George Trombley

I did not set out to write textbooks. I set out to interpret, and for eighteen years that is what I did — simultaneous and consecutive Japanese interpretation for Microsoft, IBM, NTT DoCoMo and Lucent Technologies, in boardrooms and factories and conference halls across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Interpreting is a strange education. You are not just carrying words across; you are carrying intent, register, hesitation, and the thing the speaker meant but did not say. Do it for long enough and you develop a very specific sense of which parts of a language actually carry meaning and which parts a beginner can safely be spared for another six months.

Why the books start at zero

Every Japanese textbook I picked up made the same demand: memorise forty-six hiragana characters, then forty-six katakana, and then we will begin. It is a reasonable way to organise a writing system and a terrible way to teach a person. Nobody learns to speak by first learning to spell.

So Japanese From Zero! introduces the writing system a few characters at a time, immediately using each one in sentences built from words the reader already knows. By the end of Book 1 you are reading hiragana without noticing that you learned it. By Book 3 the romaji is gone entirely. It is not a trick — it is just sequencing, which is most of what teaching is.

The series was written with Yukari Takenaka and refined over fifteen years of classroom teaching, which is the part that matters. Every explanation in those books survived contact with real students who did not understand the first three versions of it.

Beyond Japanese

The method turned out to travel. Korean From Zero! was written with the Korean linguist Reed Bullen and a team of native-speaking co-authors — Jiyoon Kim, Sunhee Bong, Sieun An and Myunghee Ham. Kanji From Zero! applied the same sequencing logic to the characters. And Spanish From Zero!, written with Hugo Canedo, took it into a fourth language.

Alongside the books there is From Zero!, the online course built on the same material, and a long-running video series that has been going about as long as the books have.

And now, fiction

Fate Squared is my first novel, out on 29 October 2026 from Sandspeck Press. It is a thriller, it has nothing to do with language learning, and writing it was the hardest and most enjoyable thing I have done in years.

I also write essays — short, irregular, and mostly about the things I notice rather than the things I know.