What Happened to Matt Vs Japan?

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [ɲihoŋɡo] ⓘ) is the principal language of the Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 128 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese diaspora worldwide.

The Japonic family also includes the Ryukyuan languages and the variously classified Hachijō language. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as the Ainu, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance.

Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period (794–1185), extensive waves of Sino-Japanese vocabulary entered the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw extensive grammatical changes and the first appearance of European loanwords. The basis of the standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo region (modern Tokyo) in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid 19th century). Following the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly, and words from English roots have proliferated.

Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or form questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics, with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.

The Japanese writing system combines Chinese characters, known as kanji (漢字, 'Han characters'), with two unique syllabaries (or moraic scripts) derived by the Japanese from the more complex Chinese characters: hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名, 'simple characters') and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名, 'partial characters'). Latin script (rōmaji ローマ字) is also used in a limited fashion (such as for imported acronyms) in Japanese writing. The numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals, but also traditional Chinese numerals.

#japan #japanese #talk

[BozheTsaryaKhrani]

i dont think i know him but i think japan won

[mr_mr]

I've gotten a lot from Matt over the years. I hope he's doing well in Japan. Maybe he should do a new channel, Matt & Japan

[springheeljak]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who wondered what happened to him. He was on a Takashii video and he's apparently in university in Osaka, so I guess he decided to focus on school and living in Japan

[coolbrotherf]

I've been watching him for a long while and would say that I understand him pretty well. He is the reason why I got started with my own language studies after learning about immersion and comprehensible input years ago.
He's currently living in Japan now and has appeared in other people's videos since he stopped posting his own videos. I believe he's still involved with the Refold platform, plus he's still posting on Twitter very often so he's definitely still alive.

This could be wrong, but I imagine he just doesn't have much more to share right now that he hasn't already shared many times over the many years of being a content creator. He's talked about his position many times and has a whole website now to explain it, so making videos probably isn't a high priority for him currently.

If there's a "bad side" to Matt, I'd just say that he just lacks some social skills due to spending all his free time watching anime for years instead of interacting with people. While he's very knowledgeable about cartain things, he can get a bit defensive when his theories are questioned as he's very particular about what he sees as "optimal".
I have a friend who has a very similar personality, and these kinds of people don't think about situations from other people's perspectives well. They usually on what is optimal for themselves at the moment, even if that's inconvenient for others.
He genuinely does seem to care about helping people learn languages better than the traditional methods and has expressed his excitement at their success. He just has a personality that can be a bit self-important and defensive sometimes. He's definitely not out here telling people about these methods to scam them as I can attest that they definitely worked for me, and were completely for free. I never had to pay him for anything I learned and have gotten much better at language learning from his content.

[lolekj]

I liked Matt vs Japan and I was even signed up for his emails... Then when I heard Anacreon's story about how his criticism against Matt vs Japan resulted in copyright claims, unsubstantiated ones, and the deletion of Anacreon's channel as a whole. Granted, I didn't see the old video but Anacreon does a good job talking about this situation on a new channel. I was actually very surprised as Matt seemed like a genuinely good guy.

[t_dit]

There's no way that video naturally stopped getting comments, it has way too few comments for 100K views and any channel that hasn't posted in a year would have the comment section of their latest video filled with "where are you" "what happened to you" type of stuff. It's probably set up so any comment has to be approved before it shows up publicly, in fact that is the case, I just tested it and my comment didn't show up when looking from a different account.

[monteiro]

There is little link between language fluency and ability as a teacher. Natives are usually terrible teachers for example, so the part about "are they good teachers" used a strange angle

[vicenglish]

No word about the Ken Cannon controversy? Also have you watched the recent Kevin Abroad interview with Matt?

[jannepeltonen]

I think that "white guy speaks perfect X" might be an American cultural phenomenon, where everything has to be huge and shiny and perfect. Will probably work better in that context than with Europeans or Asians.

[urinstein]

To be fair to Xiaoma, he uses his clickbait revenue to fund his trips to Kenya, Yucatan and the Amazon to make videos on all kinds of cultures.
They aren't really in depth, but they are very humanising.

His channel isn't a language learning channel as much as a "use language to open people up" channel, at least when it's at its best.

[kougamishinya]

Dogen's pitch accent lessons are more structured because they're based on breaking down every possible pattern and learning them separately. If Dogen's method is supervised machine learning then Matt's method is more like unsupervsied or semi-unsupervised. It's based on learning just a few basic patterns and then through massive input let your unconscious mind figure it out. I personally have used this method to greater effect. There are many different pitch accent patterns and exceptions that would be a chore to learn consciously and hence I believe Matt's method is actually easier and more targeted to learners who don't want to spend too much time thinking about it.

[nightcrawler]

The accountability to your viewers point that you raised really made me happy. Many people just ghost their viewers and you kinda become worried about what happened to them and such it just sucks You know. I know at times it's not possible when something really bad happens but otherwise atleast we can know that everything is going alright you're getting what I am saying. Great video as always ❤

[SeventhPhoenix]

Great video! I like your balanced, intelligent approach. I have lived in Japan for 32 years now and I have to say that Matts Japanese is indeed perfect in the sense that if you hide his face and merely listen to him speaking… you would not know that he was not Japanese. So in that sense … his Japanese speaking ability is indeed perfect.

[deProfundisAdAstra]

Whatever his reasons, I hope he comes back! I really appreciate his perspective and it’s only because of him that I’ve made what progress I have. I wish him the best ❤

[ToniusPlays]

I think that being a good teacher, transmitting difficult knowledge in a didactic way to another person, is almost a gift. In my life as a musician and jazz lover, I had the opportunity to study with two great musicians: One of them traveled the world and studied at the 5 best universities in the world for music. Today he plays jazz in one of the most expensive hotels in China, among other music production work, solo albums and participation in festivals. My other teacher, however, never left my city, in the north of Brazil, in the capital of the state of Pará, in the Amazon. And guess who was by far the best teacher, with whom I learned the most about improvising in an advanced way and improving my arrangements? The guy who never left Brazil was by far a person with the gift of teaching. Even though he was far from being as agile as the other one.

[Supassitorium]

on his instagram he responded to a comment about 13 weeks ago stating something along the lines of "im just on a break/hiatus right now. ill post a video in a few months". from what it seems he is probably going to post something relatively soon granted his own word is anything to go by.

[cobracommander]

I just started the video but he tried doing his own version of AJATT but things went south and it didn't work out. I'm not sure why he's not posting on YouTube but he's still on Twitter (or X) and tweets occasionally, I think he recently appeared in a Japanese TV commercial that he tweeted about a few months ago.

EDIT: He just tweeted two days ago. Looks like he's still in Japan.

[ShibaHamamatsucho]

After he scammed people with “projectuproot” he pretty much disappeared.

[GilBeloGil]

Matt's my guiding light, I try and follow in his footsteps, but always take his explanations with a grain of salt, as he can be a bit too "Matt" sometimes. Dogen, on the other hand, is my encyclopedia, and when I have very specific questions, his explanations always clear it out for me. Dogen's pitch accent course is by far the best money I have ever spent on language learning, you have to understand all the information he gives you there is often buried deep in Japanese texts, and he lays it all out for you in the English language. Legend. Both Matt and him tbh.

[Radescha]

No he actually scammed people with uproot and stuff. It cost tons of money, no or almost no value and yeah that's basically it.