11 ms·

Show HN: Japanese Complete Book 1 Released

165 points by sova 4y ago

Hello friends at HN For the past 3 years we have been arranging our physical textbook series and the first one has been published. You can view sample chapters and see that the book is printed on premium, photo-quality paper here: https://japanesecomplete.com/book-1 https://japanesecomplete.com/book-1 In true hacker ethos, Japanese Complete was a project started to address a need the founders had and now it’s turning into a tangible product so it is quite exciting for us and we appreciate your continued support. All the material in the first book is available with a free online account on our online curriculum, only that it is much more beautifully laid out for convenient look-up in the book. A much more compelling representation down to the feel of the cover and the weight of the text in your hands like fine silverware. Please only get the book if you can afford it, because as mentioned you can also get the same course material with a starter account at no cost to you. We developed a lot of innovations for teaching and acquiring Japanese rapidly and to-remember. Please ask any (sincere) questions here.

naniwaduni 4y ago
Japanese resources really are the monad burritos of language learning.
- solarmist 4y ago
  I think you're onto something, but I have no idea what a monad burrito is.
  - superchroma 4y ago
    At the very least a book in the vein of Snow Crash.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    "Monad burritos" is a riff on Brent Yorgey's "monad tutorial fallacy" post[1], a piece of lore from the Haskell community which speaks to the phenomenon of tutorials/learning resources published by people who've just barely learned (or haven't quite yet understood) the lessons they purport to teach. They're particularly wont to highlight snappy "insights" that tie together a concept from the author's perspective, but that can be kind of useless or counterproductive to just hear about, since the work was done by grappling with concepts to arrive at an intuition, and the snappy bit doesn't actually impart any intuition on its own. And there is a vibrant ecosystem of Japanese learning resources like this. The landing page for this book sure smells like one! And this line from the OP: > In true hacker ethos, Japanese Complete was a project started to address a need the founders had and now it’s turning into a tangible product so it is quite exciting for us and we appreciate your continued support. absolutely sounds like a project started by someone who just learned a little Japanese ("a need the founders had"). It's a well-trod space. [1]: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Oh! This is an excellent article! I just favorited this comment. Yes, language learning has an abundance of this. Everyone's learned a language so they all feel qualified to explain how it works or teach others. Is there a name for that fallacy? It seems like a special case of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physicists-think-they-know-everything-and-why-theyre-wrong/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physic...).
    - Koshkin 4y ago
      I’d love to have a poster with a monad tutorial in Japanese.
- tantalor 4y ago
  Japanese resources are just ethnographies in the category of psycholinguistics, what's the problem?
  - solarmist 4y ago
    There isn't a problem. To me it's more that a highly disproportionate number of programmers are drawn to languages and the Japanese language in particular. So I'm interested in why that's the case with Japanese, but not with German or Chinese as examples off the top of my head. The best explanation I can think of is the popularity of Japanese culture leads to a high enough exposure to the language to catch the attention of highly technical people who love finding and uncovering patterns in things. But that doesn't feel complete.
    - tantalor 4y ago
      Sorry I think that joke went over your head. 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
      - solarmist 4y ago
        Hehehe. Yup. Completely missed the joke.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
I'd specify "Learn Japanese" or "Japanese language". I know it's almost a given, but I'd prefer the clarity. Thanks for doing this!
- pimlottc 4y ago
  I agree with this. This post doesn't actually say what the book is about, as it could be able Japanese pop culture, Japanese history, Japanese life... Same with the website, the first thing you see is a giant video of someone fanning through a large book. On my desktop, I have to scroll down 3 pages before the first block of text, which again does not explicitly mention that it's a textbook for learning the Japanese language.
drconti 4y ago
I've studied out of most of the well-known Japanese textbooks, and yours looks really promising. You've even added a new learning mechanic with the English paragraph containing interpolated kanji. I'm really interested to see what kind of mental associations that type of reading can build. Good luck with your launch!
- x62Bh7948f 4y ago
  I remember trying a wanikani chrome extension that did something similar (Wanikanify), but it was no good for my study style
CiceroCiceronis 4y ago
This looks very interesting. Can you give a brief overview of the fundamental shifts in methodology that underlie your novel method, and justifications for why these are likely to be more effective for learners?
x62Bh7948f 4y ago
might be helpful for beginners. after learning Japanese for a while I've developed some "tastes" (I don't know how to put it). reading the sample explanations on your website, writing Japanese vocabulary in romaji feels wrong. I'd go for having it in hiragana for simplicity (bunsetsu jars...) I don't know how useful the -kanji situated in english context- would be. in my experience having the Japanese context is way better to learn kanji, once one has learned enough vocabulary. The kanji origin story (with the proto-kanji, chinese writing, etc) might be better for advanced courses (is it available for all kanji on your book?) I'd try to avoid having native language "crutches" as much as possible.
- rjh29 4y ago
  I've studied Japanese for 10 years and would never recommend any material that uses romaji. Hiragana takes only a few weeks to get familiar with, and avoids mixing up Japanese pronounciation with English.
iandanforth 4y ago
