Amir: I’m a success story too btw. Learned Japanese to fluency inspired by your site.

Khatz: How did you get started? What was your language experience (home and school) pre-AJATT
Amir: I started 4 years ago. Before I found your website I already wanted to learn Japanese independently without classes. I tried useless programs like Rosetta Stone (which was horrible btw), and books like Minna no Nihongo (an interesting start but it didn’t really help me in learning the language).

Khatz: What was your initial opinion of AJATT in general? What is your opinion now?
Amir: My initial opinion of Ajatt was that I found it awesome, and I still think that it’s great.

Khatz: Which AJATT ideas still seem lame? (lol)
Amir: You have no lame ideas.

Khatz: I love you and want to have your babies.
Amir: [No response]

Khatz: How did kanji go for you? How did SRS go for you?
Amir: Kanji was difficult at first, but the best strategy that worked for me was ‘not nothing’ every day. SRS was the same way.

Khatz: Which ideas seemed crazy and stupid but turned out awesome?
Amir: Ideas like ‘not nothing’ and simply showing up.

Khatz: How have you changed things to suit you? What personal customizations have you made to the AJATT method?
Amir: At some point I stopped SRSing as a whole and only watched shows, anime with subtitles which seemed to get the job done perfectly. I used subtitles from this site : [Japanese subtitles – kitsunekko.net] goo.gl/aNXgQ5

Khatz: What techniques do you use to make immersion an daily, hourly, minute-by-minute reality for yourself?
Amir: I turned all my devices, Computers, browsers, games etc. into Japanese. The most effective method that worked for me was ‘not nothing’ every day. Because if you continue every day like that you’ll be fluent eventually, [tortoise] vs hare and all of that good stuff.

Khatz: “The most effective method that worked for me was ‘not nothing’ every day.” This is deep. “Not nothing” is a gift that keeps giving and a lesson we can’t stop learning.
More questions: How did you deal with the “intermediate angst”? Did you ever have feelings (however unfounded) of reaching a plateau or not making progress?
Amir: One amazing thing I realized is that most native Japanese people have difficulty with kanji!! I have several Japanese friends and the funny thing is, there were instances where I could read kanji better then actual native Japanese people! I was like: “WTF dude, you’re Japanese and you can’t read that!?” He was 19.
He couldn’t read the 爵(しゃく) in 公爵 which translates into “duke” in english,
People have to let go of fake perceptions.
Japanese people are the same as you, they’ve just been in the game longer.
I had no more intermediate angst after that experience. You’ve come this far, stop being a bitch. Play the next game, watch the next anime!

Khatz: What is your daily routine like now?
Amir: My daily routine is this, I just do whatever I love in Japanese I just have fun in Japanese; that’s it.

Khatz: How did you deal with the “lostness” that beginners face? New language. New writing system. What were your first materials inside and outside the SRS?
I just followed your classic method in the beginning. Total immersion →2000+Kanji→Sentences,
There was no lostness, it’s a new language, get used to it!!

Khatz: How about social resistance? How did your friends and family react to your intense Japanese-ness?
Amir: People are all assholes. I just hid my Japanese project part.
Even now that I’m fluent they either don’t care or simply hate and make fun.
My Japanese friends find it amazing though.

Khatz: Where do you get Japanese books?
Amir: Here’s where I buy my books: [無料まんが・試し読みが豊富！eBookJapan｜まんが（漫畫）・電子書籍をお得に買うなら、無料で読むならeBookJapan] goo.gl/E3YA
They even have their own app and it’s great because it works in my country.

Hello,

I first found your site 5 years ago when I became interested in Japan, and it was my first introduction to the idea that you could learn a language without taking a class.

I didn’t stick with studying Japanese at the time, but the IDEA stuck with me forever.

Well, now it’s 2017 and okay, I’m not yet fluent in Japanese. But I feel like I’m getting there. Also, I’m writing you this note from my 30th floor luxury hotel room in [a major Japanese city that does not rhyme with “Bapporo”], where I get to live and work for 6 months. I chat to people in Japanese and they’re all shocked that I can speak it at all, plus I think my pronunciation is really good because I’ve been watching and listening to anime in Japanese for the past 5 years.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. 頑張ってください！

Hey Khatz,

I just thought I’d send you an (almost done) success story. My name is Mariah, and I’m a junior in high school; I’ve been doing the AJATT method on-and-off since the summer of 8th grade, but more on that in a bit. I was originally going to send you a success story after I had considered myself fluent or reached 10,000 sentences, but I just found something out that blew my mind and really encouraged me (not that I really needed encouragement, I’m having way too much fun with this anyway).

So, at the start of my AJATT journey, I was in a computer summer camp and bored. I was also binge-watching Naruto for the third time, and I have issues with not feeling productive, so I would tell myself that I was productive from reading because I would always read the subtitles.

Then I found AJATT and spent the next few days just poring over a lot of the posts. Eventually, I got the gist of it, and the next day stopped using subtitles forever. I’ll never forget the first episode of Naruto I watched without subtitles, and I was able to immediately imply the meaning of what a character said: 「無駄だ。」

I did the kanji, got bored at around 1700ish, jumped into sentences. I used the book All About Particles, which was a GODSEND, added sentences from anywhere I possibly could. I started out trying to cram like five new words into each sentence, but it made SRSing outright PAINFUL, and I eventually learned to just do one or two new words per sentence. Then school started again, and to try to “make the most” of the time I spent with Japanese, I just focused on “serious” stuff, like college lectures, news articles, etc. BIG mistake. I got too stressed and bombed out.

About a year later, started over, did ALL the kanji, a few sentences, just got bored, quit.

Another year later, I tried to do “lite” Japanese, just an hour or so a day, but I felt like I was depriving myself, so I quit.

Fast forward to this past summer. The kids in the Japanese class at my school were going on a 10-day trip to Japan that I was unable to go on (complicated circumstances). I felt like “This is unfair, I should be the one going, those idiots don’t even understand anything other than simple 敬語, damnit damnit”. At the same time, we were going to the beach a lot and whenever I got tired and/or freaked out from almost drowning I wanted something to read. I remembered some けいおん volumes I had at home and started reading them.

Then I learned that a class of kids from Japan was coming here in October, and that I could quite possibly host one. I was like, “Whoa, I don’t wanna miss this opportunity, better get back to Japanese…” So I started AJATT again, and I had already remembered a lot of words and kanji from my previous attempts, so I did about 600 kanji again and jumped into sentences. The kids came and I got to host a girl. I was over the roof. It turned out to be great, because she knew VERY LITTLE English so I translated a lot for her and she talked in Japanese with me.

After the kids left, I was still doing Japanese. I thought, “If they did a homestay in high school, maybe I could do one…” I started looking for homestay opportunities, and found one, and applied for the scholarship. The trip will be this summer, and be six weeks long, so I had a goal to work up to: be almost-fluent or fluent by summer 2014. So, I jumped right in. I’m still waiting on the notification of whether I got the scholarship or not, but if I don’t get it I’ll be fine; I’ll work full time over the summer and save up to either go during senior year and take the EJU (test to get into a Japanese University) or just save up for college (if I don’t get a chance to take the EJU, I want to go to International Christian University, or 国際基督教大学）.

So I have a goal, and it makes it SO much easier to stick with it because of that. You see, before, it was “Isolate myself with Japanese, maybe be able to go to Japan and talk with people someday” to “Isolate myself with Japanese, and be guaranteed to constantly use it within two years.” It definitely makes a huge difference when I’m debating on whether to play video games with my brother or read manga.

So right now, I have a little over 5,500 sentence cards in my deck, and recently finished reading an entire Japanese novel front to back. I feel almost-fluent at this point, but really need to work on reading names as well as place names. I got Japan TV on Verizon FiOS, because I couldn’t stand the low quality Japanese TV I was getting online and it’s only $25 a month, man! The reason I decided to write this now was a podcast I just listened to.

You see, when I was doing Japanese in eighth grade, I was pretty boss with anime and some drama, but TERRIBLE with news. I had a lot of news podcasts on my iPod but could scarcely understand a word. I said, “I think I’ve gotten more boss, let’s see.” So I put on a 15-minute news podcast and understood EVERY WORD. I was like, “Whoa, I really am making progress! This is awesome!” I’m not fluent yet, but can confidently say that I almost am, and absolutely love where I am. I can really enjoy things so much more than I would have imagined now that I understand almost all of it.

Of course, it’s not like I really needed motivation. Honestly, I think I would lose my sanity without Japanese in my life every day. Whenever I get home from school, I play Japanese music to tune everything out, read comics on pixiv, read manga, watch anime, watch Japanese TV. When I’m at school, I read news articles and Facebook posts by Japanese friends. During the weekend, I read manga and novels, watch Japanese TV and anime, listen to Japanese music, and feel like I’m in heaven. I am just doing FUN THINGS in Japanese so it is SO DAMN FUN AND EASY.

In my previous attempts, I would tell myself “Oh Mariah, you need to stop watching anime, watch some news for God’s sakes.” I thought I would have to graduate from kid stuff to adult stuff in Japanese, but it got so damn boring that I couldn’t take it. I was hugely mistaken. I read so much manga it’s ridiculous, and I’ve learned so much vocabulary from it that it’s ridiculous! It doesn’t matter what it is; if it’s fun and you’re learning, it’s good.

I have a clear goal in mind, and I think I’ll be just about fluent by the time summer rolls around. This has been an amazing journey. I have some things that I’ve learned and that might help other people on their journeys:

• Don’t EVER feel bad for reading manga or watching anime. It’s good for you and it’s Japanese and it’s FUN.
• Don’t try to stuff 5 new words in each sentence card.
• Stay away from the boring stuff, stay with the fun stuff.
• If you’re cash-strapped, go to manga-zone.com and download manga to your heart’s content.
• Please don’t go hard on yourself. It does no good.
• It’s really helpful to have a clear goal in mind so that you know all of this will really pay off, e.g. going to Japan or hosting an exchange student.
• If you’re not having fun, switch it up. Find something you really like, no matter what it is! Naruto! Stupid dramas! Music! Hentai manga! There is no judgement!
• Go to lang-8.com from time to time and post a journal entry in Japanese, and get a bunch of awesome Japanese people to correct it for you. I like this better than a language exchange partner because it’s more convenient (time zone differences, anyone?) and you don’t have to beg people to correct you; it’s what they’re there for.

