He told the class that we wouldn’t be using that s####y textbook anymore, or we wouldn’t be doing those stupid spanish packets where everyone would copy off each other before the teacher would check homework. What he did say we were gonna do is totally different. Every day all class long, we would listen to spanish.

So this is what he did, our teacher would create stories everyday, actually pretty fun and funny ones, and he would narrarate the story and engage the students by asking them what happened in the story, as the story progressed. But ALLLL in spanish. And every day there would be a different introduction. For example, Mondays we would listen to a spanish song while reading the lyrics and spanish. Tuesdays he would call out a topic, and we would write for 10 minutes straight in spanish about that topic. Wednesdas,,, i forget. but you get my point.

But the point was to get us listening to spanish frequently. Similar to AJATT.

I actually thought it was very fun and I learned more in that time than the 3 years of BS textbook work where i would just cheat anyway. So that’s another method you could use in the classroom. Stories and songs and involving students by asking questions about the story.

I believe that it was only successful for one reason, and that being that the teacher was a native Japanese speaker and she conducted the class solely in Japanese. She would only switch to English if there was something that she needed to be sure that the students understood like the date of a test or something along those lines.

Some people might not understand how in a beginner level class, the teacher can do nothing but yell out orders in a language that no one understands and expect anyone to get anything done, but eventually everyone starts to understand. I got a lot of speaking and listening practice and I could get any question I had, typically only half related to what we were covering in class, answered almost instantly. 

So yeah.. I don’t really there’s such a thing as good classes and bad classes. It’s all on the teacher. 

One time there was a kid goofing off in class and I explicitly remember her yelling こらー！！！ and hitting him with her notebook. Good times.  

I’m in my first year of college, here in good ol’ Missouri. Right now I’m working on an Associate’s degree in teaching English at the community colleges. I’ll probably finish up and get a bachelors degree at some university after that. I took 3 years of Chinese in high school and am now realizing what a waste of time that was. Actually I had known for awhile I guess, I found it strange when people asked me to say something in Chinese and I would say “wo ke yi qu shi shou jian ma?” every time because I didn’t know anything else. It was funny at the time, but now that I look back it seems kinda sad.

Anyway, one of the requirements is two courses in a foreign language. This presents two problems:
1. 99% sure it will suck. Just like high school.
2. The only class available that I might be remotely interested in is Mandarin Chinese, the stuff I studied in high school. The only reason I took Chinese in high school was because it was unique and I knew that some of Japanese used chinese characters(kanji). I only want to learn Japanese because I want to be an English teacher in Japan(maybe a little mangaka/writing business on the side lol… from what what I’ve heard it’s like impossible to be a gaijin mangaka even if your drawing/story telling skills are awesome, but hey If I DECIDE to do it then it could happen right? Dreams…lol). So the whole time in high school I just wanted to learn Japanese. But now I have to go through the whole worthless experience AGAIN. I’m dreading it already. I have no more interest in Chinese, so I’m not going to apply the AJATT method to it. It will completely SUCK. I’ll probably be using the AJATT method for Japanese by that time anyway, and I don’t want be confusing the meanings for hanzi characters with the meanings for kanji

If there was a Japanese class then it would be fine and I would actually look forward to it so I could destroy everybody in the class (possibly even the teacher lol), and push the world one step closer to no longer forcing useless classes on students.

Well that’s all I have to say. I guess just needed to vent somewhere lol. Thanks again man, if I hadn’t seen Tkyosam’s video with you talking about this site I would probably be one of the many foreigners who go to Japan with out being able to speak more than a few sentences.

And I actually thought of one advantage that a classroom could have. Remember that Krashen recommended that thing about i+1 material ? Well it may not be necessary, but it's definitely a motivating factor. When I immerse it's just to much work to get i+1 stuff, but a teacher could do just that. It would have to be more creative than the textbook stuff though. Maybe just choosing some good easy readers with natural language.

1. I self study much more than actual class time spent each week. I treat class as a place to practice what I’ve learned and correct mistakes, not my primary source of learning.

2. Just because my class is on Chapter 10 say, nothing prevents me from going ahead and being exposed to the material ahead of time, or even finishing the book! Makes no sense to arrive in class and see the material for the first time.

3. Like you always say, try to suck less each day. It takes time and effort. Nothing less will bring you to fluency.

Thanks.

I’m considering learning Japanese, but I want to study it as a language in my IB Diploma course, which unfortunately is problematic. The method you describe has great advantages, one of them being finance. Yes, perhaps this shouldn’t be something to focus on, but my financial situation isn’t exactly fine and dandy, and self-study would cut down a great deal, in not having to hire a tutor. Also, like you said, exploit your weaknesses, turn procrastination into something productive. I would be so willing to try this.