Kanji embedded into English sentences is an interesting idea.
tantalor 4y ago
> Please only get a textbook if you can afford one, as the same material can be accessed with an online starter account. I think you're trying to say "if you can't afford the textbook, then we have a free version available online" but it is written very confusingly. In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Also please add a link to how to get "starter account". https://japanesecomplete.com/create-starter https://japanesecomplete.com/create-starter
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Having the ability to throw the money around is not the same thing as being able to afford to spend that money. Americans are very credit-happy, among other things. Or imagine it says something more like "don't give us money if that would cause you to be unable to make rent/afford food/hoard candles".
- ylyn 4y ago
  > That is a tautology That is most certainly not a tautology. Afford isn't used in the "have enough money to pay for" sense here; it's used in the "able to do without adverse consequences later on" sense. So what it means is that you are able to buy the textbook without having to struggle to pay for other things later on.
- chownie 4y ago
  > In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Is this regional? Where I'm from (UK) "if you can afford it" is commonly used to mean "if you have the disposable income" and they're using the idiom right here, they don't want to turn away people who would be interested but consider ~$80 too expensive for a book.
- 4y ago
haunter 4y ago
Looks very nice! I'd be interested to read a comparison to GENKI, maybe someone will make a review later.
vr46 4y ago
Haven't touched Japanese since I studied it at university for several years. Useless that I am, I didn't use it or practice it again and can't remember anything after 30 years. I've bought the book :D
999900000999 4y ago
Hypothetically, you have unlimited time but you need to learn Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Which order would you do in it? I've met tons of Koreans who can speak Japanese extremely well, along with one who really hated it. She was a good first girlfriend though...
- olah_1 4y ago
  I was told to do Japanese first. Because you get grammar similar to Korean and Chinese characters both for free, or at least half off. Much of the Kanji even means the same thing in Chinese (different pronunciations of course though).
- rjh29 4y ago
  I know Japanese and have tried to learn the other two. (Didn't have enough motivation to keep going, and besides, there is always more Japanese to learn...) Korean has similar grammar and some words share etymology with Chinese/Japanese, which is why Koreans can learn Japanese so quickly. The pronounciation is harder but hangul is not too hard to learn. I felt like I could have learned Korean pretty well given a year or so. Chinese has completely different grammar, tone system is very hard for most people, no hiragana/katakana (so even simple words like 'Chocolate' are written with relatively complex characters, which you have to learn to read and write). The kanji is mostly the same but there are lots of Chinese-only variants particularly if you go simplified (mainland China) over traditional (Taiwan etc.). I found it quite difficult, particularly the tones. There is a lot of regional variation too, and crucially, I couldn't find any interesting Chinese media and have no interest in visiting the mainland, so it was pointless to continue.
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    I'm actually taking Chinese and have been for a good while. The grammar is almost the same as English, with it actually being easier to say some basic things. 他没有工作。 He (negation word / no) have job. Vs He does not have a job. Japanese, is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do. It's just hard. But I'm confident in being able to hold down a conversation in Mandarin one day
commandlinefan 4y ago
I can't tell from the linked page whether there's associated audio content, is there?
SnooSux 4y ago
As a very casual Japanese studier (450 day streak on Duolingo), this looks interesting! I like having kanji etymology explained or having them broken down into their constituent parts, even if it's not strictly the most efficient way to memorize. The kanji in English sentences is intriguing, I'm not sure how effective it would be. Can you post a complete table of contents so I can see if it makes sense for me to purchase? Do you have a timeline for the next book release? I may be more interested in that.
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  > I like having kanji etymology explained Then I recommend this dictionary, which has an edition focused on kanji too: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ The team who build that knows what it talks about, and it contains real etymologies, not fake ones based on the current graphical shapes of characters.
teraflop 4y ago
First of all, congrats on launching a product. Without having ordered the book, here are my comments on your website: The signup page asks me to enter an email address, and says it will send me a verification link that will allow me to log in. But in fact, no link is sent, no verification is performed, and I can easily log in with an email address that I don't control. I can't set a password without paying, so there's apparently nothing to stop anybody else from logging in as me. It's hard to fully judge the study program, since only the first few lessons exist as anything other than placeholders. But after skimming through it, it seems like compared to other resources like Genki, the content is very heavy on kanji, somewhat light on grammar, and extremely light on vocabulary. Is there a reason for this? Also, despite your description of the course as "beginner-friendly", it seems like the early pages have a mixture of beginner-level and more advanced information. I would expect beginners to have a hard time figuring out which parts are most immediately applicable -- especially since you give them very few examples of actual Japanese sentences that use the grammar points you're teaching. For example, I find it hard to believe that it's in any way useful to tell someone "the particle を can be used to describe motion transiting through a space" when they have never even seen a single real example of it being used in its much more common role as a case-marking particle. Basically, I get the overall impression that this course would be much more useful to a linguist who wants to study the language analytically, as opposed to a typical learner. Finally, it would be good to see some information on the credentials of the authors. As you're probably aware, there are lots of mediocre, amateur-level Japanese language resources on the web, many of which are created by people who are either not fluent Japanese speakers or lack pedagogical/educational expertise. What evidence do you have that your teaching strategy is an improvement over other approaches?
