Comments on: Massive Turnover: How To Banish Boredom and Burnout from Immersion Even When You’re Just a Sucky Beginner

By: ブライアン

ブライアン — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:48:57 +0000

Before you’ve finished kanji, reading is not your priority. Start learning them right now; the format doesn’t really matter, the important part is to do them. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be through them. (And screw what Khatz suggests, try everything and go with what YOU like. Invent your own format. It’s your learning, own it.)

Until you’re done, focus on listening for your immersion. Youtube videos (雑談 — lit. miscellaneous conversation — is a good general search term), music, anime (Crunchyroll streams a lot of series for free; the more recent ones even have removable subtitles.) Just have stuff on in the background; it really does help, I promise. LOOK at books, and manga, and whatever, but until you’ve at least most of the way through the kanji, don’t expect much. (Oh, and FWIW, even with the head-start your reading skills will probably catch up to and surpass your listening pretty quickly once you start.)

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By: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? « mefailenglish

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? « mefailenglish — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:04:28 +0000

[...] przeczytałem na jednym z moich ulubionych blogów, że jeśli ksiażka, film etc. w języku obcym cię nudzi – zmien to – natychmiast! Oczywiste, prawda? Też tak sadze, ale mimo to poczułem dzika moc do [...]

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By: Suisei

Suisei — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:06:17 +0000

Sorry for commenting on a post that you’ve written month ago but I need some help x.X

Well, what if a beginner has started kanji and doesn’t know much ? (I’m still not sure the format Khatz recommends so I haven’t really started…)

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By: The AJATT 7-Step Victory Formula | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

The AJATT 7-Step Victory Formula | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:40:37 +0000

[...] games at quitting time, before quitting time or as soon as you get bored, whichever comes first. 6. Get more, better tools. 7. Return to step (1) Share and [...]

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By: Boredom Kills | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

Boredom Kills | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:21:27 +0000

[...] Delete, destroy, skip, fast-forward, throw away, blow off, suspend anything boring that is in your way. The point is to be making contact with Japanese. That’s it. Everything else is detail. Everything else will take care of itself in due time. [...]

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By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:17:27 +0000

Honestly I’m learning English right now and I enjoy so much from reading your blog which has improved my English a lot.

YOU ROCK! LOVE ALL YOUR WRITING!!

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By: ブライアン

ブライアン — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:04:17 +0000

(I’m going to assume you’ve learned the kanji. If not, get on that and don’t worry too much about written immersion until you’re done.)

Start with your dictionary. Look up what you’re interested in, find out the Japanese term for it. (Alternately, look it up on Wikipedia and use the sidebar to go to the equivalent Japanese article.) Take that term and google it. So, for example, I’m a guitarist. Searching ”ギター　ブログ” returns about 30 million hits. From there, it’s just a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

As for not understanding it… well, that’s kind of the point. Let go of the need for 100% comprehension or you’re going to be very bored. Find a sentence you *almost* understand. Break it down, learn all the readings, learn what it means, and stick it in your SRS. Rinse, repeat. (If you truly don’t understand *anything*, you may need to do some easier stuff first. I just spent a month working through All About Particles — not the most interesting material, but I now can more easily learn the stuff I really *want* to learn.)

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By: km31

km31 — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:50:06 +0000

I like this idea, but i just dont see how it can be economically viable/time efficient at all . . for me personally i cant watch things over and over without getting bored, and i’m also finding that watching things when i barely understand any of it takes away a lot of the enjoyment, so it has to be something pretty amazing in the first place to hold my attention.
Plus i spend a lot of time obn the web just browsing stupid comedy sites, blogs etc and searching for that kinds of thing in japanese i have no idea where to begin, and dont understand emough to enjoy reading them anyway …
So any ideas on where to find an abundance of free/cheap resources ?
(ps. ive pretty much scoured everything that’s already been suggested on this site in posts and comments! yes i know i should have a ton of stuff from all that, but i am being picky after all )

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By: URL Shuffler | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time

URL Shuffler | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:41:22 +0000

[...] can flip through the web like flipping through TV channels. Shuffling gives a perfect balance of turnover (mixing) and conversion (actual [...]

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By: Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 3.5: Timeboxing Turns Work Into Play | All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency.

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:40:28 +0000

[...] dependence on coercion. We will win consistently when we use our strengths and use our nature and use our short attention spans to do fun things that just so happen to produce long-term [...]

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By: Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 3: Dual Timeboxing | All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency.

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:08:52 +0000

[...] it doesn’t work. We will win consistently when we use our strengths and use our nature and use our short attention spans to do fun things that just so happen to produce long-term [...]

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By: DrTalon

DrTalon — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:10:49 +0000

Sorry guys, I was bored on my lunch break in the far future from when the previous post to me was created lol. I remember going through RTK, and one of the ways that I attempted the kanji was to try and “follow everything by the book”. NO. Don’t do it. Following this website “To the T” is honestly NOT the way to go. I’m getting there Khatz if your reading lol just don’t think im EVER putting your site down cause this site is AWSUM. Doing this “by the book” **** honestly wasted probably 4 months of my japanese study. The reason why I say this is because I was going nowhere. I needed way that interested me and kept me upbeat and going further. I liked the IDEA of one day knowing Japanese, but the road ahead of using someone else’s ideas and creativity had to come to an abrupt halt. I had to step back and honestly question how I was carrying on with my study. My SRS reps sucked and I wasn’t remembering much, my attention span sucked unless it was something exciting and interesting and lets face it, most of Heisig’s mnemonics suck to the younger audience.

