Yuta Aoki , or “That Japanese Man Yuta”, is a youtuber with \~a mil subscribers. Almost throughout every video he advertises his emailing list, so i thought: eh, why not, more japanese learning, even if elementary, couldn’t hurt.
It was real *weird* though.
Other than the emails made to seem personal but are mass sent by bots aside, the four part email series on learning japanese was vv weird. He uses all this sad sob story type stuff in order to get you to sign up for his paid course (which is outrageously expensive, by the way), and all his videos use romaji, even after what I would consider to be stepping off material from that alphabet.
After the sending of strange videos, again and again more and more slightly manipulative emails are sent my way from this guys ass dude. I didn’t block just to see what happened. Mans sends me an 11 part series of these really poorly made videos. I had to see what’s up man.
I check his website ([https://members.japanesevocabularyshortcut.com/spage/course-open-trial.html?dfp=3xYy87X3xq](https://members.japanesevocabularyshortcut.com/spage/course-open-trial.html?dfp=3xYy87X3xq) go on its a laugh), and i think its really absolutely atrocious. Maybe its just because its so differing from what i would reccomend but still.
First, he starts off with the slightly wrong statement that you need \~800 words to be nearly conversationally fluent in both english and japanese ? (I don’t play the numbers game but i think around 1,000 – 3,000 words is around 80% average comprehension). Even 80%, let alone 75%, is nowhere near enough comprehension to comfortably learn new material, let alone be able to do all the blasphemous things he mentions one may be able to do after finishing his “course”.
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Next, he goes on to discourage people from using tried and true things like Anki, textbooks (to some extent), and even daily immersion, one of the core building blocks of learning any language !
he says, and i quote:
“You can try using real-life resources from the start. But there’s a problem: **they might be too hard** for beginners and intermediate learners. When something is too hard, **your brain shuts down.** It’s frustrating and you lose focus.”
??? the entire reason why most people don’t use a classroom environment to learn such languages is because they work along the route of having you understand everything and never learning anything new before moving on. this entire narrative is atrocious and is extremely detrimental. I pity any poor beginner whos a fan of the guy and now thinks that the things he discouraged are useless, and learning languages with 100% comprehension, “level-like”, is better!
Does anyone else agree with me , or am i just overthinking it too hard?
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TL;DR: Yutas Japanese programs don’t seem to fare anything useful, and to me, look like they would only serve as a detriment to the beginning japanese learner. if his paid course is anything like mentioned above, please do not waste your money on the useless jargon he spits. You should much rather just stick to the youtube content he makes instead.
42 comments
This is called marketing.
Yeah many of these language tutors have shit marketing
This is really unrelated to your overall point but…
>the entire reason why most people don’t use a classroom environment to learn such languages is because they work along the route of having you understand everything and never learning anything new before moving on
A good teacher doesn’t do that. Unless you’re talking about Genki I type classes, in which yeah you kind of have to understand kana and basic statements before trying to read the Tale of Genji. Even those classes don’t make sure you 100% understand everything *perfectly* ( like は vs が or the pitch accents of different conjugations etc) before introducing new content anyway.
Also the entire reason I don’t hire a private tutor is because I don’t have the time or extra money. There are lots of reasons to prefer self-directed learning over guided learning but “slow introduction of new content” is not one of them. Unless you’re talking very specifically about large introductory classes where you happen to be moving at a speed faster than the average student there… which isn’t a problem with guided learning it just means the class you chose wasn’t a good fit for you and you might need to pay extra if you want a more personalized experience.
>I check his website (https://members.japanesevocabularyshortcut.com/spage/course-open-trial.html?dfp=3xYy87X3xq go on its a laugh)
“Do you want to talk to Japanese people like them?” 😉
I would say this applies to 90% of language learning Youtubers who happen to have their own offers in some way. A saw a bunch of videos of him where he reviewed learning portals and it always seemed like he is dedicated to call things unnatural to quickly discard anything that is not his program. Usually he rants 2 minutes about example sentences using **私は**ｘです because it’s sooooo unnatural and noone would ever say it and blahblah, although this is just the introduction to the most basic sentence structures and noone really cares about how natural something is at that point. Noone says “My name is x” in English either, but it’s still a nice first example to teach a basic sentence construction without introducing more words than necessary.
That being said, this is just marketing and doesn’t necessarily mean what is being offered is bad. JapanesePod101, for example, is similarly bad with its marketing tactics, but I’ve heard tons of people say it helped them a lot. So in the end it comes down to the programs itself, and even the more vicious marketing tactics can lead to a program worth pursuing. No idea if that would be the case for Yuta’s stuff though.
