Comments

The Adam & Yuki Show — 12 Comments

  1. Awesome! This is really cool material :) Very useful for me and it’s really nice to hear you speak more Japanese in a casual way :) and the additional transcriptions are an absolute godsend! I’ll definitely be upgrading my patreon subscription soon! It’s not too long and it’s not too short either so its’ perfect for me. I hope you make it to at least 100 episodes :)

  2. I really love this idea. I’m all for the new material, even for things too advanced for me at the moment.

    It probably seems like you’re rocking the boat, but really, all the new material makes me more motivated to get there so I can participate. I know whatever you make will be very high quality and well worth it.
    Looking forward to it!!

    • Thanks Sarien for the support and for not minding all the experimentation. I’m looking forward to when you get to the level where you can start enjoying it all.

  3. So, I really enjoyed listening to the two free episodes. In the first one, in particular, the fact that you were joking around and seemed to be having fun talking to each other made it really fun to listen to.

    A technique that I heard of for listening comprehension (in the context of advice for ESL learners on an ESL website) was to listen to the passage a few times without reading the transcript, then listen again while looking at the transcript to pick up whatever you couldn’t make out, and I think these materials would be really great to use with that method (listen without reading a few times first, then listen and read) since there are scripts available.

    The $7 price point is a little bit high for me, and that is not to say I think it is an unreasonable price necessarily but just that it’s not going to have as much value for an advanced learner as an intermediate learner, because the advanced learner has no excuse to not go out there in the wild and listen to whatever authentic Japanese podcasts or radio or other audio they like (which can be done for free). So it seems like the sweet spot is going to be for those intermediate learners for whom authentic Japanese podcasts and audio are still too much of a stretch.

    • I really enjoy it when they are having fun too. Anything that makes it sound very natural is my favorite to listen to.

    • I’m glad you at least enjoyed the samples.

      I have to respectfully disagree with you about only listening to “authentic native Japanese speakers” once you get past intermediate level. There is no reason to suddenly not care about other fluent foreigners speaking Japanese. They can be just as entertaining and are someone you can relate to. This refers to audio, text, and anything. I’m not saying that I personally am entertaining or someone people can relate to, but there’s a lot of great stuff out there you may be missing out on if you shut the door on all of that.

      This is why a show like YOUは何しに日本へ? is an incredibly fun show to watch even if you are already fluent in Japanese. I love watching other foreigners speaking high level Japanese and having fun in Japan.

      • Another thing is that different Japanese people can have different accents or strange sounding speech (like people from any other language). So, a foreigner with a very high level of Japanese capabilities is kind of like a Japanese person with a different accent. I think it’s best to get used to all forms a speech.
        Another aspect to consider is that people tend to feel foreigners are not great because they can make mistakes, and yet most people I speak to on a daily basis who are native English tend to make errors in there speech consistently. (I hate things like “more better” or “more fast” the most lol). I’m sure what I’ve just written has a number of mistakes too!

        And lastly, I feel that free resources tend to have lower quality standards and little consistency. With Jalup, I feel like everything is linked for efficiency.
        Just sharing my point of view :)

      • There are a few different things that got conflated in my post, and that’s kind of confusing, so I apologize for not stating things more clearly.

        Listening to fluent foreigners is highly fascinating and is motivating to continue to push towards native-like fluency. For the sake of complete honestly, between the two I would still prefer the native Japanese person (among other reasons, my own pronunciation is still not completely native-like), but I don’t think that listening to fluent foreigners has zero value, and that’s not the main reason why I would hesitate to pay $7 per month for this resource.

        I am really not sure whether what I meant by “authentic” was “made by only Japanese people” or “meant for native speakers of the language, not made specifically to be a tool for language learning” (the latter is the usual meaning of the word when talking about “authentic” materials, such as Japanese novels or Japanese podcasts, in contrast to textbooks and the like). So with everyone’s permission I’d like to set that aside and move on to what is the main reason why I would hesitate to pay for this resource.

        The main reason why I said that (and again, I’m not saying I don’t think it has monetary value, but just that it wouldn’t make sense to me at this point for me to make that purchase) is because of the level, which painting in broad strokes I guess would be intermediate.

        Probably everyone here is familiar with the idea that there is an ideal sweet spot for learning where there is a little bit of challenge and a little bit of new information, right? If the difficulty level is too high the learner will be frustrated and will not retain very much because they are unable to make connections between the new information and already-known information. If it is a little bit too easy, it might have some slight value in reinforcing knowledge that is known but not really firmly established yet, but if it is way too easy, the learner is bored and won’t get any value out at all.

        At my current level, I’m sorry I cannot think of a better way to say this, but there wasn’t any challenge or new information. I do think it would be a really fantastic resource for intermediate learners who are at a level where listening to these conversations presents a little bit of a challenge, or there are a few unknown words or expressions, but it’s not so difficult that they feel frustrated or lost not knowing what the conversation is about. For those people, I think this resource would be really great! It is fun to listen to, there are transcripts available, and there’s one Japanese person in addition to the fluent foreigner speaking.

        But the reason why it would be hard to make something like this targeted at more advanced learners is that advanced learners can go out and listen to any Japanese podcast (i.e. not educational resources for teaching Japanese but podcasts meant for a Japanese audience), or any Japanese radio station (the English songs are unfortunate, but there are a large variety of different people with different ways of speaking, and they talk about a highly varied range of topics), or NHK News (which is free to listen to but also a very high-quality source) and do so for free. Or if they want to pay for something, they can pay for audio books.

        At the intermediate level, I think maybe there are not all that many resources out there that a Japanese learner can listen to without feeling frustrated or lost. I guess there are Japanese-learning podcasts, and maybe some JLPT listening books or some other listening practice textbooks? But at the advanced level you’re not just competing with boring JLPT listening books, you’re competing with 足立明穂の週刊ITトレンドX、日野佳恵子のかえ姉の仕事と恋愛の法則、NHKラジオニュース、 every Japanese radio station that can be listened to on a smartphone, and all Japanese audio books.

        So basically, although I think it is a great resource and would be worth some money for intermediate learners, it isn’t what I need at my current level (and if you tried making materials at that higher difficulty level, it would be harder for people to invest in something like this because there are all those other resources listed above, many of which are free).

        And finally, I have no money right now. (笑)

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