Show HN: Japanese Complete Book 1 Released
You can view sample chapters and see that the book is printed on premium, photo-quality paper here:
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.
101 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadThanks for doing this!
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.
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-intuiti...
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-physic...).
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.
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-m...
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
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".
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.
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.
I also feel compelled to note that “Affording the textbook is necessary to buy it” is itself an incredibly awkward turn of phrase. I wouldn’t normally point this out, but if you’re going to be giving out unsolicited stylistic advice, you may wish to start there.
I wasn't suggesting it, I was pointing out how awkward and nonsensical their phrasing was.
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...
Much of the Kanji even means the same thing in Chinese (different pronunciations of course though).
Also, I recommend using a website like the one I made (in alpha), which helps comparing the pronunciation of vocabulary of Sinitic origin: http://144.24.197.67/entry/e5b585e5-aba3-0000-0000-000000000...
Send me an email from the address found on the paper on the website if you want, so I can keep you notified of the real release.
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.
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
Any question starting from the assumption you will learn three completely new languages is probably the wrong question to ask.
I mean, sure if it's your job, a planned career, or you somehow have family in all those languages, go for it. If not, you probably want to prioritize whatever language you want to learn the most, the one you have the most fun being in, or have the most need to learn.
To answer your question anyway, I would guess Japanese first, then either of the other two after, since Japanese will make you learn both Chinese characters (which still help somewhat in Korean) and has grammar similar to Korean, so it should give you a leg up on either language after. But if you are in a situation where you meetings tons of Korean people, or in Korea, that seems like a way more important factor...
I'm definitely planning on continuing with my Chinese classes, it's much easier in my opinion than the other two. And I'm meeting tons of Chinese people now
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.
Then I recommend this dictionary, which has an edition focused on kanji too: 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Regarding mainland Asia, I just understand it as "not island" Asia.
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.
Feel free to waste your time on a snake oil method however, I'm not the one impacted.
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.
So basically totally pointless and a waste of time and money because this ability comes really quickly when learning how to write kanji. This can be useful when the phonetic value is learnt with the corresponding graphical part, but since Heisig skips pronunciations the whole method doesn't not teach anything really useful.
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.
For grammar you are out of luck. Japanese is a much more grammar heavy language than Chinese, typically much more complex.
(Disclaimer : it's mine :-) )
One of the reasons I tend to hold MNN as gospel is the way that it doesn't treat you like a child. The conversations are very realistic to what you would hear in modern spoken Japanese, with Keigo and all of the clunkiness that comes with it from lesson 1.
I noticed your disclaimer: "Despite being in the form of stories the Japanese used is beginner Japanese and may not reflect the way native speakers would express themselves. "
If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way? Maybe they could understand you if you spoke like this, but you would be unlikely to understand them without the need to speak to you as if you were 4 years old.
> If its not used by native speakers, why learn it this way?
Starting with small simplified building block and then refining them is pretty much what every textbook of every discipline out there does isn't it?
(Not saying MNN does not do what you claim. I know it is really good but have never used it )
There are also PDFs of it floating around the internet...
I too am against it in general, and given the sheer volume of vocabulary and little quirks required to understand Japanese, you'd probably do yourself a massive disservice waiting to dive in any longer than necessary.
Can you explain how this works? This sounds like you were familiar with Japanese, not "started studying".
>When you study Japanese in Japanese
I've heard this before (with other languages, as well) but just can't wrap my head around it. The only example I can think of is full immersion (e.g. moving to Japan or wherever you're learning the language) and being surrounded by it 24/7, where context clues sort of boot-strap you into learning more. But how does this work without full immersion?
Learning Japanese through immersion doesn't necessarily mean getting thrown in the deep end watching TV, reading newspapers, etc. A just-starting beginner would understand none of that.
This other key to language acquisition is comprehensible input, meaning you're just barely pushing the boundaries of what you're reading / hearing. Adult learners have decades of context to lean on from their native language, and so a good language learning resource will leverage that knowledge as well. みんなの日本語 starts with the very basics and builds from there. Same with Pimsleur (for the spoken language) which contains minimal English.
Which makes total sense! And the OP probably left it out because that's the sensible thing to do. But as someone who only speaks one language, I was a bit confused on where I would actually start.
It's daunting, but many people have done it. The key for me was having lots of different resources to learn from. I've found that everything teaches things a little bit differently, and everything skips something that another resource doesn't. Some explanations make more sense than others for certain facets. And of course, the repetition is good (and required).
I'd recommend:
- Write down your goals for what you want to do. Do you want to converse with other Japanese speakers? Write the language? Do you want to read Japanese? Be able to visit the country and communicate? Watch anime without subs/dubs? How you answer these questions will shape the resources you focus your time on. To build a regular habit of studying, you want to feel you're making steady progress towards a goal that you're passionate about.
- Learn hiragana/katakana. You'll not be able to make progress without this. I used a combination of this YouTube video [1] along with the "Japanese!" hiragana/katakana iOS app.
- If you want to read the language, start studying a Kanji deck.
- If you want to speak/listen in JP, start an audio course such an Pimsleur.
- Make your way through Minna no nihongo and/or Genki I.
- Google around for Japanese graded readers for beginners, to practice reading "real" content that has been synthetically simplified.
