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164 thoughts on “Comments

  1. This course is very well crafted and I give my appreciation.

    Can you help me with one thing?

    I’m still having trouble using ‘wa’ and ‘ga’ correctly. What is the difference between them and in what situations do you use them? Thank you for your time.

    1. Hi Melanie,

      I agree that it’s difficult to know when to use ‘wa’ and ‘ga.’ With practice, you will soon be getting them right most of the time. In the earliest lessons, the transcript often contains explanations as to why one or the other was used in individual sentences. Also, please check out the ‘Ga vs. Wa’ document, available for download on the Free Downloads page: download lessons

  2. Hi Roger

    After several hours, googling, on the lookout for Japanese study material, I found your site. I am based in the UK.
    Very much like yourself, my wife is Japanese and I have been trying for 15 years to speak this language.

    I tried Pimsleur, Japanese for Busy people. I have had a premium membership with JapanesePod 101 for 4 years and my membership just expired which is why I have been looking for new study material.

    I agree with your comments about JapanesePod 101 in that there is almost no grammar and vocabulary. The progress is not very well structured and the classification in groups of elementary, advanced appears to be very arbitrary. I just about managed to complete the lengthy Beginner and did some lower intermediate lessons and the outcome is not spectacular although I admit that more study time would have certainly helped as well. I used Rikichan for translation pop ups and their line by line audio which is probably the best feature of Japanese101.

    A Japanese company where I used to work got me some weekly private lessons (1to1) and I attended weekly group classes as well. I just about managed to pass JLPT level 4. At the time level 4 was the lowest, now there is a level 5.

    I have just about managed to grasp elementary Japanese which I am learning as my wife is talking in Japanese to my 8 year old daughter.

    You can imagine how frustrating it must be for someone like me who used to be a linguist. I can speak fluently Italian, German and French (English is not my mother tongue). I expected to be fully bilingual within 5 to 10 years and I have only grasped the basics by now. Of course the fact, that I work full time means that I have much less free time to spend learning a foreign language now and this is why I am so impressed by your level of dedication.

    Not only did you find the time to study but in addition you managed to compile all of this material and distribute it for free.

    All I can say is thanks for sharing all of your work at no cost, and credit to your wife as well. She must be very kind and patient.

    I have only started to sample the audio file and my first impression is very positive. I will copy the files to my ipod and play them back in my car. This certainly feels like Pimsleur but this is more structured.

    My next objective is to spend more time learning vocabulary with flash cards, something I have been reluctant to do in the belief that vocal would naturally sink in as I read texts.

    I have started to experiment with a new company named memrise. This is a typical flash card system used for just about any subject, you can take a look.

    I am looking forward to your forthcoming contribution.

    I will try to make some updates later on and let you know how I am progressing with your material.

    Thanks
    Rod

    ps: Thanks to the other contributors in this blog who also provided very useful comments and links.

    1. Hi Rod,

      It’s so good of you to send me your detailed and informative message. I really appreciate your taking the time to tell us about your experiences. I certainly share your frustration with the Japanese language, and, like you, I don’t want to give up on it.

      I hope that you find these lessons useful. Please keep in touch.

        1. 愛しています (ai shite imasu) is written in polite speech. 愛してる (ai shiteru) is a contracted form of 愛している (ai shite iru), and they are both written in plain speech. All of these clauses mean “I love you,” with both “I” and “you” being understood. You could translate them literally as “am doing love.”

  3. Hello Roger,

    You mentioned you are considering your options for further Japanese study. I would like to indicate three books I have had for a while and found very useful. They are a true challenge to me but I, like you I’m sure, am spurred on by each little gain I make in recovering/acquiring new Japanese capability. Two are aimed towards developing ability to read/understand newspapers, which may limit your interest in them, but Authentic Japanese is general and IMO the best of the lot. All are very well done and come with quite useful CDs. They are available on Amazon.

    *Authentic Japanese: Progressing from Intermediate to Advanced [New Edition]
    中級から上級への日本語 ($25.50)
    By Osamu Kamada, Fusako Beukmann, Yoshiko Tomiyama and Machiko Yamamoto

    *Nyūsu De Fuyasu Jōkyū Eno Goi, Hyōgen
    ニユースで増やす上級への語彙・表現 ($29.99)
    by Mika Kiyama

    *Nihongo through Newspaper articles, Revised Edition
    新聞で学ぶ日本語、改訂新阪 ($39.59)
    Osamu Mizutani and Nobuko Mizutani

    * indicates how item is listed on Amazon.

    I hope some of the above is useful to you.

    Roger Shorack

    1. Hi Roger,
      This is an old message that you had sent me last February. I did not include it on the web site at that time because you had said that you didn’t intend it for that purpose. However, looking at it again, I think it’s really valuable and should be shared with other people who are trying to learn Japanese. I hope you don’t mind that I’m now publishing it for everyone to see. Thank you!

