Welcome! Gakuu.com is a brand new website all about learning Japanese.
Just another boring Japanese study site..? Heavens, no!
We’re all about Real Japanese. The solid, gritty stuff you’d come across in daily life. Practical examples and unusual expressions; all the stuff textbooks don’t like to teach you! Because let’s be honest, once you’ve gotten the basics under your belt, you need to be getting your hands dirty with the stuff Japanese people are encountering every day.
So is Gakuu suitable for beginners?
Yes and no. Using Gakuu on its own to learn the Japanese language from scratch will be quite difficult. We do cover some of the basics as they come up, but for absolute beginners of Japanese Gakuu is best used in combination with a basic textbook.
Because we use real-world material to teach the language, it can be quite a shock at first. But that’s part of the process of becoming fluent in Japanese. We use heaps and heaps of quality, native-checked explanations and advice to get you really understanding the inner workings of the language. We feel that even beginners can benefit from this early exposure to real-world Japanese.
You shouldn’t try to swallow it all at once, but it’s there to be used as you progress. Quite often you’ll find yourself looking back at something you did not understand the first time only to discover that it has started to make sense. It’s an indescribable feeling!
So wear your beginner’s badge with pride and get cracking with the studying! We’re also very happy to help advise budding young students of Japanese how to best begin their language studies. Just send us an email.
What about more advanced students?
Pre-intermediate to advanced level learners will be able to jump right in and start learning cool new things that the textbooks don’t cover. We recommend you use your favourite SRS programme to mine sentences and collect the audio and video content on Gakuu. Plugins like Rikaichan will speed up your reading when coming across kanji that you don’t know. Original sources are presented in context so you can completely grasp how the Japanese is used – an extremely important feature that is key to fluency.
So what’s the bare minimum level I need?
If you want to use Gakuu on its own, you’ll need a basic level of Japanese consisting of simple grammatical expressions, several hundred words vocabulary and a couple of hundred kanji. In textbook terms, think ‘Minna no Nihongo’, ‘Genki’ or our particular favourite, Textfugu – the online Japanese textbook for self study.
Even if you don’t have that level yet, Gakuu is still an excellent resource for keeping up to date with the latest Japanese expressions, as well as providing cultural insight and advice for living and working in Japan.
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Intrigued? You can get an overview of the site on the Our Philosophy page and dig into the FAQ and Pricing sections for more info. Any questions, shoot us an email and we’ll be happy to help :).
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