- Start reading community posts in Japanese language learning communities, and see what resources are being shared around and how people are studying. You'll naturally find a good fit, eventually.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p9Il_j0zjc&t=18s
2. Full immersion while ideal is impractical for most people interested in studying this language. You can still give yourself full immersion while learning anywhere in the world by using Japanese learning resources and limiting your English use to the minimum necessary (dictionary lookups, explanations for particularly troublesome concepts).
By the end of MNN 1 going into MNN 2 I swapped from a JP -> EN dictionary to a JP only dictionary. If I didn't understand a word from context in the book I would look it up in the dictionary, if I didn't know a word in the definition I would look that up and so on until I understood using only Japanese.
I think that's where I was hung up. It makes total sense to first start with learning hiragana/katakana with whatever preferred method, then move onto something like the book you suggested. Rather than just starting with the book you suggested. And, I'm sure that point is obvious to many and why you left it out. But, as someone who only knows one language, it wasn't as obvious to me.
Thanks for the tips!
One more note that you may or may not be aware of:
Culture and language are closely intertwined, they drive each other, and Japanese is certainly no exception to this.
Japanese isn't spoken as literally or certainly as English is, especially to strangers. They use this system called "Keigo" which you'll find translated as "politeness" but that doesn't really completely encompass the idea. It is just a way of speaking in certain situations that covers your bases. Japanese is a language that is often stereotyped as needing to say a lot to say a little and this is often true.
Its useful to try and learn this intuitively. Hear and see it used often to the point that you just know the idea being communicated. Its difficult to translate many of these concepts to English because of how outside of our cultural sphere they often are (which is why I believe trying to teach them in English from the beginning is a fools errand, they must be learned contextually).
An important piece of context here (for anyone not versed in Japanese) is there there's effectively two sets of characters you need to learn, kana and kanji. The former is sort of an introductory requirement if you plan on learning, and the latter is something that takes most people years.
Kana is (for all intents and purposes you care about as a beginning language learner) split into two sets - hiragana and katakana. These are phonographic and cover specific mora (similar to a vowel), and both cover the same sounds. The corresponding hiragana and katakana often look similar, e.g. (ni) に and ニ, some are identical in both such as (he) へ, some are totally different such as (tsu) つ and ツ.
There's not that many of them, and you can probably learn them over the course of a week if you study diligently. Hiragana is the more important of the two to learn, and katakana is used somewhat similarly to how we would use italics or bold, for sound effects, for foreign loanwords, and similar.
Kanji is the other set of characters, and it's one of the tougher aspects of learning Japanese. ~800 kanji make up the 90th percentile of usage, but then you need another 1300ish to get to the 99th percentile, plus any domain specific ones. To further complicate things, there are multiple "readings" for quite a few kanji. Most kanji are imported Chinese hanzi, and many retain the original (or something close to) Chinese meaning as one of the readings, and a Japanese-specific one for another. The Japanese specific ones will often have hiragana attached.
All kanji can be written in kana. It's not generally done in practice for a variety of reasons - there are plenty of kanji that have the same pronunciation, it takes up more space, it's slower, etc. If I write out "Please buy some sake" (さけ) in hiragana, you won't know if I'm referring to the drink (酒) or the fish (鮭) without further context. Content aimed at people up through high school will frequently have furigana - the kana used for the kanji in question - above kanji, as will most content that uses rarer or domain-specific kanji in a situation where you can't expect the person to be familiar with it.
But when it come to writing beginner textbooks, they can keep things pretty focused, provide enough context, etc., to make it pretty feasible. There's lots of great electronic dictionaries now, so you can pretty easily look words up if you know the kana, etc.
>But how does this work without full immersion?
I think you might be overthinking it a bit - you need to do a little up front before you start working on vocab/grammar/comprehension/etc., but after that it's really just look at word -> look it up if you don't understand it -> figure out the sentence via context and dictionary results -> internalize -> repeat.
Cliff notes: Learning the kana, specifically hiragana, is basically pre-work to start learning Japanese in this sort of situation. I don't know if it's the right approach for everyone - some people might care more about learning some conversational basics before they go on a trip, or just generally need more immediate progress to stay motivated, but it is a method that is constantly self-reinforcing and likely works quite well for the people that can handle that sort of approach.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ha0793-Minna-no-Nihongo-1-English-T...
The grammar note books are invaluable...MNN can be a little challenging if you don't think like a Japanese person, or have a native teacher to help decipher the content. But they're also dangerous, because you can spend too much time in them at the expense of the actual textbook (I know this from direct experience).
MNN is not my favorite (I recommend Genki for native English speakers), but I agree 100% with OP about learning Japanese from an English-language book. It is a waste of time. Learn hiragana and katakana (you can do this in a couple weeks) and dive into full grammatical immersion. There is no other way.
And how do you know if your understanding of a given sentence is correct?
For structural grammar there are a lot of different routes to go about this, MNN teaches these pretty well in my opinion. I tried using bunpro (https://bunpro.jp) with mixed results but I know some people who swear by it.
As for knowing if your understanding of a sentence is correct, if I have doubts at my level I assume that I am likely incorrect. I typically google the part of the sentence that I am unsure about and either look at images or posts that use it in different contexts. Reverso context is also useful for this (https://context.reverso.net/translation/)
hmmmmm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464586
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464171
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.
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.
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] and Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat....]
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.
That said for Kanji I certainly see the benefit of using mnemonics.
The most important thing is to use whatever keeps you motivated. "Keeping on" is 90% of the battle.