  4. Hello Roger,

    I noted with interest your remarks about Japanese Pod 101. I am thinking about joining for a year and downloading those dialogs as you did. I gather enough time has passed that you have had a chance to focus some effort there. Are you happy with the material?

    I have come across a few other interesting things recently.

    1. Aozora Intermediate-Advanced Japanese Communication, Second Addition, by Fujii and Sugawara.
    This book has downloadable conversation/dialog files located at AozoraSound consisting of 135 dialogs of 1 – 4 min each. They follow the book closely, which contains scripts for them. The book is available on Amazon for $31.10, but you can download the files without buying it. The book is very good IMO – it focuses on the spoken language. It is designed for use in a classroom environment but it can be used to good effect by an individual as well. It is entirely in Japanese so about a 2nd year level background or above is useful. But a determined student can make do with less, I think.

    For such determined students, being able to make flashcards conveniently is a critical consideration, I think. For this I use Firefox (with the Perapera add on installed) as my default browser and I use online dictionaries like NihongoDict (http://www.nihongodict.com) and Denshi Jisho (http://jisho.org). When I start one of the dictionaries it will come up inside Firefox and I can pin it to a Firefox tab, for convenience. This lets me easily enter an unknown word from the text I am studying into, say, NihongoDict, hover over it with the cursor and use the Perapera pop-up to save it to the built in vocabulary list. Saved lists are formatted as UTF-8 and can be read directly by many flashcard programs.

    2. Making Sense of Japanese, by Jay Rubin.
    I won’t write much about this because B. M. Chapman has a thorough and exceptionally useful five star review of it on Amazon, where the book is available for $9.26. It is a true gem. The following short excerpt is from his review.

    Wa and Ga – Never before has there been a more thorough and easy to remember explanation of the delicate differences between these two particles. They are a great bane to learners of Japanese, and Rubin dedicates 20 pages to truly making sense of them.

    3. I have also purchased several very nice apps for my iPhone 5/iPad 2.
    The ones I like best are:
    a. Japanese (dictionary – $7.99)
    b. i-Sokki (vocab study – $4.99, $1.99 ea for additional JLPT libraries)
    c. Japanese Flip (Flashcards – $5.99)
    d. Kanji Flip (Flashcards – $5.99)

    I wish you good progress and great enjoyment in your Japanese studies.

    Roger Shorack

    1. Hello Roger,

      It’s great to hear from you again. Thank you for sharing your valuable ideas. I look forward to trying all of them, in addition to those you mentioned in your previous message.

      Regarding Japanese Pod 101, I subscribed to this site for a one-year period, and during that time I downloaded a total of 621 lessons with transcripts, starting with Lesson 60 in the group they call the Beginner Lessons. (I thought that the first 59 lessons were a little too easy for me, but after that they became quite challenging.) I’ve been able to listen to about 100 of these lessons so far and have used electronic flashcards to learn the new vocabulary they contain. Although they take a lot of time to master, I find them valuable.

      I think that the Japanese Pod 101 lessons could be useful to a more advanced student like yourself. They were clearly created by talented and enthusiastic Japanese young people, the language used in them seems very authentic, and they come with good transcripts. I don’t think that one can find comparable lessons elsewhere. However, they are not systematic, and they employ a lot of difficult vocabulary and grammar early on, much of which the authors don’t bother to define or explain. A number of the Japanese words they use in their so-called Beginner lessons cannot be found even in the 2,000-page Kenkyusha Japanese-English dictionary. It seems cruel to label these lessons as “Beginner” or “Intermediate” level, as their authors do.

      I think that the authors of the Japanese Pod 101 lessons don’t really understand the needs of English-speaking students. Although they pay lip service to the idea of teaching the basics of the language, they practice a rather scattershot, sink-or-swim approach in their instruction, something that I think can actually be harmful, if it discourages students and makes them want to give up on Japanese.

      I would not have subscribed to Japanese Pod 101 myself at this stage in my studies, if I had known about the excellent free resource that you mentioned in your previous message, “News in Slow Japanese,” available at news in slow Japanese. It seems to me that these audio files, which come with transcripts and introduce new vocabulary at a sensible rate, are much more appropriate for intermediate-level Japanese students who want to improve their listening skills and expand their vocabularies.

      Regarding Jay Rubin’s discussion of the differences between wa and ga, I agree with you that it’s excellent. I’ve tried to incorporate some of Professor Rubin’s thinking on this topic into my document ‘Ga vs Wa,’ which can be downloaded on the Free Downloads page of this site. <https://www.japaneseaudiolessons.com/how-to-speak-japanese/>.

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