Now that I have graduated from high school, I now need to use the time I have to do some major improvements. Let me preface by saying that my greatest goal in life is to become the best teacher that I can be. I know that there are still many holes to patch, but I don't want wander in a desert for forty years either.

My first impressions on many of you was by all means bitter. Regardless of this, I feel that whatever discussions are made from this should be positive and help anyone with their Japanese studies.

I've addressed most of the concerns in the past thread about my site--www.imabi.net. Here are some of them.

1. The site now has a link system much like wikipedia where many terms and expressions are linked to better explanations or first definitions. This allows readers to not have to necessarily know grammatical terms on their visit.

2. Navigation concerns: There are many ways to get to the same place. The lesson titles are now on the right-side. There are table of content pages for each section. The homepage can be used. There is a search engine. I have even made sure that references to other lessons are clearly linked to them.

3. English Grammar: At the time this site began discussing mine, my site had not been properly proofread. Though still not a solution to the entire problem, I have ran every page into Microsoft Word to get rid of careless errors. I have even switched to a web browser that underlines misspelled words. There are still errors floating about that evade my eyes. To combat this, I have gotten several people to be on the lookout. So, this issue will soon be a minimal concern.

4. Japanese errors: This problem was definitely one that I had vehemently and ignorantly denied. As such, I have spent the past two months halting the making of any new pages to deal with this problem. Many errors have been found and fixed. I can honestly say that it has received the eyes of more qualified than I for revision. My Japanese friend will soon become fully involved in helping me combat whatever is left of this issue.

5. Verbosity: This has always been a problem of mine. However, being too esoteric is also problematic. So, where's the balance? The balance is different for different people. However, I've had quite a few helping hands to make this less of a problem.

6. Anything else that I have left out that remains a problem is definitely up to open debate and discussion.

FYI: The site name has even changed to http://www.imabi.net so that it is easier to type and find.

Don't get my intentions wrong. There is something for everyone, and it has been my fault that my attitude has gotten the best of the situation.

I do not want to necessarily dictate what can or cannot be said about my site. However, for common courtesy, I would like things such as typos and small errors to be dealt with via email. I will also link this to a thread for this on my forums so that if you feel that this really should be addressed on the website it is for, you can do so.

I now have a job, which is a lot of physical labor. So, my mind and body are now worked out a few times every week. This will cut down my time that I would otherwise had, but it does force me to think of other avenues that I can better manage my time.

I do have some questions about my site that I would like advice on.

1. What exactly should I do for Kanji? I have been reading a bit here. I want to make a weekly schedule that can coincide with the text but also keep in mind a system like RTK. Since I learned Kanji in a photographic fashion, I'm at a disadvantage at understanding students' problems. How many is too much or too few in a week? Should I teach 斤 before 新? In the long term I would want to get to at least 3500 characters to be taught throughout the planned 300 lesson course.

2. I have been debating on whether I should get rid of Lessons 105~107 and moving the material to the already existing suffix lessons that could easily absorb the material. However, what other things could I mention in the freed up 3 lesson spaces? It could be grammar, culture, etc. I have some ideas left for the V section where miscellaneous ideas are to be discussed, but if ideas from that are pulled to compensate, I would still need 3 more ideas.

3. Any other ideas?

お願いします。

Again, here is the link to the site forums if you would rather it moved there.

http://www.imabi.net/apps/forums/topics/...?page=last

Membership is needed to post, but if you want to delete the account after you're done, that's fine. I would appreciate any members here that would like to help. I really want to get different threads going for advice in different languages. There are plenty of forums out there for Japanese in separate languages. I've seen forums for french, german, italian, portuguese, spanish, and even indonesian speakers. But, I haven't really found one place with discussions for tons of languages. This would take a lot of organization to pull off, but I still think it would be cool.

Lastly, thank you.

皆さん、がんばってくださいね。

Nice to see you're back Imabi!
One thing I might suggest is adding links to the Rikaichan (Firefox), and Rikaikun (Chrome) popup dictionary browser plugins somewhere. They are seriously helpful to have when you're a beginner, and can't read many kanji. There's also Rikaisama a mod of Rikaichan by this forum's own cb4960, which is amazing, but the extra features are mainly only useful for intermediate/advanced learners.

Well, I never really left. I like reading certain threads here. I will definitely link to them in no time.

Could you change the name of this thead so that people know it's about your website? 'Improvements' is super vague.

Sorry, will do.

This may be stupid question, but how do you change the title?

imabi Wrote:This may be stupid question, but how do you change the title?

I believe you edit the first post in the thread.

Can this be deleted? I clicked the back button all the way and I don't have a delete button for the first thread here. I'm confused.

[ファブリス]

Sprinkled some fairy tooth magic.

ファブリス Wrote:Sprinkled some fairy tooth magic.

Why thank you ファブリスさん.　

Not cool, I would like to bring up that I have received a very insulting e-mail from someone here that used an e-mail address that was apparently immediately deleted after the message was sent as it came back unsent saying there was no such account with yahoo. I do not know why people would want to do this.

So, please refrain from vulgarity. Please respect that my "contact me" button on my site is used for educational purposes to help students with questions about the material and not for attacking. I wish that you would all respect this. Now, this is just one person, but I don't want repeats and my e-mail flooded with such comments.

Again, thanks Faburisu for fixing the title.

[ファブリス]

Hold on, how do you know it's someone from here if all you have is their email? If they identified their username, I'm sure they would post here: as you have seen in the past people are not afraid to criticise your work.

Because the message matches word for word for something in the past on the original thread from here. Anyways, I've done a lot to make it better over the past few months.

imabi Wrote:Because the message matches word for word for something in the past on the original thread from here. Anyways, I've done a lot to make it better over the past few months.

Unexpected from you, but it seriously was and I do have my own data to figure it out. But, that's not the point. The point is that people need to leave that service for what it's for and not abuse it. That's all I ask from that incident.

Out the person then.

You don't have to be a member to send messages to me. The person clearly has no intentions to join. Nevertheless, I'd rather talk about other things like the questions I posted at the beginning. I don't have much time to devote to any improvement, so I need to use the next few hours wisely.

So you're saying that someone who isn't a member of this forum copied someone else's profanity laced post and sent it to you by email?

I never said it was profanity laced. However, it might have well has been. I meant the person never was a member of "my site". I have the apparently deactivated e-mail and IP address and location. It's just that I specifically remember seeing the same message in the past. I guess I don't understand what you mean about "outing someone".

Outing someone = posting the email and naming the member of RTK who emailed you.

Why would I want to cause more trouble by doing that? I just needed to mention the incident to try to prevent others from doing it and stating the purpose of the service so that it's not abused. それだけだ。

[ファブリス]

Oooh the mystery! I can't take it anymore!! :p

I could give you the IP address to verify if you would like.

I think it's just best to drop this. There's no need for more controversy. Anyways, this is what I've done so far today.

Today I have been primarily editing the first few lessons on the site. I have removed approximately 3 pages length of unnecessary wording. This helps with the verbosity problem as well as the difficulty level that has been a major point of issue.

imabi Wrote:Well, I never really left. I like reading certain threads here. I will definitely link to them in no time.

Cool. Yeah, lurking is fun isn't it. XD
By the way, when I click on the "Introduction" link on the "What is Imabi?" page, it gives me a dead link. Just thought you might like to know.