I’m Ken. I was born and raised in Japan, and Japanese is my first language.
This site exists because of a gap I kept noticing. Learners would put in real work — finishing textbook chapters, drilling grammar, passing tests — and still find that the Japanese they had learned wasn’t quite the Japanese people around them were using. Not wrong, exactly. Just different in ways nobody had told them about.
That gap is what I write about here.
Why I care about this
A few years ago I spent a week traveling in the US and Canada. I had studied English for years. I could read it, and I could follow most of what I heard.
Then I tried to order a hamburger, and something else arrived.
The words were right. The sentence was right. My pronunciation wasn’t, and the person taking my order filled in what they thought I’d said. I ate something I hadn’t asked for, and spent the rest of the trip a little more careful about opening my mouth.
That week taught me something I hadn’t gotten from any of my studying: knowing a language on paper and using it with a person in front of you are two different skills. The textbook had prepared me for one of them.
I think a lot of people learning Japanese hit the same wall from the other direction. So when I write here, I try to answer the question that textbooks usually skip — not “is this correct?” but “is this what someone would actually say?”
How I write these articles
On what I know firsthand. When I tell you a phrase sounds stiff, or that I’d never say something to a friend, that’s a native speaker’s ear talking. I try to label it that way rather than dressing it up as research.
On what I don’t know firsthand. Anything factual — study findings, pricing, how a specific app works, what a test covers — comes from sources I can point to. When a source is weak or I couldn’t verify something, I say so in the article rather than smoothing over it.
On products. I haven’t personally used every app and service I write about over a long period, so you won’t find fabricated progress stories here. What you’ll find is a clear account of what each tool is built to do, what it doesn’t cover, and what it costs.
On being wrong. Language changes, prices change, and I make mistakes. If something here is out of date or incorrect, I’d rather hear about it than leave it up.
Who this is for
People who have some Japanese already and want to know what to do with it. Whether you got here through anime, a trip, a class, or a partner, the questions tend to be the same: what do people actually say, and how do I stop sounding like a textbook?