Sorry guys,
I'm still very much around :)

I was working independently from home before but took a full-time job with long hours (It's a trading firm). I continue to play with Japanese and have a lot of new thoughts on enjoying the language when short on time.

My workplace is filled with many languages, none of which are Japanese :). I'm actually in Europe, temporarily, thinking that maybe I'll start Dutch and French sooner rather than later...

Thanks for those kind words Nora, I'm glad to hear you found something valuable here.

I've found when evaluating Japanese learning advice, methods and philosophies, if it doesn't also apply to life in general, it may not be good advice.

An example would be, how do you improve a friendship? If I apply much of the Japanese advice out there it would be, "Spend more time with the person, dedicate more thought, Find out their needs, wants and fears, be available". Quite a long list. And as you try to keep to that list, every time you slip up you think you're a bad friend.

Or you could say, "Learn to enjoy the other person and the rest comes for free". Learn to enjoy their quirks, passions, opinions and preferences and spending time and thought is automatic (There's still a good amount of elbow grease, but now you're free to enjoy that too).

So it is with a language, or creative writing, or engineering or art. If you can learn to enjoy it, then learning to do it well becomes much easier ;-)

Definitely. I hope to begin branching out into other languages soon.

I never found a tool to help me learn kanji in context, so I built one. I use this tool to become familiar with each kanji overtime as I encounter them, instead of drilling them into my head right now.

It's interesting to compare the Kanji I learn through memorization techniques and those I learned here. When I see one I've memorized, I think of an English meaning and a set of readings. For the ones I learned over time, I think of the Japanese words I've read them in and have an ever-expanding feel for their meaning as I encounter more words.

Hmm, I guess you can only get it wrong if you're trying, right?

btw, speaking of 'Japan', I'm looking forward to reading about your recent excursion ;-)

That's what it's all about right there. If every learner found a manga or TV series or book that pulled them in like your manga, how can you not learn Japanese?

And even if it's not possible to have that much fun all the time, surely it's worth it to try?

I welcome the discussion, but you have to realize the danger of "lends me to think" and "seems". These are typically markers for assumption. And in much of this discussion so far you have attributed words, arguments and thoughts to me that I never said, argued or thought. Then, you then offered your rebuttal as proof that my argument is flawed or insufficient.

I have no problem with a rebuttal per se, but if it's based on an assumption that proves untrue...

Case in point: "The FeedMe app seems to offer you other people's sentences with which to explore".

The FeedMe app is explicitly designed to NOT allow you to see other people's sentences. If you've seen anyone else's sentence on FeedMe, it's a security bug, not a feature. Really quickly: the reason for this is to encourage exploration. If a user uses a bookmarklet to collect a sentence from a web page, the app will share that *link* with other users, but never the sentence. The idea being - spend more time on real Japanese websites than in this app.

Now, it may be a reasonable assumption from the app's description and screenshots that you can look at other people's sentences, and that's probably a clarity issue. But to offer an argument for or against the system on that basis is to argue with a false premiss.

But that's all water under the bridge on a ducks back. You make a great point on the relationship between feel and rules. I agree that language rules are descriptive, they describe what people of a locale consider to be right or sound natural. And what is actually said creates, in a fluent speaker, that feeling of natural and unnatural; an explicit chain of relationship I hadn't considered.

The crux of my line of thinking is: how do you acquire that ability to feel what's natural and unnatural? In the post above, I argue not that right and wrong are 'bad' but that they represent a less helpful perspective for language learning.

A Right and Wrong perspective is to learn those descriptive rules and a long list of vocabulary to learn a language. Will it work? Yes. But how many burnout versus how many achieve fluency? And from reading Japanese learning forums, this is where you find the 'suck it up', 'do it everyday' crowd.

The Natural and Unnatural perspective recognizes that it takes a *huge* (and unknown) volume of listening and reading to acquire a feel for a language. Khatzumoto offered a metric of 10,000 sentences - but that was still just a tiny fraction of what he actually heard and read. Really, we're probably talking about hearing and reading millions of sentences.

Now consider that: the Right and Wrong perspective out there says, learn 2000 kanji, learn 500 grammar patterns, learn 10,000 vocabulary. A descriptive list based on what native speakers know. It seems attainable. It's a memorizable, 'learnable' quantity. It has a wake a mile wide full of burned out language learners who think Japanese is 'hard'.

But if you start out learning Japanese knowing that you need to see and hear *millions* of Japanese sentences, you start thinking, "Maybe it would be better if I enjoyed this journey...". 'Cause if you aren't interested, reading sentence #1,946,566 is gonna hurt.

And this is why I say, right and wrong are irrelevant. It's an incendiary phrasing but the point is that you don't need to worry about what is considered right and wrong. Enjoy the long journey to natural and unnatural and you'll get all the rules of right and wrong along the way.

Now you've moved from inserting words in other's mouths, to claiming to speak for their thoughts.

Right and Wrong is distinct from Natural and Unnatural. To suppose that I consider them the same and ask me to choose between the two is, amusingly, a strawman argument.

Tae Kim is well qualified to speak on Heisig. He learned the Kanji without Heisig and has offered his experiences for the consideration of other learners. Whatever he does or doesn't recommend doesn't prevent you from using whatever tool you like.

I don't claim to know what you 'would think' about anything as I don't know you. I would appreciate the same courtesy from you.

Sentences in the FeedMe app are typed in or copied and pasted. I.e. they are handled the same as text anywhere else on a computer. If want text from a book in your computer, you type it. If it's on a webpage, you copy it. I suspect that Khatzumoto dealt with this same reality when collecting sentences with a computer.

Ahhh, Great story. Thanks for sharing.
I'll never turn down a good story. There a great way to learn because they capture your interest ;-)

And you introduce a great point - that fear of saying anything 'wrong'. And when it comes to learning, fear is absolutely counter-productive.

It reminds me of learning to rollerblade and the fear of falling down. I and my friends got over it by...falling down. In fact we would go to a nearby outdoor basketball court and take turns skating around the court as fast as we could. Our objective was to lean as far as possible in the turns until the bolts on our skates scraped the ground. You were finished when you fell and went sliding off the court.

You can call falling down a 'bad' thing and avoid it or recognize that falling is a part of learning and use it. You would be amazed at what "knowing how to fall" does for your confidence as a rollerblader...

Phauna, You completely missed the point and in the process, proved mine.

I'll just say this: relevancy is a relative term. It's use to indicate a relationship or lack thereof. I never said everything is right; just as in your previous comments you are inserting words in other peoples mouths. Earlier you butchered Khatzumoto's and Tae Kim's words, and now mine.

With respect to the long term goal of fluency, harping on what is right and wrong is unhelpful. Look at this back and forth - it gets nowhere. You can enumerate examples of right and wrong all day. It doesn't matter. It only hijacks discussion and distracts from the objective: fluency.

Don't worry if your grammar, accent, or understanding is way off. Just keep reading, listening and enjoying yourself and eventually you will acquire the same feel as a native speaker. And guess what! All the "right" answers come with it for free!