Randomness

And here's some random vocab from the next chapter:

world - sekai

egg - tamago

hand - te

pretty, clean - kirei

to see, watch, look at - mimasu

I'm trying to avoid learning antonyms (or words that are too closely related) at the same time, so next time I will deal with ugly, dirty, and the like. :)

Lesson 3 exercises

A. 

1. Kutsu wa yasui desu yo.

Shoes are inexpensive, you know.

2. Doko no depaato de kaimashoo ka.

At which department store should we buy it?

3. Nani o nomimasu ka.

What will you drink?

4. Yamada san wa gakusei desu kedo, Suzuki san wa gakusei ja arimasen.

Mr. Yamada is a student, but Ms. Suzuki is not. 

B.

1. Enpitsu wa hyaku en deshita.

The pencil was one hundred yen.

2. Unagi wa sen'en deshita.

Eel was one thousand yen.

3. Booshi wa nisen'en deshita.

The hat was two thousand yen.

4. Kutsu mo nisen'en deshita.

The shoes were also two thousand yen.

C. 

1. Moo gohan o tabemashita ka.

Iie, kore kara tabemasu.

2. Kore wa nisen'en desu.

Kinoo sen'en deshita yo.

3. Kore kara nani o shimashoo ka.

Depaato e ikimashoo.

D. Antonyms

1. akarui / kurai

bright / dark

2. chiisai / ookii

small / big

3. ii / warui

good / bad

4. yasui / takai

inexpensive / expensive

E. 

1. Ookii uchi desu ne.

Your house is big.

2. Hiroi ima desu ne.

Your living room is wide.

3. Akarui kitchin/daidokoro desu ne. 

Your kitchen is bright.

F.

1. Doko e ikimashoo ka.

Where should we go?

2. Nani o tabemashoo ka.

What should we eat?

3. Dono depaato ga ii desu ka.

Which department store is good?

The book I stole these exercises from is listed in the first post. Hooray for finishing a chapter!

Verbs and the 'like' adjective...

My words of the day today:

yoofuku - clothes (This one makes sense to me because 'clothes' in Chinese is 'fu'... they're kind of similar.)

kookyuuhin - quality goods (This word totally doesn't exist in English... it sounds really slow on my recording because of the long vowels.)

shimasu - to do

dekakemasu - to go out

And the strange ones:

suki - to like 

daisuki - to like very much

Obviously, this phrase words as a verb in English and is translated as a verb, but it is used as an adjective in Japanese, so I think a more exacted translation would be 'liked' or perhaps 'beloved' in a weaker way... as in:

Kookyuuhin wa suki desu. - Quality goods are well liked; or, I like quality goods.

The word itself is easy to remember because it's one of my friends' nicknames! The usage will take a while to get used to, I think.

I haven't forgotten my hiragana! My words of the day in hiragana are:

ゅぉふく- yoofuku

こうきゆうひん - kookyuuhin

します - shimasu

でかけます - dekakemasu

すき - suki

だいすき - daisuki

Also, I think that 'dai' means 'very' or 'big'. It sounds like the word for 'big' in Mandarin (da) and it's the prefix in 'daigaku', which means 'university', which could be like a big school... It works for me, anyhow... :)

I'm learning again! Hooray!

A few vocab items

Wow, an entire month with only one post... with any luck (and a little determination), December will be better... I just need to get back into good habits. 

I think most of my previous vocabulary is still firmly entrenched in my brain. I'd thought that some of it might have disappeared due to lack of use, but I reviewed my little book today and didn't get stuck!

My new words and phrases of the day:

tatta - only

totemo - very

demo - but

tokoro de - by the way

itsu ka - sometime, someday

Demo is confusing me a bit because I've already learned a word for 'but', and it's kedo. But apparently they are used differently... kedo is a particle, demo is not. Kedo goes at the end of a phrase, demo is a conjunction used at the beginning of a sentence. I think this explains why Japanese people sometimes end up with phrases like this:

The lunch is expensive. But the breakfast is in expensive.

...which, in Japanese, looks something like this:

Hirugohan wa takai desu. Demo, asagohan wa yasui desu.

...which is perfectly acceptable. 

Also, through random readings about ESL learning and teaching, I've discovered that learning opposites at the same time can result in confusion... which I suppose I would have realized myself if I'd actually thought about it. I'm having troubles remembering telling words like 'akarui' and 'kurai' apart (bright and dark). In the future, I'll try to learn half of the pair first, and then add the second half later. 

