Neuroscience is on the cutting edge of how learning changes the physical structures of your brain. One brain imaging study found that London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than London bus drivers. Why? The hippocampus specializes in using complex spatial information to help us navigate around our world. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London and take novel routes, while bus drivers follow a … Continue reading →
On my journey with Jalup I sometimes get a little stressed, confused, and frustrated. Remember that old saying, “No pain, no gain?” Could that annoying idea be true? While reading the current research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience about when the brain learns and why it forgets, two questions occurred to me: Does Jalup work from a scientifically backed viewpoint? If yes, why? – A … Continue reading →
Wouldn’t it be great if mastering Japanese was a steady rise? It should be. You study more, you get better, and you repeat. But then a plateau hits. I don’t care what special techniques you have – you will hit a plateau. Multiple plateaus. Annoying plateaus that cause frustration and misery. The good news is that if you hit a plateau, it means you are … Continue reading →
When I lived in Japan, I remember talking with other foreigners who had been there much longer than me, and were always joking about how bad their English was getting. I started wondering if learning Japanese could make your English worse, or it was just the lack of English and increased frequency of Japanese that made it appear this way. Or was this just a … Continue reading →
Learning Japanese is like being thrown into the middle of a forest and being told you have to escape to reach fluency. You trek through the forest learning the lay of the land and mastering the terrain. You start to see how far you have to go to reach the exit. As your knowledge of the forest grows, you start to feel pretty good. You … Continue reading →
Japanese Level Up is a pretty big site now, growing over 7 years since its creation. There is a mountain of information to go through and an armory of resources to use. Before you decide to go all in with what we offer here you probably want to have reassurance that this all actually works. Are you going to become fluent if you use Jalup? … Continue reading →
Dreaming of fluent Japanese? Dreaming of the day you’ll feel as comfortable with Japanese as you do with your native language? Will the day ever come when it feels like Japanese is your true second language? I’ve talked about how native level is a meaningless standard, as it doesn’t really exist in the way you’d think. However, you should be able to feel the same comfort … Continue reading →
The greatest feeling in Japanese comes from a simple 5-step process: 1. Study hard 2. Get better 3. See yourself get better 4. Be able to do what you couldn’t do before 5. Repeat This is your reward. This is your motivation. This is your path to success. So what happens when this 5-step process seems stuck on number 1, for weeks or months or … Continue reading →
