Comments on: Advice On How To Take Advice (Including Mine)

By: Ten Reasons Why Getting Used to Languages is Exactly Like Baking Cookies | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 01:37:15 +0000

[…] Advice On How To Take Advice (Including Mine) […]

By: Immersion: Go With The Best Bad Idea | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 03:00:12 +0000

[…] the fact that my email response rate is close to a perfect 0. Let’s ignore what I said about advice on how to take advice. Let’s even ignore the paradox of how I give advice that is at least apparently contradictory […]

By: The Importance of Input | Logos Adventures

The Importance of Input | Logos Adventures — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:26 +0000

[…] choose from different methods what works. I like what Khatz from All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) has to say about taking advice: 1. Listen to it and 2. Do whatever you want with it. So I encourage you to read about as many […]

By: Do whatever the heck is m… « IMPRO.VE

Do whatever the heck is m… « IMPRO.VE — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 09:33:54 +0000

[…] by Veronica Li Do whatever the heck is most comfortable, workable, sustainable for you. “Obey”, “disobey”, remix — it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, your unique life, preferences and situation are going to call for some degree of very unique, perhaps even counter-intuitive, choice-making. You’re the DJ. “Advice on How To Take Advice” by All Japanese All The Time. […]

By: Miss Language Learning

Miss Language Learning — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:33:34 +0000

It’s all well and good and I agree with you but at some point people need to listen to some amount of Japanese even if it takes them 15 freaking years to get 5,000 hours of exposure to the language.
There’s this teacher who told me that I should listen to 15 minutes of English/day to improve my listening comprehension. BTW, this teacher’s English sucks. He makes pronunciation mistakes and is generally not very good at the language. Surprising? I think not.

By: Japanese 24/7: AJATT Immersion Challenge | nihonamor

Japanese 24/7: AJATT Immersion Challenge | nihonamor — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:22:22 +0000

[…] is how long it took for him to become fluent). Now, of course, even Khatzumoto himself is all for taking any piece of advice with a grain of salt, which is exactly what I did while reading his […]

By: Lazy Kanji Cards: A New (?) SRS Card Format | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:44:31 +0000

[…] So, as you can see, another way of going about making it easy for yourself to succeed is simply to make it difficult to fail (that’s what a lot of the AJATT immersion advice is about…the core principle is to make Japanese an unignoreable part of your life…don’t hurt yourself trying to follow it…don’t get used by it…use it). […]

By: Emp

Emp — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 06:16:38 +0000

I once was outside a shop that literally was titled “Brilliant Schmuck.” (german speaking country, of course). I took a picture. It made me happy. x3 But I digress…

I never realized that people actually take it so literally. I’ve always been the sort to absorb the parts of advice I like or think are compatible with me, and jettison the rest. To outer space. Sometimes I’ll try out a bit more as homage for clever snarkiness. But at some level many (or all?) people are afraid of freedom because they worry they can’t handle it properly. That they will EPICPHAIL. Or something like that. I know we’re not supposed to be like that in this new enlightened age of empowerment, but even the people who would obediently conform to this can’t just up and do it, as that would be a paradox in their thinking. People like stability and certainty because they can leave it unattended without worrying that it’s gonna start something that may or may not be good. Or they can prepare for the outcome in advance. Anyway. Baby steps~

I have some advice for you. And I won’t hold it against you either if you mull over whether or not to take it. Go write for a newspaper column or something in your spare time. You have a flair for that lovely sort of blunt humor that makes people think, unless they really have their guards up and their minds as closed as possible. Even when I find myself ticking off disagreements I still read through to the end because it’s entertaining.

By: Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 6: Q&A | All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency.

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:26:53 +0000

[…] person; we all have a lot in common, but there is no “average” person. So don’t come here to take orders, come here to see a perspective and see how you’re going to use it. This is why people […]

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:16:51 +0000

Ironically, this is fantastic advice. It can be a hell of a struggle to break free of that regimented form of thinking if that’s what you’re used to. (Which I definitely am.)

But once you start dropping advice that is not working for you and using the advice that does work, something strange starts to happen. You often start discovering your own unique methods that work specifically for you.

It took an extraordinarily large amount of time for me to come upon this information on my own, so the fact that it’s now posted for all to see will probably help many who have the same problem.

By: Ari

Ari — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:28:23 +0000

You know what, screw you. I’m *not* going to follow the advice you give here. In fact, from now on, I’m going to do [i]exactly what you say[/i].

