John Dinkel is the CEO and founder of Manga Sensei, an online education company that teaches Japanese through fun, effective, modern mediums, including a weekly comic series, a daily 5-minute podcast (the #1 Japanese language podcast on Spotify), and a free 30-day course on the basics of Japanese. John began his Japanese journey as an LDS missionary in Nagoya, Japan, an experience that changed the trajectory of his life, showed him the necessity of making mistakes, and lead him to start his business and share the lessons he learned.
In the interview, we discuss:
- How John went from a rural farm in Nebraska to a Japanese metropolis.
- Why you need to make as many mistakes as possible to learn a language.
- How the LDS approach to language learning is different than traditional courses.
- The critical difference between chikin (チキン) and chikan (痴漢).
- John’s frustration with traditional Japanese language education in universities and how it lead to the creation of Manga Sensei.
- Why John focuses on practical application (and why he didn’t learn the Japanese word for “coffee” until a year into his learning journey).
- What to do if you are struggling with spoken Japanese.
- Why John still uses roumaji despite being able to read kana and kanji.
- John’s favorite Japanese learning resources for beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners.
- How John learns Japanese in the shower each morning.
- Why you have to make 10,000 mistakes to get fluent in a language.
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This was interesting for someone starting out in Japanese. Would it possible to do an interview or blog post around advice for people who failed to learn Japanese (or another language) and are giving it another try?
Thank you for the suggestion. I will add that to my list of post ideas.
An interesting look at the LDS method of learning languages. But the problem I find with Dinkel’s method is that it’s partially predicated on finding Japanese people to speak with. That’s pretty easy if you’re in Japan, but not so much if you’re elsewhere. Especially if that elsewhere has few (if any) Japanese or Japanese-speaking residents.
That was true in years past, but with Skype and online tutoring sites like iTalki, you can now connect with native speakers anywhere in the world. You can do free exchanges or pay for high-quality tutors at extremely low prices compared with traditional classes.
Interesting podcast, especially the method used by the LDS church to teach languages. While Dinkel’s advice to speak to Japanese people as often as possible is good, he’s assuming that you know or are around Japanese people who will talk to you. That might be the case in Japan, but what about elsewhere?
And any chance of a podcast or blog post that offers advice for people who tried to learn Japanese (or any other language), failed, but who are trying to start again?
Please see my reply to Tom above.