How helpful has AJATT been for you?

[kulaputra]

Comparative advantage is a principle from economics.

Suppose Country X has three "production facilities", each of which, in a week, can produce 6 wines or 5 cheeses. Suppose Country Y also has three production facilities, but they are less productive and can each only make 2 wines OR 4 cheeses. If both countries choose not to trade, they could produce:

Country X: 0/15, 6/10, 12/5, or 18/0 wines/cheeses per week

Country Y: 0/12, 2/8, 4/4, or 6/0 wines/cheeses per week

X has an absolute advantage here. It is better at creating wines and cheeses. But suppose the countries specialized and traded? X will only make wines and Y will only make cheeses. Thus, X makes 18 wines and Y makes 12 cheeses. If they trade 5 wines for 7 cheeses (as an example), X gets 13 wines and 7 cheeses, while Y gets 5 wines and 5 cheeses. Both are more productive then they would have been otherwise.

Comparative advantage is always about what you have to give up to do or make something- this is called opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of having to produce some amount of wine is that you can't produce some amount of cheese, and vice versa. The opportunity cost of listening to highly comprehensible input is that you have to pay attention and generally can't do other things. Highly comprehensible input is also impossible in the early stages. But lower levels of comprehension are generally better then what you would have been doing otherwise (which is either nothing, e.g. when you are in the shower, or listening to L1 material). So even though i+1 input may have an absolute advantage in terms of productivity, listening to i+50 material is still worth doing.

[Cavesa]

I'd like to answer the original question. How helpful has AJATT been for me? Very. Eye opening.

No, I didn't take anything demotivating from it, nor did I destroy my personal life. I approached this amazing resource with open mind and knowing damn well my own limits and how much I need to adapt stuff to my situation. Khatzumoto is awesome and has had great results. That is much more than many language teachers can say, especially the monolingual ones. And more than many "language gurus" can say. I like his style, I think he can be blunt in a fun way without attacking anyone and I value that.

It has been so inspiring to read about all the activities you can do in the target language, about the ways you can squeeze much more practice time out of your day. Truth be told, my most efficient method so far has been watching tv series for several hours a day. Studying stuff IN my target languages. And simply refusing to give that up just because people think it is bad for me.

I do not agree with his opinion on coursebooks, grammarbooks, and similar stuff. i think they can shorten the path a lot. But his approach to basically making his own teaching resources based on his personal needs has enriched me a lot and changed the way I use my classical learning tools.

I am not good at sticking to Anki but Khatzumoto is one of the constant reminders it would be worth it, this is something I need to work on.

His advice on using just input you enjoy has been great too. I need to remind myself more often, my Spanish reading has been stuck for months due to not following this simple rule

It was very refreshing to read a realistic success story with the take home message "yes, you can progress really fast and get to your goals soon but you'll need to put the time into it during those months". No crappy advice on how to get from 0 to "fluency" in like 20 hours of work, no empty bragging without the results, no discouragement about years and years of work no matter what you do. Simply: the more hours you put in daily, the fewer months will the individual steps forward take. This is surprisingly not a widely spread opinion. And it was also refreshing to read that someone else had the same opinion on the classes as me. It helped me with my decision never to waste money on classes again, which I don't regret.

So, AJATT was much more helpful than I had expected. It opened new ways of thinking about language learning to me. And he is a wonderful example that you can actually achieve the impossible, if you are stubborn and hard working enough. Of course he is not to be followed blindly, noone is. But I find his success story and the reasoning behind his methods convincing and inspiring.

[zenmonkey]

I'd like to answer the original question. How helpful has AJATT been for me? Very. Eye opening.

This. I remember reading the AJATT site a long, long time ago (before part of it went to a pay wall??) and finding it very interesting. A lot of that original content became part of my learning strategy and there are now one or two small things I still remember from it. I recommended it a lot, back then.

But overtime the site or I changed and our "fit" was no longer valid. When I checked, a few years back, I was disappointed and frustrated. I found it wordy, confusing and less useful. I couldn't recommend it.

The site continues to evolve, it now has a relatively well structured content page (it is still too wordy for my taste...) but given that part of the blog is protected behind a pay wall (for reading a blog...), personally, I'm no longer interested.

[Cavesa]

I'd like to answer the original question. How helpful has AJATT been for me? Very. Eye opening.

This. I remember reading the AJATT site a long, long time ago (before part of it went to a pay wall??) and finding it very interesting. A lot of that original content became part of my learning strategy and there are now one or two small things I still remember from it. I recommended it a lot, back then.

But overtime the site or I changed and our "fit" was no longer valid. When I checked, a few years back, I was disappointed and frustrated. I found it wordy, confusing and less useful. I couldn't recommend it.

The site continues to evolve, it now has a relatively well structured content page (it is still too wordy for my taste...) but given that part of the blog is protected behind a pay wall (for reading a blog...), personally, I'm no longer interested.

Oh, it has certainly evolved since I last looked. A paywall for a blog is definitely weird. But thinking of it, it is not that weird as many people giving good advice have been logically trying to profit from it. Sure, we would all like to be paid for what started as a great hobby. And I am not against that as long as the quality doesn't go down as the price rises. That's why I dislike Benny the Irish Polyglot.

It is hard to tell as Khatzumoto doesn't give much information on the protected posts. However, the titles suggest there might be good tips in there. Or stuff we all have been discussing around here fore years. Hard to tell.

