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.

Awesome, thanks. So would you say I could pick up Tobira after Textfugu? I’m asking since you used Nakama in your first two years. I checked Nakama on amazon and it seems a lot of the index is covered by Textfugu,  but you can’t really judge hundreds of pages on an index alone :)

It doesn’t have to match exactly of course, as long as I won’t be completely lost I don’t mind putting in the extra effort.

I agree for the most part. What I mean is not necessarily a ‘grammar bible’  as much as a textbook that focuses on grammar. I’ll learn a lot of vocab with kanji, and reading and listening comprehension with other resources. Of course reading and listening will also involve learning grammar.

It might be a bit hard to explain, as it’s something I’ve gotten to know and love from books in different languages. I’ve used books called ‘reading french’  and ‘german for reading’ (I believe), which basically taught a grammar point each lesson, followed by many reading examples, examples of using it in conversation, etc. For instance:

” ‘plus’ can be used for comparing, as in: ‘ plus grande que’  (bigger than)”. And then there would follow many examples of this in actual texts. The grammar point you learned every chapter was extremely small (as in “plus can be used to compare”), but you would learn a small thing every chapter, for like 400 pages or so. By the end, I could suddenly come up with my own (and read others’) complex french sentences. I loved it.

This approach is focused on grammar in that the whole point is to introduce a grammatical concept each time (supplemented with readings and conversational examples). That’s sort of what TF does, but it doesn’t go into that much detail (as you said, it’s not even intermediate, whatever that means). I wouldn’t mind reading a very large book back to back, if it introduced a small grammar concept every chapter with some nice examples. I would do a couple a day, along with more ‘fun’ activities such as actual reading and listening.

Thanks for your reply!

• 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.