So, of course, I have to give my thanks to you, Khatzumoto, because without AJATT and Surusu and all your helpful articles and e-mails, none of this would have been possible. You are AWESOME. I haven’t really done MCDs, but I actually enjoy sentences and it works for me. You have helped me so much in my journey. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Please feel free to post this on your site, cut out certain bits, emphasize different parts, whatever. I just really want to express my thanks and help out anyone else who may need motivation with their Japanese.

– Mariah

Related articles

• It Worked For Me, Why Not You? The Success Story of a Frenchman In The Netherlands Who Learned English (and Now Japanese) The AJATT Way

Good day to you, Mr. Khatz

It’s morning here in cloudy Amsterdam, and I just thought I’d kill some time sharing my little story with you while eating yesterday’s leftover sushi. There is nothing quite like raw fish in the morning.

I really just want to thank you for your website. There, I’ve said it. That’s the whole point of my mail: thanking you. If you’re too busy or don’t care enough to read, just stop right here. But if you bear with me, I’d like to share my little story with you. It’s unlikely that I’ll teach you something you don’t already know, but after months of reading AJATT, I just realised that I’m a perfect living and breathing proof that the immersion process is the best way to learn a language. Any language.

And I can say that with absolute confidence because I’ve done it. Not with Japanese just yet, I’m still early in the process (1200 kanji and going strong !), but with other languages. And yet, when I decided that I wanted to learn Japanese, my first reflex was to seek out a Japanese class at the university. Even though I’ve always despised language classes. Funny, huh ?

I’m just a little Frenchman living in the Netherlands, so finding an English/French-speaking Japanese class proved to harder than I thought, so I went for self-study. At first, I was a bit bummed; I feared that I would never be able to achieve fluency without going through the usual socially acceptable routes.

But then I discovered AJATT.

And I realized “Hey, this method makes sense, it’s how I learned English in the first place”. It never really occurred to me before, because all my friends and family would just tell me that I was gifted at languages. And I really believed it; I went to a trilingual school as a kid for three years, from ages 3 and 6; there, classes would be held entirely either in French, English or German. About 1 or 2 hours of each every day. So I largely attributed my success in English to that; “it’s because I picked it up early”, I thought.

But then during a trip to Germany, it occurred to me: “hey, I don’t remember jack sh*t about German, how do you say ‘hello’ in German again?”. For some reason, English had stuck with me, but not German. No siree, not a single freaking word, despite learning words in German before I even knew them in French (which is my native tongue; this school was in France).

So your website got me wondering, why is that ? And then another part of my childhood came to mind; namely my love for star wars; I remember spending hours on end watching Star Wars as a kid. Why is that relevant ? Well, I only owned the VHS in English. Actually, most of the movies I had in my room as a kid were in English. Get it ? In English. Not in German.

The only reason I remember any English to this day is that I never stopped watching / hearing / reading English medias for extended periods of time. Had I watched Star Wars in German, I would probably be fluent in German by now.

Those English VHS tapes kept my English alive, even though I left this trilingual school very early, and never had another English class for another 6 years.

And then at age 10, my parents got me a DreamCast with Shenmue. A brilliant game for sure, one of my all-time favorites. And, as it happens, it was only available in English dub with English subtitles. My English back then wasn’t perfect; heck, it wasn’t even that good, but I wanted to play this game so much that I just plunged head-first into it, and I enjoyed every second of it, picking up English phrases and vocabulary by the ton along the way.

Then came Phantasy Stars Online on the DreamCast. An online multiplayer RPG. Again, there were no French dedicated servers; the playerbase was international. So everyone spoke English, and so did I. And it was tremendous fun; most of the people I played with were in the same situation as me; they spoke little English and had to make do to be understood. So there was nothing to be shy about, pretty much everyone was in the same boat, including Japanese players.

Even though the English I spoke and read back then was loaded with grammatical mistakes and very flawed, it didn’t hamper my English learning the slightest. Quite the contrary, in fact, it gave me a huge boost in confidence and a solid understanding of how the language worked.

So when English classes started in high school, I could just talk circles around everyone, despite not having learned a single grammatical rule. Ever. I just understood the “concept” of the language, the musicality, if you will. I could tell by ears only if a sentence sounded right or wrong. I couldn’t explain why, but I could correct it. I couldn’t provide any grammatical or syntactical insights to save my life, but I could make a wrong sentence right again.

As for German, I remembered so little of it (read: “jack s##t”) that I didn’t even bother taking German classes. I went for Spanish instead. Despite having learned tons of German for three years on a daily basis early on in my life, learning words in German that I didn’t know in French or in English. I didn’t follow up with German; I didn’t watch German-dubbed movies; I didn’t play German video games; I didn’t watch German cartoons. And as a result, I forgot all of it, while English stuck with me through and through because I had fun playing English video games, speaking English online with complete strangers from all around the world, and watching English media.

I am not a “language genius”. There is no such thing. I just exposed myself to lots of English, hours upon hours of it, and the language came flowing naturally. Not once had I the impression of “learning” English. I was just playing with it, reading in it, writing in it. I just… had fun in it. At no point did it ever feel like working, I just did it because I was enjoying it. The point wasn’t even to LEARN English, it was to play those video games I loved and couldn’t play in French because there was no French version. It was to watch those movies that I only owned in French. English fluency came almost as a fortunate side effect. I didn’t have to work on it, it just… happened, for lack of better words.

And so when I looked up your website, it all came crashing down on me; this is how you “learn” languages. This is how I “learned” English. But it took your writings for me to realize it. And if only for that, I am grateful. So I cancelled the orders I had placed for (expensive) Japanese textbooks and audiotapes, and ordered RTK1 and tons of manga with the money I saved. I’m about halfway through RTK1, and I’m loving it.

Entering the kanji [into the SRS] and making up stories for them can feel a bit tedious at times, but whenever I feel down about it, I just take a glance at the other side of my desk and see “デスノート”, “ドラゴンボール”, and even non-furigana stuff like “新世界より” (the book), “Black Lagoon” and “ヘルシング”, and it gives me that little extra bit of motivation to get going.

When I take a break, I fire up Kill Bill (Japanese dub, seriously, it’s even better than the original), Star Wars (J-dub), or one of the numerous anime series I’ve got lying around.
When I walk around the house, it’s with the Japanese Harry Potter or LOTR audiobook, or with NHK News or Fuji TV on in the background.
When I go to run some errands, it’s with a JUNK podcast. When I work, I put some 椎名 林檎 (awesome) or Shing02 (aww yeah 歪曲 is a freaking masterpiece) and just do what I have to do.

It’s tremendous fun, and it feels guilty. When I go to bed, it’s with my PS VITA and ペルソナ4 ザ・ゴールデン, which I already played I English, so I know the plot. I’m immersing myself, and it feels so natural that something feels wrong when I’m in a situation where I can’t have Japanese going on 24/7, like when I’m visiting my family. It feels good, I’m having fun, and even though I haven’t finished RTK yet, I surprise myself being able to read and understand some sentences I find here and there in my manga or in some anime / movies I watch.

And I could go on and on about the satisfaction I feel when I can recognize a kanji I learned when I’m outside my little Japanese wonderland. It could be on the bus on a kid’s T-shirt, at the second-hand Japanese bookstore, or on the menu of a fake Japanese restaurant or written on a wall in the background of a movie; no matter the place, no matter the overall meaning of the sentence : just being able to make sense of a writing system that so many people dismiss as impossibruuuuu if a great reward in itself. I’m not afraid of coming out now : I love kanji. I love the Japanese writing system. It’s beautiful, rich and it just makes sense.

So thank you, Mr. Khatz, for your website. It helped me realize what I knew all along, but didn’t know I knew (phew). It helped me get past those little monolingual forum know-it-alls who took 4 years in Japanese classes and came out frustrated and bitter about anyone trying to learn the language another way (i.e. not the “academic” way). It helped me realize that I’m not a language genius (that’s a relief; being a called a genius is extremely derogatory IMO: it dismisses any effort / time one might have dedicated to achieving something). I’m just a staggeringly handsome guy who happens to love languages and Japanese (pop) culture.

Everyone can do it, once they go past the mental blockade. Screw social conventions, screw academia. Your method works, I applied it unknowingly to English, despite having never been to an English-speaking country in my life for more than 2 weeks at a time (and even then, not that often), and despite never learning a single grammatical rule or cracking open a single English textbook (except in English class in high school, but I pretty much slept the entire time during those).

There is no miracle, no secret recipe; just do it, and stick to it. Living in the country is not a requirement, never was (or perhaps when the Internet wasn’t around, but that’s a big “perhaps”) and never will be. I’ve never lived in an English-speaking country and I speak English. I live in a Dutch-speaking country and I don’t speak a single word of Dutch (because I’ve got no interest in learning it and I’m living here only very temporarily). Your location doesn’t matter, [insert country here] is where your make it out to be.

So thank you, Dear Leader, for allowing me to go past the social conventions and the mental blockade. I’m on a fast track to Japanese fluency, and no one can stop me. See you at the top of the mountain.

… have you ever thought of creating a cult ?

Greg

Do you have a success story you’d like to share? Hit me up!
Also, your Mom is not a virgin.
These are facts.

Related articles

• Immersion Strategy: Your Ears Are Sacred
• There Is A Magic Silver Bullet

The attentive will recall that Jamie (an AJATTeer) came up with what I still consider to be the greatest analogy in the history of learning languages about a year ago. The attentive will also recall that a photo of Sarah Silverman on the pot was involved, something which totally wasn’t my idea by the way, plus you have no proof and you got nuffink on me and I have plausible deniability.

Well, through the magic of the AJATT Facebook page, Jamie is back, this time with her very own German success story (as well as a couple of awesome new analogies):

Hey Khatz,
[You have such gorgeous thighs, and I don’t know how you do it. The ThighMaster may be a machine, but you are truly the master of thighs. Women love you and men respect you. It pains me to even shift the topic from you, but…] I’ve been “immersing” myself in German since December 2011. At first, it wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t understand much from films, videos, music, etc and my output was simply horrible.

