Genki Japan Blog はじめまして。

When starting off on your language-learning journey, and even long after it's ended, it's easy to get caught up in methods and what methods work the best. Now, on this site I endorse every method, whether you're a university student or a self-learner; whether you eat, drink, and sleep textbooks, immerse yourself into the language, or speak your way to fluency. I don't care because I know that everyone learns differently. That's why I hate it when people out there try and make it sound like there's only one good way to learn. I've come across people who look at input methods and say, "Whatever happened to hard work! Is this some new age cult of language learning!" and I've come across people who bash on the output method saying, "You know you're still not good at it!" These people are ignorant, and I don't use that word often or take it lightly. You see, there's a lot of ways to learn a language, and I myself use different ...

When most people think of success, they tend to think of the past and present tense; what they have accomplished and what benefits are they reaping right now. For me, success isn't something tangible, nor is an accomplishment I've already made or a reward I'm enjoying at this very moment. For me, success is a mindset, and it's taken a lot of hard failures for me to realize this. Success in a language, or in anything for that matter, starts with your mind. You can't get anything accomplished if you don't put your all into it, and you won't put your all into it if you don't think it'll be worth it. It's more important than your method you use (as you can see, on this site I advocate them all, so long as they work for you), and it's more important than what book you use, what blog you read, or what website you're engrossed in. Growing up, the people around me and my own experiences taught me the greatest false lesson ever: never get your hop...

I'll be doing my Friday review at some point, since I was too busy last Friday talking about the poopcycle . Anyway, today I wanted to make a brief point about language-learning software, specifically, products like Rocket Japanese that have affiliate marketers clinging to them and putting up false "reviews". I'd been considering trying this software and reviewing it myself, but I decided to Google "Rocket Japanese review" first, as I like to get a gist of what the software does before delving in, and the company's website, while looking promising, yet overpriced and hyped up, isn't exactly unbiased. Unfortunately, every single review I clicked on was basically the same thing! Here's my problem with language-learning software: it's so easy to get scammed. Most of the good reviews that come from an independent website are made by people who either didn't use the software themselves or who are relatively unknowledgable about language learni...

I was debating whether to stick this in a blog post or not since I'm writing an ebook regarding languages (I'm not giving anything away yet), and I was going to cover this early on in the book. Regardless, I'm tired of hearing academics, fellow language enthusiasts, and psuedo intellectuals going on and on about how you have to have a "good" reason to learn a language or fail. They go on and on about their superior motivations ranging from "I'm learning X language because of my heritage!" or "I'm moving to X country and need to speak the language." They'll usually carry attitudes of, "You can't learn X language because of music, movies, TV, or books! That's not a good reason!" "Bullcrap!" is how I respond to that. You just need a reason to keep you learning, whatever that reason is. Sure, a lot of people who are learning Japanese because of anime tend to not do so good in class. In psychology it w...

I really wanted to do a review for LingQ , and I wound up doing a long and crazy post about things that didn't have much to do with LingQ. As such, I am redoing this post in hopes of better clarifying what LingQ is and how well it works. For starters, anyone even remotely familiar with Steve Kauffman will know that he's a huge supporter of what is normally called the input method. That basically means that you learn a language simply through exposure to it. No grammar drills, just listening, reading, and anything else you can think of that will expose you to the language. As such, that is exactly what LingQ strives to do. The most frustrating thing about learning an Asian language through the input method, in my opinion, is that if you're reading a book or a non-editable pdf, if you come across a kanji you're not sure how to read, you can't just type it into a dictionary. That frustrates me a lot! That's why LingQ is so good about that. You just hover your mou...