What I did was almost MANDATORY for me in order to retain the kanji the way that I can now. Every single kanji mnemonic HAD TO BE my own, otherwise it was useless. The whole point of a mnemonic is to associate what you see with a memory, and if the memory is “by the book” like the readings of Heisig’s representation in RTK, then it’s stupid to think that you can use his OWN visulization of that kanji in a way that will work for you.

It really wasn’t much more effort on my part to get this down and done. BUT, I did make flash cards ON PAPER that seemed to work much better than the SRS program at the time. To do this, you need to think like a boring art teacher thinks. You know what I’m talking about, like when thery ask a group or a class “What does this painting really mean to you?” Good question. The same thing applies to a kanji. Look at it and think, do you know of anything that you run into in everyday life or from a vivid memory that LOOKS like the kanji in question? If so, write down the situation that the “kanji” or “look alike memory” is in in plain english. Voila! You have your mnemonic for the kanji. It doesn’t even have to be very long, just so long as you can look at the kanji and remember the situation that your nmemonic describes.

Some kanji will just have to me REMEMBERED because there will be no mnemonic that you can possibly think of or come up with. I actually managed to come up with exactly 1841 personal mnemonic devices for my kanji. But it’s funny when you run into a kanji through your SRS that you somehow REMEMBER doesn’t have a mnemonic, your brain will seem to narrow it down in some magical way that you can remember even the NON-mnemonic kanji faster and more accurately. I dont know, but that is how it works for me.

If I was to add up the time it took me to write the mnemonics down for each kanji, I bet you it would probably end up being 1/16 of the total time of constant blank face memorization. It really paid off in the end.

Through my kanji learning journey, I started with trying Heisig’s mnemonics and it took me about 4 months to have a retention rate of around 700 kanji. But, with my new mnemonic flash cards, I had them written down on paper and entered into an SRS in about 2 months WITH a retention rate of about 1600 round and about.

So I think it paid off, let me know what you guys/Khatz think about this idea.

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Why The Way We Read Sucks, And How To Fix It: Part 1

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:54:53 +0000

[...] barely knows the subject matter at hand, really have the ability to decide where and what to skip? (Actually my answer to that is “yes”, but, school’s answer tends to be a resounding [...]

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » On The Very Serious Subject Of How To Have Fun All The Time

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:13:04 +0000

[...] need warnings like this). I am saying do the same thing — keep switching stuff up (Massive Turnover) — just be sure the thing you switch into is Japanese, that’s [...]

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By: Mikhail

Mikhail — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:56:20 +0000

Khaaaaaz Thank yoouuuuu. I AM 16. I wanted to learn japanese so i wanted to go to a japanese school or sumtin. But….. TO HELL WIT TEH SCHOOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1. I read sum of your entries and they got me into learning Japanese NOW. I got that “naaaah ill do that later” stuff outta my head. I started reading the book last night and i already cought on the first few kanji. Like up to 20 or something I dunno.I’m going to download the SRS now to see if i really memorized the ones i read on. If anyone had told me there where almost 2000 kanji before I found this blog….. I probably would have slapped em and dropped this language there and then. But you have a good way of saying things so i don’t think i’ll be stopping anytime soon.

@Jenny: hmm. Well Jenny i was born bilingual. I know spanish/english. Even though spanish is my native language, i rarely spoke it except for at home. Therefore when i DID speak in spanish it had a very “foreign” accent to it. Now since i moved to the Dom. Rep. my spanish is very nice , but my english suffered a bit with the accent.
So what i’m trying to say is if you speak 1 language more than the other, the accent of the one you speak more is bound to stick to the one you speak less. It’s NOTHING PERMANENT. You say you hardly do anything in your native language anymore; So since you speak and hear so much english that accent is going to be present in your native language.ONLY because your accustomed to speaking so much English. But if you ever start to speak in L1 more than english… Well that accent WILL disappear.Your fluency WILL return (if you’re any less fluent now than you were before). I’m sure of that. Regardless of what language you speak.

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Little and Often

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:51:01 +0000

[...] in the loop. Watching YouTube clips, watching short clips of several movies you like (this is the massive turnover idea — the turnover is massive but the pieces are [...]

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Intermediate Goals, Mini-Dreams

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:48:59 +0000

[...] Set a 1-month goal for number of pages or words or characters read (I find these measures easier to deal with than whole books, since I often switch books before finishing). [...]

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By: Mighty

Mighty — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:09:32 +0000

This helps me a lot.

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By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Taking A Break: The Third Way

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:01:16 +0000

[...] “burn-out” issue [as discussed here, here and here] is really interesting. Now, all you wusses out there — you know I’m just [...]

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By: Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:06:15 +0000

Juan, interesting that you should bring that up. I’ve been using the same website over the past few days. It’s L1 to L2 stuff, so it’s probably not good for the long term, but as I’m a complete beginner in Japanese…outside of Kanji…I’m finding it perfect for that absolute raw noob period of time when you’re learning stuff like 行く or 分かる. Native speaker pronunciation, addictive video-game-like study, pictures, constant repetition, notes on your progress; the works. I like it a lot.

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