I started trying to learn Japanese like a year and a half ago…not on Textfugu, but originally through some software (human Japanese) then with books, then I found smart.fm. Unfortunately smart.fm went away and in its place is a pay site. I paid for a year anyway, and I’ve been making some progress (I can now “hear” one or two words out of a sentence when I listen to someone speaking Japanese).

Unfortunately, iknow.jp (the site that replaced smart.fm) doesn’t really seem to teach me Japanese. I get vocabulary words and I learn the kanji associated with those words. When I got to discussing this on an unrelated message board, someone pointed me to tofugu and a pdf file that had some useful Japanese grammar type stuff on it. Since I felt like there was no better resource for learning Japanese grammar I decided to get the full membership of Textfugu, and here I am.

I know all the hiragana and katakana, though a few of them still give me some trouble occasionally: ぬ vs め　for example or シ vs　ツ　and ソ vs ン. I’m still very much a beginner, though I have been through a few courses on iknow.jp and according to that site I have mastered 600 items (before that starts to sound impressive, that includes each individual katakana and hiragana, plus all the combinations like ちょ).

I started very slowly, and worked my way up to more and more study time. According to the TED talk in the freebie area on textfugu, telling someone you’re starting a new goal is a sure fire way to fail, except I still did that and I’m still (a year and a half later) working towards that goal. The key for me was telling everyone that I knew it wasn’t going to be easy and that I wasn’t going to master it in a year or something equally unreasonable.

As for telling everyone WHY I am learning Japanese, I’m actually sick of explaining it. Everyone sees me studying it in my spare time, and they ask that same question…so the answer is simply “because I want to” and that’s all anyone needs to know. Again, if this is related to me needing a reason to continue studying, rest assured I haven’t given up on this in a year and a half and I won’t give up on it 10 years from now either. I expect I will always have something to learn, seeing as how I’m a native English speaker and yet I learned today that the phrase “head honcho” is from a Japanese word.

So far one of the most promising things about this site is the fact that they put an emphasis on learning the radicals. Nobody else seems to do this. A long time ago, I would look at a kanji and just see a bunch of squiggles. I never made any effort to decipher the squiggles and so there were very few instances of me recognizing any of it. After I started studying it, I learned a few basic radicals that related to things like movement or feelings and I would then start to notice these pieces of Kanji everywhere I looked.

It seems to me that learning the radicals is probably the best way to learn and it puzzles me that few sites seem to advocate that style of learning.

Other tools I have found before finding textfugu include: Anki, the Kodansha Kanji dictionary (the SKIP Method revolutionized the way I learned Kanji), Remembering the Kanji (though I haven’t put as much effort into learning that way), and for online resources, iknow.jp and of course textfugu.

I’m hoping to find this site useful to learning Japanese instead of being just given a list of vocabulary words to memorize. If any of this has come across as “not nice” or “mean” sounding, it’s because I’m no good at introducing myself.

tl;dr I’m new here but not necessarily brand new to learning Japanese; but I don’t even know enough to hold a conversation with a 5 year old.