful of and impatient with my coursebooks - because of the message that coursebooks are a waste of time, they don't teach you what you need to know, and nobody speaks Japanese like they do in the coursebooks. I now know that there is nothing I like better than starting a language with a decent, well-structured coursebook, because I need to build a decent foundation early on and, when it comes to grammar, I don't like learning inductively (this is why Assimil doesn't really do it for me either). Also, as a professional adult, I have found that the kind of Japanese used in the better coursebooks is perfectly suited to how people like me speak.
I wasted a lot of time listening to stuff I didn't understand - now I think the one useful take away from AJATT is that if you want to be able to listen to and read authentic materials, then at some point you will need to start listening to and reading authentic materials (and maybe AJATT was more inspiring for those who had already completed one of those aforementioned "boring" coursebooks, for that reason). However, you still need to be able to understand enough of what you are listening to/reading to start to fill in the gaps, at which point you will progress in leaps and bounds. Otherwise time is better spent going back to "boring" coursebooks (or in my case, the library of JapanesePod101 dialogues).
I wasted a lot of time trying and failing with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji - not least because it was presented, at the time, as the only alternative to having to mindlessly write out characters hundreds of times. What worked for me was a conbination of Basic Kanji Book (which I actually found recommended on HTLAL) and Anki, particularly when I started sticking to it rather than distracting myself trying to "learn ALL the kanji!" with Heisig. It turned out, that once I had done enough work with Basic Kanji Book etc, it was easy enough for me to learn to recognise new vocabulary together with new kanji, especially with regular review in Anki. My handwriting still sucked, but it's neither a skill I particularly needed or was particularly essential in learning Japanese as a whole.
I wasted a lot of time on sentence cards - goodness knows how many hours I spent lovingly crafting the things. A good chunk of my study time was more like data entry time. Not to mention the time reviewing, with the expectation I'd have to review the things in perpetuity. There was a whole lot of Anki abuse in my life at the time. Which would have been fine had the impact justified the effort. It simply didn't. Flashcards work best for me when I focus on words and phrases, and I run them both L2 > L1 and L1 > L2, with L1 > L2 being most important (going against the no translation ethos on AJATT). I also find that it is better to think about the life of an Anki deck in terms of a few months rather than years (or even a lifetime). If a word hasn't stuck after being in your SRS for 6 months (or maybe even less) then you simply don't need it (yet). I know since then AJATT has taken up this idea of using cloze deletion cards instead, but I'd rather buy a book full of drills and save time on the data entry.
I developed unrealistic expectations - because the guy from AJATT became "native-like" in 18 months, when this didn't happen to me it was very demotivating. Nowadays I think 4-5 years to reach C levels is perfectly respectable, with the added bonus that a language can become useful long before you hit the C levels anyway. And who cares if I can "pass for native"? Take one look at me, I'm obviously not Japanese, and in any case my Englishness is an integral part of my identity. As long as it doesn't impede communication, it is not a problem.
There is some good advice on the AJATT site, but it's surrounded by so much bad advice, that when you don't know what you are doing it is hard to sort out the treasure from the rubbish. In a way there's a similar risk for language forums like this, but on the whole I found a lot more of use on HTLAL and the forums on the JapanesePod101 site than I did on AJATT - because there is no one true way when it comes to learning languages, and on a forum you get to see a wider range of approaches and experiences.
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