How To Study TextFugu’s Audio Lessons

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.” – Lao-tzu

The audio lessons have been designed to be difficult. They’ve also been designed to be packed full of great information for you to learn and take away with you. You won’t see improvement the first time you go through an audio lesson. You probably won’t see improvement the second time, either. It’s going to be consistency (and possibly a little hardheadedness) that show you lots (and lots) of improvement. The more you study the audio lessons, the more you’ll learn. It’s just a matter of getting better at using them.

The audio lessons all have a pattern. Here’s what I recommend you do to go through each audio lesson:

  1. Read the introduction, so you know what’s going to be talked about.
  2. Hit the “Play All” button and listen to the whole thing. Do your best to follow along with the text below, too.
  3. Listen to each line individually (hit the play button next to each line) to get a sense of what’s on each of them. You won’t necessarily understand what’s in each line, but try to pick out things you do happen to know.
  4. Identify the things on each line that you don’t know. Take a look at the vocab list and figure out the meanings of the words you don’t understand. Listen to the line again, this time knowing (at least partially) what each word is. You don’t have to know the grammar at this point.
  5. After going through each line, looking up the vocab you don’t know, download the Anki list for all the vocab. Just from step four, you should know at least 20% (or so) of these words, plus the ones you knew before starting the audio lesson.
  6. After learning the vocab words (or at least enough to study a line or two at a time), scroll down past the vocab table and listen to the individual lines again. This time, you should recognize the vocab. Also, take a look at each English translation. Listen to the line of audio, then repeat after it until you sound like the speaker.
  7. After you’ve learned a line, show the explanation to see why the sentence works the way it does. Also, many explanations will ask you to form your own (similar) sentences to help make sure you understand the grammar, rather than memorizing things like a robot.
  8. Go through each line like this, until you get to the bottom.
  9. Go back to the top, and hit Play All. Make sure you can follow along (and read along, out loud) with the audio as it’s playing.
  10. Congrats! You’ve just learned a ridiculous amount of Japanese (though, you probably put in a lot of work in the process). Nice Job! Do another.

If you follow these steps with each audio lesson, you’ll find that they will get easier and easier each time (not only because you know more, but because you’ll learn how to study this kind of things more effectively). These audio lessons will help train your conversation and listening skills, as well as give you things to study when you want to take a break from the “core” lessons. Enjoy!

Bounty?