六本木　（ろっぽんぎ） – Are we allowed place names? :P
浪人　（ろうにん） – If we’re not allowed them haha.

@Hattori: I started Core2k last summer I think, but I was going kinda slow after starting uni and being busy all the time. Plus I wait for reviews to die down before I do new cards. I’m picking up the pace a little this semester though, doing new cards slightly more often. I’m at 1100 now, 900 to go. Though once I’ve finished those 900 left, I’ll just go straight on to the Core 6k ones, so it’s more like “1100 down, 4900 to go!” :D Probably won’t finish Core 6k for another couple of years at least.

@Elenkis: How long have you been doing the Core series, do you think?

• This reply was modified 13 years ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

Katakana is also used for scientific words – including plant and animal names, even ones that already have associated kanji – emphasis (like italics), stylistic choice, and some words even have some kind of cultural significance when katakanised in certain places, or so I’ve heard. Katakana is reasonably important, and I just went straight onto it after doing hiragana, but it’s not necessary. It’s certainly nowhere near as important as kanji anyway. You’re going to be learning kanji for a while, so no matter which you start first, you’re going to finish katakana first. I think the reason for starting kanji before katakana is that it’s best to start kanji as soon as possible, really, just because it’s so important. But if you choose to get katakana “out of the way” first, it’d be fine.

Basically, it’s your choice which you start first :) It’s been more than a year since I was at that stage with TextFugu, and the lessons are all different now, but I imagine there’s only a very short gap in-between the lesson where you start kanji and the lesson where you start/finish katakana.

D’awwww :3

@missingno15: Ah, that was hilarious! :D Was there something in particular about the video that spurred you on to try learning Japanese?

The video that got me thinking about Japanese was this one: http://youtu.be/V2wzUuGm7yw
He advertises TextFugu at the end, so I had a look at it and thought “Hey, this sounds kinda cool! :)”.
(Actually, events may have played out in a slightly different order; maybe the video didn’t come first, I can’t remember what happened actually haha. It lead me on to the textbook at least.)

@winterpromise: Next time you see that card, you’ll be at least semi-fluent, right? ;D I’d actually imagine that you’d wanna stop reviewing that deck before 2.7 years are up – you’ll be at a stage where you won’t need it any more long before then, I think :) Just out of curiosity, which kanji was it? It’s coming up for a year since I finished the main body of RTK now (minus the supplement), and I’ve *still* not go every card in the last box on koohii XD I finished on my birthday last year, and it’s my birthday on Friday – 2 things to celebrate I guess :P

OT: I watched an episode of The Simpsons in Japanese over on ニコニコ動画, and while I can’t understand 98.742% of it, because the show uses a lot of visual comedy (and I can remember the gist from watching it in English) it was still pretty good :D Bart and Lisa’s voice actors sound pretty close to the English ones :)

Also, I’m about halfway through Japanese for Busy People III and have 926 “fresh” cards to review in the Core 2000 deck on Anki :D Will still be a while before I make it on to Harry Potter, but I’m getting there :)

“Normally you would use the を particle with a verb” – don’t think of it as the “verb” particle, think of it as the “object” marker (or something similar). You’re right that it’s used along with verbs, but so are は and が and so forth. Generalising though, I’d say を is used for transitive verbs while が is the main particle for intransitive verbs. Compare「かれ を おこします」(I woke him up) and「かれ が おきます」(He woke up).