Mr.Papers' Language Learning Method

[Cyborg Ninja]

I'll abstain from sharing that person's name with you. If the atmosphere around here does change, I'll make sure he knows it. It's only fair. By the way, even Khatzumoto of All-Japanese-All-the-Time fame had a few things to say about these boards; but he decided his happiness isn't worth wasting on swaying your opinions. He's committed towards constructing, not destroying.

Simple correction is not offensive. Degrading someone, including those "kids who want to be cool," is deplorable behavior. This topic is one example. To see grown men in their 30's to 50's treating a 16-year-old like that is evidence enough that it is, in fact, your attitudes that need to change. I actually believed at first that the threatened ban was toward Furrykef: that is how upside-down this forum is.

I've been around enough boards to know that this kind of treatment of new users, and perhaps even older ones, is abnormal and undesirable. Usually you'll have several teens who say off-color remarks and troll. Here, you act like a troll is anyone who doesn't think the way you do. A troll to you is someone who asks too many questions. Questions like "What book should I buy?" or "How long did it take you to learn Japanese?" are met with derision and condescension. I cannot believe how something so innocent is met with so much judgment.

Threatening to ban someone for giving links to sites he recommended, no matter what his skill level is, is shocking. And you know what, you ban a lot of users, don't you? And you get in a lot of fights, right? If the administration of this forum had clear and proper guidelines on moderation, it never would have plummeted this far. For the number of posts at this site, I'd expect many more active, established users than the same ten every day. I bet the owner of this site would, too.

[phreadom]

Frankly at this point, YOUR attitude is ticking me off a little. Why don't you have a look at the post I made in the admin's forum the other day after Mr. Paper's half a dozen rude necroposts to get a better idea of what happened here.

http://thejapanesepage.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=97817

I PMed him about his unacceptable behavior today on the forum. Several necroposts that were short and rude.

As I'm not very diplomatic I simply said that such behavior wouldn't be tolerated and that if he continued I'd ban him.

Every post that I've seen from you today has been both made on very out of date posts, and have been nothing but insulting and combative. Asking for trouble.

This is trolling on multiple counts. If you continue, you will be banned.

Maybe you need to stop and think for a second before you post if you're actually contributing anything positive to the thread, or why you're posting on a very out of date thread, or whether or not your statement is going to come across as rude or offensive etc.

This is your only warning (from me).

If it had been just one or even 2 posts, I wouldn't be as ticked. But he posted several today that were all necroposts and very rude.

"History sucks!"

"I never have problems with memory."

"My parents don't listen to my music. Why would you want to share it with them?"

"Who cares?"

"Japanese history is boring! Who cares about their politics in the old days if you're not even Japanese. Its not like you're going to be working for Japans' goverment. But I do like to learn how the humans came about in Japan though/geography of Japan."

"I don't use textbooks, I use notes on grammar. Textbooks suck when it comes to learning a language, its better to just use your brain that deals with language better than a book would." etc.

This was blatant necropost trolling today.

Oddly enough he did appear to make one post that didn't come off as trolling, unless he intentionally made all the mistakes he did... but given the blunt nature of his other troll posts, I won't give him that much credit.

This person intentionally went back and dug up half a dozen posts from months to a year and a half ago for the SOLE PURPOSE of making rude comments. And you have the audacity to say that we were out of line for asking him to stop doing that? And that when he then went on to ignore those requests and start saying none of us knew what we were talking about and that he was half way to fluent already and our methods were all stupid and his was the best etc... WE'RE the ones in the wrong?

I'm sorry if I seem a little steamed... but frankly you're being absurd and don't seem to have a grasp on even half of what actually happened.

I suggest you go back and read all those posts he made before anyone started making any comments to him, and then continue reading the rest of his posts, as linked from his profile, to get an idea why people were getting a little fed up with his intentional trolling and horrible attitude.

And you might also take notice of the fact that when he was asking actual questions and being remotely polite, people were helpful and offered information etc.

I'm glad that he came back and has decided to be much more polite, but there is a reason he got banned and I think it should be abundantly clear if you'd seen what we'd seen.


That said, I appreciate honest criticism, but frankly on this particular point you really don't know what you're talking about.

[Yudan Taiteki]

I'll abstain from sharing that person's name with you. If the atmosphere around here does change, I'll make sure he knows it. It's only fair. By the way, even Khatzumoto of All-Japanese-All-the-Time fame had a few things to say about these boards; but he decided his happiness isn't worth wasting on swaying your opinions. He's committed towards constructing, not destroying.

In other words, he's willing to bash people as long as he doesn't have to give specific criticisms. And you'd rather continue to make vague criticisms and name drop rather than providing anything helpful.

Questions like "What book should I buy?" or "How long did it take you to learn Japanese?" are met with derision and condescension. I cannot believe how something so innocent is met with so much judgment.