Disappearing act...

Oh with the disappearing... So I went to Calgary for a weekend, then started school again (which occasionally requires some brain action) and work got crazy and blah blah blah.

I didn't forget about my Japanese learning altogether, though! While I was away, I learned almost all of my hiragana characters, and am in the process of practicing them. 

Here's what I added to my repertoire:

ha - は

hi - ひ

fu - ふ

he - へ

ho - ほ

ma - ま

mi - み

mu - む

me - め

mo - も

ya - や

yu - ゆ

yo - よ

I'm still working on the r- line... ra ら ri り ru る re れ and ro ろ. I keep forgetting wa わ and recognize but can't always reproduce the particle o を, but n ん is easy!

Still plugging along...

Food and shopping vocab

Two days in a row! Hooray! I am being good about learning my vocabulary right now... though not so much with the grammar. I am being lazy with that... I learned question words but not how to use them. That will be my project for the weekend. 

My food words:

pan - bread

sakana - fish (there's a restaurant in Calgary called the Sakana Grill... now I know what that means!)

maguro - tuna (good for using in sushi restaurants! not that I eat tuna...)

asagohan - breakfast

hirugohan - lunch

Random (shopping-related?) words:

hana - flower

bara - rose

casa - umbrella

And my question words:

nani - what 

doko - where

dono - which

Also, my hiragana of the day are ま and み (ma and mi). 27 unique hiragana characters down, 13 to go! Getting closer.... And I think, the more hiragana I learn, the easier they become to learn. :)

Hiragana fun and random stuff

I learned FIVE new hiragana characters today! They were actually remarkably easy to remember, though again, I write like a two-year-old. 

ha - は

hi - ひ

fu - ふ

he - へ

ho - ほ

I really have no idea what fu is doing in there, but sure, why not? は and ほ are easy to remember because they're almost the same (as long as I remember which is which! ha comes first...) へ is just plain easy, ふ is oddly easy to remember (it's very distinctive) and ひ looks like a happy face.

My words of today were:

akarui - light

kurai - dark

nani - what

kutsu - shoes

mise - store

depaato - department store

booshi - hat/cap

Apparently Thursday is a good day for learning Japanese.... I feel all educated today. HA! Or maybe it's just that my guilt kicks in only once a week. 

Adjectives!

I am excited because today I get to add adjectives to my collection! Apparently these are all i-adjectives (as opposed to na-adjectives), and I think there's some difference in how they are used, but I'm not quite sure what yet. All i-adjectives end in i, but it must be preceded by a, i, u, or o, never by e. 

From my textbook: "I-adjectives change their forms depending on the tense or whether they are affirmative or negative. In the present affirmative, however, there is no change of form, and the i-adjective is followed by desu. Unlike the copula desu "to be", the desu used with i-adjectives does not conjugate."

(Side note: Mandarin does not use copula for adjectives, only nouns. This is a significant difference between Chinese and Japanese and in this case, the Japanese way actually makes more sense to an English speaker. Not that Chinese and Japanese are the same at all, except for their stolen writing systems. But still.)

My words:

takai - expensive

yasui - inexpensive

ii/yoi - good/okay/nice/fine

warui - bad

ookii - big

chiisai - small

Sentence examples:

Takai desu. - It is expensive.

Ookii desu. - It is big.

Hooray simplicity! At least for now...

Also, I have finally learned all of the hiragana from chapter 2 of my textbook! Hooray! The last holdouts were ぬ (nu) ね (ne) の (no).

の is really easy because it's absolutely EVERYWHERE (and marks possessive!), but ね and ぬ are had to draw and remember. Again with the feeling like a child who doesn't yet know how to form letters.... I kind of wish I had one of those books with the dotted lines so you can get the spacing right and then maybe some hiragana to trace over before I move on to writing them myself...

25 unique hiragana now live in my brain!

More hiragana

I may as well add the hiragana that is almost identical to the ones I've learned except with two little sticks on the top right hand side... they're the voiced equivalents of some of the voiceless consonant hiragana that I've learned: t changes to d, k to g, and s to z. There are a few exceptions, which I'll point out.

が - ga

ぎ - gi

ぐ - gu

げ - ge

ご - go

ざ - za

じ - ji

ず - zu

ぜ - ze

ぞ - zo

だ - da

ぢ - ji (limited use, same sound as じ)

づ - zu (limited use, same sound as ず)

で - de

ど - do

Well that was easy!

