Thanks, Joel,
No, actually it was a Pimsleur course, which is very step by step and does a good job of building a conversational base over time.

I’ve found that, for me, one of the weaknesses of the Pimsleur approach is that it is completely audio based. Sometimes vocabulary is introduced at a rate that I simply can’t assimilate, especially as the sounds of most words have little relationship to English. Of course one can always redo a lesson, but I still have had a lot of difficulty remembering vocabulary introduced earlier in the course. Most of the constructions introduced, at least by halfway through Level 2, are more formal and assume interactions that one would use for business. I’m sure this would get me to Japan and back without creating an international incident, but I want to know more than just that. And though I’ve been exposed to some grammar overtly, I’ve had to pick up most of it intuitively, which leads to not a small amount of frustration. For example, I still can’t, for the life of me, figure out why sometimes a noun is followed by “wa” and sometimes by “ga” for the same verb. I’ve found myself starting to look around the web more and more to answer questions about grammar, pronunciation, verb conjugation, vocabulary etc.

I do plan to continue to supplement my TextFugu work with Pimsleur (hey, I’m retired, why not?) but I think that TextFugu, which appears to be more comprehensive, may become my primary method of attacking the language.

Take care and thanks for replying to my post.
Burry