I’m almost certain that 痛いかったら will be 痛かったら as Joel says, and that the sentence basically says “If it’s painful, you can scream”.

から at the end of a sentence has the feeling of “because”, it shows reason, often with the question left unstated.

From what I’ve read, writing the names of animal and plant species in katakana is convention because their kanji is usually rare and complex, or they don’t have kanji at all. How many people even know how to read 麒麟? :) So people, especially reference materials, tend to just write them all in katakana.

I’m not sure why katakana and not hiragana, maybe just to make it more obvious that it’s a species and differentiate it from other words.

Hm, I’ve seen はずだ used for the speaker’s actions. Though certainly not as frequently.

Example:

私は確かにそう言ったはずだ。 – “I’m sure I said so.”

I’m not really sure. It’s been about 15 or 16 months since I started, but I’ve taken a number of breaks from it during that time, so I can’t say how many days of studying it’s been. If I had been more conisistent then I could have finished it by now.

Right now I’m aiming to finish by May.

Pretty much all of the words in the Core 6k are really quite common in native Japanese material, as far as I’ve got to at around 4700 anyway. You may dismiss the more business based ones now, but I think you’d be surprised how often I see them. It’s not like they’re specialist words or anything, it’s stuff that comes up all the time (though some less than others of course).

The problem is that in the original Core order they throw a bunch of the business words at you all at once at around step 3/4 and then it gets much easier again after that. That was fixed when they reordered the course, but as far as I know there aren’t any Anki decks based on the new order.

Anyway, you’re probably going to want to know every word that’s in the Core 6k. So you might as well learn them :)

I don’t see anything that needs correcting here. Different Japanese fonts just display the character slightly differently, neither way is right or wrong.

Just put a note on the textfugu page for はち to explain the difference with some fonts. I don’t know why it would ever be an issue though.

“I think it’ll be fun :P”

If it’s what you want to do then you should go for it :)
As you said, if it doesn’t work out then you can always try other things.

Missing, how much vocab do you know? And haven’t you been studying for a couple of years now? Are you comparing your current ability with people who have been studying for much less time than you? Would that 300 page 携帯小説 still have been so easy if you did it after your first year of learning? (I have no idea what that book is like, so I’m just wondering)

Also I’m not saying Harry Potter is a difficult text, I’m saying that for me it would have been frustratingly slow and inefficient back when I still had little vocab. It probably wouldn’t be now, but back when I only knew 2000 words it would have been.

I’m not saying that anyone shouldn’t read native material, I think it’s important to do so. Indeed much of the stuff contained in good intermediate textbooks is native material, it’s just picked out and structured for specific levels of ability. I was just responding to Michael’s statement that jumping into Japanese literature and newspapers(!) is “best” right after beginner grammar, as I don’t necessarily agree.