But it looks like he is gonna publish the posts in 6-18 months for free anyways, I don't think it is a big deal at all. Just some people might even like to support him on patreon and get the early access.

There are many more posts now and I agree they are long (finally someone even more unable to be brief than me! yay!) and that doesn't automatically mean more quality. But that changes nothing about what I have already learnt there. And perhaps the site (which seems to be really under construction now) will end up great.

[zenmonkey]

I'd like to answer the original question. How helpful has AJATT been for me? Very. Eye opening.

This. I remember reading the AJATT site a long, long time ago (before part of it went to a pay wall??) and finding it very interesting. A lot of that original content became part of my learning strategy and there are now one or two small things I still remember from it. I recommended it a lot, back then.

But overtime the site or I changed and our "fit" was no longer valid. When I checked, a few years back, I was disappointed and frustrated. I found it wordy, confusing and less useful. I couldn't recommend it.

The site continues to evolve, it now has a relatively well structured content page (it is still too wordy for my taste...) but given that part of the blog is protected behind a pay wall (for reading a blog...), personally, I'm no longer interested.

Oh, it has certainly evolved since I last looked. A paywall for a blog is definitely weird. But thinking of it, it is not that weird as many people giving good advice have been logically trying to profit from it. Sure, we would all like to be paid for what started as a great hobby. And I am not against that as long as the quality doesn't go down as the price rises. That's why I dislike Benny the Irish Polyglot.

It is hard to tell as Khatzumoto doesn't give much information on the protected posts. However, the titles suggest there might be good tips in there. Or stuff we all have been discussing around here fore years. Hard to tell.

But it looks like he is gonna publish the posts in 6-18 months for free anyways, I don't think it is a big deal at all. Just some people might even like to support him on patreon and get the early access.

There are many more posts now and I agree they are long (finally someone even more unable to be brief than me! yay!) and that doesn't automatically mean more quality. But that changes nothing about what I have already learnt there. And perhaps the site (which seems to be really under construction now) will end up great.

I've got nothing against a paywall - It just significantly reduces my interest to going to a site primarily focusing on a language I am not learning. I've spend a lot of money on language material (and sell some apps) but I find a paywall for a blog just frustrating, since it is mostly talk about learning and not learning material - and I believe that is always hit or miss, for me.

[Axon]

I read a handful of the protected posts. It's an interesting system, even more complicated than a paywall: every time he updates, the password for everything changes and you have to enter it again. I've never seen anything like it.

The new posts aren't anything world-shaking, even though the titles are very attractive. Honestly they're just not very memorable to me. Most of them are shorter than his most famous articles and several are tailored specifically to learning Japanese, which I'm not. One was about how he'd rather dedicate himself to learning Japanese as well as he can instead of learning other languages. Another was about how you should skip around in non-fiction books instead of reading them cover to cover.

That said, AJATT really did have a big impact on me. I'd been very interested in language learning for a while even before I read it. What I liked was mostly the attitude of being okay with "feeling" your way into a language instead of putting pressure on yourself to be correct. Plus, his thoughts about the required time on-task really rang true with me.

[garyb]

I enjoyed reading articles on it back in the day and sometimes come back to the classics. It was something different from the standard language learning blogs, and interesting to read the thoughts of someone with an impressive result. I could never go as extreme as he did, but plenty elements can be applied to part-time study. He did a lot to popularise the "semi-immersion" idea that most of us try to apply, even if it's hardly groundbreaking. I can't comment on any of the paid material or his current business practices.

[RedInkstone]

I’m curious, did anyone of you adapt AJATT to use it for another language and if so, how?
The “learn all the Kanji before studying the language” approach is pretty unique to Japanese and I cannot really fathom how that aspect would translate into studying other languages.

And did anyone of you use the method for a language after already having acquired a solid basic foundation through more traditional approaches?

[eido]

I’m curious, did anyone of you adapt AJATT...

And did anyone of you use the method for a language after already having acquired a solid basic foundation through more traditional approaches?

I’d like to know this as well. I’m curious especially for Spanish, which is easy for me as an English speaker, and Korean, which is harder, and doesn’t rely strictly on Chinese characters for the written word.

[zenmonkey]

I’m curious, did anyone of you adapt AJATT to use it for another language and if so, how?
The “learn all the Kanji before studying the language” approach is pretty unique to Japanese and I cannot really fathom how that aspect would translate into studying other languages.

And did anyone of you use the method for a language after already having acquired a solid basic foundation through more traditional approaches?

My take home lessons (for parts of German) were
-- massive listening
-- creating an immersive space
-- Anki and Memosyne everything (massive SRS period)
-- all input (news to books) in German
-- not translating sentences. Understand them instead (ASSIMIL)
-- fail fast and cheap (delete cards, drop languages, move on...)
-- show up

What I didn't do effectively
-- stick to it for 18 months (me: 6+)
-- 10 000 sentences (gah)
-- critical frequency (I should try this...)

A lot of his stuff isn't unique, but back when I was reading him (oh, soooo many years ago) his energy, conviction and single purpose to help out were massively helpful.

And in those billion and billions of words that I no longer spend so much time searching out because I'd rather be studying there are still some gems...

0. Zeroth Law: Compare yourself only to yourself. And to newborn babies.

1. The Prime Directive: Have fun.

2. The Promise: Show up.

3. The Triple Path:

Don’t learn: get used to.
Don’t improve: suck less.
Don’t binge: nibble often.