Creating a Weekly Newsletter - Nihongo Yaoya
Having self-studied Japanese for over three years, I created a weekly newsletter called Nihongo Yaoya.
What is Nihongo Yaoya?
The name “Yaoya” comes from the Japanese word yaoya (八百屋). Beyond its well-known meaning of “greengrocer’s shop,” it also carries the connotation of “an abundance” or “many things.”
My goal is simple: “To satisfy the curiosity and information anxiety of Japanese language, Japan, and J-drama enthusiasts. To help lower learning barriers, reduce information asymmetry, and enrich cultural knowledge about Japan. Content covers Japanese language learning, travel in Japan, Japanese culture, anime, language learning techniques, and more.”
Language learning often starts with the seemingly trivial things—the fifty sounds (hiragana and katakana), grammar, vocabulary, honorific speech—and eventually internalizes into your own knowledge. Step by step, a thousand miles is covered, gradually adding up to “eight hundred” (an abundance).
There are plenty of online resources for learning English, and the platforms are relatively mature. VoiceTube, Hope English, and TutorABC are all great learning avenues, offering massive amounts of video content. With a dedicated search online, you can always find quality materials.
However, resources for learning Japanese are comparatively scarce, mostly consisting of fragmented information scattered across blogs and Facebook groups. Sources like Sonic Japanese, Wang Kela’s Japanese Classroom, etc., still predominantly rely on traditional offline teaching or self-study books.
Once you subscribe to the newsletter, we will send out an issue containing 5 to 10 articles for readers every Monday morning.
Why not just run a Facebook Page?
The answer is quite subjective: Japanese-related Facebook pages are practically overflowing everywhere. A quick search for “Japanese” or “J-drama” on Facebook turns up countless pages.
Yet, this fragmented information is scattered across all corners of the web, making it not only difficult to organize, but also leaving beginners clueless about where to start in this vast sea.
Sharing information in a single niche isn’t our goal; we want to explore the language from multiple angles without being confined to just grammar, vocabulary, or textbook learning.
Publishing books and opening courses requires more resources than we have, and plenty of people are already doing that in the market.
As for Facebook pages, there are more than enough people running them already—they don’t need another hobbyist Japanese learner like me. So for me, the simplest and purest approach right now is sending emails.
The Facebook page I set up is purely for promotional purposes; there won’t be many posts on it.
How is it different from a typical Facebook Page?
If we only curate grammar and vocabulary-related information, it can feel a bit dry and boring. Besides, the web, bookstores, and blogs already offer an abundance of excellent materials.
If there is a difference, it’s that we primarily deliver content via email.
Although email isn’t as instantaneous as Facebook, that turns out to be an advantage—it lets you focus entirely on the content at hand. Furthermore, email isn’t interrupted by external social media distractions, and people probably check their inbox only slightly less often than Facebook!
Taking advantage of the natural characteristics of email, we deliver 5 to 10 articles a week—definitely a manageable amount to finish in a week (or even a single day).
While it might not drastically accelerate your learning overnight, I hope this approach not only broadens your understanding of the Japanese language, but also introduces you to Japanese culture along the way. Therefore, the scope is wide: anything related to Japanese culture can be material for this newsletter.
In the future, I hope everyone can easily share their own notes or links, making the newsletter even more diverse and vibrant. So if anyone is willing to share articles or study notes, that would be wonderful.
After all, one person’s knowledge of Japan is limited: some binge dramas every day, some watch anime, some know history inside and out, while others might be great at economic analysis. But if we can bring all of this together, this newsletter will be packed with great substance :).
Finally, why not head over to the website and subscribe at https://www.shurado.com?
The Tech Stack
Because I wanted to focus on writing articles, I spent about two days building the site and gradually expanding its features. After all, the minimum requirements were simply:
- Sending emails
- Composing newsletters
- Dispatching newsletters
- An archive page for past issues
- A landing page
That was basically it. The entire app was built with Ruby on Rails, using Redis to manage background jobs. For the trickier interactive pages, I handled them with React + Redux + Redux-Observable.
For email delivery, I integrated two third-party services: Mailgun and Mailchimp. Mailgun handles transactional emails, like subscription confirmation emails; Mailchimp is responsible for blasting out the newsletters. Both APIs were fairly straightforward to integrate, and their documentation is well written.
Down the road, I’ll gradually add a few features, such as:
- Cross-posting to Medium and the Facebook Page simultaneously when publishing an article from the admin panel
- Adding furigana (hiragana reading aids) to Japanese text on demand
- Searching for specific issues or articles
Postscript
Wanting to accomplish something meaningful before graduating—and before my passion faded—I also launched a course on Hahow called From 0 to 1 - Japanese Designed for Beginners, which organizes foundational Japanese grammar.
In hindsight, the price was set way too low. The 10,000 TWD.
The outcome was quite unexpected, though. Initially, I thought just successfully launching the course would be an achievement, but the crowdfunding campaign has already surpassed 900%. Looking back, if I had known how exhausting preparing a course would be, I might not have started it—especially subtitling bilingual content, which was utterly draining.
Reflections
Before I knew it, the newsletter is about to reach its 20th issue. My biggest takeaway is that technology is no longer the main bottleneck; the real challenge is how to produce the content. While machine learning might help shoulder some of the burden down the line, content generation will always be in demand. Yet, having great content without a good reading experience to engage readers means all that production effort goes to waste.
I hope I can keep going and stick with it.
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