The core course keeps its system small on purpose: no reading, hours without minutes, five counters, prices you point at. Every one of those is a real piece of Japanese the course skips because the traveler’s cost/benefit didn’t justify it. Skills are how you buy one back. Each skill extends the system in exactly one direction — a script, a number system, the clock — as a self-contained module with the same format as everything else: tap-to-reveal on every item, audio wherever there’s something to hear, and an Anki deck.
Two promises hold for every skill:
- The core is sufficient without it. No lesson or booster ever requires a skill; a skill exists for learners who want the ability, not because the course secretly needs it. (A skill may build on another skill — Prices at Speed assumes Numbers 11–99 — and says so at the top of its page.)
- Skills extend, boosters don’t. Boosters add vocabulary to frames you own and never touch the system. A skill is the one kind of module allowed to teach something structural — and each one names exactly what it adds.
Shipped skills are listed below.
What it adds: an ear for staff keigo. The closed wardrobe of polite wrappers, the flipped no-thanks questions, and forty-seven real counter lines your scripts never taught — shuffled into one listening deck.
Stringing clauses into real sentences — so, but, though, and then, if-then, maybe, have-you-ever — the course’s single most important move, finally drilled by ear. Thirty voices.
Every form and word you own, recombined and drilled by ear — the rare shapes (didn’t, want-to, let’s) and the quieter words, landing as fast as the common ones. Thirty voices.
One skill, not vocabulary: ~70 characters that turn menus, signs, and konbini shelves back into English. One of the course’s two reading skills, alongside Sign Kanji.
Recognition only: 23 sign units — the kanji that gate doors, bodies, and money. Meanings, never readings; most of them are words your ear already owns.
One fact, thirty drills: the ten numbers you own already build every number to 99. This skill makes your ear believe it at speed.
Five sounds change, one pivot at 10,000 — everything else you already own. Thirty real prices, ragged to the yen the way registers actually say them.
Months, dates, and the words around them — the closed sets that turn ‘write it down, please’ into hearing July 14th at native speed.
The course rounds every clock to the half hour on purpose. This skill un-rounds it: the minute counter, its six sound changes, and train-timetable times at full speed.