But after 3 months of immersion and SRS Vanilla sentences, I was able to hold basic IM chats and write emails in German with German and Austrian people. 99.9% of the Germans and Austrians thought that I was a language “Genie” ¹ and said that it was amazing that I learned German so “quickly” without any tutors or classes. I still believe that input (reading and listening) is still more important than output (writing and speaking) but once in a while I practice output.

I like writing German emails with my friends from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and I’ve had about 5-7 voice conversations over Skype in German. It wasn’t hard for me to understand what the native German speakers were saying. and most recently during Spring break 2013 in New York City, I heard a couple talking to each other in German and I just approached them by asking them in German: “Are you from Germany?” (kommen Sie aus Deutschland?) My brave action allowed us to have a short but good conversation — all in German. The couple said my German was very good especially considering “the short amount of time” I spent learning it, and not once did they try to switch the conversation to English.

So, how did all this “magic” happen? It ain’t magic. It’s just listening and/or watching to >90 minutes of audio in German during my waking hours and playing audio throughout my sleeping hours and making and doing SRS reps from time to time.

It’s about making it fun, doable, and practical to one’s OWN schedule. I learned Spanish from 2nd grade – 10th grade, but my Spanish input and output was NEVER was good as my German. The more I think about it, some of this AJATT stuff is really foolproof. “You are what you eat” and “You speak what you hear”…DUH!!

• You are what you eat.
• You write what you read.
• You speak what you hear.

I signed up for AJATT+ again to check in to see what recent developments have occurred and to also pay my dues. I owe a great deal to you and your website in helping me to develop my skills in second language acquisition and, most importantly, helping me reframe how I understand language learning.

As it stands right now, I am about 2 and a half years into learning Japanese. It took me a full year to get through Heisig. Hypothetically, you could say that I have only been learning Japanese for the last year and a half (obviously this isn’t true, but it sure felt that way at times during Heisig. Even more so when peers would question why I was wasting my time with something like RTK when I couldn’t even string together a correct grammatical sentence in Japanese to save my life).

I have done all of this while finishing my Master’s in English Literature and teaching college courses for the first time. I was also in a long-term committed relationship with someone who was not learning Japanese (which has recently come to an end, sadly). In other words, I was, and still am, living a busy, fulfilling life while teaching myself Japanese effectively. The trick I found, as you have promoted throughout your website, was simply controlling my environment, making Japanese a habit, and being willing to throw out materials that are boring until I find something that is compelling.

For a long time I really doubted whether or not I was making progress, up until I had the opportunity to enter into a Japanese classroom at the University I attend and teach at. It was a 400 level course (also the first Japanese course I had ever taken), so the students were in their fourth year of Japanese courses and some had even done a semester abroad in Japan. At first the learning curve was very high, the entire class was conducted in Japanese and walking into an upper level class really shook my self-confidence. But as time went on, I realized that not only was I on par with the students in the classroom, but I was quickly surpassing them thanks to immersion, Anki, and simply having fun with native materials.

What was disturbing for me was recognizing that the other students, throughout this semester, had simply plateaued. Obviously this is not an objective judgement, but my own impression of what was happening. After talking to a few students after class, I realized how many of them simply did not study outside of class or even use Japanese over breaks. They are spending enormous amounts of money on classes expecting that an undergrad in Japanese will lead to fluency or working knowledge of the language without putting in the time or effort outside of class. It completely boggled my mind.

But then, I started paying more attention to the materials we were using in class. They were incredibly boring and even painful. I remember getting really burnt out with our study materials and I would simply put it down and pick up a MURAKAMI Haruki (村上春樹) novel and pick through it. What I didn’t realize, which is crazy if you think about it, was that the novel I’d pick up would be way beyond my level or the level of the classroom, but it felt like a total pleasure and relief because I was interested.

For the majority of my fellow classmates they didn’t question the classroom itself. They saw it as the only way to gain fluency. They’d burn themselves out on class materials until they hated Japanese and would not look at it again until they were forced to from fear of punishment (i.e. tests). Then when a break came along, they’d simply stop studying entirely.

I always had a resting point for my Japanese, I’d keep interesting materials that supported the boring, hard to do stuff. I’m not saying the class was pointless (it wasn’t, I learned a lot and it pushed me and gave me the opportunity to focus on Japanese in my already busy life), but rather how everyone approached the genre of the classroom was pointless.

The classroom is meant to support and guide you on your own discoveries and studies. It is not a magical purchase that will impart you with skills simply because you paid and show up to class having done the minimum amount of homework.

What really upset me was there was this reinforced culture of mediocrity amongst the students. Some of them almost seemed to brag about how little work they did or they would just complain about the teacher, the language (seriously? writing kanji is an absolute pleasure), or any other excuse they could come up with. I made a point to close myself off from that culture and focus on my own language acquisition process.

You know, if I had taken classes first, before finding AJATT, I think I would be exactly like those students. It is not really anyone’s fault, it’s simply how the system has evolved…the system influences in a large way what you can think and do. That’s why it is so important to have multiple systems. This is getting abstract, so let me try to give an example. Systems or genres influence what we can do or not do, for example the genre of the classroom dictates what is appropriate behavior and not.

If I were a student, taking off my pants and walking to the front of the classroom while the teacher is lecturing, obviously would break the conventions of that genre. In fact, normal, healthy people, would never think of doing something like that because we pick up on the rules of the systems and genres we interact with everyday. A weird example, I know, but you see the point I assume. Your website’s most important feature is simply breaking the power that our assumptions hold over our behaviors when it comes to language learning.

I can’t tell you how many of these students kept pushing textbooks on me to try and help me with my Japanese (yo, seriously? I have been studying Japanese not even half the time you have been and I am at your level already. You want to tell me what I ought to do?). Talk about cognitive dissonance…

What is my point? Well, first I want to tell you how thankful I am that you created this website and that you continue to break down misguided assumptions about language acquisition in entertaining and enlightening ways. Secondly, I want to echo one of your main points that has been the most difficult and important aspect in self-learning. Create your own system and constantly change it.

Don’t allow a rigid system to take over because you think you ought to be doing something. Keep your system healthy by pruning away at the parts that don’t work any more and feed those parts that are working. Be ready to abandon what isn’t working or has stopped working. Always be ready to explore and test. When your system is about to break you, break the system. You’ll move far faster by being pragmatic and allowing your likes and dislikes to guide you.

Because of my life (graduate student/instructor/friend/boyfriend/part-time waiter), I had to make my own system and make it work for me. Anytime I listened to dogma, it would eventually break me and take me away from exposing myself to Japanese. When I stopped being so anal retentive and just focused on what I liked doing and was interested in doing, I would make huge leaps in development without even realizing it.

I hope that my experience might help other people who are struggling with all the internal and external resistance that comes with self-learning.

Keep up the good work, Khatz. You are an inspiration and you have functioned as a kind of guru to me. It has been a pleasure learning from you and being challenged.

But as the Buddhists say, when you meet the Buddha along the path, kill him.

You’re the man, Shawn. I humbly accept my metaphorical passing. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Take care and stay handsome.

AJATTeer Jake C shares this little story of how he learned how to use certain Japanese words and phrases before he knew what they actually  (literally) meant, because he was aware of their emotional content. I have had similar experiences myself in both Cantonese and Japanese, but didn’t have a  name for the phenomenon. Now, thanks to Jake, I do (“emotional context learning”, he calls it). It’s definitely one of the benefits of an immersion environment (one primarily based on FUNBUN ¹ media) as opposed to a classroom one — you learn stuff without even trying, at an almost physical, muscular level. Anyway, here’s Jake’s little story:

I feel as though I’ve hit on something no one else has considered before. It’s something I noticed in my own learning. I realized that humans aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure. When filled with a certain kind of emotion, attitude or mindset, I noticed that entire phrases of Japanese would jump into my head that I had never previously studied or reviewed. They must have stuck due to me comprehending their emotional context.

「一体誰の仕業なのか?」 ² came into my head in response to me actually holding that kind of emotion towards someone (a coworker). My mind had latched onto it through comprehending its emotional context, though I had never formally studied it before.

I’ve been repeating aloud the things I hear in the news or in anime while acting out the emotion or mindset the idea was conveyed with, and it seems to be super effective. Even conveying dry information still holds a degree of emotional context that can be acted out.

I personally think this is a fairly unique and cool way to engage in language learning: acting out (and thereby comprehending) the emotional content of the sentence, even if you don’t fully understand the words. I found out later what 「仕業」 meant, but I actually used the phrase before I even knew what it meant, which I find very weird and cool. I knew the emotional content before I knew its specific, literal meaning.

“Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.”
~ Neil Postman

Jack shares his perspective, reached through bitter experience, on what he quite elegantly calls “The Inverse Relationship Between AJATT Pwnage and Classroom Winnage”:

Hey Khatz,

I’ve just finished semester at uni, it’s been a rainy and gloomy week here in Brisbane, Australia, and it’s as if a single ray of sunshine has just broken through the thick clouds, shining right into my brain.

This is a bit of a story, and I’d like the message to reach a lot of people (so please post the good bits to the regular ajatt blog!)

So my name is Jack, and I started learning Japanese as a little kid in primary school (grade 5). I was so excited to start learning as I had just entirely skipped the fourth grade (after taking some IQ tests) due to being a wee bit older than the other students, and Japanese started in the 5th grade.

I soaked it in like a sponge. I learnt the hiragana very quickly, and in the following years I surpassed the other students by taking optional proficiency tests and learning katakana (not typically taught in primary school). I started high school in a special group of students that had already learnt the katakana.

I progressed through high-school with the same teacher for 5 years, and started scratching kanji by the end of it (I probably knew about 100-150 kanji).

I then continued it in university, hoping to do a study abroad to Japan. I changed universities, and had to start the classes from beginning again. It wasn’t until the end of my first semester at my new home university (The University of Queensland), that I found your blog. I found it because I basically had an epiphany – the subject being how badly I still sucked at Japanese. I was doing perfectly well at university, getting very high grades, but I realised I still couldn’t produce the language impromptu.

So here it is: The Inverse Relationship Between Classroom Winnage, and AJATT Pwnage.

I thus started AJATT, and found it incredibly liberating. I referred hundreds of people to your site *fist bump*. I was learning kanji some 4000 times faster than I was in High School. I was starting to understand things I had never even come across before. I was enjoying it.