I've never seen those questions met with derision. We do expect people to do some basic checking before they ask questions and not just to use this site as a dictionary or free translation service, however. In the end, though, I don't believe I've ever seen someone come here with a serious interest in learning Japanese and get rebuffed.

Threatening to ban someone for giving links to sites he recommended, no matter what his skill level is, is shocking.

The ban was not for this thread alone. I think you could make an argument that the temporary ban was excessive, but it was not based on "giving links to sites he recommended".

EDIT: Checking through your old posts, it seems that on the whole you have gotten good responses from your threads -- there was one thread where people were critical, but that's going to happen anywhere.

[phreadom]

The ban was not for this thread alone. I think you could make an argument that the temporary ban was excessive, but it was not based on "giving links to sites he recommended".

And as a matter of fact, as soon as people said that a week might be too long, I shortened it to 3 days from the initial 7.

So not only do I not think it was exceptionally to begin with, given all the evidence, but as soon as people mentioned that it might have been, I changed it to be much shorter.

Now I'm sorry, but I'm not just going to sit here while people go around digging up old posts to start trouble on by being blatantly rude etc... and then let them completely ignore any warnings or advice about their behavior and continue to troll the board.

I'm aiming this at Cyborg Ninja, who seems to have some personal beef with this forum and is using this particular issue as an opportunity to vent that displeasure. Now that would be fine if Cyborg Ninja were willing to point to some actual evidence for these things and address them more accurately, rather than jump on this particular issue which was in reality entirely justified on our part.

I'd think the Ronin_Mike thread might have been a little more appropriate to criticize, or any one of a number of other points that might have been dug up to illustrate an actual case where we might have handled something poorly...

But griping about this particular issue with Mr.Paper is absurd as it stands.

(And I'm not rehashing my Mr.Paper bashing. I'm glad he's back and being much better now. I'd not have even mentioned these things had you not ignorantly started bashing on us for something you clearly didn't understand or know the full story behind.)

[furrykef]

Simple correction is not offensive. Degrading someone, including those "kids who want to be cool," is deplorable behavior. This topic is one example.

Then you've completely missed the point of everything I have said. The point wasn't to degrade him. The point was to get him to stop behaving the way he was behaving. He was on a high horse and he needed to get off it, by any means necessary.

To see grown men in their 30's to 50's treating a 16-year-old like that is evidence enough that it is, in fact, your attitudes that need to change.

This community has standards. These standards are easily observed and posted in prominent places. Those standards were violated, and badly. When that happens, you have to do something, otherwise forum quality suffers. There is a point where enough is enough. I repeat: have you seen the posts we were complaining about? I don't understand how you could read the posts he was making, compare them to the sorts of posts that we do and don't normally make, and not see that he needed an attitude adjustment. How would you propose that we give him one? Remember that phreadom said he'd already PMed him and he still didn't change his behavior.

I've been around enough boards to know that this kind of treatment of new users, and perhaps even older ones, is abnormal and undesirable.

I repeat: we only do this to people who do something wrong. When people do something wrong, we want them to stop it. We have to express that somehow.

Usually you'll have several teens who say off-color remarks and troll. Here, you act like a troll is anyone who doesn't think the way you do. A troll to you is someone who asks too many questions. Questions like "What book should I buy?" or "How long did it take you to learn Japanese?" are met with derision and condescension. I cannot believe how something so innocent is met with so much judgment.

I repeat yet again: have you seen this guy's posts? None of the questions you mentioned are even close to what ticked me off about him. Again, this is a guy who would constantly talk about how he's not a beginner, yet he thought "I don't like milk" is "miruku ga sukkunai na". He thought that "Sushi ga sugoi" is a grammatically incorrect sentence because it was missing "desu", and tried to correct Yudan (a fluent speaker) with this. These are mistakes that I wouldn't have made even six years ago. Now, the problem is not that he made these mistakes. I'm sure some of us here have made mistakes that are just as bad. The difference is, those people didn't go around saying "I am not a beginner", "basic conjugations? wtf. I know what I'm doing", etc., and they didn't start threads trying to teach other people with a method that obviously hasn't worked well for them so far (or, at the very least, hasn't had enough time to have worked well).

And those people also didn't necropost with useless 'conversation' like "Who cares?"

Threatening to ban someone for giving links to sites he recommended, no matter what his skill level is, is shocking.

I've never seen that happen unless the links are spam. It's pretty obvious what's spam and what isn't. In those cases where it isn't clear, I haven't seen any bans threatened.

