Nとして indicates the role or function of something and can be translated as “as” :)

建物として – as a building
I believe 建物としての家 is saying that 家屋 is an 家 in the sense of a building. 家 has a wider meaning, but 家屋 specifically means a physical building. Not really sure how else to put it, but hopefully that makes sense.

恵みとして与える – give as a blessing

I don’t really see any way it would make sense for “here” to be contrasted with “today” in that sentence.

The contrast doesn’t have to be explictly identified. は can have contrast even in a simple sentence like “テニスはしない”. “I don’t play tennis (but I do play other sports like football and hockey)”. It’s a nuance thing. In this case it’s emphasising that the speaker doesn’t play tennis, but probably does play other things.

Knowing stroke order and count is useful (sometimes necessary) for looking up kanji in dictionaries (both electronic and paper) when you don’t know the reading.

People are paying for a service, if they don’t feel that the service has lived up to expectations then it’s natural that there will be complaints. I’m sure Koichi can handle that, he’s running a business after all.

Back when I signed up the site was advertising a lesson every week. At the start of this year Koichi said his goal was to finish all the basic content by the end of 2011, which was to be 6 seasons or more (this was before the seasons were split in half). Obviously that goal isn’t even close to being achieved, but stuff happens.

I’m not going to complain about spending the money, because hey, I knew the risks when I signed up and I’ve long since moved on to other resources. I still want to support Koichi’s efforts because I appreciate what he’s trying to do and his site was a help to me, so I don’t want to be down on the guy. But at the same time I can completely understand why people are disappointed.

• This reply was modified 13 years ago by  Elenkis.

Thanks, I’m talking about structured exercises though that are based on the readers level. For me that made learning from textbooks better than anything I’ve found online (not counting pure vocab resources/SRS). A beginner doesn’t have a chance of understanding Yotsuba, but a good textbook should have him reading easy paragraphs in Japanese right from the beginning, based on his level. Then build up in complexity as he learns new grammar, so by the end he is reading conversations, short stories and articles in Japanese.

It may not sound much, and some may not care for them, but for me such exercises improved my reading comprehension in a way that I was never going to get from just reading short, contextless example sentences on Tae Kim, or in a reference book. I actually went through all of Tae Kim before doing any standard textbooks, but I found there wasn’t enough reading practice in there, and when I tried native material I didn’t understand enough of it to really get any benefit from trying to use it as practice – my reading comprehension wasn’t good enough.

Going through the Genki books and then on to ‘Tobira: Gateway to Advanced Japanese’ (which is written entirely in Japanese, aside from the grammar, and is a fantastic book) improved my reading ability so massively that I can no longer dismiss textbooks as a learning tool. I think some people just benefit from more structured learning and practice, while others do better jumping right into more difficult stuff. It’s good to have to so many options available, and would seem a mistake to dismiss any of them too easily when making recommendations, as we all learn differently.

I think a lot of people discount how useful good exercises can be though, and no online based textbooks seem to have put any effort into this area. Though Lang-8 can largely take care of the writing based stuff.

It’s だれか (someone) and います (to be/exist).

Not かいます :)

By basic I just mean it doesn’t go beyond the grammar taught in a beginner textbook. Though admittedly the sentences are better than beginner textbook example sentences that are always kept as basic as possible (reading exercises are a different story though and perhaps the most valuable tool in a textbook).

A couple of typical sentences from early in the intermediate textbooks I’m reading would be:

また、勉強しても必ずしもいい将来があるわけではないという気持ちが強くなっているのかもしれない。

これは、相手の気持ちを大切にする日本人の考え方が日本語に現れている表現の一つですから、「。。。」が使えるようになると、会話が上手に聞こえます。

So that gives an idea of roughly what reading level you’re at after finishing a beginner textbook course (in this case Genki 1&2), in which case I don’t think you would get much value out of “Sentence Particles”. On the other hand, the “Dictionary of Japanese Grammar” series is likely to remain a useful reference even for advanced students.

For a beginner I have no doubts that it would be useful, but I still think DoJG series is the best resource that can be bought.

RTK is difficult to explain because it can be hard to see the benefit until you’ve actually done it for a while. But the principle of it is that it’s a simple divide and conquer strategy to learning. You break the learning up into separate processes that in theory makes things easier to remember. Think about seeing a Japanese word for the first time and trying to remember it; you have to remember the meaning, how it is read, then you also have to remember whichever complex new characters it’s using that you’ve not yet learned. That’s a lot of information for your brain to memorise at once, just learning the kanji alone is a task.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you already knew the kanji in that word so you didn’t have to deal with that at the same time? Then your brain would just have to focus on remembering the pronunciation and meaning of the word, and associating it with the already known kanji should be easy and pretty natural. So you’re not also having to learn new characters at the same time as a new word. Just like learning words in most other languages.

It’s a bit like the way Textfugu breaks down kanji into radicals that you learn first, in order to make learning the bigger kanji easier. RTK breaks it down so that you learn the characters first, in order to make learning whole words easier.

Now that isn’t going to work for everyone, no learning method does. If you’re the kind of person that has no problem learning 20 new words every day with full kanji and have a good 90% retention of those words, then RTK may be of little benefit to you (or it may let you learn 40 words instead of 20!). But some people find it to be a very effective method, perhaps especially for some of us older guys whose brains no longer store new information as easily as they once did :)

For me, RTK made words quite a lot easier to remember and retain.