I started classes again in semester 2, and the contrast of enjoyment I could see really bummed me out. I went on though, this time hoping that my new found learning method would pull me through.

I failed the course.

I simply didn’t score high enough. I hadn’t studied for each test individually because I didn’t really feel the need. I was learning so fast! Why dedicate 2 hours of study to a written piece when I could just do some sentence reps everyday?

I knew what it was though. I hadn’t finished the kanji, and a large portion of the grade was focused on Kanji. THAT was the problem. So with re-newed vigor, I promptly did a 2k Kanji crash course (well not really a crash course, but I did dedicate my whole summer to just Kanji and immersion). I emerged victorious, with over 2000 kanji under my belt and hundreds of hours of immersion. Ready to start another semester of Japanese.

I felt very confident with my Japanese this semester. I didn’t need to prepare for a test for more than 45 minutes. I was preparing all the time, after all. The other students in the class looked to me for help with Kanji, and the small pieces of the language that we studied in class were very easy to understand. I had racked up over 2000 sentences in the time as well. The result?

I passed the course.

A mere pass. Some assessment items I almost failed (despite having no trouble with them at all). I blamed it on the teacher, and a latent bias towards the understood attitude towards classes that I have. The teacher knew that I had failed the last semester, and knew me personally as someone who wasn’t overly excited about the course (which she had designed). I had dedicated hundreds, almost over 1000 hours to Japanese this semester, and I had to watch as all my classmates scored better than I did. The difference between them and I? They worried about tests, I didn’t. I DID prepare, but I didn’t explicitly feel the need to. They used the resources we learnt from in class, I used natural Japanese.

Yes, I made plenty of errors in my assessment items, however these errors were not scripted like the errors other students would have made. I could have made those errors all day long (haha) but the other students could only keep up the charade for 60 minutes.

My cumulative total was very close to a ‘credit’ grade, which is a bit more modest, so I submitted some pieces for a re-appraisal. (I only needed 1.29 marks). This is the response from my lecturer:

“For the Opinion Piece: On the basis of this reappraisal and in comparison to other students in the 9 to 11 range of marks, we will raise your mark to 10.5 out of 20. Many sentences in the writing cannot be understood at face value and there are gaps in the logic.

One example of this is your translated explanation of why children don’t read is: ‘it is impossible for time to exist’. To the question of why children don’t like reading, your response was: ‘on top of that children don’t read’. The linking word ‘而も＝しかも’, which means ‘in addition to this’, was not followed by a related point as was ‘他に＝ほかに’.

It is not clear what the referential terms ‘こんな事＝こんなこと’ and ‘そうすると’ refer to in the text. The structure of your piece was in dot points instead of paragraph format. Students who received 11 points for this exercise used the grammar forms introduced in the course for defining ‘と言う事＝ということ’ and used evidence such as anecdotes to elaborate their opinions.

Although these are all the negative elements that you have asked for an explanation on, there are signs of development in your writing such as your use of predicates such as ‘べき’ and ‘verb-来た＝きた’ and two relative clauses. These are not used accurately, but the appearance of these in yor work is noted as development.”

To me, it sounds like a piece with perfectly structured grammar would have given her an orgasm.

Everything I wrote was literally translated back into English and checked for logic. A lot of it seems to be taken out of context. I understand what I wrote, but she doesn’t; that’s fair enough. However, no mention of my almost perfect use of Kanji? I could rant about this all day, but the fact of the matter is that classrooms and AJATT aren’t compatible. They can’t be friends. They’re like The Roadrunner and the Coyote; Christianity and Atheism. The more powerful one is, the less powerful the other. I used to be good at classroom Japanese, but I have since lost that ability.

Yet my natural understanding is at an all time high. I’ve started learning new words without using a dictionary. I have a more intuitive understanding of kanji, and how the primitive elements shape the meaning, for example: 睫 has the primitive for “eye” on the left, so I can guess it has something to do with the eye (睫＝まつげ：eyelashes, not covered in RTK 1).

So, after I received my grades for Japanese, I’ve lost all motivation to do anything relating to Japanese. I’m a little depresso actually. After 10 years of taking classes, nothing seems to be in my favour. Classes won’t make me fluent, and AJATT will kill my classroom ability.

I feel like I have seriously wasted my life. That’s thousands of hours, and thousands of dollars I’ll never get back. And the only reason I continued my classes was for a chance to study in Japan, and score some real immersion. All of it was a flipping waste of time, the only good thing was AJATT, which is just an idea, for a different way of doing things.

I’ve decided that I will not finish my diploma in languages. I will leave it unfinished when I return from Japan, because on the off chance that I do become fluent while I’m there, I don’t want my success to be attributed to classes. I seriously want language classes to be a thing of the past. A fable written in childrens books. Almost a myth, that such an absurd thing once existed.

~ Jack

The point isn’t that Jack’s Japanese is already perfect and flawless. The point is not the point his Japanese is at ¹ — its position. The point is the clear path, the line of progress, it’s on: its direction. Jack has found a path to natural, native-like Japanese and school is getting in the way of that. School is, to put it rather bluntly, c##kblocking vigorously impeding his Japanese awesomeness. And for what? In exchange for what? For nothing, really. Nothing but gold stars and awkward gaijinese (=gaijin-sounding Japanese).

That, as I understand it, is what he’s frustrated about. As Japanese class lameness goes, what Jack experienced is, arguably, on the mild side. But knowledge, intelligence, learning, these are fragile things, and all it takes is a tiny bit of bureaucratic behavior to suppress or even destroy them ². As someone who went to that idiot-making house called school once long ago, I sympathize with Jack completely. Also, he’s really handsome and has amazing taste in websites.

Maybe you have a story about school getting between you and real Japanese? Rant about right here . Right down there in comments. It’s a rantfest, people .

I was a few chapters into my Minna No Nihongo advanced textbook and I showed to my native Japanese stretch-class friends while on the subway ride home. I take a weekly Japanese stretch class so that I have a chance for real Japanese practice and it is also really good for your body! I showed them the Unit Test at the end of the first few chapters…and they were getting the answers wrong.

I then calmly closed my textbook and I wished it well. That event essentially proved the most important pieces of your nonsense/brilliance were CORRECT. My Japanese friends know Japanese. Whatever that book was giving me was not of real use. I would have clung to those type of low-immersion, high-tedium Japanese-reminiscent language textbooks FOREVER if I didn’t actually find a few pure diamonds on your site.

Twp weeks of immersion and fun have pushed my Japanese speaking comfort level further than years of boring and unnatural textbooks and addiction to external valuations through test scores and other unnecessary benchmarks

…

I am writing you as I listen to the news in Japanese. By changing my iTunes language to Japanese, I was able to access the Japanese podcast section (which is free) and download 760 25-minute Japanese podcasts and I listen ALL. DAY. LONG. Even while reading Japanese manga. Not to mention that new podcasts come out every day (other than just news) so that things never get stale.

End result: After 2 weeks of your immersion (and 3 1/2 years of being unable to continue a Japanese conversation for more than 2 sentences), I bumped into a Japanese native who lives on my floor. I just moved here last month and my building is about 30% Japanese. So we started talking in the hallway in Japanese. After a few minutes, he asked me if I was married to a Japanese woman or if I had lived in Japan —

I almost pooped my pants! I was so da[r]n shocked!

Thank you, Khatzumoto.
.

~ Lou W

Has AJATT helped you? What’s your success story? Share. It will make us all smiley and happy. It may even keep a kid off drugs. Will it keep me off hookers and blow? No, but it might save that next kid. Share your success story. Save a life.

The thing that did the most for my German, was watching all 7 seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 dubbed in German. People told me it was trash, and it wasn’t a real German TV show so it wouldn’t help, and all sorts of other bunk. It was dubbed in German for real Germans to watch.

It was really hard to understand all of it at the start, but I enjoyed it and I knew the characters from having watched it a bunch in English years ago, so I could frequently figure out what was going on. By the time I hit the end of the 7th season, I was understanding a LOT of the dialogue.

I had also been reading German Harry Potter while listening to the German Harry Potter audiobook, so that helped too. People also told me not to do that, because somehow I’d only learn the words for “magic wand” and “dragon”. Apparently they didn’t realize that 99.9% of the words in the book are not fantasy words, they were just regular German. And again, it was hard to understand at the start, but it got easier.

It worked, too. By the time I actually got to Germany, I understood pretty much everything I heard or read. Now I’m trying to duplicate the experience with Dutch, reading any Dutch book I feel like. Currently on my desk I have book 11 of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (translated to Dutch), a book about the rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes mountains (in Dutch), The Da Vinci Code (in Dutch), a book on the history of Anarchism in Spain (in Dutch). Basically anything I could find that sounded interesting. I don’t actually own any textbooks about Dutch at all, nor do I plan to. Nothing boring allowed.

So I am in the beginning of my journey towards learning Japanese…and I’m getting so much pure enjoyment out of it that I almost feel guilty.

I am at the kanji learning stage and I’m finding it fun and relaxing. Am I crazy? I thought kanji was supposed to be filled with misery but it is…relaxing to me. While I learn the stories I have fun picturing them in my head; in the background, I normally have Japanese music or anime playing. I downloaded some Japanese music to my iPhone and listen to it when cleaning, driving or studying for school (I am a grad student and work two jobs).

I bought a Japanese game for my PSP — Hagane no Renkinjutsushi/Fullmetal Alchemist: Yakusoku no Hi e (鋼の錬金術師 FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST 約束の日へ). I want to buy some Japanese kids storybooks as well, but for now I just read the game manual when I’m taking a bath. I can’t read in Japanese yet, but it is fun to recognize kanji that I have learned…and kanji don’t look quite so scary anymore.

Every other weekend, I work two 12-hour night shifts as an RN on a critical care floor. I don’t get much downtime, and I can’t listen to headphones because I need to hear ventilator/tele alarms, but I still listen to Japanese music on my way home and when I go to sleep. My concentration isn’t the best on those weekends, so instead of learning new kanji, I make sure I watch anime and relax before work. Occasionally, if I do happen to get some downtime at work, I try to review old (already-learned) kanji.

Besides those 12-hour weekends, I also work as a graduate assistant 20 hours a week. At that job, I listen to Japanese music while working; if I have downtime I visit Japanese websites and review my kanji.

