This topic contains 36 replies, has 17 voices, and was last updated by koichi 13 years, 1 month ago.
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September 26, 2011 at 6:57 am #17717
The vocab decks aren’t of much use to me as there are already much more complete decks available elsewhere for Anki. If you do 20 words a day it will take about 2 weeks to get through all the new cards in one of the Ultimate decks. So even for the vocab it wont take long until you only have reviews and nothing new to learn, when ideally you should be continuing to learn new vocab every day.
“If you combine that with the fact that ideally your studying some kanji and practicing grammar and whatnot there should be more than enough for the beginner.”
But if it’s less content then an average beginning textbook found in a bookstore then there isn’t a lot of incentive for a beginner to hand over their money and sign up. That beginner would soon reach the end of the lessons and have to go get those other textbooks anyway as the new Textfugu still doesn’t cover basic, fundamental grammar such as ~て form and verb nominalization.
That’s how it was for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the style of the Textfugu lessons, but it’s hard to recommend something that’s still so incomplete.
September 26, 2011 at 11:55 am #17822Thats true, I keep forgetting how much it costs (advantages of early sign-up, eh? :D )
September 26, 2011 at 1:27 pm #17888I have to say here, that my lifetiem account cost me about 90 euro.
I’ve bought a normal japanese textbook before, to accopany some lessons I took at university.
Apart from having it with me I never used it. It cost 30 euro. For nothing.Even the motivational bits of TextFugu and its presentation are worth the ride for me.
Getting me to use Lang-8 actually did a lot for me and will in the future. I see it that way.September 26, 2011 at 2:04 pm #17925I haven’t been here for very long but I feel the price is worth it. I can see though where it might be very frustrating to those who are more advanced since it doesn’t keep up with your level (thought reviewing can be a good thing too). With all the projects that the Tofugu/Textfugu crew is working on I can see why it takes time.
I thought of an idea and forgive me if someone else as already mentioned it or if it is not a possibility. Do you think that perhaps it might help if Textfugu offered an advanced area that they build on at the same time as they build up the basics? As I said I don’t know if that would be possible for the Textfugu team since I don’t know how far out their general outline of the Textfugu textbook and tools goes, but I thought this might be a solution that could appease everyone.
I’ll shut up now and go curse at my RTK book for awhile.
すみませんSeptember 26, 2011 at 2:17 pm #17941I don’t think it would work. One of the strength of textfugu is building a linear textbook, meaning that each lesson uses things of the past one and integrates things such as kanji and vocabs. Putting a gap for advanced section would only make it confusing for both the reader and the writer I believe.
September 26, 2011 at 3:11 pm #17983I think Koichi’s just prettying up the beginner’s end to entice people in – once you’ve settled in your nice lavish quarters, ready for a magical journey ‘cross the Seaven Seas, you’re taken and thrown in the cold, dark brig. Once Long John Silver *ahem* Captain Koichi has taken your “Forever” dubloons, there’s no getting them back, so it doesn’t matter how you’re treated… down in the brig. I know that’s a little over-dramatic, and some would say “harsh”, but that’s what it feels like; once you’ve paid your money, that’s Fugu Corp. all fine and dandy. Oh wait, there’s the 110% money back guarantee, isn’t there: well since I got my subscription for so cheap I may as well stick around to see how everything pans out; if you’re paying the full $120/£? for yours though, I’d recommend asking for it back (+10%), if that’s even still possible.
Am I just having a bad day? Yes, quite.
Is there still a little truth to my words? Yes.
Would it be funny to see Koichi’s disgusted face when he sees his crew mutiny? Yes ;P
It’s cool though, he’s a businessman (despite what he says): he knows what he’s doing.(Zap Brannigan: “Throw them in the brig!
Kif: “But this is just the boiler room.”
ZB: “From now on, this room shall be known as “The Brig”)EDIT: While this stuff has to be said, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference. He makes all his money from new customers, and I think that’s going pretty well just now so nothing will change. If you were writing a book, wouldn’t you want to make as much money as possible? It sucks for us right now, but we all know we’d do the exact same thing in the same position.
EDIT 2: And don’t think I don’t appreciate all the help he’s given me and the push to learn Japanese in the beginning; still grateful and glad I took the plunge. I appreciate how good he is to beginners, but this textbook is supposed to be for post-beginner/intermediates too.
