AJATT

[DJLLAP]

I just came across the All Japanese All the Time method a couple days ago and am interested in trying it out. I am interested in how this "program" has looked when actualized in other peoples lives. I have access to NHK TV, so I am leaving that on whenever I am home, and I am studying kanji and katakana once per hour.

I am also interested in the whole MCD thing. It was very difficult to piece together what exactly MCDs are, and how they work, but I think I have finally figured it out. My first one is this:

Front: {{c1::じゅうに}} {{c2::はん}} {{c3::です}}。
(It) is half past twelve.

Back:
じゅうにじ = 12 o'clock, noon, midnight -
十=じゅう=ten
二=に=two
時=じ=time, hour

はん=半=half, semi-

Am I getting things right? I am a novice in Japanese, knowing the hiragana and most of the katakana, but having a very small vocabulary and knowledge of kanji.

Anyway, I am mostly interested in what other people's lives looked like when studying Japanese in this pervasive manner.

[EdLee]

Hi DJLLAP, interesting. For those of us who have never heard of it,
could you give some background info on All Japanese All the Time,
and what is MCD ? Thanks.

What are c1, c2, and c3 ? "Are you getting what things right?" ?

[Boidhre]

Last time I looked it was a combination of immersion and spaced repetition language learning. With a focus on full sentences taken from native texts for the flashcards once a person was beyond the basics. Analogies could be made to the play a lot and drill a ton of tsumego approach to go.


Nothing particularly new about what he did, just good marketing on his part (fair play to him).

[Boidhre]

I'll add a little more since I did look into this quite seriously several years ago. I think his method (like any good language learning method) will work well for some and terribly for others but crucially his target language was Japanese. Japanese was a good choice I think because of its relatively simple grammar. I was looking at applying this method to Irish which has a rather complicated grammatical system (a common half-joke is that you're better off being a native Russian speaker than a native English speaker learning Irish simply because you'll find the grammar a lot easier).

The kind of out of context sentence based flash card approach is more problematic when you're dealing with a lot of noun cases, genders, adjectives altering depending on sentence position etc etc. It's not that it wouldn't work but that the number of cards you'd have to review would grow exponentially since you can't just see a noun (remember just a symbol or cluster thereof!) in a few sample sentences, you need a few sample sentences with it in the nominative etc. This is before worrying about spelling changes, conjugating verbs, the different verb classes, irregulars etc. I think the advantage over just sitting down and reading texts becomes very small and just reading texts is a lot less work than making out SRS cards.

The total immersion side would still work of course (if it's a good method for you) but that's tricky with Irish due to a dearth of material in good native standard Irish, compared to Japanese or any other major language where there is enough for many life times. Most of my Irish comes from listening to my wife and kids speak and her family, the result is a steadily growing passive vocabulary but a weak active one (and an inability to read or write the language).

[Bill Spight]

The title of this thread reminded me of my experience learning Japanese. Living in Tokyo helped, of course. One thing that I had learned about language by then is that you don't just use it to communicate, but to organize your life. (I did not believe that all thought is language, but language helps. )

So I started talking to myself a lot in Japanese. In public I would whisper or talk silently in my head. "Ima aruite imasu. Sore wa basu desu. Sore wa koban. Hi ga akarui. (Later I learned to call the sun taiyo, and to say mabushii. ) Gohan tabeyo ka?" Etc. These days I guess you can walk down the street talking to yourself and people will think that you are on the phone.

Later I learned that self talk is a stage of language use that children go through at around seven or eight years old. Kids that age talk to themselves a lot.

I also bought Japanese dictionaries (kanwa jiten and kokugo jiten) rather than relying on Japanese-English or English-Japanese dictionaries. I had the latter, but avoided using them if possible. All Japanese All The Time, right? I read books aimed at children, with furigana. I read manga. That had a strange effect on my language, but at least I never went down the sidewalk saying, "Doke! Doke!"

[MJK]

Front: {{c1::じゅうに}} {{c2::はん}} {{c3::です}}。
(It) is half past twelve.

Back:
じゅうにじ = 12 o'clock, noon, midnight -
十=じゅう=ten
二=に=two
時=じ=time, hour

はん=半=half, semi-

Am I getting things right?