lowatt 4y ago
Authors may be "language pros" but the content can use more proof reading. One (trivial) example: > Kanji are ideograms imported lock, stock, and barrel from __mainland Asia__ into Japan over hundreds of years, starting around the 5th century, followed by Buddhism in the 6th century. "mainland Asia"? This makes me laugh. Technically not totally wrong, but, do people really say that? Won't people from India get offended? If someone (e.g, a child) googles "mainland Asia", the first result is Indochina. Did Japan import Chinese characters from Indochina in the 5th century? I believe a textbook should be clear, straightforward, and shouldn't obscure/blur facts.
- BossingAround 4y ago
  To me, the biggest problem with the sentence is "lock, stock, and barrel," which won't be understandable to a number of non-native speakers. I don't know who the target audience is, but not having non-native speakers in mind seems like a pretty big oversight to me. Mainland Asia is, of course, pretty bad as well.
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever heard the expression outside of the title of that one movie.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      I've heard and even used it a couple of times, but it's not very common anymore.
  - hurflmurfl 4y ago
    As a non-native speaker, I don't think I've ever seen this expression, but one can easily guess what it means. Enumerating bits of the whole as a way to emphasize the wholeness, I think, might be common in many languages. Regarding mainland Asia, I just understand it as "not island" Asia.
innocentoldguy 4y ago
I like the format and colors in your book. Well done! I believe this would have been helpful to me at the beginning of my Japanese studies. I do have some questions, if you don't mind: 1. Does your book take into account the frequency with which words are used in Japanese? I've found frequency dictionaries are an excellent place to start learning languages because you begin by learning the most commonly used words first (maybe you address this on your website and I just missed it). 2. I've seen English study materials in Japan use the same strategy you're using when you embed kanji into English sentences. One problem I've noticed is that some Japanese people studying from those guides will inject Japanese particles into their English sentences. For example, "Me and my friends wa ate lunch together." Have you noticed this issue in reverse with your book's strategy? 3. Have you found including archaic kanji to be helpful or confusing for new learners? I love the Japanese language. Thanks for your efforts it making it more accessible to people. Best of luck on the series. I hope you do well with it.
tokinonagare 4y ago
The "kanji situated in an English context" thing is the most brain-dead weeby thing I've seen since Heisig's RTK, and that was a very high bar to pass. Same with the grammar mixing English and Japanese.
- ranger_danger 4y ago
- teraflop 4y ago
  I wouldn't put it quite so uncharitably, but I agree with your skepticism. It seems very much in line with the way the individual lessons put much more focus on the kanji writing system than on the Japanese language itself, which IMO is a common strategic mistake made by beginners who are self-studying.
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  I'm currently using Heisig's RTK; it's been great. I wonder if you simply don't like the system or if you think the pedagogy is ineffective/inefficient.
  - tokinonagare 4y ago
    How many kanji can you read? Even after finishing RTK it will still be zero if not using real learning materials, at which point having RTK is a waste of time anyway. That "method" is bad because it skip the main difficulty of learning kanji, which is memorising the ton of readings each character has and the actual words using them. Feel free to waste your time on a snake oil method however, I'm not the one impacted.
    - claudiawerner 4y ago
      >How many kanji can you read? That's not the point of the book; the point of the book is to build symbolic recognition and memory by hooking into words you already know. It's not there to teach you vocab, which is how one does learn readings and usages. I will say that even about half way through, many kanji I see are no longer unintelligible blobs, but I can identify them with high accuracy and associate with a word. Sure, I can't read them, but I can recognize them, which is all I need to associate that with vocab with readings. I already tried sitting down with kanji vocab and it wasn't worth it - I'd recognize kanji only from context and the general shape of the blobs, as if they were fuzzy in my mind. I was unable to actually write them, because I didn't recognize the components from which most of them are formed. Heisig removes those worries automatically.
slater 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=japanesecomplete.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=japanesecomplete.com hmmmmm.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Just say what you’re thinking instead of leaving it up to the reader.
  - slater 4y ago
    Eh, just that this guy ALWAYS spams their site. Hasn't done so in a while, then started up again a day or so ago. See link in GP, and then also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464171
    - throwaway675309 4y ago
      Even worse all of the previous hacker news links that they had posted are now behind a login page and can no longer be accessed. Terrific.
    - stazz1 4y ago
      legitimately interesting things are not spam
elldoubleyew 4y ago
