All sorts of people pronounce the U. It’s more commonly just “dess”, but you’ll definitely hear “desu” at some point or other. Same goes for “masu/mass”. When ever I’ve heard it, the speaker doesn’t exclusively use one style or the other, they mix it up; I’m guessing there’s some kind of pattern they’re following or specific situations where it’s more appropriate, but as far as I’m aware, they just choose when to say it or not.

Actually, I’ve heard it fairly frequently when it’s part of 「～ですが・・・」, mostly when the speaker has a nasal pronunciation of が, but maybe that’s just me.

At the start, the rightmost of the three girls at the front. No?

You can’t really call anywhere “The City of Rain” if it’s not located in Scotland ;)

Whenever I say “hello” or “goodbye” or “goodnight” to anyone I’m speaking to online, I usually never say it in the plain English form :P “Goodnight” etc. sounds so boring, so I’d imagine the Japanese may feel the same about some of their own words. I tend to say “gute Nacht” and “guten Abend” a lot :D

@Andrew: If you want to use the TV analogy, then no, it’s not like buying a TV then demanding they give you free stuff because you don’t like it (sorry if I’ve oversimplified or misconstrued that). The key element of my fish analogy was the time it took being a lot longer than previously specified, or more appropriately the process of completing the meal was going slower than specified. When you buy TextFugu, yes, you understand it’s a work in progress, but you don’t expect things to be moving so slowly (well, at least I didn’t).

“So it doesn’t matter if the chef is moonlighting, or catching a fish, or if he doesn’t exist at all.” – it *does* matter, that’s the *main* thing that matters haha. One of the main reasons it takes so long to get new lessons out is because he’s doing all this other stuff on the side. I’m not saying Tofugu isn’t a good site, but it takes time away from Textfugu, even if he has happy little elves working for him.

So in your TV analogy, it’s not asking for free stuff, it’s more asking them to repair it sooner rather than later. I’m not saying there should be compensation for the slow progress, just that the progress should hurry up a little.

Y’know, the best analogy for the situation is like this: you buy an e-book that’s a work in progress and you think “It’ll probably take a while, but it’ll be worth it”. You finish all the current content and think “OK, I’ll do something else while I’m waiting for new material to be written”. You wait. And wait. The waiting’s taking too long so you go somewhere else to learn. A new lesson gets put up after weeks and weeks and weeks (if not months) of delay and you say “Oh, I already learned that while I was waiting…”. Then you learn more while waiting for the next chapter, and the same thing happens: you covered that shit months ago. You stop using the book because, no matter how slow you go, it never catches up. You could take a 6 month break and there’ll still only be a couple of week’s worth of new content to go through. Oh wait, that’s not an analogy…

He says on the FAQ TextFugu is going to be about 6 seasons long, minimum (bear in mind, when the FAQ was written, each season was as long as around two of the current ones). That’s about equal to 12 of the new-style seasons. I think last Spring/Summer, he was finishing up his overhaul of season 3 (they’ve overhauled the site design/lesson design/kanji lesson design/Anki deck design what must be about 3 times each in the past year, more for the site design). So about 3/4 of a year ago at least, he finished what’s now season 5, I’d say – I said 2 new seasons per old season, but that’s a little off. Almost one year later, he’s only just starting season 7. It’s taken the best part of a year to write one season. Does that not seem a bit slow? He’s written a lot of kanji lessons in that time too, but the “core” content is more important, I’d say. Compare all that to the hundred bajillion (no hyperbole) Tofugu articles that have been written in that time. Hashi joined at the end of Spring last year, John during the Summer, and Viet relatively recently (I don’t know when), so it’s not like they’ve been writing for him for ever. He is still very involved in Tofugu, which leaves less TextFugu time.

*long post, sorry*

As for refunds, the FAQ says: “If you don’t like TextFugu within the first couple weeks, send an e-mail to refunds@textfugu.com to get a 110% refund. To get the extra 10%, please write 100-200 words of feedback to help make TextFugu better! Normal refunds can be gotten with a lot less hoo-ha. Just make sure you try the free lessons out first to see if you like it!”.
>>”within the first couple of weeks” – I take that to mean you can only get a refund relatively recently after you’ve bought it. You don’t notice the slowness until at least a couple of months, which by then it’s too late. I’m not looking for a refund anyway; I didn’t really pay all that much for it. That doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t live up to promises. He’s a great guy and the content was good when I first started out, but he just doesn’t write fast enough. Anyone else dissatisfied with the speed shouldn’t have to need a refund – they don’t want the money back, they just want the content.

四（よん）
Sorry, but thinking of ん words is much more fun :P Just play around me if you must ;)

@wiseguy12851: Never really found I needed a mnemonic for 日本語, seeing how important a word it is :P