We had to take the site down today to put updates up (sorry!!) and like a lot of things, it’s taking way longer than we thought. So, we’re going to put the site back up with the updates partially done, and over the next few days we should be able to get everything squared away and finished. Depending on what you’re studying, you may or may not get affected by the updates as they’re going up, so here’s a summary of what’s changing so you can get a good idea.

Updates That Might Affect You

Like I said, depending on what you’re studying and working on, the updates may or may not affect you. The main things that need watching out for are the kanji / radicals section. It’s also the areas I was trying to get ready for today’s update. Although most of it was ready, I ran into a lot of road blocks that slowed down getting everything out of a spreadsheet and onto TextFugu, so the updates will keep on rolling (and hopefully be done by this weekend, or early next week). First, I’ll go over changes at the same time as I go over how it might affect you.

Radicals Page

There’s a Radicals Page that contains all the radicals now. The Kanji menu before just didn’t make sense, and it was hard to find what you needed to find. Now all radicals are on one page. Even better, if you click on a radical it will take you to a radical page for that radical (which never existed before). On the page is the mnemonic for the radical as well as a list of kanji the radical is used in, in case you’re interested.

Change #1: Only the radicals you need for the next set of kanji are present. I’ve taken out any radicals not used until right before you need to use them. That way they’ll be fresher in your brain, and you won’t have to learn any radicals you don’t need right away. Just more efficient and will help you to learn radicals faster and kanji better.

Change #2: There are some new radicals as well. As I went through kanji, I kept finding more and more things I wish I had made as radicals, but it was hard to go back. This was my chance. There’s a bunch of new radicals in there. I’d recommend going through and reading through them. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes or so if you just read and look. Radicals aren’t too hard to remember, right? It’s the kanji that gets nassttty, I think.

Change #3: Some radical names have changed (sorry!). I made some mistakes on naming previous radicals in the past. I just didn’t have enough experience with them and didn’t know enough how they would effect future things. But now I know, so now I want to make sure each radical is more memorable. I’ve changed out radicals with long names (super sweet water slide is just a water slide now), I’ve changed radical names that were too similar to other radical names (upside down box, knocked over box, knocked over broken box, box, etc., is just ridiculous. They all have very different names now), and I’ve changed most names that aren’t nouns (i.e. things) because things make for way better mnemonics once you have to use them with kanji. I’d look through the Radicals page and see what looks different for you, and click on those ones and read the mnemonic to remember them. Really sorry for making you re-learn some radicals, but in the long term it will really, really help with kanji learning.

As for what might affect you – it’s the above things, and also the Anki decks for the radicals. I’ll have the new decks up probably tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight. I’ll let you know in the updates section of the dashboard where you can find these Anki downloads soon, so check there please!

Kanji Page

Kanji also gets its own page, like the radicals. It makes it a lot easier to find kanji and see where you’re at, in the grand scheme of things. This is the section that is the least complete in terms of the updates, and the part I’d recommend staying away from if you’re anywhere above 3-strokes (for a couple days, at least). Here’s what’s going on.

Change #1: Kanji has its own page – although lessons will suggest what kanji to learn before moving on (since lessons use kanji in the example sentences, etc., based off these “suggestions”), the kanji page itself is going to be more standalone (if you want it to be). Instead of having to go to a stroke’s page or having to dig around to find what you’re looking for, everything’s in one place. If you want to find something, I’d recommend doing ctrl+f or cmd+f and searching the page that way.

Change #2: A lot of the mnemonics for kanji and kanji reading are getting changed, either because the mnemonics could be better (I’ve gotten better at coming up with mnemonics I think, so the older kanji mnemonics could stand some improvements) or because the radical changed and so the mnemonic has to change. The thing about kanji mnemonics, though, is if something worked for you, you don’t have to learn a new mnemonic, because the important thing is you know the kanji. If a mnemonic didn’t work for you, then you may have a better mnemonic to use now that will actually help you to remember the kanji / reading of the kanji!

Change #3: There’s been a lot of visual / interface changes on the kanji pages too. Just go look at any kanji 3-stroke or below to see. In terms of content changes I’m now listing the radicals that make up the kanji with links to their respective radical pages, just in case you need to remember a radical. Also, vocab are getting mnemonics / pointers for how to learn them. More on that in the next section of this post.

