I promise this is a SCAM.
(Sentence Containing An M)

Yeah, the reason it’s written that way is to get your brain operating in a more Japanese order. In English, we tend to say who is doing something, what they’re doing, who/what they are doing it to (if applicable), some type of reason and finally time/location info. In Japanese the “what they’re doing” part usually comes at the end.
So a sentence like:
“Bob went to the store to buy an apple for his grandmother yesterday.”
Becomes, in “Japanese order” something more like:
“Bob, yesterday, for his grandmother, to the store, an apple, went to buy.”
or something like it…Japanese is a bit more flexible due to the particles.

Try leaving bowls of natto outside your house at night.

カイル is right. It’s as close as you’re going to get anyway. As a benefit, you get to listen to all the frog jokes and have people laugh (the same people again and again (apparently it never gets old)) every time you leave and they get to say 「カイル帰る(笑）」….

@ Missing – not too many people are complaining about it being too slow, I think the complaints are that it is going slower than promised. For example, on the last page of the new chapter it is mentioned that the kanji (7.3) will be up in a few days. It took 8 days. I’m not saying that 8 days is too long, but it’s more than a few. It’s these little delays and broken promises that lead to all the complaints of things taking too long or going to slow. If something is going to take a week, say it will take a week. Don’t say things like “we add a couple more chapters every month” if you’re only adding one a month. If it takes a month, say so.
(I don’t know when texfugu started exactly but I signed up early 2010, if things were coming at the pace a even one chapter a month, there should be over 100 as opposed to the current 64.)

You’ll find your vocab retention gets better when you know a lot of kanji. I think trying to learn a lot of vocab without it is making things harder than they have to be. Let’s look an example with kanji free study:

“a commuter pass (for trains)” – ていきけん
to get this correct, you have to remember 5 meaningless symbols (not easy)

now with kanji:
“a commuter pass (for trains)” – 定期券
to get this correct, you have to remember three symbols each of which has a unique meaning “determined interval ticket” (easy)

Granted I chose an easy example to make a point and not all vocabulary words are composed of kanji that make this much sense (at least to me) but a lot of them are and you drastically reduce the mental load required by learning the kanji first.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by  thisiskyle.

Your brain focuses on changes in things. If you look at a blank piece of paper, your brain makes note of the edges and, after an initial scan just to see that the rest is blank, will pretty much ignore the inside of the page and just keep track of the edges. The same is true for sound. If the sound you are hearing is fairly regular and smooth, your brain will tune it out pretty quickly. You can’t do this with random or chaotic noise (at least it’s harder). So if you are listening to music that is not particularly abrasive and it is loud enough to drown out the random noises in your setting that are harder to tune out, then it actually reduces the amount of information your brain is dealing with, giving you more cake to study with. OF course you want to reduce the random noise around you anyway, but that is not always possible (train, library, rattling fan, etc)

One thing that I would actually be interested in trying is to get a white noise generator (probably available online somewhere), a good pair of ear buds, and a set of hearing-protection headphone things that you are supposed to wear with certain power tools. I’d like to put the white noise in the ear buds and put the hearing-protection on after that. It should result in hearing just about nothing as white noise can be easily tuned out and would cover any small sounds that made it through the hearing-protection.

Don’t think of たら as past tense. Just think of it as “if”, the tense comes with the last verb.
雨が降ったら、野球をしません。 – If it rains, I won’t play baseball.
雨が降ったら、野球をしませんでした。 – When it rained, I didn’t play baseball.
雨が降らなかったら、野球をします。 – If it doesn’t rain, I’ll play baseball.
雨が降らなかったら、野球をしました。 – When it didn’t rain, I played baseball.

I think.

Negative – ないー＞なかったら

• This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by  thisiskyle.