I started studying Japanese in 2020 with 「みんなの日本語」(Minna no Nihongo). The book is entirely in Japanese and only assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana and have access to a dictionary for JP -> your native language. The book also includes an audio CD of each of the lessons to practice listening comprehension. I used the two books, audio CDs, and an excellent YouTube channel called "Nihongoal" that provides supplementary lessons to each chapter in English. In 2 years of daily study I have a better command of Japanese than I did in Chinese, my college major... Admittedly the Chinese study has helped me immensely with Kanji. When you study Japanese in Japanese you are constantly reinforcing prior knowledge while acquiring new concepts. Minna no Nihongo does an excellent job of pacing these concepts in a way that is powerful but not overwhelming to a foreigner learning the language. I guess I am just a bit apprehensive to teaching Japanese in English because of how much efficiency you loose in that concept reinforcement. If you want to learn words and phrases this approach might work, but if you want to actually speak the language I feel that its going to take a lot longer.
- drshapeless 4y ago
  Does knowing Chinese helps when learning Japanese? My Chinese is already quite good, and I am looking for another Asian language to learn.
  - elldoubleyew 4y ago
    Only with Kanji. Many share the same meaning, and onyomi reading often sounds a little bit like modern mandarin, but the kunyomi readings are exclusively Japanese and you'll have to memorize those separately (Wanikani was helpful for me in this). For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.
  - crumpled 4y ago
    Knowing Chinese Kanji gives a lot of insight into Japanese Kanji, which is borrowed from Chinese. Some of the meanings are exactly the same
  - Freak_NL 4y ago
elric 4y ago
I'm a bit confused by the "re"-hiragana example in the screenshot on the website. It says "れ" is pronounced like the "re" in "red" or "ferret". This probably depends on which English dialect one speaks, because when I pronounce them, the "re" in "red" or "ferret" sound nothing alike, and neither of them sound like Japanese "れ".
- BossingAround 4y ago
  That's because a lot of native English speakers (not all though) do not know how to pronounce rolling R's. You won't solve that on a paper through textbook. "red" is the best the textbook can do, I'd think.
  - katspaugh 4y ago
    The Japanese R not being a rolling R doesn’t make it easier either. It’s a single tap. Americans are actually familiar with this sound in words like water and butter. The alveolar tap in the middle (the T) is close to where the Japanese R/L is produced.
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    I don't know that the re in "red" and れ really sound nothing alike, though. If you want to reduce it down to something simplistic, "ray" would be a lot closer, if still not actually all that close. For the r sound specifically, it's like 60% r, 30% l, 10% d. Most people don't struggle with getting it passable once someone teaches them that it's more about tongue positioning than anything. Have someone say "la" and "da" back and forth a few times, tell them to position their tongue touching the roof of their mouth in between the position it is for la and da while trying to make an r sound, and they'll probably be pretty close. And once your understand where the difference is on pronunciation vs an english r, you know what to start tweaking as you try to match native pronunciation.
- dymk 4y ago
  Learning Japanese phonology from a written resource will always be a losing battle. It's alright for getting the most basic understanding of what the mora kind of sounds like, but one must practice with audio resources to improve their phonology. Pimsleur and Dōgen (on Patreon) are great for this. It's super uncommon that you find written JP resources that go in depth about e.g. the vowel devoicing rules, or how っ works.
layer8 4y ago
With regard to the “Kanji in English context” sample, I wonder how well that works when only a single English character is replaced by a kanji, because it’s easy to still read the word without discerning the specific kanji. Meaning, you could replace those kanjis with random blotches and still have no difficulties reading the text
chimineycricket 4y ago
What are (better) differences between this book and Genki that you all consciously made?
xingped 4y ago
Between your book and your course on your website, I must say I'm pretty disappointed that no prices are listed anywhere unless you go to a stripe checkout page.
GolDDranks 4y ago
You mention about innovations. As a Japanese major who studied a lot second language acquisition and did some empirical language learning research for my masters, I'm interested to hear about these innovations. What kind of stuff are you talking about? Is any of it research-backed?
bmalicoat 4y ago
I've been learning Japanese for ~3 years and tried a variety of methods. Of course there are better and worse ways to learn, but to me the most important factor is keeping my motivation up. Without having read this book, congratulations on putting it out. Making anything is hard. It's nice that you're trying something new (at least to me) with the embedded kanji in English. As part of my learning process, I decided to make a mobile app for learning kanji. It was quite a technical challenge for me to figure out how to let users draw kanji based on SVG in Unity -- I had to write my own SVG parser + renderer. Sourcing quality data for ~2000 kanji was also tough. If you want to check it out, it's free on both iOS [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605] and Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat.kanjibook&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat....]
- throwntoday 4y ago
  Having taken a quick look at this book I have to say it seems incredibly dumbed down for no reason. The example of showing a ferret to remember the sound of れ is hilarious. For anyone wanting to seriously learn Japanese I recommend passing on this strange magazine formatted pseudo textbook and just buy the tried and true Genki.
  - PaulsWallet 4y ago
    You may disagree with it but mnemonics are very helpful for remembering information that has no relationship to things you already know. I used my own set of mnemonics to learn hiragana and katakana when I first started.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      I don't see the merit in using it for Hiragana/Katakana which are far easier to pickup with something like rote memorization. That said for Kanji I certainly see the benefit of using mnemonics.
      - 4y ago