Basically, though, here’s the deal. I’ll need another couple days to get all the kanji pages updated. One more bad news, too – I had to backtrack on 7-stroke kanji for a little bit, because of the new way kanji’s set up and organized. I have to finish all of the kanji in a section before I put them up, so this will change how kanji gets updated and added on the site. Good news is probably next week all the 7-stroke kanji will be added up, so even though you lose around forty 7-stroke kanji for a week, you’ll get around 100 next week with most of them being totally new. At least, that’s the plan.

As for Anki decks, there’s a new Kanji Anki Deck set that I’ll probably put up tomorrow. It’s a lot more simplified from the current deck, and although some fields are now going to be gone, I think it’s an overall better experience in terms of how it’s supposed to work. I’m sure I’ll hear from you if you hate it, though ;) Expect that tomorrowish.

Vocab Page

Vocab page is the least finished of the three main new content-related sections, but it’s also the newest. Vocab’s hard, and people email me telling me it’s hard, and I know it’s hard… Vocab’s really the only really abstract thing you have to learn on TextFugu. There’s not much there to help you with it, and that sucks, I think. So, I’ve been working on fixing this so even vocab is more of a pleasure.

Change #1: Vocab has its own page. You can see what kanji spawned this vocab, too (though not yet, I’ll be adding that in next week).

Change #2: On an individual kanji’s page, each vocab word will have 2 or 3 sections below it, to help you remember. There will be “Combo” (to show you what two+ kanji make up the word), “Meaning” (a hint to help you to learn the meaning of the vocab word) and “Reading” (a hint to help you learn the reading of the vocab word). Even though vocab will always remain difficult, I think this new section appended to each vocab in the kanji pages will really help ease a lot of the pain – then you can focus on learning more, rather than struggling and getting overwhelmed with vocabulary.

Change #3: I’ve decided to strip out any vocab you aren’t learning at that moment from kanji pages. I can see how it might be useful, but at the same time, I want people to focus on things that aren’t abstract. I think it will help people to progress more quickly and with fewer distractions. All those words will come up eventually, but not until you know all the kanji that reside within a given word.

Vocab’s the main thing that’s slowing things down, but I’m adding in vocab mnemonics / hints as the kanji pages get updated with the new mnemonics as well. Same as kanji, vocab (at this point) has only been updated up to 3-stroke kanji, but over the next few days I should finish up to 6-stroke with the new vocab stuff. Figure it’s best to do this rather than keep the site down, yeah? :)

Updates That Probably Won’t Affect You

Hashi’s been working on the design side of the updates (and sometimes tagging Viet in too), and there’ll continue to be updates for the design in the coming week that we didn’t quite get done yet. There’s lots of fixes and little alterations that will happen tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, but hopefully it won’t prevent you from studying and learning. There’s probably more than this, but here’s the things I can think of that will be changed around in the very near future.

1. Dashboard (Why’s it so boring??)
2. Table Of Contents (A little bit of fine tuning is in order)
3. New About Page (currently not up)
4. Updated FAQ Page (it’s sort of out of date).
5. And probably a bunch of other things I don’t know about / am forgetting

Anyways, I don’t really know what goes on in this area. I just nod my head and pretend, but I’m sure there’s fantastic things happening. Of course, other things have already changed. Like the table of contents has its own page now (no more drop down menu that breaks for half the people out there), and kanji/radicals has its own section as well. We’ll be making tweaks, but the big stuff is there.

So, be nice to us for a couple days at least. Lots of things will be fixed and changed (hopefully for the better) and we’ll keep you updated as to what those things are as we do it, so you’re not in the dark. Follow us on Twitter to get all the deets, or just keep an eye on the blog (here) or your dashboard (here).

Roundup

Just a quick roundup, in case you forgot:

1. Individual radicals now have their own individual pages.
2. There’s new radicals and changes to current radicals to make them more unique and memorable (better for learning kanji)
3. Individual kanji are getting mnemonic upgrades, either because mnemonics got better or because radicals got changed.
4. Kanji after 3-stroke (that’s 4-stroke and up) isn’t quite ready for use yet. You probably can use it, but it’s not going to be finished updating for a few more days.
5. Vocab got better – updates have and will have better ways to study vocab.
6. Kanji and Radicals will be getting new Anki decks tomorrow, most likely.
7. Visual updates also happening over the next few days, but I don’t really know what’s going on here because I’m making someone else do it (I know how much you hate it when I work on design… content content content, yeah??).
8. Give us a few days before you barrage us with broken things – we already have a big list of things that need to be fixed and worked on, though we hope the site works pretty good for you right now. It’ll get better in the next couple days, promise!

