No books. No long lists of vocabulary. No chance of failure.
Welcome to Learn with Paul Noble - a tried-and-tested language-learning method that has been used by more than one million people to speak fluently and confidently.
Take your Japanese to the next level and further your fluency with Paul’s simple, relaxed approach and learn in a way that suits you - without having to memorise long lists of words you won’t use; scribbling notes as you listen; or feeling frustrated.
Instead, Paul will help you to you build on your existing Japanese knowledge and guide you through 12 hours of essential tenses and grammar that you need to independently construct sentences and feel confident speaking Japanese in a variety of scenarios. Just listen, interact, and learn wherever you are. This course also contains a handy downloadable booklet to help you revise and reinforce your learning.
Next Steps is an intermediate course for non-beginners that follows on from the Learn Japanese with Paul Noble for Beginners - Complete Course.
Paul Noble left school unable to speak a language - having found that the traditional learning methods left him feeling ‘confused, incapable and unable to really say anything’. Determined that there must be a better way to learn, Paul spent years devising his own unique method of learning languages that cuts out all the grammar, all the memorisation and all the stress. He began using his method to teach in his Language Institute, and thousands of students later, he prides himself on never having had a student fail.
To continue your language learning journey once you’ve completed this course, download Learn with Paul Noble Complete courses in a variety of languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German and Mandarin Chinese.
This review is going to talk about this course in the beginner course, as if they are one entity because in my opinion, there are two parts to the same course.
The method of instruction is very similar to what you would find with MTM courses, and I believe that Paul nobles, methodology is heavily inspired by it… And if I remember correctly, Paul Noble was a student of Michel Thomas at one point, and it shows. This is basically a refined version of that.
In terms of value, I would argue that Paul Nobles Japanese courses as good as its MGM counterpart for a fraction of the money, it covers just as much of the structure of the language, as it’s more expensive counterpart, all without the annoying third wheel present in the former’s methodology. And while I understand that the “not so good student“ was supposed to reduce tension during learning, I have found that it actually created some bad patterns when using the language by the time I finished… And I would have to go back and clean that up mentally. I don’t have that problem here.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the second half of the Paul Noble course was edited from a previous addition, because they introduce some vocabulary, midstream that they gave no formal introduction to, which left me mildly confused. It wasn’t much of a problem for me, though, since this was more of a grammar refresher than anything else. And in terms of what I needed it for, it did very well my only minor complaint would be that I wish they gave some time to teaching dictionary form verbs for Japanese… Since most of the time when you look up a word in a Japanese dictionary, or even a bilingual dictionary, that’s what you’re going to find.
And most of the time when people talk to you, you’ll find a mixture of the neutral, polite form, and the dictionary form being used, which kind of leaves the student at a disadvantage. It covers the most common structures you’ll find in the language, no, when comparing it to something like the Spanish or Italian courses, I don’t think there was quite as much structural coverage here… And I feel like that’s probably because of the linguistic distance between English and Japanese, and that they were doubling down on, needing to explain certain things in a more repetitive way. That being said, it was a pretty good experience, and for the money, you really can’t go wrong, using this to jumpstart your journey to learning Japanese.
I always wish this wasn’t Paul Noble's most advanced Japanese course. I've used his audiobooks for both Japanese and French, and they've been incredibly helpful. It's quite upsetting that his Japanese audiobooks have now become rather useless to me. Paul Noble is excellent; I highly recommend his audiobooks. They include a free PDF, which is extensive and akin to an entire textbook. You can either print it out and bind it or use it as an ebook.
While this audiobook remains at a basic beginner level, it establishes a robust foundation that will greatly help your learning in the long term if mastered first. It covers a broad vocabulary range, which is my main struggle. Moreover, it acquaints the listener with constructing basic sentences in Japanese, a language that rarely employs pronouns or future tense and heavily relies on context.
My sole complaint is the format of this audiobook: someone speaks in English, then there's a pause, followed by the Japanese translation, another translation, and then it progresses to something new. There are no back-and-forth Japanese conversations, which are crucial for familiarising oneself with the natural speed and emphasis used in spoken Japanese. Thus, I wouldn’t recommend relying solely on this as your primary resource.
The audiobook offers insight into Japanese language and culture, particularly the common particles, which is valuable as understanding context is crucial even for basic Japanese sentences.
This book primarily teaches formal or polite Japanese, which is suitable, but quite distinct from casual Japanese you might wish to brush up on elsewhere if you plan to travel to Japan and make friends, or read the Japanese often used on social media. Despite that, you'll still comprehend most spoken Japanese without your casual Japanese being at the same level.
This oral Japanese practice is pretty decent at guiding one along step by step from my perspective, but then there was no new information that really challenged me. I consider myself an intermediate level Japanese learner. It seems like this was high beginning level... maybe low intermediate.
My real gripe though is that there is no Japanese-Japanese practice. Ideally there would be conversation with the audio speaking Japanese and the learner answering in Japanese, but this is not present. There are scenarios where one replies in Japanese to a conversation, but the conversation prompt from the partner is given in English. I think the audiobook would be vastly improved by having a Japanese-Japanese section.
Although I am happy with the extra listening and speaking practice this audiobook gave me, overall I am disappointed because I was expecting a bit higher level as well as being able to respond to Japanese conversation prompts.
Good companion to the beginners course, but I gave it 3 stars because I felt like the grammar covered was a little random, and was all still introductory level. Calling this intermediate is just completely wrong. Still a good format though, and easy to follow along with on car rides or if you're cooking dinner etc.