Thanks for your reply! It is very encouraging to see someone that has kicked the habit, haha. I definitely love getting advice that tells me to think less. I have been trying to do that, and it is reassuring to know that I’m not being unproductive. Watching movies and hardly understanding anything is frustrating when I know if I just had the transcript I’d know almost every word! But I’ll make it – I suppose I just need to get hooked on a telenovela or two or fifty.

When I first started AJATT, I too had already learned quite a bit of the language the wrong way. What worked best for me was to do two things. The first was to read through text at “full-speed” without slowing down to understand. The second was to watch lots of TV/DVDs and try NOT to understand what was being said. Over time (a few months) all of my previous analyzing habits disappeared and I understood the material in that language rather than in English, without having to think about it.

As for outputing words you “know”, I think the brain requires far more exposure to a word to recall than it does to recognize. I like to think of it as a “Word Ownage” meter.

E[——————–]F – Have never seen the word
E[////—————–]F – Seen the word in a few contexts
E[//////—————]F – Seen the word in many contexts
E[///////////———–]F – You understand the word regardless of how it’s used.
E[/////////////////////–]F – Output

Also, it seems that the speed at which a word gets to output is highly dependent on how strongly connected that word is to either vivid or a vast quantity of experiences as well as how strongly it is connected to the words that surround it in the semantic web.

What happens when you can already recognize a lot of words/phrases before you ever start an SRS? I have been studying Spanish on and off, the wrong way, for about 6 years, and I am pretty much incapable of any output. When I’m reading, I recognize way more words/phrases than I would ever be able to remember when speaking/writing (which I am holding off on!).

Do I put the phrases I already “know” in my SRS? How else will I see them often enough to implant them in my brain for output? Should I just rely on continual input to remember them?

Also, since I’ve been learning the wrong way for so long, I mostly know “words” and I then have to analyze, using my grammer knowledge, to understand “phrases”. I’m quick(ish) at it – but from what I read on this site, I know this is not how it is supposed to be done. How do I re-learn what I already “know” in a way that leads to output?

Yeah, kind of repetitive there, but you get my drift.

I do that pattern often and over time I’ve developed a habit of being drawn into what I read because I want to find out what happens next. Of course pictures help (^.^)

The question is, in the sucky L2 stage, how does one determine what chunks are worth reading? Perhaps in the sucky stage, the type of material that would work best for this is nonfiction with a clearly defined table of contents. Unfortunately for me, my Japanese nonfiction library is severely limited.

When we were 6, 7, 8, 9, we often encountered words we didn’t know while reading. As optimistic learners who understood we’d eventually “get it,” we would skip over these words and faithfully rely on context to understand these unfamiliar words. And when context didn’t help us decipher the word, we didn’t care, because we were already onto the next sentence, and next paragraph. This kept happening each time we read a book, an article, the back of the cereal box, TV Guide, until one day we understood those words, and eventually, ~99.9% of everything we read. At that point, we learned to avoid (or struggle through) texts that were too difficult or boring.

Remember: in learning L2, we are children again. Kids don’t care that they don’t understand every single word in that book. They’ll eventually understand them from seeing them again and again in other contexts, whether they’re books, comics, cartoons, or the cereal box.

So read it through with confidence, whatever it is you’re reading. If you don’t understand it, that’s okay. Go back and read it again later, or don’t worry about it, because odds are you’ll see it again somewhere else with more helpful contex.

I guess my problem is I don’t want to just arbitrarily skip for the sake of skipping, but it’s hard to know what to skip when still in the sucky stage. Any suggestions?

Yeah, I’m with you. I SRS as I read. Which usually seems more efficient to me. If I dog ear stuff I see at least two problems: 1 I have to look things up in the dictionary again, wasting time; 2 I have to re-read a lot of the page to figure out exactly what it was I though I wanted to SRS in the first place; 3 I often don’t want to go back and look through the stuff I’ve already read to put it in the SRS as I’ve moved on and am ready for something new.

I really like SRSing as I go. As long as I don’t get carried away trying for a high conversion rate, I still get through a lot of material and before I know it I’ve got 50 new SRS items for the day. I’ve also found the recent tweeter stuff on looking for new uses and applications of words you already know in L2 really helpful. These SRS cards are usually a lot easier, but you’re still learning something new in L2.

By the way, Khatz, maybe you should join Bookcrossing (www.bookcrossing.com). XDD