I watch his videos just because it’s funny watching old Japanese people try to read Chinese and use the completely wrong reading, or whatever – but I would never use his videos to try to learn Japanese. For one thing, his accent in English is strong enough that it distracts me whenever he tries to explain something.
After he made that video saying mattvsjapans Japanese is better than some natives, I stopped watching him.
You dont need a course to learn Japanese. People have been learning languages for centuries before apps and courses. All you need is lots of content and time with the language and to practice routinely to form good habbits.
Funnily enough I never considered learning from his emails or website.
I simply watch his videos because they are entertaining and I guess it’s good input. Usually only watch the ones where he talks in Japanese to other Japanese people.
Call me petty but his worn out t shirts just look like crap
I’m going to stop and say right now that George Trombly is absolutely legit. I appreciate that guy for some reason, I guess he’s just endeering, I don’t know. If you want to learn some Japanese, try his From Zero course. I’m stubborn and learned differently, but I think he is one of the few Japanese youtubers that teach Japanese that have anything useful to say about the language.
I don’t want to sling any mud at people, so instead I’m just going to recommend George’s course to beginners.
Classic online marketing tactics and sales funnel. His whole real Japanese that people speak really talks to beginners who are frustrated they can’t understand non scripted conversations and don’t understand they haven’t reached the level and exposure necessary. Also just being a native speaker doesn’t qualify a person to teach a language.
Looks like he’s targeting people who don’t know much about language learning and want to do it on a whim
Kinda sad 🙁
What do you mean by “sad sob story type”? I just don’t know much about YouTube JP learning community, but that one got me interested
The website
It confuses me more than anything.
The best Youtuber I found for learning Japanese was Tokini Andy.
I wish I could “understand all daily conversations”, “read manga in japanese” and “watch anime without subtitles” with my mere 800 words
Yuta’s japanese vocabulary shortcut sends me updates even though i’m not in the course anymore. And when i tried to stop it, the website threw me an error. i asked about this to their support email but they didn’t do anything :>
i dislike you Yuta.
$98 per month lol
He is a player. He spams videos to make money and he often reacts or coincidentally makes the exact same videos other youtubers are doing. This has being known for a while
is this the guy who copied paolo from tokyo? similar content kind of stuff* ?
I agree with you 100%, from the sob story to the odd and poorly constructed multi-part email video series. I signed up as well out of curiosity about a year ago, I can confirm everything you’re saying and that it hasn’t changed. The same old countdown on his website is present to make people feel unnecessarily anxious about signing up and spending money.
I’m not sure if there’s any real value comparatively to tried and true methods, especially when compared to immersion. It’s insane to argue against the benefits of immersion when learning anything.
What I do now know after speaking to other native, reputable tutors and teachers of Japanese, is that what he offers is incredibly overpriced.
One tutor offered me a 6 month course, including any necessary text books and learning materials provided digitally, for like $100 I think it was. That’s $16.67 per month, with materials included, as an example to compare with Yuta’s offering.
Okay but…how much is he charging?
As soon as i see the timer on the website i went “ah shit, here we go again”
I mean idk if it’s intentional or not, but the website looks similar to those “GET A LIMITED PROMO NOW! SIGN UP TODAY! THIS IS A LIMITED OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU” fake guru website on coffezilla videos. I don’t know much about web design, but the website layout feels Sussy
His videos are all about shock baiting and then trying to sell you something. Not surprised his content is shit.
Really panders to weebs who wants to know “the real japan” whatever fuck that is.
He doesn’t teach well at all, there are better teachers out there with good content.
This is today’s post showing that:
*The Japanese Language Learning community is a bucket of crabs.*
How dare someone offer something for sale! How dare people make a living!
I agree. Back when I started this journey to learn the language a year or so ago, I was digging around through YouTube video after YouTube video (alongside other google found sources) trying to figure out the best method. I stumbled upon him and also said “Eh, why not” but it started to feel like a ponzi scheme, even if that’s not exactly what it is (idk what I would call it), but I backed out. I found Refold and even though the people running it also kinda have some weird issues, I liked the methodology and borrowed from it, to make my own method that has been working well for me. I’m probably not learning as fast as I could be (I certainly could use more immersion time on a daily basis) but I’m making progress each day and that’s what counts.
My advice to any beginner is just find something that gives you a good starting point on the basics regardless of what it is and use that as a jumping off point to just dive into the language. If someone tells you “Only my method works” ignore them and go to another source cause people are different and that’s just not true.
I think the whole point of his course is to get you to talk japanese as fast as possible and not be a japanese language pro after the course.
