Japanese uncovered

[GarlicYum]

Has anyone tried the japanese uncovered course by olly richards?

Would you recommend it or not?

[SeanMay]

I haven’t personally tried it, but I have evaluated a lot of ways to learn Japanese, and this one seems a little dubious. I’m always wary of people who start by learning/teaching Romance or other European languages and think that they can just apply that same teaching style to Japanese, even though it’s really different.

Then I looked at the price, and I got REALLY wary. $397 for a beginner course is a really big ask, especially when it appears that most of the content is just reading stories with various levels of complexity.

Compare this with something like Satori Reader, which seems to have a similar method of immersion, except with more text to read and a much lower cost ($89/year), you could read stories in Satori for 5 years for almost the same cost as Japanese Uncovered.

Again, I haven’t personally tried it, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, but, with all the other resources out there for learning at much more reasonable prices, I can’t really see how Japanese Uncovered could justify that cost.

[GarlicYum]

Wow you can even limit the texts to use the amount of kanji you know. This looks awesome.
Thanks for the tip

[SeanMay]

Yeah it seems pretty flexible, and I think they have sales pretty often to get the price even lower.

[Danreviews]

You can also do a lot with Satori Reader for free. Try it out before you splurge on a subscription. Even the unpaid version is a great resource.

[nclbk]

I would generally avoid any course that advertises itself as being designed to “set it apart from every other Japanese course” to justify charging you a steep premium. There’s good and bad Japanese learning material out there, like there is for most languages, but it’s highly unlikely that literally all of it (mostly developed by studied linguists as well as certified teachers with ample experience who are often native speakers) is ineffective, inefficient, or bad, which the author effectively suggests.

Learning a language takes time and effort. There are techniques, tools, and methods that will make it easier of course, and some will work well for you and others not so much. Anyone that promises you a be-all-end-all solution to the painstaking process of acquiring a new language, however, is doing so solely for commercial gain.

And while I admit that this is also a personal pet peeve of mine, it’s usually a giveaway when a language learning website or tool references Krashen’s input theory from the 1970s as “the science” when second language acquisition research has done so much more in the 40 years or so that followed.

Lastly, just because someone can speak an impressive amount of languages doesn’t mean they will automatically be a good teacher. There are fantastic language teachers that are nowhere near being polyglots and polyglots who don’t know how to teach.

[Ryouki]

I’ve never even heard of Japanese Uncovered, but I also highly recommend Satori Reader. I started using it daily, and I don’t have a paid sub and I still find it extremely useful.