Based on my Korean language intuition, while this does not imply unreliability, your sentence should be:

(今は)十二時半(です/だ)

You missed 時.
十二時三十分 12 hours 30 minutes may also be common too.

This is again based on my Korean language intuition, but I believe believing me won't be that bad.

[Bill Spight]

In line with the tsumego analogy, I would prefer to have flash cards like this:

表：　
次郎さんは十二時十分から十二時半まで待ちました。
何分待ったのですか？

裏：　
次郎さんは二十分待ちました。

All Japanese All The Time.

[DJLLAP]

Hi DJLLAP, interesting. For those of us who have never heard of it,
could you give some background info on All Japanese All the Time,
and what is MCD ? Thanks.

What are c1, c2, and c3 ? "Are you getting what things right?" ?

After jumping from post to post in AJATT for what seemed like way to much time, I think I understand the core of what it is. The underlying theory is that much more than quantity of practice time, frequency of exposure to Japanese will produce greater results. When put into practice it means exposing yourself to as much Japanese media as possible. Listening to Japanese music, watching Japanese movies, podcasts, radio, reading Japanese books (even if you don't know enough Japanese to understand them). Another aspect of AJATT is not letting a waking hour go by without spending at least a minute or two studying whatever it is about Japanese that you are working on.

MCDs also took me a long while to figure out how they worked. Basically, MCDs are a special type of sentence flash cards. I think it stands for Multiple Close Deletion. Using the same sentence, you omit a single word or kanji and use the context to identify the missing part. Each bracketed "c" number is a cloze that will be ommited on a separate card. It is supposedly much better than using normal sentence cards both is ease of study and a deeper learning of the material and contextualizing the sentence.

Based on my Korean language intuition, while this does not imply unreliability, your sentence should be:

(今は)十二時半(です/だ)

You missed 時.
十二時三十分 12 hours 30 minutes may also be common too.

This is again based on my Korean language intuition, but I believe believing me won't be that bad.

My Japanese is at a very beginner level. As such I am not doing any translations for my own sentences. I am using sentences straight out of Genki book 1 right now, so it often doesn't use kanji when appropriate, but the grammar of the sentences should be impeccable.

[Kirby]

My Japanese is at a very beginner level. As such I am not doing any translations for my own sentences. I am using sentences straight out of Genki book 1 right now, so it often doesn't use kanji when appropriate, but the grammar of the sentences should be impeccable.

I agree with MJK: You should use 時（じ）. Note that in your original post, you specified "時=じ=time, hour" as something presumably on the back of the card, but in the actual sentence listed on the front ("{{c1::じゅうに}} {{c2::はん}} {{c3::です}}"), this was not used.

Is it possible that you omitted the something between c1 and c2 when you wrote it here? If you want to specify the time in this manner, you must use 時.

[Splatted]

I agree with Kirby and MJK, there should definitely be a じ　there.

I also think you're doing MCD wrong because I've heard it's supposed to stand for "Massive Context Deletion". Here's a thread about it on another site, but they also don't seem to know what it is: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7070

I also have a vague memory of another thread where it seemed to be pretty unanimous that an MCD card looks like this:

Front:

Reddy Brown

潅木かんぼくがまばらに伸びる草原を、一台のモトラド（注・二輪車。空を飛ばないものだけを指す）が走っていた。 　後輪脇わきとその上に、旅荷物を満載まんさいしたモトラドだった。遠慮ない爆音を響かせながら、ただ真っ直ぐ延びた一本道を行く。赤茶色をした道の土は、乾期のせいで細かくひび割れていた。 　運転手は[ X ]のコートを着て、余った長い裾すそを両腿りょうももに巻きつけてとめていた。頭には、鍔つばと耳を覆おおうたれのついた帽子ぼうし。目にはゴーグルをしている。その下の表情は若い。十代の半ばほど。

Back

赤茶色　- Reddy brown

With the idea being that you don't normally read anymore than you have to, but you can read it all if you need to or feel like it. I don't know if it's really suitable for a beginner (or any use to anyone ) but perhaps if you are using level appropriate material it will be worthwhile.