And I'm not saying that phauna is actualy suggesting that right or wrong mean one right answer with everything else wrong, but that's what they imply to me.

I forgot to say before, Khalid, but I really liked the points about bike riding and "not not understanding" a language. I think they were particularly perceptive. Since I first learned to read English, I've constantly been amazed at my inability not to read it. It's so automatic. Same with listening; I've always wanted to know what English sounds like when you don't know what it means. It may well be impossible for me to acheive now, but still, it's a dream. Even Japanese is rapidly becoming something I listen to, rather than sounds I hear.

On a slightly unrelated topic, but something I thought you might find interesting anyway: someone recently asked me how I could tell the difference between written Chinese and written Japanese since they both use Kanji. Rather than try to explain why it is a really naive question (as well as hiragana and katakana) I said "German and English both use Roman letters, do you get confused between them?" The asker was shocked - no of course not English is English - it looks nothing like German, he said. Made me smile.

I've read the whole of Khatzu's site, it's mostly great. He says he doesn't like textbook sentences (or textbooks) or sentences that you didn't 'find' yourself (because they are aren't fun or in context or whatever). I think he does admit somewhere that you can learn by taking a big chunk of impersonal, de-contextualised sentences, but that it's the 'brute force' method. Personally I find typing up ten thousand sentences by myself to be much more brute force.

Khalid's app uses other people's sentences, somewhat out of context unless you go and search out the source, plus some of your own. Surely the main feature is that people can share their sentences, and share the load of typing or finding them.

If you can explain how natural and unnatural are different from right and wrong, I welcome it, but you didn't. You say they are based on 'feel', whereas right and wrong are based on rules. I think however these rules are non-prescriptive, they are descriptive. They are based on what is actually said. What is actually said creates that 'feeling' of natural or unnatural. Ergo they are the same.

The FeedMe app seems to offer you other people's sentences with which to explore with. It's a very good app, but it's based on, hopefully, not having to type in a million sentences yourself. I'm all for that.

Tae Kim and Khatzu are just people on the internet talking about stuff. So am I. They are no more authorities than me. We are all offering our comments. Do what you will with them.

I'm not trying to poison your blog or anything, I just like discussing stuff.

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.

Conversely, when a native Japanese speaker responds to the question "What are you hobbies?" with, "I like do jogging," it sounds unnatural, because it sounds odd. No person who grew up with English would say that (probably, since English is spoken so many countries nowadays I can't be sure). Here it is ok to give at least one example of a more natural way of saying it, for instance "I like jogging," or "I jog," and given enough experience the second language speaker will find a form they prefer and say that. "Unnaturalness" is still a value judgment, but but it's easier to define. I know you won't agree but I had fun writing it.

As for your little jab at the end of your post, I wonder if you actually read any of Khatzu's articles or if you just intentionally decided to mis-represent what he was saying? He clearly doesn't suggest sentences you type yourself (not exactly sure if you mean made up by yourself or not) are superior in any form, but sentences you add to the SRS yourself from native sources, compared to downlaoding a SRS deck of premade sentences. Copying from other people (esp from sources that interest you) is the point. Which, if I remember correctly was a point partially inspiried by this blog. And the app the Khalid has produced is all about putting sentences in that you find yourself. Unless it's changed in a big way since I last used it…?

As for Tae kim, he said he thinks Heisig sounds like a bad idea, and encourages people not to use it, instead to learn words not kanji. He also says he has never used it so he is noone to judge really. Khatzu has repeatedly and at length advised people that sentences you type up yourself are somehow superior to ones you just copy from someone else. I would think with your app you would also disagree with this message.

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.

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…

I am not condoning prescriptive grammar, grammar is what is accepted by the majority of language users in a group. Irregardless and I could care less are, even by the majority of Americans, considered wrong, I was just pointing out that the reason they are considered wrong is because they are double negatives, which don't exist in English (at the moment). When one is created, the vast majority of English users shy away from them, because they feel unnatural, as you say. Up to triple negatives are possible in Japanese, so if a new expression was created which was a double negative in Japanese, most Japanese would accept it as 'possible' and therefore allow it to be used (maybe). I just don't see English users quickly jumping into the double negative camp, in any part of the world.

Also, grammar books these days are not prescriptive either, but they are still full of useful rules and common examples of what seems natural. Of course all that stuff can be bent, but I don't think any English teachers would be doing anyone any favours by accepting the above two examples as 'right'. I'm a native English speaker, but if I started to spel reelly baddly lik this, then the majority of English speakers would be picking me up on it. It's cool to pretend that no one is wrong and all answers are right, but it's not true. Essentially by saying right and wrong are irrelevant, you are saying everything is right (if said by a native speaker). There is no Platonic form of grammar, but there is, let's say, a huge corpus of acceptable examples which everyone is checking stuff against. That's why mangled expressions are still comprehensible, because they are close enough in the Anglosphere hivemind. And for some languages there is a language arbiter, for example in French.

Another point I'd like to raise is that, this is somewhat a culture issue. I've never heard a Brit arguing that irregardless and I could care less are okay, and not to be such a grammar nazi about it. That's because it's only really being used in America at the moment and just spilling out a little on the internet. I've truly never heard someone say these things, only type them, and I'm an Australian living in Japan. I watch a lot of American tv, as does anyone who speaks English, and I've never heard them used. So amongst Americans I assume it's quite unaccepted to not get into movies, or the news, or newspapers, or tv. However when it becomes an us (or US) versus them argument, suddenly any usage of English is acceptable if an American says such things.

I know Australians with appalling grammar, especially using came and come interchangeably (He come by the other day), but no one is championing their right to say wrong things. People hassle them. And if you choose to accept my crazy Australian use of words, that's fine. However, I think most non-Americans are actively trying to keep out American linguistic influences. You want me to accept irregardless as being okay, well that's just not going to happen. I'm a native and I don't accept it. That's my point of view, however because nothing is 'wrong' in your point of view surely you can see your way to spelling 'colour' with a 'u' occasionally, perhaps using the word 'sheila' for a woman every now and then, a few g'day mates and so forth. All in the name of everything being acceptable, of course. I mean you are writing for the internet after all, not just Americans.

Quickly, the other points. Local expressions are usually grammatically correct, they just use 'local' words, and most of those words are just words not as used in other places. Bin and can, rubbish and garbage, I think everyone know these words, but depending where you live you prefer one or the other. No one anywhere considers these words wrong. Same with spelling, same with pronunciation.

The other group will introduce themselves, but only slowly as they try to remember the correct forms and words to use, probably from something they've memorised verbatim. Once that little bit they 'know' they can do is over, and the Japanese person has responded with a "You're Japanese is wonderful" comment and then the learner basically walks away without saying anything to go and sit with the other beginners who've given up, speak English and complain about how hard kanji is.

The latter group is obsessed with not saying anything "wrong", while the former is just happy to say something, anything. And the Japanese people I've asked almost universally agree that the former is more fun and interesting to talk to. Remeber these two 'groups' are actually epople who've been studying about the same amount of time.

Ok…let's pretend I have a point….how about "grammar is like a map, it'll only get you so far in the real world". Or correct and incorrect is always a simplification, there is always some grey (gray?) and knowing when and who it is ok to use "irregardless" and so on with and in what contexts (ie informal email between a close friend who doesn't care about grammar) and when it is not (typing a thesis) and not being too worried if you accidently get mixed up.