/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>21558788
Just sat down and marathoned every Nama-sensei video related even tangentially to Japanese, so I'm now the global authority on the subject of his lessons. I figure I should use this power to write an informed post on him.

First, his good points. Nama-sensei actually lived in Japan and spoke with Japanese people regularly, so he has a practical view of the language which is carried over to his lessons. He strongly emphasizes the necessity of using context to understand what's being said, for example, and in several videos he even shows himself speaking to Japanese people. His accent is embarrassingly bad and whatnot, but he's out there and he's got experience. So at the very least, he's not peddling bullshit, per se.

The entertainment value is also important to consider. He's a legit funny guy, and although I'm not sure how effective it is to draw Jesus on 十 while comparing it to the cross, it definitely keeps one's attention on Japanese. Even when being entertaining, though, he never forgets to emphasize the importance of work. "Write it 50 times in your notebook, bitch" isn't that effective for long-term retention and is antiquated, but it does instill a good work ethic. Do your work, you bitch.

Okay, now his bad points. Well. This is pretty major, so I'll just lay it out. Nama-sensei is bad at Japanese, and he's bad at the Japanese he does know, so his lessons often straddle the border between being lacking and being straight-up wrong, occasionally falling head-first into being wrong. The mistakes range from innocuous shit like writing 大きい as おうきい, but over time it really adds up. I think close to, if not all, of the example sentences he wrote himself were wrong or otherwise awkward. Two examples of such example sentences:

いまなにをしているですか。Ｘ　
いまなにをしているのですか。
あなたのＣＤをかいたいでもおかねがない。Ｘ
あなたのＣＤをかいたいけどおかねがない。

Of course, I'm not a native, so there's no telling what number of other mistakes I missed, but more than several stood out to me even as a gaijin.

Regardless of mistakes, however, the fundamental structure of his lessons isn't very conducive for effective learning. As you might have guessed from those example sentences, he doesn't introduce kanji in his lessons until the very end, after all the grammar lessons (except one). He spends a lot of time with romaji, then the rest of the time with kana. It's not very good. Kanji are dumped individually in what he called the "Daily Dump", of which there are 58, meaning he taught 58 kanji total (often saying to write out the readings 50 times, which is understandably bad). At the start of the dumps, he mentioned knowing 400 kanji total, which probably sounded impressive to him but to someone more informed about the writing system, well...

So. The lessons aren't reliable and they course is structured poorly in general. Could things get worse? Yes. He never finished. He taught the barest fundamentals of grammar, and the barest fundamentals of kanji, but neither ended up complete. He didn't even finish Katakana. So even disregarding everything else, it's just fundamentally true that nobody will learn Japanese from Nama-sensei. At best, they will get their start from him. I did, 7-some years ago. But you'll either leave early or be cockblocked very quickly whether you like it or not.

For this reason, barring all other problems, I would not recommend Nama-sensei. Even if they were the best lessons in the world, they're so incomplete as to be nothing more than a single uncomfortable stepping stone towards other resources. And alas, I can't ignore the other problems, so I can't recommend it even in that sense. You'll learn incorrect information, study incorrect example sentences, and just generally start Japanese off on the horribly wrong foot. Nama-sensei is good for a laugh, and watching a couple videos from him as motivation is fine. He's actually a cool guy with a lot of cool things to say, in particular I recommend his "How to pick up bitches" series since there's some actually good life advice in there. But in general, Nama-sensei should be avoided. Learn Japanese without him, and 7 years later, look back through his videos nostalgically, while laughing to yourself about the constant mistakes.