THE MASTER OF THE KITE
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| I was born in Triest, Italy, on the 5th of April of 1947. My passion for foreign languages was already present since my childhood. I learned english at school, but I also studied german and spanish by myself. After my Bachelor of Electronic Engineering I had to travel very much for work, so that I also studied french, swedish and portuguese. Japanese comes into my “languages luggage” in 1990, raising my actually spoken languages to eight, including italian, my native language. I embraced japanese because of another great passion I have: the martial arts of the Rising Sun. I was touched by Samurai movies and the culture of Japan, so I entered this charming world in 1969 practicing Karate. I kept on practicing this martial art for 40 years, achieving important results first as a student, and later as a teacher. Since 2010 I practice Kyudo, the way of the japanese bow. Moving from martial arts to japanese has almost been a must. The basics for learning other languages mixed with the strong curiosity about Japan made me study the language of that country, which seems to be so far away, but geographically and humanly is quiet near to my place. Italy and Japan are two countries that have miles of coasts, valleys and mountains, different seasons and weather, love for arts and a strong family sense. There was a small problem though: how could I study japanese in 1990? I think I have been a pioneer in this, because it was pretty hard to find japanese schools or courses in that time, above all in Italy. Triest was outside of any kind of oriental meetings or classes or anything, unlike Venice and Naples for instance. Not many japanese tourists came to Triest either, I mean, not like the biggest italian cities. After a lot of research and without the internet that did not exist in that time yet, I could finally find a company of Milan. As soon as I read its name I remembered that when I was a kid I studied german with the same course, on 78 rpm records! So I bought a course made of tapes and books. It was very original and well done, so that I started to study japanese with this course, all by myself. After that start in 1990, I kept on “hunting” interactive japanese courses. In 1991 I ordered a new course from the United States. Of course it was in english but I could finish it successfully in about six months. Later, during a vacation in California, I purchased a japanese course that even the Hawaii University was using. In 1993 I bought another one in London and so on. All of these courses were made of tapes and books. At the same time I could finally meet japanese teachers in Triest and in Udine to get private lessons and to improve my pronunciation. Anyway, the big step was in 1994, when I went to Japan for the first time, taking a professional japanese course at the international school Eurocentre in the city of Kanazawa. A full-immersion period of four hours language every morning plus two hours of japanese culture (music, cousine, ikebana, tea ceremony, gardening, writing, etc.) in the afternoon and above all living in a japanese family, where I could actually put my japanese into practice. When I got back to Italy I kept on studying and bought a japanese-french DVDs course. At the same time I always tried to make new japanese friends when I travelled for work. In 2005 I attended japanese classes in a private school of Triest. Finally studying japanese was not for pioneers only. In 2008 I went back to Japan and this time I travelled around the country even more, so that I really could improve my skills. |
| The best method of studying japanese has always been clear to me: studying according the same system that had lead me through all the other languages. This means to follow this sequence: I LISTEN, I SPEAK, I READ, I WRITE. This is the first rule of “I Learn Japanese RIGHT NOW”. I got inspired by the “babies experience” that everyone of us has gone through: babies first listen, then at about two years old they start repeating and speaking and finally, when they are five, they learn to read and write their native language. This is a “placed” path in our brain. I mean an open road that makes learning a new language easier, since it works exactly as when we learned our native language. If we take a look at the common school methods, we can easily see that the learning sequence is totally opposite: they first teach you some written words, then their pronunciation and then, if there is still some time, teachers try to train you to understand native speakers. To drive on a “one way” road in the wrong direction looks like something masochistic, but it is exactly what happens in most languages courses, even in the internet. On the other side, we all know that japanese writing is kinda tough, so I do not think that starting to learn all the ideograms makes any sense. Just consider that japanese has three groups of different characters and one of these is ideograms, which are around 2000… hieroglyphs. Sometimes they are not that easy, so that there is no reason to spend so much time to learn them all. For japanese writing many people use the same method of japanese children schools. This could be because the first japanese persons who travelled abroad found easy to teach other foreign people through this way. Well, I consider very important that we do not have the time and do not feel like to spend four or five years to learn japanese writing and reading before being able to talk with a japanese. This is where the need of understanding and speaking RIGHT NOW comes from. Listening and repeating short sentences at first, and then to learn how to write and read them just as a consequence. At the same time, students should look for japanese friends as soon as possible, to improve their comprehension and pronunciation, listening to the different sounds, voice and intonation of the native speaker. |
| In October 2012 I uploaded my first lesson of “I Learn Japanese RIGHT NOW”. As you can imagine after having read “my method”, the entire course has been set on a revolutionary way, unlike classic methods. Through remembering all the difficulties and mistakes when I first started to study a foreign language, I tried to “pack” every lesson so that students can learn the most natural way, and why not, even funniest. For example, I have totally skipped the “Roma-ji”, which is the transcription to latin characters of japanese words (i.e. “arigato”, “sayonara”, etc.) I have also skipped long and boring Hiragana and Katakana drills, which are phonetic alphabets, preferring to teach them into sentences, step by step along the first lessons. Arriving to the 18th lesson you will already know all the japanese phonetic characters. This is actually considered an aim and not a starting point, in my course. As you can see, the first character of my first lesson is actually a Kanji, one of thousands of ideograms. This is to make the student get familiar with the real japanese at once. In the further lessons I also explain how they were born and how they are structured and I tell you about different kinds of writings in the world. Did you know that our alphabet also comes from ancient ideograms? Actually we use ideograms too, but we just do not realize that: I am talking about numbers, which are not phonetic signs. In facts their pronunciation changes according to the position of the numbers, for example 1, 10, 11, 1000 and have as many different pronunciations as the people in the world who use them. The goal of my course is to make the students be able to understand and speak japanese, giving them a real good and efficient start to improve their knowledge later. Grammar is taught sentence by sentence on the way, instead of boring lessons apart. I do not think you can split grammar from speaking. When you talk you are using your grammar knowledge at the same time, so this is not an independent skill. “I Learn Japanese RIGHT NOW” is recommended to anyone who really wants to understand and speak japanese. If you are only interested in curiosities, food, culture, or any other kind of japanese tutorial you can find tons of videos in the net. “I Learn Japanese RIGHT NOW” is a scientific and factual path for anybody who wants to learn a language for everyday life. |
