Cool as.
Just out of interest, do the textfugu lessons cover this?

Hi! does anyone here have any articles, like stories or something you can read for practice. like not OMG overly hard stories or articles but ya know I’m half way through season 4 and know a lot of things just need sample articles to get the connections and continuation of the sentences in my head.
it would help a lot with the flow of things
orrrrr
if you knew where any videos of conversations?

it is such a shame. i wonder what text book i should buy? that doesn’t drill so much formal japanese into your head like rosetta stone. and although i have rosetta, i use it for dialogue mostly and pronunciation. but other than that nope. lol
we should suggest that he put up some simple stories.
because he said that he used to make himself read everyday. and thats what we need to do as well, is read some articles
to keep the word flow going to build bridges between the gaps of vocal!
=D

I bought myself a bunch of manga in Japanese from Kinokuniya. Dunno how good they are so far as learning. Having pictures to look at helps. =)

I’ve been using Nakama in my classes, and Japanese for Busy People for private study, and they’ve both been pretty good (though I’ve been somewhat slack on private study of late). Another idea is Maisho – the version of Mainichi Shimbun for elementary schoolers: http://mainichi.jp/feature/maisho/ (I’m still finding that humblingly difficult to read. To be fair, though, the expected audience has spent every waking hour of the last six years learning Japanese, whereas I’ve only spent about ten to twelve hours a week for the last fourteen months. =P)

I haven’t looked touched Textfugu for so long I didn’t even know where to open the actual textbook! loool After looking at it, halfway through Season 4 will honestly not get you so far so after thinking of what you should read, I reached the conclusion that you should look at whatever native reading material anyways as you go along. Although you should really get going on the textfugu thing and taekim for reading. As for my recommendation, its probably the easiest to read IMO compared to many other stuff as it surprisingly follows many rules and stuff that are demonstrated here, in taekim, and in textbooks. That’s not to say that any other Japanese source does the same thing (cause then it wouldn’t be Japanese anymore lol) but I feel that it’s more apparent than lets say a news report. Also, its not something TaeKim can’t handle. Not only that, you can follow 5 adorable girls あぁちゃんやびゃあああぁヽ(//▽//)ノ.*・ﾟﾟ・*:.

I only push on native material because now I look back in everything and everything I did in hindsight seems to have worked and made sense too, not to mention that I can’t imagine learning if I didn’t do both things concurrently

Also about reading, if you’re going to look up every word you don’t know, just do it. Anyway you’re not going to know 97% of text anyway, so might as well take the time to waste time learning words.

I agree with both things. Graded reading can be very good for the exact reasons Elenkis points out. Only problem is that it is often damn boring (my experience). Native material on the other hand can be hand-picked from a number of resources, and you will most likely be able to find something that will suit your humor, and that you find interesting. This makes it a much more enjoyable experience, and it gets to a point where (if you find something you like) will do it whenever you have spare time. This leads to a huge bonus in motivation, and a huge boost in learning, even though it may be damn hard to understand.
For example I started to watch AKBingo just recently, and I have been enjoying it quite a lot. Many parts of the show I don’t understand at all, and as you say Elenkis the returns of the effort aren’t all that good. But there are many sentences, that you can understand if you have basic vocab, and assisted by the Japanese subtitles most of what is going on can be understood. Usually I write the sentences down and keep them. In the future I will make a deck based on the simpler sentences, which should profit me greatly because I know the context they are said and can see the reactions of real people. My study time could most likely be spent better, but the thing is that I probably wouldn’t be studying in the time I use for watching AKBingo… So watching it just incorporates even more Japanese in to my everyday. And come on, don’t tell me you don’t find this interesting:
「え～胸とかいらなくない？」とよく言っているが、内心自分の胸が大きいことに満足している。
正直、AKB48に入った時は大きいとか小さいとか分からなくて、着替えの時に見えちゃうじゃないですか。皆に胸がデカイって言われると、胸が無い人を見るとある方がいい。
I know the context is missing, but as you can see the sentence has some pretty basic vocab, and there is only 1 word there that I had to look up, and that was 着替え. So maybe picking what you want from the natives materials are better than the whole graded reading thing? That is how I see it at the moment, but I haven’t read any of the books referred to, so I can’t say for sure.
At least it is so much more fun!