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"All Japanese All The Time" or "AJATT" is a language blog written by Khatzumoto, who learned Japanese to a respectable level in 18 months. "AJATT" is also used as a name for his language-learning method. The method was heavily inspired by Antimoon and Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition, although the details of the method have changed over the years.

The AJATT method has three major features:

  • Attitude towards the language. "Pretend you are Japanese. Tell yourself you are Japanese. Who you think you are matters more than who you actually are."
  • "Immersion" at homeKhatzumoto aimed to spend every free moment either listening or looking at Japanese, whether he understood it or not.

The amount of work involved was substantial—many thousands of hours of listening, and over 7,000 SRS cards.

Khatzumoto sells an excellent one-page summary of his method for US$0.01. This is payable via Paypal, which means he also gets your email adress (though if he uses those addresses for anything, it's fairly rare). For those with a much larger budget, he provides a considerably more expensive online course called Silver Spoon/Neutrino, which gamifies your learning.

In practice[]

Lots of people have combined large amounts of native media with SRS. In general, this works quite well, provided that a reasonable fraction of the input is comprehensible. When none of the input is comprehensible, this method can fail spectacularly. You can't just listen to incomprehensible news radio all day for 6 months and expect to learn anything; you need some kind of "hook" which allows you to learn something. An easy test: Do you know more about the language than you knew yesterday? More words? More about how sentences fit together? If not, you're probably not making any progress.

Many people at HTLAL have used less-intense versions of AJATT, spending smaller amounts of time doing SRS reviews and enjoying native media. This actually works quite well, especially for languages related to one you already speak, and languages where you can already follow the main points of native material.

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