new log, ported MT review, suffering post

content/references/definitions.mkd

@@ -261,3 +261,15 @@
 [Jaynes Society]: http://www.julianjaynes.org/
 [Legend of Grimrock]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/207170/
 [Space Pirates and Zombies]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/107200/
+[lie to children]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
+[loop unrolling]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_unwinding
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+

content/references/personal.mkd

@@ -39,3 +39,4 @@
 [avg_dmg]: https://github.com/muflax/scripts/blob/master/average_damage.rb
 [yonmokunarabe]: https://github.com/muflax/yonmokunarabe/
 [gist revlog]: https://gist.github.com/3143132
+[Michel Thomas Anki]: http://muflax.com/stuff/french_foundation.tsv

content/references/references.mkd

@@ -113,6 +113,12 @@
 [Bodhi talk]: http://www.buddhanet.net/audio-lectures.htm
 [Khatz System]: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/the-search-for-the-system-how-i-found-one-why-you-need-one
 [God hates the world]: http://godhatestheworld.com/
+[Michel Thomas French course]: http://www.amazon.com/Michel-Thomas-Foundation-Course-French/dp/0340938919/
+[The Language Revolution]: http://www.amazon.com/Michel-Thomas-Jonathan-Solity/dp/0340928336
+[Michel Thomas preview]: http://www.audible.co.uk/pd?asin=B004GYSQZC
+[Michel Thomas booklets]: http://www.michelthomas.com/downloads.php
+[lang-8]: http://lang-8.com/
+[Warranted Neo-Confucian Belief]: http://www.davidtien-phd.com/publications/warranted-neo-confucian-belief/
 
 <!-- onion -->
 [onion horoscope]: http://www.theonion.com/articles/your-horoscopes-week-of-january-10-2012,27001/
@@ -162,6 +168,9 @@
 [LW timeless physics]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/
 [LW fun theory]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y0/31_laws_of_fun/
 [LW obvious]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9q5/on_saying_the_obvious/
+[LW review]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7qq/review_michel_thomas_french_direct_instruction/
+[LW owen]: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/7d1/scientifically_optimizing_education_hard_problem/
+[LW DI]: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/7g3/what_direct_instruction_is/
 
 <!-- Hanson -->
 [Hanson smile]: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/poor-folks-do-smile.html
@@ -248,6 +257,7 @@
 [The Christ-Myth Theory And Its Problems]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Christ-Myth-Theory-Problems-ebook/dp/B00771ZPZA
 [Freedom Evolves]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves
 [Der Zauberlehrling]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice_%281910_novel%29
+[Japanese in Mangaland]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_in_Mangaland
 
 <!-- internal links -->
 [main]: http://muflax.com

content/references/videos.mkd

@@ -84,3 +84,4 @@
 [Lacrimosa Straße der Zeit]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdzI88X4YZk
 [Lacrimosa Herz]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWkkwVA0eEg
 [Sonata Arctica 8th]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3E1fZUi3cA
+[Arguelles Assimil]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLvTEqXqlsI

