Japanese Complete

We set out to create the world's greatest Japanese curriculum and after one year we are well along the way; we've even invented several tools to help that process go more smoothly.

Wag: Visually Compose
For one, we created the visual sentence composing tool Wag which allows new students to make Japanese happen very easily. It will always be grammatically correct (maybe not in meaning but certainly in sequence) and it is a cornerstone of our future work.

Rolling Questions: Forum
We have also built a questions and answers forum on a brand-new idea: every page is a chatroom. In this way, questions and answers are rooms with main topics, and the discussion can be ongoing. First, we start with rooms, and when you promote an answer to a question, it creates a new chatroom for that question. In a question room, any response can be promoted to an answer, and it will show up towards the top of the page in green. It's a simple concept that is very powerful and fills a void where other Q&A sites are blind.

Chapters, Lessons, Curriculum
We've been steadily expanding our collection of chapters for lessons and our custom dialogues.

Audio Reading Tutor
We created an audio reading tutor to help students learn classic Japanese stories line-by-line by sight and sound.

Hiragana Identification with Sound
We've released for free our hallmark tool, the Hiragana listening quiz.
Now anyone can learn the Japanese letters without relying on romaji, or latin transliteration.
https://japanesecomplete.com/hiragana

Cumulative Daily Quiz
And we've added our amazing cumulative daily quiz that will give you a collection of questions from the curriculum you've seen so far, to keep you on a daily swing and give you confidence in the material more rapidly. Our students report that after just a few days they "feel much more confident" in their ability for recall of the material seen so far. It's really inspiring to see many people getting something valuable out of the program and we are delighted to work on it for bringing Japanese language to the world!

As we continuously improve our tooling for our subscribers, we hope you will stay tuned. If you are sincerely interested in learning Japanese we would be honored for you to join us. The chapters are written in a way to maximize comprehension and help you dive in to a native mindset as swiftly as possible. We rely on the 2011 Balanced Corpus for our frequency analysis and curriculum orientation -- so far we are astonished with the results of our learners because they are making amazing progress and recognizing language in natural media, such as shows and radio programs, very rapidly. By teaching the hardest part of Japanese first and foremost: the grammar and particles, we prepare the learner to climb the sheer rockface of Japanese with the best tools for the task.

You can learn more about our offering at https://japanesecomplete.com/ and we offer a free guide at https://japanesecomplete.com/guide

Today we released our free guide to the Japanese Mental Model, called Essential Japanese.

This guide features Bunsetsu Jars, Nouns, Verbs, Particles, the Four Kinds of Kanji, and excellent notes.

You can access the guide for free at https://japanesecomplete.com/guide

Know your audience. We wanted to offer some deep insights into Japanese and Computing Science simultaneously with an article about EBNF grammars and how Japanese is regular enough to fit a simple grammar parser with just 5 rules.

Our post made it to the front page of HN which got us a lot of good coverage. It's still hovering on Lobste(rs) and it's nice to see some people commenting things like, "Wow, I wish I had seen this 20 years ago when I started studying Japanese!"

https://learnjapanese.best/2020/01/04/japanese-grammar-in-ebnf-notation/

https://learnjapanese.best/2019/12/29/japanese-complete-1-0/

We have officially released Japanese Complete 1.0

Thanks to all our supporter subscribers and to all our new scholars. We are excited to reach this landmark and we are dedicated to delivering a complete path to fluency. Fast, efficient, digestible, and designed to rapidly train your mental model to fluency, Japanese Complete is a curriculum and learning platform designed with over forty years of advancements in language learning in mind.

In the last 4 months (we started about Sept 21) we have earned the business of 12 customers, a handful of beta testers, and one vehement anti-customer.

"What is an anti-customer?" you might ask. Just as the name implies, it's someone who campaigns against your product.

Hilariously in trying to promote our product, I have occasionally summoned the ire of reddit. The anti-sell mentality of the messageboard is stunning in some of the subreddits, and people are very fast to point out dubious or doubtful products as scam. And likely for good reason, people are likely tricked often on reddit, it's hard to tell what is legitimate, and it's hard to interact with quality people without putting yourself out there to some degree.

