Oops, just realised that I said vertical top when I of course meant horizontal.

My font has the almost closed vertical top for 八.

Very nice! I likely would have put in a bid on the first auction, but he was only selling to the US :(

I really do like it a lot as a resource and it’s quite a hidden gem. It’s a shame that there isn’t anything like that still going these days.

Thanks for mentioning Exploring Japanese Literature, I wasn’t aware that the author had done a follow up to Breaking into Japanese Literature. I’ll be getting myself a copy of that! How is the difficulty in comparison to the stories in the first?

• This reply was modified 12 years, 10 months ago by  Elenkis.

The only concern I’d have with Genki for Text Fugu or Tae Kim users is that they all cover a lot of the same things (in terms of teaching grammar), and so likely wont get as much value for their money as a complete beginner would. The reading exercises were worth it for me though, especially in Genki 2. My reading comprehension was still very poor after TextFugu/Tae Kim, compared to now.

If you like that kind of structured practice reading, then you can also continue on into intermediate textbooks that work much the same way and continue building in difficulty. Not required of course, but very nice if you’re someone who learns better from that kind of method.

It’s a new day and I decided to make another attempt at translating that block of text. Disclaimer: It could be totally wrong (and probably is in places). If anyone else has any input or corrections then please go ahead and share.

A foreign English teacher appeared on the TV show 「世界一受けたい授業」this weekend and gave a lesson on loanwords that aren’t understood by native speakers. The teaching itself was useful as a reference, but the poor pronunciation of the teacher’s fluent Japanese has been on my mind. It was the often heard ワタシーノーナマエワー、XXデース style. I guess the people around him probably didn’t advise him about the pronuncation. When I worked in America, a close American friend would call and just for fun, when he said things like “ドモ、アリガト、ゴズアーイマス”, I would meddle with things like “That’s not it, it’s どうもありがとうございます! Try saying it.”
Of course, meeting someone for the first time, to the best of my ability I keep in mind the circumstances in order to not be rude or discourage a person that’s putting effort into trying to speak broken Japanese. But because this is no longer an era where Japanese is known as an unintelligible language from some unknown far eastern island country, I think that isn’t it better manners to give proper teaching to foriegners with odd pronuncation, rather than to match (I wonder why when the other party speaks with odd pronunciation, native Japanese speakers also reply with odd pronunciation?) and cater to them? But what does everyone think? Also, how do you deal [with such things/people]?

Well the monster sentence that forms the second half of that post is still beyond my abilities. My guess is that it starts something like:

“Of course, meeting someone for the first time, to the best of my ability I keep in mind the circumstances in order to not be rude and discourage a person that’s putting effort into trying to speak broken Japanese, but…”

After that I can make out fragments, but can’t put it into a cohesive whole :(

Missing is probably just trolling the thread anyway.

Well, 原 (げん) is a prefix meaning “original–”

For example:

原判決 – original judgement
原案 – original plan

From Daijirin:

げん1 【原】
漢語の上に付いて連体詞的に用いる。本来の。元来の。

So if it was giving all the definitions and readings for that kanji, the prefix note probably refers to the げん definition and reading.

Joel, the full size Kenkyusha 5th Edition (aka The Green Godess) is about 3000 pages!

It’s expensive, but a fantastic dictionary. I have it in electronic form and it’s far better than Edict based dictionaries like Kotoba.