PS that Characterizer thing made me squerm. it BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“You don’t have to control all the variables in order to achieve control of the entire situation. Like a row of dominos, you only have to topple one, to topple them all. All you have to do is put your body into Japanese — if you just keep your body there, Japanese will then put itself into your mind. I am repeating, restating and reiterating for a reason.”

Those two quotes reminded my of my first few episodes of anime in Japanese only. Man, I felt so screwed and my mind couldn’t comprehend. I either watched pictures to follow or I listened to Japanese and figured the plot. It really took some time to adapt, but in the end it worked out well.

All went down to: Get going, watch anime on end and eventually you will manage.

Best regards from Germany
Ionize

See it and hear it, and just mash everything in there and you will understand in due time. It actually works really well contradictionary to what people may think.

I’ve finished RTK, so I guess I’m at the good stage of this method.

I’ve looked up lyrics before, it’s partially effective for me. But I find it a lot easier when people add J-subs to a song I find it easier to follow and I learn readings for Kanji

Looking up songs is a great way to take a break from Kanji reps, Kanji can give me a headache after a while but singing a few Gackt or 嵐 or 氷室京介 songs makes the headache go away. Then I go back to Kanji reps. I’m on about 1300 in the Heisig book, been slowing down recently though.

whilst I don’t think that your wrong about mimicking sounds, but I fear I may do something like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo

So, I’m suggesting as part of anyone’s language training, sing along, match sound for sound, not word for word, the singer’s voice. It does something (children just flat out do this) that can’t be acquired from reading or listening. I feel qualified to say this because I watched anime & tv for 15 years nearly every day (hooray for torrents and usenet) and couldn’t really do jack with Japanese.

But with singing…something about it caused new brain cells to wiggle or old ones to make more friends or something. Spend a month and memorize a song, to the degree you can sing along harmoniously with the singer and see how it affects your other areas.

To me it feels like I own it. It feels the way I imagine fluency is supposed to feel. Though I don’t have a vocabulary like i do in English; kitto itsuka wo tsukamun da. ne sou darou.

So to fill out the be, see, hear list. Don’t have to speak, you just have to sing!

Thank you again Kaz for another timely and inspiring article.

I think I might have to take one or two more steps in immersion in order to obtain the concentration I need, as I keep drifting back to English websites (such as 4chan and wikipedia).

Anyway, I guess this post is also my official thank you for telling me to go through RTK, and although I can probably only directly recall about 50% of them, the other 50% are very easy to write given the primitives, although there may occasionally be an error in the organization of the primitives, and therefore my ability to remember them when a word arises with that Kanji is acceptably good. Basically, I really hope to be going monolingual here soon, and getting out of this nasty English habit I’ve worked my way into.

This is prolly a bit off-topic but I really feel the need to express my own thanks. Ive been visiting this site, like, every day for the past 3 months and it kicks serious ***. The method works like a charm. Today is a bit special for me cause I’ve decided to delete everything even remotely English (katakana loanwords barely passing) from my SRS, so going monolingual. After 709 sentences. I come to this site mainly for motivation, because the method is already stuck in my head anyway. Whenever I feel my wussy-self come up (‘man, this is too hard, I cannot do this, no way, h4lp, so many kanji, so many readings, I keep messing up the ons and the kuns, nooo’), I just force myself to read any random article on this (you need some article randomizer, man!), and Im good to go again for the day.

I’ll been flying into Tokyo on october the 2nd and make my way to Hokkaido on the 10th. Then, Im gonna hitchhike all the way down south. The reason Ive been AJATTing for the past months is because I wanted to get a decent fundament going, one I can use to build Japanese skills on that I’ll undoubtedly gather up in the time hitching around. Im sure my skills will make a huge leap, especially speaking. Output’s been behind, way behind, and it’s all been input so far. Im curious how I’ll fare, turning all that passive vocab into active.

Anyway, please keep posting the motivational stuff. Im your faithful reader up until the 10,000th sentence, and probably beyond.

~Sado
A Dutch AJATTeer

okay I surrender been through the Chinese project posts and a bunch of other stuff, you obviously do support the meaning and writing first approach….

Apart from that I appear to have been doing my own version of mostly Chinese most of the time. Some variations of course, have you seen the Chinese Ting dictionary search http://hua.umf.maine.edu/php/search.php old school tech now but you can often get interesting sentances with multiple male/female voices in many accents .

For dialogue over music I always preferred digital laptop reggae (checkout jahtari.org) low phat bass sounds, Chinese dialogue floats nicely over the top, that of course is in reference to your Cantonese rap post.

My SRS is informal repetition cycles of texts and audio, but it works (I cannot bear being told what to learn and review ever, no matter how efficient the algorithm, won’t do it and no one can make me ;P).

I of course have not the experience or will to add marketing to the mix

This post from 2007 sums it up http://friedelcraft.blogspot.com/2007/10/study-without-effort.html the annoying thing is that some people take what you do literally out there in forum land are mounting signs of some people hurting their learning by trying to do EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO. I realise already that you suggest that this is not the point but some need hitting with a bigger cluestick. Apart from the fine details I think we would both agree that your successes are due to the many things you did right and in spite of the few things you did wrong (you may not even know what these are).

The exact details are not important general approaches and attitudes are. I doubt there is a bigger enough cluestick you could wield to prevent all possible damage, that is the downside of marketing sadly.

Initially the obvious injection of marketing expertise along with a healthy dose of some of the tactics used by evangelical religions grates a little, but fair enough.

What does confuse me slightly is that I find instances on forums or blogs of people citing your approach as justification for doing heisig right at the start of learning Chinese and expecting to be able to read it along with other such nonesense (when they should be absorbing and immersing not learning to read simple Chinese in pigin English). Where does the fault lie? Perhaps all will become clear.

残念ですが、「無神」（Godless）はまだ日本語に翻訳されていないみたいだ。

Great article!
Khatz, you should be like the next President KhatzumObama of the Peoples Republic of Rhetoric or something!

…and I should be getting back to reading about 自然農法…