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Textfugu and EtoEto are dead projects. I’m surprised someone is still paying the hosting fees for this site, though given how many of us paid for “lifetime memberships”, I suppose it’s the least they could do. Perhaps money is still flowing in from somewhere. The point is, you’ll have to move on to other resources if you want to continue learning.
There are a number of other posts about the topic of “what to do next” if you do some searching around. Best of luck to ya.
Do we know if or when Koichi stopped officially accepting payments? The Pricing page mentions that new registrations are unavailable, but the text below it states the price for lifetime memberships and how to contact the team to ask about signing up. The fact that he was accepting payments even up until sometime after 2015 is still incriminating, given that he and the site were full of empty promises and unfinished content even back then. I even recommended Textfugu to others back in the day, which probably lead to at least one or two more subscriptions for them.
I never described Koichi as a “self interested cheater”. It’s probable that he genuinely wanted to fulfill the promises he made but just lacked the drive to do so, as well as the managerial foresight to effectively contract the assistance of others.
From a business standpoint though, it doesn’t matter if he felt like he was doing the right thing or not; the fact is that people paid money for this. It is an unfinished product that didn’t deliver on the promises its creator made to its investors. I say “investors” because some of us subscribed to this site with the expectation that it would continue to be expanded and improved, as we were told it would.
Anyone else is welcome to proceed as they wish.
Koichi: Important lesson that everyone has to learn. But, um. Yeah, I mean, we’re–we’re working on… on something, but, like, it’s–it’s a little–it’s quite a bit different from what we originally were envisioning and originally promising.
It’s just words. And as GRRM would say, “Words are wind”. Koichi’s approach to Textfugu and EtoEto is a prime example of this. In fact, I’d say GRRM and Koichi share more in common than just that…
Koichi’s last post in these forums was in 2013. That’s seven years ago. Seven. And I still see people posting in the Self Introduction forum, which means that he (or his business) is continuing to accepting payments for a project that will never be finished.
This is my first time logging into this site in years. I receive the occasional email update about the forum posts and felt compelled to respond to this particular post for any other suckers out there like myself. In fact, when I attempted to log in, I noticed that there wasn’t even a secure login for the site. So, he’s continuing to accept money from new members but can’t be bothered to pay for some basic security protection for paying customers. Smooth move, Koichi.
Here’s my best guess about what happened. Koichi started this project as he was busy with his other projects back in the early 2010s. Eventually, Wanikani grew big enough to become his cash cow. Once he began making decent money from Wanikani, his drive to finish and improve his other projects waned. He had passive income rolling in and life was good. However, people had paid money towards his other projects based on promises that he began to realize he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be keeping. He kept the promises coming, because saying the words helped him to feel like he was doing the right thing. But the progress on the side projects crawled almost to a halt. Slowly over time, he hoped people would forget about it all. And I imagine that many have.
Not me. I want my $120 back (actually, more than that in total payments). I’d recommend any other lifetime members to request the same.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
thatgumyoulike.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
Textfugu is an unfinished product, and the latter seasons in particular show plenty of evidence of that. As I progressed further I found myself referencing Tae Kim and Imabi more and more for extra support, and I stopped studying Textfugu’s Kanji a long time ago. I would’ve dropped Textfugu completely if I hadn’t invested so much money in it (and gotten sidetracked from studying Japanese due to other life events). I am going to shift to another textbook soon, perhaps Genki or the last of the Japanese from Zero books (which I actually liked better for self-study than Genki, though I’ll have to switch to Genki II afterwards). The state of Japanese learning resources in general is certainly better than it used to be, but compared to other languages, it isn’t great overall. I wish there was an unequivocally better overall resource for self-study learners out there, but there unfortunately isn’t much of quality to choose from. Lots of lower-quality stuff put together by non-experts and people who have no formal background in Japanese language teaching or materials development mostly.
It doesn’t feel right to me that Koichi is still accepting signups (and thus, payments) for this unfinished product, but I guess it’s all business in the end. I suspect that the Wanikani money (plus whatever Tofogu brings in) is keeping his business afloat so they’ve lost motivation for things like EtoEto. Ignoring all of the errors and unfinished bits of Textfugu, the fact that much of his practice exercises rely on Lang-8, which has stopped accepting new signups and appears to be in the process of being phased out, is quite telling.
It has been discussed in a few other threads but yes, if you’re doing Wanikani you can skip the Textfugu Kanji
EtoEto Fugu is unfinished. Some nice ideas in place but not much content. Textfugu is also unfinished and needs more tweaking that will likely never come, but is more complete than EtoEto Fugu is. Best if you work your way through Textfugu and switch to something else afterwards. After WaniKani became the cash cow, the other Tofogu projects magically began to decline. Koichi’s broken promises and pace remind me of a certain author of a certain wildly popular fantasy series…
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This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by
Thanks! My end goal is to get at the very least semi-fluent but it’ll be easier to get to that level once I can find a decent job in Japan (hopefully). For now I’m planning to learn as much as possible before I start sending out applications again. As I learned in Korea, the more Japanese I know before I go to Japan the easier the transition process and the first few months will be. Not to mention, being able to answer basic questions during an interview will help immensely.
Best of luck to you in your studies! According to your other post you said you are Greek. If so, your English is fantastic! I have great respect for you for trying another language on top of that.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by