content_blog/morality/suffering.mkd

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+title: Suffering? What suffering?
+date: 2012-07-31
+techne: :done
+episteme: :speculation
+---
+
+I'm confused by "suffering". I'm no longer sure it even exists in a morally relevant sense. That's a weird position to be in.
+
+(Maybe that means I'm enlightened. If so, I accept sacred offerings in return for favors in the afterlife, and will petition Papa Nurgle on your behalf.)
+
+I'm not saying "the experience of suffering" doesn't exist, in the sense that "the experience of an integer between 3 and 4, but neither 3 nor 4" doesn't exist. The experience sure does exist, just as the experiences of bliss, joy, sadness, that cramp in your leg that just won't go away, sweetness, anger, and so on, all do exist.
+
+I'm also not saying that nothing is morally relevant in a metaphysical sense, but without suffering as one foundation, moral realism becomes quite a bit smaller, and I'm not sure if the concept of "harm" even makes sense without it. (Of course, "suffering" is obviously important even for moral anti-realists as a political tool. I'm not giving up this use, the same way that consequentialist hedonists would agree that sacredness is not a moral property, but still a very useful social property.)
+
+What I mean is this: I cannot tell a difference, experientially, between "suffering" and "bliss", any more than between "calmness" and "bliss". It is as if someone had declared "green" is an Evil Color that must be eradicated, but "purple"[^jcm] and "yellow" are Good or Neutral Colors. They are different experiences, of course, but one isn't privileged over another, and they are all Just Fine As They Are.
+
+[^jcm]: Jesus Christ, Marie!
+
+In Theravada Buddhism (and Zen, to the extent that I understand it), this is very likely the actual position behind the teachings, hidden behind complex [lies to children][lie to children]. You can't tell the new monk that "you being freaked out by suffering is a delusion on your side; experience the full suchness of the experience and you will realize your mistake". They'd believe you're bullshitting them or not taking them seriously. But what you are really trying to tell them is that suffering-as-bad is an erroneous belief-in-belief, but not an actual belief.
+
+Consider what the Buddha actually *does*. He proposes that suffering (dukkha) is a fundamental property of all experience, in the same way that subject-lessness (anatta) and impermanence (anicca) are. This doesn't *change* for the Buddha. He's not part of a different reality. He also still experiences everything he did before, including pain in the form of frequent headaches, and he still dies. Yet, he is liberated, independent of his death, merely through observation. Liberated of what, exactly?
+
+"In the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard; in the thinking, just the thought", as the sutra goes. What is gone is the belief-in-belief, the idea that he was a separate floating ego somewhere, being harmed by the experience of suffering. The actual object-level of experience, the actual dukkha, doesn't change - it can't. What is gone is the mistaken belief that merely *declared* that "this is bad", even though it was not the case that "this is bad", as can be learned by, for example, experiencing "this" in a concept-free way, and then finding no flaw with it. Liberation is the realization that Samsara didn't exist to begin with.
+
