What I Learned From Khatzumoto (Founder of AJATT)

Hey KoreKara Squad, 

If you don’t know who Khatzumoto is, he’s one of the legends on the internet among Japanese language learners. He had a website called AJATT, inspired lots of people to learn Japanese (like Matt vs Japan, myself, and more.)

This is him speaking Japanese.

Many years ago he completely just disappeared from the internet. I’ve been fortunate enough through the podcast to have met several people who know him personally, and have seen an inside look into how he studied Japanese to such a high level and how he continues to maintain his ability.

I wanted to take the time here to briefly reflect on AJATT (his method) – what it got right, what it got wrong, and what we can gain by looking back on it today.

💡 Tip of the week

AJATT (which stands for All Japanese All The Time) got a lot of things right. Some of the core tenets that still keep AJATT relevant to this day are:

• Create an all-Japanese environment

• Make it fun

• Sentence mining

#1: Create an all-Japanese environment

You are the average of the people you spend the most time with. So if you spend most of your time interacting with Japanese people, you will get better and become more Japanese in your mannerisms, just through osmosis.

The caveat here is to not overly skew your time with books and content, try to create a real environment with real people. Like ordering food in Japanese, talking to Japanese people, or even hopping in a Japanese discord.

#2: Make it fun

Personally, I would say that “making it fun” is the most important thing when it comes to acquiring a language. From the hundred or so immersion learners I’ve spoken to, I’ve never seen a successful case where the person didn’t enjoy the process of learning the language.

Enjoy the journey, you’ll get there if you don’t stop.

#3: Sentence-mining

Sentence-mining refers to the act of finding a word you don’t know, copying down the whole sentence, and then reviewing the sentence + the definition in a spaced repetition system. (Such as Anki)

Khatzumoto was a huge proponent of an SRS (spaced-repetition system). While immersion learning was a relatively new idea that he was right to be promoting, sentence mining was the meat and potatoes of what he was doing.

Sentence mining is great but beyond a certain point, it becomes more of a crutch than a benefit. For me that was around 7,000-10,000 flashcards, but it might be different for you.

What AJATT got wrong

Even though there were a lot of really useful ideas with AJATT, there were a few ideas that aren’t helpful for 99% of the population and even some ideas that himself did not do. Ideas like

1. Never output early

2. The best way to study Kanji is grinding RTK

3. Just immersion and Anki is all you need

This is a typical example of a lot of language learning gurus I’ve seen.

They promote a language learning method that they themselves didn’t go through, but that they feel is “more optimal” or “more marketable.” What often happens is that they oversimplify a complex process and people find it hard to replicate their results. 

If you want the same results, study what they did and do the same things they did.

We’re still digging ourselves out of the “output is bad” mindset that AJATT left behind. Sure, early output could be weird, awkward, and maybe even embarrassing, but output is an essential part of language. Engaging with a language and culture is especially difficult if you’ve taken a vow of silence.

Even Khatzumoto said he surrounded himself with Japanese speakers at university to better ‘Japanize’ his environment. This means that he would’ve had to do some speaking fairly early on in his journey. The same with Matt vs Japan.

At the end of the day, language learning isn’t a religion and shouldn’t be treated as such.  In the wise words of Khatzumoto “Have fun at learning Japanese.”

📺 Immersion of the week 

All this talk about immersion and learning made me think about THIS YouTube channel. フェルミ漫画大学 makes educational content but they deliver it in the form of manga. This means it's pretty fun to look at and has high-quality audio. They discuss a wide range of topics, meaning you’re sure to find something that piques your interest. Below is a link to a video they made discussing how to learn.

✍️ Kanji of the week

This week’s kanji means “learning” or “acquisition” and can be used in the word 日本語を習得する which I figured might be fitting considering we were discussing Khatzumoto and his influences on the language learning world. This kanji is comprised of 習 meaning “learn” and 得 meaning gain, find, earn, or acquire. Their meanings combine and this word is used when discussing acquiring a new skill.

🗣️ Update 

Last week I mentioned I’m going to be hopping on some calls with some of you to help you with Japanese. I’m still sorting through the responses but if you singed up I’ll be sending out a calendly later this week so you can book some time.

If you missed it and still want to sign up, you can do it here before Tuesday.

I’m in the process of deciding between different platforms to host a KoreKara Community. If you’re interested just reply to this e-mail and I’ll let you know when it’s ready!

Besides that I’m working on a video for KoreKara and hopefully I can upload it before the end of the month. I’ll see you then!

Eric