Who’s Behind All This?
That would be me, Lloyd Vincent. For nearly 5 years I lived in Nagoya, Japan working as a translator, before which I spent more than 4 years actively studying Japanese (and a few years before that “dabbling”). I passed JLPT 1級 (=N1) in 2007, my first year in Japan, but have never stopped learning.
I returned to my home country of USA in late 2012 because I wanted to move on with my life. After a brief break, I began a 6-month-long project which culminated in the cheat sheets I now sell on this site.
My evil plan is to turn what I love to do (write articles and create content about Japanese language and culture) into a money-making activity, so that I don’t have to slave away in a cubicle somewhere making some rich guy richer. You get cheat sheets, I get freedom, and the Force maintains balance. I win, you win, we all win, right?
And yes, Nihonshock.com is run by just me.
Creator’s Philosophy
I may not be an expert Japanese speaker, but I am an expert learner. And I want to do (and enjoy doing) whatever I can to help other learners along their journey. That is the reason I started Nihonshock.com and the reason I made these cheat sheets.
In my personal experience, as well as my experiences with other learners, the people who learn Japanese the best and the fastest are their own teachers. They don’t waste time looking for shortcuts, they set their own goals, they take responsibility for their own studies, and they review like crazy. This approach requires raw information–lots of it.
Fortunately, there are dictionaries, a concise reference to all individual words. How useful! What would we do without them! But what about a reference for grammar, verb forms, spoken forms, adjective forms, counting, politeness and all of the other stuff? I was always frustrated that reference materials for these topics seemed to consist solely of cumbersome and verbose books. So, I set out to create something leaner and more efficient, but which still achieves the scope and detail necessary for advanced learners.
At first, (especially for beginners) these cheat sheets might be a little overwhelming. That’s only natural considering that I’ve compressed onto 9 sheets of paper what would typically take up hundreds upon hundreds of pages in a textbook. But given time, I’m confident that these cheat sheets will become a valuable asset and indispensable part of any learner’s materials collection.
Learning a language is more than just a great accomplishment; it is a liberation of the mind. There are times when it will seem endless or impossible, but always keep going. As someone who has survived the gauntlet, I can assure you that whatever investment of time and effort you make will be returned to you a hundredfold.