@jchowes no, SSi has one subscription which gives you access to everything. As long as you use the new app - SaySomethingin - or app.saysomethingin.com - you can use any of the languages, and take part in the Japanuary intensive.
@verity-davey@brigitte@martin-harte
To those asking about nihongo ga and nihongo (w)o, Japanese has ‘particles’ which go after the word and indicate how it’s being used. They’re a bit like case markers, but not always. ga tends to indicate the main topic of a sentence, and wo (pronounced o) indicates an object, but you’ll hear others and, in the SSi way, learn to use them in context.
That means that sometimes you’ll hear nihongo ga, sometimes nihongo o and sometimes, as you’ve probably noticed nihongo de. It all depends on how the word Japanese is being used in the sentence, but if you say the wrong one, when it’s the short phrases, don’t worry as you’ll get used to which one as you practise the longer phrases.
Yes, Japanese tends to omit personal pronouns if they’re obvious, and male speakers don’t tend to use watashi wa. There are some differences between male and female speech in Japan, but they’re not huge and as a non-native speaker, you’ll be forgiven pretty much everything!
From the Japanese I’ve learnt, yes, the verb always goes at the end, so I’ve questioned the adding of words like isshoni on the end too. We’re having those little details checked by a fluent Japanese speaker, and the course will be modified if necessary, but in the longer phrases it’s generally in the right place.
From how the intensive day of Italian worked, I think what will happen is there’ll be a link posted here to a YouTube livestream each day from the 13th to 23rd of January. We can then watch and listen along as Kai, Tom, and Aran use the app to learn as much Japanese as possible for roughly 10 hours each day.
Or, we can choose to join in fully by using our own apps, from something like 9am each day through to the end. (I watched a bit of the Italian, and trying to learn with the livestream on would do my head in. YMMV, but if you’re at all like me and you want to learn Japanese rather than just watch someone else out of morbid curiosity, I’d suggest you go solo. Just run the app all day and check in at the end.)
Then hopefully in the evening there will be a link to a video chat, where everyone who has joined in can use what they’ve learned to attempt having actual conversations. By the end of the full 10 day intensive, if your brain isn’t just mush, theoretically you’ll have learned Japanese for close to 100 hours, so that last group video chat ought to go pretty well! I have used the SSi Welsh Challenges which come to less than 40 hours of material (though of course with listening exercises, time to think things over, watching S4C etc as well) and I’m impressed with the range of things I can say and understand.
Even though (might be my imagination) the app doesn’t seem to move through material quite so quickly, I would still think the intensive has the potential to take you beyond a similar level of Japanese.
By default the app definitely goes through stuff slower, which is on purpose as the old lessons were just too fast for most people. You can make it faster by skipping a few times, but I recommend spacing them out to whenever things feel a bit too easy! You’ll have skipped over some introduction items but as a Zen SSi veteran you might be able to handle it But we expect we’ll still be past L3-like content by the end of the intensive
I’m thinking that since I’ll be awake for a bit more than 10 hours each day, I’ll try to fill the rest of the day with a bunch of Japanese listening…
As for intensive plans in general, we’ll make a thread here on the forum and try to check in regularly (I’ll do it, and I’ll try to remind Aran and Tom to do it too). I’ll also see if we can set up some times for streams and chats ahead of time as well, so you can plan your days out as well
That’s cool. While when I first started I repeated a challenge or the second half of a challenge in order to be “perfect” before moving on, by the end I was fully convinced the method worked so I did each challenge only once.
Somewhere in the first 50 mins of app use I thought I heard the audio speed up slightly… and I was relieved. My trouble is I like to do whatever task I’m doing “properly” and so even though the app felt slow I was hesitant to skip and miss something important. But I suppose the world won’t end if I risk it.
I have done a little Japanese on Duolingo, along with French and Welsh and am very interested in tackling Japanese on here. So it’s great news for me. Would love to have more details of when and how, and price etc.
I’ve been a member of SSi W for many years doing Welsh and have looked into the Forum several times but dont really know how to use it re posting messages, replies, etc. Can anyone give me advice on this please?
Hey there! All new langauges are included in any SSi subscription, so if you still have access to Welsh, then you also have access to Japanese They’re all available in the new app.
If you’re not in a rush, I’d wait until after we’ve finished our intensive - currently while it definitely works, it requires a lot of faith that things will work in the end and we have a lot of easy fixes we can do almost straight away once we’re out
Hey everyone! We have a plan to improve the Japanese in the short term, so I thought I’d let you know what to expect and what we’re trying to address:
The beginning of the course is too difficult and scary! In other courses we try to keep things simple in the beginning so you get very comfortable with a few patterns before you have to dive into the deep end, but the beginning to the Japanese course introduces too many variations too early on. Aran has designed a new start to the course which should help give you some confidence early on that you can already try to communicate with people.
We’re adding romaji! Sorry @verity-davey - I’m on your side with this, but we’re trying to reduce the amount of early scary things that will make people feel like they can’t learn Japanese, and seeing some kind of romanization is going to help people feel less lost early on… Hiragana is still going to be available in the future, but it’ll have to go in the queue for app improvements which might take a little longer than it’ll take us to make the new course.
General phrase quality improvements will be tested and applied as well.
Due to all these changes to the course structure, it might end up being safer to ask everyone to start again from the beginning and skip forward where it feels too easy… But if we end up having to go with that option, there will be a pop up in the app letting you know about it - it won’t just start from the beginning with no warning!
But we expect we’ll still be past L3-like content by the end of the intensive 
They’re all available in the new app.