If you're specifically referring to Mr. Paper's first post in this thread, that's not what pissed us off. The links were fine. It was his apparent attitude that was wrong: "I'm great at Japanese, or at least great at learning it, and you should follow my method and you can be great too." If he were actually great at Japanese, nobody would have minded this. But his Japanese skills are near zero. And, again, nobody minded that he was describing his learning method, either. It was the way he was presenting it that was totally wrong.

It was also not the post itself that really irritated me. It was that it was the last straw. If this thread was this guy's only offense, I'd probably have brushed it off completely and not even mentioned it.

And you know what, you ban a lot of users, don't you? And you get in a lot of fights, right?

I actually don't see very many fights or bans around here. I'd also like to point out that I was the one who suggested that Mr. Paper's ban be shortened. He just needed a swift kick in the pants, not to be driven out of the community.

- Kef

[coco]

I'll abstain from sharing that person's name with you. If the atmosphere around here does change, I'll make sure he knows it. ．．．．．．．．．．I bet the owner of this site would, too.

We didn't notice that you were much concerned about TJP like that.
You would be able to become one of members who constantly stimulate new members by their contributions.

I hope you change the atmosphere around here, if it is needed.

[coco]

Just I wanted to let Clay-san and our moderators/admins, who have been working hard for us, know this Youtube link, instead of someone's.
In this video he mentioned TJP at 6:19～6:28.

[clay]

Just I wanted to let Clay-san and our moderators/admins, who have been working hard for us, know this Youtube link, instead of someone's.
In this video he mentioned TJP at 6:19～6:28.

Thanks! I noticed that a while back. That was very kind of him.

Cyborg Ninja, we are not like many other forums where anything goes. As Furrykef said, we have standards. Our golden rule around here is "If your grandma wouldn't like it, don't do it." If someone was given a warning or was banned, his or her actions violated this rule.

Still, everyone makes mistakes; we are all human and can misread people's intentions. However, that is not our intention. My goal for this site is to give friendly (which includes enforcing the "grandma" rule) and accurate information. I am just amazed at how many people bend over backwards to help others freely and willingly to accomplish that goal.

EDIT: Sorry! I meant to also add that PLEASE contact me with any specific suggestions for improvement. We realize we aren't perfect, but constructive criticism is much better than non-specific "your attitude ain't good" criticism.

[leonl]

Simple correction is not offensive. Degrading someone, including those "kids who want to be cool," is deplorable behavior. This topic is one example. To see grown men in their 30's to 50's treating a 16-year-old like that is evidence enough that it is, in fact, your attitudes that need to change. I actually believed at first that the threatened ban was toward Furrykef: that is how upside-down this forum is.

I've been around enough boards to know that this kind of treatment of new users, and perhaps even older ones, is abnormal and undesirable.

Few Simple points

1. This forum does not exist to help posers express thier individuality, with Japanese Characters they don't understand. So the 16yr olds who come asking for this type of help are told politely that we dont do that here. It is only when they become combative that the problems arise.

2. Obviously you haven't been around enough forums. On certain larger forums that I frequent your post would get you a temporary ban. Its laced with vagued and unsourced claims(with the exception of Mr. Paper which has now resolved itself)

3. As it has already been stated, TJP is not your standard internet fora. The standards here are different, people are expected to bring certain things to the table if you will when they ask their question.

As for for the AJATT guy having a problem with this forum thats honestly not surprising. But I bet you its more of a personal issue due to the fact that a few people here are a little more vocal in their criticism of his method.
I don't know why people dont understand this, This is not place where you can make grandiose, unfounded statements and expect to go unquestioned. If you make a statement in a declaritve way and it seems suspect people will call you on it. TJP helps people, it doesnt it coddle them like children. If people want to be coddled, and be able to say whatever they want this is not the place for that.

[clay]

In Cyborg's defense, her last post was before Phreadom listed out the grievances unknown to non-admins.

I definitely want TJP to be a friendly place and I in no way want it to be intimidating to those new to Japanese, but not at the expense of grandma. If grandma is offended, I suspect a great many everyday individuals would be offended too and less likely to actively participate. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned fart, though.

[AJBryant]

Eh? Speak up, sonny. I'm a might deef.

[Mr.Paper]

Get off my lawn teenagers!

[leonl]

Bring it on Grandma!!!

But seriously. I think most criticisms of this place are based on peoples hurt feelings not any actual flaw in the way things are run here. Clay there is nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, if more forum admins were "old fashioned" internet forums wouldn't be so chaotic and disorganized

[furrykef]

In Cyborg's defense, her last post was before Phreadom listed out the grievances unknown to non-admins.

I don't see anything phreadom said that wasn't already evident. They weren't evident inside this thread alone, but he didn't say anything that I didn't already know about from simply looking at Mr. Paper's posts (and phreadom's public responses to them).

[AJBryant]

Get off my lawn teenagers!

LOL!

I almost used that, but went with "deaf codger" instead.