More numbers

Hooray! I now know not only the number for one hundred, but also the number for one thousand! I can count!

one hundred - hyaku

two hundred - nihyaku

one thousand - sen/issen

two thousand - nisen 

Also, the word for Japanese currency (yen, in English) is en in Japanese, and just gets tacked on to the end of the number word: ichien, juuen, nihyakuen, and so on.

Hiragana of the day: na な and ni に.

Numbers and hiragana troubles

I haven't been taking a break, I've just been learning numbers and practicing hiragana! I have to say, trying to read things in hiragana currently is extremely frustrating. I only know about half the characters, so I have to guess based on the words I already know, and since my repertoire of words is quite small, my guesses are often terrible. Not that I've been trying to read anything actual, just stuff in my textbook, but I think I'm going to give up for a while on that and wait until I know ALL my hiragana before trying to read.

Of hiragana, I currently know 20 characters, my most recent two being te て and to と.

Japanese numbers are confusing... not only are there two completely different sets of numbers to count from 1 to 10 (one Chinese-based and one Japanese-based), there are two different words for some numbers depending on context within the Chinese-based system. 

0 - zero/rei

1 - ichi

2 - ni

3 - san

4 - yon/shi

5 - go

6 - roku

7 - nana/shichi

8 - hachi

9 - ku/kyuu

10 - juu

To get to 19, you just add numbers to the end of 10: juuichi is 11 (literally ten one), juuni is 12 (ten two) and so on.

You count tens by adding a number in front of 10: nijuu is 20 (literally two ten), and anything above that follows the same pattern as the teens: two ten one, two ten two etc etc. (nijuuichi, nijuuni).

As far as I can tell, this pattern continues all the way to 99. I haven't learned the word for 100 yet... that will be next!

Random words and some numbers

So apparently this every day thing isn't going so well, but I haven't given up altogether!

The words of today:

keiko - practice

eiga - movie

rei/zero - zero

ichi - one

ni - two

san - three

And today's hiragana is tsu つ.

Up next: more numbers. 

More of the same

More of the same today... words that sound almost the same except for the long/short vowel difference. (They're minimal pairs! Hooray!) 

su - nest

suu - number

beru - bell

beeru - veil

(These last two both sound like borrowings from English.)

Since these feel kind of like they're only one word to remember (they're so short and easy and almost identical), I decided to up it a bit today with some more vowel sound distinctions:

hoshi - star (This one I know because it's the name Kel gives her horse in Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small series, in which one of the cultures is very definitely based off Japanese.)

hooshi - service

The purpose of these vowel-full words is to demonstrate that the vowel sequences don't turn into diphthongs; that is, they are each pronounced at their own full vowel and don't meld into one another. 

ue - top, up, above

akai - red

aoi - blue (This one sounds exactly like the sound you would make if you were to become black and blue. Sort of like 'owie'. Or perhaps [aʊi]. 

koe - voice (This one is very like the Mandarin word for mouth, which I think is ko or something like that. I wonder if the kanji is the same as the Chinese character.)

And the hiragana for the day:

た - ta

ち - chi

It kind of seems like if you put them together, you'd get that crazy Chinese relaxation martial art thing, but there's no diphthong [aI] in Japanese, as far as I know. That means no tai chi! Just たち, which is a completely different kettle of fish! And, I think, the plural suffix? Watashitachi means 'we', and tomodachitachi is 'friends', so yes. Plural suffix it is!

Sometimes I am weird even to myself.

Hm... waたしたち and tomoぢちたち I think. Hooray putting things together! Probably all wrong, but it's a start. 

Words that sound almost the same

This selection of vocabulary is meant to emphasize the difference between long and short vowels.

cado - corner

caado - card

chizu - map

chiizu - cheese

And today's hiragana: 

せ - se

そ - so

I think that そ looks like a quarter rest, so it should be easy to remember. :)

Slowpokishness

So I took a few days off from new words for absolutely no good reason, just out of sheer laziness. Bad me! A large part of it was that I had new books, and I'm such an addict. If books were drugs, I'd never get out of rehab. Luckily, this is an addiction that society considers acceptable, even admirable. Hooray! I'd better stay away from actually addictive substances, though, because I'd probably never escape. 

