Also, once you go to university/college, you’ll look back on your time at school and think “Wish I had done more with all that free time I had; I thought school sucked but it was actually a piece of cake!” XD That’s how I’m feeling at the moment. The work was piss-easy back then, but I just spent so much time fannying about getting bugger-all done. I wish I had started learning Japanese back then, a few years ago; take the opportunity, man.

(That’s assuming by “school” you mean anything below university/college)

Exceptions, exceptions, exceptions. I assume you’re using the TextFugu kanji section. While knowing on- and kun-yomi can be useful, don’t use them as a pronunciation guide. I find the best way to learn new readings is just to learn new vocabulary; over time you just kinda pick them up.

The counting system is especially riddled with reading exceptions, which you’ll see once you start to learn some more counter words. 一人 and 二人 are special cases after which 三人、四人、五人、etc. are all read as expected (さんにん、よんにん、ごにん、etc.). The kanji for “first day of the month” are 一日 which is read as ついたち; stuff like that just messes with your head, but you have to get used to it :P Generally though, counting comes in two flavours (with about 17 different subflavours >.<): the いち、に、さん system and the ひと、ふた、みっ system.

@Elenkis: Hmmm… never knew they changed it with the new iKnow. I’m betting the vast majority of people still refer to it/know it as 2k/6k though.
Looked up the とは thing in A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar, and apparently the は is used to convey some emotion (e.g. surprise, joy, regret) caused by the unexpectedness of the situation – “I’m surprised that…”, “I never thought that ___ would be ___”, “It’s too bad that…”, “It’s great that…”, etc.
The “meaning” of that sentence in Core 2000 was given as “I don’t think the new policy is very good.”, but I think it’s more like “It’s a shame the policy doesn’t seem very good.” (since 思える is more “seem” than “think”, which makes more sense, I think).

新しい政策はあまり良いとは思えません。
Core 2000 sentence for the word「政策」(せいさく) [policy, political measures]
Why is there a は after と?「新しい政策」is already established as the topic of the sentence, so I’m not sure what the second はis for. I’m not versed in all the uses of はyet :/

@Armando: Yup, が and の are interchangeable in subordinate clauses, or so I believe. Not sure of the reason; maybe it just makes it easier to say?
And yes, 方 means something like person there; Rikaikun is telling me it’s a polite pluralising suffix for people, said がた (instead of the usual かた).

@missingno15‘s link: Oh man, I feel so bad for laughing so hard at that! XD We’ve all come from that stage, I’m sure; that’s why it’s so funny, cause we’ve probably been there and made such hilarious mistakes before.

Advice for Mark: Once you’ve “finished” TextFugu, go back and read the majority of it again. You’re gonna especially want to read up on たい form and plain form verbs (and their conjugations).
します is the polite form of する, so you can’t say するませんでした, since that is some freaky amalgamation of the two.
Don’t just pull the first word you find from the dictionary that seems to mean what you’re looking for. Look up example sentences (in jisho.org or Jim Breen) and see if it has the same connotations you’re wanting to convey. A simple 忙しい would have sufficed over 立て込む.
I’ve been advised by several lang-8 people to not bother using よ and ね in my writing: they say it’s more a spoken thing, and that it’s *really* tricky to get right. Seems fair enough to me.
I assume you meant to say じゃ・ね at the end instead of ち・や・ね.
Again, revise stuff you think you already know! It’s vital!

My sincerest apologies for finding your mistakes so hilarious XD If you look at my lang-8, you’ll see the first few posts are similar (almost), and I cringe every time I look back at them – you’ll cringe one day too! :D haha The whole point in lang-8 is to learn from your mistakes.

「勉強をませんした」
Quick! Somebody divide by zero! We need to reverse this to stop the world imploding!

*ahem*

@Yggbert: Was that the sentence patterns book? Do you recommend it? It’s weird that I can’t find a pdf version of it anywhere… An Excel doc of the sentences was all I could find XD It’s still ok, but it doesn’t have the explanations that are in the book. Could be good to make into Anki cards however :D

I mean what? I never did any of that stuff… >.>

My library doesn’t seem to have it either, unfortunately :(

• This reply was modified 13 years, 4 months ago by  MisterM2402 [Michael].

I’m reading Japanese for Busy People II just now and it’s quite good. It’s free from my Uni library though, and I’m pretty busy atm, so it suits me well haha.

Everyone’s made good suggestions so far, look here too: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=95122

Instead of it sounding like SHEE-CHEE-NEEN, I’m guessing it’s more like SHEECH-NEEN, yeah? There are some words that you can “contract” by not pronouncing the vowels (e.g. 一 is commonly pronounced EECH instead of EECHEE, and して is said as SHTE [one syllable]).