Finally got season 3 finished up! I’ve jumped ahead of that level of material in Genki grammar-wise and in WaniKani vocab/kanji-wise so my TextFugu motivation dropped pretty significantly. I really think, though, that going over things in TextFugu solidifies it all much better than any other resource I’ve tried so far, so it’s important to keep advancing here.

@Miki – I’ve listened to podcasts for awhile, and didn’t notice an improvement, but found myself demoralized by them, so I’m giving them a break. I do plan to give them another shot soon. I suspect until I can really understand more than random phrases and words in the podcasts I’ll cycle them in and out of my listening. Perhaps I’m giving up too early on them, so I’d love to hear if someone has a different experience. I do honestly understand how you feel. It really does feel like I should be able to do more based on the time I’ve put into this. At the same time I do see improvement over time.

I’ve just finished Season 5. Starting Season 6 today. Season 5 was tough. Casual verbs are a pain with all the different conjugations and exceptions. I still feel I don’t fully understand them  but I’ll just look over my notes. When you get to 6 stroke kanji, you learn 15 at a time now.

Hearing everyone say these seasons are challenging does help me feel better about them. I don’t know if I thought of them that way, but I do know that I felt like I wasn’t ready to learn a new grammar concept before a new one was introduced. I think in that way they are challenging for me. I really feel like there should be more practice and review in the later seasons to help cement the rules.

Also, I’m finding Textfugu is really strong at introducing new ideas, but it isn’t a great place to go back to when you want to reference those ideas. I would love to see some kind of a review version of each chapter which is written in a way that is better for reference than learning.

I’m just about to wrap up season 2! After finishing the numbers and learning how to ask how much something is, the first thing that sprung to mind was, “Yes, I can go shopping in Japan now!” Must be a victim of consumerism.. :)

I try to do as much as I can, but sadly uni takes up a lot of time if I want to do well (so far, so good. Fingers crossed). So I hope I won’t drop Japanese again because of that, but will just get better at time management!

I agree with Ben Reilly about the importance of keeping up on your Anki, and how easy it is to do. If you must you can get it on your smartphone. I prefer to wait till I’m in front of my PC though.

As for shopping in Japan. If you’re in a big city like Tokyo, then you can shop pretty easily with no Japanese. Actually, it’s a bit faster to shop without using Japanese. I would try to practice my Japanese as much as possible on the shop keepers, and as a result it slowed the transactions down. The vast majority of them were cool with it, and even seemed politely amused.

I hear that on the holidays.

I wasn’t meaning to imply everyone speaks English. Although, a surprising amount of people are passable in the cities. However, even if the clerk doesn’t speak any English, and you don’t speak any Japanese a lot of communication, especially in retail transactions, is routine, and body language. Very rarely do you need to ask questions, and very rarely do they need to tell you anything other than the price, and even if you speak Japanese, if you’re white, they’ll just point at the display to indicate price.

Also, expect to hear “thank you desu.” I love that. ;)

I found most clerks are pleasantly amused at my speaking Japanese to them during the transactions. A very rare few might just wish to hurry along with the transaction, but a quick apology seems to work on every Japanese person I’ve ever interacted with. I don’t intend to foster stereotypes, but they sure are polite. :)