Khatzumoto and AJATT are back, but as a private Patreon

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emk
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Khatzumoto and AJATT are back, but as a private Patreon

Postby emk » Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:50 pm

Way back around 2007(?), Khatzumoto became relatively famous in Internet language-learning circles for massively improving his Japanese over a period of 18 months. If I recall correctly, he started out with some basic knowledge from a class, but not much. 18 months later, he went to Japanese job fair and managed to get hired by a Japanese electronics company after interviewing in Japanese.

He called his method "All Japanese All the Time". Basically, he sold or gave away all of his English books, music and other media, and replaced it with Japanese media he didn't understand. He tried to spend as much time "immersed" in Japanese as possible, sometimes to ridiculous extents—if he went to watch a movie in English with friends, he might have a headphone in his other ear, playing Japanese dialog to a different movie. He also made heavy use of SRS, promoting something called the 10,000 sentences method. After watching a lot of people try the 10,000 sentences method, he eventually replaced it with a form of cloze card called MCDs, which were easier but which produced better active skills.

Khatzumoto admitted that he was basically just elaborating on language-learning theories from the linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen and from Antimoon.

If you don't mind getting spammed with language-learning tips for the next 10 years, you can get access to Khatzumoto's Nutshell page here, which will provide you a one-page description of his current method, linking to his best posts. But if you'd just like a sampler, here are a few of his posts:

Over the years, he tried to turn AJATT into a business. He sold Japanese sentence packs, and his MCD kit (which was a ~$45 collection of advice on using SRS software—very expensive but it influenced my thinking about how to improve substudy). He also sold a service where he would send you a bunch of media links several times a day to encourage immersion (the French version was awful, with boring media), and a really expensive course called Silver Spoon/Neutrino. This cost about $2700, and it guaranteed "fluency" in a year or two, or your money back. Back on HTLAL, rapp actually bought Neutrino and he liked it. He also posted a Neutrino log, which I found quite interesting. Khatzumoto also wrote Surusu, an ugly, web-based alternative to Anki, which nonetheless has a couple of brilliantly innovative ideas (if you can figure them out), plus excellent tools for mass-producing MCD-style cloze cards, and a really giant "Delete" button, which is probably the most important advice you can give to SRS users. Delete your painful and boring cards! Surusu's not easy to use, but I personally feel like it contains the seeds of a much better product than Duolingo, etc., if you squint at it correctly.

Eventually, there was something of a scandal, where Khatzumoto stopped responding to emails, and he took a long time to follow through with several people's promised Neutrino refunds. (I may have forgotten important details here, so don't quote me on this.) Shortly thereafter, he stopped updating the AJATT blog, and disappeared for several years. (Apparently he was mostly working as a translator?)

Recently, however, he has resumed blogging. However, all of his new posts are "protected", and only available to his Patreon subscribers (starting at $1/month). There's a clunky system where each post has a different password, and you get the passwords from his Patreon feed. He's averaging a post every 5 days recently, and he's been consistent since early summer. His new posts are… OK. Nothing as brilliant as his "Best Of" posts, but to be fair, those were the highlights of almost 10 years of steady blogging. And even his best new posts are somewhat repetitive, and often rehash ground he has already covered before.

Over at Patreon, he also also posts occasional links to interesting articles, such as Has the Queen become frightfully common?, which argues that the Queen's accent has been slowly changing from RP towards "estuary" English. Take a look; it's actually pretty interesting.

Is his blog worth $1/month? Well, if you really like AJATT and miss seeing new posts from Khatzumoto, I suppose it's cheap enough. And as somebody who works on language learning software, I'm well aware that Khatzumoto will very occasionally publish an idea that blows my mind and makes me re-think everything. Some of my most effective Anki decks were originally inspired by his ideas (before I did weird things of my own). But if you weren't craving more Khatzumoto posts, then it's not worth the money. Or you can wait 6 to 18 months, when he has promised to start unlocking older posts.

Still, I'm glad to see Khatzumoto is back, and that he's still interested in languages. It reminds me of the old days, when I had no idea how to learn French and was madly trying to improve any way I could, looking for advice from all kinds of sources.
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