I talk to a native speaker (a professional Japanese teacher) in Japan on Skype for 45 minutes every week. We go through the exercises in Genki and also chat a bit in Japanese. It’s quite demanding and pushes me to learn the vocab in Genki plus grammar obviously, which is the main thing we do. I spend about £80 a month on this. I feel it is the best way to learn to actually speak Japanese.
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Hmm, sounds pretty cool tbh. And not too dating-focussed. Still put off by the unexplained limited-time sign-up, but I would say that it sounds worth the money.
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It’s too expensive for me, but I guess it’snot overly expensive in general. I mean, a lifetime on WaniKani is $300 for kanji, and this is a grammar course for $350 lifetime (with a claim of more lessons to come).
The parts that interest me are the ones that discuss textbook Japanese vs natural Japanese. Genki does teach you てもらえませんか but simply says it’s equivalent to てください. I don’t think I want to buy another beginner grammar course right now just to get those insights, though.
Also, “I sometimes read Japanese picture books, just like a Japanese dad does to his children. On my private group, you will have the kind of experience only Japanese kids can have.” …I don’t know what kind of weird fetish he’s catering to here but I kind of like it haha
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hahaha yeah that part was pretty weird to me too. I understand how it could be useful but the way he said it was strange.
It would be kinda fun to watch videos of someone reading picture books. But yeah the wording made me laugh 
If he had a cheaper plan that was just videos of him ripping apart textbooks (uh, figuratively) and reading picture books, that’d be cool… and no dating advice.
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I swear I remember seeing someone in a video resource thread post about finding those videos on YouTube. Apparently Japanese parents will post videos of themselves reading those books to their children, but it would obviously lack in-depth explanations lol
I was looking for a native speaker teacher, so I went through his 3 day beginner videos which didn’t present anything substantial, and at the end of that period I got the LimItEd SiGn uP shenanigan. It completely threw me off. I’m not even subscribed to his channel anymore lol Those dating/relationship videos were always weird anyway.
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OP was from March 2017, not March 17th. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
We’ve all done this at least once thanks to the delightful formatting here. If you get into userscripts I recommend Detailed Timestamps by Kumirei to make dates appear like that first screenshot.
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