+This is clearly analogous to the realization of anatta. It's not like people have a self before they practice, then the practice actively destroys it, and finally they don't have a self anymore. (Though that is the pop-cultural idea.) What's really happening, in the Buddhist framework, is that the belief of having a self clearly distinct from objects it experiences is false, and through practice and arguments this is *demonstrated*[^demo], and in the end, the practitioner understands how they were non-dual all along, without a dividing line between subject and object, without a stable core of experience.
+
+[^demo]:
+    As an obvious implication, this means that realization of anatta (and the rest of enlightenment) is a *conceptual* thing. Zen and early Theravada clearly understand that, and they accept e.g. parables and koans as effective teaching tools. (In LW lingo, anatta is dissolving the question of subjectivity.) However, only some folks might be able to get the necessary conceptual steps. Not everyone has +10 meta (da fewls!).
+
+    Furthermore, in the fundamental sense, this doesn't *matter* - everyone *already* is enlightened, they just don't *know* that. Getting them to know that is hard, though. (But their dana is still green, as some would say.) This still leaves "normal" problems, and chopping that wood, and getting on with your life, now that "Samsara" has been taking care of.
+
+    I'm sure this makes Theravada's ultra-seriousness *hilarious* for Zennists and Tantrikas.
+
+So, what is bad about suffering, or any experience for that matter? "Ah, *pain* clearly is bad! You can just *feel* it!" So as a good empiricist, I waited for the next headache, or any other source of pain, and then I put my ass on my cushion, and tried to investigate this feeling for myself, paying close attention, as if I had never encountered it before.
+
+And sure enough, there is the sensation of pain. It has a distinct texture, maybe a location and extension, and a certain frequency[^frequency] of being there, like all sensations. But there is no badness to be found. It can't be found, just as there is no self, distinct from the sensation, that experiences it. 
+
+[^frequency]: All experiences flicker. Start looking, you'll see it. Some flicker quite fast, but they all do. Even walls.
+
+However, there might well be the *additional* sensation of a thought that says, "this is bad". But this thought itself, despite its alleged content, is itself not bad, nor is it fundamentally connected to the experience of pain. It might just as well say this about bliss, or cats, or itself. Most importantly, it is clearly false - the pain itself isn't bad. Lastly, I might sometimes find flinching sensations, attempts to push away my attention, but those flinches themselves aren't bad either (as they are the same thing that pushes my attention *towards* things when I concentrate). And so, having investigated all components, there is no mysterious "badness" left over at the end. 
+
+And [then I thought][Dark Stance], maybe I'm not looking at the right thing. So I investigated sorrow, grief, sadness, disappointment, laziness, disgust, and all the other candidates I could think of, and they are all alike. There is an experience, which is not bad, and maybe a belief about the experience, which is not bad (and demonstrably false if it claims the experience is bad), and if I feel particularly meta, there are beliefs about beliefs, and there even might be complicated webs of experiences, but all of that can similarly be investigated.
+
+I can't even tell the difference, in a thought-experimental way, from a world *with* inherently bad experiences, and a world *without* them. "Behold, I flip this switch, and *now* this sensation is *bad*! It is now *true* suffering!" just... doesn't work. The referent of the thought "this is bad, make it stop" cannot be found - the thought is empty, a behavioristic gesture.
+
+So where is it? Where's the invisible dragon of bad experiences? Because I sure can't find any.