Anyhow, that being said, I did learn some new words and phrases. 

Ii desu ne. - That's a good idea.

Irasshae(mase). - Welcome. Can I help you? (not too sure on the context of this one yet)

So desu ne. - I agree./That will be fine.

Ittakimasu. - (literally) I'll go and come back. In practice, this one is said when leaving home to go to work or school or whatever for the day.

Itterasshai. - (lit.) Please go and come back. The corresponding saying to the last one, this one said by the person who is staying at home.

Tadaima. - I'm home!

Okaeri nasai. - Welcome home.

Gochisoosama. - Thank you for the meal. (said after eating)

Itadakimasu. - Thank you for the meal. (said before eating)

Doozo yoroshiku. - Nice to meet you. (I'm not sure the difference between this one and hajimemashite. I think the second is more formal.)

Also, my hiragana:

さ - sa

し - shi

す - su

さ is giving me troubles because it looks different in my book than on the screen. In my book, the bottom part doesn't exactly connect... I think it's a handwriting/printing kind of distinction, but it's a bit confusing, the way it must be for English learners who see 'a' written like that and also like an 'o' with a stick on the side... し is fairly easy because it's such a simple line, and す I recognize because it's in every verb I've learned so far. Hooray! And darn this hiragana, slowing me down. 

I feel like some of this is a repeat of the last post, but that's just too bad. 

A few useful phrases

I've exhausted all the vocabulary in chapters 1 and 2 of my book, but I still have quite a ways to go on hiragana characters to catch up... I'm slow with the hiragana. The words stick in my head easily, but the hiragana not so much... I have my あいうえお / かきくけこ pretty firmly in my mind, but only if I do them in order... Well, practice makes permanent, as an old band teacher of mine used to say, so I'll just have to keep working away. Also, my character of the day is さ - sa.

Here are my phrases of the day:

Ii desu ne. - That's a good idea. 

Irasshae(mase). Welcome. Can I help you?

Soo desu ne. - I agree./That will be fine.

Ittekimasu. - I will go and come back.

Itterasshai. - Please go and come back. 

These last two are said when leaving home for the day to go to work or school or whatever. You wouldn't say sayoonara because that's just for leaving in a permanent/indefinite sense.... ittekimasu is for 'see you soon' type situations, I think. And itterasshai is what the person who is staying home gets to say, as far as I can tell. 

Verb forms

I can't believe that it's September already. I don't know what happened to my summer... well, I do know, but it seems like it went too fast, as always. It's weird for me that I'm not starting school tomorrow. I may be starting sometime in October, but I'm just not sure! Eep!

Anyhow, I realized that I've been using all kinds of verb forms but haven't explained them, so here it goes:

The basic verb form that I've been using (the one my textbook teaches first!) is the present tense polite/neutral affirmative tense. This is the tense I've been listing my vocabulary in, and they all end in -masu.

For example:

oyogimasu - swim

kaimasu - buy

kaerimasu - go/come back

(Also, though I've been listing them in infinitive form, this is not actually how they translate, it's just for my own purposes so I know that they're verbs, not nouns. Like, is 'nomimasu' a verb or a noun? If I listed it just as 'drink' I might get confused. Well, not now that I know that -masu is a verb ending. But still.)

To make this into negative form (still polite/neutral and present tense), you change the -masu ending to -masen.

For example:

ikimasen - do not go

kimasen - do not come

tabemasen - do not eat

To change your verbs into past tense (polite/neutral and affirmative), you change the -masu ending to -mashita:

kimashita - bought

ikimashita - went

kaerimashita - returned/came back

The verb ending -mashoo indicates 'let's'.

For example:

tabemashoo - let's eat

Oosaka e ikimashoo. - Let's go to Osaka.

Ocha o nomimashoo - Let's drink tea.

Laziness and more particles

So I've been slacking off for the last couple days, but I blame it on the 12-14 hour work days and the inescapable social commitments (i.e. family). Not that I'd want to escape them, because I love spending time with them, but it definitely cuts into my Japanese learning time. This means that I still don't have my vocabulary down pat, so I will not add any more until I know those ones.

In the meantime, more particles:

wa - topic particle, often used after the subject, literally means 'as for'

For example:

Watashi wa Stephanie desu. - I am Stephanie. 

Kochira wa watashi no tomodachi desu. - This is my friend.

