Khatzumoto finally released the much anticipated, by his readers, Quick Reference Guide to AJATT. As an avid reader of his site and practitioner of AJATT, with my own twist, I was excited to be able to buy this and give it a look.
As a note, like he does, if you read his whole site you don’t NEED this guide. However, it is for those that need a bit more of a helping hand than what the main site offers.
To start it is broken into say 12 bookmarked sections for you to read. The first 24 pages are more precision instruments of things to understand about the AJATT method to get you started in why the how works. The other 22 pages are the how to do AJATT in solid action steps. Where Khatsumoto clearly explains what to do.
This is for sure a Quick Reference Guide. I would also like to say it is a companion guide to the AJATT site itself. It more clearly defines the goals of the main site and compliments the main AJATT site. While you should be certain to read the main site the QRG fills in a couple of holes along the way.
One thing that troubled me about the main site is it explained a lot of theory but the atualy doing was left a little dry and took a lot of inferring to figure it out, however it was very possible. Sometimes though a precise description just helps a lot and the QRG provides that.
Another benefit to the QRG is the diagrams. The main site provides some really weird hard to follow diagrams, but the QRG provides a simple visual representation of the order in which you should learn things. Personally, I think the order should switch the kana and the kanji, but at the end of the day to get to the sentences, which is the bread and butter of AJATT, you need to know them both so to some degree following the pure AJATT method it doesn’t really matter. Back to the main diagram It was pretty exciting to see it as the order in which to learn things; originally while it defined was also abstract enough to potentially make it hard to grok.
The best part I like is the second half of the book. The action lists’. After reading and failing and reading and trying and reading and succeeding a couple of times with the main site I was able to figure out each of the action list steps on my own. The QRG goes ahead and lays it on out what you should do and in order too.
Overall the QRG is pretty solid e-book for the AJATT method and if you just aren’t quite able to understand the AJATT site as fast as you want I would recommend buying the e-book. Again at this point the only thing I would change is swapping learning the kana first before the kanji so you can get some use out of the kana while you are on the few months long journey of learning the kanji. So other than that one minor thing get it if you want it. I think it is worth getting since it helped me to re-enforce my thoughts on a few things that I was shaky on understanding.
If you get it let me know what you think of it.
maja (1)
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If I had this book when I first started the method I would have made it to the point I'm at now a whole lot faster. Love how he gives exact, step-by-step instructions for getting started with media, doing your first sentences, etc, I think is what most people need.
Nice review, I have spoken to a few 日本語 learners and thy usually do the Kana first as well, like me because it gave me motivation to continue.
I see buying the QRG as a sort of donation to Khatz and the great work that he has done with the site, 8 months on I am still studying 日本語 so i have to thank him by buying the book