Dishonesty Olympics

I will talk about the immersion itself later, but allow me to bitch about ajatt&friends first, since you’ve probably heard about them and may possibly be considering joining the cult. Obviously there can be no exchange of ideas between us if you are already following their teachings, but if I can warn even one person who’s about to dive deep into that sea of misguidedness, I’ll consider my time typing this essay spent rather well.

The problem with AJATT is that while is does correctly identify the core principle of acquiring real fluency, its over-the-top fanatical cult-like approach is blind to way too many real world factors, which leads to a tad too many pulled-straight-outta-ass conclusions about its own effectiveness based on absolutely nothing but pride, wishful thinking, and general immature drunken overconfidence backed up by nothing but “discovering” one on-point idea. That’s exactly what “good” cults do though:

1. tell one big on-the-nose universal truth to lure you in;
2. proceed to weave a web of bullshit justifications around it for why you need to enroll NOW.

I don’t recommend starting with AJATT to anyone precisely because of that. It is a diary of a madman (and quite a bit of a conman, too) who’s kinda sorta right about certain things… but is cutting my hair short and wearing these dirty white robes really necessary for purification of my chromosomes? I honestly don’t think most of AJATT “teachings” are correct, let alone practical. Is there some truth to them? Yes. Are there at least some good ideas for language learners there? Yes, but AJATT is not the first source to come up with them and I’ll give you pretty much all of them in a minute anyway, in a way more curated and digestible form. If you’re an absolute beginner at learning languages and go into ajatt&friends with blind faith — I am super worried that you won’t be able to filter out the bs, especially the biggest piles of it (the obviously idiotic ideas of the original AJATT teachings can probably be filtered out by most adults) and end up wasting immeasurable amount of your very much finite time and effort on absolutely useless practices and rituals. All kinds of which they’ve got to tell you aaaaaaaall about.

Thу correct core idea which AJATT managed to get precisely right is very simple, and it is something polyglots knew for ages (at least) but at some point people stopped listening to them because:

1. following the polyglot way would’ve meant trying something opposing what most people already believe and invested in, and most people are simply incapable of such advanced actions;
2. sunk cost butthurt. if when tried the polyglot way turned out correct (and it is) it would’ve meant that an uncountable amount of time and money was wasted by generations of people blindly following the “traditional” academic approach to studying languages. people reeeally hate being proven wrong. simply being wrong doesn’t bother them all that much.

“The School of Traditional Academic Approach”, lead by people calling themselves “linguists”, is essentially a scam:

1. First of all, you don’t need to go far nor dig deep to find overwhelming evidence of it
   Not. Working.
   I am talking about all the cases of people spending around a decade (or more/several) studying a given language yet still not being capable of consuming any native-level content, let alone participating in native-level conversations (and they never will be capable of that, unfortunately), convinced they are doing everything right and “it just takes time, bro, you know. my sister’s been studying Japanese since high school, you know. she’s 35 now and she recently went to Tokyo: she said she couldn’t understand a single thing there. languages hard, bro”. That is just criminal idiocy: becoming fluent in any language doesn’t take a lifetime. Even if you don’t study full-time. Those who say that it is absolutely normal to spend half a life acquiring one additional language and that that is exactly how it should be are either lying or spreading a lie, on top of being top-notch moronically oblivious to how they acquired their first one (also, in their case definitely the last one).
2. There is absolutely nothing common or traditional about the “traditional” academic approach. Chances are you speak at least one language natively. Do you remember how much time it took to become fluent in it? And did you do any book study before you could speak and effortlessly understand it? Who told you only babies can do that? Could it have been someone monolingual? A language tutor selling you their services, perhaps?

The true path to acquiring a language is immersion, and you’ve already been down it: it’s the same one you took when acquiring your first language.

The kind of immersion a modern polyglot would recommend you is somewhat artificial in nature, yet fake it is not. Indeed real it is. Instead of going to a foreign country and forcing your brain to learn the language out of need to survive and function in society — you make the country, along with its language, come to you through the power of consumerism media content. By far the best thing about artificial immersion is that it is actually much more productive (also cheaper and safer) than the old school “lemme go some place where no one speaks my language, that’ll sure learn me a new one” way of doing it. The classic method is by far the next best thing though, undeniably: it’s been very popular with those who take languages seriously… since forever, really. Probably because before the internet it was not only the best but also the only way of becoming fluent in a foreign language. Polyglots have always known that book/class study was a waste of time (and a scam), so I guess over a few centuries of world travel being possible the idea of “professionals say extended stay in the country of your target language is the best way to become fluent” has at least a little bit became somewhat of a public assumption. Welp, classic immersion is way more problematic in modern era: countries are way more paranoid about letting foreigners in for extended stay. In fact, extended stay is pretty much impossible unless you’re in the country as a student or on a very cereal, highly professional and official business. In addition to that, current younger generations are extremely poor on top of also being jobless most of the time (thanks for leaving us nothing, boomers), so travel, let alone international studenthood, is out of the question for most of us. Artificial immersion is the knew, better, and more accessible solution to the language acquisition gatekeeping. It only became possible about maybe 15 years ago with availability of relatively fast and uncapped home internet. Totally hot new thing, optimized just for you by a 17 year-old language genius who is yet to leave their parents’ basement this year. Only $299.99 $14.99 a month for the discord server access. Dude we have so much based stuff there like omg you have to join.

This guide is about learning Japanese, but its ideas can be applied to learning any other language. For some, like the Chinese languages, the application is going to be borderline identical. For most other languages: you could probably skip about 50% of the modern Japanese/Chinese polyglot-method-learner’s toolkit. By which I am mainly referring to SRS (covered later). I will mention this point again before talking in detail about it.