I think that’s everything – so sorry again for the downtime to work on these updates. Big updates like this never go to plan, even with three people working on them day and night day and night weeks before launch day :( For the stuff that’s up right now, I hope you enjoy it, for the stuff that’s not up but going to be up the next few days, I hope you look forward to it! After this, I’ll be able to get back to more of a normal update routine… one that doesn’t require thousands of kanji, radicals, and vocab spreadsheet entries, I hope!

Was that a corny enough title? I hope so, I try really hard.

I’ve been trying to think of some ways to provide a little extra value for members, but in a way that doesn’t take up a ton of time (because, you know, there are lessons and such to write). In the forums, MisterM sparked a little idea in my head, so I’m going to try and make it happen. We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to be doing “mini-lessons” in a members-only section of the forum. What does that mean? Read on:

What’s A “Mini-Lesson”?

So, the idea behind a mini-lesson is two-fold.

1. It’s small, so it won’t take too much time (for both parties)
2. It’s consistent, meaning you can spend five minutes a day learning something different and new every day (or, at least 5 days a week, which is what I’m planning for mini-lessons at the moment).

Consistency is the most important part, I think (don’t I harp on that enough in the lessons themselves?), but I like how small these are going to be. You can actually pull a ton of information from just a little tidbit of Japanese, if you know where to look and know what to ask (which is what I’m attempting to do… ask the right questions). Here’s the very first one … I’m sure we’ll see the mini-lessons evolve over time, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

If you’re a member, you can click on the image above to be taken to Mini Lesson #1

Also, the mini-lessons are going to be in the forum (only accessible by members, I’m afraid), making it easier to post them up and easier for people to have discussions on them. Folks can talk about the answer, try to figure the answer out, and come to better conclusions. Plus, since seeing how people think is really important when learning something (i.e. seeing how people come to various conclusions for the mini-lessons), even if you don’t know the answers you’ll be able to learn a ton that way. Half of learning a language (okay, not half, but a good percent) is learning how to think and learn. Once you learn how to do those things, you get better and this will help with that.

Then, after 24 hours or so (or after the weekend, if it’s Friday) I’ll post the answer up on the topic thread so everyone can see the “official” answer, though I’m sure you’ll all figure out all the answers before then ;) It’s kind of like a crossword puzzle in the newspaper. One day you get the questions and the next day you get the answers so you can check and compare (and learn what you did wrong so you’ll be better next time).

Anyhoo, I’m excited about this. I’m trying to make sure I get it into my schedule so I do this every day. Hopefully will make forum-people happy too. I’ve always thought the forum needed more learning-related stuff to happen, so this is a first step in that direction, I hope!

Update Turns out it wasn’t as interesting for people as I thought :/ We’ll be putting mini-lessons on hold for a while until more folks want it or we figure out a way to make it more useful / interesting for peeps!

I actually haven’t done this before. The other day I thought I’d mess around looking at TextFugu numbers, just because I thought it would be interesting. I figured out the breakdown of member types, how many people have asked for a refund, how many people have canceled monthly payments, and how many people have upgraded to Forever from monthly. I also figured out a couple of other interesting things, if you’re interested.

I Have No Idea What’s Normal…

But these are the numbers I came up with. Seems pretty good to me, though I’m no fancy MBA or anything like that. I’m not really keen to share actual member numbers, but these are pretty interesting too, I think!

71% of members are Forever Members (thanks, everyone!)

29% of members are Monthly Members (thank you very much, too!)

“Other” Members (friends, reviewers, etc. who get free accounts) are such a small percent I’m not including them here.

Since the beginning of TextFugu, 20% of monthly members have canceled their accounts (sad face)

~8-10% of monthly members have upgraded to Forever (email me if you want to do this, I’ll hook you up with a better deal)

~70% of monthly members are continuing to be monthly members. Thank you so much for your support!

.005% of people who pay for TextFugu have asked for a refund. The main reason (it seems) people ask for a refund is because they’re too advanced for the content. That’ll of course be less and less of an issue over time! :D

Anyhoo, time to get back to work. Writing blog posts with numbers in them is a good diversion from other, important things ;)

Non-logged in users can’t see this (lucky you, members!), but I’m starting to organize and reorganize the menu for the future. A while back I mentioned that I’m working on an “audio section.” It’s still pretty early in development, and I’m working on finding people to work with on it, but I wanted to put it up in the menu so I could get started. It’s all about the MVP (Minimum viable product), because then I can get feedback, figure out what works (and what doesn’t) then make something useful and great to use early on, rather than putting a ton of time and effort into something that won’t necessarily work. Anyways, the goal is to start slow and then ramp up this “Conversation” section as soon as I get into Season 4.

