Genki Japan Blog はじめまして。

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...