明けましておめでとうございます! It’s 2023, which means that it’s time for your New Year’s resolutions to make contact with reality. If you’re like most people, the goals you enthusiastically set in 2022 to …
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They Want Your Money, Not Your Fluency
A lot of intermediate and advanced-beginner Japanese language learners fall into what I call “the pre-fluency trap.” The pre-fluency trap is a state of artificial progress that language learning apps …
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SRSly, What Is the Deal with Flashcards?
If you embark on a serious study of Japanese, it is only a matter of time before you hear how important flashcards and flashcard technology—in particular the spaced repetition system or SRS—are to …
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Training Wheels Get You Killed Everytime
There might be no “right way” to learn Japanese, but there are definitely wrong ways to learn Japanese. Not every path will lead you to fluency, and there many, many, many ways that, despite what they …
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Pains, Gains, and Bloodstains
There is no getting around it: learning a language will be painful. It will be painful in part because learning anything new is painful as it takes time to build the cognitive reps necessary to …
Fear and FOMO
Understanding Japanese stories in Japanese is the primary allure for many of us who embark upon a dedicated years-long Japanese study. But like most motivators, this desire to “really” grasp the …