Other than when I’m working at the hospital, I try to learn 25 or more new kanji a day — sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on how I feel. My kanji time is time I take out for myself, so maybe that’s why I enjoy it. It’s also fun because learning Japanese gives me an excuse to play games and watch cartoons.

I still have a long way to go, but this is so much more fun than when I learned Spanish in high school (which I don’t remember at all by the way)! I never thought learning a language could be so much fun…it almost makes me feel like I’m not doing something right…Oh, well…I will keep learning and having fun. Thanks so much for this site and your inspiration. When I finish learning the kanji I’ll email you to let you know how I am doing .

Koffegirl

So much fun that you feel guilty. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

[勝]元先輩、[Khatzumoto-sempai]

Maybe it’s that I finally found some really chill Japanese music that fits my taste (I’ve been aching for something besides upbeat pop), or maybe I’m in new-blog-post afterglow, but I’m about to write some sappy thank-yous along with a short life story, both of which I’m sure you get a lot, but I have no idea if you like or dislike. Can’t help it, it’s coming.

I’ve finally figured out this AJATT thing — specifically the “how it teaches you Japanese” part. A little late, I know. I’m coming up on a year since I found your website, skeptically examined articles here and there, thinking how full of [%&#!] this guy was — probably because deep down I really didn’t want to have to do so much for Japanese. But I warmed up to the idea. I made sure my music listening was in “This is almost done” mode as I approached the end of RTK (I took that advice immediately and put off immersion, I couldn’t do it so fast). All of that motivational material just marinated in my brain. People around me noticed a difference.

But I’m an engineer, [Khatz]. I’ve been trained to “figure out” and “understand”. I thrive on that desire to understand and the energy it produces. So when I started sentences, I was constantly struggling to “get it”. I think I went through three separate weeks where I proclaimed I understood the basic particles. They just slid off of me, and I’d do it again, “That’s RIGHT, に is for contexts and を is for targets and blahblahblah”.

I understood the input hypothesis, but I didn’t understand the implications, specifically on our biology. I figured that was just “We learn better by seeing examples than by trying to use grammar to produce sentences” — but that’s only half way there. I’m realizing that we learn better by seeing examples and not attempting to understand them.

The vast amounts of language learning power in our brain get to take over uninhibited at that point, and by forcing myself to take the role of the observer while that happens, I’m experiencing some very interesting things. Everything has a feeling. It feels right or it feels wrong. You’ve said this before, I’ve read it all, it just never clicked. I never stopped thinking, and that was a really big problem.

But all of that energy was just GONE. I was really down about all of this. But I kept going forward (vector normalization is a wonderful motivator). I set a minimum “new sentences” goal of 5 per day, which I never even approached, because every time it was starting to get late or I was busy with other things, I thought “Just read until you have 5,” and by the time I actually stopped I had more like 15. It wasn’t like before though, there was just no excitement, no “I must figure this out,” nothing — but after about two weeks of that, I started to realize that I was enjoying myself again just on a more general level. It wasn’t directed, and that’s why I liked it.

Japanese is now one of the only things in my life that isn’t directed in some way by logic and higher brain functions. It’s now a self-sustaining reaction producing pure spiral energy, and I was suddenly hitting more 30-35 card days, and now I hit spring break and I’ve had four 60+ card days, and the reviews are getting just silly-large, but I just keep going, and I love it. I love it so much.

Thank you. Thank you so much for running the blog, for cracking a whip on Twitter, for not keeping your methodology hidden and safe so your skills stay super-valuable (if this ever hits mainstream, sorry [Khatz], your days of “wow, that guy’s good” are toast). This entire endeavor has had a profoundly positive influence on my life. Thank you.

A most sincerely thankful

Drewskie

Khatzumoto,

I just wanted to write and say thanks for offering easy access to such an effective method for Japanese language acquisition, not to mention all the great motivation.

I know. That Khatzumoto guy is just awesome.

I began using your method last July.  It is now September 1st, a little over one year since I began, and I can now read all the jyoyo kanji, plus a few extras (around 2,050 in total).  A year ago, I had trouble comprehending almost anything with kanji in it, and I am now able to read newspaper articles, books on subjects ranging from relativity to Japanese history and volume upon volume of manga (Naruto fan).

I coupled your ideas with a program called Kanji Odyssey.  The program basically lists all the jyoyo kanji, along with all the given readings for a given kanji, as well as the most commonly used vocabulary found in Japanese printed forms (e.g. books, newspapers, magazines) for each kanji.  On top of this, example sentences are also given.  Needless to say, it was a lot of work to input all of this into Mnemosyne (my SRS of choice), and there were times when I questioned whether or not I could truly retain such a large volume of information, but the outcome was well worth the effort.  I also took it upon myself to dispense with conventional textbooks, as you suggest, and instead seek out lists of grammar points, especially those necessary for the JLPT.  I then used such lists to scour the internet and online Japanese grammar dictionaries for sentences containing each grammar form, inputting them into a seperate file for study.  Again, the power of combining the living form of the Japanese language with an SRS, especially for this kind of targeted study, surprised me.  My grammar acquisition proved to be quite rapid.  It’s so strange; your mind simply begins to adapt itself to a certain way of thinking after seeing grammar repeatedly used in context, regardless of whether or not you have a concrete explanation in your primary language. Actually, when inputting the grammar points, I only listed explanations of the points in Japanese, which really seemed to help me get a better grasp of each form, even if it did take some time for my mind to adjust.

Of course, I also began to exclusively listen to Japanese music (eerie how quickly it can grow on you) and watch movies in Japanese.  Watching movies in Japanese is such a great way to take a break from your studying, without actually ever leaving it behind.  It also has the added benefit of making crappy acting almost unnoticeable.  At the beginning, I couldn’t understand much of what was being said, but, after sticking to a strategy of always having some movies on hand for my downtime, meaning around two hours of Japanese listening practice a day, besides what I was getting at work, I can now watch a movie in Japanese without much of a problem, only occasionally turning on Japanese subtitles to check what I heard.

Oh, and Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” proved to be an incredibly effective way to learn how to write the kanji.  Thanks for the recommendation.  It’s fun being able to take a quick glance at a compound like 薔薇 and be able to reproduce it with ease.

Perhaps I should have prefaced this with the fact that I’ve lived in Japan for three years now, and during the first two years my Japanese was deplorable.  I could understand hiragana and katakana, but, before hitting on this method, the language seemed a bit too overwhelming, and learning it to fluency somewhat of a foolish enterprise, unless I was willing to spend a good five or six years earnestly studying it. I could conduct only the most basic of conversations with my co-workers, whereas now I can have heated debates about anything from politics to science to whaling (touchy subject).  Anyway, in short, my Japanese sucked and now it doesn’t, thanks to your method.

I think I now understand why you offer so much motivation on your website.  While it is true that the method can be a lot of fun, the learning curve for Japanese, due in large part to kanji, seems a bit higher than most Western languages, and it can be frustrating, even if you feel you are making progress.  Sometimes you just want to pick up a book and read the damn thing, but you only know the readings for, say, 837 kanji, making it almost impossible, or at least very tedious, to even look up certain words.  It can really demoralize you at times, but, if you can keep your goal in mind and not lose hope, you’ll take more notice of your progress, rather than what you have yet to achieve, and I think that might be key; the encouragement and positive attitude you foster is indispensable.

Again, thanks for putting in the time and effort to make all this information available.  I wouldn’t have learned Japanese without it.

Victor Brunell
Tokushima Prefecture

[P.S.] I just wanted to send along a quick update. I received my results for the July 2009 JLPT 2級 today and have passed with a score of 77% (309/400).

文字 – 語彙　９１／１００
聴解　７４／１００
読解 – 文法　１４４／２００

Thank you, Victor, for good looks and awesomeness.

And now it’s your turn. When are you going to start living (and sharing) your success story, oh fellow AJATTeer? It’s got to start someplace; it’s got to start sometime; what better place than here? What better time than 今?

I’ve been using your methods for the past year and a half to learn Japanese, and have been for the past semester at law school. I’m the only student in the school who knows what an SRS is (I tried to inform a few close friends, but you know, people don’t like trying new things). Anyway, thanks for the great information, and keep up the great site. What you write does make a difference, so keep it up.

I mean, who wouldn’t have praise for Khatzumoto? Who? Who dare not…
OK, end of ego trip. But, that’s not even the coolest part of AdShap’s personal account. This is:

The SRS is amazing for law school. I had my doubts at first, but after the first semester it gave me top scores. While everyone scrambled towards the end of the semester spending countless hours cramming (cramming for law school exams usually takes place a week or 2 before exams, so maybe cramming is the wrong word), all I had to do was continue my reps and do some practice exams. Watching people create 100s of index cards by hand the week before just seemed like such a waste.

The thing about law school is that you will actually be using the information you learned after you graduate, but most of these people have already forgotten what they learned the past semester, while I have it strongly fixed in my mind as I go into the second semester. Also, since most courses build on each other, I have a serious advantage going into the next semester.

Yea, I start to realize that the less people that use an SRS, the more it makes the people who are using it succeed and look better. If everyone was using an SRS it was just increase competition, so I definitely don’t go around telling people about it.

I never once had to work all night, cram, lose sleep, or over-stress. As long as I kept up with my SRS at a normal pace every day I was fine. It mentally made me feel strong knowing I had such a powerful tool. Of course it worked for me in studying Japanese (I’m up to about 10,100 self-created cards and building) but I had my fears that it wouldn’t work in law school because professors like to say “don’t bother memorizing stuff: it won’t help you succeed in law school.” Shows how little they know! How can you apply what you learn if you don’t firmly know it first?

My first semester I had a writing course which unfortunately I couldn’t use it for since it was just for improving your writing skills. But the other 2 main courses I had, I ended up with about 2600 cards for the semester. This semester I have 4 normal classes in addition to the writing course, so I may end up around 5-6k cards this time around.

I noticed that with all the SRSing you really have to exercise your hands and body. I started to develop a little tendinitis before realizing this.

I use the Anki SRS system and have to say I love it. I think you mentioned you’ve used that as well on your site.

Anyway, good luck with your continuing Cantonese studying and your blog.