And in one conversation, someone accused our whole approach as being a scam, and I thought, this is brilliant, if I can explain my product to a person who is an extreme non-believer full-doubter, I will gain valuable experience in dealing with less extreme prospects.

In the end, going back and forth actually created a lot of great questions in my mind: how do you justify the price given the competition? how do you justify the price given the incompleteness of the product?

The answers are:

1. To go to the gym you gotta pay for membership. We have some treadmills running great, with plenty of track laid down and new track being laid down faster than you can run it all. We are not just a textbook or a reference product, we are a translator-grade learning resource that has drills that work in tandem with your lessonplan. Comparing our product to a textbook is inaccurate because the textbook cannot tell you when you are right or wrong, it's a picture of a bicycle, not a treadmill. Comparing our product to the other available products on the market, they are all vastly incomplete compared to ours, and offer piecemeal what we offer in one. The time you save is easily worth our subscription premium, and the value of the content is gold. Compared to other apps, you may learn the basics but they have no plan to take you to fluency, we do. Those are a couple huge chasms that would not have come to light had I not had a constructive discourse with a vehement nayser.

2. The product is currently in development, and it will likely be in development for several more years. This is inevitable with an ambitious education product. At the same time, it's a language learning platform and it takes time to master a language. Absorbing the material takes time and the drills are designed to perfect your understanding. Given that the curriculum has already 3+ months of material ready, it's unlikely you'll outpace our curriculum development team. And, in the unlikely event that you do, because you are a genius beast, or because you already know Japanese some, then you get equal or more credit for catching up to the brink of the curriculum-horizon.

If you don't feel like you got your money's worth, just let us know and you'll get a full refund for the month. It's that simple. Why not try the ultimate tool for mastering Japanese and invest in a skill and tool for the rest of your life, maybe even beyond.

https://japanesecomplete.com/

https://learnjapanese.best/2019/11/29/japanese-complete-first-lessons-live/

Japanese Complete has gone live with the first batch of lessons, available to our initial Supporter Subscription members on a rolling-access basis. It's quite exciting, we are thrilled to be offering the latest and greatest curriculum for Japanese learning.

Japanese Complete can be used in a classroom alongside traditional texts or as a standalone solution for an independent study course.

https://japanesecomplete.com/

Japanese Complete has begun rolling out beta access to Supporter Subscriptions today. It's a landmark achievement for our team and we are excited to begin offering Japanese learning materials roughly a month before schedule. We have about 30 beta testers signed up to provide feedback before the next major release.

Today, Supporter Subscribers are slowly trickling in with access to our Iroha Chart, a way to learn the Japanese syllables that are used to write the language. We also have a song, a lookup chart, and the English translation with a song as well, to make it easy to begin learning Japanese in a fun and engaging way.

Stay tuned for more updates, and if you're interested in learning Japanese, get a Supporter Subscription before December to take advantage of the 80+% savings.

https://learnjapanese.best/2019/10/30/top-50-most-frequent-japanese-verbs/

We published a new write-up today showing the first 50 japanese most frequent verbs as figured from a contemporary corpus assembled in 2011.

This list is great for beginners because you can start to maximize your coverage with a minimal amount of data. That's what our approach is all about. Imagine taking that to the Max.

https://learnjapanese.best/2019/10/20/articles-in-english-versus-particles-in-japanese/

One of the trickiest bits of learning Japanese is seeing how it compares to English in an analogous way. With a brief image, sometimes you can convey a complex gist.

We've released a small (admittedly incomplete) list of some Japanese particles and a helpful way to consider how they engage the primary words of a sentence, in contrast to their Japanese counterparts as articles/prepositions

https://learnjapanese.best/2019/10/17/whats-next/

We are synthesizing a lot of questions we get about Japanese learning in general into helpful blog posts. We find that the more we stay active online in a helpful manner, the better our reputation. In general, we desire to be a precise and helpful language assistance platform, and it helps to create posts that give value for free without asking for much or anything in return. This gives your consumers faith that if you're giving something nice away for free, the paid for product must be that much better! And it's quite true in our case, we could give away countless little snippets of the curriculum, and the value still wouldn't be near enough to shadow the value in our signature product, Japanese Complete. Image of the Typhoon going crazy. Please pray for Japan.