Agree with Sheepy. That’s why all these big programs are pirated so often, because they’re unreasonably expensive. The high prices increase the piracy, which means the prices need to increase to make a profit, which leads to more piracy, and so on.

Hello.

Is there not a link to that Hiragana stroke-order sheet in the lessons? There was in MY day! :P

@Robb: Yeah, I assumed you just meant little “learning mini games”, that sorta thing. But then I suggested *proper* video games, and everyone else just followed from there haha. Sorry :P

@Sheepy: Thanks haha :)

@missingno15: I know it doesn’t have anything to do with RTK, so what’s your point? A guy asked me a question that deviated from the “Textfugu vs RTK” topic a bit, and I answered him.

I understand why you didn’t give RTK a chance – for someone who actually knows a lot of kanji already, it probably feels boring and slow-paced, cause “Hell, I know this shit already, bro!”. But for total beginners, people like me who’d only covered some kanji up to 3 strokes, it’s a really useful, helpful method. Nobody says you NEED RTK, just that it’s a method they like. And yup, we still end up learning words (would be a bit strange if we didn’t), but it’s just so much faster when you only need to learn a meaning and a reading. We’ve been “enlightened” in a way only RTK-completers know ;) It’s kinda hard to explain, but everything is so much easier and fits together so much more nicely after having finished that book. If you start off reading the book with an intermediate knowledge of the language (and only sticking with it for a mere 2 weeks), of course you’re not gonna feel any different.

The “3-4 birds with one stone” analogy doesn’t quite work here. By doing RTK, we’ve started a big campfire and got everything set up to just cook the birds as we kill them. The brute force method you employ is like throwing a big rock (very slowly), and having to light a new campfire, prepare new equipment, for each new species of bird you see. Obviously your bird-cooking skills will develop over time, but RTK-finishers have their own “kitchen” set up all the time. In this analogy, new birds are new radicals. OK so that’s probably not 100% accurate imagery, but it gets the general point across. Basically, it’s all preparation, so you can go into vocab learning with one less thing to worry about. It’s either “kill 3-4 birds with one stone” or “send out a guerilla squad to kill the alpha-bird, leaving her chicks unguarded” (to use a different analogy).

@Elenkis: Yup, totally agree. You’ve put it in words better than I could have haha. I was about to say “you should keep that post and copy it every time someone asks”, but then I re-read it and saw that that’s what you *already* do :P

@missingno15: Wow, that guy is just horrendous XD And he says it’s a hentai game, but it’s not at all.

If you want a good Japanese learning game, go and buy a SNES or a Super Famicom :D No really, they should help you. Get something basic that doesn’t have a lot of Japanese in it at first; I would imagine that’d be the best way to start, though I haven’t actually tried it myself. I changed Sonic Adventure 2: Battle for the GameCube to Japanese audio and subtitles and that was pretty good :)

You don’t have to be good at Japanese to play Japanese games – you GET good at Japanese BECAUSE you play those games haha.

Ahhh… the good old days of image embed, forum search, video embed, links that were distinct from the regular font, automatic font tag generation, custom Koichi taglines, one big RTK thread… :’) *sigh*

Link spam just isn’t as inviting as the little “preview” you get with video embedding – so much more engaging that way. I know you can’t fix it though, which sucks gigantic balls :/

@ooh_a_robot: I referred to you as a Miss, you obviously weren’t looking hard enough – try looking REAAAAL close with a magnifying glass; I’m sure you’ll see everything’s fine ;)