Comprehensible input

Japanese
#1

Hello, first time poster here.

For any of you that are using CIJ (comprehensible inpus japanese), should know that Yuki, the founder of the webiste will be leaving and during a 2 year period all of her videos will be phased out (over half of the videos on the website (867 / 1711), and the other Co-founder (Ben) will be leading the website on forward, i dont know why but this whole situation feels off somehow, i mean despite there being 2 founders, she litteraly is the face of CIJ and has done all the hard work so to speak (in my eyes CIJ is Yuki’s webiste) and i have a hard time seeing her leaving so suddenly without any good explanation by her own choice.

Anyways her videos will (over half of the videos on the website (867 / 1711) will be free on her new youtube channel/website https://www.youtube.com/@nihongo-no-jikan & Videos | Nihongo no Jikan currently there is already 120+ videos uploaded/phased out of CIJ and many more to come the following weeks (many gameplay videos and such)

If anyone wish to support please do so! :slight_smile:

11 Likes
#2

Thank you for highlighting the website and youtube channel!

#3

That’s a mighty fine heads up. Thanks for the links!

#4

Wow, getting 800 of those for free is really cool!
Though I feel bad for cijapanese as they will probably stop getting premium users with this one

1 Like
#5

As a more advanced learner, I found actually a lot of profit watching this type of content. Usually I would see only a few new words every episode, but they would be actually the meaning words and all the context would be around them, so they stick really well just from one listen

#6

i dont know why but this whole situation feels off somehow, i mean despite there being 2 founders, she litteraly is the face of CIJ and has done all the hard work so to speak (in my eyes CIJ is Yuki’s webiste) and i have a hard time seeing her leaving so suddenly without any good explanation by her own choice.

I personally am reserving judgement. If you’re on the Discord for CIJ (which is now going to rebrand as NIJ/Natural Japanese, in case people still wanted to find it going forward), Co-founder Ben has made it clear he’s invested significant money into keeping this project going as he believes in the core goal of the website.

I think it’s important to note that it seems ‘sudden’ to us, but behind the scenes this has to have been going on for a long time. For anyone who doesn’t know the situation, Ben and Yuki were previously 50/50 owners and Ben has now bought out Yuki’s share. Dealing with that and all the contracts about changing branding, removing Yuki’s image etc. from the website is not an overnight thing.

Chances are neither of them contractually can provide an explanation, at least not in the near future, which does make it hard to know if anyone is ‘in the wrong’ or if it’s just business. If it helps at all, in the Discord Ben has gone out of his way to promote Yuki’s new content outside of what would be under any legal obligation, so it can’t have been too crazy whatever happened.

Lastly, I’ll add that the website was coded by Ben and was the big thing Ben brings to CIJ. He is (was I guess?) a software developer and I think the website design is one of the big reasons people are willing to pay for the content on there - the ranking by exact difficulty level feature is especially helpful. That’s not to take away anything that Yuki has done for the brand and all that she did to build it up, but there is a reason her and Ben were business partners at the end of the day

3 Likes
#7

Someone asked about what was happening with CIJ on reddit (link to post) and this morning it looks like Ben has been answer some questions people have had so if anyone is looking for more information I would recommend looking through that post.

#8

I don’t really understand why so many people are making such a big deal out of this.
It’s normal to not go into detail with customers; they both may influence people with their work, but they aren’t social influencer, who keep everyone informed about everything and everyone shares his own point of view. It’s also normal for partners to part ways at some point because they have different opinions on the future or because one of them suddenly wants to try something new. There are so many possiblities.
And why is the website suddenly going to be worse just because Yuki is leaving? Yuki has a lot of content on the website, but there’s also plenty of content from other teachers. A two-year transition may be not enough to produce a sufficient amount of new content, but there will be new content. And if you personally like Yuki and her videos in particular, you can of course follow her, but does that make the other teachers any worse? Aren’t there also a lot of people who love the other videos beside Yukis? (Personally, I don’t have a favorite yet.)
I understand, that lifetime subscribers are upset though, especially if they just subscribed recently…
For everyone else, just wait to see how both sides develop and don’t speculate about any possible bad feelings between Ben and Yuki :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#9

@Blausternchen I found that odd as well. I haven’t used CIJ, but it seems like it’s just one person out of many moving on. This seems like a nothingburger, at least for someone on the outside looking in.
https://cijapanese.com/team

#10

Isn’t she like ALG adjacent in some ways? Whereas I never got that vibe from the other teachers. I noticed that Yoshito has been a bit more liberal with using quick English definitions in recent videos so maybe that’s a result of this going on behind the scenes.

#11

While I think Yuki is the best teacher, probably due to the sheer amount of videos she made as her earlier videos are rougher, I find Yoshida hilarious. There is something very weird (in the best way) about her videos and her presentation style.

1 Like
#12

Thank you for sharing this. I was about to get a membership, and Yuki is the best teacher imo.