I started Japanese some time in September 2010, I think. I’m nowhere near the level I should be, though; if I’d studied more consistently and in a smarter way, I’m sure I could be far better by now. I’d say I was maybe “lower-intermediate” in reading, “lower-beginner” in listening and writing, and “total noob” in speaking, but it really depends on how you want to define terms like that (plus I could be under-/over-estimating myself).

Just as a run down of stuff I’ve done though, which is probably more helpful: completed TextFugu (not that TF is complete itself); completed James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji Vol. 1; completed Japanese for Busy People Books 1-3; read everything up to section 6 on Tae Kim (plus a small bit of section 6); half-way through Tobira: Gateway to Intermediate Japanese; 4300 words from Core6k added to Anki; read a few of the stories in “Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text” (stories with each left page Japanese and each right page its English translation); read a few of the stories in “Breaking into Japanese Literature” (same deal as previous but with “classic” authors and more complex, old-fashioned Japanese); a handful of articles on LingQ; half an episode of “Densha Otoko” plus lots of variety shows; countless articles on NHK News Easy; 100 trillion plays of every Perfume song ever made.

That was a little more comprehensive than I meant it to be…

There are a few things to note about that list, though. Where I say I’ve “completed” something, it doesn’t mean I have absolute mastery of everything in it – I forget stuff all the time and have to look back (especially at Tae Kim) to remind myself of what I’ve already read so often. There’s no way I could have read those short stories without the English translation to fall back on. RTK was a great foundation in kanji, making me somewhat comfortable with reading and dealing with it in general, but I forget proper stroke order frequently and am so bad at remembering how words are written.

Edit: Oh, also, I’ve done pretty well at the practice reading questions for N3 on the JLPT website (not as well for the listening ones); haven’t actually taken the exam.

@Joel:

“Honestly, I find it incredibly demoralising. We’re not quite ready to be Pokemon masters just yet.”

I’m feel exactly the same :/
What would the equivalent of the Elite 4 be in terms of Japanese? Passing N1? Passing KanKen 1? *Not* breaking down and crying any time a Japanese person tries to speak to you?

“I think she would probably teach like how japanese kids learn kanji.”

Almost certainly. Native Japanese teachers seem to think the way they learned kanji was the best and the only way it should be done. They learned kanji by writing them out by hand 100s of times but that seems such a waste of time to me haha.

I agree with the opinion that you shouldn’t need to explicitly learn readings themselves. As an example, if you learned the words 電車（でん・しゃ）, 自転車（じ・てん・しゃ）, and 自動車（じ・どう・しゃ）, then your brain will be able to infer itself that 車 can be read as しゃ, without having to learn the reading as a separate entity beforehand. Whether しゃ is ‘on’ or ‘kun’ isn’t really that important, unless you’re being tested on it :P There *are* a few basic guidelines on where ‘on’ and ‘kun’ readings are each used but there are so many exceptions. Also, if you learn readings from words, it guarantees that the readings you do learn are actually useful (only learning useful readings is also part of TF’s kanji section, but this method streamlines the process even more, if that makes sense).

Say that you’ve learned the word 電車（でん・しゃ）above, you know that 電 can be read as でん, but you can’t be sure it’s a common reading since you’ve only seen one word with it. Then say that you learned the word 電気（でん・き）- this makes the association between 電 and でん in your head a little more concrete and it gives you a better idea of how common it is. Learn the word 元気 and that’s you got 気 → き more firmly in your head :D And from the second two examples in the above paragraph, you’ve also got 自 → じ. All these associations happened naturally, without you making any extra effort to learn しゃ, じ, でん, or き on their own.

If I remember correctly, Cassandra aka winterpromise31 and her husband were adopting a child from… some Chinese-speaking country, so she was giving up Japanese for the meantime to start learning Mandarin. She said she’d still lurk the forum a little but I haven’t seen her post in a while.

No idea where Sheepy is, though I heard he went to live in the mountains.

To be honest, now that Bbvoncrumb posts here only every few months, the forum doesn’t really *need* moderation ;)

As for the new video-making girl, she did one on her own and she was kept looking at her tablet while she was speaking, to remember what to say. The video had jump cuts – as so many vloggers do these days – but they didn’t think to put them where she was looking at her notes haha. She was just all round awkward, especially in the videos with Koichi. Tbh, I’ve no idea what made them hire her.

As far as I’m aware, typing in romaji (and converting) is pretty common in Japan, so it’s not like you’re getting a more “authentic” experience by using one with kana on the keys. Are you really going to be typing enough to warrant buying one? Just seems kinda unnecessary.

Yeah, pretty sure that’s the shop. Uh huh, here’s the book: http://shop.jpbooks.co.uk/product.php?id_product=7951
It *is* a pretty good book but £42.99 is quite dear for me. I guess some people can afford it fine: my current flat mate, for example, bought it and recommended it to me. I’m lucky missingno15 was so generous :P

It’s kinda sad looking at Hashi’s old Tofugu Twitter account :/
Ah, the joys of reminiscing over something that was only a couple of years ago haha.

@kanjiman8:

Yeah, LingQ is quite good. Having lots of texts with accompanying audio is great. One quite annoying thing, however, is LingQ’s Japanese text parser: because the language lacks spaces, it’s difficult to split words up perfectly, and the one they use doesn’t always do a good job. If you’re not bothered about “creating LingQs” and using their flash card system, you can still get a free account and read and listen to everything anyway. I only signed up for a premium account because I got a month free; I’ve paid for a few months but might cancel now as the paid-for features aren’t *that* great (mainly creating LingQs).

Tobira has been pretty good. There are a lot of classroom exercise style parts, but it contains a lot of good reading material and has good grammar explanations with examples. I think there’s a shop down in London that sells them but they’re a little on the expensive side from what I remember. My copy though, I actually got that from missingno15 – even though he lives in New York (or thereabouts), he offered to give me it for the cost of shipping because it was taking up space in his room. I added a little extra as a thank you, but all in all it came to about £20 or so, which was extremely lucky :D

That other textbook you mention, I’ve probably seen it but can’t remember what it was like. I’ve seen a number of different books even if I’ve not used them all.

EtoEto hasn’t been updated, yeah. I’m assuming that’s for the same reasons TF hasn’t been updated either, because he’s merging them, albeit at a snail’s pace.

So that’s where Hashi went! I think earlier in this thread I asked Koichi how he was doing but didn’t ask what he was up to these days, I don’t think. Hashi’s a pretty cool guy and doesn’t afraid of anything.

As far as I know, TextFugu is still offering Gakuu membership for 80% off. I’m not sure if this is actually still valid though, it may just be an artifact of him not updating the site in so long. Back when that deal was first offered, the site seemed a little difficult, but I might have another look at it again when I have more free time.

“I have typed a lot of incorrect words by using IME on the first conversion, naturally.”

If you’re not counting the formal numbers, this was the only conversion, not the first of many. Maybe the one with formal numbers actually follows different rules.

Edit: And there you go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals#Formal_numbers

“In some cases, the digit 1 is explicitly written like 壱百壱拾 for 110, as opposed to 百十 in common writing.”

That implies that the digit 1 isn’t usually written there. It’s not conclusive because it doesn’t specifically mention the case where a larger number comes before 百, but then your example only mentioned いっせん, not… I just realised I’m not sure whether it should be いっぴゃく or いちひゃく. Neither appears in the dictionary or IME, so maybe neither are correct and it’s *always* ひゃく, even if it’s written as 壱百.

However, your Japanese friend said it should be 一百… I mean, a person using their native language incorrectly? That’s unpossible! ;)

Does this mean I get to keep my perfect score? :D