Japanese With Pops

You can speak Japanese on your first morning in Tokyo. Not read it, not memorize kana or kanji, speak it, and understand the answer that comes back. Japanese With Pops is a sixteen-chapter spoken course built on a proven way of learning by ear: an English guide explains one small idea, a native speaker says it, you say it yourself in the pause, and the course quietly builds that idea into the next one until you are making sentences you were never taught as sentences. No writing systems. No grammar tables. No homework. Just the engine of the language, one piece at a time, with a pause after every line so you are always speaking, never just listening.

The course follows a traveler from Tokyo to Hakone, by Shinkansen to Kyoto, on to Nara and Osaka, and home from Kansai Airport: the bow and the greeting at Haneda, the konbini and the ATM, the subway and the taxi, ramen, sushi and the izakaya, shopping and the new tax-free system, a night at a ryokan with Mount Fuji at the window, the bullet train, temples and shrines, a family dinner in Kyoto, the deer of Nara, and an Osaka pharmacy. Japanese turns out to be friendlier than its reputation: the verb always goes last, a question is one small word on the end, "I" and "you" can usually be left out, one polite verb ending serves everyone, and thousands of English words are already Japanese. Every chapter uses the most common words in polite everyday Tokyo Japanese, spoken by a native male voice, with a native female voice playing the clerk, the waitress, the ryokan hostess and the pharmacist so your ear learns to follow real exchanges. Numbers-by-ear drills and the set call-and-response courtesies of Japanese daily life are built in, and the course closes with a grand review and a gift: the Japanese you already own.

Compiled and edited by Pops. The narration is produced with digital voices.