Tanaka san wa ocha o nomimasu. - Mr. Tanaka drinks tea. 

e - literally 'to' or 'toward', indicates that the noun it follows is the direction toward which the motion is directed

For example:

Gakkoo e kimasu. - I will come to school/I am coming to school.

Uchi e kaerimasu. - I will go back to my house/I am going back to my house.

Kissaten e ikimashoo. - Let's go to the coffee shop.

Vocab

tabun - probably

minna de - all together

moo - already

yoku - often

doozo - please

こ - ko is my hiragana of the day.

I should probably mention that I'm following the format of long vowels as it occurs in my current textbook: a doubled vowel = long vowel. Thus, moo is pronounced [mo] (long), not [mu]. 

Also, given that I know the IPA, I will tend to use it if the limitations of my computer allow it to be practical. I find it so much easier than trying to spell it out phonetically any other way... English just doesn't work that way! (Does 'ay' sound like [aI] or [eI]?)

Particles

Japanese expresses all sorts of ideas through particles; they serve as prepositions, case markers, and inflections, among other things (I'm still a beginner, so I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of particles).

Here are some that I've learned:

no - possessive marker, equivalent of 's, placed after the noun it modifies

For example:

watashi no uchi - my house

Sumisu san no tomodachi - Mr. Smith's friend

ojiisan no inu - Grandpa's dog

o - direct object marker, no English equivalent (English uses word order to express this idea), placed after the noun it modifies

For example:

(watashi) ocha o nomimasu - (I) drink tea

bangohan o tabemashoo - let's eat dinner

to - directly translates to 'and', but can only connect nouns

For example:

Yamaguchi san to watashi - Ms. Yamaguchi and I

keshigomu to enpitsu - erasers and pens

de - can be directly translated as 'at' or 'in', the location in which an action takes place (it looks like there's only one word for this, unlike darn English's seemingly random alternation between 'at' and 'in')

kissaten de ocha nomimashoo - let's drink tea at the coffee shop

tomodachi no uchi de bangohan tabemashita - I ate dinner at a friend's house

Also, pronoun dropping is fun but will take some getting used to. But more on that later. Apparently I was in a writing mood, anyhow. 

Time words and more verbs

Feeling kind of blah today, so not much writing. I'm not 100% confident with yesterday's words, but I'm going to add new ones today anyhow:

ototoi - the day before yesterday

asatte - the day after tomorrow

nomimasu - to drink

dakara - so, therefore

karimasu - to buy

And the hiragana of the day is け, which is ke.

I find it interesting that the Japanese have a word for the day before yesterday/day after tomorrow. I can't think of another language that expresses that concept so easily, at least not of Indo-European languages. I wonder if it's common in Asian languages? I wish English had an easier way of expressing it though. Obviously the concept exists, it just creates confusion and awkwardness in English. 

I feel like I might get these terms confused, though, because there doesn't seem to be a lot linking the words for tomorrow and day after tomorrow or yesterday and day before yesterday.

tomorrow - ashita 

day after tomorrow - asatte

yesterday - kinoo

day before yesterday - ototoi

The only connection I can see is that ashita and asatte both start with a... and kinoo and ototoi both have o and i sounds.. a tenuous link at best, but it may help. 

Other time words (review):

today - kyoo

every day - mainichi

...

So it's not that the vocab list that I posted yesterday is the complete extent of my knowledge, because it's not, it's just that the words that go in my little book are the ones that require learning. I find that some words stick in my mind more easily than others, and so anything that goes in super easily doesn't deserve a line in my book of words (i.e. the place where I keep my five daily words... it's this really adorable miniature notebook that is perfectly spaced to hold the exact amount of information that I want for each day, and it's a flip notebook so that I can read it backwards or forwards, thus the English is on one side of the page and the Japanese on the other for easy self-testing. Hooray little books! Thank you, Amanda!).

So today's words are:

keshigomu - eraser

tokei - watch, clock

oto - sound

koko - this place, here

kinoo - yesterday

Also, I'm sure there's an easier way to get hiragana into these posts than copy and pasting from Wikipedia, but I haven't discovered it yet, so here are the hiragana characters that I've learned so far:

あ - a

い - i

う - u

え - e

お - o

か - ka

き - ki

く - ku

I think yesterday I referred to katakana by accident instead of hiragana... I keep getting them confused. These characters are definitely hiragana, though: hiragana is the writing system 'with a roundish shape', used for 'conjugation endings, function words, and native Japanese words not covered by kanji'. Oh the three different writing systems... why? Why? Mind you, it probably makes just as much (or as little) sense as the 'consistency' of English spellings.... what a maze that is for non-native speakers. 