165 points by sova 4y ago

naniwaduni 4y ago

Japanese resources really are the monad burritos of language learning.

solarmist 4y ago
I think you're onto something, but I have no idea what a monad burrito is.
- superchroma 4y ago
  At the very least a book in the vein of Snow Crash.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  "Monad burritos" is a riff on Brent Yorgey's "monad tutorial fallacy" post[1], a piece of lore from the Haskell community which speaks to the phenomenon of tutorials/learning resources published by people who've just barely learned (or haven't quite yet understood) the lessons they purport to teach. They're particularly wont to highlight snappy "insights" that tie together a concept from the author's perspective, but that can be kind of useless or counterproductive to just hear about, since the work was done by grappling with concepts to arrive at an intuition, and the snappy bit doesn't actually impart any intuition on its own. And there is a vibrant ecosystem of Japanese learning resources like this. The landing page for this book sure smells like one! And this line from the OP: > In true hacker ethos, Japanese Complete was a project started to address a need the founders had and now it’s turning into a tangible product so it is quite exciting for us and we appreciate your continued support. absolutely sounds like a project started by someone who just learned a little Japanese ("a need the founders had"). It's a well-trod space. [1]: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Oh! This is an excellent article! I just favorited this comment. Yes, language learning has an abundance of this. Everyone's learned a language so they all feel qualified to explain how it works or teach others. Is there a name for that fallacy? It seems like a special case of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physicists-think-they-know-everything-and-why-theyre-wrong/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physic...).
  - Koshkin 4y ago
    I’d love to have a poster with a monad tutorial in Japanese.
tantalor 4y ago
Japanese resources are just ethnographies in the category of psycholinguistics, what's the problem?
- solarmist 4y ago
  There isn't a problem. To me it's more that a highly disproportionate number of programmers are drawn to languages and the Japanese language in particular. So I'm interested in why that's the case with Japanese, but not with German or Chinese as examples off the top of my head. The best explanation I can think of is the popularity of Japanese culture leads to a high enough exposure to the language to catch the attention of highly technical people who love finding and uncovering patterns in things. But that doesn't feel complete.
  - tantalor 4y ago
    Sorry I think that joke went over your head. 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Hehehe. Yup. Completely missed the joke.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

I'd specify "Learn Japanese" or "Japanese language". I know it's almost a given, but I'd prefer the clarity. Thanks for doing this!

pimlottc 4y ago
I agree with this. This post doesn't actually say what the book is about, as it could be able Japanese pop culture, Japanese history, Japanese life... Same with the website, the first thing you see is a giant video of someone fanning through a large book. On my desktop, I have to scroll down 3 pages before the first block of text, which again does not explicitly mention that it's a textbook for learning the Japanese language.

drconti 4y ago

I've studied out of most of the well-known Japanese textbooks, and yours looks really promising. You've even added a new learning mechanic with the English paragraph containing interpolated kanji. I'm really interested to see what kind of mental associations that type of reading can build. Good luck with your launch!

x62Bh7948f 4y ago
I remember trying a wanikani chrome extension that did something similar (Wanikanify), but it was no good for my study style

CiceroCiceronis 4y ago

This looks very interesting. Can you give a brief overview of the fundamental shifts in methodology that underlie your novel method, and justifications for why these are likely to be more effective for learners?

x62Bh7948f 4y ago

might be helpful for beginners. after learning Japanese for a while I've developed some "tastes" (I don't know how to put it). reading the sample explanations on your website, writing Japanese vocabulary in romaji feels wrong. I'd go for having it in hiragana for simplicity (bunsetsu jars...) I don't know how useful the -kanji situated in english context- would be. in my experience having the Japanese context is way better to learn kanji, once one has learned enough vocabulary. The kanji origin story (with the proto-kanji, chinese writing, etc) might be better for advanced courses (is it available for all kanji on your book?) I'd try to avoid having native language "crutches" as much as possible.

rjh29 4y ago
I've studied Japanese for 10 years and would never recommend any material that uses romaji. Hiragana takes only a few weeks to get familiar with, and avoids mixing up Japanese pronounciation with English.

iandanforth 4y ago

Kanji embedded into English sentences is an interesting idea.