AdShap’s story got me thinking about this discussion on the SuperMemo website, on the issue of data vs. information vs. knowledge vs. wisdom. The author makes a very convincing case for the value of memorization and the dishonesty of the current “we don’t test rote memorization, we test reasoning” fad that’s got its fingers stuck in all the orifices of schooling in America and many other countries. That the SuperMemo article used flight as a metaphor is quite pertinent in light of recent aviation events (thanks beneficii!).

Update: AdShap very kindly shares a sample of his SRS items.

Hello there Khatzumoto~ though I’ve only commented once on your blog (by the name of Kaba), AJATT has almost taken over my life.  It literally will when I quit my English-heavy preschool teaching job in August [Khatzunote-o: this was written back in June].  Anyway, my story mostly consists of how I found success through any little thing I could find to motivate myself.

Working my way through Heisig seemed as natural and ordinary as it could’ve been. There were two main sources of motivation in this stage:
1. Bragging family and friends’ ears off about my progress (“I was at 1200 last week, and now I’m at 1550,” for example.  I became a little too happy with the “wow”s and such). I’m just not too sure what to say about how this bragging business involves English-speaking. Anyhoo…
2. Recording this progress on a calendar. Each day, whatever kanji number I was at was written on the respective calendar day.  If Tuesday’s number on the calendar was the same as Monday’s, I’d become ashamed and make sure such a thing wouldn’t repeat itself.  Seeing the difference in numbers between each day was a nice concrete form of motivation.  Also, setting a “last day of Heisig” date was effective since I was always trying to see how many days or weeks before the date I could finish, just to be extra proud of myself and all.  Almost each day I would surpass my daily average amount of kanji, just so I could happily watch my deadline move up.

Now, in the sentence stage, I’m using pretty much the same forms of motivation.

The Kanji Poster: This combines both physical evidence of progress and the ability to show off (though more humbly this time).  Here is what I do: Each time I learn a new kanji reading I write the kanji down on an index card.  By the end of the week, the card is filled with kanji that I am now able to fill in with a red marker on the kanji poster.  Once the whole poster is red, I will have accomplished my goal.  This definitely brings on determination to learn more readings, and anyone who passes through my room is bound to say, “Hey, your poster there is lookin’ pretty red if I do say so myself ;)”  Take a picture of your reddening (or greenening or purpling) kanji poster each week and you’ll truly see your progress.

It’s fun to watch them merge into large blobs of blushing kanji.

My last key to my success is entirely different, and something I just recently started.  I’ve found that swapping emails with a native Japanese speaker does wonders for reading comprehension, knowledge of readings and all the other abilities that seem to appear magically.  And, it puts the pressure on you to truly make an attempt understand what’s being said.  It’s easy to give up when there isn’t another party on the other end waiting for your response, but when you know you can’t leave the other guy hanging, there’s an automatic need to respond with something related to the kanji after kanji of email that was sent to you (and if you’re typing in Japanese, ask for your native speaker friend to correct your mistakes).  I’ve exchanged about 20 emails so far and now I find myself speed-reading even furigana-less manga…

Working full time has bought me some nice media to pull sentences from, but it has me on a slow pace. My “stats” are as follows: 560 sentences in 2 months, 200 of which were done on my one week vacation.  So guess what? Bye bye job

To sum it up, my success is muchly due to shameless bragging, concrete evidence of progress, and situations where one must must must understand the Japanese that’s laid out in front of one’s face (and plenty of time away from other obligations).  Whatever bit of motivation you can find with undoubtedly lead to results, which will, in return, lead to motivation once again, and it repeats over and over from there.  Obviously there’s the constant audio-visual immersion as well, but what else can I say that Khatz hasn’t about that?

That’s her story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Ask, and you shall receive!

Khatzumoto,

A (partial) success story, 為了提高別人的士氣! Though as applied to Mandarin rather than Japanese.

I’ve been studying Mandarin for a long time. Well…’studying’ belongs in parentheses, I think. Huge amounts of time were lost due to procrastination, poor study methods, and simple disinterest. I started my language study the way a lot of people do: listen to language tapes or podcasts a half hour or an hour a day, practice writing a few characters every now and then, then set the language aside until tomorrow while I go off to play an English language game or watch an English language movie. ‘Language learning as daily chore’ about sums it up, and the result was I treated it precisely like I treat most chores:  put it off as long as possible and feel relief when it’s finally out of the way. A missed day wasn’t a rarity at all, and by the time I finished the third and final set of Pimsleur Mandarin CDs my Mandarin was still awful.

So I devoted more time. I bumped up the number of ChinesePod podcasts I listened to a day. I set aside two hours every night to studying characters (Heisig-less character study, which meant I found myself studying the same characters again more than a few times). I amassed gigantic piles of hanzi flashcards. Still, I felt something close to despair whenever I looked at a Chinese Wikipedia page. There seemed to be simply so much there that learning the language to any kind of fluency in any reasonable time frame would be impossible. I found myself on the verge of just abandoning the whole idea and taking on an ‘easy’ western language more than once. A westerner, learning Mandarin to fluency? Reading the two billion and one characters necessary for fluency just like a native? Saying a long sentence and hitting every tone right? Pfftt. The whole idea was hubris from the start.

A funny thing happened while I was browsing the forums at ‘How to Learn Any Language’, however. Someone put up a link to your web site, asking for opinions. At that time, I knew next to nothing about Japanese and had no intention of ever studying it, but I checked out the web site out of curiosity. I was more than a little skeptical about the claims (18 months to fluency? Who does he think he’s fooling?), but the more articles I read, the more excited about the whole concept I became. Even if the results weren’t true, my methods at the time were going nowhere. Besides, it isn’t like constant exposure could hurt my language ability. So I filled up my iPod with Mandarin language music and podcasts, ditched anything in English, and off I went.

At first, I have to admit maintaining the environment was tough for me. The siren call of English language YouTube had a bad tendency to lure me off the path, in those moments when the longing for words I could understand was particularly strong. The method itself is also a bit rougher for Mandarin, given that you have to learn thousands of more hanzi than the student of Japanese, and without a ready-made Heisig book to guide you step by step. I had to use the Heisig method for myself, starting from scrap and making up my own stories and keywords as I went using the character tree at zhongwen.com and a couple of character dictionaries I had lying around the house.

Nevertheless, the logic of the method becomes extremely obvious the farther you go. I used to wonder what possible use it could be to constantly listen to things in a language when you haven’t learned any of the words you’re hearing yet. The answer now is clear: you get used to it. Even when you don’t understand every word, the mind begins to accept these strange sounds you’re hearing day in and day out. They stop being foreign and start becoming the simple background of everyday life.

The greatest problem I once faced in Mandarin was that my mind kind of….rejected the words. Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. Every word had to be painstakingly drilled in order for it to stay there, and often ended up being forgotten anyway. It was like the immune system of the mind would leap on the new, obviously-not-English word like a foreign bacteria and chew it to pieces before it ever had a chance to stay in my long-term memory. Why couldn’t my mind simply accept a new Chinese word with the same ease it accepts new English words?

Because (of course) Chinese was an hour or so a day, not much more. As soon as conceivably possible, the mind must learn to treat the language as an old friend to be welcomed rather than a foreign intruder to be expunged. And the only way to make this happen is…wait for it….constant exposure to the target language.

Though it took me awhile to fully embrace the idea (I used to tag the English definition to every word I added to the SRS, worried that I would misunderstand if I stuck purely to Chinese), the monolingual dictionary is also an immeasurable help. Using one, you begin to understand two things:

1) There is a whole lot to learn. Much more than anyone can reasonably expect to pick up taking a language class a few hours a week. Learning a language to fluency simply cannot be a part-time project; there are a lot of objects and concepts in the word, a very large proportion of which must be mastered if you want to be fluent, so you must be able to approach it with passion for long periods of time. And, in order to do that, you must enjoy studying it. Anyone who views language learning as a matter of ‘willpower’ is taking the wrong view; you must find yourself in a position, as I have on occasion, where you are stuck doing something that isn’t in Chinese for a few hours and really wanting to go back and do a few more sentences/watch another Mandarin movie/play another Mandarin game. When you have to use willpower to avoid studying your language (because your boss at the Taiwanese 補習班 (cram school) doesn’t approve of the English teacher speaking in Mandarin all day, for example), you’ll know you’re on the right track.

2) There isn’t really all that much to learn. Yes, a paradox, but a good one. Put simply, the more words you pick out from the monolingual dictionary, the more you see the same words cropping up over and over. A language is like a jigsaw puzzle; at first, you don’t even know where to begin, but as each piece/word/grammar idea drops into place, the whole becomes more and more obvious and easier to understand. Always keep in mind as you go that this is not an unending road; so long as you keep adding sentences to your SRS, there will eventually come a day when you stumble across a long, intricate definition and find you understand every word of it. How soon that day comes depends on how high you manage to keep your enthusiasm, and how high you keep your enthusiasm depends on how much you enjoy what you are doing.

Today, I live in Taichung, Taiwan. I’m not yet fluent, by any means, but getting closer every day. I have my characters and sentences separated into two Anki decks: the former is now up to 3500 characters and the latter up to 3000 sentences. Ripped audio from the Mandarin dubbed versions of The Incredibles (超人特攻隊), Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫, but to me it’s 魔法公主), alongside any number of songs and Taiwanese TV shows. When I find myself delayed, I always have a Mandarin book or 漫畫 handy (presently sentence-mining my way through Animal Farm; 所有動物生來平等，但有些動物比其他動物更平等!). When I get the chance, I end up playing the Mandarin version of Civilization IV (文明帝國四).*

Everyday conversation is rarely a problem. English speakers who have been here for years typically turn to me to translate Chinese characters for them. My computer uses a Traditional Chinese version of windows, which becomes easier to use by the day. I cannot yet hold a meaningful debate on particle physics, perhaps, but…eh, I can’t in English either.

What is my chief difficulty now? Containing my anxiousness to start Japanese. I never intended to study it before, but constant exposure to AJATT, KanjiClinic, Heisig, etc. has had an effect. I have learned to stop worrying and love the knji, and besides, it will feel good to finally know how all those little squiggly ‘hiragana’ things I keep seeing are pronounced.

* Antimoon mentions playing adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island in English, and if you’re studying Chinese, I cannot recommend enough picking up this game. Not only will you be bombarded with new vocabulary, complete with lots of helpful pictures, but it comes with it’s own internal 中文 encyclopedia for you to check that vocabulary as you play. I usually turn off the music and listen to a Mandarin movie soundtrack. Just wonderful in every way. Skip the expansions, though; no 中文 versions available.

