Yeah I guess. I’m going to take a few days to do some chapters of different books before I set out a path. I guess the important thing is to learn at least some new things every day, and you will get there. It’s just so much easier when you can find a great and engaging textbook :)

Btw, I found a book called “reading Japanese” published by Yale press. It goes like this: learn like 20 kanji, read a metric ton of readings that contain them. Learn some kanji, read another ton of readings that contain the former and new kanji. It looks a lot like what I’m looking for, but kanji is a bit of a problem. It pretty much just throws them at you, and that’s it. But then again, you immediately start using them in many many sentences, which reinforces memorization in a more natural way than using ‘ smart memory tricks’. From what I can tell it starts using authentic reading selection after a couple of chapters.

Another problem is that this book is pretty old. The romaji is really odd. I’d rather have no romaji to be honest. It writes ‘tsu’  as ‘tu’  and ‘chi’ as ‘ti’ . Sort of annoying, as this makes absolutely no sense considering the pronunciation.

Jury is still out on this one, but it looks promising. I have found a ‘preview’ if anyone is interested (just pm me). If the kanji part ends up working for me I will probably buy it and dig in.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by  Daan de Boer.

I don’t know why it has romaji in there at all. But the actual reading is all real. This is the first proper chapter of the book. You first get 20 kanji (each with about 20 example sentences) and then you get this:

http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/1763/45657259.jpg

And it does that for about 400 pages with increasing complexity. Seems like a nice book to spend some time on every day, but we’ll see how I feel in a few days. It does presuppose quite a bit of grammar I don’t know yet, like unfamiliar verb conjugations.

It also has stuff  I don’t know like: ” あのハンドバッグの下のパンフレット”, but since I know what の means I can figure it out with some thinking and figure it out for myself. That ‘ aha’ moment really makes new patterns stick with you. This is what I was looking for, it’s a challenge.
I guess it would be best to use this as a supplement next to an actual textbook though, because it doesn’t actually explain anything, it just immerses you with japanese literature of increasing complexity.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by  Daan de Boer.
• This reply was modified 10 years, 11 months ago by  Daan de Boer.