LOL WHAT.

The only gem within that whole book collection of yours is Japanese Sentence Patters for Effective Communication. I highly suggest you use it, no I command you to use it. I can vouch for its practicality, own a copy myself and probably one of my best purchases towards learning Japanese. Maybe now that you are learning with Textfugu and got some sort of start, you should take a look at that book. Probably if you took a look at it any of those books right away expecting to learn Japanese, it is most likely not gonna help you.

I here Dictionary of Japanese Particles is a good book but I haven’t taken a look at it myself.

if you guys didnt know, sheepy is australian so i apologize on his behalf.

also, he lost more than 15 lbs. on his diet so everyone give him a hand!

I guess this will be my first legit question in this thread.

I looked カリキュラム in google because it appeared here and I didn’t know what it meant. Upon finding the meaning, I attempted to read the Wikipedia summary about it and there was one part that I didn’t understand.

「カリキュラム（Curriculum）は、一定の教育の目的に合わせて、考え出された教育内容とその決まった修業年限の間での教育と学習を総合的に計画したものをいう。しばしば教育課程と同義に扱われることもあるが、元々はラテン語の「走る」（currere）から由来した言葉で「走るコース、走路、ランニングコース」のことをいい、第二次世界大戦後、アメリカから入ってきた概念である。一般に学生、生徒には小学校から大学に至るまでの各学年での時間割として知られるものも、カリキュラムの一部である。これは狭義のもので、教育課程とほぼ同じである。
カリキュラムは単に教育課程に狭められるものではなく、より広い意味で教育の目的、教育内容を超えて、教授活動やそれに対する教師の構えのようなものまで拡大して、教育にアプローチする姿勢そのものまでもカリキュラムとして捉えなおすということが、20世紀の半ばあたりから盛んに語られている。そこから提案されてきたカリキュラムのコンセプトは、しばしば文部科学省が学習指導要領を改訂する際にも反映される。カリキュラムはどういう視点からそれを考えるかにより、さまざまな分類がある。実際には小学校から大学まで、それぞれの教育機関の目標と教育的援助への多様な視点からなるカリキュラムを組み合わせて、それぞれの長短を補い合うようにして活用している。」

The part I don’t understand is bolded.

I’ve seen Danny Choo use it too in the Japanese version of his biography but I cannot seem to figure out the meaning in context or even looking it up in English.

That and I’m just too lazy to ask my Japanese friends. I’ll get to it at some point.

Mayuyu’s other nickname was CG (Cyborg) because of her emotionless expressions when she first entered AKB. Or something like that. Either way, nowadays, she isn’t referred as CG as much anymore compared to earlier years (2010 and back)

Today’s Tofugu post reminded me of 殺し屋１, which as of course filled with interesting yakuza-related vocab like 紋紋/もんもん (Yakuza tattoos) and 組長/くみちょう　(head of a ‘group’). Of course, most of the stuff in that manga’s…not the sort of thing you’d want to include in your day-to-day life, but it’s still pretty fascinating.

殺し屋？

Oh yeah btw, if you plan on make a deck full of expressions, it would be a good idea to follow MLC Japanese School on Twitter. Or if you don’t want to use twitter or whatever, you can just click on their twitter profile and look at all the tweets that they did. They are all full of expressions by the way that you can add to this deck

I haven’t looked touched Textfugu for so long I didn’t even know where to open the actual textbook! loool After looking at it, halfway through Season 4 will honestly not get you so far so after thinking of what you should read, I reached the conclusion that you should look at whatever native reading material anyways as you go along. Although you should really get going on the textfugu thing and taekim for reading. As for my recommendation, its probably the easiest to read IMO compared to many other stuff as it surprisingly follows many rules and stuff that are demonstrated here, in taekim, and in textbooks. That’s not to say that any other Japanese source does the same thing (cause then it wouldn’t be Japanese anymore lol) but I feel that it’s more apparent than lets say a news report. Also, its not something TaeKim can’t handle. Not only that, you can follow 5 adorable girls あぁちゃんやびゃあああぁヽ(//▽//)ノ.*・ﾟﾟ・*:.

I only push on native material because now I look back in everything and everything I did in hindsight seems to have worked and made sense too, not to mention that I can’t imagine learning if I didn’t do both things concurrently

Also about reading, if you’re going to look up every word you don’t know, just do it. Anyway you’re not going to know 97% of text anyway, so might as well take the time to waste time learning words.

I think this is a pretty good application for learning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPhEP7C54_U