EDIT 3: Also glad that people are agreeing with me :) Well, with what I said before at least; let’s see how this post goes down :P
- This reply was modified 13 years, 1 month ago by MisterM2402 [Michael].
- This reply was modified 13 years, 1 month ago by MisterM2402 [Michael].
- This reply was modified 13 years, 1 month ago by MisterM2402 [Michael].
September 26, 2011 at 7:50 pm #18001I don’t understand the change to the dashboard. I really liked it before. Now it’s booooring.. :P I haven’t gone through the whole site to see other changes, as I havent really been studying much lately. tsk tsk. I think part of it is…. lack of new content. Even though I’m not 100% caught up, I kinda am. Just not with vocab. (or kanji) I’m caught up with grammar points aka core lessons… So I get excited when I see a new lesson.. (and I mean NEW, not REMADE..) And when I start learning new stuff it motivates me to also continue with vocab and kanji practice. I must say I agree with Mister on a lot of points. I’ve been here since day 1 (ok maybe more like day 7 or something) but when it was it’s cheapest. So I don’t mind that much, and it has been awesome and helped me a lot. I guess I just wish it would continue…Personally I no longer care about the season 1 and 2 stuff since I’m passed it, so all the work that’s done to it is not relevant to me.. but I’m glad that it’s improved for new beginner’s sakes…
=^..^=September 27, 2011 at 7:51 am #18040Half way through season 2 and this is my first forum post. Hello everyone! Does anyone else use a smartphone to visit TextFugu? There seems to be a problem for me with having the season buttons on top open a second scrolling box; mainly that I can’t scroll the new box when it opens. Makes it pretty hard to do a lot away from the computer.
September 27, 2011 at 8:22 am #18042I didn’t really want to rub more salt in the wounds in this topic. It seems clear since the way it was turned, koichi and hashi are afraid to touch it with a ten foot pole.
That being said, I can see some of the points made here. I do realize (as a business man myself) that their money is only made from getting new signups. I have aksed myself too in the past why they spend so much time on blog and youtube posts, but I never see new content that I can learn from.
I know it was kind of a lost cause for me from the beginning. I live in Japan, i’ve bought many books, and for me this was meant to be mostly a motivational tool. It did serve this purpose and I have the other members here to thank more than anything. Seeing their determination has giving me cause to try my hardest. But I didn’t pay my $120 just to join the community. Full disclosure, I joined during the campaign to donate %110 (? i think) to Fukushima relief fund. Again, living in Japan and seeing the devastation caused, I wanted to do atleast something to do my part. I tried to donate blood, but actually my lack of fluent Japanese hindered me there (that’s another story… sigh) so I signed up here.
Anyways, I will never ask for my money back and hopefully koichi will develop the advanced section someday…
September 27, 2011 at 9:16 am #18069Hey guys and gals~
Big apologies to those who don’t feel like they’re getting enough :( As MisterM suggests you do, always more than happy to give refunds if you don’t think what you’re getting is worth your money. No real set time on the refund either – so even if you’ve been using TextFugu for a year, hit me up and I’ll be more than happy. Unfortunately I can only do as much as I can do, and I do as much as I can do, and although I’m sure the redesigns seeem like all I do it only really lasted for 3 days + 1 day of bug squashing, and then I went right back to writing content again. In fact, the updates were meant almost solely for the new content stuff, including the sentences deck which I thought would be particularly helpful for the more advanced folks :/
I know it can be a rocky ride and I know it can be tough using an unfinished product … especially with someone like me who’s constantly excited to make changes (happens a lot because it can happen a lot, I suppose… not something that big companies with finished products can do – you guys are always emailing me feedback and I’m making changes based off that feedback). Most of the changes here content-wise (Sentences Deck, Better Vocab study, Practice Pages, Why Pages) were because I was getting a lot of emails from people having trouble with Vocab… so I spent some time researching and spent some times coming up with ways to make vocab learning less painful and am adding it in w/ everything else. I mean, to be objective here… I probably do spend half my time trying to make old things better and half my time working on new stuff… I understand that people want new stuff (understandably). But… I don’t work on old stuff to get more new members (when MisterM said all of the income comes from new members he’s kind of right… though I’d give it a 60-40 new-old split these days, so it’s not quite “all”).
