One of the worst decisions I made for my Japanese was accepting a $20,000 scholarship for Japanese classes and materials. Over the next year, I funneled thousands of someone else’s money to a cause that I wasn’t fully committed to. A year later, my Japanese felt crippled and incapable of consuming native material. Afterward, I invested $500 of my own money to a creator I … Continue reading →
In the programming world, refactoring is the essential process of cleaning up, reorganizing, and restructuring your program’s code. When any program is built, the idea is to be clean, organized and structured right from the start. So no refactoring needed!? But then: You become pressed for deadlines, where speed overrides form Your program evolves, so your program’s structure needs to as well The structure you … Continue reading →
Going monolingual. Going J-J. Banishing the English. It is one of the cornerstones of the Jalup method. Yet as you probably know, Jalup is still in the minority in encouraging and teaching you how to do this. Why is this? If it’s so good, why aren’t more people doing it? Is it really that special? The Criticism The majority opinion is still to stick with … Continue reading →
Interesting fact about the Jalup deck series here on this site: you learn more about pens, Suzuki-san, and apples than any other Japanese learner course in existence. Why? Because Jalup Beginner doesn’t focus on vocabulary. It works with the bare minimum, carefully building your grammar. But who needs grammar? You want vocabulary, right? You may start thinking that you’ll need to add in a little … Continue reading →
All Japanese learning starts off the same. Simple sounds become simple words. Simple words become simple sentences. Simple sentences become not so simple sentences. In the beginning, confidence flows like a river. When you get used to confidence, you expect things to be that way forever. Very few people have trouble learning “hello” or “good morning” or “this is a pen.” But slowly start combining … Continue reading →
Immersion is awesome. You can’t get enough of it. The more immersion you have with Japanese in the day, the higher your skill will rise. Again, awesome. But before you go and watch yet another episode of that show you are dying to watch, consider the Immersion Hierarchy. Immersion comes in a variety of forms. Some are simply better than others. The best way to … Continue reading →
For anyone interested in Kanji Kingdom, or RTK, or anything that splits up kanji learning into multiple pieces, I often get asked the following: “Where is the reading of the kanji? If I only learn its meaning, how will I learn the kanji?” This person asking the question gets worried, asks a Japanese person or someone who studied kanji the more traditional way, and hears … Continue reading →
Everyone expects areas of ability to vary in strength depending upon your focus and the training you put in. If you don’t care about something, you let it become frail. You accept your weaknesses, and study based on the reasons you are learning Japanese and what you want to use it for. You always have the opportunity to strengthen your weaknesses later once the need or desire arises. … Continue reading →
