You don’t start learning verbs here on TextFugu until towards the end of season 3. You’re still on season 2. Don’t even think about verbs yet. You don’t need to either. You’re still learning about nouns.

I think you’re getting confused as your comparing Japanese to English too much. です、じゃありません、でした、じゃありませんでした are all sentence enders. They come at the end of sentences and determine whether the sentence is positive (です), negative (じゃありません), past (でした) and past negative (じゃありませんでした). They’re not verbs. English doesn’t have sentence enders as the tense comes at the start of the sentence. Japanese is reversed.

Koichi tells you that です means ‘it is’, じゃありません means ‘it isn’t', でした means ‘it was’ and じゃありませんでした means ‘it wasn’t’ to link it to a concept in English you already understand. The sentences you’re learning have a simple structure of Noun + Sentence Ender. Think of the yoda grammar to help.

As tubatime said, don’t question why something is the way it is. Just learn it. Just accept that Japanese isn’t like English. If you keep questioning the differences, you will end up driving yourself mad and waste valuable study time.

When you guys put it that way, $25 does seem like money worth spending. If Anki 2 can fulfil my needs such as syncing decks across all platforms then I won’t mind donating to the cause.

I’ve just finished Season 5. Starting Season 6 today. Season 5 was tough. Casual verbs are a pain with all the different conjugations and exceptions. I still feel I don’t fully understand them  but I’ll just look over my notes. When you get to 6 stroke kanji, you learn 15 at a time now.

The reviews are timed, meaning it can vary (from my experience) between 1 minute or 2 days between each one. Although the 2 day gap has only happened to me once so far. 99% of the time it will be shorter than that. If you let your reviews pile up, that also affects when the next one will be I imagine.

It’s a great site, good design and graphics. More interesting to learn than the Anki route. I don’t know if it’s the best deal out there though.

Google translate is translating it as ヴィニシウス. Go ahead and give it a shot. To be on the safe side, you could always write your sentences in English underneath so anyone who might be confused will see how your name is written in roman letters.

Hey Rebecca. Welcome to TF! I’m also from the UK. It’s great you got the chance to live and work in Japan. Good luck with your studies.

You should learn it in order. Think of it as three stages:

1) The first lot of 46. The first five vowels あ, い, う, え, お through to ん.

2) The dakuten. Which are some symbols from the first 46 with a ” or small circle next to them.

3) Combo/double symbols. These are a combination of two different hiragana.

I haven’t read people learning the hiragana out of order and I don’t see any advantages to it. If anything, it will make it harder. Stick to the recommended way which is what I have posted above in the three stages.

After reading through that, I don’t think I will bother to upgrade to Anki 2.0. The version I”m using (1.2.8) is fine and I have no problems at all. Sure, Anki isn’t the best looking software out there, but it does the job and does it well.