tantalor 4y ago

> Please only get a textbook if you can afford one, as the same material can be accessed with an online starter account. I think you're trying to say "if you can't afford the textbook, then we have a free version available online" but it is written very confusingly. In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Also please add a link to how to get "starter account". https://japanesecomplete.com/create-starter https://japanesecomplete.com/create-starter

naniwaduni 4y ago
> In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Having the ability to throw the money around is not the same thing as being able to afford to spend that money. Americans are very credit-happy, among other things. Or imagine it says something more like "don't give us money if that would cause you to be unable to make rent/afford food/hoard candles".
ylyn 4y ago
> That is a tautology That is most certainly not a tautology. Afford isn't used in the "have enough money to pay for" sense here; it's used in the "able to do without adverse consequences later on" sense. So what it means is that you are able to buy the textbook without having to struggle to pay for other things later on.
chownie 4y ago
> In English, "buy the textbook only if you can afford it" means the same as "affording the textbook is necessary to buy it". That is a tautology; that's true for literally everything: to buy something, you need to afford it. Is this regional? Where I'm from (UK) "if you can afford it" is commonly used to mean "if you have the disposable income" and they're using the idiom right here, they don't want to turn away people who would be interested but consider ~$80 too expensive for a book.
4y ago

haunter 4y ago

Looks very nice! I'd be interested to read a comparison to GENKI, maybe someone will make a review later.

vr46 4y ago

Haven't touched Japanese since I studied it at university for several years. Useless that I am, I didn't use it or practice it again and can't remember anything after 30 years. I've bought the book :D

999900000999 4y ago

Hypothetically, you have unlimited time but you need to learn Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Which order would you do in it? I've met tons of Koreans who can speak Japanese extremely well, along with one who really hated it. She was a good first girlfriend though...

olah_1 4y ago
I was told to do Japanese first. Because you get grammar similar to Korean and Chinese characters both for free, or at least half off. Much of the Kanji even means the same thing in Chinese (different pronunciations of course though).
rjh29 4y ago
I know Japanese and have tried to learn the other two. (Didn't have enough motivation to keep going, and besides, there is always more Japanese to learn...) Korean has similar grammar and some words share etymology with Chinese/Japanese, which is why Koreans can learn Japanese so quickly. The pronounciation is harder but hangul is not too hard to learn. I felt like I could have learned Korean pretty well given a year or so. Chinese has completely different grammar, tone system is very hard for most people, no hiragana/katakana (so even simple words like 'Chocolate' are written with relatively complex characters, which you have to learn to read and write). The kanji is mostly the same but there are lots of Chinese-only variants particularly if you go simplified (mainland China) over traditional (Taiwan etc.). I found it quite difficult, particularly the tones. There is a lot of regional variation too, and crucially, I couldn't find any interesting Chinese media and have no interest in visiting the mainland, so it was pointless to continue.
- 999900000999 4y ago
  I'm actually taking Chinese and have been for a good while. The grammar is almost the same as English, with it actually being easier to say some basic things. 他没有工作。 He (negation word / no) have job. Vs He does not have a job. Japanese, is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do. It's just hard. But I'm confident in being able to hold down a conversation in Mandarin one day

commandlinefan 4y ago

I can't tell from the linked page whether there's associated audio content, is there?

SnooSux 4y ago

As a very casual Japanese studier (450 day streak on Duolingo), this looks interesting! I like having kanji etymology explained or having them broken down into their constituent parts, even if it's not strictly the most efficient way to memorize. The kanji in English sentences is intriguing, I'm not sure how effective it would be. Can you post a complete table of contents so I can see if it makes sense for me to purchase? Do you have a timeline for the next book release? I may be more interested in that.

tokinonagare 4y ago
> I like having kanji etymology explained Then I recommend this dictionary, which has an edition focused on kanji too: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ The team who build that knows what it talks about, and it contains real etymologies, not fake ones based on the current graphical shapes of characters.

teraflop 4y ago

First of all, congrats on launching a product. Without having ordered the book, here are my comments on your website: The signup page asks me to enter an email address, and says it will send me a verification link that will allow me to log in. But in fact, no link is sent, no verification is performed, and I can easily log in with an email address that I don't control. I can't set a password without paying, so there's apparently nothing to stop anybody else from logging in as me. It's hard to fully judge the study program, since only the first few lessons exist as anything other than placeholders. But after skimming through it, it seems like compared to other resources like Genki, the content is very heavy on kanji, somewhat light on grammar, and extremely light on vocabulary. Is there a reason for this? Also, despite your description of the course as "beginner-friendly", it seems like the early pages have a mixture of beginner-level and more advanced information. I would expect beginners to have a hard time figuring out which parts are most immediately applicable -- especially since you give them very few examples of actual Japanese sentences that use the grammar points you're teaching. For example, I find it hard to believe that it's in any way useful to tell someone "the particle を can be used to describe motion transiting through a space" when they have never even seen a single real example of it being used in its much more common role as a case-marking particle. Basically, I get the overall impression that this course would be much more useful to a linguist who wants to study the language analytically, as opposed to a typical learner. Finally, it would be good to see some information on the credentials of the authors. As you're probably aware, there are lots of mediocre, amateur-level Japanese language resources on the web, many of which are created by people who are either not fluent Japanese speakers or lack pedagogical/educational expertise. What evidence do you have that your teaching strategy is an improvement over other approaches?

lowatt 4y ago

Authors may be "language pros" but the content can use more proof reading. One (trivial) example: > Kanji are ideograms imported lock, stock, and barrel from __mainland Asia__ into Japan over hundreds of years, starting around the 5th century, followed by Buddhism in the 6th century. "mainland Asia"? This makes me laugh. Technically not totally wrong, but, do people really say that? Won't people from India get offended? If someone (e.g, a child) googles "mainland Asia", the first result is Indochina. Did Japan import Chinese characters from Indochina in the 5th century? I believe a textbook should be clear, straightforward, and shouldn't obscure/blur facts.

