Does that last line say “Laughing while bathing in sprays of blood”? XD Am I looking at it too literally?

I’d say 消えてしまえ means “Disappear completely! (aggressive command)”, or something like that. Rikaikun tells me ブチ means “spots; speckles; mottles”.

Most people who have corrected me have a decent standard of English (some being REALLY good at it). If you ask them in English for a clarification, they usually respond in English. Or if, in your main post, you write an “English translation” beside your Japanese (i.e. what you WANTED the sentences to mean), they’ll be more likely to try and use English (and they’ll have a better idea of where you went wrong, too).

Let me ask you to clarify: do you mean that you can’t write the kanji just as is, on their own, or do you mean you can’t remember which kanji go in which words? I’m assuming it’s the latter, because if you’ve done RTK then you know how to write kanji (otherwise you haven’t really done RTK). I did RTK too, and while the actual writing of kanji is a piece of cake, remembering how a word is written in kanji trips me up much more than I’d like :( It can be REALLY frustrating some times :( I do Anki reviews every day, and I can generally read words if I see them but I can never seem to remember the kanji (oh how ironic). I can go kanji -> pronunciation/meaning reasonably well, but I can’t go pronunciation -> kanji that well :/ (Obviously the more the common the word, the easier its kanji is to remember, though [and by "common" I mean "how often I've seen them outside of Anki"]).

If you don’t understand, just ask them to clarify :)

Don’t increase the leech limit to 99: change it to 0. I doubt you’re going to fail a card 99 times, but still, changing it to 0 is like turning leeches off.

Also, go Japanese to English, not English to Japanese: the majority of your time will be spent *taking in* Japanese input, so it’s more useful to be able to recognise a Japanese word and know what it means. Plus, how do you know which Japanese word corresponds to your English one? There are many.

Once Koichi has finished all the planned “v3″ updates, he’ll put out one new lesson then think “Wait a minute… these Anki decks actually suck! Time to re-do them! :3″ *6 months later* “There! Done! Oh wait, that forum sucks too – time for a new one! :3″ *a few months* “There needs to be a -1th section to each lesson, to ease people into the introduction (section 0)” *a few months* “Yuck, the dashboard sucks. Hashi, grab that colour palette!” *a few weeks* “Let’s make a feature-length Tofugu movie (completely disregarding TofuguTV)! :D” *1 year* “Oh yeah, new content for TextFugu, riiiiiight… Huh? Wait a minute, everyone left! Ah well, Starcraft it is :3″

:P

@Altaira: Don’t worry – I joined TextFugu last September and his post is Greek to me too ;) Not because I’m terribly bad at Japanese, but just because he is so much more advanced.

@Larisa
>So you’re saying the textbook is “incomplete”?
Well… yeah. If stuff keeps getting added, how could that be “complete”? :P

>I guess I just can’t wrap my head around someone providing a fun/ affordable source for learning something, but when it no longer meets your needs you don’t think its good enough? If this is how you feel, were ALL the lessons this way? Were you thinking this the entire time? Did you feel that every single lesson was lacking? Or just the later ones? What the heck guys! Koichi, don’t flex these punks!

I love(d) TextFugu, but all I’m saying is that it’s not been updated fast enough, so unless they add conversational material or I stop learning Japanese for the next 6 months (unlikely haha), then it will never be able to meet my needs. I did the trial lessons and loved it. I did Season 1 and loved it. I did a bunch of Season 2 and loved. And then I sat twiddling my thumbs while waiting for Koichi to finish updating the Season 2 lessons (and adding the rest of them) and get onto Season 3. Then I thought “I should probably learn some stuff instead of twiddling my thumbs”, so I did. And now that he’s put up a lesson on nominalisation, I just think “Pfft! I learned that on my own 6 months ago when I was waiting for Season 3 to start.”.

Basically, you pay for the whole textbook, but only get use of half of it. If $120 is, in a sense, the price of the whole textbook, that means you’ve paid $60 more than you ought to have. My university textbooks are around £40 each (whatever that is in $) and they are whole, complete, comprehensive books. TextFugu is half the textbook they are (in amount of content) and is currently going for almost twice as much. Once it’s finished, it’ll be worth every $, but in the mean time, for us “early adopters”, us “beta testers”, it’s not been worth that amount at all. There really should have been a reduced price for this beta stage, bringing it up to full price once it’s done.

>I mean if it’s so easy…. why don’t you guys create a Japanese learning site? :PPPPP
If I wanted to and was able to, yes, I’d create a Japanese learning SITE. But if I wanted to write a TEXTBOOK, I’d wait until it was done before releasing it to the public (or at least the core content written). What Koichi is doing now is what should be done AFTER the core stuff has been written. You don’t make the DVD bonus features before you finish filming the movie. You don’t start painting a shed before it’s finished being built. You don’t… etc.

So yeah, it used to be good but now it’s fallen so far behind that it’s not good any more.

I agree with Elenkis: I appreciate what Koichi is trying to do, but at present, the textbook just isn’t good enough. Anyone buying it more than, say, 6 months before completion is losing out.

(This post hasn’t been as coherent as I’d have liked – I can see I’ve rambled a little haha)