Thanks for your response, but saying common phrases aren’t useful is really off the mark. I’m not talking about learning phrases like “Do you speak Japanese?” I’m talking about ones like I mentioned such as hello, goodbye, good day, good night, please, thank you, i dont understand, etc etc. These are all very, very basic staples of learning any language and are extremely common. I’m quite suprised these aren’t included as vocabulary in the Textfugu lessons. And yeah, I know a few of them, like こんいちは and ありがとう, but I also know there are many different greetings, a handful of different forms of “thank you”, depending on how polite you want to be, etc, lots of things I need to learn. It’s like you said, there are different ways to say everything, but in following with Koichi’s 80-20 rule (which is a pretty practical concept) I know that there are many common ways people are going to say things and you will usually hear them that way. These phrases have proven absolutely detrimental in having conversation with foreigners in my other language backgrounds. I would have gotten nowhere without being able to say simple things like “good evening” “how are you?” “please” “thank you” “see you later” “have a great day” etc. You get the idea. I want to be sure I can say these things in Japanese in the proper way, which makes it tricky to just look them up on Jisho.org because it doesn’t do the best job explaining which ones are appropriate for what situations. This is why I feel I need another resource besides Textfugu, preferably one that is free, as I’m hard pressed for funds right now. A friend of mine recommended “Japanese for Busy People”, but like I said, I’m broke, so for the moment I’ll have to wait on that.

This is definitely something I think Textfugu could use, and if Koichi doesn’t see this post, I might drop a suggestion with him via email some time. In the mean time I’ll check out the resources page you linked to and see what I can dig up there. Thanks for the intel.

Carlie, I understand how ya feel. Haha. I may be treading rather slowly into season 2, as I spent a good amount of time working on the material from season 1, then took a few weeks off to do lots of holiday stuff, and ended up forgetting a lot of what I learned. I had the hiragana down pretty well (and katakana too), and now I can’t remember either one too well! I will probably just try to strengthen my hiragana for now though since katakana is covered in season 3. I had gone ahead and learned katakana after I finished season 1 and was waiting to have the money for membership. I may just hold off on reviewing katakana until I get to season 3. That might make it easier.

But yes, I’ll let you know when I’m feeling more comfortable and ready to talk to people online! Good luck to you as well! :)