Oh wait, is that like the difference between:

Quickly, he ran to the store.
and
He quickly ran to the store.

?

@マーク・ウェーバー –

“Learn て-form. You won’t regret it.”

hehehe, oh man, (wipe tears from eyes)… I’ve been wanting to do that forever. I keep having people tell me that, but it won’t pop up in Textfugu till season 6 or 7. In fact when I first started looking at Textfugu that’s the first thing I looked at “when will I learn te form.”, but the only thing I could find on the topic was a screen shot someone had of the Textfugu UI they posted on their blog. I guess it was a super old screen shot because at that time te form was covered around season 3 or 4.

Thomas Fullerton said:

ヘイさん！
Hey-san!

私はわかりますか？
I understand?

今日はなにをしましたか？
Today, what did you do?

教えてください！
(This uses some grammar I haven’t seen yet, but it looks like a polite way to say something about teaching.)

—

Did you intent to say “あなたは分かりますか？” or am I misunderstanding?

@Astralfox – Sweet thanks Astralfox, I’m checking it out now.

@missingno15 – Thanks for that article! It was inspiring. I’m reluctant to call myself intermediate, by any sense of the term, but perhaps I’m finally approaching it, and I wasn’t recognizing it. I must admit in my mind intermediate meant that I could understand, and speak a lot more than what I am able to do now, and as that article kind of implied. Once I get to that level I’ve kind of learned the language.

I have to say I can relate with what you’re saying about kids books too. It’s a real humbling experience going from being able to communicate effectively at a rapid pace in your native language to feeling like you’re reading and writing at a 1st grade level again.

The article you linked also has me nervous about trying kids books again because it pointed out trying to keep the learning process fun. Reading a kids book likely won’t be that fun for me. If I translate a manga it may be above my head, but I suspect it’ll be more fun. I guess I have some thinking on my best approach to keep things fun.

I do admit I’ve been focused on metrics lately. I’m trying really hard to keep up my pace with Textfugu, so I can start my JLPT N5 studying, but perhaps that’s sucking all of the fun out, and I need to sacrifice a bit of speed to ensure I don’t burn out.

I didn’t intend this thread to go in this direction, but all of your advice has been incredibly helpful, so thanks!

@Bbvoncrumb –

“improvement of my 90 minutes to look up one kanji
Did you walk to amazon headquarters to get a dictionary for the look up? I can’t even comprehend.”

Hahaha
No, nothing that bad.

In my defense, I hadn’t started learning to write kanji at the time. I had just barely started learning radicals, so I would pull up jisho.org, and try to find kanji that way. Sometimes I could find a kanji real fast, but other times no matter what I did I couldn’t find it. My look up times got a little faster as I learned things about radicals, like they don’t always look like themselves, and what not. Still, my look up time has improved dramatically since I started following missingno15′s advice about learning to write the top 100 kanji. I’m up to 40 of the 100, and even after only learning 15 or 20 I knew enough about stroke order to guess a fair amount of the time.

I really think learning to write kanji should be added to Textfugu. I understand Koichi’s argument for not including it, but the gain from learning it far outweighs the time spent learning it. Also, it’s not really that hard. It’s not like I’m learning 12 things when I learn a 12 stroke kanji. I just need to learn what the kanji looks like, as a whole, and I know the handful of stroke order rules that I apply to all kanji, and every once in awhile I need to remember how a kanji might have an exception to those general rules.

Honestly, I’m not a point where I could properly leverage either of those yet.

From what I can tell learning Japanese is a lot like trying to scale the face of a cliff. Before you seem to gain any elevation, that’s useful, you have to build a really really tall ladder. I keep building this ladder, but I’m not seeing real results. Rumor has it if I make the ladder tall enough I’ll see what’s on the other side, but right now I feel like I’m looking at the same cliff face as when I first started.

I’m tempted to speed up my pace of study, but I risk building a bad base, and foundation. Also, I’ve already sped up my study pace quite a bit over the past 6 months. I’m tempted to study more, but I already study 90 to 120 minutes almost everyday, and at least 60 minutes everyday without exception.

This leads me to one of 3 conclusions:

* I’m bad at Japanese. (Totally possible.)
* It’s a super massive ton of work up front just to get past the beginner level. (Also, totally possible.)
* There are ways I can make my studying more effective. (I’m really hoping this is the case.)

That’s what this post is really about. I see one area where I’m possibly not as effective as I’d like, and I’m looking for a way to improve. Reading Idol’s blogs seems like a good free source of Japanese, but I’m so far removed from the place where I can do that, that it’s not really an option for me yet. As a point of reference, I went to translate a manga the other day. It took me 45 minutes to translate 2 pages. Now mind you these pages had maybe a total of 13 kanji a piece. Granted that’s a massive improvement of my 90 minutes to look up one kanji I had back in June, but still, I’d spend all my study time trying to get through a paragraph on a blog, and if I don’t know the grammar she uses then I’m kind of boned.

That’s why I’m looking for resources that only leverage things I’ve already covered, so I can reinforce those concepts, and move on to the next.

Does all of that make sense?

What I needed to know was the why.

If I didn’t convey it properly in the last post I made. Missingno15 did me a favor by walking me through it offline. Although his posts had good information there was a communication gap that I needed to be cleared before I could make use of the information he posted. He did that, and quite well. My followup post was intended to show what that missing understanding was on my part to help anyone else who may have a similar question, and to make it so future people didn’t waste time trying to help me when I had the answer. :)