content_daily/log/77.mkd

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: Where is your warrant now?
+date: 2012-07-31
+techne: :done
+episteme: :log
+---
+
+Wrote [a quick post][Suffering? What suffering?] about suffering, and how I seem to have misplaced it or something, maybe it's under my pillow, no, was it even there to begin with, I don't know, have you seen it?
+
+Also started some of the preparation of a post about epistemological warrant, as proposed by Plantinga. It's a really cool concept, has some neat implications and enables *great* troll arguments[^troll], demonstrates why theologians aren't worthless (well, ok, this *is* epistemology, so maybe that's not the most convincing demonstration of usefulness...), and, most importantly, I'll need it later to argue that Crackpottery is also warranted.
+
+Also ported the old [Michel Thomas French][] review from LW to my site.
+
+[^troll]:
+    Just read the paper [Warranted Neo-Confucian Belief][], which out-trolls *Plantinga* through *his own theory* with the help of *Wang Yangming* by combining *morality and epistemology*. You have no idea how happy this paper makes me.
+
+---
+
+A quick highlight of an *hilarious* passage in [After Virtue][] as your daily dose of sane philosophy:
+
+> This change of character, resulting from the disappearance of any connection between the precepts of morality and the facts of human nature already appears in the writings of the eighteenth-century moral philosophers themselves. For although each of the writers we have been concerned with attempted in his positive arguments to base morality on human nature, each in his negative arguments moved toward a more and more unrestricted version of the claim that no valid argument can move from entirely factual premises to any moral or evaluative conclusion - to a principle, that is, which once it is accepted, constitutes an epitaph to their entire project. Hume still expresses this claim in the form of a doubt rather than of a positive assertion. He remarks that in 'every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with' authors make a transition from statements about God or human nature to moral judgments: 'instead of the usual copulations of propositions, *is*, and *is not*, I met with no proposition that is not connected with an *ought*, or an *ought not*' (Treatise III. i. 1). And he then goes on to demand 'that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it', The same general principle, no longer expressed as a question, but as an assertion, appears in Kant's insistence that the injunctions of the moral law cannot be derived from any set of statements about human happiness or about the will of God and then yet again in Kierkegaard's account of the ethical . What is the significance of this general claim?
+>
+> Some later moral philosophers have gone so far as to describe the thesis that from a set of factual premises no moral conclusion validly follows as 'a truth of logic'. understanding it as derivable from a more general principle which some medieval logicians formulated as the claim that in a valid argument nothing can appear in the conclusion which was not already in the premises. And, such philosophers have suggested, in an argument in which any attempt is made to derive a moral or evaluative conclusion from factual premises something which is not in the premises, namely the moral or evaluative element, will appear in the conclusion. Hence any such argument must fail. Yet in fact the alleged unrestrictedly general logical principle on which everything is being made to depend is bogus - and the scholastic tag applies only to Aristotelian syllogisms. There *are* several types of valid argument in which some element may appear in a conclusion which is not present in the premises. A.N. Prior's counter-example to this alleged principle illustrates its breakdown adequately; from the premise 'He is a sea-captain', the conclusion may be validly inferred that 'He ought to do whatever a sea-captain ought to do'. This counter-example not only shows that there is no general principle of the type alleged; but it itself shows what is at least a grammatical truth - an 'is' premise *can* on occasion entail an 'ought' conclusion.
+>
+> Adherents of the 'no "ought" from "is" view' could however easily meet part of the difficulty raised by Prior's example by reformulating their own position. What they intended to claim they might and would presumably say, is that no conclusion with substantial evaluative and moral content - and the conclusion in Prior's example certainly does lack any such content - can be derived from factual premises. Yet the problem would remain for them as to why now anyone would accept their claim. For they have conceded that it cannot be derived from any unrestrictedly general logical principle. Yet their claim may still have substance, but a substance that derives from a particular, and in the eighteenth century new, conception of moral rules and judgments. It may, that is, assert a principle whose validity derives not from some general logical principle, but from the meaning of the key terms employed. Suppose that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the meaning and implications of the key terms used in moral utterance had changed their character; it could then turn out to be the case that what had once been valid inferences from or to some particular moral premise or conclusion would no longer be valid inferences from or to what *seemed* to be the same factual premise or moral conclusion . For what in some sense were the same expressions, the same sentences would now bear a different meaning. But do we in fact have any evidence for such a change of meaning? To answer this question it is helpful to consider another type of counter-example to the 'No "ought" conclusions from "is" premises' thesis. From such factual premises as 'This watch is grossly inaccurate and irregular in time-keeping' and 'This watch is too heavy to carry about comfortably', the evaluative conclusion validly follows that 'This is a bad watch'. From such factual premises as 'He gets a better yield for this crop per acre than any farmer in the district', 'He has the most effective programme of soil renewal yet known' and 'His dairy herd wins all the first prizes at the agricultural shows', the evaluative conclusion validly follows that 'He is a good farmer'.
