ACATT WIP Guide

acatt.md

My (intense?) ACATT Roadmap

1. UNDERSTAND AJATT CORE PHILOSOPHY!!! The following resources are all aimed at Japanese learners, but look closely and you’ll see the fundamental principles still apply. Your goal now is to go through these to understand the why behind this guide.
   1. Read every article in the AJATT TOC!
   2. Read through all of Refold. It’s a bit corporate-y and watered down version of AJATT, but “modernized”. Worth a read.
      1. The owner, Matt vs Japan, used to post incredibly high quality videos on language acquisition and AJATT. Sort videos by oldest and watch the ones related to AJATT philosophy. Or go through the most important ones listed here.
         1. Some of his old Patreon videos (free) are worth watching as well.
   3. Other resources: r/ajatt, Moe Way, Tatsumoto, BritVSJapan
2. Gather resources and setup an immersion environment
   1. Dictionaries, Anki, IME, passive immersion, dramas, anime, bookmark websites, etc. There are a shit ton of free resources online. Find them.
   2. Join refold mandarin and heavenly path discord for like minded learners. Don’t spend too much time here though.
      1. Go through refold mandarin resources pages
         1. [[Refold Mandarin Resources]]
         2. [[Refold Mandarin.pdf]]
      2. Heavenly Path resource page
   3. Frequently used in my environment:
      1. Anki and Ankidroid (obviously)
         1. Addons: AJT flexible grading, Anki simulator (to predict rep count), RefoldEase, Straight Reward, Anki Connect, Review Heatmap (for motivation)
         2. Download my Anki mining note type. Use this for when you start mining words from immersion.
         3. I highly recommend my tool ace for anki automation. Check out my github for other useful tools.
      2. Novel reading on browser: reader.ttsu.app
         1. Jidoujisho for novel reading on android
         2. Download books from https://zh.annas-archive.org/
      3. Jellyfin + Sonarr/Radarr + Jackett (w/ Avistaz) setup for shows
         1. Really helps to just be able to yomichan subs directly
      4. Passive immersion podcasts useful app: PocketCasts
      5. Yomichan for popup dictionary
         1. Pleco on android
         2. Setup audio bank using my server script and configure auto-play word audio in the initial stages!
      6. Bilibili for Chinese youtube
      7. CCTV for live tv
         1. 央视影音 on android
      8. Zhihu, Jihe, CSDN, Juejin, Toutiao, Xiaohongshu, Douban, V2EX, 36Kr, Baidu Tieba, Douyin for daily internet / social media
3. Go through all of Chinese Pronunciation Wiki
   1. Drill tone pairs every day
      1. Very useful site: https://www.dong-chinese.com/learn/sounds/pinyin/toneTrainer
   2. Definitely make sure to learn the tone exceptions and the 5th neutral tone.
   3. Understand that the 3rd tone doesn’t always have to go back up again after down
4. Start listening immersion (passive and active)
   1. Embrace ambiguity
   2. In general, avoid content that is not by natives & for natives.
   3. Use subtitles and look up words that pop out
      1. Don’t hesitate to look up a ton and progress “slowly” through the drama. You actually make more gains this way in the beginning.
5. 100-200 cards a day until you get to HSK3
6. Go through the grammar guides for HSK1 and HSK2 quickly
   1. Look up every word in every example sentence and understand thoroughly
7. After reaching HSK3, mainly immerse with drama w/ soft-subs
   1. Decrease your daily new cards to 50
   2. Drama is a very comprehensible form of immersion material w/ audio, visuals, story context to accelerate learning. Only pick out shows that look interesting plot-wise.
8. Start reading pure text after 2-3 months of only drama
   1. Focus on simplified characters first. After reaching an advanced level you can learn trad by finding an Anki deck that maps the most common 500 simplified chars to trad and immerse with Taiwanese content.
   2. Browse the Chinese web (e.g. blogs, forums, etc) more often
   3. Read novels!
      1. To ease the transition, read no more than 2 graded readers. Skip straight to real novels if it gets too boring
   4. At this point, you should be spending 60% of your time with drama (with soft subs) and 40% with pure text.
9. Once you finish HSK 6, make your own mining deck and add cards from your immersion. Use my frequency miner tool as well to automate the process of finding “juicy” words.
10. Over the course of your first dozen shows (with subs), you want to initiate the “transition” into pure listening without any subtitles. Keep in mind that in this stage, you want to “map” the subtitles to the actual speech, so you need to slowly start paying more and more attention to the audio as you progress.
    1. It’s hard to specify exactly when you should completely switch off subs, but for me, it was after around 6 shows. Think of subtitles like training wheels.
    2. Even after you switch to pure listening, you may still use subs to “revisit” a specific line of dialogue and find out what they were trying to say — kind of like an answer key, you don’t want to just read the answer key mindlessly. You gain the most by wrestling with the problem yourself first. You need to make that effort to really focus on what they’re saying in the audio using your ears.
11. After you start pure listening, emphasize listening more because you have a lot of “catching up” to do.
12. After your listening ability catches up to your reading, adjust the ratio back to 50-50 or 50-60. Your reading will always be ahead of your listening (usually), and you want to bridge the gap between the two as much as possible at all times. Mess around with the ratio and find out what works for you.
13. TBA…

Tips

• Type CC, “X” with X being a keyword to find content with subtitles surrounding X
• Google search in chinese
• Leave CCTV on second monitor