The idea is to teach you only the most common words that you would encounter in most conversations so that you can go and actually talk to japanese people in a way where you don’t sound too robotic or unnatural. I feel like a lot of people have this wrong idea that you need to “master” a language before you can attempt to even say a single sentence when in reality you can get to conversational level very early on with only a few words (few as in about 800-1200 words). A great example of this is Cdawgva if you are familiar with him. Went to japan barely speaking any japanese and started learning through talking to japanese people while playing games with them. His japanese is by far not perfect but through practical usage of the language he came to a point where he can usually get by day to day without having to rely on a translator all the time.
Is this the right way to learn japanese for a beginner? I don’t know, I guess it really depends what you are going for and what “type” of learner you are but it sure seems like this course was not what you were looking for OP.
Ok I thought you were talking about Nihongo Learning who posted here a few days ago , who was also named Yota , and I got a bit confused for a while
I gotta be honest, I’m bored of hearing warnings about this guy’s courses. I like the channel well enough and the guy’s gotta eat so I don’t care if his marketing is a little aggressive. And [“What’s the ‘best way’ to learn Japanese?”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcg5E3qVa5w) is one of the more astute videos about language learning I’ve watched.
I like his videos, i learned interesting things from them. But damn, he’s a hardcore spammer no shit.
Overpriced and he comes off as a creep (and markets to creeps). Bad all around.
I recommend nihongo no mori.Great channel with hundreds of videos by fun teachers.
I used to watch his videos back in the day but his whole lessons thing started to seem shadier and shadier and now I avoid him like plague. I signed up to his lessons years back, I got like three emails over the space of a few years with basic bitch info you can get from the first few pages of a textbook and that was it. But a while back someone posted here saying that they signed up for those lessons, and then got an email from him with a “limited time only chance” to buy his paid course and oh no buy now or you can never get it!! Which is artificial scarcity, which is a scam tactic.
Fully agree on the whole, but to be completely fair to him
>You can try using real-life resources from the start. But there’s a problem: **they might be too hard** for beginners and intermediate learners. When something is too hard, **your brain shuts down.** It’s frustrating and you lose focus
He’s not saying “don’t immerse”. He’s saying “don’t start that way from the first second” – and based on what I’ve seen that’s not a strange idea at all, even in some of the most immersion-focused language learning communities. That immersion is just so much more effective and so much less frustrating if you’ve got *some* sort of foundation – say, some basic grammar and the 1000 most common words.
Aside from that though… Yeah, his marketing is weirdly manipulative and he doesn’t really ever seem to show he’s actually halfway decent at teaching stuff. I’m sure he speaks Japanese fluently – you know, being a native and all – but being fluent doesn’t mean being a good teacher. Otherwise I could just teach people Dutch, no problem, but it turns out teaching is a skill too.
My friend used to work for him behind the scenes. I got to see all the inner workings. He uses japanese girls to send you private thank yous and updates. The whole thing is the equivalent of a puppy mill for learning japanese. He has a pretty hefty army of underpaid workers doing all the leg work and he collects the funds.
I was even able to see his rough income from this.
I saw several for over 100k. Stop throwing your money at this.
I enjoy his street interviews but not into his classes or opinion pieces much.
a youtuber promoting a useless scam product? THE SHOCK… but no, really, thank you for biting the bullet for us and checking it out. his vids get recommended to me but there was just something off about him to me… my libra intuition strikes right again 😵💫
I hope Yuta would word it better when he said “learn Japanese with me”. For some reason I thought maybe it’s a free course or material or something. He should make it clear it’s a paid course and the cost involved upfront. I don’t want to sign up to something that hasn’t been explained properly.
I was disappointed to see his self-promotion posted to this sub the other day. I haven’t explored his content deeply, but he rubbed me as cheap, exploitative, and a scammer. As others have said, being a native speaker does not mean you can teach someone else your language, and Yuta’s teaching skills seem virtually non-existent.
I’m glad the overarching opinion in this thread is that his product is overpriced and low quality.
I know about 600 words of Japanese now. I still can’t read a single article in a children’s magazine, let alone watching anime without subtitles or understanding conversations.
Watching anime without subs or understanding japanese songs are 2 of the hardest things to do as a non-native. You have to deal with slangs, shortforms, technical or sometimes even made up terms, accents and a bit of culture knowledge, while also trying to just enjoy it.
So you definitely CANNOT do any of that stuff with 800 words.
using those 2 japanese girls as bait for some fat weeb to buy their course is weird
Cool. I came here from higurashi
https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/vsmc9e/anime_questions_recommendations_and_discussion/iibzg2a
https://www.reddit.com/r/Higurashinonakakoroni/comments/wbspkx/higurashi_and_spy_x_family_rika_furude_overuses/ii8zzsj