A comment of mine published on Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide

Dear Tae,

I have just loved to come upon your guide! It is so full of useful details, organized, and pleasant! Also it is clear almost all the time.

Regardless of this, please allow me to point at an exceptional example of something that might deserve editing.

I thrilled in finding out ingredients to make nice sentences such as these:

魚が好きなタイプ。
魚が好きじゃないタイプ。
魚が好きだったタイプ。
魚が好きじゃなかったタイプ。

However, maybe it is not so didactic to show them in such a direct way, because they have at least three factors of difficulty for non-Japanese speakers:
-1- an adjective used where you would usually expect a verb;
-2- the foreign word タイプ used in a way that seems to be similar to English, but actually isn't;
-3- a complex syntactic construction translatable as an English relative clause.

Although I do approve your strategy to teach Japanese through a Japanese stance, this case is just too hard for a beginner. I don't mean it shouldn't be taught in this lesson. What I do mean is that it could be built upon an easier example such as this:

きれいな猫
きれいじゃない猫
きれいだった猫
きれいじゃなかった猫

Here you have a simple, concrete Japanese noun, along with an adjective with an English equivalent of the same nature, and also a simple syntactic structure. Once learners master something like this, they are surely ready to take more advantage of those nice, complex constructions with 好き.

What do you think?

(http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/adjectives#comment-21922)

Antes de comprar um livro pela Internet, olhe dentro dele

Precisando de um livro, mas na dúvida se ele realmente serve?
Encontre-o na minha loja filiada da Amazon e, então, clique em um botão como este aqui:  

Look inside a book before you buy it online

Wanting to buy a book and not knowing if it's good?
Just find it at my Amazon affiliate store and then click on a purchase button like this:  

こんにちはブラジルから - My first written text in Japanese

This is just a very simple way to introduce myself to people who know the land of the rising sun's language.

こんにちは。わたしはダニエルといいます。ブラジルからきました。

にほんごがすこしわかります。えいごとポルトガルごをはなします。

フォルタレザにすんでいます。さんじゅうよんさいです。やくしゃです。

えいがとビールがすきです。

So you want to learn how to speak and read Japanese...

 

日本語を話しますか。


I have been testing a lot of materials for learning to understand, speak, read, and write in Japanese. After I did start to learn a bit and could take a critical stance towards the resources, I came up with this post as a result. 

I hope you can take good advantage of all the items listed. Practically everything is available online for free without breaking any copyrights. The only possible issue is with Pimsleur audio lessons, which are usually sold. However, there is a tiny sample of them, which I have found on YouTube.com. It is only the first lesson, divided in three parts. Please don't use it for commercial purposes and don't search for further online free samples. If you download it, do it exclusively for your individual educational purposes. 

As for all the other studying and practicing materials as well as reference resources, simply enjoy them! And if you have any questions or comments on my experience in organizing this set of materials and starting to learn Japanese, don't hesitate to post a comment. 

---

 -1-

STUDY PLAN OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE

The materials are organized in function of their potential to get students ready for new contents, their complexity, and their potential to allow reviewing contents and skills worked on previously. The stages are two large ones, the first being divided in three substages: start part I, start part II, start part III, and long-term study and practice.

There is no necessary internal order for the items of a specified stage. However, complying with the order both of subitems and of stages and substages is highly recommended for a more effective and easy learning.

So, it is irrelevant if you start by listening to Pimsleur sample audio, or by reading the Textfugu lessons 2 to 4, or else by watching GenkiJapanNet’s tip video. In contrast, you should not read Textfugu lesson 4 before lessons 3 or 2 if you are really interested in learning Japanese from scratch in a way as effective as possible. Also, the most recommended way to start up is to study the items of part I of the start stage, instead of parts II or III, or else the items of the other stage.

START – Part I (3 items)	Japanese speaking lesson 1 by Pimsleur: - sample audio lesson: parts 1, 2, 3. Textfugu by Koichi (I): - lesson 2: Japanese character sets; - lesson 3: Japanese pronunciation; - lesson 4: Hiragana. Kanji learning tip by GenkiJapanNet: - 1 video
START – Part II (3 items)	Textfugu by Koichi (II): - pages 5 (Vocabulary) & 6 (Customized word lists) of lesson 5; - lessons: 7 (Intro to Kanji), 8 (Intro to Kanji radicals); - extra hiragana practice (from lesson 6). Japan Society language lessons (I): - 7 video lessons: 1 (Introduction), 2 (Numbers 1-100), 3 (Days of the week & of the month), 4 (To go), 5 (To drink, eat, see, hear), 6 (To do), 7 (To give and to receive). Expert Village lessons by Yuu Asakura: - 15 videos – Greetings & questions: 1; - 15 videos – Counting & buying: 2; - 14 videos – Basic conversation: 3; - 15 videos – Basic grammar: 4; - 14 videos – Traveling to Japan: 5.
START – Part III (3 items)	Japan Society language lessons (II): - 1 video lesson on ‘family members’; - Waku Waku by Konomi (14 video lessons). Wikibook: - lesson 3 on telephone numbers and ages. Japanese for Beginners by Eisha: - 5 video lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
LONG-TERM STUDY AND PRACTICE (3 items)	Free Japanese Lessons: - Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced levels Japanesepod101 audio lessons: - Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced levels How to read Japanese by Hidechi: - 25 video lessons

-2-

EVERYDAY RESOURCES FOR JAPANESE LANGUAGE

Don't worry if you have no clue of what these resources are all about. In due time, they will be very helpful. For someone in my learning stage, for instance, only the first six of the eight sets of URLs are interesting. The other two, concerning kanji (which is how the Japanese call Chinese characters), are for more advanced learners.

Tool for writing kana and kanji (in case of no MS Word IME for Windows 7):

• http://ajaxime.chasen.org/

Romaji-hiragana-katakana conversion:

• http://www.mauvecloud.net/charsets/asian/fastromaji.html

Popup tool - mouse pointer hovering for automatic conversion from kanji to kana and for dictionary:

• Firefox add-on: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/
• Chrome add-on: http://www.japanprobe.com/2010/01/07/rikaichan-for-google-chrome/

Japanese grammar guide:

• http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar

Japanese-English dictionary:

• http://tangorin.com/

English-Japanese dictionary:

• http://www.alc.co.jp/

List of Joyo kanjis: 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

Kanji radicals: 

• http://www.jisho.org/kanji/radicals/ 
• http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa070101a.htm