About

About the App

Hello! Tabi is an app to help you learn Japanese from zero! There are a lot of features to keep you engaged and keep track of progress as well as to ensure that the Japanese content you learn sticks. The app is a distillation of techniques I used to learn Japanese to fluency and later Mandarin from zero after you're not supposed to be able to (they say only kids can achieve this, but they're wrong!). The app is still a work in progress so any feedback is greatly welcome.

About the Creator

So I learned Japanese from zero to the point of being able to interview with large Japanese engineering corporations over the course of just 2 years. 2 years!? That sounds crazy, how do you even achieve that? By the way, this was also at a time I was attending University to get an advanced Engineering degree, staying in shape, and socializing frequently!

My Japanese learning journey was pretty straightforward and relied heavily on a website, essentially a motivational blog, called All Japanese All the Time (AJATT). The main focus was to come into contact as much or more than an actual Japanese person would. Basically you simulate, wherever you might live, a little Japan in your bedroom with Japanese Manga, Anime, Dramas, Books, etc. On top of that, there were a few techniques used to help learn and ingrain Japanese content.

I first started by learning the hiragana, katakana, readings and pronunciations (romaji was crutch to be rid of as soon as possible). After learning the kana, I learned to remember and write the 2000 or so Jouyou Kanji (common use Kanji) using a book called Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. The learning process was paired with Anki, a spaced repetition flashcard program, to help keep track of reviews and show new content. My crazy self went through the entire book over the course of the 3 months I had between semesters.  All the while I kept up with the AJATT philosophy  and only consumed (even though I couldn't really understand) Japanese content. I would walk around with a headphone in my ear on low volume from the time I got up in the morning to the time I took a shower in the evening playing Japanese content (music, audio from anime or dramas) to help train my ear and get used to how the Japanese language sounded. 

Even though I could recognize the kanji like fire,  火, and flower, 花, and also make logical connections like 花火 means fireworks, I didn't know how to pronounce the kanji. After the initial 5 or so months learning the kana and Kanji, I then focused on vocabulary. AJATT emphasized learning vocab in the context of sentences so that you can know not only what a word means, but also when best to use it. The first step in learning vocab was sentence mining Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese, along with finding other sentences to help build vocabulary. The process was a bit involved.

Sentence mining was the most grueling, yet most rewarding part of the AJATT method. As I was doing the whole immersion thing, listening to Japanese, and engaging with native Japanese content I would add to a list of vocab words vocabulary I kept seeing over and over again. So while I was sentence mining Tae Kim's, I was also finding example sentences to these words that kept popping up on a website called Tatoeba. The main thing I had to keep in mind when sentence mining was to only have one new word for each sentence I was learning. This meant that if a sentence I came across had two words I didn't know, I had to choose one of the two words and find yet another sentence for that second unknown word (this is that i+1 philosophy). This led to some crazy branching, and vocabulary acquisition I hadn't intended, but it was a great exercise. 

Mining of content continued for about a year during which I was learning about 30 vocabulary words a day (I seriously don't know how I had time for this). But at a rate of 30 vocabulary words a day I was able to learn over 10,000 Japanese words. It's this massive amount of input that allowed me to learn Japanese so quickly. My fourth semester into this journey led me to attending Boston Career Forum (a job fair of mostly Japanese companies) and successfully interviewing with a number of companies. 

Fast forward a number of years, and here I am, taking what I learned from my Japanese journey and attempting to condense it into an app that will hopefully be beneficial to some of you starting your Japanese language journey!