BossingAround 4y ago
To me, the biggest problem with the sentence is "lock, stock, and barrel," which won't be understandable to a number of non-native speakers. I don't know who the target audience is, but not having non-native speakers in mind seems like a pretty big oversight to me. Mainland Asia is, of course, pretty bad as well.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever heard the expression outside of the title of that one movie.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I've heard and even used it a couple of times, but it's not very common anymore.
- hurflmurfl 4y ago
  As a non-native speaker, I don't think I've ever seen this expression, but one can easily guess what it means. Enumerating bits of the whole as a way to emphasize the wholeness, I think, might be common in many languages. Regarding mainland Asia, I just understand it as "not island" Asia.

innocentoldguy 4y ago

I like the format and colors in your book. Well done! I believe this would have been helpful to me at the beginning of my Japanese studies. I do have some questions, if you don't mind: 1. Does your book take into account the frequency with which words are used in Japanese? I've found frequency dictionaries are an excellent place to start learning languages because you begin by learning the most commonly used words first (maybe you address this on your website and I just missed it). 2. I've seen English study materials in Japan use the same strategy you're using when you embed kanji into English sentences. One problem I've noticed is that some Japanese people studying from those guides will inject Japanese particles into their English sentences. For example, "Me and my friends wa ate lunch together." Have you noticed this issue in reverse with your book's strategy? 3. Have you found including archaic kanji to be helpful or confusing for new learners? I love the Japanese language. Thanks for your efforts it making it more accessible to people. Best of luck on the series. I hope you do well with it.

tokinonagare 4y ago

The "kanji situated in an English context" thing is the most brain-dead weeby thing I've seen since Heisig's RTK, and that was a very high bar to pass. Same with the grammar mixing English and Japanese.

ranger_danger 4y ago
teraflop 4y ago
I wouldn't put it quite so uncharitably, but I agree with your skepticism. It seems very much in line with the way the individual lessons put much more focus on the kanji writing system than on the Japanese language itself, which IMO is a common strategic mistake made by beginners who are self-studying.
claudiawerner 4y ago
I'm currently using Heisig's RTK; it's been great. I wonder if you simply don't like the system or if you think the pedagogy is ineffective/inefficient.
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  How many kanji can you read? Even after finishing RTK it will still be zero if not using real learning materials, at which point having RTK is a waste of time anyway. That "method" is bad because it skip the main difficulty of learning kanji, which is memorising the ton of readings each character has and the actual words using them. Feel free to waste your time on a snake oil method however, I'm not the one impacted.
  - claudiawerner 4y ago
    >How many kanji can you read? That's not the point of the book; the point of the book is to build symbolic recognition and memory by hooking into words you already know. It's not there to teach you vocab, which is how one does learn readings and usages. I will say that even about half way through, many kanji I see are no longer unintelligible blobs, but I can identify them with high accuracy and associate with a word. Sure, I can't read them, but I can recognize them, which is all I need to associate that with vocab with readings. I already tried sitting down with kanji vocab and it wasn't worth it - I'd recognize kanji only from context and the general shape of the blobs, as if they were fuzzy in my mind. I was unable to actually write them, because I didn't recognize the components from which most of them are formed. Heisig removes those worries automatically.

slater 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=japanesecomplete.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=japanesecomplete.com hmmmmm.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
Just say what you’re thinking instead of leaving it up to the reader.
- slater 4y ago
  Eh, just that this guy ALWAYS spams their site. Hasn't done so in a while, then started up again a day or so ago. See link in GP, and then also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464171
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    Even worse all of the previous hacker news links that they had posted are now behind a login page and can no longer be accessed. Terrific.
  - stazz1 4y ago
    legitimately interesting things are not spam

elldoubleyew 4y ago

I started studying Japanese in 2020 with 「みんなの日本語」(Minna no Nihongo). The book is entirely in Japanese and only assumes that you can read hiragana/katakana and have access to a dictionary for JP -> your native language. The book also includes an audio CD of each of the lessons to practice listening comprehension. I used the two books, audio CDs, and an excellent YouTube channel called "Nihongoal" that provides supplementary lessons to each chapter in English. In 2 years of daily study I have a better command of Japanese than I did in Chinese, my college major... Admittedly the Chinese study has helped me immensely with Kanji. When you study Japanese in Japanese you are constantly reinforcing prior knowledge while acquiring new concepts. Minna no Nihongo does an excellent job of pacing these concepts in a way that is powerful but not overwhelming to a foreigner learning the language. I guess I am just a bit apprehensive to teaching Japanese in English because of how much efficiency you loose in that concept reinforcement. If you want to learn words and phrases this approach might work, but if you want to actually speak the language I feel that its going to take a lot longer.

