Thus spake Erick P., and incredibly handsome young man from Brazil [edited for typos]:

Khatzumoto! THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MAN!

Before anything else, I wanna thank you for the incredibly useful, entertaining and inspiring fountain of knowledge that is AJATT. I’m dead serious, it’s just life-saving.

I’m from Brazil and have been living the past few days in what you could call “All ‘All Japanese All The Time’ All The Time”. I can’t seem to stop reading the blog! Really, thank you for all the help with my learning Japanese!

And, as I’m a big enthusiast of meta-learning as well, I stumbled upon something that I think might really interest you. I was going to post this as a comment on one of your AJATT posts, but it became too big and I don’t wanna flood the blog…

But I find this content extremely interesting for all your meta-learners out there and I think it should be shared. I did a search for “Suzuki” on AJATT and found no entries. If you do not yet know about this, you’ll certainly love it!

Have you heard of the famous Suzuki Method for teaching music? It’s cited in that Scientific American article from a post of yours (from 2007, “The Expert Mind”). The resemblance with some language learning techniques is incredible! In fact, Suzuki devised his method based on his observations about language learning. Gotta love it, man!

I recommend a brief read on the Wiki, but I’m gonna paste some highlights that really link this music learning method to language learning methods put forward by you and others:

“The central belief of Suzuki, based on his language acquisition theories, is that all people are capable of learning from their environment.”

Immersion theory:

“Saturation in the musical community, including attendance at local concerts of classical music, exposure to and friendship with other music students, and listening to music performed by “artists” (professional classical musicians of high caliber) in the home every day (starting before birth if possible).”

and…

“Suzuki pointed out that great artists (such as Mozart) were surrounded with excellent performances from birth, and that the advent of recording technology made this aspect of their environment possible to achieve for large numbers of “ordinary” people whose parents were not themselves great musicians & music teachers like Mozart’s father

was. So-called “traditional” (that is, not Suzuki trained) music educators have used this technique since the earliest days of recording technology; the difference in the Suzuki method is the scale on which Suzuki systematically insisted on daily listening in the home, from before birth if possible, and his focus on using recordings of beginner’s repertoire alongside recordings of advanced repertoire.”

Input Before Output (sort of):

“In the beginning, learning music by ear is emphasized over reading musical notation. This follows Suzuki’s observation that in language acquisition, a child learns to speak before learning to read. Related to this, memorization of all solo repertoire is expected, even after a student begins to use sheet music as a tool to learn new pieces.”

Forget about grammar, it comes naturally:

“Traditional etudes and technical studies are not used in the beginning stages, which focus almost exclusively on a set of performance pieces.”

and…

“Another innovation of Suzuki was to deliberately leave out the large amount of technical instructions & exercises found in many beginners’ music books of his day. He favored a focus on song-playing over technical exercise, and asked teachers to allow students to make music from the beginning, helping to motivate young children with short, attractive songs which can themselves be used as technique building exercises. Each song in the common repertoire is carefully chosen to introduce some new or higher level of technique than the previous selection.”

SRS theory (maybe?):

“Retaining and reviewing every piece of music ever learned on a regular basis, in order to raise technical and musical ability”

You must enjoy it:

“Frequent public performance, so that performing is natural and enjoyable.”

Sentence Mining:

“extensive listening to and copying of recordings”

And finally, something I think relates to the Principle of Anticipation, from the Pimsleur language learning Method (which I actually like a lot, for it shares many of the said principles):

“Review pieces, along with “preview” parts of music a student is yet to learn, are often used in creative ways to take the place of the more traditional etude books.”

Well, that’s it, Khatz. I hope you liked the parallels…

Thanks again, man, for all the AJATT experience!

Best regards,

Erick P.