Study vocab. Be sure to learn new words every day, learn them in their full kanji glory. I’m not happy unless I’m learning at least 10 new words per day, preferably 15. That’s going to be different for everyone though.

Personally I don’t like the idea of dividing vocab up into separate decks for verbs, adjectives and so on. Studying too many of one particular type of word in a row (aside from nouns) would be more likely to hamper my memorization as you’re going to start getting multiple words that sound too similar in one session. I like to mix things up more. I shudder at the thought of an adverb deck!

You’re going to finish Textfugu long before it’s complete, this is inevitable. So you will need to go elsewhere to learn the rest of the grammar you will need. Either continue reading Tae Kim’s guide all the way through, if that’s working for you, or buy a decent textbook/workbook combo like Genki 1/2 (the advantage with these is that they have plenty of exercises including reading exercises for each lesson such as short stories, the disadvantage is that they aren’t cheap). You can then progress onto intermediate textbooks if you wish.

Start jumping into native media as soon as you feel comfortable, again this will vary greatly for everyone. My recommendation is to use subs2srs for Anki. Basically you feed the tool a Japanese language movie or tv show, along with japanese and english subtitle files. Then it will automatically chop it all into separate lines and turn them into Anki cards, complete with audio and video. So it will play a line from the movie and show you the line in Japanese on the front of the card, and the english translation on the back.

Instructions here: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ – and if you like anime then someone created a nice deck for ‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ that you can try out.

Oh yeah, and keep doing vocab!

I really liked the Mary story too and was a bit disappointed to see that it hasn’t made a return or been replaced by anything similar.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.

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.

である is the more formal version of です.

日本で有名な歌手である初音ミク would perhaps be like saying: “Hatsune Miku, who’s a famous singer in Japan…”

“I like the song called Po Pi Po by Hatsune Miku, a famous singer in Japan.”

But I really don’t know if that’s what he is getting at in regards to である and commas, I don’t know enough to give a real answer.

Ken is Missing’s real name.

>So there is some kind of game or movie where it’s like you are hanging out with the members of this singing group. Missing just got it, but I guess he had talked about it with Anonymous previously, because Anonymous says there is no point in him sending it.<

If I recall correctly, back in the first mini lesson Missing posted, Nameless said that when he returns to Japan he will buy an AKB PSP game and send it to Missing. So I think it's the same person he's talking to, about that same game.

>M: さて、次は誰かな・・・<

This is 誰 then かな. So it's like he is saying "Who next I wonder…" in regards to the game. Which appears to be dating game, so he was wondering which girl he would pick to date next. Then Nameless follows this by saying:

>A: にゃんは俺のものだからダメ～♥笑<

Because Nyan is his, Missing must not date her. If he does then Nameless will go to America and kill him. The 笑 (laugh) shows that he is of course joking.

That's my take on it.

He says that he will kill you if you go out with にゃん, who from the videos I’m assuming is a character in that AKB game you’re talking about.

聞いてくれてありがとう means either “thank you for asking” or “thank you for listening”. In this case I’m going with the former as you were thanking him for offering to send you the game (which he no longer needs to do as you already have it).

I did have some problems this time though, it was definitely tougher than the previous ones for me:

[2011/09/19 23:09:30] 名無しさん: まぁ俺にはもう恋愛の勉強はいらないんだ＾＾

Is that 要らない at the end? He doesn’t need to study love anymore?

[2011/09/19 23:13:14] missingno15: いやでも、フェイントとかかどうか
[2011/09/19 23:13:27] missingno15: 分からなかったから

The first sentence there lost me :)

[2011/09/19 23:13:44] 名無しさん: ＡＫＢのゲーム買う前に彼女できちゃったから、ゲーム買うのやめようかなと思ってるんだよ。

I translated this as him thinking that he will stop buying games because he got a girlfriend before buying the AKB game. But that reason doesn’t really seem to make sense to me so I think I’m wrong with that part of the sentence.

[2011/09/19 23:17:52] 名無しさん: 正直になってみ？
[2011/09/19 23:32:20] missingno15: 正直、いいというかよくないというか
[2011/09/19 23:34:48] 名無しさん: それに実はアジア人って明かせばより親近感わくでしょ！

I’m really not sure what these three say.

[2011/09/19 23:44:54] 名無しさん: あ、てかさ、まだ昼ご飯食べてないから今から食べるね～＾＾；

I know what this says, but I don’t know what the てかさ is.

>>Interesting. Could it mean “member who supports” in some other context, maybe if you were talking about which member supported a certain proposition or candidate?<<

I think so, that would seem likely to be the case if it has a direct object.