I’m sure if you wanted to ‘try’ pimsleur, there are sites you will find a torrent of it..

If you wanted to go down the audio book route, I would look at michel Thomas method.. Again, available to “try” in places..

Basically I have tested both full courses and neither were really that strong.. I would recommend vocab vocab vocab from an srs like anki or iknow.. That will get you further than these rip off courses.. If you see it advertised a lot.. Thats where your money is going. Not into a new and better product..

Hashi, I would recommend private browsing and dont track me.. You won’t get served annoying, algorithm driven ad’s that tell you to hate people ha!

It should be possible to handle about 15-20 words a day.. I know it sounds silly when you look at a vocab sheet and just think ‘wtf do all these bit’s of chicken scratch and hiragana mean!?’ – This is mainly to do with the method.. Remembering brand new words with no “hook” on them is pretty hard, and usually only 3-4 a day with intense repetition.. bur rote is boring.

I’m going to say it.. iKnow.. Seriously.. Vocab is so simple with that.. Audio, sentences, Images… If only it was also scratch and sniff..

Textfugu for me does grammar and explanations very well.. however Anki for Vocab, even though it is strong SRS just doesn’t seem to help.. I had the very same issues you did, got frustrated and nearly quit because I thought “If I can’t even remember 3 vocab words, how the hell am I going to learn an entire language before I die” – I suffered through, discovered iKnow and kicked myself for not using it properly.. Try the free 5 lessons thing and really spend time on each word/sentence – look up the Kanji at Jisho + Kanjidamage – Take it all in and move on.. Using that method, i’ve easily got 20 odd words to stick in an hour session.

Keep at it with the vocab, it gets way easier once you push through the first 100 words! :D

use iKnow.. Pretty much has the same lists of verb/adj/noun’s here on textfugu.. just delivered in a better form than Anki – Not textfugu’s fault, just the way in which the mind retains information.

@Yggbert thats pretty impressive.. I spent about 6 hours on the step one, mainly because I stopped to look up the Kanji mnemonics and study every sentence.
However, my rate of exposure and retention has shot up since I started the course. It’s pretty easy for me to tackle 20 words a day if I really work at it – 6000words / 20pd = 300 days – Under a year to get 6000 words down, not bad.. Obviously, I might not make 20 new words a day.. Meh, combine that with a Japanese class and some reading + podcasts.. It can all move at a pretty decent rate once you start enveloping it into your life.

I once asked a dutch friend of mine how he spoke such fantastic English, on to par with myself, a native.. He said that in Holland, 90% of the TV is in English, he read English books growing up etc.. He didn’t have any real English interaction until he moved here about a year ago (he’s 23 or something) – It was just all in his head and with a little practice has been able to apply it all.. pronunciation an all.. Ok.. so dutch is pretty similar, and would only take 6 months to gain a good understanding and lexicon from the base of English, but you get my point.

@TangSooPap – Don’t get disheartened.. It usually take about 2-3 months to get up to season 5 (if you only working an hour a fay) – sooner if you put your mind to it – I’d set a goal.. Once you reach season 5, subscribe to iknow and get those vocab juices going! I wouldn’t just ignore iknow until this time, keep at it.. just don’t worry if you’re getting frustrated as it will fall into place ^_^

@mister – whats your lang8 profile?

“reference guide to the 70 common particles used in the Japanese language” – 70… wow – Ok, maybe i should go re-think everything.