Pomax
commented
3 years ago The textbook was written for an audience that needs an alternative to an expensive university course. If you just want to casually learn Japanese, then this book (and books like it) are probably not the right resource to do that with. There are plenty of casual learning books and sites out there, but essentially zero free or near-free university level textbooks.
As for the lack of furigana, I'm scrolling through http://pomax.github.io/nrGrammar/#section-2-Verb_grammar right now, and there is plenty of furigana, which browser are you using and/or are you running any script blockers or userstyles extensions that might be blocking the markup?
E.g:
And:
All have furigana. If you don't see those, then there might be a (or several) bug(s) that may need to be investigated.
However, note that the book does no hand-holding: words are not accompanied by furigana indefinitely, and by the time you hit chapter 3 you are expected to know the readings for the verbs used throughout chapter 2, for instance, because they're core verbs that any student should learn in the first few weeks of classes. Some common words will still have furigana, but the further you get in the book, the less furigana you'll be given, because you shouldn't need it anymore. You should know these words by then.
reedleoneil
A lot of my friends were linking me the guide and after I finished chapter 1 I thought wow this is the best overview of Japanese ever. The author truly understands all the differences between the languages and gives a brief history of how kanji evolved etc. However after reaching chapter 2 it became completly unreadable for me... it went from a thing an average person could read and understand in simple terms, to a scientific journal for PHD linguistics students. I appreciate the fact that everything is so in depth but its just impossible for me to read without my brain starting to hurt, I don't know all the fancy words like inflection... I am not a linguistics student, I am just a normal dude trying to understand Japanese.
Another thing that was mind boggling for me is that the guide went from using romaji and then the next chapter completly switching to complex kanji without furigana! Why is it so hard to just keep the romaji and furigana? You have to realise not everyone has the same learning process, not everyone learns kanji first, some people only learn kanji in order of JLPT levels, some learn all 3000 at once, some like me leave that until later. I started with core 10k vocab + grammar + watching tv shows / anime in between. So far I got by reading furigana just fine and plan to start kanji studies several months later.
I don't know why I made this issue because I doubt you would be willing to change the guide, the ideal guide I can picture in my head would have two sections or even two separate guides, an easy to read overview with charts showing all the particles and rules in one place, kinda like a quick reference guide and then the other part being the very in depth version explaining everything.
Anyway this is just a perspective of someone starting out and finding your guide, I just wanted you to see things from a different perspective, please close this issue if you want.