+>
+> Both of these arguments are valid because of the special character of the concepts of a watch and of a farmer. Such concepts are functional concepts; that is to say, we define both 'watch' and 'farmer' in terms of the purpose or function which a watch or a farmer are characteristically expected to serve. It follows that the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch nor the concept of a farmer independently of that of a good farmer; and that the criterion of something's being a watch and the criterion of something's being a good watch - and so also for 'farmer' and for all other functional concepts - are not independent of each other. Now clearly both sets of criteria - as is evidenced by the examples given in the last paragraph - are factual. Hence any argument which moves from premises which assen that the appropriate criteria are satisfied to a conclusion which asserts that 'That is a good such-and-such', where 'such-and-such' picks out an item specified by a functional concept, will be a valid argument which moves from factual premises to an evaluative conclusion. Thus we may safely assert that, if some amended version of the 'No "ought" conclusion from "is" premises' principle is to hold good, it must exclude arguments involving functional concepts from its scope. But this suggests strongly that those who have insisted that *all* moral arguments fall within the scope of such a principle may have been doing so, because they took it for granted that *no* moral arguments involve functional concepts. Yet moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition - whether in its Greek or its medieval versions - involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of *man* understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function; and it is when and only when the classical tradition in its integrity has been substantially rejected that moral arguments change their character so that they fall within the scope of some version of the 'No "ought" conclusion from "is" premises' principle. That is to say, 'man' stands to 'good man' as 'watch' stands to 'good watch' or 'farmer' to 'good farmer' within the classical tradition. Aristotle takes it as a starting-point for ethical enquiry that the relationship of 'man' to 'living well' is analogous to that of 'harpist' to 'playing the harp well' (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a 16). But the use of 'man' as a functional concept is far older than Aristotle and it does not initially derive from Aristotle's metaphysical biology. It is rooted in the forms of social life to which the theorists of the classical tradition give expression. For according to that tradition to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose: member of a family, citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God. It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept.
+
+"Deriving *ought* from *is* is impossible? I've just done it twice on the same page!" Virtue ethics, fuck yeah!
+
+---
+
+Did some experiments how to learn grammar, automatically.
+
+All of my existing techniques are designed around the fact that virtually all existing teaching material is either complete bullshit (like classes) or woefully incomplete (like the rare good textbook, or Michel Thomas courses), and most of it is based on really boring source material. I dare you to find a single textbook, parallel reader or vocab list that has space pirates in it! There aren't any![^any] That's how shitty this industry is.
+
+[^any]: This is a lie. [Japanese in Mangaland][] has space pirates, which is why it's the only textbook I would ever whole-heartedly recommend, and I've read *a lot* of them, for *many* languages. But you get my point.
+
+That's why my Anki stuff designs itself, based on good material I like. Unfortunately that means I can't use the experience of a fluent speaker to break down some structural components for me, and the computer isn't smart enough to do it either. This somewhat limits my tools (but far less than I thought).
+
+Of course, the *vast* majority of skill in a language is raw memory. It's almost entirely about learning words (and phrases) with fairly limited compressibility. However, once you have those, you can *rapidly* add grammar and become fully fluent. Michel Thomas very elegantly demonstrates how to do this for French, where he can rely on the fact that his English-speaking students already know many thousands of words. If you have the grammar organized according to sane criteria, you can go from "never spoken before" to "speaking in full, non-memorized sentences" in a few *days* (provided you already know the vocab, again).
+
+Now, so far I have largely ignored how to actually learn the grammar, MT-style, without having someone like MT design a course for me. I couldn't even *hire* someone to design one for half the languages I want to learn (like Sumerian, which has fewer speakers than SWTOR has players). I thought, well, worst case, I'll sacrifice my speaking ability in these languages (the Sumerian blogosphere is fairly niche anyway), but likely, I'll just be able to compensate with sufficient immersion, even though I'll sacrifice some efficiency. But maybe, I'd handwave, I'll figure out some ways to design those courses myself based on my superior meta skills, HJPEV-style! (I now hate myself.)
+
+So I tried generating yes/no pairs for certain grammatical features (i.e., you take a common word with multiple forms (like "is" vs. "are"), then pick one form (say, "is"), and list many sentences that use *any* form, but hide it, and then you train by first showing, say, 5 sentences that use "is", 5 that don't, then you hide it, and ask, "is or are?", until you get it. Normally you'd intelligently design this, but maybe it works well enough on it's own. Overall it looks weakly promising, at least for a certain subset of grammar.
+
+Alternatively, I could infer grammar through large enough collocations (like, find sentences which are similar in many specific features, and then show all until the structure clicks), but that might require a huge corpus (which I don't have). Worked on the collocations, but I doubt that leads anywhere.
+
+No results yet. (What? That's a practice log, not a complete ideas log.)

