It’s a great play-sure to have all of you here today…

I’ve always wanted to say “pleasure” like that, with a straight face.

But seriously…Today I’d like to share with you good tidings of great joy appertaining to a project named:

AJATT Plus!

What Is AJATT Plus?

It’s “AJATT” with “Plus” attached to it, dumbwad! What, I have to explain it to you? OK here we go…

Executive Summary: AJATT Plus =  Super Uber Cool Premium Version of AJATT = Forum +  AJATT Articles in Translated Into Japanese + Members-Only Benefits + Friends With Benefits .

To make all this work, AJATT Plus is subscription-based. This does a number of things:

• Pays for hookers and blow for Khatzumoto and Momoko, all at your expense. This is crucial. No hookers + no blow = . Not good, people.
• Forumwise, it acts as a conveniently simple barrier to people less intelligent than you, who would otherwise waste your time and flava.
• Other stuff. Like research about hookers and blow. I cannot overestimate the importance of the H&B.

Why AJATT Plus Sucks and You Should Stop Reading This Now and Never Look Back

• The name is stoopid
• You should know better than to take Japanese advice from random Kenyans on the Internet, I mean…come on, man…seriously.
• It’s too weird
• For the price of “AJATT Plus”, you could buy like at least two gallons of milk, even in Japan
  • Two gallons!
  • You then take this milk, put it on a high-sugar cereal, and BA-DA-BING! Happiness
  • Can “AJATT Plus” give you a sugar high?
  • Nooooo…
  • I mean, AJATT Plus is so bad, there are nested bullet-points about how bad it is
• AJATT products and services in general suck so hard that this one should just be called “AJATT Minus”
• Dude, what was this list even about?

So What’s In It, This “AJATT Plus”?

Here’s what you get:

• Access to AJATT Plus members-only AJATT forums (yes, forums), where you will:
  • Buy/sell/swap media
    • Save on shipping from Japan
    • Save on buying new books, DVDs, CDs, etc.
    • Make money on your used media and hardware that would otherwise go to waste
    • Put to good use media and hardware (dictionaries, etc.) that would otherwise go to waste
  • Work with other committed learners, encouraging and helping one other
  • Get cool tools, links and techniques
  • Save time spent finding and/or learning how to use cool tools, links and techniques
  • Share your techniques and experiences
  • Enjoy a safe, moderated, well-lit environment populated by polite, intelligent, good-looking, well-spoken, fun and mentally-stable human beings just like you.
  • Get your questions answered faster
• Access to AJATT Plus members-only Japanese translations of original AJATT articles (two per month).
  • Read aloud (for that audio-book feeling!)
  • Illustrated
  • Not just translated word-for-word, but “re-imagined” into Japanese to flow as if they always had been in Japanese.
  • Edited by native Japanese writers, to ensure you get the highest quality
  • With SRS packs to help you “chunk” those articles into little pieces to play winnable games on.
    • The SRS packs can also show you the multiple ways in which a single idea can be expressed.
• Get free copies and previews of AJATT products
• Get members-only discounts on AJATT products
• Get exclusive insider information on Khatzumoto’s l33t tactics and ground-level techniques, for free

Who’s It Even For, This “AJATT Plus”?

• You’ll benefit from the forums no matter what level you’re at.
• Even if you’re not learning Japanese, you’ll benefit from the forums just as you have from the AJATT Blog.
• If you’re a beginner, you’ll benefit from having other AJATT Plus members help you get your bearings and get started
• If you’re intermediate, the fact that the articles have both text and audio will be a good fit for you, especially since there are so few audiobooks in Japanese.
• If you’re advanced, well, the articles themselves will be fun, unique, quirky reading material for you.
• And finally, if you’re just looking for a simple monthly way to support AJATT …there’s always that. You like how I’m pushing this angle? Yeah.

What About People Not Learning Japanese?

Oh, you people . Just as with this blog, AJATT Plus will include a space for other languages as well.

