I’ve built this website and material, because I have been extremely frustrated with the existing language learning materials. As discussed in detail in “How to learn foreign languages“, they are totally inefficient, inadequate and illogical. The only alternative has been to spend an enormous amount of money and time and go to colleges, language schools or actually live in the foreign country, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve built this website and material to prove that there is a better way.
Please support this website
Currently I am running this website all on my own. I have developed the whole thing, the teaching materials and the website, all on my own too. I have truly poured my blood, sweat, tears and money into this for almost a decade.
I believe high-quality education must be available to anyone who is willing to work hard. For that reason I will forever keep the core features of this website available to anyone for free. This is a language educational website so neutrality, sponsor influences and so on are not really a factor, and I will try to raise as much revenue as possible from running ads, but this is my first time running a website, so I don’t know if that will be sufficient, if any.
Without sufficient financial backing I won’t be able to sustain this website for too long, let alone improve and expand it. For instance, this website lacks audio capabilities at the moment, which is obviously crucial for language education. The commercially available voice programs are still pretty expensive (or technically not satisfactory for Japanese), but as soon as it becomes financially and technically viable, I would like to incorporate it.
If you find this website useful, please support and donate however much it is.
Please support the linguistic work
My hope is that people see my material and do the same for all the other languages in this world, so that anybody can learn any language effectively, efficiently and economically. Also that should preserve many languages that will soon go extinct otherwise. It took me well over 5 years to build my English teaching material for Japanese. It took that long because I had to do it all by myself, but hopefully once I prove that my method works better than anything else, many people from all over the world contribute in the cloud style, and we can quickly do the same for other languages. If 100 Italian speakers contribute, “Italian for English speakers” could be done in a matter of a few months, instead of years, for instance.
At this moment I still do not have the platform where all those contributors can work together at the same time. The web programs will have to be set up for the group work, the server will have to be upgraded to support the increased traffic, and so on. Obviously this will take money, labor and expertise.
Please contact if you are interested in contributing to this project.
Languages are one of the greatest cultural heritages of mankind. It is simply marvelous how different languages have developed all over the world in the human history. There are many beautiful languages all over the world I wish I could learn. I don’t just want to learn dominant languages like Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. I want to be able to sing along African music with the original lyrics. I want to watch all the movies from all over the world without subtitles. Wherever I go, I want to speak the local language and show respect.
Different languages are not just different ways of saying the same thing. Languages are more than just mechanical methods for communication. Social customs are deeply woven into languages, and you cannot separate languages from their cultures. Different languages differently affect how you think, or even behave. And I truly believe that if people from two conflicting cultures learned to speak each other’s language and talk directly, there would be much better mutual understanding.
Linguists are estimating that a half of the world languages will be lost forever in the next 100 years. I understand that languages will keep changing along with the changes in society, as they always have. English is an amalgam of Germanic, Celtic and Latin languages. Many of Japanese vocabularies were imported from Chinese. We often find it difficult to understand poems written in our own languages 500 years ago. However there is a big difference between languages changing and evolving, and letting minor languages die so that everybody uses a handful of dominant languages. Losing languages means losing a large part of culture and our connections to our history. We will lose our ability to read many great literature and historical documents as they were originally written and intended. We will lose the understanding of the meanings and origins of our own names, places, customs and traditions. That tragedy has already happened to many people through slavery. The world where everybody speaks one standard language, eats the same food, listens to the same music, sometimes it feels like that is the direction we are going, but that is definitely not the world I want to live in.
It is an even greater tragedy because learning languages is not difficult with proper learning systems. There is no need for us to discard all our languages and use one standard language. All of us can easily be multilingual. And I am here to prove it.
About the author
Born and grew up in Japan. Got inspired to learn English while listening to English-language rock music and playing the guitar in bands. It was long before the Internet age or even satellite TV’s, but managed to score near perfect TOEFL/TOEIC without ever living abroad. After graduating from a college, found a job and moved to the US, and by now has spent the first half of the life in Japan and the second half in the US.