How We Made Our Japanese Lessons Easier

March 30, 2014:  Imagine that you don’t know any Japanese and I ask you to repeat a Japanese phrase that is 10 syllables long.  It will be very difficult for you if not impossible.

Now imagine for a minute that you don’t know any Italian.  If I ask you to repeat an Italian phrase that’s 10 syllables long.  You probably WILL be able to do it.   You may have no idea what the phrase means, but you will probably be able to repeat it.

Notice that this has nothing to do with the fact that Italian has an alphabet you are familiar with, and Japanese has three writing systems that you probably aren’t familiar with.  This only has to do with your ability to repeat the sounds.

How Your Brain Stores Language

It turns out that your brain has a very small storage area, for storing new sounds.  But if your brain can use it’s language processing memory, you can store about twice as many unfamiliar words as it can sounds.  If the sounds are 100% new to you like Japanese will probably be, you can easily repeat about 4 to 5 syllables, and if the sounds are more familiar to you like Italian will be, then you will be able to repeat 8 to 10 syllables.

Why Our Japanese Lessons Are Easier

Our Japanese lessons start with phrases that are 4 to 5 syllables long.  Sometimes they are just one word.  This helps you learn them easily because they don’t exceed your brains buffer size for new sounds.

Study Our Pre-Lessons Before Our Lessons

Our system of learning is based on teaching you complete phrases.  Unfortunately in Japanese, these phrases will often exceed your brain’s buffer size for new sounds.  Our solution is to make Pre-lessons of partial phrases that you will learn before the full phrase lessons can be learned.

What you will do is study two different Pre-Lessons, then remove them and add the full lessons to your study plan.  This will keep the amount you are learning per repetition, to a small enough size that you brain can learn it well.

Enjoy!