Speaking of Season 4… If you’re logged in, you can see that there is now an “old” tab where Season 4 used to be. Because there are so many new Season 3 chapters planned, I decided it would be best to reorganize this too, and put all the old lessons (ones that need revisions) into one place, and then go fresh on Season 3. It just helps with organization, making it easier to continue moving forward with updates without having to worry as much about what’s what and where it connects, etc!

So, just some small changes that shouldn’t really affect you too much now. They should, however, be kind of awesome for your future.

I might have mentioned this in a few places, but today’s kind of a big day in TextFugu-land. The first Tofugu/TextFugu employee started (Say “hi” to Hashi!), and in order to do that I expanded my office to two whole desks. TWO. That’s at least twice as much as one.

Hashi (aka Justin Gordan Levitt)

A hanging Fugu

Messy desk!

My favorite thing is that he’ll be able to work on work and then I’ll be able to work on lessons and it’ll be super cool (i.e. I’ll have more time to get certain things done with his help, and he’ll get things done too… I guess that’s kind of the point of having an employee, right?).

Hashi graduated from the same college, and we knew each other from working at the computer help desk. He took forever to graduate because he’s younger than me (or some terrible excuse like that), and graduated just a couple weeks ago then moved to Portland so he could start work. Today’s his first day, and for the first time in quite a bit, some bounties were done (whaaaat!?).

Anyways, lots of great stuff should come from this, especially over time! He’s going to be helping a lot on Tofugu on the front end, and a lot on TextFugu on the back end. Look out for more things from Hashi in the coming months :D

Yesterday morning I put up the new forums, which ended a bag full of updates (including an entire site redesign) and pretty much completed everything I needed to do to get things up to date and ready for future features / sections.

The new forum, I think, was the toughest update to do, and one I was sort of dreading. The old forums were running on a standalone version of bbpress. It was pretty good, but it had its problems. First issue was that it didn’t let you sign in with your TextFugu usernames, meaning you’d have to create a second username (or the same username you had before, again). The other issue was that it didn’t feel like a part of the site. It looked different and pretty much was different in every way.

The new forums still use bbpress, but now it’s an actual plugin rather than a standalone software. It goes right into your site, does everything automatigically, and allows you to use current usernames and so on. It also looks like part of the site (because it is) – take a look and see for yourself if you want!

In so many ways it’s 100x better, but there are a few things that don’t quite work the way it used to. Some of the changes I like a lot, and some of them I’ll hopefully figure out how to fix and get working.

• YouTube Embeds are only do-able by admins (like me!) and not regular users (like everyone else). This is sad-bears, and obviously something I’ll be fixing as soon as I can figure out a way to.
• Adding images also doesn’t work, for the same reason as YouTube videos (if everyone had the ability to post up any code they want, someone could in theory put up some malicious something-or-another and mess it up for everyone else). Still, will try to figure out a workaround, since images are a lot of fun.
• Only TextFugu Members can post now – used to be that anyone could sign up for the forum (though it was generally hidden from non-member site). Now I have to have it so that only members can post. Non-members can still see posts and any non-member-only protected sections of the forum.
• Haven’t been able to transfer “old” forum posts to the “new” forum. Not sure if I’ll ever be able to (seems like there are too many posts in the old forum!). Thankfully, you guys have jumped right on over to the new forums and have been pretty active! Thank you for switching over so nicely! You are hoopy froods!
• A few small admin/moderator differences that I’m trying to figure out still… not something most people see, though!

But anyways, if you haven’t seen it yet check it out! I think it’s overall pretty slick, and with updates in the future it’ll be even slicker. See you on the forums, I’m sure! :D

Oh hi there. Notice anything different? Just applied a facelift to TextFugu! :D

Literally have been working on this redesign for around 6 months, very slowly but surely doing tiny bits at a time (because I wanted to make sure I spent 99% of my time on new content rather than dumb redesigns). Then, about 48 hours ago I got some kind of design itch and had to work on it. I worked on it pretty much every waking hour during that time, stayed up late, and just got it done. First six months got me about 5% finished with the redesign. Last 48 hours finished the last 95%. Now I can get back to work on content again… obsession over!