content_letsread/read/michel_thomas.mkd

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+title: Michel Thomas French
+date: 2012-07-31
+techne: :done
+episteme: :believed
+---
+
+(This review originally [appeared on LW][LW review].)
+
+# Purpose of Review
+
+Owen's [recent post][LW owen] brought up the topic of optimizing education. One particular approach, Direct Instruction (Misha's [better explanation][LW DI]), claims to have essentially solved the problem. In particular, Direct Instruction (DI) does allegedly not only work for basic reading skills, but any teaching task. Owen brought up the Michel Thomas language courses as a good application. Language learning is one of my main interests, so I gave the [French Foundation][Michel Thomas French course] course a try.
+
+The main point of the review is to summarize what Michel Thomas actually does, how it differs from other common paradigms and how effective it seems to me.
+
+**Summary**: Nice for beginners and people with bad learning experiences; limited use afterwards. The audio-only aspect is very convenient. It complements other strategies well and I see it as a good proof-of-concept of DI-like methods for language learning.
+
+# Overview
+
+Let's start with a disclaimer. Michel Thomas (MT) is not officially a DI course and as far as I could google, Thomas propbably wasn't aware of DI at all. However, according to Solity's [The Language Revolution][] and Owen, the reason MT works so well is that it applies (an approximation of) DI techniques. It is right now the best realistic example beyond the grade school level, so it'll have to do.
+
+I had some French in high school and thanks to fluency in German and English, I can read some French, but I have no active skill at all, nor have I ever used French in a serious way.
+
+I have now completed the first half of the French Foundation course and skimmed many other courses. You can listen to the first [20 minutes here][Michel Thomas preview]; they are very representative. Furthermore you can [read the booklets][Michel Thomas booklets] to get an idea of the material covered in each course. The whole course is audio-only, consists of 8 CDs (and 2 review CDs) and is intended to be listened to only once.[^1] There are several advanced courses which merely cover more grammar points and vocabulary. Structurally, they are all the same.
+
+# Method
+
+MT teaches the course to two new students[^2]. You're supposed to take the role of a third student, pausing the recording whenever MT asks a question so that you can say your own answer. One of the two students also answers and you can compare your reply and listen to MT’s advice and error correction. Both students are beginners, so most of your mistakes will be covered that way.
+
+MT introduces one language component at a time and makes you use it in a given sentence. He provides a short explanation first and then lets the students answer a couple of examples by giving them an English sentence and asking them to translate it into French. Each component is thus reinforced through many examples.
+
+MT also tries to combine the translation tasks over time by re-using partial sentences. This way, sentence quickly look complex, but always stay easy. ("What impression do you have of the political and economical situation in France at the present time?" is used about one hour in!)
+
+Vocabulary is only introduced as necessary and relies heavily on cognates. The primary focus is on teaching structure. MT strongly emphasizes not to guess or try to remember anything, but instead to rely on induction ("Do not guess, but think it out!"). This works because the examples are carefully chosen to be as obvious as possible. All translation tasks have only one correct answer. All production is tightly controlled. MT relies on the constant tests to see that the students are successfully keeping up. He is never unsure if some concept has been understood or not.
+
+Complex rules that might thematically belong together (like verb conjugations) are broken apart so that each individual new form or word is learned on its own. Similar rules that might be confused are deliberately spread out.
+
+MT stresses that you aren't supposed to try to remember anything. If you don't know something, then he has not succeeded as a teacher yet and he will take care of it, not you. He does this by doing manual [spaced repetition][SRS], i.e. he repeats previous questions (or similar ones) over time and tests the students constantly. If they have trouble answering, then he quickly goes back to the relevant lesson. This is of course how most language textbooks are supposed to be used, but they rely entirely on the student doing the testing themselves. Instead, MT provides the complete lesson including all necessary repetitions so the student doesn't have to do anything at all except answer MT’s constant stream of translation tasks. (As a programmer, I'm strongly reminded of [loop unrolling][].)
+
