Is there any app or website that just teaches how to speak and listen to Japanese first?

4 comments

1. There’s the [Pimsleur Method](https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-japanese/subscription-all-access), but baring specific situations where you’re likely to be having lots of conversations in Japanese, focusing on listening/speaking to exclusion of reading/writing is a questionable idea.

2. Well, that’s how babies and toddlers learn, so it’s not completely illogical.

   Anyway, have you considered Pimsleur? They are pretty much all audio based. They introduce words, say them slowly, syllable by syllable, put them in sentences and so forth. They also work on recall, so you’ll hear a word frequently at first, then it will be brought back several sessions later.

   “Do you remember how to say…?”

   Pimsleur also strongly encourages you to say the lessons aloud.

   Years ago, there were Pimsleur demos (as in, you could download the first lesson free to try it out with no obligation). Perhaps they are still available.

3. I would recommend against it. Matt vs Japan has a video on outputting first and the problems associated with it. Listening is fine but when speaking early on, you will tend to “create” your own version of Japanese and it will sound funky as language is not like math and is very unpredictable. I mean if you don’t care about little stuff like that then go for it. I know that for some people it can be more motivating to speak in the beginning. And plenty of people have been successful. Just watch Matt vs Japan output video and then decide if you want to speak in the beginning.

4. Pimsleur, Japanese from zero YouTube channel lessons can do that. But you do need to learn some vocab on your own if you’re going to do that. However it will give you sentence structure.