Let's Learn the 777 Kanji!

Good evening everyone, Hake here with some amazing curriculum updates.

Japanese Complete has begun the journey of designing and releasing multiplayer experiences to help you master Japanese according to our brilliant and one-of-a-kind philosophy of excellence, building on the basic building blocks of your understanding, gradually and incrementally.

To this end, we have recently poured a substantial amount of development effort into our new multiplayer game Let’s Learn the 777 Kanji!

Here’s a brief video showing the game in action.

We are working with the “minimal friction to get started” idea, which means you just open the page and there is no gap, you are immediately in the game.

limited time offer for 38% discount on subs in honor of multiplayer

For a limited time, in honor of the release of the multiplayer experience, we are offering monthly subs at 38% discount. You can use this link to get a monthly subscription and lock-in a great rate today. https://buy.stripe.com/7sIeW5bYp9ZK9yM3cq

Why Japanese Complete?

Japanese Complete is designed around the 777 Kanji list.

https://japanesecomplete.com/777

The 777 kanji list is a list of kanji you can master and unlock 90% (ninety percent!) comprehension of Japanese in the wild.

This is great news. Education theory used to believe that one needed minimally 2000+ Joyo [standard use”] kanji to get started fluent and stay fluent. However, our groundbreaking research at Japanese Complete has challenged this longstanding belief. Instead, we relied on frequency analysis of the whole of the Japanese language in many media (newspapers, scripts for tv, movies, poetry, research papers) by the “Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese” — a research effort that is the foundation of our curriculum. Completed in 2011, the Balanced Corpus gives the most complete and holistic view of Japanese as it is used today by native speakers. By relying on the frequency data provided in the Balanced Corpus we have been able to craft a curriculum that seemingly defies the laws of gravity and the laws of nature. You can read more in our seminal article, “To Learn Japanese, You Need a Rocketship.”

In general, standard curriculums do not have the cumulative, snowball-down-the-mountain effect that is so prominent in Japanese Complete, because traditional curriculums were created before and without the knowledge of the statistics behind the Balanced Corpus. A corpus is just a fancy word for a collection of all the literature in a language. In this case, the Japanese Complete Corpus is from the BCCWJ, chosen in varying ratios of what kind of literature: is it written? is it spoken? audio that was transcribed perhaps, is it poetry? is it research articles? is it newspapertalk? All those were taken into account and each category constitutes a “natural percentage” of Japanese as it occurs in the world. For example, 2% of the corpus is poetry, while upwards of 15% are television scripts. It’s been a while since I looked at the exact figures, but that’s the general gist.

So please, and thank you so much for your help so far, stay tuned for our new multiplayer experience. We might call it “Japanese Complete Live!”

(update, several hours later: )

You can get a taste of the live experience here: https://live.japanesecomplete.com 

(live link immediately above =)

We are wishing you fluency and many trips and adventures to and inside Japan. We hope that our philosophy and ongoing research efforts will always bear fruit for you to enjoy, dear learners and aficionados!

If you are able to get a monthly subscription, we won’t lie, it will help with covering development costs for expanding our platform. We believe in investing in the best, and making both software and educational writings that will last the test of time. For that purpose, we are so glad to have you as part of our language learning family and team. Thanks a ton for your support, belief, and participation in the Japanese Complete project. Seventeen textbooks in total are planned, and on the way there we plan to issue some amazing software tools that nobody is expecting! (Nobody, except the insiders, of course!)

With deep gratitude,
心から感謝します

[kokoro-kara kansha-shimas]

Hake