Unfortunately, I’m required to have a tutor and proper classes; my co-ordinator says self-study is not allowed. While this post about class suckage reduction is by all means incredibly useful, I am likely to have difficulty making this work, since it’s bad enough trying to find a tutor, trying to find one who will be willing to teach ‘differently’ will be an even greater pain, not to mention that the costs are going to rise too.

I can sort of understand what beneficii said about ‘giving-the-apperance-of-putting-on-a-show-when-you’re-really-doing-it thing’ although I have a slightly different problem. Like you said about listening to Japanese 24/7, I got into a habit of listening to JPop 😛 Which is fine, no ‘putting on a show’ factor unless someone graps your mp3 to see the playlist. However, I’m a bit of a singer at heart, and so I tend to sing these Japanese songs out loud (not that I know just WHAT I’m singing. Although I do get a pleasant kick out of it every time I recognise a word or two. Also I like to think it’s working a little towards my pronunciation. Har har a likely story, but yeah) and eheh, I regularly get my head yelled off for it by my mother, whose hate for Japanese it seems, is inversely proportionate to my obsession with it.

Such is the dilemma. I’ve got about another half a month to find a decent tutor for the course. If I don’t well, stick to French it is, and work around this alien new schedule to perhaps stuff self-study in (which I might try to pass of as CAS…)

I’m in love with your site (although i should try spending more of that time doing your suggestions). I just read your response on improving the classroom traditional style teaching. I’m all for your AJATT method (or for me since I want to be a consultant of English in Japan, the AEATT method), but I was wondering what do you do if you can’t do AEATT? What do you do if you have only 3 hours to your day to study japanese or just one? What’s the most effective way to achieve your goal? I want to incorporate and spread your methodology to the unknowing japanese who are spending tons of money on useless eikaiwa schools (although I think I have to be employed by one initially to plant the seeds. it’d be near impossible to teach this style in such a school with strict preprogrammed lessons. I hear these schools are the majority. I wish I had the funds to start my own alternative school!)
I know you suggest, just do something. And I know you were able to make time in spite of being a computer science major to study japanese as much as possible. But what’s the most efficient approach to acquiring proficiency in the language for a high school or junior high school student (who spends most of the day in classes and then in clubs always around people speaking the same language, and then has to do homework. the suggestion to break away from his friends seems inappropriate at that age level). Or for a college student who has a time deadline to pass a test like TOEFL or TOEIC? (I know I hate the sounds of standardized testing too but these are barriers to coming in to America to study) Surely watching a tv show or listening to music that you can’t comprehend for an hour wouldn’t be better than studying a grammar book or working on an SRS? What activities would be fastest? Do you think getting the most essential phrases into an SRS from a study guide would be most helpful and then next getting the student to input what he is interested in into the SRS.

Maybe I’m making excuses for people. As the saying goes, where there’s a will there’s a way. Maybe the question is how to spark that will in students. To encourage them that it’s possible and cool to do even if their friends will think it weird and might alienate the person. Do you have any suggestions for sparking motivation? Does Antimoon talk about this topic?

1) It’s by input (and coming to understand the input we get) that we gain vocabulary, unconscious grammatical patterns, and usage of a language.

2) Output isn’t useless, but rather output improves the -mode- of output. Unless someone already has strong grasp of a language, I have serious doubts that output will help someone with that understanding of the underlying logic of the language, but if you want to improve the sound of speaking, or your writing ability, output will help. Ie, getting rid of accents, sounding like a native, being able to handwrite/remember kanji more, etc, output will help this.

Thus I think language classes/schools should strive to keep the two separate. Firstly, have lots of input available for people. Also, make the understanding of the input more accessible to students. I don’t mean translate things to their native language for them, but rather, imagine if some language center made their own accurate subs for several tvs/movies and provided one-click definitions (which could be in context of the sentence too) of words a student doesn’t know. These don’t eliminate the learning or the challenge of studying, but just skip the unnecessary time spent trying to find definitions or new materials.

Then secondly, work on output by working on output. Be strict, correct students how they say things etc. Don’t try to make students produce output, give them some material, let them read or what not, and help the student’s output from there. The ability to produce output isn’t what is being critiqued, but how the output comes out.