What Has Changed

Most of the change is in the look and feel of TextFugu – content-wise there isn’t too much new (a few small things), but the new design makes room (and helps with organization) for future things to be added to TextFugu that wouldn’t have worked too well in the old design.

Also, I think I’ve made lessons a little more readable. They look pretty similar, but there are fewer words per line and the spacing is a little nicer. Some work needs to be done on lists and blockquotes to bring them in line with the rest of the text in terms of how they look, but overall I think it’s a big improvement. The new design is also a little friendlier to mobile devices and tablets, so those of you using iPads to read TextFugu should notice a bit of an improvement, I think! Someday there’ll be a mobile version of TextFugu, but until then this update should make things just a little bit better!

As for new stuff – the dashboard got a lot of updates, and is actually a little bit useful now. Before it was totally useless, now it’s slightly useful. That’s an improvement in my book! Changes to the dashboard are…

• “Weekly Video” feature for members – just a weekly video on the dashboard talking about something that can help anyone who’s learning Japanese, regardless of level. That way all members can learn something / get something from the video!
• Form for joining the mailing list (which I’ll start mailing in again any moment now, I’m sure!).
• Space for special downloadables. Nothing here yet, but will be adding things for you in the coming month or two. I’m working on an ebook for Tofugu, and it’ll be free for TextFugu members (you guys get everything, lucky ducks!). Also working on TextFugu workbooks that will help you to review things you learned in the Seasons, as well as special articles for members that hopefully will help you out (but don’t fit anywhere in the main part of the text).
• And finally, added a space for updates on TextFugu from around the web, including blog posts, Facebook updates, and the Twitter search for “TextFugu” so you can see if anyone’s complaining or asking questions :P

There are a bunch of other small changes strewn about TextFugu too, and I’m sure you’ll bump into them as you work your way through the new design!

“Emergency” Contact

The coolest thing I’ve added to the new design, I think, is the “Emergency” contact form. It’s on the contact page, and there’s a form there that you can fill out if your account isn’t working (or some other “emergency” along those lines). When you fill out that form, I get a text message telling me you sent that, so that way even if my email isn’t open (as it often isn’t, so I can stay focused) I can respond and fix your problem really quickly… now, this assumes I’m not sleeping or away from a computer, but chances are I’m not doing either of those things, meaning you get an even quicker response. Generally I think I’m pretty speedy, but this’ll help if there’s ever a problem. Please don’t send a million of them to me in the middle of the night, though!!!

Bugs

There are a still a bunch of bugs to fix that I’m working on, but overall most things should be working pretty well. Let me know if you notice anything totally missing or broken, though, and I’ll give it a fix. Hopefully most things are where they should be and a little bit prettier too! I hope you like the new design – time to go back to work on the next lesson in Season 3!

Of course, the $7,320 number is just your end of the bargain. I’m adding 10% to make it 110% of revenues donated, bringing that total up to $8,052.

I donated the money to World Vision, which wasn’t an easy choice. Finding a high impact charity that at the same time is trustworthy and reliable (i.e. not a scam trying to steal money) is one challenge, making it hard to look at the really small organizations (though I’m sure they’re great). The reason I went with World Vision was because they have a national headquarters in Japan, they’ve sent people to Japan to work (on top of the workers already in Japan), they worked on the Kobe Earthquake, I was able to go through their financials (publicly available), they’ve sent supplies and are still sending supplies (i.e. helping people directly), they were great/helpful on the telephone (what’s a telephone??), and a lot of their focus is on children (children separated from parents/family, children that have had trauma, etc). If you help the children, you help the parents and the families, plus, they’re kids, you know? Also, supposedly they’ll stop accepting money when they run out of need for it (for a particular disaster, problem, etc), though I imagine that kind of thing is tough to measure.

Here’s my receipt (yay, payable via Paypal). I also rounded up… apparently their max is $5000 for a donation, so I had to put in $860 and change “number of items” in the cart to 10 so I could get up to $8060 ($860 x 10 = $8060).

Whatever you do, I think it’s important you donate to someone you believe in. There are a lot of good charities out there doing a lot of good things. Is one wayyyyy better than the rest? Probably not (that’s what makes this so hard). Are there a lot of good organizations doing good things? Definitely.

So, I’m sure this amount of money isn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but it should buy a lot of water, blankets, food, and so on for a lot of people, if used correctly.

Thanks so much for all your support! I’m really happy and proud to have such a giving and passionate community here! Thank you all!