PHP Amateur At Work

You may have noticed some “strange” (but very useful) changes going on. Now, if you’re logged in you’ll see different things from those that are logged out (which means you should log in!). When you’re logged in, you will no longer see so many “buy now” buttons, and you’ll have a little button at the bottom of your screen that lets you post a bounty from any page! How convenient.

I’m also spending the next 9 days going through Season 1 and Season 2 to make them better, streamline some things more effectively, and overall just make the experience better for all of you learning Japanese. Thanks to all the response I’ve gotten so far from you guys, I think I’ve also figured out my key demographic: Self-learners of Japanese. This is a really tough group, but nobody else really caters to them, I think. I’ve already done a lot of things with TextFugu to help keep self-learners motivated, but now I’ll be able to focus on that much more to make the experience for self-learners of Japanese so much better (and non self-learners won’t have any problems either, if you’re out there!).

I’ve also gotten a little bit of help on the customer service side, so if you send us a message, hopefully you can expect to get a quicker (and more pleasant than me) response. Of course, you can still always e-mail me directly.

Coming up:

Going through chapters one-by-one and making content / usability adjustments. You’ll start to see sub-chapters pop up one at a time on various chapters to make your life easier (especially when going back and re-reading something specific).
New worksheets: I’ll be re-doing all old worksheets to streamline them with a new “style” – content won’t really change in these, so don’t worry, just want to go back and pretty up old worksheets and make them easier to use.
Talking with users. I won’t be doing this right away, but starting in February I’d love to talk to some of you and learn more about how you use TextFugu and what you like / don’t like about it. This will help me make a better product, and market it more effectively!

Of course, there’s a lot more than that going on, but those are the main things I’m focusing on this week. Cheers and thank you to all of the support so far!

bounty, php, updates

sumi

I have a problem with the “Claim Bounty” you have added. I print the classes and some of the type is covered by this at the bottom left of every page.
sumi

I also find it distracting to see “Claim Bounty” at the bottom of the screen.
Sorry for the comments. I appreciate all the improvements you are making.
Tanne

If the key demographic is the autodidact, this website is gonna end up with the little questions that one usually asks one’s real life teachers after class. I wonder if this is gonna be a problem.
http://mangacomments.wordpress.com/ パトーくん

I guess that makes me a non self-learner^^

For almost 1 year I’ve been learning Japanese in evening class. I made a couple of nice friends and my sensei rocks.

I think it’s important (regardless the language you are learning) to review the stuff you already know from a different point of view. This is where Textfugu jumps in: Compared to all other textbooks Textfugu wraps up all the beginner topics in a fresh new way. It’s fun to read and you are actually learning stuff. That’s combination that you won’t see often xD

So keep up that great work Kouichi!
がんばって。

PS: Forgive me if there are some spelling mistakes. It’s almost 2 a.m. here in Germany.
http://www.textfugu.com koichi

Thanks Sumi, I’ll try to adjust this so it doesn’t block printing out.

@Tanne – Hopefully I’ll get it to the point where a lot of these questions are answered (at least that’s the goal). One reason I have the bounty system up, in fact. I want people to let me know what questions they have so I can continue to improve the text!
Tsetycoon13

I’ve already done your old worksheets, so maybe I’ll also complete your new worksheets, Koichi, just as a review.
Reem Al-Baghli

I already knew the hiragana, katakana, n some kanji before starting textfugu. I learned the hiragana through practise sheets which took a long time. Learning Katakana was much faster due to an iPhone app. that had interactive flash cards, and multiple choice quizes.
each flash card would show its corresponding romaji/audio only after touching it. I think it would be gr8 2 have that in textfugu.