AJATT MFSP Thoughts and Review

This post is all related to learning another language based on the AntiMoon or AJATT way. If that’s not your thing, you can safely skip this post

I bought the MFSP (My First Sentence Pack) from All Japanese All The Time a few days ago and figured I’d share some thoughts on it for any language learners out there. It honestly couldn’t have come at a better time.

I believe every Japanese language learner goes through the phase of reality setting in right around the half-way point. You’ve seen every Anime that interested you. You can breeze through most Manga at a decent pace. You can even understand most of it. You can even speak better than some 2 year olds. But you’re still not there!

Now you’ve given up the idea of wanting to sleep with every J-pop, J-dorama, and gravure idol out there, and simply wish to speak coherently as you push through the 4000-5000 sentence range.

You also realize that going monolingual is actually possible and not a hindrance to your progress anymore. (I still believe it is a waste of time to do it immediately or even around 500 sentences -as some people suggest-, you will be hindering yourself by looking up monotonous words you don’t care about, breaking the first rule: fun).

Anyway… I was staring at my SRS entries which magically piled up to around 800 due over the past few days (this happens every few months, it’s the nature of the SRS beast) which Anki reports will take about 4 hours of my life away… Do I really need to enter a set of new pre-compiled stuff totaling over 500 new entries (570 to be precise)?

Khatz, as usual, tells me that I don’t need it and I should turn off my electricity to survive the down economy. Considering he was wrong when he told me that about the QRG (which I reviewed here), I didn’t believe him. So I purchased it with a discount because I bought the QRG, right around $5.

Disclaimer: Khatz isn’t paying me for this, he probably doesn’t even like me While I cannot deny the sheer awesomeness of Khatzumoto’s work, I simply won’t pass up the chance to steal a bunch of his visitors to make my site ranking go up hock his wares, even if he is too cool to meet up with me for a beer in Tokyo when I offered on my recent trip. Ah well, let’s get to the good stuff:

This took me a few days because I’m damn busy and I didn’t just glance at the entries, I entered them into my Anki to see how they held up.

Without giving too much away from the actual pack they are organized like so:

Sentence: どんな感じ？

Translation: Like…how?

Kanji Readings: 感じ＝かんじ

Extra Info: どんな⇒どの様な

This is pretty standard fare for beginners to late beginners, yet Khatz’s translations into English are spot-on and frequently amusing. However, Khatz doesn’t pull any punches and still decides to give us intermediate-advanced learners stuff to ponder such as:

Sentence: 叩いて被ってじゃんけん

Translation: [A variant of janken/rock-paper-scissors where the winner of the rock-paper- scissors part gets to hit (たた叩く) the loser with a hammer and the loser gets to save themselves by putting on a protective cap).

Immediately you’re thinking ‘What the–?! He must be joking…’ and he follows up with links to two brilliant videos displaying it. I won’t post the links as that would spoil the fun. (I honestly had no idea this even existed).

On the whole, I blitzed through about half of the entries in the MFSP the first time; they were pretty easy and don’t really count as full sentences anymore. ‘何これ？’ would be a good example (scoring them as a 4 in Anki). A quarter of them I wasn’t familiar with, but was able to read them and figure them out the first time (scoring them as a 2 in Anki). And the last quarter were brand spanking new and worth the price of admission several times over (they got a 1 in Anki until my brain figured it out).

However, the MFSP isn’t perfect. You must copy and paste all the entries manually into your SRS program. Some will see this as a pain. I honestly don’t care that much, as most of the sentences in my SRS were typed in manually from Manga/Anime/Movie/Drama mining (and the rest were copy and pasted from yahoo.co.jp news articles). The only problem I did have was the formatting was pretty lame:

The entries in the fancy PDF Khatz put together are setup horizontally like a spreadsheet. This makes sense when looking at it, but when copying-pasting it can get a bit confusing. Especially since Khatz has a sloppy habit of running out of room on some pages and trying to squeeze the rest of a translation into a box below or kanji reading above the actual entry. It’s obvious when you see blank rows or columns, but it can get confusing.

All that being said, the MFSP is awesome and totally worth the measly $5 or $8. For ultra-beginners (just finished Heisig or too impatient for Heisig), I personally think you will lose a lot by not mining your own sentences and learning to type them in by yourself. I would honestly wait until you hit 200-500 sentences on your own. Have patience.

For everyone else: Khatz’s pack has so much to offer, from colloquial phrases (and spot-on translations) to stuff you didn’t even think to put into SRS because you thought it was unimportant, or thought ‘I’ll just pick it up eventually’. Do yourself a favor and buy it.

In closing, there was only one thing missing which I was sure Khatz would include… maybe he missed it purpose: どんだけ?

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