Starting with this post.

Wait a minute…

By: マイケル

マイケル — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:10:07 +0000

Advice is always given in context… with general advice, such as this blog, you must place it within your own context yourself.

By: ヒュー

ヒュー — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:32:08 +0000

Yay for recursive rants!

By: Jaybot7

Jaybot7 — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:17:07 +0000

Your advice sucks!

…But it’s great.

It may work for you, but it can’t work for me!

…But maybe if I tweak it just a little…

The best advice is FREE!

….Except the really good advice, you have to pay top dollar for that!

Neat article in any case 🙂

By: bubble

bubble — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:50:08 +0000

ke6i, the blah blah blah phase really sucks. All I can say is to fiddle around with your sources as much as you like… for me I liked watching things I had once seen with subtitles or read the book or something, so I knew what was going on. Also things that are very visual work well for me at that stage. And I find it works better not to sweat the words I don’t know, and just to enjoy the ones I do… until I head a word six times and still don’t get it. Then I look it up.

Also, khatz, for some reason the blog looks squished or decentered on my computer. Maybe it’s since the last firefox update? There’s a big beige empty space to the left, and a narrow little text box to the right. Looks fine in IE.

By: ke6i

ke6i — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:30:17 +0000

I’m pretty well-motivated, I think. But, maybe this is just me — I have a hard time with native audio. I spent 2008 listening to a lot of incomprehensible audio, but 2009, I switched to a mix of podcasts and other language learning CD’s combined with some incomprehensible audio, like anime or news. With something like anime, I’ll hear “blah blah word blah blah word blah blah blah” — and with something like Japanesepod intermediate I’ll hear “word word word blah word word word blah.” and I can learn the missing words from context or using a dictionary.

By: Kendo

Kendo — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:59:48 +0000

I think, a lot of what you might be percieving as people looking for minutiae is people reading your site, realizzing you’ve achieved something they want to achieve, and simply wanting to find the easiest, most efficient method for reaching that same achievement. I know I personally fit this category, with my own recent questions. Here I’ve tried dilegently and usually in a disciplined manner to try to learn Japanese for four years, several times getting discouraged and slacking off when I didn’t seem to be making any real progress. Then I find this website and here’s this dude that achieved what I want, fluency in Japanese, in 18 months, and he says he had fun doing it. So, as I begin to implement some of his ideas, I run into a couple areas that either seem inefficient, or aren’t fun, or just aren’t working for me. So, my thought isn’t so much to ask questions so I can follow your instructions to the letter, as it is that I figure you or someone who reads the site has probably encountered this before, and I’m wondering what sort of solutions they came up with, because I want to find the most efficient and fun means to go about things, in fact, need to find the most efficient means because of certain physical limitations which I discussed before.
I think you have a lot of great ideas, and I fully realized you got many or most of them from others. But, I also figure that if I have a problem, it is likely you or others have encountered it before and have some ideas to save me time. If it wasn’t clear, I mostly worked out those problems on my own, but simply took into consideration the ideas presented by others. I think sometimes you worry a little too much about people blindly following your advice, when they probably just don’t want to re-invent the wheel if someone else has already built a really good one.

By: Triplez

Triplez — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:36:30 +0000

This was a good post for me. I think I need to work on the ordering side of the relationship as much as the interpreting orders side. Because I spend so much time deconstructing things I’ve heard and read, I think the POV that I’ve built for myself is the best one, and forget that other people will be just as different as me. The way we tell other people things probably reflects our thought process just as much as the way we tell things to ourselves.

It seems to me that the best road is equal parts cynicism to reject things, and optimism to accept good things and stay excited and hungry for more information.

On a totally unrelated note, does anyone have and suggestions for Japanese SF books?

By: Eldon

Eldon — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:01:26 +0000

That wasn’t cyclical and self-referential at all :p

I do very much agree though with the idea of not following every last piece of advice to the letter, and am surprised every time anyone does. Seems pretty obvious that no-one is going to be dishing out advice that is perfect for everyone.

Everyone is a unavoidably a composition of everything and everyone around them, and it’s odd that they’d ever consider trying to take advice from just one source. It’d be a pretty weird world if they did.

By: nacest

nacest — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:57:09 +0000

1. Read it
2. Understand it
3. Forget it
4. Think of your own way to do things

If point 2 was successful, it will influence point 4 subconsciously, in some way.