How it's made

9,464 words and patterns, 60,595 example sentences, 549 dialogues, 73 hours of Japanese audio

It's made with love by one person, a 'team' of eight Claude AIs, and as much Gemini AI as we need for media generation. I'm the founder, the learner, and the target customer: I've travelled to Japan for two decades while working in tech and I'm building the course that I wish existed for expats and frequent visitors. I'm not the teacher. My own Japanese was low-mid when we started building although it's rapidly going up because the course works!

But wait — how can you be sure the Japanese is correct?

The gap is not where one might expect. Both Claude and Gemini AI know native-level Japanese and will catch mistakes readily — try it in the tutor. That's why we generate language through them. In six months of development and review we found not one instance of broken grammar or unnatural phrasing in AI-generated text — the errors we do find are of a different kind entirely. We constantly find AI errors in continuity, script-following, or misunderstandings that a disembodied AI would make but a human who's actually there wouldn't. We find them, fix them, and create a review process so they don't recur. We're also building in public. If you do find something wrong please report it with the 'Report AI content' button and we'll fix it right away.

Not an AI wrapper

What separates us from an AI wrapper is teaching real situations from years of travel, not "hello, my name is...". Knowing the frustration of having decent vocabulary but being unable to hold a conversation at nomikai. Knowing how to fix it, where to put the guide wheels and where not to. Getting you to communicate what you need to: the nature of your query, getting the dates right for a booking, or expressing the embarrassment of arriving at your hotel much later than expected. By all means use a bare AI chat, but you need to be already good to do that. One thing though — keep your human tutor. We're not competing with them!

The pipeline, concretely

• Humans set the scenes, the register rules, and the curriculum — what's worth teaching and in what order.
• Gemini drafts the dialogue and speaks the voices. Every voice you hear is synthesized; our characters are fictional and no real person's voice or likeness is imitated.
• An automated transcription audit re-checks every audio clip against its text.
• Adversarial AI review passes hunt for the "not actually there" errors, and a human curates the results. Your reports close the loop.

A human — me, via Geeks in Cities Ltd (SC885112) — holds final editorial responsibility for everything the course publishes.