+What I stood out for me was the reward structure. Students rarely make big mistakes and actual correction is mostly needed for pronunciation issues. The major way students do fail is by simply not remembering something, which MT easily fixes by reminding them again. The students have good confidence in their answers and don't have to guess. The lessons are fast-paced and consist mostly of tests. MT is constantly positively reinforcing the students, rarely correcting them. The whole lesson looks a lot more like an Anki session than a class room or a traditional textbook.
+
+# Comparison to other methods
+
+The course is basically a (minimally edited) live class MT teaches. The result is a very natural pacing. This has the major advantage that it never goes too fast. Most other courses edit out mistakes or necessary repetitions out of fear they might be too boring, but by doing so, no student can actually keep up. This can't happen with MT's untrained live students. (Unfortunately, MT's courses are also unscripted, so he does make a few organizational mistakes and the later courses don't exactly fit together. Fortunately this is not a big issue due to MT's large experience.)
+
+A major difference to most other approaches is that MT actively implements what [Krashen][] calls "i+1", where i is the current level of a learner, meaning that concepts are taught in the order of minimal effort. Each new step contains exactly one new rule. Most language courses group rules according to some underlying pattern, like tenses, and expect you to learn a whole group at once.
+
+MT focuses entirely on production, both by using only translation tasks and by teaching only useful components, i.e. parts of the language you need for a wide variety of contexts. No lesson has only one narrow use. This creates a very active learning experience. I fully agree with this early focus on grammar (but not grammar theory!). Once you're done with that, you can go more-or-less monolingual and immerse yourself in the target language, relying on spaced repetition software to rapidly build your vocabulary.
+
+Furthermore, MT's course is very engaging. There is little downtime where you merely listen. It consists almost exclusively of quick tests. Thanks to i+1, you never have to juggle more than one new rule at a time. The subject matter does not get repetitive and MT is a very enthusiastic teacher. This can be a major problem with other language courses.
+
+My main criticism, especially as an autodidact, would be that MT never makes his methods explicit. You entirely rely on him. He may have an awesome lesson plan, but you're never taught how he arrived at it or how to continue beyond that.[^3] Hopefully that's not a general problem with DI. In particular, any language course should teach you how to use [spaced repetition][SRS]. It's the only sane way to handle vocabulary and prevent unnecessary review sessions.[^4]
+
+For contrast, look at the (excellent) [Remembering The Kanji][RTK], which similarly teaches Japanese characters through decomposition, logical ordering and the use of mnemonics. However, much of the book focuses on teaching the method and the logic behind it, so that you can use it for any amount of characters you want. It is very simple to move beyond the scope of the book. I wish every textbook worked like this.
+
+# Outlook
+
+I'm quite impressed by the course design. It's really effective at building a solid speaking foundation. It won’t get you anywhere near fluency and, being audio-only, totally ignores literacy, but by the end of the course you should have enough skill to actively engage the language.
+
+After finishing MT, you should have a good grasp of the grammar. A good follow-up course might be something like Assimil ([video overview][Arguelles Assimil]), which would take care of literacy and fill in any remaining grammar gaps. After that, the only thing missing is vocabulary and general practice. This is the point where traditional language teaching ends, but graded readers, parallel texts and so on, combined with [spaced repetition][SRS], solve this problem nicely. Or, you know, start talking, maybe on [lang-8][].
+
+Personally, I plan to work through the full French, Spanish and Italian courses, and would recommend checking them out. Again, try listening to the [preview][Michel Thomas preview] to see if this approach appeals to you.
+
+[^1]: MT recorded the whole course on one weekend, so listening once might work, but I find it too overwhelming. Spreading it out over a few weeks is probably the way to go.
+
+[^2]: The students have quite a different aptitude for the language. \<harsh\>I like that one of them sucks; it makes me feel superior. I suspect this is intentional, but regardless, it certainly is rewarding. You don’t feel so bad about making minor mistakes or for forgetting something.\</harsh\>
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+[^3]: Further evidence for MT's lack of meta-teaching is the poor quality of the courses produced after his death. They strongly diverge from his method and outright remove crucial features like the natural pacing.
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+[^4]: I converted the French Foundation course into an Anki deck based on the official booklet. It's available as a shared deck in Anki (search for Michel Thomas) or as a [tab-separated text file][Michel Thomas Anki].