Let Me In! Let Me Into This Exclusive Gated Community!

You can become a member of AJATT Plus in any of three simple ways:

Annual subscription
$89.95
(24¢ per day)

Six-month subscription
$49.95
(28¢ per day)

Monthly subscription
$9.95/month
(33¢ per day)

The Amazing AJATT Fo’ Shizzle 100% Refund Guarantee

Your happiness matters to me. I think about you every day . You can cancel your AJATT Plus membership at any time, and get a full refund on your immediate previous subscription payment. One word: “refund”, will suffice. So try it for a month and see how you feel. If you don’t like it, you can always cancel your subscription and get a refund.

First off, I’d like to thank the many people who’ve been so supportive of AJATT throughout its existence, both in wallet and spirit. You’ve been very kind; you’ve made it both psychologically and economically possible for me to write. It is because of you that this website exists and continues to exist.

Why Does AJATT Plus Cost Money? What Happened To Love Of the People?

There is a small but vocal minority of people who hate everything that costs money, even though they benefit from it. Let me address this group briefly: you don’t “need” AJATT Plus, mmm kay? In fact, you don’t “need” most of the things you have. You don’t even need a computer to do spaced repetitions — you can make paper flashcards and run the calculations by hand. More fundamentally, you don’t “need” to know Japanese…or any foreign language, for that matter. You don’t “need” a college degree…you don’t “need” jeans…unless you’re on a life-support machine, you don’t “need” electricity…none of these things are necessary.

I didn’t have AJATT Plus when I was running the original Japanese experiment that produced this site. Nor did I have Surusu, nor Twitter, nor even a website like AJATT with advice on it. It follows, then, that since these things did not exist when I was doing it, one can do without them. And one can.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to.

AJATT Plus is for you if you:

1. want it
2. enough to pay for it.

Some people just don’t want it. No problem. Some people want it, but not enough to pay for it. Again, no problem. To some people, this site is valuable, but not valuable enough to actually pay money for. “And”, as my imaginary ditzy southern California girlfriends might say, “that’s okay”.

Because most Internet forums are free, large numbers of random people can randomly come in and say random crap. Because most Internet forums are free, no one has the time or incentive to keep them moderated and maintained to the extent necessary to compensate for the openness. It is a bitter irony.

So make no mistake: the AJATT Plus price is a barrier. It keeps a lot of people out, so that that the inside of AJATT Plus is a polite, productive and safe place for you to be — a place where you can trust people with your PayPal address and your feelings. Not a place for ironic trolls with MSN email accounts to use the word “Microsoft” as an insult. </amateur economics rant>.

The AJATT blog will still be here, for free. But for those of you who are more committed, who maybe want some more cool materials and support, and/or just want an easy way to support this blog — and the hookers & blow requirements of the little family behind it — AJATT Plus is here for you, too. It would be my pleasure to host you.

Many people have joined AJATT Plus already. We’re going to have a lot of fun together backstage. AJATT Plus is already a place where we respect, encourage and help each other. The AJATT Plus forum has been designed, right from the very start, to be that rarest of things — a forum with civility. A forum dominated by people who realize that there are individual human beings with hearts on the other side of that avatar. A language forum that actually gets people making contact with their language — not merely talking about being in contact with their language. I’m excited to have you all here; it’s a big Internet and you could be anywhere else. Thank you for joining. And welcome . いらっしゃいませ。

Annual subscription
$89.95
(24¢ per day)

Six-month subscription
$49.95
(28¢ per day)

Monthly subscription
$9.95/month
(33¢ per day)

The Amazing AJATT Fo’ Shizzle 100% Refund Guarantee

Your happiness matters to me. I think about you every day . You can cancel your AJATT Plus membership at any time, and get a full refund on your immediate previous subscription payment. One word: “refund”, will suffice. So try it for a month and see how you feel. If you don’t like it, you can always cancel your subscription and get a refund.