Hello everyone!

My name is Jeff and I am currently living in Wisconsin. I started studying Japanese a few years back (2009 to be exact). It was an on again, off again relationship that really had no structure through the years. At the start of this year, I decided to be more disciplined and have been making “traditions” and the follow-through has been quite good. I work a full-time job as an engineer and study Japanese after work for about 4 hours each night (I do a review each morning before work for about an hour and a half). Anyway, since I made this into a more regular thing and am amendment about not breaking the streak (can you tell I’ve been taking notes koichi?) I am really starting to feel the progress.

I must say, I have been through a number of sources since I started this long term investment in my Japanese language learning journey. That said, it has been about 2 months of spending time with RTK and about 3-4 months with other sources/texts on getting the basic structure down along with much vocab. So, coming into TextFugu has been a bit of a review for me, however I think that the method presented for learning Kanji will be very helpful. I am sort of between a rock and a hard place with RTK as I am not learning the readings while going through v1 of Heisig’s book. I think the approach in TextFugu is refreshing and am excited to start getting into it more.

The reasons for my wanting to learn Japanese vary. On a broad level, I want to learn a second language and become a fluent bilingual individual. I think there are many benefits to this, cognitively speaking and that alone is a major goal. Japanese, specifically, is of interest to me as I have a great deal of interest in Japanese media as well as the culture. I first wanted to learn a few years ago for reasons of wanting to view media in raw format (anime, games, etc), however it has morphed into something much more than that now…and I am liking it. Every day I become more fascinated with what I learn and I look forward to finally being able to go there and converse.

Anyway, long story short, I am loving TextFugu so far and happy to be here amongst everyone.

始めまして
よろしくお願いします！