Learning hiragana makes me feel like I'm four again, though, because when I write them, they never look the same twice. Or even close to the same, really. I feel like I'm not enough of an artist to create hiragana properly. But then, perhaps native Japanese speakers feel similarly when learning Western characters? 

Vocabulary

Here's what's in my little book of words so far:

ikimasu - to go

kimasu - to come

oyogimasu - to swim

tabemasu - to eat

These verbs are all in the polite/neutral present/future affirmative form.

mainichi - every day

hisho - secretary

gakkoo - school

daigaku - university/college

kaerimasu - to go/come back

kore kara - starting from now

kyoo - today

ashita - tomorrow

issho ni - together

oyasumi nasai - good night

doo itashimashite - you're welcome/don't mention it

kuni - nations

kissaten - coffee shop

honsha - headquarters (of a company)

ryokoo - trip

shutchoo ryokoo - business trip

kankoo ryokoo - sightseeing trip

hon - book

enpitsu - pencil

I'll also post the kana that I've learned if I ever figure out how to get it in here. I may have to be creative with copy and pasting, or else thief one of my more tech-savvy friends to assist me. 

New beginnings and travel plans

I've never blogged before, so I'm not entirely sure how exactly I should be doing this. I feel like this is going to end up very stream-of-consciousness, which is probably boring for people to read (take that, Virginia Woolf) but chances of people actually reading is probably slim to none, so this will probably end up mostly as me just organizing my thoughts. Just like my old junior high diaries, except wordier, because I type faster than I write, and with less pining over boys. 

I embark upon my quest to learn Japanese because I want to move there. I recently graduated from university with an English Language degree, and though teaching is not something I want to do with the entire rest of my life, I want to move to Japan for a while and teach English. I have done some ESL tutoring before (volunteer work only, and mostly one-on-one) and I know I love it, and I think that it would be a wonderful way for me to truly experience Japanese culture and have a job at the same time. 

Why Japan? This is a good question, actually, especially since my mom's family is Chinese and they all want to know why not China. Honestly, Japanese culture interests me more, perhaps because it's more foreign to me, but also perhaps because it does feel a little closer to home. Japan's definitely more Westernized than China, and the political situation is much less delicate (censorship is not something I am fond of). At the same time, because I live in Vancouver, sometimes it feels like I live in China already, so moving there would feel much the same. Probably just as many people would speak Mandarin at me; I just wouldn't be able to read the signs... 

I've learned a bit of Mandarin before, in my second year of university, but very little of it stuck with me, and I feel like I didn't learn much anyhow because we were trying so desperately to learn how to write as well as speak. A 100 word vocabulary is really nothing to brag of. 

I don't speak any language other than English fluently, but I did take French for most of my elementary/high school years so I can speak that with some confidence, I can read German fairly well but can't put a sentence together to save my life, and I also have a smattering of Swedish. In hindsight, actually sticking with one language or another would probably benefited me more in the long run, but the wannabe linguist in me (I discovered the wonder of linguistics after I'd already changed my degree plan twice) just wanted to learn a bit about the structure of all the languages and not actually commit. 

I will become fluent in Japanese, though, I swear. Because I have a goal and a time frame, and because I will actually be immersed in it in a way that I'd never been with any other language that I've studied, I think that this venture will be more successful. 

My plan is to be in Japan in September of 2010, approximately. Some cursory research indicates that the first school term begins in April, but I'm fairly certain that the JET programme (one of the ones I'm considering applying to) recruits for September. As the time comes closer, I'll look into more details, but I've still got a year before I can even think of applying anywhere, so right now I'm just going to focus on language skills. 

I have a variety of textbooks to play with, but the one I will be using primarily is Living Language's Ultimate Japanese: Beginner-Intermediate. You can find it at

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Japanese-Beginner-Intermediate-Book-Basic-Intermed/dp/140002112X/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219728972&sr=8-1

if you're interested. So far I've gotten through chapter one, vocabulary, grammar, and katakana all, and I'm working my way through chapter two.  

I'm finding the grammar fairly easy to understand, grammar nerd that I am (SOV, SOV, SOV), and I've resolved to learn five new words per day and one kana character.