But anyways, I work on old stuff because it makes the new stuff better… and it will make it more likely that new people make it to the old stuff, Forever membership and monthly membership alike. When the advanced stuff has the sentences deck… the better vocab study… and the practice pages… it’s going to be so, so good, I think. I’m really excited about it, but I forget that most people don’t have the same thoughts in my head all the time for some reason :p
So dang, yeah. I’m sorry things feel so volatile and I’m sorry to those of you who think there aren’t enough updates (remember the old days of once-a-month updates, though? I do way more than that these days!). Really, though – you know you guys can email me individually too, yeah? Happy to help sort out any problems, give you a refund if you’re unhappy, and more. Happiness > Money any day of the week. If I wanted more money, I’d stop paying people to help me with work (designer/programmer starting next month, fyi… some of you will be particularly happy to hear about that so I stop trying to touch the stuff), I’d stop helping people individually on email for free and create some dumb “pay the teacher to ask questions” program, and I’d raise prices and not offer to let monthly people upgrade to Forever while subtracting what they’ve paid so far. Seriously not like I’m rich or anything :/
P.S. Also sorry it too me so long to respond to this thread… If I’m in the forums, it probably means I have extra time :) If I’m not, it probably means I’m feeling overworked at the moment, almost certainly working on TextFugu content stuff.
P.P.S. Flip them tables! (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
P.P.P.S. If I really wanted to get nitty-gritty and spend a lot of time on redesign I would have fixed these input forms for the forum… damn they’re ugly. What’s up with the indented “reply” and “tags” headers?
September 27, 2011 at 10:28 am #18079.:,⌒┻━┻o(*・ω・`*)yareyare((*´・ω・)o┳━┳
I’ve seen people spend more money than that on things that never did anything for them.
I did so myself. So I’m not implying that the ride wasn’t worth it or something.
And I don’t believe Koichi is a money-sucking vampire business man of sorts.
You should just employ me, actually. But you already have Hashi.
He, too, plays Starcraft. That would make us duel and compete all the time.
Not productive…Don’t hurt them tables, people!
- This reply was modified 13 years, 1 month ago by Revenant.
September 27, 2011 at 1:58 pm #18104Sweet, first couple of practices pages are up with sentence decks, less than a week after I posted complaining I couldn’t find any useful sentences decks…yay coincidences! Also on the price thing, I must have like…£350 worth of different books and what-not, maybe more, of Japanese learning books and they ain’t taught me a damn thing…whereas fugu has taught me about 85% of what I know… so yeah…
September 27, 2011 at 3:32 pm #18140I don’t think anyone has been volatile. I also don’t think anybody feels cheated or taken advantage of which is why people who share the opinion of Mister and I have not asked for refunds or abandoned the site.
I understand that you want to make the site great from the beginning through to the end but it seems like you are trying to build a house and keep changing the blueprints and altering the shape of the foundation. At this rate it seems like you’ll never get to the roof. Some of us are getting cold. There comes a time where you just have to say that maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. Let’s drywall already!September 27, 2011 at 5:05 pm #18142@kyle: Hooray for continuous analogies! :D First pirate ships, now houses. Let’s just call TextFugu a houseboat; then *everyone’s* right! :D
Oooh, dem tables… B¬E
Appreciate the apology Koichi, but I still have one question: when is Season 3 going to finish and Season 4 going to start?! XD Oh wait, the Seasons are all different now – FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-!!! I don’t care though, I’m gonna refer to them as 1, 2, 3 and 4 for evermore >:)
But anyway, I assumed you paid Hashi in slaps to the face, so how would cutting his salary benefit you at all? :D I say give him a raise!!I don’t care about waiting for stuff like て-form or が(but) because I just went ahead and learned them myself; all I care about is what happened to メアリー!!あの人が「タイム・ツ・ダイ!!」を叫んだぞ!
September 27, 2011 at 6:53 pm #18145I really liked the Mary story too and was a bit disappointed to see that it hasn’t made a return or been replaced by anything similar. I imagine it was probably a lot of work though.
I do think that example conversations and dialogue is an area that Textfugu is lacking in when compared to other textbooks. Maybe the new practice pages will help with that.
And yes, I’m well beyond needing て form and が lessons, but those are still very basic, necessary concepts that are yet to be covered in the current version of Textfugu. You can’t really make much progress in Japanese without learning those so I’d really hope that such content is a priority.
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