That’s his story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people — including me — and you’ll save me some writing!

For your happy perusal, here’s a success story from a reader who goes by her Chinese name, Plum Ocean —  I mean, 李洋. Here are her words, digitally remastered in super ultra high definition wide screen Dolby 10.2 digital surround text:

Dear Khatzumoto,

I really want to thank you for writing your blog! [Khatzumoto: Yeah!] I have found so much success through your methods [Khatzumoto: Yeah!]. This isn’t really a success story as much as it is a thank you email [Khatzumoto: Yeah!].

I started learning Japanese in September of 2007 after reading your blog. It really encouraged me that even though there are no lessons around my area, I can learn Japanese. Soon I would find that the methods are much more effective than any text book, class, or listening CD anyone could find. The difficult part of this method is ignoring what everyone else thinks about your progress, and continuing on with doing what you’re doing. I really faced a lack of confidence after talking with a professor of Japanese. I was only a few months into learning Japanese when I told him about your method. He immediately shut down the method [Khatzumoto: Boooooo!], and told me he doesn’t think the way I’m going about learning Japanese is an effective way. He told me to wait for college to really start learning Japanese, rather than going about it in such a difficult matter. He warned me that because I’m learning Japanese from media, I’ll be learning random things, rather than what I’d be learning in a structured text book. Immediately, his comment made me forget about the progress I was making. After a few weeks, I was able to get my confidence up again, and to continue on with your method. I decided not to go to the college this professor was apart of because of his egotism, and because of how he shut me down. I started seeing more success. The more I was immersed into the language, the more I was able to hear the things I’ve learned in the dramas and movies I watch, and in the songs I listen to. The language was no longer a blur to me. I was able to type down the things I heard in Japanese, and study from what I took down. I was able to repeat the sentences I heard, but have never learned before, with correct pronunciation. Learning to read hiragana, and katakana was the easiest thing for me, I had already gotten that down the first few days of learning Japanese. The kanji came the more, and more I would read Japanese. I didn’t start using an SRS, mainly because I didn’t understand how to, until just recently. The SRS has really helped me study Japanese. Especially now, since I’m learning how to write. I regret not studying how to write the language early on. Mainly the reason was because I was to lazy, and would rather type Japanese. I use the SRS to help train me to listen to music I know, and to write down the lyrics while listening to it. I also use it to learn sentences, and grammar. I’ve decided from now on to write down any Japanese I see to help practice my writing skills. Even though I can recognize, and type the characters, when writing, it’s like I never had learned them, which is why I’m focusing on it now. Along the road of learning Japanese, I met a guy who is from Japan who helps me out. He has especially been a help with my grammar, and he corrects my sentences for me, so that I can put them in my SRS and learn from my mistakes. The SRS really makes it so I remember the corrections, so that I can avoid the mistakes in the future.

Now, the success. I would’ve never imagined being able to understand a song in Japanese, or a TV show in Japanese, but now, I am able to do these things. I write a blog on a Japanese hosted server, and in the beginning of the blog it was only in English, but now with every post I write more, and more of what I write is being translated into Japanese. One day, I hope to be able to express everything I write for my blog in Japanese. The guy I met from Japan corrects the Japanese I write on my blog so that I can learn from my mistakes. Recently, I have made a big step in my road of learning Japanese. My friend who lives in America, but used to live in Hong Kong, introduced me to a friend of hers from Hong Kong. Even though he speaks Cantonese, and I speak English, he’s been learning Japanese on his own for a long time, and we were able to become friends through speaking Japanese to each other. When I first attempted having an instant message conversation with someone in Japanese with someone who didn’t speak English well, but knows Japanese, I failed miserably. I was so embarrassed, because they couldn’t understand anything I was saying. However, now, I can hold conversations with people in Japanese. I’m very happy about this. The reasons why I want to learn Japanese is because I love Japanese culture, and I want to move to Japan to teach English. However, if you strip down my reasons to the bone, it is revealed that my real reason is because I want to connect with other people, and form new friendships I would’ve never been able to form if I didn’t speak their language. Making friends with this guy through speaking Japanese has been a success story for me, because I am starting to reach my goal (^-^). The whole reason why I’m learning Japanese is coming true. My Japanese learning road will never have an end. Continuously, I will meet successes, which will make walking on this road worth it. Successes like making new friends through speaking Japanese, becoming a really great teacher in Japan, falling in love in Japan, raising a child in Japan. These dreams are dear to my heart.

I have taken four years of French in high school. When I compare my progress in Japanese to the progress I had in French, there are many differences. I wasn’t able to reach my goal of making friends with a person through speaking French until the latter part of French IV, because I couldn’t hold a conversation until my fourth year of French. While for Japanese, it hasn’t even been a year, and I have made a friend through speaking the language, because I can already hold a conversation in Japanese. It took me four years to be able to listen to a French song, or movie, and sort of get an idea of what is going on, and I am already at that level with Japanese. When listening to French, it is still a blur to me. I can’t repeat every word I hear of it, yet in Japanese, I am able to. To me, it has been proven that your method is way more effective than structured classes because of my experience through learning a language through both methods. I’m not taking French next year, I will have to study it on my own now. The challenging part will be reversing all the methods I’ve been taught in class, and applying the methods I’ve learned through your blog.

Recently, I’ve started learning Mandarin. I know it isn’t good to focus on too many languages at one time, but to me, Japanese, and Mandarin are equally important. French is just a thing I’m keeping up with so that I can hold onto the friendships I’ve made through speaking French. I’m in love with Japanese. I really love learning it, and learning it is essential to go for my dreams of becoming a teacher in Japan. Mandarin has recently become something important to me because I sponsor a girl in China who is around my age. I want to learn Mandarin for her. The English I write to her is translated, but she gets both copies of the letter. When I write Mandarin to her, she is really happy. One day I hope we meet, and I want to be able to speak with her in Mandarin. So far, her English is much better than my Mandarin, but even so, I want to speak with her in her language. The friendship we have has made learning Mandarin important to me, even as important as learning Japanese. A plus to learning Mandarin is I also love to watch Taiwanese dramas.

I started learning Mandarin February of 2008. It has been five months, and seeing my progress reminds me of the progress I had in Japanese. Starting to learn Mandarin was the hardest part. Thankfully, I had my best friend who is from Mainland China who speaks Mandarin as a second language, and Cantonese as a first. She introduced me to pinyin, and taught me how to read it correctly. At first, I was embarrassed to speak Mandarin, because I feared not getting the tones right. Now, I am getting better at pronouncing it without having someone tell me how to first. Even though I learned the kanji in Japanese, I still have to learn a whole new character set, because I am learning simplified Chinese on top of Traditional Chinese (which has more characters than Japanese to begin with). From the beginning I was able to listen to Mandarin, and repeat exactly what I hear. My friend told me that I am amazing at learning languages because I have this skill. I think I only have it because I was taught how to listen through your method. That was very helpful in the beginning. What came later was remembering what I had repeated. Learning to read pinyin, oppose to the other method where numbers are used, has helped me tremendously to remember pronunciation. My progress has been very similar to my progress in Japanese. At first came being able to remember sentences. Now, I am at a point where I’m listening to dramas and songs, and hearing what I have learned in what I’m listening to. I find it amazing, because I am able to sing along with songs sooner than when I was able to in Japanese. I pick up lines more easily. Luckily, all the dramas in Mandarin have Chinese subtitles, so that helps me learn faster. Seeing the parallels in my progress with Japanese, and Mandarin really encourages me, because I now if I keep going, my Mandarin will improve to a point of being able to hold a conversation. At first, learning sentences from passages that were taken from things that don’t have a sound sample was hard for me. However, I have found that writing down everything I see while doing my SRS sentences helps me to remember the feeling of each word in that sentence, and to connect them together to form what concept the sentence is getting across. Now, my friend who was helping me is moving to another town, and she won’t be able to help me with pronunciation like she used to. I’m on my own. However, I’ll be okay. I’ll keep to the methods I’ve learned, and make sure to always get more input before outputting.

Because your blog encouraged me to learn Japanese, I am set free from needing a college that teaches it. When searching for colleges, my major disappointment was not being able to go to the college of my dreams, because it doesn’t have Japanese as a major. Now I am able to go to that college, because I am learning the language on my own! Your blog has made a major impact on my life. Thank you so much (^-^). I hope my long email hasn’t been tiring for you to read.

That’s her story . If you’ve had success with the methods discussed on this website, please email me about it! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Khatzumoto,

I wanted to contribute my story to the success stories page. I have been using your site and method for about 8 months now and absolutely love it, and figure I should contribute something. It’s kind of long so if you have to cut it that’s okay. Thanks for everything,

Here goes;

Part 1: Faulty Methods

I started studying Japanese during my last semester of college. They only had Japanese level 2 available so I lied to get in and said I studied elsewhere and that I would be able to catch up fine. (I was able to do this in about 2 weeks after studying hard) but this shows how ineffective college Japanese really is.)

I really wanted to improve my Japanese so I figured the best way was to study in Japan. Since I had no money, the only option was to go as an English teacher. So I moved to Japan shortly after I graduated, and ran into something that shocked me. No English teacher could seem to speak more than a few words of Japanese – maybe some important phrases, etc. And when they did speak a little, they sounded awful. It really made me worried, and think that it must be impossible [to learn Japanese]. I started to meet some of these teachers that had been living in Japan for 3, 5, 10, 15 years, were married to Japanese women, had children, and still had no Japanese ability at all. I decided I was not going to let this happen and I would never let myself fall into such a pathetic situation like this.

I cut off all my contact with the other teachers (spent all of my time at work studying when I had free time), made Japanese friends and worked my hardest to really improve my Japanese. My first year went great and I really felt I was way above any other foreigners I met. I was studying my ass off. I was probably putting in about 5 hours a day, which seemed like a lot at the time (though with my Japanese environment now it pales in comparison). However I was using so many faulty ways of studying that just didn’t work and it caused a lot of my great effort to be wasted.

