掲示板 Forums - No One Teaches Useful Japanese - Am I Crazy?

I think that's a perfectly valid criticism. The response I tend to give when this comes up is that you (not you specifically, but the general you) are not the same as others, and when given the goal of "a whole language", there is *no* objective ordering of words/phrases that can be considered optimal for all (or even most) learners.

To use some of the data you mentioned in your post, you are living in Japan, so I'm going to guess that you are not studying here. So already, what you need is vastly different from someone who might live 10 km away from you in the local university, or someone who is working next door in a restaurant.

Some people have no desire or intention to visit Japan, and are perfectly happy and content to consume media. For them, "returning to Kyoto" might be "useless", but as they happen to love slice-of-life anime, knowing all the terms that are used in schools here, or learning phrases used by senpai/kouhai might be useful.

This may not play out to all of the other examples you could pluck from renshuu, but "the students return to the dorm" is a great way to get a few extra vocabulary words out there. If one approaches it from a minmaxing standpoint, then one might think "well, I'm going to be saying 私 or I'm going to be using people's names. Get all those other people nouns out of there! I can learn them later." That can lead to a more myopic view of the langauge, and creates a set of rails of sorts. By that, I mean that if you optimize for only the things you see immediate use for, it can be *great* as long as you are inside of those rails. As soon as you take a detour into an unexpected conversation, it feels like your Japanese no longer exists (I experienced this countless times during the first several years in the country).

In defense of Genki, I would argue that while you might not be getting a "I can use this right now" feel from every word, it gives flavor to the material that makes it easy for many people (not all, of course) to stick with it. As silly as it was, me and my classmates in Uni enjoyed joking about Mary and Takeshi's relationship throughout the course of the two genki texts, wondering if they'd ever start dating.

At the same time, other people will subjectively feel that approach is terrible, and they want (if we're talking vocabulary) the first 6000 words ordered by frequency of use, and they'll just ingest them directly. No flavor/context needed.

Is either group wrong? Of course not.

What it sounds like you are looking for (and I'm glad to hear that irodori fits that) is survival Japanese. It tends to focus more on "pre-packaged" phrases that you can bust out and use. For those that benefit more from that, they tend to have a timer of sorts hanging over their heads, in the sense that they need to be able to use that Japanese sooner than later.

What renshuu and genki and many other textbooks do is approach it from a "you're in this for the long run. We unfortunately cannot fully customize every word list/phrase set/grammar for your specific needs, so we're going to teach you the fundamentals while giving you a broad selection of many different areas.

A "jack of all trades, master of none" approach.

In short, "useful" is a surprisingly subjective word, and so there will never be a day when learners can get together and come up with a single list of set of lists of useful words (or grammar or whatever) that works for everyone.

​Doesnt travel revolving the word kyoto have weird wordings depending on if you're from there/not? Like w/ up vs down being flipped?

Because you can't teach Japanese that will "feel useful" or even "be useful" for everyone. Whatever you try to do, it will be always not useful for some people. Some ressources may teach you things that feel more useful than others but there are no ressources that will teach only useful for you.

So just don't expect anything from those ressources. It still important, or "efficient", to study with those ressources for the long term but if you want to get ride of that "not learning useful things", search for a few things that you want to say and add to them a custom schedule. Like, look for few channel related to your interests with JP subtiles, watch a couple of video or short and then start adding a few words/sentences to a custom schedule to study them. Then rinse and repeat.

A lot of people "only" study with those generic ressources, common words list, etc. and end up frustrated at some point because they still can't have basic conversation after a few years, or even more. But that's normal. All of them are designed with a "jack of all trades, master of none" approach like マイコー said. It's useful for the long term but it will also never be enought for any "basic" conversation besides greetings. Because as soon as you're past the greetings, you will need more specific things, uncommon words, etc. Like for talking about your hobbies in details. It won't stop at "What are your hobbies?" and you listing your hobbies. People will ask details about them, why you like them, etc.

Basically, you need to "complete" your japanese, or customize it. And Renshuu can allow to do that quite easily with the schedule system, the community list, etc.

ALSO, it doesn't mean do "more". It mean do "less" with those ressources and give yourself some time to study what you want or need. For example, watch some vlogger in your case (for that part "I still can't make a reservation at a hotel, order at a restaurant, or buy a train ticket"). There a tons of them on youtube with JP and EN subtitles.