Mmmm…

Call me extreme, but my position is that you should leave the class [Michael], or at least make it stay out of your way. What I mean is, generally, a class will not GIVE you more time for self-study; your time was already there [there are exceptions — Sutebun is an interesting case, he’s just taking Japanese so that his university coursework vaguely aligns with his personal study — this is admirable — Sutebun, just keep going as you are, not expecting to learn anything of true value from the class, ask if you can turn in self-study work instead of the stupid (yes, stupid) homework; make the class serve you, not you the class; and let there be a concrete understanding between you and your teacher that you are in this to learn Japanese, not to follow the curriculum [in theory, that is the aim of all curricula; in practice…]. In Michael’s case. the fact that these clowns are not dealing with kanji is a serious problem. VERY SERIOUS. And so, in a sense, trying to make that better is like trying to make your wetsuit smell nice when you’re swimming in a lakeful of raw sewage — it is possible — but it would be much easier to just get out of the lake, and wash in the perfumed, disinfecting waters of RTK1…

In any case, class may be valuable to some extent, but so is every wasteful experience. When I say it’s not valuable, I mean that the NET value is negative, not that the class didn’t do anything. What class gives you minus what class takes away, generally puts you in the red. All that time spent, for what? For knowing 12 kanji and some kana, having a bad accent that the teacher never bothered to correct, and still spelling は as わ [real class-takers I met being described here]? Now, there might be a good teacher who’ll give you freedom and step out of your way, but are you going to sit around in the lake of romaji and busywork sewage waiting for her to come and save you? Why not just save yourself? I think…

But that’s only my opinion, and I’m only one person. I can’t tell you the outcome of every situation, and it’s not my place to tell people what to do, so, if nothing else, think of this an experiment: “How To Get Fluent Even With Class Being All Up In My Grill” :D; give it a try, see what happens. In my experience, we’re almost always better off experimenting our way to truth than trying to just reason our way there.

Even though you may be in classes, that in no way inhibits your ability to study outside of them. Actually then, your outside study provides study for the language class itself, making the grading easy. On top of that, any homework you get from that class is related to your study itself, so it could help your study. If your homework/class time doesn’t help your study, it minimizes the time you have to spend on outside class work.

I want to go to law school, so my major doesn’t really matter. I was a philosophy major, but I recently changed to Japanese not because I think the classes will shoot me towards native level, but rather now I don’t have to spend hours reading philosophy/writing essays. The time I do spend on my class work will be on Japanese.

So, I’m in no way arguing against anyone that classes alone do not provide sufficient time/usage to achieve a high level on class work alone. However, for students who have the luxury of being able to major in the language they want to learn without harming what they want to get out of a degree it is a very good idea that can allow them more time to their self study. Of course, not everyone has this luxury, but for those who do…more opportunity to study that language of your choice 🙂

I am currently a university student enrolled in a Japanese language class after having taught myself some basic Japanese through high school. I agree with you that classes are much less efficient than self-study, but I still like to believe that I can get something useful out of the classes (besides a degree).

This post addressed how a class setting could be better optimized for learning in a non-artificial manner. The only problem with this is that, unfortunately, we don’t have much control over how we are taught. We do, however, have control over how we learn. So my question is this:

What do you recommend a student do to best learn in a classroom setting? Any suggestions on how to use an SRS in the context of a class would be useful. I don’t know enough kanji to use the “sentence method” outlined on the site (though I’m currently working through RTK 1). We periodically get vocabulary and dialogues, how should I format them in my SRS or should I even bother? Also, any other suggestions you have would be much welcomed. Thanks!

And somethimes, mostly not though, I find a person-to-person explaination clearer than some obscure internet post. Not always, but somethimes I do.

At the language center I currently doing my internship they have the exact same concept. Students don’t have to attend lessons anymore as they study on their own. Instead, they can consult teachers in the language center who can answer their questions, and only the questions they asked. No extra work, just plain answers and study help if the student wants to.

I really like the concept and more and more schools in the Netherlands are moving to this concept.

beneficii,
I’m having almost the same problem as you and people are often saying im too “obsessed” with Japanese. I just try to ignore them. It’s funny because they want to learn Japanese themselves but never make the effort to do so.

khatzumoto,
Those are really good ideas and I think they would work. But I do agree with nacest. I was never really interested in learning Italian in high school, so I don’t think this would have worked for me. I wish we had more choices.

I guess that beyond: 1. answering tough questions and 2. demanding the students to express themselves (speaking and writing), the teacher should also analyze the statistics to see if there isn’t a strong bias in the SRS database.

And maybe scrutinize the database looking for errors or some misusage (although I understand that could be kind of demanding).