A few methods I wish I had never used:

1) Using massive amounts of textbooks. I did get through them all. But after doing all the lame fill in the blanks, reading comprehensions, kanji exercises, etc. by the time I finished I had retained only about 15-20% of it. They were mostly incredibly boring so I never wanted to go back and review them. So I’d just go to the next textbook and continue this cycle. Textbooks are boring, no matter how many you do, your progress will be slow and they will never really help you get through to the real fluency.

2) Listening CDs. God, never use these. But Khatzumoto touches on this.

3) Listening to Japanese try to explain their language in English to me. There are some good English speakers living in Japan, but they are absolutely terrible at explaining their language. They give the wrong meanings, translate badly, and try to force their methods on you. I remember two examples. I was told ってか means `by the way` and that I should always use 僕 in all situations polite or impolite. You should’ve seen me try to start sentences with ってか and how wrong I sounded.

4) Language exchanges; Nothing but Japanese people trying to get as much English out of you, and hope that you really don’t have an interest enough in Japanese past a few phrases.

5) Japanese-English dictionary; Always Japanese to English never once Japanese to Japanese.

6) Dating a Japanese girl who was dead set on being an English master. This just lead to unending conflicts and a breakup.

Part 2: More Faulty Methods

Year 2, I finally started to realize that I had to get my hands on more Japanese materials and real stuff. However, I found new faulty methods:

1) Watching Japanese dramas and anime with English subtitles. This accomplished nothing.

2) Reading books, but every time I found a word I didn’t know, I’d look it up in English and then actually write the English word in the book. It took me forever to read books, was boring, and I never ended up looking at those words again.

3) Not worrying about mistakes at all, and thinking that Japanese people would correct my mistakes if I made them. This just caused unending mistakes that never got corrected.

4) I gave up writing kanji and figured I would never need to write them out so what was the point of studying the writing.

Part 3: All Japanese All The Time

In my 3rd year, I finally started to realize things on my own, before I reached the AJATT site, that coincide with it perfectly. I stopped using subtitles for TV dramas, started putting dramas on my iPod and just listening to them over and over. I also started reading straight without relying too much on a dictionary.

I felt like I put more time then anyone else into studying, yet I still wasn’t seeing the results I felt I deserved. I was understanding dramas and books but not to the level I wanted. Newspapers were still way over my head. I starting feeling as though this was as far as I or anyone could get. A decent understanding of Japanese but never really truly understanding it or feeling natural with it.

And then (*drumroll*) I stumbled across this website around November of 2007. At first I thought this guy Khatzumoto was just bulls****ing around not knowing what he was talking about. But as I started to read more of his articles I became intrigued and figure I would give the SRS system he talked about a try. I also started to use the listening environment he talked about (which I was already developing as well, but not to the extent he had recommended). I started listening to Japanese 24/7 (though I’ll admit I still can’t do it in my sleep — it gives me a headache), and I put in about 1000 sentences in Anki (though I also like Khatzumoto’s as well, but my internet connection wasn’t so great).

And immediately I was hooked. My level skyrocketed from doing these sentences (I started right off with Japanese to Japanese since my level was fairly good). I immediately decided that if this one thing was so good I wanted to go the whole way. I found out about the advice to do the Heisig method as well first (Which I always thought was the worst way to study Japanese), and after hesitation I finished the Heisig in SRS after about a month and a half. My level once again jumped up to new heights. I read through every article on the website (more than once) and it gave me incredible inspiration and ideas that I was so happy to finally found. Now, I’m up to about 6000 sentences, still doing the reviews of the kanji, and have reached new levels I never thought possible. I’m still going for the goal of 10,000 sentences (higher of course is the real goal). I get through about 30 new sentences a day now. I understand Japanese dramas and news and books really, really well, and am starting to feel more like a native speaker. I can read tons of kanji that Japanese can’t. I’ve listened to IWGP (Ikebukuro West Gate Park) about 200 times. I love Japanese and am so thankful to find this great site. I’m finally leaving Japan next month where I’m returning to study international business law in law school and hopefully will be able to continue to make use of my Japanese.

I wish everyone the best of luck. Have fun, don’t let other people get you down, remember your goals and use good methods.

Adam

That’s his story. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Email it to me! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

To start with, I’d like to express my displeasure with classes. The only thing that I gained from my two years of Japanese at college is that it would take me 10+ years to get good at it if I continued on that path. The professors’ grasp of English was equally saddening, as clearly whatever methods they used to learn it were not very good. “If these people are what I’m going to sound like in Japanese, I’m in trouble,” I thought.

I picked up the pieces from my last attempt at Heisig and began searching around for the methods people used to learn Japanese to a fluent level. On a newsgroup I found a link to Khatzumoto’s website and was stunned at how quickly he was able to learn Japanese. I found out what an SRS is and if that was the only thing I found out I was already doing great, because that meant I was able to pitch 800+ cards that were already done up for Heisig’s system (pain in the butt, right there). My two months with that SRS before going into the sentences phase showed me that an SRS really can work for securing long-term memory.

At that point, I went AJATT. Goodbye friends, non-Japanese websites, all the things I used to love. “Headphones up, drown out the English,” was my motto for those last couple of months at school. I began working through Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar, mining sentences in concert with reading a bit from my Japanese textbooks from school (Genki I, II).

At the same time I picked up Death Note and starting mining sentences from that. Talk about repetition! 犯罪者 this, 死因 that, and some 病死 added for good measure. Amusingly for the first month I did it wrong and translated from Japanese to English. Amusing, I know. Also lead to extreme despair for the next couple of weeks as I fixed the sentences.

Anyways, I kept reading on there about “monodics” and thought “man, I’m only two months into this, can’t do it.” Instead of admit defeat however, I just started using Sanseidou for everything. It was tough, but not impossible to understand things and it did take a while. At the beginning it was perhaps 2-3 sentences per day (with maybe 3-4 hours available) with the monodic, which is hard to rationalize against the many more that I could be learning with a bilingual dictionary (bidic?), but the more I used the monodic the more it rewarded me with vocabulary seen over and over. Now on a good day spending about 8 hours working on sentences I’m able to put in 25-30 sentences using a combination of monodics (Sanseidou, Yahoo!, and Infoseek) to reliably check my understanding using different terminology.

(However, with the addition that the sentences should be the length you mentioned, this may balloon to more per day. I was doing sentences a wee bit bigger than that as an average for a while there…)

I still run into stuff over and over that I’m not able to decipher completely, sadly, but it’s just a matter of time. Using a monodic has given more perspective on how the language works and its incredible compact and condensed nature that kanji allows it to have. So… yeah. Right now I’m at 976 sentences, but I’m pretty confident that this is going to just get faster and faster the more sentences I put into my SRS. Just like how I was only able to put one sentence in per hour before and now it’s 3 or 4, pretty soon it’s going to be even more. The “back” sides of my cards are still friggin’ huge, however, what with the circular nature of definitions.

Right now I’m starting to read about the Japanese video game scene because they were a big reason for my interest in Japan (Pokemon, oh yeah! Dragon Warrior! Woo!). So, I’m picking up a lot of stuff that I already knew from one source or another about video games. Good ol’ Japanese Wikipedia has been my best source.

“Learning a language is not a linear process. The better you get, the easier it gets for you to get better. The more you know, the more you are able to learn. Knowledge, words, structure will get stickier ― but first you have to go through this sucky period, before the curve starts to shoot up.”

is also, like, such a great quote and so true.

Anyways, there’s where I’m at after three months of sentences.

以上。That’s his story. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Email it to me! I can put it up here and it’ll inspire other people, and you’ll save me some writing!

Understanding the News

This article is about how I learnt to understand the news.

I started by listening to the Yomiuri News Podcast and the Nihon Keizai Shinbun Podcast when ever I had a moment’s spare time. At first I understood close to nothing, maybe the odd word or two. However, the more I listened, the more I understood. As a result, I now have the confidence that I will understand it all first time.

What was particularly helpful was the reading TBS or Fuji News Network articles in the morning and then listening to news podcasts later in the day. Generally, they all report the same news so having that initial knowledge about a story helped astronomically in boosting my understanding.

What I also did was read articles/editorials/anything news-related and if there was a word/phrase I didn’t understand I would simply copy and paste into Mnemosyne/Surusu. This, to me, is the definition of sentence mining: harvesting any sentence that you would like to be able to say or want to understand.

This is really a simple process, but one that is essential to get the large amount of names of people/places/crimes/boats/buildings/etc. into your SRS and thus into your brain. I didn’t actually read many ‘newspapers’ as such — but I did read editorials and articles from online sources (much easier for SRS entry) and since these are practically the same as newspaper articles you will be able to understand real newspapers.

My typical day in the ‘news’ phase would be:

• Get up read listen to news online whilst having breakfast.
• Walk to uni whilst listening to news podcasts.
• If the lecture was boring, I would listen to news podcasts and try to write out what was said (or the headline) on the notes in front of me.
• Any free time during my day where I was alone, I read news articles online or listened to news podcasts.
• A lot of the time I would just walk around listening to news on my iPod and mimicking (albeit very quietly) the news reader.
• I tended to mix my focus on news with other Japanese studies such as books, magazines, Youtube videos — pretty much anything that was in Japanese.
  • The best thing about this was following a news story for weeks and seeing how it developed over time.

One thing I struggled with was understanding the headlines of news articles. Often they rely on Japanese people’s knowledge of kanji to decipher the meaning or simply are just words with no particles in between them.

As you learn more and more Japanese you will understand the incredible flexibility of Chinese characters and hence will become able to, as the Japanese do, to grasp the meaning simply from seeing the characters in the headline. To this end, knowledge of ALL 2000 odd characters is essential as they ALL appear in news no matter what internet forums/idiots may say about the lesser-used ones.

As Khatzumoto has recommended previously, using the FNN Video News would be a good place to start as the videos’ text is in the corresponding article on the main page. If you loop the video the same news articles repeat — thus giving you reinforcement of the content. I combined this with podcast listening.

In my opinion, the most important thing for the learner of Japanese is knowing all the general-use kanji. Everything stems from this. I can concretely say that if I had not done Heisig, I would have quit Japanese years ago. Anyone who has done the Heisig method will tell you it works perfectly and it is 100% worth doing.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of knowing ALL the kanji in general use; they are the foundation of Japanese and will provide a helicopter to the top of the mountain that is Japanese whilst everyone else falls by the wayside.

He’s right about the kanji, you know…