How to Speak Japanese Cross-culturally (All Levels)

Let me ask you an important question.

Are you perhaps feeling distant from your Japanese acquaintances?

Are you unsure whether your Japanese counterparts are speaking their true minds to you?

Have you ever had the impression that your business abilities might not be coming across in the best light due to your limited knowledge of Japanese?

If this sounds familiar, you are in the right hands!

If you can’t afford to spend months learning the language, but want to strike an emotional connection with Japanese colleagues or customers, this course will be a unique chance for you to reach your objectives.

It is always better to be on the polite side in crosscultural interactions. However, this does not mean that you can’t be authentic or that you have to resign to being unable to show your true value.

This course is not going to teach you another set of situational phrases you find in most courses. It teaches you “what’s missing” there: how to communicate at a deeper level, pushing levers that are normally out of reach for foreigners and whose effect is to allow Japanese interlocutors to feel at ease with you.

You will get glimpses into an elusive dimension that language courses cannot show you: evoking this deeper cultural level will be key in persuading your counterparts to trust you and give you the chance to become even an indispensable colleague or partner to them. All this with simple “connecting” phrases that anyone, whatever their language proficiency, can use every day, both in face-to-face interactions and in written correspondence.

Wondering how you are supposed to do this while being a beginner?

Secret 1: The idea for this course and the language I am going to share have been inspired by real fieldwork. I facilitated crosscultural training programmes for a total of 20,000 Japanese management executives and their foreign counterparts over 30 years, collaborating with Japanese firms in 20 countries.

Secret 2: The course puts particular care in getting across what the right context for using the phrases is, in order to have the right kind of impact. But in the end it doesn’t matter if you don’t get the context exactly right. The sentences are such, that those hearing them will be anyway impressed by your efforts to familiarise yourself with the local work styles.

Secret 3: Here and there in the course, you will find a number of key phrases paired with graphics, illustrating important philosophical concepts behind Japanese business behaviours. You will therefore not only be able to appreciate the meanings of the phrases, but also understand which cultural levers are being pushed in the Japanese mind when you use them. This knowledge is an exclusive takeaway from this course which will become an invaluable asset in your crosscultural toolkit.

So, by the end of the course, you will be able to:

1. Understand the Five Golden Rules for connecting with the Japanese

2. Learn select connecting phrases and the right context for them

3. Acquire Japanese communication skills and crosscultural knowledge

4. Know how to become an indispensable partner of Japanese people

The Japanese, in their hearts, are eager for you to step forward and help them drop their polite mask to connect. I want to help you become such a person — by Speaking Japanese Cross-culturally!

See you inside the video.

N.B. This is a new course, so I would very much appreciate your comments and suggestions. Thank you in advance.