drshapeless 4y ago
Does knowing Chinese helps when learning Japanese? My Chinese is already quite good, and I am looking for another Asian language to learn.
- elldoubleyew 4y ago
  Only with Kanji. Many share the same meaning, and onyomi reading often sounds a little bit like modern mandarin, but the kunyomi readings are exclusively Japanese and you'll have to memorize those separately (Wanikani was helpful for me in this). For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.
- crumpled 4y ago
  Knowing Chinese Kanji gives a lot of insight into Japanese Kanji, which is borrowed from Chinese. Some of the meanings are exactly the same
- Freak_NL 4y ago

elric 4y ago

I'm a bit confused by the "re"-hiragana example in the screenshot on the website. It says "れ" is pronounced like the "re" in "red" or "ferret". This probably depends on which English dialect one speaks, because when I pronounce them, the "re" in "red" or "ferret" sound nothing alike, and neither of them sound like Japanese "れ".

BossingAround 4y ago
That's because a lot of native English speakers (not all though) do not know how to pronounce rolling R's. You won't solve that on a paper through textbook. "red" is the best the textbook can do, I'd think.
- katspaugh 4y ago
  The Japanese R not being a rolling R doesn’t make it easier either. It’s a single tap. Americans are actually familiar with this sound in words like water and butter. The alveolar tap in the middle (the T) is close to where the Japanese R/L is produced.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  I don't know that the re in "red" and れ really sound nothing alike, though. If you want to reduce it down to something simplistic, "ray" would be a lot closer, if still not actually all that close. For the r sound specifically, it's like 60% r, 30% l, 10% d. Most people don't struggle with getting it passable once someone teaches them that it's more about tongue positioning than anything. Have someone say "la" and "da" back and forth a few times, tell them to position their tongue touching the roof of their mouth in between the position it is for la and da while trying to make an r sound, and they'll probably be pretty close. And once your understand where the difference is on pronunciation vs an english r, you know what to start tweaking as you try to match native pronunciation.
dymk 4y ago
Learning Japanese phonology from a written resource will always be a losing battle. It's alright for getting the most basic understanding of what the mora kind of sounds like, but one must practice with audio resources to improve their phonology. Pimsleur and Dōgen (on Patreon) are great for this. It's super uncommon that you find written JP resources that go in depth about e.g. the vowel devoicing rules, or how っ works.

layer8 4y ago

With regard to the “Kanji in English context” sample, I wonder how well that works when only a single English character is replaced by a kanji, because it’s easy to still read the word without discerning the specific kanji. Meaning, you could replace those kanjis with random blotches and still have no difficulties reading the text

chimineycricket 4y ago

What are (better) differences between this book and Genki that you all consciously made?

xingped 4y ago

Between your book and your course on your website, I must say I'm pretty disappointed that no prices are listed anywhere unless you go to a stripe checkout page.

GolDDranks 4y ago

You mention about innovations. As a Japanese major who studied a lot second language acquisition and did some empirical language learning research for my masters, I'm interested to hear about these innovations. What kind of stuff are you talking about? Is any of it research-backed?

bmalicoat 4y ago

I've been learning Japanese for ~3 years and tried a variety of methods. Of course there are better and worse ways to learn, but to me the most important factor is keeping my motivation up. Without having read this book, congratulations on putting it out. Making anything is hard. It's nice that you're trying something new (at least to me) with the embedded kanji in English. As part of my learning process, I decided to make a mobile app for learning kanji. It was quite a technical challenge for me to figure out how to let users draw kanji based on SVG in Unity -- I had to write my own SVG parser + renderer. Sourcing quality data for ~2000 kanji was also tough. If you want to check it out, it's free on both iOS [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605] and Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat.kanjibook&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat....]

throwntoday 4y ago
Having taken a quick look at this book I have to say it seems incredibly dumbed down for no reason. The example of showing a ferret to remember the sound of れ is hilarious. For anyone wanting to seriously learn Japanese I recommend passing on this strange magazine formatted pseudo textbook and just buy the tried and true Genki.
- PaulsWallet 4y ago
  You may disagree with it but mnemonics are very helpful for remembering information that has no relationship to things you already know. I used my own set of mnemonics to learn hiragana and katakana when I first started.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    I don't see the merit in using it for Hiragana/Katakana which are far easier to pickup with something like rote memorization. That said for Kanji I certainly see the benefit of using mnemonics.
    - 4y ago