I just joined TF yesterday.  I’ve got a few years of off and on learning under my belt, but I’m quite rusty.  Using Tofogu’s 100 top Japanese resources brought me here.  I signed up for the lifetime membership.

I’ve read most of the motivational speels in season 1, but I haven’t ventured too far beyond that.  I basically got to the hiragana part and stopped.  I’ve been using iknow.jp (formerly last.fm) and it’s been working great.  I quickly re-mastered hiragana in about 2.5-3 hours and I’m guessing it’ll take me around the same time, or a little longer for katakana.  Once I’m finished katakana I’ll continue on with TF and the seasons.

I’ve got a fractured jaw currently, so I’m voraciously devouring anime and all things Japanese.  I look forward to brushing up my grammar and getting back to the point where I used to be.  I expect I’ll be using iknow for vocab building a lot too, but I suppose I haven’t explored enough on TF to find out just how effective their training methods are.  So far iknow seems to be doing quite well for me, but I’ll definitely be using both!  Anki sounds interesting too, and I expect I’ll be using that in the future, as well as other tools.

@kanjiman: Someone earlier had mentioned “Audacity,” which is a great, free audio editing tool.  When you download audio snippets from google translation, you could input them into audacity and slow down the speed of the audio in there.  That way you can add it to your regime and later on increase the speed as you get better.

IMO, if anyone is going to Japan, I would highly suggest getting something like Pimsleur (Japanese) and practicing it quite a bit.  I found a lot of the conversations in it quite useful when I was in Tokyo.

I look forward to using TF and I’m glad to see a thread like this pop up to help motivate everyone!
Ganbatte!

• This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  S C.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  S C.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  S C.
• This reply was modified 12 years, 2 months ago by  S C.