Here’s the quick and skinny on it: Each kanji narrative is taking a lot longer than I thought to write (good thing and a bad thing, I think. The more time I can put in each one the better they’ll be when they’re finished! … but at the same time they take longer to write, and I know you’re all very patiently waiting!). The more I worked on Kanji2.0, the more ways I found to improve on stuff (which includes both simplifying things down to a prettier core as well as working on some new things too!). I definitely have a good layout now for things, and I should have a preview version of the first 6-7 chapters for members of TextFugu sometime later this week. At that point I’ll probably put the new content up in a separate drop-down so that you can still use “Legacy” Kanji 1.0 as well as the new one, depending on where you’re at. From there, I’ll just add new sections as I have them done, probably catching up to Kanji1.0 a week or two after the preview is up (I’m on a roll, now, I think, partly thanks to my new “office”).

I also wanted to thank everyone for the patience. You guys are all really awesome and patient! I really appreciate it, and it helps me to focus on what’s important (getting good content out to you all!). Thank you very much!

P.S. I just found an awesome t-shirt making company in Portland. That can only mean one thing… hmmm.

If everything goes okay over the next 15 minutes, there should be a moderate amount of change. This is going to set the groundwork for a lot of changes over the next week or two in terms of how the content is displayed (two words: “more simple”). A few new things include:

• Dashboard (what would you like to see in your dashboard?)
• Different menus for logged in people and not logged in people (and its simplified)
• New front page (will be doing tests on this, so expect to see small changes over the next few weeks).
• A Manifesto (still writing it, Sorry!)

If you notice anything broken in your particular browser, please shoot me an e-mail at koichi@textfugu.com. Looks good in Firefox / Chrome on my end, anyways, but you never know with that sneaky Internet Explorer.

Anyways, like I said, very early version of things, and laying the groundwork for some other changes I’ve wanted to make. Would love to hear your ideas, too, especially since things are in early stages!

One of the coolest things about writing your own textbook is the ability to make fun of other people’s textbooks… I’m not sure why more people didn’t take advantage of this. I don’t think my physics text in high school once took a jab at another physics text. Maybe they just didn’t have any sense of humor (or, they were just horribly boring to begin with).

Although I haven’t posted updates on the blog in a little while (make sure you follow TextFugu on Twitter if you want update alerts as they happen), there have been quite a few updates. One of them, the most recent, is the beginning of “conversation practice,” which basically sits you down with a conversation script to read and go through. This sort of text is pretty standard in any Japanese textbook. Heck, it’s even required, I’d say. The problem with these, though, is that they’re terribly boring… and they don’t do a good job explaining themselves, which essentially means you memorize the words and phrases as is (unless you have a teacher around to expand your horizons). Here’s what TextFugu is doing instead:

1. Be interesting with the story. End on cliff hangers (so you want to keep learning) and make you laugh.
2. Explain each and every line in a way that a) helps you learn the sentence, and b) helps you learn it in a way that you understand the underlying concept, so that you can use that concept to say other, similar things. It’s not very useful if you memorize conversations line by line, and still can’t use any of the grammar to be found within it.

Anyways, I can tell I’m going to enjoy writing these. If you want a sneak peak (or a full peak), you can take a look at the first part of the story: Mary Makes A Horrible New Friend.

Kanji Updates

Because I’m finding that adding kanji to lessons is taking a lot longer than it should (seriously, I don’t know why it takes me so long, despite a good typing speed & masterful knowledge of shortcut keys), I’m going to start trying to put up approximately five new kanji every day (and hopefully a little more when I can). This means there will always be one “in progress” kanji chapter. It won’t be done, but you’ll have access to the most recently added kanji. Just be warned that some small changes may happen between its “in progress” stage and its “finished” stage, but at least you’ll be able to study them, if you’re at that stage.

Also, it’s a good opportunity for people to find and submit bounties. Heck, I love that I have hundreds of editors going over everything.

So, pretty soon you’ll see an “in progress” kanji chapter pop up, and there should be smaller (but more frequent) kanji updates going up almost every day.

Anyways, stay classy San Diego.