An experiment in teaching a language without relying on translation

The site is definitely not supposed to be the main resource used to learn Japanese despite being self contained. It exists to complement the learning from a more traditional app.

Well the good news is that the kana are really low hanging fruit. You can learn them in a day and as long as you continue learning Japanese you will be constantly exposed to them. There are only just over a hundred of them and, unlike English, they are only ever pronounced one way[0].

Kanji are significantly more effort, with 2k characters to learn and multiple pronunciations for each. Interestingly, while you will probably hate Knaji at first and wonder why they are still used, you will come to appreciate them later as they aid reading by breaking things up[1] and disambiguating between homonyms.

[0] Ok, sorry, that was the lies-to-children version. Katakana are only ever pronounced one way. Hiragana has different pronunciation for は and へ when they are used as particles. Also there's pitch accent.

[1] Japanese generally doesn't use spaces.

Hi

I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page.

A quick word on the rationale for not using translation.

All of the classic apps (Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, ...) are to some extent translation based. Translating has three scalability issues.

First, if you want to be inclusive and your product to be used by everyone you have to translate the whole product in a long list of languages. I imagine there is a ton of people who do not speak English and would love to learn Japanese !

I don't really know how to express the second limitation better than by saying 'translation is not additive' or it does not 'scale up'. What I mean by that is that if you translate at the word level (such as with Memrise), you learn words but somehow you do no learn the language (to be fair is the point of the app and that works fairly well). However a language expresses itself through sentences and translating a sentence is not the same as translating each one of its word. So you are sort of stuck at the word level and can't scale up to the sentence level by combining the low level components that words are.

Third, translating sentences does not scale well due to the complexity of natural languages. If like Duolingo you base your app on translating sentences you face all the poblem faced by Duolingo.

How do you translate 猿はバナナを食べる ? There are a lot of potential translations. Here are some I can think of right now :

The monkey eats the banana.

The monkeys eat the banana

The monkey will eat the bananas.

The monkeys are going to eat the bananas.

> But... why?

I started it for two reasons. First there is close to no easy to read content when you begin learning Japanese and there is demand for such thing.

The second reason is to see how far I can go like this. It is a sort of thought experiment like you say in your comment.

I discovered after I started that Hans Ørberg something similar for Latin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg ). His Lingua Latina has been quite influential.

I think that one problem that eventually happens with this approach, which is a problem I had with Duolingo as well, is that very soon after learning a few words you need to start learning basic grammar. In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing.

For example, in 猿はバナナを食べる, how should I understand what は and を mean? When should I use them? I can more or less easily understand that 猿 means monkey, バナナ means banana, and 食べる is related to eating. But to understand that は indicates the topic and を indicates that the word before is having an action done to them, I would have to see a LOT of examples.

I think a little grammatical explanation goes a very long way in terms of the number of examples you have to show.